Maria Anjiras and Amy Billig

The Hour, a newspaper out of Norwalk, Connecticut, has done a really good article on the 1976 disappearance of fourteen-year-old Maria Anjiras. It has loads of info on her case that I didn’t know before, and this is just the beginning, as the article is only the first of a two-part piece. It seems that Maria ran away with some bikers and hung around the general area for at least six months afterwards, but she never returned home.

Her case reminds me a lot of Amy Billig. Both pretty brunette teenagers, aspiring actresses, who disappeared in the mid-seventies and apparently spent quite awhile running around with bikers after they went missing. Both of them are probably dead now. It looks like Amy and Maria came from good homes, and it seems highly unlikely that they would go over thirty years without ever contacting their folks again.

Syllania Edwards found deceased

I just got a recovery notice from the NCMEC saying Syllania Terene Edwards has been found dead. I knew nothing about it so I Googled it and found this article. She is the eighth mesa victim! This is very odd. All the other victims thus far have been white or Hispanic local prostitutes in their twenties or thirties. Syllania was black and a runaway from Lawton, Oklahoma. She was fifteen years old when she disappeared in August 2003. The article says she was in foster care and hadn’t seen her mother since she was five.

That’s eight down, three to go.

Two runaways

As I noted on Charley yesterday, Nicholas Francisco was found alive and well. Unconfirmed sources placed him in California. He was 28 and married with two kids and another on the way when he vanished off the face of the earth from Washington State in February 2008. Nicholas’s case got more attention than most missing men’s cases do, I think in large part because his wife was very vocal and active in the search for him. At first she insisted he would never have abandoned the family and must have been murdered. But four months later, she filed for divorce citing “willful abandonment.” She said she found evidence that Nicholas was living a double life, with secret bank accounts and such. Some comments I’ve seen online claim he was having sexual contacts with men he’d met on the internet. If so, how humiliating for the wife! She has already remarried.

As far as I’m concerned, that kind of behavior is inexcusable. A real man, gay or otherwise, does not walk out on his wife when she’s pregnant and unemployed. A real man doesn’t abandon his young children without a word. Nicholas apparently found his home life intolerable — okay, I’ll buy that. So find a lawyer, get a divorce, divide up the marital assets, set up a custody arrangement and pay child support. Don’t just leave. That’s the worst thing, the very cruelest thing you can ever do to those that love you.

Also, as I will put up on Charley today, Theresa Marie Meadows has been located. She was sixteen when she ran away from Mechanicsville, Virginia in September 2004. Her case was a bit unusual because, except for a letter her guardian got six weeks after her disappearance, it appeared that no one ever heard from her again, and she never used her Social Security number or anything like that, so there was no paper trail. Theresa was located in Florida recently, after over five years. She’d been living under an assumed name and without documents. I expect her life has been pretty hard. She’s talked on the phone with her mother but they haven’t met yet. Theresa’s mom was in drug treatment when her daughter disappeared, which is why Theresa was living with a guardian. I hope Theresa is happy and will be able to live an easier life now that she is now longer listed as a missing person.

Very sad article about runaways

The New York Times has done a very good article about teen runaways and why they run and why they stay away and how they survive. It’s really sad — especially the statistic on page 3 that 75% of runaways are never even reported missing, either because the parents don’t want them around or because they’re afraid to get the police involved.

I read an excellent book by Todd Strasser, Can’t Get There from Here, about a group of teen runaways and throwaways living on the streets of a major American city — New York, I think. They ranged in age from 12 to 22. They lived lives a lot like what’s described in the newspaper article.

I think maybe if a runaway is from a good home and they don’t come back, maybe it’s because they’re ashamed. They might not want to go home after having done things like sell drugs or sell themselves to survive. They might be afraid their parents will be mad at them and will reject them.

Runaway vs. non-family abduction

It often happens that a young girl chooses to run off with an older (usually of age) boyfriend. In most cases, when this occurs the NCMEC lists the girl as a runaway and says she “may be in the company of an adult male.” Not always, though. Some of these girls are classified as abducted, and I’m not sure why. It seems to be like a completely random thing.

