Here are five people who managed to leave nothing behind, except a mystery as to their true identity and a whole bunch of baffled reporters, authorities, and dick joke websites.

Today, it's impossible to interact with someone without leaving some sort of record. Whether it's a call record, a Facebook photo tag, or a leaked sex tape, it's all on a hard drive somewhere, and probably will be for eternity, or at least until the robot apocalypse. But despite this incessant note-taking by our future technological overlords, some people have achieved the impossible: They got their faces plastered all over the news (usually in corpse or mugshot form), and we still have no freaking clue who they really were .

5 We Know "Cheryl Ann Wick's" Killer's Identity, But Not Hers

Huffington Post

In 1991, James McAlphin of El Dorado, Arkansas, pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to 15 years in prison, because he's an asshole. The weird thing, though, is that we still have no idea who he killed. Well, to be clear, we know exactly who was murdered -- it was his girlfriend, "Mercedes," a stripper/prostitute whom McAlphin pimped for. However, after she was killed, police discovered that Mercedes wasn't her real name -- nor was her "real" name, Cheryl Ann Wick, her real name. Despite the fact that we know who McAlphin murdered (and that he got sentenced for it), we don't know who he murdered.

KLRT‑TV

Has the Tyrell Corporation reported anything missing?

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After she was killed, the coroner issued a death certificate for Cheryl Ann Wick and contacted her parents in Minnesota. This came as quite a shock to them, considering that Cheryl was alive and well in Minneapolis. After getting a good night's sleep to make sure this wasn't some Fight Club-esque gaslighting, the police confirmed that the real Wick was living in Minneapolis and had had her purse stolen a few years earlier, including her ID and birth certificate. Investigators snooped around and found more places the victim had lived and worked under names like Cheryl Kaufman, Shannon Wiley, and Kelly Carr, all of which were equally made up. People she had worked with said that Cheryl had variously claimed to be in witness protection (nope), that her father was in the Mafia, and that she was on the lam after pulling some bank robberies -- because if you're going to create a fake past, it should at least be something badass.

El Dorado Police Department

Did anyone try to remove her mask to see if Patrick Swayze was under there?

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McAlphin claims to know her true identity and that he had met Cheryl's mother and sister, but he ain't saying shit. He refuses to give any information to the police unless they do something for him -- evidently not giving him a life sentence for murder wasn't enough. He's currently back in prison, serving 10 years for domestic battery, because once an asshole, always an asshole.