Suspected Green River murder victim identified

The cops have identified a suspected Green River Killer victim as sixteen-year-old Angela Marie Girdner, who disappeared back in 1983. She wasn’t reported missing until 1985, though. This is the first time I’ve heard of her. She looks like such a pretty girl in the picture. Very blue eyes.

The police actually misplaced her bones (something that happens more often than you’d think; it happened to one of Ted Bundy’s victims), but they found them and were able to identify them based on dental records. This article has some more detail. Gary Leon Ridgway insists that he didn’t kill Angela, but the cops kind of doubt it. It’s my understanding that he pleaded guilty to 48 murders in King County, Washington and got a life sentence. If they can pin any murders on him outside the county, the process starts all over again and he could be sentenced to death.

Rest in peace, Angela.

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.

Yet another set of disappearances from an institution

Earlier on this blog I wrote about three teenage boys who all disappeared (years apart) from the same treatment facility for troubled youths and were never found. Well, I have just discovered another set of disappearances from another institution, in this case a state-operated institution for retarded people.

Seventeen-year-old Steven Eugene Anderson and twelve-year-old David Williams disappeared together from the New Lisbon State School for Retarded Males in 1975 and were never found. Steven was moderately retarded (from his picture he looks like he might have Downs Syndrome). I don’t have any info on David’s mental condition, but I know he takes medication, and I listed him as mentally disabled since he did, after all, live at the school.

I just found the NamUs profile of 46-year-old Kenneth Arthur Schweighart, who disappeared from New Lisbon State School in 1982. From what little information is available, the circumstances look about the same: walked off campus and vanished without a trace, no evidence to speak of.

I think this is rather odd, to say the least.

The New Lisbon State School is now called the New Lisbon Developmental Center. According to the New Jersey Department of Human Services, it houses over 400 people. It’s coed now and only serves those 18 and up. I wish I could find info as to what the place was like in the seventies and eighties.

I wonder if anyone has looked really hard at the school and its employees? Were there any more links between the 1975 disappearances and the 1982 one, besides the location? I can see one retarded guy wandering off. But three? Were Steven and David supervised? It seems to me that a seventeen-year-old and a twelve-year-old with mental disabilities should not be able to just leave campus without someone with them. I would love to know more about these cases but I can’t find much. As ever.

Brian Carrick’s mother is dead

Terry Carrick, whose seventeen-year-old son Brian disappeared from Johnsburg, Illinois in December 2002, has died of cancer at age 65. She had both leukemia and lung cancer. She left behind her husband and thirteen other children besides Brian.

As I’ve observed on this blog before, I’ve noticed a lot of cases of parents of missing children dying young, or relatively young. (The most striking example I can think of is Sofia Juarez’s mother who died of unspecified “natural causes” at age 26.) I don’t know if this is an actual statistical trend or not, but the stress involved in having a missing child certainly isn’t conducive to a long life.

Teen survives 48 hours in a ravine after crashing her car

A seventeen-year-old Maine girl, Kourtney Thibeault, who was last heard from late Wednesday night and reported missing Thursday morning, was found trapped inside her wrecked SUV in a steep ravine today, Friday. She’d lost control of the car when she swerved to hit a deer, and reportedly has a broken pelvis, a broken leg and a broken jaw. A police officer who was looking for noticed a tree had been damaged, and had a close look around the area and found her. Kudos to him!

I consider this to be a minor miracle. Kourtney’s injuries don’t sound life-threatening, but Maine in late November is COLD. With her being pretty much immobile, I’m surprised she didn’t freeze to death before she was located.

Articles:

Maine Public Broadcasting Network
WCHS 6
MyFox Boston
The Nashua Telegraph

Much as I find Ohio’s flatness to be dull, dull, dull, I’m glad I don’t have any steep ravines to get caught in or cliffs to drive off of or anything. A year or two ago I was driving 55 mph on a country road and hit a patch of black ice and next thing I knew I was thirty feet off the road in the middle of a plowed-up cornfield, facing the wrong direction and wondering how I got there. I remember reflecting that a plowed-up cornfield is about the perfect place to run off the road, except an empty parking lot maybe. There’s nothing to hit. With some effort I got my car back on the road and straight to the local car wash to get rid of the mud plastering the sides, and presto, good as new.

One of Elizabeth Smart’s kidnappers pleads guilty

Wanda Barzee, Brian David Mitchell’s accomplice in the abduction of Elizabeth Smart, pleaded guilty today. She got fifteen years in prison. She’s already spent the last five years in a mental hospital. It’s only recently that they decide to forcibly medicate her and she became competent enough to stand trial. As to whether Mitchell will is up for grabs — the courts say he can’t be forcibly medicated.

Barzee apologized to Elizabeth and her family for the suffering she caused them, which is only proper. I feel a little sorry for her. She seems like a pathetic, weak woman. But that doesn’t mean she shouldn’t be punished for her actions.

Sad news (but unsurprising)

I have written before about the mysterious disappearances of three boys from the same boarding school for troubled youths in California, the CEDU School. I don’t know much about the disappearance of John Christopher Inman, just that he was seventeen, had seizures, and listed as a runaway. He disappeared in 1993. Blake Pursley, a fourteen-year-old with physical handicaps that would make it difficult or impossible for him to survive on his own, disappeared from the school in 1994. Daniel Yuen, sixteen, ran away from the school in 2004. Since it’s verified that he did in fact run away and there have been sightings of him after his disappearance, I would think his case to be above suspicion. But as to the others…I just don’t know. Blake’s disappearance in particular looks suspicious to me. The boy had so many medical problems, I don’t think he was physically capable of running away.

What are the chances that so many children would vanish off the face of the earth from the same school?

CEDU filed for bankruptcy and closed down in 2005. This was in part because of lawsuits filed by parents of children who were physically, psychologically and sexually abused there. It appears that the school systematically abused its students and violated their rights, while conning parents into thinking they’d done the right thing to send their children there. The tuition ran to thousands per month.

Anyway, a Charley Project blog reader showed me this artlcle about a convicted child molester and murderer who visited CEDU on a regular basis in the nineties as a psychiatrist’s “helper.” Both the psychiatrist and his helper, James Lee Crummel, were eventually convicted of sexually abusing one of the doctor’s teen patients. Crummel is now on death row for the murder of a teenager who was killed over twenty-five years ago. He was convicted of the murder in 2004. The article provides a long, sad forty-year litany of his crimes: molesting kids, killing or attempting to kill them, over and over and over again. I don’t understand why he wasn’t locked up long before this.

So now the cops are looking at him for Blake and John. And curiously, Crummel lived on the same street as nine-year-old Jack Daniel Phillips who disappeared in 1995.

I do hope something comes of this. Something happened to those boys, and their families deserve to know what became of them. I doubt either of them are alive today.

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.

A slight clerical error

I just got an email from a woman who claims she is listed on my website. She has been listed as missing under suspicious circumstances since 1982. She was only fifteen at the time. Assuming this is not a joke, it look like the MP report was closed long ago but somehow it accidentally found its way onto a missing persons database, where I grabbed it. I suggested the woman get in touch with the listed law enforcement contact.

She must feel kind of embarrassed. She’s married now, so hopefully acquaintances and future employers etc. will not be able to find out about this by Googling her name.