The Disappearance of Attiin Rachmawati Shaw (Maine)

In early 2023, pleas for help reached the small Aroostook County town of Washburn, Maine from across the world in Indonesia. Family members and friends of Attiin Rachmawati Shaw hadn’t heard from her in over a year and the stories they were told about her suspicious disappearance didn’t make any sense.

If you look at your feed right now, you’ll see two episodes released on the same day. Both of the Maine missing persons cases I’m covering are in need of some major attention because the investigations are active and ongoing. Getting these names and photos circulating in the public could bring in the leads that investigators need to make progress.

Attiin is Missing

In early 2023, a message from worried loved ones in Indonesia began popping up in Facebook community groups across the world in Aroostook County, Maine. 

“Dear Good People of Washburn, Maine, A message of concern from Papua, Indonesia. Attin[sic] Shaw is still missing. She was last seen in your fine community and is the wife of Mike Shaw. She has family and friends here that love and miss her and children in Washburn that need her. Please, any information, no matter how seemingly innocuous, share with us or preferably the police in Washburn who, my understanding is, are still actively investigating her mysterious disappearance. Her passport has expired and there is no record of her leaving the country nor would she have the means. No activity on her social media which she utilized often. No activity on her credit cards, and no activity with her social security account. No record of her entry into Indonesia. She has just…vanished leaving young children who were the center of her life and her parents and extended family distraught and desperate for answers. Anything you can do to find her would be deeply appreciated by many. Please ask friends and anyone in the area if they know something or have a detail to share. Please do not forget her as we have not. Many thanks to you all in advance.”

For almost a year and a half before they shared that appeal on social media, the family and friends of Attiin Rachmawati Shaw had been trying to track her down. They reported Attiin missing to the Indonesian Embassy. They contacted the Consulate General in New York which oversees the State of Maine to determine if Attiin had ever applied for a travel permit. They contacted an attorney in the United States for advice. They even did interviews with Indonesian media outlets to get the word out. From almost 10,000 miles away, Attiin’s loved ones were doing everything in their power. 

The posts in local Facebook groups were their effort to generate new information and track Attiin down after so many months without contact, yet a source told me that many of those posts were overlooked and some were even outright dismissed as spam. Not all of them though. The growing public concern for Attiin’s well-being finally reached Washburn Police in March of 2023 and landed on the desk of Officer Hunter Bellanceau.

Now, as the post from Attiin’s family indicates, Washburn Police were already on the case long before that point. Records show that Attiin’s husband Michael Shaw filed a missing persons report in November of 2021. Whatever efforts Washburn PD made in the previous 16 months had not led to Attiin, so Sergeant Chandler Cole assigned the case to Officer Bellanceau for a second look. 

The now former-Officer Bellanceau posted a copy of her March 2023 supplemental narrative to Facebook recently in August of 2025. I gotta say, in my experience, it is atypical for an officer to independently release a report by posting photos of it on social media, but Hunter says in her post accompanying the report that she did it because Attiin’s case keeps her up at night and she wants to see justice done. It details only a few of the early investigative steps, but it’s also one of the only primary sources publicly available about Attiin’s case at this time.

So, according to that report, the last time Attiin’s family had any contact with her was in August and September of 2021. 

An article published in the Indonesian Lantern and translated to English gives more context to these last points of contact. Attiin’s sister Anita said that when she spoke to Attiin in August, Attiin told her she was planning to start looking for a job. She’d previously worked at a pizza place and she also did some cleaning, but the translated article indicates that Attiin was bored and wanted to find something new.

The following month, in early September of 2021, Attiin talked to her mother and a sibling. It was a casual conversation, nothing out of the ordinary, but that was the last known time Attiin’s family in Indonesia had any contact with her.

Early September was also around the last time Attiin posted on her private Facebook page. On September 7, 2021, Attiin shared a link or post that was unavailable by the time a friend took a screenshot of it. A loose translation of Attiin’s caption along with the post indicates that whatever the content was, it made her head hurt or bothered her in some way. After that, Attiin’s family realized that her social media activity stopped, which was highly unusual, so they reached out to Attiin’s husband, Michael Shaw.

According to Attiin’s family, Mike informed them he actually hadn’t seen her for about a month at that point.(2a) When they spoke to him again in October, he informed them that he’d reported her missing. However, when Officer Bellanceau checked this out, she saw that the missing persons report wasn’t filed until a few weeks later in November of 2021.

Attiin’s family and friends reached out to Mike several more times over the coming months for updates. According to certain family and friends, Attiin’s initial absence didn’t seem to be all that concerning to Mike because it wasn’t the first time she’d left home.

About Attiin Rachmawati Shaw

Attiin is originally from the Papua province of Indonesia, and much of her family still lives in that region. According to Attiin’s own blog posts found on Blogger, she met her future husband Michael Shaw in Indonesia around December of 2010 while Mike was on a work contract teaching math and science at an international school. Attiin wrote in a blog post that it was love at first sight. They dated for just a few months before Mike proposed, and they were married on March 23, 2011.

Attiin had a son from a previous relationship when she met Mike, and he assumed a paternal role from the start. Over the next few years, Attiin and Mike built a life and a family together. They welcomed their first child in 2012, with a second and third just a few years later. Public videos on Attiin’s Facebook page capture the first time Mike ever changed their son’s diaper. Attiin wrote in her blog that Mike was a mature, responsible guy, a good teacher and, “a great Papa for my son.”

When Mike’s contract at the international school expired sometime around 2019, he, Attiin, and the children relocated out of the country to Myanmar. Although leaving Indonesia for the first time caused Attiin some understandable anxiety, she took comfort in the fact that Myanmar was relatively close to Indonesia and had a similar culture. Attiin’s friend Beth told Nicolás Viñuela of Dateline NBC that Attiin was simply grateful for the life she had, even if the change made her nervous.

When COVID-19 struck Myanmar, the Shaw family decided to move to Maine. I’ve asked around and still haven’t figured out why Mike and Attiin chose Washburn, Maine. Mike appears to be from New Jersey originally and from what I can tell, none of his immediate family members live in Maine. We know he got a job at a local school there for a short period of time, but whether that was a deciding factor to move to Maine, or if they picked Maine first and the job came after, I can’t be sure. Maybe it just sounded like a good place to ride out the pandemic. Mainers will be the first to tell you how many folks “from away” flocked to the Pine Tree State in 2020. 

Attiin’s friend Beth said that before moving to Maine, Attiin owned a salon that Mike helped build and she was proud to be a business owner. But after arriving in the United States, she struggled to find employment. A source tells me that her visa status made things difficult. I have to imagine that moving to northern Maine at a time when everyone was stuck inside (or at least six feet apart) must have been incredibly isolating – the culture, the climate, everything is so different from what she knew. On top of that, family members have said in various media sources that Attiin lived with known mental health challenges.

Attiin’s cousin Zadia told Dateline NBC that Attiin lived with bipolar disorder, and sometimes she experienced mood shifts and angry outbursts. According to Zadia, it wasn’t unusual for Attiin to leave home after an outburst, “She felt bad that she is always angry with the boys – the kids – that she left home several times.”

But even when she left home in the past, she was still in contact and kept posting on social media. And she always came home when she was ready. Zadia said that Mike and Attiin even had an agreement. If Attiin was away from home for more than a month, Mike had to contact police because she had always come back after a month when she took some time away in the past. But this time was different.

Attiin’s story continues on Dark Downeast. Press play to hear the full episode wherever you get your podcast.