News on murder-without-a-body cases

The jury in the Aarone Thompson trial has still not reached a verdict, and it’s been over a week. They say the longer a jury is out, the more likely they are to acquit or to hang. But in this case they’re considering dozens of charges. I have confidence that they will do their duty.

A trial date has been set for Geralyn Graham, the accused murderer of Rilya Wilson. Rilya’s case gained national notoriety when it was discovered that she, a Florida foster child, had been missing for a year and a half without the Florida Department of Children and Families finding out. Geralyn was her foster mother. I’m a bit concerned about this case. Geralyn killed Rilya, I’m quite sure — but can they prove it? There’s very little evidence and a principal witness has backed out. Anyway, Geralyn is scheduled to be tried in March. She could face the death penalty if convicted.

Two suspects have finally been indicted in the presumed kidnapping and murder of Donald Dietz, a Michigan man who disappeared in September 2007. He was vulnerable — one account I read said he was autistic, though I’m not sure how they’d know — and he had a lot of money, and the police think these two guys killed him and stole his identity. Another article is here.

Another for the ???? Category

I’m writing today’s updates and recorded the case of Wojciech Fudali, who disappeared from Rhode Island last December after a late-night party with friends. Sounds typical on the surface, except that Fudali was stark naked when he vanished. He left his shoes and every stitch of clothing behind. In New England. In December.

This article says, “While police interviewed some of his friends at the East Shore Road house Sunday afternoon, a friend arrived and said he saw Fudali running nude near the Galilee Escape Road around 11:30 a.m. Saturday but did not report it to police.” What’s going on there? If I saw any of my friends running in the buff down the road at any time of year, never mind the dead of winter, I’d probably call 911 on the spot. At the very least I’d be yelling, “Hey! What’s going on? Why are you naked? Are you okay?”

Other articles say Fudali was a “nature lover,” so perhaps he dabbled in nudism before. But being naked in public in suburban Rhode Island IN DECEMBER is not normal, even for nudists.

I think he’s got to be dead. A naked person could not survive more than a couple of hours outside in below-freezing temperatures. What caused him to leave the house in that condition, I wonder? Was he depressed and trying to commit suicide by hypothermia? If so, why didn’t he go off somewhere where no one could see him, not lounge around in public places? Was he whacked out on some kind of drugs or something, did he have a psychotic episode? That poor guy. He had just gotten his college degree, too.

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.

“Missing” fugitives

I saw the 1967 disappearance of William Leslie Arnold on the Nebraska State Patrol database. I don’t think I’ll put him on Charley, though. According to this Unsolved Mysteries post, he escaped from prison where he was serving time for the murder of his parents, a crime he committed when he was just 15 years old.

There are a few other people listed on missing persons sites who are actually fugitives believed to be on the run from the law. Heather Jean Johnson is wanted for attempted murder. Another man listed on NCMA, I forget his name, is wanted for hiding a camera in a girls’ locker room and filming the girls undressing. Whenever I find out about this sort of thing I remove the person from Charley. If they’re believed to have run to avoid prosecution, they’re not really missing, though their families may miss them.

Missing persons case prompts investigation into possible police racism

According to this article, a brain-damaged Asian refugee (identified in this article as Chinese dissident Yu Dongyue) wandered away from a relative’s home and was reported missing. Meanwhile, the police picked him up for public intoxication. He couldn’t tell them his name so they listed him as “Jackie Chan” on the intake papers.

Apparently some people think that is Seriously Not Funny. They even suggest that perhaps not calling him the usual “John Doe” hindered the search for him. That is, if his family checked the jail for an unidentified man (and it’s not clear that they did), they wouldn’t have been able to find him because he would be listed under a name but not his own name. (Dongyue was released without charge eighteen hours after his arrest and someone found him eight miles from the jail, recognized him from the missing persons fliers and took him home. He’d been missing about a day and a half.) So now there is a review at the police department and the chief is making a public apology and someone is going to get seriously yelled at and possibly fired.

Tasteless? Definitely. Insensitive? Definitely. I don’t know if the cop who did this was racist, but he certainly should have known better.

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.

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.

Michael Francis possibly found

The cops think partial skeletal remains they found last year may be the body of 21-year-old Michael Jay Francis, who was abducted from Baltimore in 2007. It was apparently drug-related. Witnesses saw a suspect shoot Francis with an assault rifle and force him into the trunk — alive or dead, who knows. They found the car later, with Francis’s clothes and a lot of blood.

The suspect was charged with murder, but after two trials there’s still no verdict. In the first case the judge declared a mistrial midway through; in the second, the jury couldn’t reach a verdict. It doesn’t make sense to me. This seems like an open-and-shut case — certainly much more so than most murders without a body.

Remains could be Colorado man missing 8 years

Several news outlets say the police have found skeletal remains that they think could be the body of a man reported missing from Aurora, Colorado in August 2001. ID was found at the scene. The cops aren’t releasing the person’s name, though, cause they haven’t contacted his family yet.

I checked and I don’t think he’s on Charley. I have no matching reports.

Articles:
9 News
Vail Daily News
CBS 4 Denver

“Brandon’s Law” passed

Remember this post about a possible new law for missing adults? Well, it passed. It’s named in honor of Brandon Swanson, age nineteen, who’s been missing from Marshall, Minnesota for nearly a year now.

The law is supposed to mandate a more uniform response to missing adults by authorities throughout the state of Minnesota, as well as requiring the police to search for missing adults under 21, or those who disappeared under suspicious circumstances.

Additional articles:

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune
KEYC 12
KSFY News
The Worthington Daily Globe