Spotlight Case: Charles Hall III

Fifteen-year-old Charlie Hall disappeared from Nashville, Tennessee twenty-seven years ago today. He was last seen that afternoon when he went to walk to his girlfriend’s home, but he never arrived.

I have next to no information on this case. That always frustrates me. Teenage boys don’t seem like very good targets for kidnapping, but there’s got to be some reason why the NCMEC has listed his case as a Non-Family Abduction. I’ve been unable to find any articles in the old newspaper databases, and his common name makes research all the more difficult.

His NCMEC picture shows him wearing a dress shirt, sport coat and bow tie — a school dance, perhaps, maybe the prom? A wedding? He looks as if he’s trying to decide whether or not to smile. His cheeks are still soft — I think he seems younger than fifteen. His hair is done in a poofy Afro, so common in the seventies and eighties.

Someone knows what happened to this boy. Someone knows where he is. I hope that someone comes forward, so Charlie’s family won’t have to wait another year for resolution.

Dealing with the families

I don’t contact them on my own, but I get a lot of emails from family members of the missing people profiled on my website. Most of them write to thank me for posting their relative. Some of them have additional information for me, or corrections. I’m always glad to get those.

Once in awhile, though, I get a family member’s email that’s troubling. Once, shortly after I set up the Charley Project, a woman wrote to me claiming her husband was profiled on my website. She was absolutely furious that I’d posted his missing persons file without asking her permission first, and accused me of insensitivity and copyright violation, among other things, and demanded I take his file down. I did so immediately, but she apparently went around bad-mouthing me to other people online and I heard about it. I have no idea what her problem was. Sometimes I wonder if the man whose profile I removed was really her husband, or if something else was going on.

Today I got an email from a woman whose son is on my site. She was very upset because in his file I put that he was suicidal at the time of his disappearance. She wants his whole casefile removed. I’m trying to talk her out of that, suggesting I just remove the part about suicidality. I got that information from law enforcement, incidentally, and I showed her the source. I’ve gotten several emails like these: family members asking me to remove information from the casefiles that seemingly portrays their loved one in a bad light, but is nevertheless true. Another man I posted on Charley, the police said he was a suspected car thief, though he hadn’t faced any charges. His sister asked me to remove this piece of information. I was uncomfortable. I didn’t want to offend her — god knows that poor man’s family had been through enough — but the MP’s alleged criminal activities may well have played a role in his disappearance. In the end I removed the information.

I think about what my own Charley Project casefile would look like, if I were missing and someone was doing a write-up for me. I suffer from a certain serious medical condition which, while I’m not ashamed of it, has a stigma attached to it. You could also say I have a “history of alcohol abuse.” (I used to go on fairly spectacular drinking binges from time to time. I have vowed to stop that, and I haven’t had an alcohol at all since August.) Now, to me, an MP is an MP and I don’t care if they were criminals or mentally ill or on drugs or whatever. But I can see why some people don’t want that sort of information getting out.

It’s a quandary. I have always acceded to the family’s wishes as far as removing embarrassing information, but I’m never very happy about it.

Louisiana Repository for Unidentified & Missing People

Today I discovered the Louisiana Repository for Unidentified & Missing People. They have several missing people profiled that Charley doesn’t have, so of course I started adding them. I put up five today.

This site is clearly using Charley Project photographs. Without attribution. (As ever. I believe more sites plagiarize my content than cite it properly, in spite of my generous terms of use and my attempts to prevent such copying. Sigh. Such is the way of the internet.) I have some doubts about the accuracy of some of the casefiles, too. One case I added today, for instance, the LRUMP database gives a date of disappearance in December, but all the other sources I could find listed the date as October.

Nevertheless, it’s another resource, and hopefully it will get bigger and better as time passes. In the meantime, I’ve got a score or so of cases from it to add to Charley.

