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Missing Model Could Have Been the First “Girl in the Box”
Did Marie Elizabeth Spannhake appear as a ghost to lead investigators to her body?
Did the infamous “Girl in the Box” kidnapper have another victim? Colleen Stan’s story is widely known throughout the true crime community, but there is another young woman who vanished shortly before Colleen was abducted and she has yet to be found.
Could the two cases be related?
Colleen Stan is famously known as the “Girl in the Box.” Her story is plastered all over newspaper articles and the internet. She had been kidnapped by a couple named Cameron and Janice Hooker and forced to live in a wooden box in the basement and underneath a bed for seven excruciating years.
Only 16 months before Colleen’s life would change forever, 18-year-old Marie Elizabeth “Marliz” Spannhake disappeared without a trace.
Marliz had just recently moved to Chico, California and was working as a camera store model during the one short month that she lived there. On the 31st of January 1976, Marliz was at a flea market in Eagles Hall with her fiancé, John Baruth, when they got into an argument. After the couple’s fight ended, Marliz said she wanted to walk home alone. She left the flea market, and Baruth, at 4:00 p.m. that day and…
