In the predawn hush of a winter Monday in New Zealand, Jim Donnelly kissed his wife goodbye and headed to the job he’d held for nearly two decades. By lunchtime, he was gone—swallowed by the very workplace that had defined his professional life. No note, no struggle, no body. Just a muffin left uneaten on his desk and a hard hat perched ominously near a vat of acid. Two decades on, the 2004 disappearance of the 43-year-old metallurgist from Auckland’s Glenbrook Steel Mill remains one of the country’s most perplexing cold cases, a riddle that has haunted his family, baffled investigators and fueled endless speculation. As his widow, Tracey, grapples with the endless void, renewed calls for tips underscore a simple, aching truth: Someone, somewhere, knows what happened to Jim.

The morning of June 21, 2004, unfolded with the quiet rhythm of routine for the Donnelly family in their Dannemora home, a quiet suburb east of Auckland. Jim, a devoted father to 7-year-old Liam and 5-year-old Siobhan, rose between 4:30 and 5 a.m. He chatted briefly with Tracey about a computer game he’d bought for Liam’s upcoming birthday—a small, telling glimpse into a man who doted on his kids. After a quick breakfast, he grabbed his keys and drove south toward the sprawling Glenbrook Steel Mill in Waiuku, about an hour away, where he supervised engineering processes as a metals scientist.

En route, Jim stopped for petrol and picked up a blueberry muffin for lunch—nothing out of the ordinary for a man whose colleagues described him as meticulous and affable. He arrived around 7:30 a.m., parked his silver Toyota in the staff lot, clocked in at the time terminal and changed into his work gear in the locker room. A coworker spotted him shortly after, chatting casually about weekend soccer scores. Jim even placed the muffin on his desk, a ritualistic touch amid the mill’s clangor of machinery and molten steel.

Then, as abruptly as a furnace shutting down, he vanished. Colleagues last saw him around 8 a.m., wandering a hallway toward the mill’s core operations. One worker noted he seemed “disoriented,” shuffling as if lost in his own workplace—a 900-hectare industrial behemoth he’d navigated for 19 years. By 9 a.m., when Jim missed a scheduled team meeting, alarm bells rang. Tracey, sensing something amiss after unanswered calls, contacted the mill. A frantic search ensued: His car sat untouched, engine cool. His locker held his street clothes, neatly folded. But Jim was nowhere.

The initial response was swift and exhaustive. Police declared him a missing person by 6 p.m. that evening. Over the next days, up to 50 searchers— including officers, mill staff, Air Force personnel, St. John Ambulance volunteers and search-and-rescue teams—combed the facility and its environs. Dogs tracked scents through paddocks, bushland, waterways and beaches; helicopters buzzed overhead; even the mill’s massive furnace was idled and inspected for any sign of mishap. Divers scoured nearby ponds after boot prints—potentially matching mill-issued footwear—were found trailing into the grass near one. Nothing. No wallet, no phone activity, no bank withdrawals, no sightings on CCTV beyond that hallway glimpse.

Five days later, on June 26, a chilling breakthrough—or tease—of sorts. A mill worker spotted Jim’s yellow hard hat, stenciled with “DONNELLY” in bold letters, tucked behind a protective cage near an acid reclamation tank in the pickling shed. Inside the 10-meter-deep vat, bubbling with hydrochloric acid used to clean steel strips, divers retrieved more: his work ID badge, safety glasses, Palm Pilot organizer, business cards and a single key—possibly to a cabinet or locker. The items were intact, unmarred by the corrosive brew, suggesting they’d been tossed in recently. But crucially, no trace of Jim himself. No clothing fibers, no bones, no DNA. The acid, while potent, wasn’t the Hollywood-dissolving superacid of lore; experts later confirmed it couldn’t erase a body so thoroughly without residue.

For Tracey, the discoveries were a gut punch. “It’s like he’s been erased, but not quite,” she told RNZ in a 2017 interview, her voice cracking over the line from the family home that still echoes with Jim’s absence. Now 61, she has spent two decades in limbo—officially widowed after a 2007 coroner’s inquest presumed Jim dead, yet forever the wife of a ghost. The children, now 28 and 26, grew up fatherless, piecing together memories from photos and stories. “I struggle with the fact he isn’t here,” Tracey said in a 2024 reflection, marking the 20th anniversary. “The not knowing… it’s a daily theft.”

What makes Jim’s case so maddeningly elusive? Investigators, led initially by Detective Senior Sergeant Neil Grimstone, pursued four main theories: accident, suicide, voluntary disappearance or foul play. Each has its adherents and its holes.

