Ylenia Carrisi

He arrived on a rainy December 27 in the village of Hopkins, going door-to-door searching for her, only to discover that the previous day she had boarded a bus to New Orleans.

At the time of her disappearance, she was staying in the LeDale Hotel with Alexander Masakela, a street musician twenty years her senior.

Masakela was arrested on January 31 on an unrelated charge[2] but eventually released for lack of evidence to connect him to Carrisi's disappearance.

In relation to her disappearance, a security guard testified that he saw a woman vaguely matching her description jump into the Mississippi River saying the words "I belong in water".

In November 2006, her father Albano stated for the first time that he believed in the security guard's story about the Mississippi river jump.

In June 2008, the German weekly Freizeit Revue reported that Ylenia was living in a convent in Arizona, the US state where her mother owns a home.