MP of the week: Rebecca Ferguson

This week’s featured missing person is Rebecca Ferguson, a 32-year-old woman who disappeared from Jasper, Alabama on September 16, 1988.

She was supposed to go visit her cousin in Birmingham, but never arrived there. Two days later her car was found abandoned on the roadside; it had been shot at but there was no blood.

If she is still alive, Rebecca would be more than twice the age when she disappeared, 68. I think it’s unlikely she’s still alive but can’t find out all that much about her disappearance. She left two little boys behind.

Topped sixteen thousand

The Charley Project has now got over 16,000 cases on it. 16,078 to be exact. When I started the website twenty years ago with the remains of Jennifer Marra’s old MPCCN that she’d given to me, it had like three or four thousand cases.

MP of the week: Derrick Engebretson

This week’s featured missing person is Derrick James Engebretson, missing since December 5, 1998. This was around the time when I was getting interested in missing persons. I remember reading articles about the search for Derrick. I wouldn’t have thought they’d still be looking, 26 years later.

Derrick and his dad and grandfather were looking for a Christmas tree in the Winema National Forest in Klamath County, Oregon when he disappeared. If he simply got lost, the searchers didn’t find him and no one has found him since.

The police think foul play is a possibility, though. A convicted child rapist, Frank Milligan, confessed to Derrick’s murder and offered to lead the cops to the body, but nothing was found and Milligan later recanted.

If he’s still alive, Derrick Engebretson would be 33 today.

MP of the week: Kimberly Riley

This week’s featured missing person is Kimberly Ann Riley, missing since December 23, 1998 from Lorain, Ohio. She was 19, 5’2 and 122 pounds. She’s white, with blonde hair and blue eyes.

Kimberly was originally listed as missing with her boyfriend, Omar Seymore, who is also the father of her two kids. Seymore turned up in California in 2004. As for Kimberly, the details are at the casefile but the circumstances look very bad and it’s likely Seymore killed her. He was found liable in a wrongful death suit (basically by default, since he didn’t defend himself) but has never been charged in her disappearance.

If she’s still alive, Kimberly would be 44 today. She’s probably a grandmother by now.

Between the family death and my recent travels I’ve been absent

So my father-in-law’s funeral is over and this past weekend I went to the Wisconsin Missing Persons Awareness Event, where I gave the keynote speech and the Charley Project was awarded a plaque from the organization. It was a really awesome event; they get bigger every year and every year more people show up.

Now I’m home again. And have a bunch of cases to resolve.

MP of the week: Corey Kelly

This week’s featured missing person is Corey Tahj Kelly, who was 19 and within days of becoming a father when he disappeared from North Charleston, South Carolina on September 11, 2017. He left his mom’s home to stay at his sister’s, then left his sister’s place and never came back.

Corey is black, 6’0 and 165 pounds, with black hair, brown eyes and a tattooed arm there’s a photo of, as well as other tattoos.

He had a history of drug abuse and mental illness, both possible causes for his disappearance, but his family doesn’t think a voluntary disappearance is likely because his baby was born just ten days later and he wouldn’t have abandoned his daughter.

David, my father-in-law, is dying

Yesterday (Friday) evening he collapsed and though they got his heart started again, he was without oxygen for about 20 minutes and based on that and other indications the ICU doctor has predicted massive brain damage. We do not expect him to come back from this and have summoned the extended family to say their goodbyes.

Given David’s age (78 I think) and state of health, this wasn’t unexpected. But it really sucks. We’re all very sad. He was a very good man. I had known him for 22 years.

Every Friday my in-laws have lunch with my husband. I don’t usually join them but yesterday I did and we had a very pleasant meal and got on very well. We talked about books and politics and fixing the roof and the upcoming trip to Wisconsin. Ten hours later we were talking about end of life decisions for David.

I’m really glad I went to lunch with them yesterday.

I will miss him very much.

[EDITED TO ADD]: Everyone who could come arrived so we pulled the plug. He officially passed at 12:53 p.m. today.

Why is this woman on NamUs? She was identified in 2017.

Yesterday I happened to see this case on NamUs and included in the casefile was a link to this article, explaining that her body was found in 1970 and she was semi-identified in 2014 — by fingerprints, not by name. They were able to match her fingerprints to an arrest record, but as this woman was arrested under a bunch of different names, they still didn’t know her name.

I looked further and found this article from 2017, explaining they had now identified this lady. Her name was Evelyn Moore, one of the aliases she was arrested under, and a family member of Evelyn identified her photo and said the family hadn’t heard from her since 1969 but had never reported her missing. DNA was pending, said the article. That was in 2017; surely they’d have gotten around to testing that DNA by now. She’s been identified.