No one knows they’re missing

The Los Angeles Times ran a lovely editorial on the Michelle Pulsifer case. Her mother, Donna Prentice, was able to conceal her 1969 disappearance for decades. Prentice was finally brought to trial for Michelle’s murder, but the case went through two mistrials and then a dismissal. But, as the editorial points out, there is some nobility in trying. I think in To Kill a Mockingbird, someone asks Atticus Finch why he’s taking the case because he’s sure to lose, and he answers something like, “Knowing you will fail is no reason not to try.” Prentice did, at least, spend over four years in jail awaiting her two trials for her daughter’s murder, and now everyone knows what a horrible excuse for a mother she was. Another prosecutor who cared more for his conviction record than for trying to get justice might not have touched this case at all.

Michelle’s case terrifies me because I’m sure she’s only one of scores, perhaps hundreds, of children who slip into the void and aren’t even missed. And cases like this one, this one, this one, this one, this one and this one show that it can happen today just as easily as it did in 1969. I’m sure these children are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. After all, the reason they’re on Charley is because eventually the disappearances were discovered and reported. How many have never been reported, never will be?

When you think about it, it could be shockingly easy to conceal your child’s disappearance, particularly with very young children who aren’t old enough to be enrolled in school (or who, like Garnell Moore, were never registered for school even when they got old enough). Families move away and lose touch. Kids are sent to live with relatives and aren’t seen anymore. If it was a single parent with one child and not much of an extended family, or if two parents collaborated and kept it a secret among themselves, and they kept their story straight, the lie could hold indefinitely. I read a book once about a scheme where parents would send their more troublesome teenage offspring to a rural “boarding school,” when in fact they were knowingly sending them to a facility that killed them and hid their bodies. Obviously that’s taking it a little bit far, but only a little bit.

This is part of the reason why I, like the editorial’s author, praise the prosecutor in the Pulsifer case. Perhaps hearing of this case — Donna’s past catching up with her some 35 years later — might deter some people from trying to “disappear” their own children. Perhaps it might cause neighbors and family friends to look a little closer, or ask a few questions, when a small child quietly disappears. Every child, every person, should have someone who loves them and cares enough to want to know where they’re at.

Spotlight Case: Deniese Hiraman

Christmas, I’m told, is a very difficult time for the families of missing people. I can sort of relate. One of my brothers was killed in a car accident twenty years ago and I’m sure he’s on my parents’ minds every Christmastime. But at least they know where my brother is, at least they can visit his grave. I can’t imagine how terrible it would be to try to celebrate Christmas while wondering if your child/spouse/sibling/friend is alive or dead or hurt or scared or can’t remember who they are.

Today I thought I’d spotlight the disappearance of Deniese Hiraman, who disappeared from New York City nearly a decade ago. I’ve always had a special interest in her case, probably because she’s exactly one day younger than me. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had her listed as a runaway for years, but they’ve since changed the classification to endangered missing. Endangered missing is a catchall term and I’m not sure the changed classification actually means anything in Deniese’s case — the NCMEC appears to change most runaways to endangered missing once they reach a certain age.

At any rate, Deniese was only thirteen years old when she left to go to school and never arrived. Though I don’t have a lot of info on her disappearance, there are indications that her life was troubled. She reportedly was involved in a gang, and she had a fake ID giving her age as 18. She may be very far from home; there have been reported sightings of her in Minnesota, Canada and Trinidad. My intuition is that she’s alive and may not even know she’s listed as missing. I’m reminded of another runaway case, a young woman named Michelle Branch who disappeared in I think 1997. If I’m remembering the story right, about ten years later she called home after she got her own missing persons notice in the mail on an ADVO card. She said she’d been a “wild kid” and hadn’t realized people were looking for her.

But even if Deniese is alive, that doesn’t mean she’s well or in a good situation. Young, pretty girls like her, who think they know more about the world than they do — and I sure thought I knew everything when I was thirteen — are vulnerable for all kinds of predators. I only hope she’s safe and perhaps, this coming year, she’ll decide to call home and her family won’t have to spend another Christmas without her.

Chance Wackerhagen

The San Marcos Record did an article about the 1993 disappearance of Chance Wackerhagen. The article didn’t really say much that his Charley casefile doesn’t have already, but at least he got a little bit of publicity after all this time.

