Stephanie Ann Drnovsek -- Missing From Lakewood, Colorado Since 1984

Author: Shane Lambert
Original Time of Writing: January 11th, 2021
All articles are subject to editing after the original posting.

A high-school photo for a missing

27-year old?

Missing person: Stephanie Ann Drnovsek    

Last-seen date: September 5th, 1984
Last-seen location: Lakewood, Colorado in 10600 block of West Virginia, Avenue near south Kipling Street
Link to Government Source: #MP21211

Ethnicity/Race: White

Sex: Female

Age at time of disappearance: 27 years old
Hair: Blonde/strawberry
Eye color: hazel
Height and weight at the time of disappearance: 5'4" and 120 pounds
Other: scar on abdomen from removal of uterus; butterfly tattoo on abdomen; also, tattoo on left hip as per the Colorado Bureau of Investigation; had a fractured right femur at some point in her life

Vehicle: driving her boyfriend's vehicle

Commentary and opinion: 

The case of Stephanie Drnovsek was not an inspiring one to research. She went missing after leaving her home and the home of her live-in boyfriend. The last time she was seen was September 5th, 1984, she was driving her boyfriend's car at the time, and the car was found 17 days later. It would be two days later than this before her boyfriend would file a missing person's report on September 24th, 1984 (source: CharleyProject).

One thing that stood out to me, in this case, is that she went missing at the age of 27 years old. However, the photo of her that's used is one from her 1975 high-school yearbook. She went to Iver C Ranum High School in Denver, Colorado and the yearbook is uploaded to Ancestry.com. It struck me as strange that someone who goes missing at the age of 27 has a photo from nine years earlier used.

It did not strike me as that strange that there wasn't any hit to her name with Newspapers.com. Lots of missing person cases don't end up getting covered. Furthermore, she had aliases (Heckel, Henckel, and maybe Drnousek) for her last name and Stephanie has variants too, like Stefanie, Stef, or Steph. I spent some time mixing and matching different ways that her name might have been reported but found nothing. When you research this case you don't really find that much information on what happened to her.

Having read thousands of missing person's cases in my life, the odd thing about this case is that it just seems like no one cares to communicate some of the fundamentals. A picture is worth a thousand words yet there is no photo of her from near the time of her disappearance, I found no coverage of her case in any news from about the time of her disappearance, and she wasn't reported missing until 19 days after she was last seen. 

There's loads of work to be done on this case and I think it's the Websleuths where you'll find people that might put some effort in. From what I saw, it was members of that website that were willing to find a photo of her, even if it was an old one.

The vehicle that Stephanie was driving (what model???) was found on September 22nd, 1984. It had been stripped, meaning that thieves had taken whatever they could of value from it. I would not hold that to mean that the thieves that stripped the vehicle disappeared Stephanie, although I'm sure the police would want to talk with them.

I saw a vehicle abandoned on the side of a road once and drove by it every day. Hubcaps started to disappear and the gas cap was taken. Thieves target abandoned vehicles for sure so the car Stephanie drove probably was stripped after she went missing.

I reached out to someone that I thought might have known Stephanie via email. Hopefully, I can pick someone's brain to get some better coverage or details for this case.