17-year-old Brianna Maitland spent the morning of March 19, 2004, taking a math test. It was the final exam standing between her and a GED.
Brianna had to take the test at the Community College of Vermont after having dropped out of high school that winter. By late morning, the results came in, and she had passed.
Her mother, Kellie Maitland, later recalled that the two of them were in great spirits after, and spent the day together, running errands and shopping together in St Albans City, Vermont.
According to one account, Brianna grew distracted while they were shopping and told Kellie she would be right back before stepping outside.
Brianna apparently returned tense and agitated, unwilling to say what was bothering her. The two left at about 2.30 pm, heading out of town. Brianna was unusually quiet and withdrawn on the drive.
Kellie then dropped her daughter off at her apartment in Sheldon, Vermont. This would be the last time Kellie ever saw her daughter again.
An hour later, Brianna left a note for her roommate, Jillian Stout, saying she would be back after a work shift. Then she drove her green 1985 Oldsmobile Delta 88, 20 miles to Montgomery, where she worked as a dishwasher at the Black Lantern Inn.
The shift was mostly unremarkable. No phone calls or unexpected visitors, according to co-workers. When Brianna clocked out, her colleagues invited her to a late dinner, but she declined.
At 11.20 pm, a co-worker watched Brianna walk to her car alone and drive out of the parking lot. That was the last confirmed sighting of Brianna Maitland to date.
The Car at the Old Dutchburn House
The next afternoon, a Vermont State police trooper was dispatched to a derelict farmhouse on Route 118 in Richford to respond to a report of a car parked strangely against the building.
It was Brianna’s Oldsmobile, and it had been backed into the side of the abandoned house with enough force that the rear bumper was caught on the foundation. The back tyres were actually lifted off the ground.
There was no sign that the car had veered out of control. A sheet of plywood, which had been boarding one of the house’s windows, lay across the trunk.
The doors were unlocked, and their keys were gone. On the front seats sat two of Brianna’s paychecks from the Black Lantern Inn. They were still unopened.
Police also noted loose change scattered on the ground, a water bottle, and an unlit cigarette. The troopers’ working theory was that the driver was drunk, crashed the vehicle, and fled on foot.
He called a tow truck to haul the Oldsmobile to a local garage and drove to the Black Lantern Inn, a mile away, to inquire about the incident. The paychecks in the vehicle carried Brianna’s name, but the restaurant was closed for the day.
The vehicle’s registration was traced to Kellie Maitland, but no one contacted her at first. The Oldsmobile just sat as an impounded asset for days before anyone connected it to a missing girl.
Who was Brianna Maitland
Brianna Alexandria Maitland was born on October 8, 1986, in Burlington, Vermont, to Bruce and Kellie Maitland. She was the younger of two children raised on a farm in East Franklin.
From a young age, Brianna was restless, headstrong, and determined to build a life on her own terms. Her father mentioned that Brianna’s free-spirited nature manifested from a very young age.
That independence took shape when she moved out of her parents’ home in 2003, at 16, and switched high schools to be closer to friends. The living arrangement didn’t work out at first, and she kept moving between friends’ houses for months before eventually dropping out of school by the end of the year.
Rather than stopping her education, she enrolled in a GED program so she could go to college. By February 2004, she had settled with Jillian and was working two jobs to support herself.
A few weeks before Brianna disappeared, she was attacked at a party by a woman named Keallie Lacross. Witnesses claimed the motive appeared to be romantic jealousy.
Bruce said Brianna had been talking to a boy at the party who Keallie was interested in. Despite her extensive jujitsu training, Brianna reportedly did not fight back.
She was beaten badly enough to end up in the hospital with two black eyes, a broken nose, and a concussion. Brianna did file a criminal complaint against the woman, which was still open when she went missing.
The district attorney, however, dropped the charges against Lacross weeks later despite objections from Brianna’s parents. Lacross was also cleared of any connection to Brianna’s disappearance.