It’s a very unusual case, largely because Chance and his father seem to have disappeared without a trace. I’m inclined to think they’re both dead. Lee Wackerhagen was just a truck driver. He would likely have had contacts spread across the country as a result of his job, but he probably didn’t have the money and know-how to completely change his and his son’s identity and walk off the face of the earth. And Chance was old enough to remember his family and he’d be an adult now; I think he would have contacted his loved ones by now if he could have. I’m wondering about the possibility of a murder-suicide, but if so, where are the bodies? Or perhaps Lee and Chance left the country and that’s why there’s been no trace of them.

It’s a shame the Amber Alert wasn’t in existence when Chance went missing. His disappearance would definitely qualify and they might have found him if they’d used an Amber.

He’s out there somewhere. Alive, I hope, but I expect not.

The media and missing people

I once read a novel about a teen prodigy who tries to come up with a mathematical formula to predict the duration and outcome of romantic relationships. It occurs to me that if you were interested enough, and much better at math than I, you could probably come up with a formula to predict how much media attention a missing person will get.

The world has grown much smaller in recent decades, due mainly to the internet. Every day true crime buffs on web boards discuss cases many hundreds or thousands of miles from their homes. A click of the mouse and you can access thousands of newspapers. The Charley Project has over 7,000 cases on it, and anyone who googles one of the names will find the person’s Charley Project casefile with all the details I can provide. But all the same, it takes a lot for any missing person to become a household word. It only happens to a select few.

A lot of people think it’s just an issue of race, or income. I’ve seen many blog entries saying “This rich/white missing person is all over the news, and this poor/minority person who disappeared around the same time isn’t. Clearly the media is racist/classist.” I don’t think it’s nearly as simple as that, however. Race and income are part of it, of course, but there are many other issues to consider.

I would list the factors in this equation as follows, in no particular order:

Race — White people are more likely to get attention than people from minority races.

Physical attractiveness — Beautiful people are more likely to get attention.

Income — The more wealthy the MP or their family, the better.

Social status of MP and/or their family — If you’re a missing boy scout or pregnant housewife, you’re much more likely to become a media darling than, say, a prostitute or a drug addict.

Circumstances of disappearance — Runaways and family abduction cases rarely, if ever, receive national attention. People who simply drop off the face of the earth, with no clues one way or another, also tend to get ignored. On the other hand, an obvious stranger abduction (with witnesses) is riveting and tends to draw a lot of interest.

Gender — Female missing people get more press. If it’s a very young kid, gender doesn’t matter as much. With adults, though, women have a definite edge.

Age — The younger, the better. Little kids get a lot of attention, teenagers less so, unless there’s clear evidence they didn’t run away. Young adults, particularly women in their twenties, get attention. If the MP is over forty, their chances of drawing a lot of news drop precipitously.

Social connections of MP and their loved ones — If the MP or their family has a lot of social connections who will help them, like if they belong to a big church, they are more likely to get attention because they have more people to advocate for them. If the missing person is related to someone famous, more to them.

The most common demographic of missing people is a black adult male. I read somewhere that black men make up something like one-third of all persons reported missing in America. But how often do you see them on Nancy Grace?

Two major missing person cases that drew worldwide attention are Laci Peterson and Elizabeth Smart.

Their stories captivated the United States and made the news abroad as well. One ended happily, the other not: Elizabeth turned up alive and well in the company of a pair of loons who’d been holding her captive for months. Laci’s body, and that of her unborn child, were found floating in the Pacific Ocean, and her husband was convicted of two counts of murder.

Both Laci and Elizabeth had all the right things to become missing person media darlings. Both were Caucasian, female and quite attractive. Both were relatively young — Laci was 32, and Elizabeth just 14. Laci came from a comfortably middle-class family, and Elizabeth’s parents were wealthy and could afford to hire a publicist for her. Both families were considered very respectable and there was no indication of trouble in Laci or Elizabeth’s backgrounds. As for the circumstances of disappearance: Elizabeth was abducted at knifepoint from her bed in the middle of the night. (Her sister witnessed this; otherwise it’s likely Elizabeth would have been written off as a runaway.) Laci, who was seven months pregnant, vanished without a trace on Christmas Eve. Nobody witnessed anything, but right away people assumed something terrible must have happened to her — it seems highly unlikely that a pregnant woman would choose to walk out of her life at Christmas.