An industrial accident seemed plausible at first. Glenbrook was a hazardous hive—furnaces roaring at 1,500 degrees Celsius, conveyor belts hauling red-hot slabs, vats of acid and molten metal everywhere. Jim’s role involved overseeing quality control in high-risk zones. “He could have slipped into a machine or fallen into a conveyor,” one early theory posited. But exhaustive searches, including thermal imaging and shutdown inspections, turned up zilch. No blood, no screams reported, no unexplained shutdowns. “If it was an accident, it would have left a mark,” said Inspector Dave Glossop, who revisited the file in 2010.

Suicide loomed larger, fueled by the week prior. Colleagues and family recalled Jim acting “off”—withdrawn, irritable, missing calls. The weekend before, he’d snapped at Tracey over a minor spat and seemed preoccupied, pacing at night. “There was something on his mind,” Tracey later shared. No history of depression, but stress from work deadlines or unspoken marital strains? Possible. The acid tank find screamed intent: Dump your ID, end it discreetly. Yet skeptics point out the logistics—scaling a safety cage, tossing items precisely without splashing, then what? A leap into the vat? Divers ruled that out; the acid level and residue didn’t match. And why leave the muffin? “Suicide doesn’t fit the half-measures,” a Reddit true-crime thread debated in 2023, echoing broader online frustration.

Voluntary disappearance? Jim’s life seemed anchored—no debts, no secret lovers, no wanderlust. His passport sat unused at home; credit cards dormant. “No forward planning,” Grimstone concluded in 2005. Friends like Stephen Baker, who joined searches, insisted: “Jim wouldn’t abandon his kids. He lived for them.” Still, whispers persist—did he stage it all, fleeing to a new identity? International alerts yielded nothing.

Foul play rounds out the quartet, the theory Tracey clings to hardest. “The truth lies in the mill,” she insisted in a 2017 RNZ podcast, convinced Jim stumbled on something illicit—safety violations, embezzlement, corporate cover-ups. Glenbrook, owned by Bluescope Steel, was under scrutiny in 2004 for environmental breaches; Jim’s supervisory role put him in position to notice irregularities. Coworkers were interviewed voluntarily, police escorted—standard protocol, but it irked some. “Why not mandatory statements?” one anonymous mill source leaked to local media in 2010. No enemies surfaced, though; Jim was “the guy everyone liked.” Police dismissed murder as “no evidence,” but the hard hat’s placement nags: Someone placed it there post-disappearance.

The 2007 inquest by Coroner Sam Herdson delivered no closure. “What happened remains unexplained, but the presumption is Jim has died,” she ruled, open verdict intact. Fresh eyes followed: Glossop’s 2010 review mobilized 50 pros for a two-day sweep, chasing those boot prints anew. A 2020 forensic revival—re-testing vat residue, DNA on the Palm Pilot—yielded nada. Detective Inspector Shaun Vickers, now holding the file, told the Times in 2023: “It’s a mystery. For Tracey’s sake, I hope we crack it.”

Media has kept the flame alive. A 2006 “60 Minutes” segment probed psychic angles; “Sensing Murder” psychics in 2008 claimed visions of “industrial intrigue.” RNZ’s “The Lost” podcast in 2017 humanized the void, Tracey’s raw grief at its core. The Herald’s 2022 “A Moment in Crime” dissected timelines; the 2024 GUILT podcast season trekked to Waiuku, interviewing locals who swear the mill “feels different” since. Online, Reddit’s r/TrueCrimeDiscussion and X (formerly Twitter) threads pulse with theories—acid disposal cover-ups, witness tampering—though a 2017 RNZ post on the case drew scant engagement.

Bluescope Steel, via NZ Steel, maintains it cooperated fully: “We assisted searches and support those affected,” a spokeswoman said in 2017. No lawsuits, no internal probes reopened. Critics, including Tracey’s advocates, decry the opacity: “A company that size has secrets,” one ex-employee told the Times anonymously in 2022.

Today, Tracey lives in the same house, a shrine to what was. Liam, an engineer like his dad, and Siobhan, a teacher, honor Jim with annual mill visits—pilgrimages of unanswered questions. “We’ve built a life without him, but not complete,” Tracey said last year. New Zealand logs over 450 missings yearly; most resolve fast. Jim’s doesn’t, a stark outlier in a nation of tidy narratives.

As 2025 unfolds, with cold-case tech like genetic genealogy untapped here, hope flickers. Police urge tips: 105 or policenow. “Someone saw something,” Vickers reiterates. In Waiuku’s shadow, where steel birthed progress and peril, Jim Donnelly endures—not as a statistic, but a man mid-stride, forever 43. His story begs: In a world of surveillance and searches, how does a good man just… stop?