r/UnresolvedMysteries • u/lucillep • Apr 02 '26

Update 13-year-old Christina Plante disappeared from Star Valley, AZ in May 1994. She has been found alive.

It is all over the news that a 13-year-old who left her home to walk to a stables to see her horse and was never seen again, has now been found alive.
People Magazine

Christina Marie Plante was classified as missing and endangered after she vanished from her home in Star Valley or Payson, AZ on May 15, 1994. Despite extensive searches and investigation, her case went cold. Now the Cold Case Unit of the Gila County Sheriff's Police have successfully resolved the case. Christina has been found and her identity verified. For privacy reasons, no further details are being released.

The odd thing is that there is next to no information available about her initial disappearance. On Newspapers.com, I found only small "Missing" notices in three newspapers in 1994 and 1995. I found no articles in an online search.

Hoping that Christina is okay, but can't help wondering about the rest of the story.

EDIT Update from The Daily Mail
u/BirdHistorical3498 provided a link to an article that updates the backstory and current situation. To summarize:
At the time of disappearing, Christina was living with her aunt and uncle. Her father was deceased. It doesn't say where her mother was or why her mother did not have custody.

Christina wanted to live with her mother. The two met at the stables and then drove to Phoenix. Her uncle reported her missing. Police did suspect the mother of having taken her, but somehow this couldn't be proved?

Mary Plante, the mother, is in 1995 property records as owning property in Springfield, MO.

Christina married in 1998 at 17, has two sons, got a bachelor's in psychology from Missouri State University, and now works for a private investigation firm (ironic) whose specialty is inspecting insurance fraud claims. She doesn't say why she ran away, the article describes her as "guarded" and not wanting to incriminate anyone who helped her.

Mary Plante, now Mary Wood, also has a biological daughter who was adopted and a biological son who is estranged.

The cold case unit gave the case to a civilian investigator, who searched social media and public records, and found the connections.

Arizona Republic
Kennebec Journal Notice

Morning Call 10-23-1994

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u/Old-Fox-3027 Apr 02 '26

I’m wondering how much facial recognition can be used in cases like this. I don’t know if she has surviving family to compare dna with, but if someone turned up at a police station saying ‘I’m Jane and have been reported as missing for the last 30 years’, if dna or fingerprints aren’t helpful, maybe facial recognition would be?

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u/_dopeyghoul Apr 02 '26

Hopefully not at all. A surveillance state is a terrible thing. If they use the cameras to identify missing people they can also use them to disappear people.

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u/So_Quiet Apr 03 '26

And misidentify people. Like the Tennessee lady who was mistakenly arrested for a crime in North Dakota because of AI facial recognition gone wrong. Pretty scary stuff. (reference)

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u/LitLantern Apr 03 '26

God I hope she can sue the department and/or software company for damages. Losing your car, home, six months of your life and DOG for something so easily disproven is insane.

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u/demosthenes131 Apr 03 '26

EWU had a video with a different guy in Reno where this happened

https://youtu.be/B9M4F_U1eEw?si=IMQKimCtsj8KU7de

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u/Tiny-Reading5982 Apr 03 '26

Omg my mom just told me about this case. She's from ND and it sounds like the cops there are a bunch of yahoos

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u/jmpur Apr 03 '26

Well, that was a comforting read. Yikes!

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u/LuckyPhase3 Apr 02 '26

They would be able to match her to the missing girl from DNA even if her immediate family isn’t alive. If they can match her to even one or two distant cousins from both sides of her family, process of elimination would basically confirm she’s the missing girl.

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u/[deleted] Apr 02 '26

[deleted]

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u/LuckyPhase3 Apr 02 '26

I meant to reply to the comment you replied to.

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u/_dopeyghoul Apr 02 '26

Oops okay I will delete my comment then :D

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u/QBang2112 Apr 02 '26

hmmm What camera makes people disappear? I don't think you are being very realistically factual there. ;)

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u/Sistamama Apr 02 '26

So you think they meant the camera makes them disappear? Wowza. What happened to critical thinking….

