Girls just want to have fun: The Kortne Stouffer mystery

Kortne Stouffer was just a young girl having fun, the night she went missing.

28 July 2012 was a Saturday night and the 21-year-old wanted to party with her friends.

They came round to drink beer at her apartment in the small town of Palmyra, Pennsylvania, and were planning to go to a bar in nearby Harrisburg later.

At 9.05pm the police were called because neighbours suspected that some of the drinkers were under-age.

They were right. There were seven people in the apartment and everyone was breath-tested.

Only Michael Burdge, 19, and Corey Bowman, 18, tested positive so they were the charged with under-age drinking and taken away.

But Kortne’s boyfriend, Brad Herr, was also arrested, because he was on probation for drink driving.

When the cops left Kortne and her friends tried to laugh it off.

They headed into Harrisburg and had a good night, although there is a suggestion she had a row with another girl and was thrown out of the bar.

By 3.12am Kortne and one of her friends, Cody Pruett, were back at the apartment.

A police officer was called again after neighbours complained about Kortne’s dog barking.

The cop spoke to Kortne and left about 3.45am.

Half an hour later the cop came back after neighbours complained about banging noises.

This time nobody answered the door.

But Pruett, who spent the night at her apartment, told her father he did not see or hear anything and when he woke up at 7.30am she was gone.

She did not show up for work the next day.

When her mother, Wendy, went to her apartment she found the door unlocked, her wallet and cellphone inside and her car parked outside. But Kortne was nowhere.

Friends mounted several searches on foot, with dogs and on horseback.

Wendy and her husband Scott held "Come Home" vigils to spread awareness of the case, posted up 5,000 flyers and raised $40,000 towards reward money.

But like the character in the book and film Gone Girl, Kortne had vanished.

Unlike Gone Girl though, her friends and relatives are pretty sure she has been murdered.

Pruett obviously became the prime suspect.

But he has taken a lie detector test and passed with flying colours.

Police also searched a car owned by Milton Rodriguez, one of the men Kortne went into Harrisburg with, and they also checked out his house.

Strong rumours surrounded Palmyra that Burdge - whose father was a former chief of police in the town - was responsible for Kortne’s death.

He is said to have wrapped her body in a carpet and a large plastic bag, taken her from the apartment in a silver van, dismembered her in it and then disposed of the remains in a lake.

Burdge then supposedly cleaned it at the car wash where he worked.

But Burdge died in a car crash in June 2013 and took his secrets to the grave.

There is also a suggestion that Kortne may have been pregnant and that was the reason why she was killed.

Other rumours - discounted by the family - suggest Kortne and her boyfriend, Brad Herr, may have been involved in drug dealing and this led to her death.

I first wrote about Kortne in 2016 and at the time her father Scott Stouffer said: “In a sense, not having closure is hope for me. Having the hope that she might show up one day. With closure comes reality."

The following year a podcast called The Vanished put up an episode about Kortne.

The FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) has joined the search and says: “Foul play is suspected regarding Stouffer's disappearance.”

A poster the FBI put out says Kourtne had a tattoo on her right arm that read "One Love", another one on the top of her right foot, which was made up of three stars (pictured below), and third tattoo on her left side of a pistol shooting flowers.

In July 2024 the local newspaper, the Lebanon Daily News (Lebanon is a small town in Pennsylvania) published an article about the annual family gathering where Kortne’s family float colourful inner tubes down a river and remember her.

Kortne’s sister, Kerstin Jennings, told the paper she felt “mixed emotions” of happiness at remembering something Kortne used to enjoy doing.

"But then you get overwhelmed by the emotions that she's not here. She's not here to be able to do it with us. We still don't know what happened to her, and we miss her every day,” she added.

A Facebook page about Kortne has 12,000 followers.

That £40,000 the Stouffers initially offered for information leading to the case being solved, it’s now been bumped up to $100,000.

But it is now very much a cold case and it feels like it will take something extraordinary for a breakthrough.

As for Cody Pruett, his whereabouts are unknown but he has not spoken about Kortne’s disappearance since 2012.

If you do know anything about Kortne’s disappearance, contact your local FBI office or the US embassy in your country.