Gone: The Disappearance Of Aeryn Gillern

By: Robert O'Neill
In-House Review - Jul 06 2012

Gone: The Disappearance of Aeryn Gillern starts mining for tears right away. As Kathy Gillern talks about her son Aeryn, his upbringing and their close relationship, her face glows with affection. It quickly becomes all the more heartbreaking that Kathy hasn't seen him since 2007.

Raised in upstate New York, Aeryn moved to Vienna as a college student and eventually began working for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. He had a happy life in Austria ? complete with a boyfriend and numerous neighborhood pals and co-workers who looked upon him with great respect and admiration. He even won the title of "Mr. Gay Austria." The only thing that was missing was his mother. A retired police officer, Kathy had been planning to sell her home and move to Vienna to be with Aeryn. Unfortunately, she never got the opportunity.

On October 31st, 2007, Kathy received a voice mail from Aeryn's employer, informing her that he had not been seen or heard from in several days. The very next day, Kathy was on a flight to Vienna, assuming that there had been some kind of misunderstanding and that she would quickly locate her son. That was not to be the case. Even now, close to five years later, the details of Aeryn's disappearance remain sketchy. He was last spotted at the Kaiserbründl, a local gay sauna, where, according to some reports, a scuffle ensued. Aeryn was last seen fleeing the establishment and has not been heard from since.

Aeryn's co-workers had attempted to file a missing persons report before Kathy arrived, but were swiftly rejected based on the fact that he was not an Austrian citizen. When Kathy sought information from the police, she found little help or support. The detectives assigned to the case made minimal effort to solve this mystery. They maintain that Aeryn suffered a severe emotional breakdown, fled the establishment without any clothes, ran naked through the cold city streets and intentionally plunged to his death in the Danube Canal. This theory, supported by little to no evidence, makes sense to the detectives based around their notion that all homosexuals are in fragile mental and emotional states. Kathy made every effort to cooperate with the police, but was met with hostility, suspicion and homophobic assertions at each turn. Despite his respectable background and clean bill of health, Aeryn was painted as a diseased sexual deviant who reached an inevitable expiration. Desperate for answers, Kathy used her well-honed skills as a police officer to launch her own investigation.

Directors John and Gretchen Morning keep the film's focus entirely on Kathy. Most likely due to budgetary restrictions, she is the only interview subject in the entire movie. I'm sure, if given the opportunity, John and Gretchen would sit down and talk to everyone who had any connection to Aeryn and his disappearance, but they did not. Ultimately, the lack of supporting stories works against the film as a whole. Hearing from other involved parties would greatly strengthen the impact. Though nothing about Kathy Gillern suggests even the tiniest hint of dishonesty, her account of these events is filtered through her distress. It is entirely possible that her perception of how she was treated by authorities ? who, most of the time, were not speaking English ? could be skewed. Nevertheless, Kathy's singular recollection remains consistently riveting (though, obviously, heartbreaking) and the filmmakers use a wealth of home video, including video taken by Kathy during her search for clues, that lend the audience a distinct sense of time and place.

Understandably, Kathy will never be able to let her son rest until she knows what really happened to him. Without concrete proof of his death, she will always entertain the possibility that, someday, he will come walking through the front door with a crazy explanation for his long absence. Each year, she returns to Vienna to hold a vigil in her son's honor, hoping that someone with a new piece evidence or testimony will come forward. Hopefully, this documentary will provide some help.

By: Amos Lassen

Kathy Gillran is a veteran police officer in New York in a small town. Her son, Aeryn is a researcher who works at the United Nations in Industrial Development and he is located in Austria. He was once Mr. Gay Austria. In October, 2007, Kathy got a call from the United Nations that her son had not been to work for two consecutive days and she immediately went to Austria to find him but she also found out that the Austrian police have no interest in the case. She is told by detectives that her son was last seen at an exclusive men's sauna in Vienna on October 29 and there he suffered an emotional breakdown and fled the sauna with only a towel on and ran naked through the streets and then jumped to his death into the Danube Canal. His disappearance was written off as a suicide.

Directors Gretchen and John Morning decided to take the story and put it on film and to try to understand what happened. They give us a film of a harrowing experience. Kathy narrates and we really only get her perspective on the story. We find ourselves totally frustrated by what we see and especially seeing Kathy's helplessness. She knows that something is not right both because she is a cop and a mother. Her son had been living a successful life in a beautiful city and he had many friends.

The picture that we get of Aeryn was that he loved his life and his job and that is what made Kathy so suspicious when he did not show up for work. The policemen who said there was no interest in the case treated Kathy disrespectfully and she thought it might just be anti-Americanism but then she thought of her son and she wondered if that same anti-Americanism is what led to his death or was it homophobia or misogyny or combinations of these? The police were very unsympathetic and inhospitable to Kathy and when Kathy noted that a body had never been found, the police began to treat her as if she was on trial. Kathy stayed with Aeryn's boyfriend and she maintained contact with his colleagues at the U.N offices. Every year in October she returns to Vienna in the hope that there is some news but what she finds is a police that does nothing. This is an absolutely fascinating story but we still do not know anything and probably never will. All we can takes from this is the hostility of the Austrian police and a case in which nothing was done right.