The disappearance of Angelo "Andy" Puglisi is a case involving the unsolved disappearance of Angelo Gene "Andy" Puglisi, a 10-year-old American boy who went missing on August 21, 1976, from the Higgins Memorial pool across the street from his apartment in the Stadium Housing Projects, Lawrence, Massachusetts.
Disappearance
On August 21, 1976, Melanie Perkins and Andy met at the pool late in the morning. As usual, they spent the entire day playing there. "It was the place to hang out if you lived in the projects," Melanie says. At about 2:00 that afternoon, she was hungry and decided to go home. Usually she walked alone to her mother's apartment, which was less than 200 yards away. But on this day, something she still can't explain made her feel afraid. She asked Andy to accompany her, but he wasn't ready to leave. So her 11-year-old brother, Jeff, walked her home. The last time Melanie saw Andy, he was sitting by the pool in his green bathing trunks, talking with friends. National Guard troops and Green Berets scoured the neighborhood the next day, truckers with CB radios rallied around and neighbors helped with the search. Dogs were brought in to sniff a local city dump and woods adjacent to the pool. Scuba divers dragged the nearby Shawsheen River. More than 2,000 volunteers pitched in. The search was called off after six days. In 1998, while researching for her documentary, Melanie Perkins met with two locals, Alan and Tony, who described finding a rectangular hole dug in the woods near the pool a year or two after Andy's disappearance when the two were children. They describe the hole as being "perfectly rectangular, with a flat bottom and flat sides" and looking "like something had been removed from it -- like a chest, or a crate, or maybe a coffin." The hole was filled in two days later, and neither individual reported the finding until hearing about Perkins' documentary. Perkins added that she had heard rumors a year after Andy's disappearance that the police intended to dig in the area Alan and Tony described to her. Two weeks after Andy's disappearance, Wayne W. Chapman was arrested in Waterloo, New York. In his van police found Polaroid pictures of naked children, maps of wooded areas, a fake police badge and starter pistol, duct tape, 8 mm movies of children, child pornography, high end camera equipment, a bloody child’s sock and rope. Shortly afterward, Chapman confessed to raping two boys in Puglisi's hometown of Lawrence and, according to one of the victims later interviewed by Melanie Perkins, displayed a familiarity with the area. Despite being considered a prime suspect, police did not have sufficient evidence to arrest Chapman in the Andy Puglisi case.
In media and aftermath
In 2007, a feature-length documentary film, Have You Seen Andy? was made by Melanie Perkins, Andy's friend who later became a filmmaker. It was broadcast on HBO and won the National Emmy for Best Investigative Journalism in 2008. Puglisi's parents divorced in 1975, and his father has since moved to New Hampshire. In 2016, his case was profiled on the podcast The Vanished.