Five Days of Silence
Back at their apartment, Jillian woke up on 20th March 2004 to an empty house. She walked into their kitchen at 7 am and spotted the note Brianna left on the table the previous afternoon.
Jillian felt no need to be alarmed because her roommate frequently stayed over at her parents’ home or with friends after a late shift. So, she just assumed Brianna went elsewhere for the night.
That day, Jillian also had plans to visit her grandparents for the weekend. She left the note exactly where it lay on the table, locked the apartment, and drove away.
She would spend the entire day with her grandparents. Concurrently, Bruce and Kellie Maitland also whiled away their Sunday, assuming Brianna was busy working her second job or studying.
Because their daughter was fiercely independent and living on her own, they avoided calling that weekend. The first warning sign was on March 22, when Jillian returned to the Sheldon apartment.
She walked in and immediately spotted the same note Brianna left on Friday still sitting in exactly the same place on the table. She realised Brianna never came home all weekend.
At first, Jillian assumed Brianna may have spent the entire weekend with her parents and decided to call her mother the next morning to confirm.
On Tuesday morning, Jillian called Kellie and asked whether Brianna was at the family farm. She replied that she hadn’t seen Brianna since dropping her off on Friday afternoon.
Panic set in immediately as Kellie started calling the Black Lantern Inn, Brianna’s second waitressing job, and any other friends to ask if they had seen the teen.
Bruce Maitland remembered how the family’s concern shifted to something much worse. At first, he said it did not register as an emergency. Brianna did have a wide circle of friends and could plausibly be at any of their houses.
After calling everyone they could think of and coming up empty, Kellie filed a missing persons report with the Vermont State Police. Two days later, Kellie and Bruce drove to the State Police barracks in St Albans to drop off their daughter’s photographs.
A trooper showed them a picture of the green Oldsmobile backed into the site of the Dutchburn house. Kellie said she felt deeply repulsed by the image.
They were both convinced that their daughter was not driving when the car ended up in that position.
The Investigation and Bruce Maitland’s Ongoing Search for Brianna
The Vermont State Police spent the first few months treating Brianna’s case with scepticism concerning foul play. Brianna was profiled as a teen with an unstable living situation and a habit of moving between houses.
To the police, she fit the bill for a runaway. Kellie Maitland vehemently disputed this assumption, telling CNN, “There wasn’t a reason to. Brianna was very self-confident. She was living with a friend. It wasn’t like she was running from our restrictions or had an argument with us or a problem. We got along wonderfully. Every few days, we’d go out for a girls’ day together. No, Brianna didn’t run away. I’m 100 per cent sure that Brianna was abducted.”
A search was done nonetheless, and they focused their initial efforts on the immediate vicinity of the Dutchburn House on Route 118.
Search teams on foot fanned out from the barn, combing the woods and rural fields for any signs of the girl.
Because the vehicle had already been towed away on Saturday morning, the wind and passing traffic over the following days eroded the scent trail. When search dogs were deployed, they could not follow her.
When the vehicle was eventually returned, Bruce noticed Brianna’s ATM card, glasses, contact lens case and migraine medication were all still inside. His daughter leaving behind her contacts or medication did not make any sense to him.
The witness accounts were even more confounding. Several people came forward saying they had seen Brianna’s vehicle on the night she went missing.
One witness claimed they were driving by the barn between 11.30 pm and 12.30 am and saw headlights.
They did not see anyone in or around the vehicle, though. Another said they saw the turn signal flashing between midnight and 12.30 am the same night.
Brianna’s former boyfriend said he was returning from a party across the border in Canada that night when he saw the vehicle at 4 am. But there was no one in or around it.
Investigators then changed course. A flyer distributed by the FBI stated the crash scene at the Dutchburn house may have been staged so it looked like an accident.
Search teams on the ground near where the car was found recovered an undisclosed item that yielded a usable DNA profile. Several tips about Brianna’s whereabouts came in from various sources.
One anonymous caller told the police she was being held against her will in a house in Berkshire, 10 miles from Montgomery. She alluded that Brianna’s situation was connected to illegal drug-dealing activities in the area.