Yet she is on NamUs as missing.

There are a lot of people who get added to NamUs as “missing persons” after they were already found dead and identified. I have no idea why this happens. I understand that sometimes (often) only partial remains are found, but come on! A person whose skull has turned up cannot be considered missing anymore. It seems to me if they want to add partial remains cases they should do so in some kind of third category, so you don’t have people wasting their time thinking a person might be still alive, or trying to match them to various bodies.

I once spoke to some NamUs official about this and he wanted me to send him a list of names of found people that are still on NamUs. I admit I never did, thinking that a database with the backing of the federal government ought to clean up their own house and I shouldn’t have to do their work for them.

Rant over.

Because thats not suspicious or anything

Yeah, Blake Deven? Whom I wrote about earlier? Another relative, a girl named London, is missing too. From this article:

FPD reported Thursday that investigators recently identified another possible missing relative. London Deven, who would be 28 years old today, was last seen in 2019 in Fayetteville. The most recent photo of London available to investigators was taken in approximately 2007, when she was likely 12 years old. No age progression photo is available for London.

Press X to doubt she actually went missing in 2019.

Things were worse than I thought

I suck at capitalism. I think of ways I could make more money off the Charley Project, like merch and stuff, and wind up not doing anything because I get to feeling horribly guilty because

1. It seems like there is no way to make money without the risk of exploiting others. Like merch. How do I know my merch wouldn’t be made by enslaved Uyghurs in Chinese labor camps (that’s who makes all the Temu stuff from what I’ve heard) or by child laborers in Bangladesh or something?

2. I don’t want anybody to ever be thinking I started the site as some kind of grift for donations. I’ve been accused of it before and though I know it’s not true and that no one who actually knows anything about the Charley Project would think it was true, it’s really hurtful every time it happens. I am actually a lot more sensitive to criticism than any of you know. The reputation of this site is worth more to me than making loads of money.

I would never put the Charley Project behind a paywall. Even if I wanted to do so, which I don’t (since it would make the site a great deal less useful to the public), I am pretty sure the internet would hate me for it.

Lately, the way things have been, I’ve been feeling like the Charley Project is akin to the Great Barrier Reef: providing a true crime ecosystem that many podcasters, YouTubers etc, feed off of, but suffering from over-exploitation and at risk.

Because no one wants to pay for content on the internet. Everyone wants it to be free. Like, how many people ACTUALLY donate to Wikipedia every year? They get the impression it’s a free public service but it’s not; it relies on grants and on donations. Imagine how upset people would be if Wikipedia vanished—but how many people would pay $3 a month to keep it?

I don’t want ads either. There don’t seem to be many products that would be appropriate to advertise on the grim catacombs of my site.

Patreon has been suggested. I don’t know much about it but I know Patreon supporters get offered rewards and I don’t know what I could offer for rewards. I know one true crime podcaster offered behind-the-scenes police homicide file content as a Patreon reward. Which on the surface sounds like a good reward given the content they were producing , but then the podcaster got canceled because the behind-the-scenes stuff included crime scene photos of a murdered child and people got upset. You can see how this can be problematic.

PayPal is taking more of a cut than they used to, and people are donating less. Because times are hard. The economy is supposedly going well but the middle class is shrinking and most people I know personally say they’re struggling. I saw in the news that they’d figured out how much it costs to live “comfortably” in my city, and that amount was more than twice the average income of a worker in my city.

I know I could make more if I officially registered as a nonprofit but I don’t really know how and only know that it involves lawyers and lawyers cost. Plus I don’t even know if a “nonprofit organization” can be legal if it consists of just one person.

I am exceedingly grateful to everyone who chips in, knowing they don’t have to and that most people do not. Several years ago some true crime people did a big fundraiser for the Charley Project and I was so grateful I cried. This money kept the wolf from the door for a long time when my husband lost his job. I don’t know what we’d have done without it.

I don’t know if the Great Barrier Reef thing is a very good metaphor but I’m tired and I’m cold and I’m writing on my cell phone in a dark room cause our power got shut off today. I hadn’t expected it but my husband didn’t seem surprised when I texted him at work about it. He says he’ll get us reconnected tonight. He handles the bills so until the disconnect I didn’t realize things had come to this.

And late this month I’m supposed to go to Wisconsin and give the keynote speech at their missing persons event and I am trying to figure out how to make this work financially: twenty hours of driving round trip, an Airbnb, and putting Patrick in a boarding facility while I’m gone. My sister and mom can’t take him cause of their own pets, Michael’s parents are not physically capable of handling him, my dad lives in a pet-free apartment. He will have to board.

I just suck at this. I’m sorry.