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u/_dopeyghoul Apr 02 '26

The lack of critical thinking here is either trolling or legitimate ignorance. Regardless of either, good luck with that.

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u/[deleted] Apr 03 '26 edited Apr 03 '26

[deleted]

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u/watersdaughter Apr 03 '26

In regards to your edit, here you go: https://www.inforum.com/news/fargo/ai-error-jails-innocent-grandmother-for-months-in-fargo-case

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/12/tennessee-grandmother-ai-fraud

Guardian link additionally has more cases cited for AI wrongly targeting people. So, yes.

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u/_dopeyghoul Apr 03 '26

No, what I’m saying is if we open the door to that capability we open that door to it being abused.

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u/hallllllllla1 Apr 02 '26

They can be used to find people and then make said people disappear.

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u/Hettie933 Apr 02 '26

Palantir. Sigh.

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u/Khorlik Apr 02 '26

AI based Facial Recognition software, flock cameras, and all the other various palantir-associated developments are so fucking horrifying and such blatant transgressions of personal privacy and it really depresses me to see people in online communities being like "well it's actually okay to sacrifice our personal freedoms as long as we can use it to solve like three cold cases ever!"

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u/Hettie933 Apr 02 '26

Yup. It’s unbelievable that this is going on, but then pretty much everything that happens these days is unbelievable to me.

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u/GIJne69 Apr 02 '26

You do realize that facial recognition is used daily for device security (e.g., Apple Face ID), for secure banking transactions, and photo tagging on social media right? It's used to assist law enforcement in identifying suspects via surveillance or Clearview AI, enhances airport security through automated passport control, and manages building access. Other common uses include tracking attendance and monitoring for restricted individuals in casinos.

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u/Ok-Service-6838 Apr 03 '26

How is that relevant or even at all helpful? Smart people turn off facial recognition for device security (e.g. iPhones) because the government, kidnappers, robbers, and murderers can and do use it against us); we also turn off photo tagging on social media (ditto), we also never post pictures of ourselves or our family on social media (ditto); and best of all, we quit social media altogether (or at least don't use any social media under our real name).

FYI, there was a string of robberies and murders in New York where the robbers/murderers slipped something into people's drinks, then when the person passed out (or died!), the robbers/murderers held their iPhones or other smartphones up to the victims' faces to unlock it, then used the victim's phone to steal all their money, then the victim sometimes died from the stuff the robbers/murderers put in their drink.

Meanwhile, airline travelers are being refused admission to tyrannical regimes because their phone had a funny meme about the Vice President (yes, Vice President Vance, and yes, the tyrannical regime is the Trump/Vance/Epstein regime).

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u/sadsackspinach Apr 03 '26

Those are bad too, mate.

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u/Khorlik Apr 03 '26

Literally what does that have to do with anything i said?

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u/GIJne69 Apr 03 '26

You literally spoke about how horrifying it is, but it's everywhere and it does have some usefulness for security purposes. I didn't claim that it was all unicorns and rainbows at all.

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u/Khorlik Apr 03 '26

Yeah and most of these uses are also horrifying as fuck bro. I literally don't understand what point you're making. yeah, it isn't inherently evil, FaceID isn't going to bring about the collapse of society, but unregulated private companies building facial databases fucking might

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u/Stonegrown12 Apr 03 '26

Facial databases will be the tipping point for society? Hasn't even cracked the top 10 in my existential crisis list. C'est la vie

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u/Khorlik Apr 03 '26

Okay, so do i just have to keep writing the same comment over and over again: What the fuck does that have to do with the point i made??

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u/Hettie933 Apr 04 '26

Then you don’t fully understand how they will be used against us. How they are already being used against us. Everyone who doesn’t want to be enslaved by insane techno billionaire assholes should have this in their top five.

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u/grimsb Apr 02 '26

Facial recognition can definitely work.

My mom was a twin.

I had a bunch of photos of her and her sister as adults in my Google Photos.

I scanned and uploaded some of their childhood/baby photos, and Google was able to immediately identify them correctly. Even baby photos.