According to Catt’s True Crime Corner, police followed the tip and raided the Berkshire house on April 15, 2004. Investigators recovered cocaine and marijuana from the residence, but there was no evidence that Brianna had been there.
State attorney James Hughes later claimed, “It helped to eliminate a couple of theories, but also brought new ones to the surface.”
Another anonymous caller said a man who went by the name “Joker” had been overheard bragging that he had killed Brianna. He was brought in for questioning and subsequently released for lack of evidence.
Police determined he invented the story to seem dangerous. As the years passed, Bruce Maitland increasingly became frustrated by what he perceived as a lack of transparency from the police.
Speaking on the investigation, he informed the Burlington Free Press, “As the parents, we receive many tips that we forward to police. Have they acted on it? Who knows? Police tell you nothing about what they are doing with your case and tips, but we know the results. Nothing.”
The most significant lead was in 2006 at Caesars Casino, Atlantic City. On February 17, footage showed a woman resembling Brianna seated at a poker table with a man.
The obvious problem was that Brianna would have been 19 at the time, and New Jersey casinos require patrons to be at least 21. Bruce told WPTZ they were desperate to know if it was her in the footage.
“This is the most important lead we’ve had because it’s real video.” He added that the rest of the family had differing perspectives after seeing it.
“Brianna’s brother saw the video and within five minutes said it wasn’t her, but her grandmother saw the video and thought it was her,” said Maitland. Neither individual in the footage was ever identified.
Brianna’s family also created a temporary website named BringBriHome.org and posted an initial $20,000 reward for any information that would lead to her successful recovery.
DNA Match But No Suspect
The item recovered near Brianna’s Oldsmobile in 2004 sat in evidence for 16 years before technology finally caught up. In 2020, Vermont police sent the sample to Othram, a forensic genealogy lab in Texas, with lab and research costs covered by investigator Paul Holes and the Murder Squad podcast.
This DNA profile had already been compared against eleven other persons of interest, and there was no match. Genetic genealogy allowed tracing of family trees rather than searching a single database.
Investigators interviewed and collected DNA samples from a new group. One of these samples, which was tested, matched the profile recovered near Brianna’s vehicle.
It was not enough to go on, though, as police claimed there was insufficient evidence to name that person a suspect. Lead investigator, Sergeant Angela Baker, has remained on the case, though.
She described the case as so complicated and convoluted that once you think there is a good lead, it takes a swift turn.
Two Decades Later And No Suspects Yet
On the 20th anniversary of her disappearance, the FBI Albany Field Office, in coordination with the Vermont State Police, stepped in and boosted the reward to $40,000 in hopes of getting fresh leads.
Colonel Matthew Birmingham, the director of the Vermont State Police, was careful to announce that it was not a cold case, just an unsolved one.
Bruce and the rest of the family have spent the last twenty-two years holding onto the possibility that Brianna might still be found. Speaking to a MyNCB5, he described the difficulty of not knowing.
“Part of closure for me is about finding Brianna,” Maitland said. “The other part of closure is finding whoever did this and making sure they come to justice.”
He reiterated that the chances of knowing decreased with each passing day, and eventually they might have to accept that they would never know. That pushed him into a new initiative, the Private Investigators for the Missing.
Founded in 2018, the organisation was created to help the families of missing persons who cannot afford the associated costs of hiring professional private investigators. This came from him hearing too many stories of parents taking out second mortgages to search for their missing children.
Bruce and Kellie Maitland are currently separated and living in different states, though they remain committed to finding their daughter.
Brianna Maitland would be 39 years old today. She is 5 feet 4 inches with brown hair, hazel eyes, and a small scar near her left eyebrow. Vermont State police and the FBI are still asking anyone with information to come forward through the Vermont State Police tip line or the FBI 1-800-CALL-FBI hotline.
For more stories on unsolved mysteries or heroic escapes, explore our articles on the Disappearances of Lauren Spierer and the Tromp Family.
