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.

Elizabeth Smart goes public

Elizabeth Smart, who was abducted by Brian Mitchell and held for nine months back in 2002, has testified at a hearing to determine Mitchell’s competency and has detailed the horrors of her captivity for the first time. Elizabeth is now 21 and a music major at Brigham Young University. She’s grown into a beautiful young woman. The details she gives don’t surprise me a bit: rape several times a day, forced to take drugs and alcohol, constantly threatened with death, etc. Elizabeth seems shockingly well-adjusted for having gone through all that — evidence for my theory that human beings are amazingly resilient and have the potential to bounce back from anything.

Elizabeth also says that Mitchell seemed perfectly rational all the time while he held her and only started going on about religion and being a prophet when he wanted something. She thinks his insanity thing is an act. I have no opinion on that, it’s not for me to decide, but frankly I don’t think this guy is ever going to be tried. It’s been six years since his arrest and they haven’t even decided whether he’s competent or not, never mind set a trial date. It doesn’t really matter, I think, as long as he’s locked up forever.

You can read some of the testimony here.

As for Wanda Barzee, Mitchell’s wife and accomplice, the press has got hold of some letters she wrote to her mom where she speaks of wanting to repent of her sins. But she doesn’t really talk about Elizabeth, only says that both she and Elizabeth were “victims” of Mitchell. She hasn’t been declared competent yet either, but she seems to be on the way there now that they’ve forced her to take antipsychotic drugs.

Additional articles:
The New York Daily News
The Associated Press
The London Daily Telegraph
The Salt Lake Tribune

Austin Childs

Project Jason has put up a poster for Austin Childs, a seventeen-year-old boy who disappeared after a boat accident in 2005. It reminds me of a story I thought I’d share:

Several years ago, a stranger contacted me on AOL Instant Messenger and said right away that she was Austin Childs’s mother. I assumed she must want to speak to me about his Charley Project page, though I wasn’t sure how she got my screenname. Anyway, she told me all about Austin’s disappearance — details I already knew. And showed me a bunch of websites and articles about it that I’d already seen. Then she showed me his Charley page, and I suddenly realized this woman had no idea who I was. She told me she had a habit of contacting random people to talk about her son, as a form of therapy, and she just happened to contact me. It was a big coincidence. Anyway, by then we’d been chatting for like half an hour and it seemed a bit late to tell her I was the administrator of the Charley Project, so I didn’t say anything and just kept listening to her go on about her son. Eventually she signed off and I never spoke to her again.

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.

Well, this is news to me!

I found this Utica Observer-Dispatch article about the 1990 disappearance of Mark William Seelman. It seems he went missing together with another teen, Douglas Goodwin, who has never been found either. I hadn’t had any information about Douglas. The Charley file says he may have gotten into a car driven by an eighteen-year-old black male. Douglas was eighteen in 1990, but from the picture he appears to be white.

I will have to update Mark’s file, and add Douglas’s.

Article about Monica Carrasco

I found this article about sixteen-year-old Monica Carrasco, who’s been missing nearly six years now. The article doesn’t really say much but at least it gets her name back in the news again.

Monica was an absolutely gorgeous girl; in her pictures she looks like a model. It’s not really clear what happened to her. She had recently been released from the hospital where she was treated for depression and anorexia, and she was mad at her mom for some reason so she went to live with her aunt and uncle. She got up and left the house in the middle of the night, wearing only her nightgown, and never came back. Some theorize her medications caused her to become disoriented and that’s why she wandered off, but if so, what happened to her after that? I’m a little surprised her case did not get more publicity than it did, given the mysterious circumstances and Monica’s good looks.

I think she must be dead. Who runs away in only a nightgown?

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.

Okay, this is nauseating

I have read about a lot of horrible things and gotten pretty used to it, but even I am shocked and sickened by the story told in this article. In summary: Ian Richardson started a “sexual relationship” with John Taylor in 1989, when he was thirteen. He went to the police in 1991 and told them about the abuse and Taylor was charged, but Ian later retracted is statements and Taylor walked. In 1992, Ian told the cops he’d gotten drunk with Taylor, passed up, and woke up missing his foreskin. He said Taylor admitted to circumcising him. Taylor claims Ian did it himself. Ian was subsequently charged in juvenile court with punching Taylor during an argument. Then he disappeared without a trace. He was sixteen.

The whole thing sounds straight out of Running with Scissors.

What I want to know is: where the hell were Ian’s parents? We know he had a mother, at least. At minimum, his mom should have kept him away from Taylor after the first time Ian claimed he had been abused. But Ian kept hanging out with Taylor, and getting abused, and getting CIRCUMCISED WHILE PASSED OUT DRUNK for crying out loud, and even after that incident he was still around Taylor quite a bit. (Which goes to show how much he was under Taylor’s thumb.) What was his mom doing, if anything, to keep her son away from this monster? I understand you can’t watch a sixteen-year-old twenty-four hours a day, but…

I wouldn’t be surprised if Taylor wound up facing a murder-without-a-body trial.

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.

Missing teens in Ciudad Juarez

The Los Angeles Times has done an excellent, if short, article about the series of teen girls who have mysteriously disappeared from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico (just across the river from El Paso, Texas). The missing girls of Juarez have become notorious over the past several years. I saw a documentary about the case three or four years ago. Over 350 young women were killed in Juarez between 1991 and 1993, but the more recent missing girls are of a different profile: from stable, working- or middle-class families, whereas the early 90s victims were poor and mostly worked in the city’s factories. It’s theorized that the missing girls have been forced into prostitution.

The upside is if the prostitution theory is correct, most of these girls are probably still alive. Human trafficking claims more victims than we’ll probably ever know, and not just in third world countries either. Nicholle Coppler, who disappeared in 1999 from Lima, Ohio (a city near my home, where my father works and where I used to attend school) may have been forced into prostitution. I talked once to a friend of mine, a university professor in Lima, who claims he had a student who had at one time been a prostitute and his student told him she’d run into Nicholle in Las Vegas. This is all very vague, of course, and third-hand, but I think she probably was in the sex trade after her disappearance, assuming she wasn’t killed.