missing persons cases

A missing persons case is, in practice, an investigation opened when a person has been reported missing and it has not yet been established whether the disappearance is voluntary, the result of an accident, or conceals a crime. Under Danish law the term is not a fixed statutory category in criminal law, but is used as a practical label for the initial and often protracted investigative process.

In the true crime genre and in podcast formats such as Jensen & Holes: The Murder Squad, the term is used broadly for cases in which a person has disappeared without a satisfactory explanation, and where investigators — either actively or in retrospect — attempt to reconstruct the sequence of events. Such cases may involve missing persons, unsolved killings, or the identification of unknown bodies.

The police initially treat a missing person report as a pure search matter. The investigation intensifies and changes character if suspicion arises that a crime has been committed. In practice this can mean that a missing persons case comes to be investigated as a possible homicide, even without a body having been found.

A separate legal issue arises if a missing person is to be declared dead. This is done under the civil law rules on absent persons and is a different procedure from the criminal or police investigation of the disappearance itself.

Missing persons cases are particularly challenging for investigators, because the absence of a body or a crime scene makes it difficult to establish whether a crime has been committed at all. It is precisely this uncertainty that gives the category a central place in true crime — the question of what really happened often remains unanswered for decades.