I thought it might have to do with age. Not so: Janet/Janeth Munoz, who wasn’t even twelve and a half, is listed as abducted on the California DOJ database but as a runaway with the NCMEC. Nor do the authorities have had to issue a warrant for the girl’s boyfriend: there is apparently no arrest warrant out for Reyna Alvarado-Carrera’s boyfriend. Chioma Gray is listed as endangered missing, neither abducted nor a runaway, in spite of the fact that her boyfriend has a slew of warrants out for him connected to their flight. On the other hand, Diana Gonzalez, who is missing under very similar circumstances, is listed as a non-family abduction. What gives?

Go figure.

Rebecca Rathstone WTF?

According to the NCMEC poster, Rebecca Rathstone ran away on October 17, 2006, when she was twelve years old. According to the Santa Clarita Valley Nonprofit News Center, the date of disappearance is September 15, 2008, making her fourteen. The Cali DOJ also has her listed under the September 2008 date. Pretty huge discrepancy.

5′7 is very tall for a twelve-year-old, but it’s kind of tall for a woman, period. Rebecca doesn’t look twelve in the pictures, but it’s difficult to tell the ages of people, especially when they’re in adolescence and trying hard to look older.

I think a phone call is in order.

UPDATE: The September 2008 date of disappearance is correct. Rebecca’s brother ran in October 2006 and Jerry Nance reckons the person writing the poster got confused and put that as Rebecca’s date of disappearance as well. Her brother is still missing, but he’s turned 18 and is no longer on the NCMEC.

Article about Blake Pursley missing 15 years now

Blake Pursley has been missing 15 years, longer than he’d been alive before his disappearance. He is presumed dead — even if he didn’t meet with foul play, his medical conditions would have killed him without treatment. There’s an article about this in the San Bernardino Sun.

The article doesn’t directly cite the Charley Project, but I’m reasonably sure Charley was used as a source. I don’t know where else they would have gotten the info about the two other boys missing from the same school.

I’m not accusing anyone at the Cedu School of anything, of course, and one of the boys definitely did run away. But I think it’s very usual to have THREE long-term disappearances from one small school. Any school for troubled teens is going to have runaways, but two of these “runaways” have been missing more than 15 years, and even Daniel Yuen’s been missing for five. I wonder if anyone has investigated this.

Anybody else think this kid might have some medical condition?

Dean Worsley was fifteen years old at the time of his disappearance, looked about nine, and was only 4′11 and 70 pounds. That seems improbably tiny to me.

Human remains found at missing teen’s house

The police have found human remains at the house where fifteen-year-old Alycia Mesiti disappeared from in 2006. Her family no longer lives there. Alycia was listed as a runaway; she supposedly took some clothes and her dog. The article has photos of her which her Charley Project casefile hasn’t got.

There’s no identity to the remains yet, but this certainly doesn’t look good. It reminds me a bit of the Karen Kamsch case. I would say I hope the body is NOT Alycia, but if it isn’t her then it must be someone else. Either way, some person has been murdered and their loved ones will suffer.

Voluntary missing adult

A lot of people on missing persons databases such as the California Department of Justice one are listed as “voluntary missing adult.” I’m not sure how accurate this is in a lot of cases, as it seems to be the default classification for any adult that goes missing and doesn’t have any serious medical conditions or any obvious signs of foul play. But I know many adults do go missing voluntarily. Or some of them just leave and aren’t aware that anyone is looking for them. Today I’d like to write about the “classic” cases—like the ones where someone goes out for a jug of milk, takes a taxi to the airport instead, hops on a plane to Phoenix and starts a new life with nary a word to anyone. It’s much harder to do that than it used to be, but it still happens.

