What I hadn’t known before I spoke to this reporter is that his disappearance may very well be a simple drowning accident or suicide. The Chicago Tribune piece I’d read about his disappearance, written two years after he vanished, said nothing about it, and even the NCMEC didn’t know. But they found Dermot’s shoes and jacket on the banks of a semi-frozen river, a set of bare footprints leading across the ice, and no returning set. And they found a rifle, probably his, under the ice. (If he did die there, I’d be inclined towards accident; if he wanted to kill himself why not use the rifle?)

However, it would be highly unusual for this body to NEVER be found, and Dermot’s parents later decided he’d staged his disappearance or something and ran away. He was declared legally dead in 1992, but in his mom’s obit last year he was listed as having survived her.

I doubt we will ever know what really happened here.

Ernest’s defense was that Edwina wasn’t really dead and instead had just dropped out of sight for reasons of her own; he claimed to have heard from her as recently as July 2009, eighteen months after she vanished. The prosecution pointed out that Ernest couldn’t prove his claims and they could find no one else who claimed to have seen or heard from Edwina. They flew her dad all the way over from Kenya to testify that Edwina had been in regular contact with her family back in the old country, and this contact had abruptly ceased in late 2007.

This Morning Call article provides a good summary of the case, as does WFMZ-TV. No word on how much time Ernest Freeby is expected to get.

Edwina was 34 years old when she died. One of her relatives said, “She was killed. She was killed for apparently stupid reasons.”

We each saw the doctor both yesterday and today. She wanted to mess with my crazymeds (there are certain anti-depressants that reduce chronic pain but I’m not taking any of those at present) and I was like HAYLE no. It took years to get me on the cocktail I’m on now, that has (headache aside) made me feel better than I have in perhaps forever. I don’t want to screw that up. She said she understood, and just prescribed a beta blocker. Today she brought up the subject again and persuaded me to let her make one small change: extended-release Depakote, which I need to take only once a day, as opposed to regular Depakote which I have to take three times a day. She assured me that there is no other difference.

The first day I saw a physical therapist, and today started an exercise regimen. And also got infused for several hours. One of the drugs left a horrible taste in my mouth but otherwise it was all right. I had my laptop with me and surfed the net, so I was not bored.

Today in the group headache education meeting thingy I talked about my frustration and annoyance at my utterly ridiculous diagnosis. The psychologist in charge of the group said no one knows anything about New Daily Persistent Headache. He has a 1400-page textbook dedicated exclusively to headaches, and all of 1.5 pages are devoted to NDPH. There’s not much of an incentive to study it: it doesn’t kill you, it’s very rare, and because it’s pretty much a diagnosis of exclusion, screening for the study would take forever and cost untold millions.

He did share an interesting tidbit of information, however: although no one knows or can prove pretty much anything, the prevailing theory is that NDPH is caused by a viral infection. The majority of sufferers report that, shortly before their headache began, they got a virus and had a fever or whatever for a few days. Then they get better, and then the headache starts. The idea is that the virus causes damage to the nerves that cause headache, and even after the immune system kicks out the virus, the nerve damage remains. Of course, it’s got to be more than that, because (A) Not every NDPH sufferer says they had a virus beforehand and (B) Why does it only happen to a very few people and not others? But the correlation is very strong and they believe they’re on to something.

That theory applies to me just about perfectly: on September 17, 2010, I caught stomach flu from my boyfriend. I puked and was generally miserable for a few days, then recovered and went on with life. Then on October 13, I woke up with a terrific headache…

The $64,000 question, then: why, if Michael and I got the same virus, am I the only one with NDPH? Well, most NDPH sufferers have a history of other kinds of headaches — in my case, migraines afflicted me as a child, and have cursed every female on my mom’s side of the family for at least three generations. That might have something to do with it as well. Michael has no such history in himself or his family.

Of course, this is still just supposition and correlation and so on, not proof. It’s just a theory that happens to make a lot of sense. It certainly doesn’t help me any, even if I were to know for sure that this is what caused this to happen.

I talked about how, last year around this time, when I was desperately looking for answers, how devastated I was when my MRI came out clean. I broke down and cried, because I had been so hoping it would show something that would explain what I was going through. I would have almost been relieved to find out I had a brain tumor. (I was quite sure, even before the MRI, that I didn’t, since I had no neurological symptoms besides pain.) I just wanted to have something you could see, something I could point to on the scan and say “Here, there’s the headache, right there.” Instead this is an invisible and elusive enemy I’m fighting. The other women in my group (who don’t have NDPH, incidentally, but other kinds of chronic headache) expressed similar sentiments.

I think the program, so far for me, is doing what it is designed to do. They outright said they could not cure me and could not promise any pain relief at all. But I am being educated and enlightened and learning coping skills and all that stuff.

Fun anecdote: when they asked me this morning how bad the pain was, I said it hurt pretty bad and felt like something was pulling on my hair. A short time later I had a sudden thought and realized that something was pulling on my hair: my headband was too small, too tight for me. I pulled it off and immediately felt much better.

Crikey, I’m tired. And, needless to say, my head hurts. No remedy for that but to go to bed.

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.