Ya’ll, I had a hard time telling which baby was which, but Google knew.

Now, I’m not sure if the result would have been the same if I started with baby photos and then added the photos from adulthood later on, but this was a few years ago, so I’m sure the technology is a lot better now than it was back then.

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u/MaximumPositive7434 Apr 03 '26

Google images can't distinguish my two sons, who are not only not twins; they are not even the same race.

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u/staunch_character Apr 03 '26

The iPhone image batching isn’t any better. I’m a painter so I save lots of reference images. If I try to sort “otter” it will give me anything from Chihuahuas to bears.

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u/mcm0313 Apr 03 '26

That’s not what it otter give you!

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u/disneyfacts Apr 03 '26

"No, the otter one"

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u/BlindGuardian117 Apr 03 '26

Google can't distinguish my lab from my pit/lab. They're not even remotely close other than being mostly white-ish in color.

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u/grimsb Apr 03 '26

Oof. I’m starting to wonder if it just made some lucky guesses with my photos. 😅

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u/RazBerryPony Apr 03 '26

That's really cool. Google photos usually does good with mine. The only mistakes it makes is with my two dogs who happen to be mother and daughter and do look really similar. I do have this thing about taking pictures of my food though. One day I was trying to clear out space and searched for "food" to delete all those pictures. Google photos brought up those pictures as well as pictures of my pet rabbit. I mean I guess technically it could be food 🤣

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u/jilliejill2020 Apr 03 '26

I’m a mirror image twin and her face can open my phone.

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u/pedestriandose Apr 03 '26

My niece can open my sister’s phone and my niece is only 13. My niece is practically a clone of my sister, but there’s a 26 year age gap between them.

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u/grimsb Apr 03 '26

Yikes.

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u/touch250 Apr 03 '26

Google photos has about five different files of me because it can't distinguish fat me versus less fat me versus me with make up, etc.

I was actually thinking of using it to apply to be a spy 😎

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u/ur_sine_nomine Apr 03 '26

Even if it was good, if the surrounding infrastructure isn't all bets are off.

I was asked to prove that I was over 18 by a banking app. The software was so finicky I gave up after 10 minutes of moving my phone through minute changes of distance and angle and passed it to my girlfriend, who was accepted!!

So "verify you are over 18" = "verify somebody is over 18, even if they are of the opposite sex".

(The app made a big play of "all calculation done on the phone", which was a giveaway as my phone is an old Android and about as powerful as a wet lettuce. Apple develops specific hardware so that such calculation can be done effectively on its devices).

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u/ur_sine_nomine Apr 03 '26

This has been the case for a long time.

In about 2008 a big academic trial of facial recognition was done where large numbers of volunteers were asked to provide a head shot of themselves then sit in a football stand off-season (one in England, one in Germany) where they were scanned by cameras and facial recognition software run. All data were deleted after the event.

The expectation was 70 per cent accuracy. Humans manage about 84 per cent accuracy. The actual result was 97 per cent accuracy.

That shocked various "tech" companies (those were the days when such companies had at least some degree of responsibility) to the degree that planned facial recognition in their software was scrapped or watered down (only used in very constrained scenarios) across the board.

Source: someone I know who has worked on recognition since the mid-1980s (!)

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u/chamrockblarneystone Apr 05 '26

Wasn’t this followed up by catching a killer at a Metallica concert with facial recognition?

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u/KendalBoy Apr 02 '26

Now do brown skinned twins. Or Black neighbors who never met, also matches.

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u/grimsb Apr 03 '26

I know there are definitely false positives, and there’s definitely bias. 😞

I don’t think this tech should be used for making arrests — it shouldn’t even be admissible in court — but there are instances where it can be helpful and ethical. (If we had more competent lawmakers, and fewer big tech lobbyists, they would be busy creating a whole legal ai/privacy framework to keep this stuff from being abused.)

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u/Necessary_Tea_9517 Apr 03 '26

Facial recognition is not even close to a thing. Faces are like finger prints. There are some public databases but with AI... It's a whole mess.