Positive ID in Boulder Jane Doe case!

Not too long ago I read an reviewed Someone’s Daughter: in Search of Justice for Jane Doe. Well, she’s not called Jane Doe anymore. She was just identified. She’s called Dorothy Gay Howard, and she was 18 years old when she was murdered in 1954. I had heard they had another possible match and was hoping the third time would be the charm.

Dorothy looks like she was a beautiful young woman. That photo is so fifties, with the Marilyn Monroe hairdo and everything. The bust of Jane Doe’s face looks a lot like her, except the hair.

Hats off and stand up for Silvia Pettem, for without her dedication to this case it’s highly likely that Boulder Jane Doe would never have been identified and Dorothy Gay Howard’s family would have been left wondering for the rest of their lives.

Brooke Wilberger found

As noted by one blog commenter, one person who emailed me, and Google News search, Brooke Wilberger’s body has been found. She was nineteen years old and between her freshman and sophomore year at Brigham Young University when she was abducted from an apartment complex parking lot in Corvallis, Oregon May 2004. The case got a lot of attention at the time, because of the sensational nature of the crime and because Brooke was the kind of victim the media loves: young, innocent, Christian, middle-class, blonde and very beautiful. Just like a slightly older Elizabeth Smart. They were both Mormons, even.

Joel Patrick Courtney was charged with Brooke’s murder in 2005. Well, this month he pleaded guilty and lead the police to her body. He will be in prison for the rest of his days. I’ve heard that Courtney is considered a possible serial killer and a suspect in the disappearance of Katheryn “Katie” Eggleston, but I don’t know if anything came of that lead.

Anyway…may Brooke rest in peace.

Soldiers from mass grave in Turkey identified

Back in 2006, officials from the United Nations Committee on Missing Persons located a mass grave of nineteen people in northern Turkey. According to this article, five of the bodies have been identified as Greek Cypriot soldiers. 35 years ago Turkey invaded Cyprus (which, for the uninitiated, is an island nation in the Mediterranean sea, which is bilaterally divided into the “Greek side” and the “Turkish side”) and about 1600 people disappeared without a trace, not just soldiers either: there were over a hundred kids under seventeen and over three hundred old people sixty and over. (These numbers come from the Missing Cypriots website.) Very few of them have ever been found. The last sign of those particular five disappeared people was when they were photographed upon surrendering to the Turks and becoming prisoners of war. The oldest man was thirty years old, the youngest only nineteen. I’m not 100% sure but it looks like the other fourteen people in the grave are still unidentified.

That Turkey has committed war crimes (the Armenian genocide of the nineteen-teens also comes to mind) is not shocking to me. Many countries have done so — not that that doesn’t make a terrible thing, but what I’m saying is that Turkey is hardly alone in having committed atrocities. But they should at least admit it. Turkey has maintained a stony silence as to the 1974 invasion and what happened to the missing Cypriots. And they won’t even acknowledge the existence of the Armenian genocide. I am not holding present-day Turks responsible for what their fathers and grandfathers did, but the government should do the right thing and fess up and try to make amends, rather like Germany has. Revealing the ultimate fate of all the missing Cypriots, uncovering more mass graves if necessary, would be a good start.

Having a relative who is missing for political reasons or war-related reasons has got to be at least as stressful as having a missing relative of the kind listed on the Charley Project. You don’t know where they are, if they’re hurt, if they have enough to eat, where they lay their heads at night, even if they’re alive at all. The people of Cyprus deserve this closure.

A roundup of resolves

It sometimes happens that I get several resolved cases dumped on me all at once. Today is one of those days. We’ve got:

Alice Louise Donovan, 44, who was kidnapped from Conway, South Carolina on November 14, 2002. Her abductors were too thoroughly frightening young punks, Brenden Basham and Chadwick Fulks, who’d broken out of jail and gone on a multi-state crime spree of robbery, car theft, burglary, kidnapping and murder. The suspects were arrested two days later. They were later convicted of carjacking resulting in death in Alice’s case. Bone fragments found in Horry County, South Carolina in January have just been identified as Alice’s. Basham and Fulks are both on death row now. Another of their victims, a West Virginia college student named Samantha Burns, is still among the missing.

Michael Ray Larsen, 49, a transient who disappeared from Fort Bragg, California in August 2003. His skeletal remains were found near a homeless encampment in Fort Bragg last week, and were identified this week. There was no indication of foul play. It looks like he might have fallen off a cliff.