I would consider this kind of disappearance to be a symbolic form of suicide. The two actions have a lot in common. Both the MP and the suicide are basically trying to obliterate themselves and their identity. They both seek to escape a life that, for whatever reason, has become unbearable to them. In both cases (I believe) mental illness and/or drug abuse is often a factor. And both dropping out of sight permanently and killing yourself are abominably selfish things to do, and leave your family and friends torn at the seams and feeling confused and guilty for the rest of their lives. Nevertheless, I do feel some sympathy for most adults who choose to go missing, as I do for suicides.

I figure your life has to be REALLY bad before you are willing to simply drop off the face of the planet. Even if it appears good on the surface, there’s a lot of things that aren’t obvious to anyone other than yourself. Who knows what lurks inside a person’s head?

To give an example: a young man named Matthew Wilson, a native of Oklahoma, vanished without a trace from Houston, Texas in December 2007. He was a full-ride student at Rice University, one of the most prestigious schools in the nation. He was brilliant and hardworking. He got straight A’s at Rice, something that’s very difficult to do—a C really is a typical grade there, unlike most other colleges that practice grade inflation. He seemed destined for a glittering future in his chosen career, computer science. He also had a very loving, stable family. His father had died when he was very young, but he had two older sisters and a mother who adored him.

And then he was suddenly gone. He vanished during final exams week and never completed his coursework for two classes. His car disappeared with him, but almost nothing else did. He left quite a bit of money behind in his bank account, over a thousand dollars I think. For a missing adult man, there was quite a lot of press about him, because his life seemed so stable. He looked like the last person you would believe would run away.

But run away is what he’d done. Matthew was located eight months later in Berkeley, California, at the University of California campus. He was first arrested on a minor charge (I think he had a laptop with the serial number filed off) that was later dropped. Then he was committed to a mental hospital, as the police suspected he might be a danger to himself.

His mother was reunited with her son and later gave an interview with the press. She said she found out that Matthew had been deeply unhappy at Rice for a very long time. She didn’t say why, but I can guess—the pressure. Being a prodigy, an overachiever, is very hard to be, something I know firsthand. Everyone expects you to be brilliant all the time, perfect at everything, and you’re terrified that if you actually screw up at something (like every human being does once in awhile), everybody will be terribly disappointed and disillusioned with you. My guess, also, is that Matthew suffered from depression. He was apparently suicidal when the cops found him, after all. Having to keep up a rate of 100% success while being bogged down with depression…no wonder he burned out. No one had had any idea how he felt, and he was afraid to tell anyone.

It came out that Matthew had been living homeless in the Berkeley area since he went missing. For awhile he lived out of his car, then at homeless shelters and on the streets. He said he hardly had contact with anyone the entire time and certainly didn’t form any relationships. What a dismal and miserable time he had: sleeping in the bushes, scrounging for food. But he didn’t come back, he didn’t contact anyone. I think I remember that he even initially gave the police a false name when they found him. Whatever he was running from was apparently worse than living impoverished, anonymous, roofless, alone and far from home. He’d heard about himself in the news and knew people were worried about him and looking for him, but even that didn’t make him reveal himself. I hope he’s feeling better now. Last word is, he went home to Mom and they were going to try to work things out. Hopefully this included lots of therapy. Mom said he probably wouldn’t be coming back to Rice.

Obviously, I feel a lot of compassion for Matthew. But that isn’t to say I agree with what he did. He wasted thousands of dollars in resources from the police and other people trying to find him. He caused horrific pain to those who knew and loved him. If I were one of Matthew’s friends or a member of his family, I would be pretty angry with him.

I firmly believe that walking away from your life without a trace, permanently, is one of the most selfish things a person can do. On some level, it’s even more selfish than suicide. With suicide, at least your family and friends have a body to bury, and they can go and visit your gravesite, and they know what happened to you and can, maybe, come to peace with it. But when a loved one is just missing, that’s a wound that never heals. For the rest of their lives they will have to wonder what happened to you. Many times I’ve heard from the parents of missing children that it would have been easier if their child had died.

But I think when an adult runs away, you shouldn’t necessarily just assume the person is simply irresponsible and doesn’t care about those who love them. There’s probably a lot else going on that no one else will ever know.