The same month Elizabeth disappeared, a little boy named Jyrine Harris disappeared from Irvington, New Jersey. He is still missing. Certainly he was never covered in People magazine or on talk shows. Even within his own region his disappearance was almost unknown. One article I did find lamented the situation:

Aside from [police detective] Malek and a few of Jyrine’s relatives, not many people appear concerned about the boy’s whereabouts.

When the toddler disappeared, the only volunteers who came forward to search for him were off-duty police officers. After a flurry of media coverage, the story has slipped off the pages of newspapers and the evening news. Even with a $20,000 reward put up by the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office for information on Jyrine’s whereabouts, the phone never rings…

What are the differences between a case like Jyrine’s and a case like Elizabeth’s or Laci’s?

Jyrine was very young, only two years old at the time of his disappearance. Males are less likely to get coverage, but not if they’re tiny. He’s African-American, which works against him in the press. He suffers from ostogenesis imperfecta, a brittle bone disease, and had a broken leg when he went missing. Clearly, being a toddler with limited mobility, he didn’t run away from home. But we can’t really rule out anything else. Jyrine’s family was poor and pretty troubled. His father was a heroin addict and wasn’t involved in his life. His mother was in jail when he disappeared; she’d been charged with abusing him. (The charges were later dropped. Jyrine’s mother wrote me at one point and said she’d never harmed her son and that his injuries were due to his disease. I can buy that; babies with ostogenesis imperfecta can get fractures just from having their diapers changed.) Jyrine lived with his grandmother and eight other people, and his sister’s boyfriend was also at the house the night he disappeared. He was discovered missing at 2:30 a.m., but his disappearance wasn’t reported to police until 5:00 a.m. The little boy’s cousin says Jyrine was abducted from his bed by two men, but the police have treated the family as suspects. Jyrine’s own parents seem to believe someone in the family harmed him. Who can tell what happened? Jyrine’s gender, his race, his family’s poverty and low social status, and the murky circumstances of his disappearance work against him, and it’s extremely sad, because every missing person deserves to be found and that often requires public knowledge of their case.

But if the world was a perfect place, there would be no missing people to start with.

Women, men and moving cars

Today I added the case of Shirley Clift, who disappeared from Oklahoma in 1980. Her ex-husband said she died after she jumped out of his moving car. His story is eerily similar to the one told by Kirk Lankford after he was accused of murdering Masumi Watanabe. It’s almost as if Kirk Lankford copied from Gary Clift. That’s not likely, though. I wonder if either of the men even expected anyone to believe their stories? If someone jumps from your moving car and dies, you call the cops. You don’t bury the body in a riverbank or dump it in the ocean.

Masumi Watanabe got justice, at least. Kirk Lankford will never see the light of day again. Justice is a small, weak and pale thing, but it’s better than what Shirley Clift got. Gary is still walking around free, probably married again to some poor woman, and his and Shirley’s daughter has to live with the knowledge that her father killed her mother. Here’s to hoping that something comes up in the Clift case — not necessarily her body, though of course that would be great — so her killer can go to prison where he belongs.

Little Charley Ross

As this is my first post, I thought I would tell you readers about the little boy the Charley Project is named for. Though he’s all but forgotten today, there was a time when nearly everyone in America knew all about Charley Ross.

His name was Charles Brewster Ross and he was born in 1870 to a respectable middle-class family in Germantown, Pennsylvania. His family called him Charley or occasionally “Little William Penn,” due to his serious manner. On July 1, 1874, two strange men lured four-year-old Charley and his eight-year-old brother, Walter, into their wagon with the promise of candy.  The men drove to a general store, gave Walter some money, and told him to go inside and buy some candy for himself and his brother. When Walter came out again, Charley, the men, and the wagon were gone. Charley was never seen again.

It was a whole different era back then. Whereas nowadays missing children are plastered all over the newspapers and television, abductions were all but unknown, or at least unacknowledged, in 1874. In fact, kidnapping was so rare that it wasn’t even a criminal offense in Pennsylvania at the time of Charley’s abduction. (This very quickly changed.) When Charley’s father, Christian Ross, reported his son’s disappearance to law enforcement, the police were initially unconcerned. They thought the men had probably been drunk and taken Charley on a lark, and would return the boy once they sobered up. They advised Christian to go home and wait and see. It’s hard to imagine law enforcement acting that way today if a four-year-old were abducted by two strange men.

