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Motiveless murder/disappearance - that is, where the victim has no enemies or any reason to have become a victim of murder (e.g. robbery) - are extremely hard to solve even today. Police are much better able to capture criminals today, but they’re still batting a pretty measly average overall, and especially so in cases of motiveless disappearances. The US has ~350 million people in it, and there are enormous swathes of land that are uninhabited or are only lightly inhabited. Massive marshes, endless forests, etc. Dumping bodies in there is so effective that sometimes even serial killers who have confessed and are helping the cops locate victims’ bodies can’t find them all.
The behaviour of killers outside of the crime itself is usually what fucks them. Bragging to people, taunting the cops, leaving calling cards/clues, or just becoming so confident and hubristic that they lower their standards and get caught for future murders through sheer sloppiness.
Also most serial killers don’t want to talk to the police. They just wanna be left alone to torture and murder people nobody will care to look for like teenage runaways working as truck stop prostitutes. The bonus is that if you’re a long haul trucker that frequently crosses state lines, there’s a low likelihood that the couple of police departments who even bother to try solving those crimes will ever actually talk to each other enough to compare evidence (this is an actual theory of something that might be happening).
The town I grew up in, and the next town are connected by a road (shocking, unusual, I know). There was an 8 month period where the police departments and politicians all agreed that there should be a way to pass high urgency alerts back and forth, in case there’s someone fleeing along that road, or anything like that.
It was eventually decided that the viable ways were:
a desk agent would fax over a document and call to notify/confirm about the event.
one department would have to replace some substantial portion of their IT system so it could work with the other system.
they could pay for a custom solution, maybe.
They settled on option 1, and it worked. Every time I hear politicians talk about sharing information across organizations, I think back to a working meeting with two vendors going down a list of protocols and standards, eventually deciding there was no common ground. It’s been made difficult, and no one in the industry appears to want to fix that.