Tiairra Jo Garcia, 19, disappeared from Pasco, Washington on June 22, 2008. Her dirtbag boyfriend and three of his associates were charged in connection with her disappearance. The police believe Tiairra’s boyfriend accidentally shot her and then let her die without trying to get help for her. Tiairra’s remains turned up in Mount Rainier National Park. The boyfriend was sentenced to eight years in prison and one of his friends got one year for their roles in her death. It hardly seems to be enough.

Brody Shaun Shelton, 3, and his sister Logan Willow Shelton, 1, were kidnapped by their mother from Las Vegas, Nevada on March 19, 2004. The children have been found safe, according to the NCMEC; I have no other details.

Even more Jeannie Melville articles

A whole bunch of them now. Perhaps the media attention will lead to some tangible results as far as identifying her killer.

The Chicago Tribune
The Green Bay Press-Gazette (with picture of Jeannie)
WHIO TV
WBAY TV

Authorities estimate the time of death as late September or early October 1970, but Jeannie actually disappeared in August. Where was she in the intervening weeks, who was she with, what was she doing? She was certainly a remarkably pretty girl. Did she have a history of taking off, a boyfriend, anything like that? I suppose those are questions the police will have to answer.

Jeannie Melville article

I had previously reported that Jeannie Melville, an eighteen-year-old girl who went missing in August 1970, was found deceased. I didn’t have any details at the time, but I just found this article in the Dayton Daily News. Jeannie’s nude body was found in a cornfield in Darke County, Ohio in October 1970, but it wasn’t identified until now. She was en route to visit her aunt in Ohio when she disappeared. It looks like she met the wrong person on that bus.

Obviously she was murdered, and the killer got a 39-year head start. I doubt the case is solveable, but at least her family knows what happened to her.

Jeannie Melville found dead

Per the NCMEC, Jeannie Marie Melville has been found deceased. She was an old case that just made it onto the internet not too long ago. Jeannie was 18 years old when she disappeared sometime during August 1970. She got on a bus in Green Bay, Wisconsin that was bound for Ohio, but never arrived there.

Jeannie’s photo looks so late sixties-early seventies it’s ridiculous. I could totally imagine that picture being in one of the Classmates.com banner advertisements.

I can’t find anything about it in the news yet. I’ll keep checking over the next week or so, but frankly I don’t expect to find anything. A lot of times these old cases are ignored in the media.

David Michael Bell’s remains identified

Some remains found east of Cisco, Texas last week have been identified as David Michael Bell, a Charley Project missing person. He was 27 years old when he disappeared from Cisco the day after Christmas in 2007. His case got more than the average amount of attention for a black man, I think because he had been a minor league baseball player and also he was kind of cute.

The police don’t suspect foul play in David’s death, though with skeletal remains you would be hard pressed to find proof of murder. His car had run out of gas and they think he might have gotten lost walking to get help and gotten hypothermia. He may have also been having mental problems when he disappeared. He stopped randomly at a church that day and made some remarks that were so bizarre the pastor called the cops. But when the police came, David was acting normal and so they let him go. No way anyone could have known, of course.

This is the part, I suppose, where I’m supposed to say something about closure. But closure is such an overrated concept.

Missing person case from 1992 solved

According to this article, the cops have identified the person responsible for a woman’s 1992 disappearance, and he lead them to the body. The article doesn’t identify the woman, but says: The officer’s interest in the case began when he logged onto an Internet “missing persons” site, typed in “Williamsport” and the missing woman’s name and description appeared.

So I went to Charley’s frontpage and typed “Williamsport” into the Google search box and only one case popped up: Dawn Miller, missing from Bellefonte, Pennsylvania since 1992. She lived in Williamsport.

If the missing woman they’re talking about isn’t her, I’ll be very surprised. I wonder if the site they’re talking about was Charley? Dawn is also on the Doe Network.

Sanchez children’s identity confirmed

Authorities have confirmed the identities of the three children’s bodies found in Richard Robert Sanchez’s car, which I mentioned in this post. Of course it’s his three sons. Richard Robert’s identification is still pending. We will probably never know if this was an accident or a murder/suicide, but due to the circumstances I’m guessing the latter.

Some of the comments on the aforementioned article are just dreadful. Some people are accusing Sanchez’s wife of murdering him and the boys and also framing him for the rape against her sister. Other people saying Richard Robert was a “great guy” who was driven to do all the things he did because of his wife’s infidelity. (One commenter actually said, I quote, “This had to happen.” I’m really hoping this person was being sarcastic.) Because of course, when a woman is unfaithful, a guy has to go out and rape her sister, and then kill himself and his kids, he can’t help himself.

I don’t know the personal situation of the Sanchez family. Perhaps the mother really did go out and sleep with every guy in town. But no matter what she did, she did not deserve this, and there was absolutely no justification for the father to go out and do what he did.