Shortly thereafter, the first of many ransom letters arrived at the Ross house. The kidnappers wanted $20,000, a considerable sum of money for the times. Christian Ross wasn’t so wealthy that he had that sort of cash just lying around, but he could get it. However, on the advice of the police and in tune with his own convictions, he decided not to pay. Christian believed the abductors would probably return his son once they realized they weren’t going to get any money. This was the first big ransom kidnapping in the nation, a test case so to speak, and Christian felt it would set a bad example to pay for his son: that other criminals would catch on to the idea and children would be getting snatched left and right. He also simply thought it was morally wrong to make the abductors profit for their crime. So he dug in his heels. And the abductors dug in theirs.

Walter had gotten a good look at both of the men, and one in particular had a very distinctive appearance (his nose had been eaten away by syphillis), so within a reasonably short time the police knew who they were looking for: two penny-ante criminals named William Mosher and Joseph Douglas. But the cops got nowhere — the men appeared to have vanished. Meanwhile, Christian kept communicating with the kidnappers through newspaper ads and letters, stringing along, hoping they would get caught before they would harm his boy. It became clear pretty quickly that the men weren’t going to give up Charley without being paid. Christian was often tempted to give in and pay the ransom, but though he agonized continually over this he never backed down.

Charley’s abduction was extensively covered in the news. He was basically the Lindbergh baby of the 1800s. As an indication of how famous the little boy was, I will share the following anecdote: in the early 20th century, decades after little Charley’s abduction, some Swedish tourists visited Pennsylvania. They decided to first see Charley’s old house. Then, they would go and see the Liberty Bell.

In December 1874,  the Ross abduction case came to a climax. Mosher and Douglas were shot to death while robbing somebody’s house. Douglas lived long enough to confess: as he lay dying on the floor, he said there was no point in lying anymore and that he and Mosher had kidnapped Charley. He didn’t know Charley’s whereabouts, however: Mosher knew, he said. But Mosher was already dead, and Douglas expired a short time later. Young Walter Ross subsequently viewed the bodies in the morgue and identified them as the abductors.

The case wasn’t over — William Westervelt, an associate of Mosher, would be tried for kidnapping in 1875. Prosecutors alleged he’d been involved in Charley’s abduction, but there was little evidence to support this and Westervelt himself swore he was innocent and didn’t know where Charley was. Even after he was offered immunity from prosecution if he would produce the child alive, he still said he didn’t know anything. He was acquitted of kidnapping, but found guilty of conspiracy and sentenced to six years in prison.

Christian Ross would spend the rest of his life looking for his son. He traveled all over the United States and sometimes even out of the country, checking blond, brown-eyed boys to see if one of them was his. There were so many Charley sightings that Christian actually had to start issuing certificates to the boys he checked, so if someone tried to report them again the boy could prove he’d been checked once already. After Christian’s death, his wife and Walter would carry on the search. But they never found Charley. He would be lost forever.

My thoughts: the kidnappers do not strike me as being particularly ruthless men, or particularly bright. Of course, they cruelly strung along a family for months with promises and threats. But they let Walter go alive, when he’d gotten a good look at them and could (and did) identify them later. The logical thing would be to either take both boys, or to clobber one over the head and leave his body in a ditch. But they let Walter go. I wonder how they got the ransom idea in the first place — both Mosher and Douglas were not-very-successful thieves, impoverished, with criminal records behind them. Hardly criminal masterminds.

I wonder if they would really have deliberately murdered Charley like they said they would. Something — just a feeling — tells me no. That doesn’t mean Charley didn’t die shortly after his abduction, however. Being somewhat in over their heads, Mosher or Douglas could well have accidentally killed the child in a panic. Or, more likely, after his abductors were killed Charley starved to death wherever he was being held. Or perhaps the answer lies in some old churchyard, underneath a vine-covered tombstone carved with another name and a date well into the twentieth century. I simply don’t know.

In any case, Charley’s story has haunted me ever since I read about it some ten years ago, and when I started my database it seemed only right to name it after him. The original missing child. May he rest in peace.