Anyway, Alice Hummel is off my murder without a body convictions list because her husband’s conviction has been overturned on a technicality. More pain and anguish and uncertainty for her children, then. I moved her back to the not concluded cases list.

But a new case I added tonight, Carolyn Killaby, makes the convictions list; a guy was convicted of her murder two and a half years after she disappeared. At the time he killed her he was on parole for killing his sister; he’d strangled her, stripped her body naked and dumped it by a creek to make it look like a rape-homicide. He served a whopping ten years for this crime and his parole supervision was a joke. They locked him up for good after Carolyn Killaby’s murder but it was too little, too late. Fortunately he took the final exit, hanging himself in his prison cell in 2004. Good riddance.

Although I’ve been forcibly prevented from offing myself and I’m glad of it, sometimes I wonder why we try so hard to keep prisoners, particularly convicted rapists and murderers, from killing themselves. Okay, I know why we do it, but it still seems silly to me. I even heard of a case where a woman killed herself in jail, and left a note for her lawyer instructing him to sue the jail for permitting her to take her own life!

• Four months before Teekah vanished, a man molested a four-year-old boy in the bowling alley’s restroom.
• A few weeks later, a stranger tried to lure a six-year-old boy at the same bowling alley.
• Only a few hours before Teekah went missing, someone tried to abduct two children from a local park less than a mile from the bowling alley. He fled the scene in a Pontiac Trans Am — the same make of vehicle that was seen speeding from the bowling alley parking lot around the time Teekah disappeared.

For some reason the authorities didn’t put this all together until now, but needless to say they’re now looking into the possibility that all these incidents were connected.

Articles:
King 5
KIRO TV
NWCN
The Tacoma News Tribune

Taken today.

What do you say, PrincessShantae, do I still look sick? Earlier you commented that you’ve never seen a photograph of me where I looked well.

Sofia Juarez will have been missing nine years next Saturday, as noted in this article. She vanished without a trace, presumably kidnapped, the day before her fifth birthday — making her just old enough to have some memories of her former life, assuming she’s still alive. After Jaycee Dugard, etc., you can never say never. Sadly, though, Sofia’s mother will never be reunited with her daughter on this earth. Maria Juarez died three years ago. She was only twenty-six years old. Natural causes.

(Another article about the case which says “Sofia is the only open missing child case on record for the [Kennewick] police department, but the oldest missing person case is from 1978 when June Howard disappeared.” Who’s June Howard? Inquiring minds want to know. They ought to do an article on her.)

The police are re-examining the case of Virginia Rambus, who disappeared from Washington state in 1985. She was nineteen and last seen leaving home to go to a party. They had previously mentioned a person of interest, a neighbor known only as the “Candy Man.” Well, he’s been identified as Jesse Pratt, who’s currently doing life in an Oregon prison for killing another Seattle woman. Prior to the murder he had kidnapped yet a third woman. Click here for a picture of a car Pratt drove, which might have some connection to Virginia’s case.

The family of Tracy Melton, a 32-year-old Stockton, California woman who disappeared in 1998 and is profiled on Charley, are very angry that the police identified a bone fragment as hers all the way back in last April but didn’t bother to inform them for nine months. The police are sorry and promised to mend their ways. With so little remains to go off of, they may never know how or when Tracy died.

There’s going to be a TV show focusing on black missing persons, hosted by S. Epatha Merkerson, who used to be on Law and Order.

Anyone who’s in psychotic online stalker mode can just go to the Cleveland Clinic’s headache center Monday through Friday, 8 to 5 for the next three weeks. I’ll be there.

All the best to her; I hope this marriage works out. She is a very strong, resilient young woman who has been through a lot.

I am particularly pleased with the Amber Hoopes one. I had some stuff on her from NamUs and then realized I had never altered her casefile in the whole seven years the Charley Project has existed, so I Googled her name to see if I could find anything. I found things in abundance, in particular a website her grandparents made about her disappearance. The Hoopes updates lead to my updating Stephanie Crane‘s casefile too; since those two cases share a suspect, they also shared a lot of the same details for the “circumstances of disappearance” section.

If only nights like this could still happen at the rate that they used to. But! I have an appointment to see a neurologist in Cleveland on Tuesday and it looks like the ever-elusive I-Match Program will at last come within my grasp. I think this appointment is the final, or close to the final, hoop that I have to jump through before I get my name on the waiting list. And then it’s just a matter of, well, waiting.

Because the Headache has for the past fifteen months been such a powerful malevolent force in my life. It makes me feel nostalgic for the days when all I had to worry about was severe depression and resulting suicidality, or horrific bullying at school, or academic problems, or all the backstabbing petty fighting in my family, or all of these at the same time… all of these seem to pale in comparison to this entirely different kind of misery. I must needs get into I-Match because it is the greatest weapon that I know of to fight the Headache. One of us has got to go.

I’ll put him on Charley’s resolved page next time I update. His online obituary is here. He was 25 when he disappeared, had been married for two years, and left behind three children. I’m sorry he was found dead, but glad that he was found at all.

In 2010, Herzog had been paroled and was required to keep curfew, wear a tracking bracelet and live on the grounds of the High Desert State Prison. He had a trailer there and was free to come and go at will during the daytime hours. He hung himself inside his trailer. This may have been prompted by a warning that his partner-in-crime, Wesley Shermantine, was planning to disclose the locations of their victims’ bodies.

I doubt many people will mourn him.