Another for the ???? Category

I’m writing today’s updates and recorded the case of Wojciech Fudali, who disappeared from Rhode Island last December after a late-night party with friends. Sounds typical on the surface, except that Fudali was stark naked when he vanished. He left his shoes and every stitch of clothing behind. In New England. In December.

This article says, “While police interviewed some of his friends at the East Shore Road house Sunday afternoon, a friend arrived and said he saw Fudali running nude near the Galilee Escape Road around 11:30 a.m. Saturday but did not report it to police.” What’s going on there? If I saw any of my friends running in the buff down the road at any time of year, never mind the dead of winter, I’d probably call 911 on the spot. At the very least I’d be yelling, “Hey! What’s going on? Why are you naked? Are you okay?”

Other articles say Fudali was a “nature lover,” so perhaps he dabbled in nudism before. But being naked in public in suburban Rhode Island IN DECEMBER is not normal, even for nudists.

I think he’s got to be dead. A naked person could not survive more than a couple of hours outside in below-freezing temperatures. What caused him to leave the house in that condition, I wonder? Was he depressed and trying to commit suicide by hypothermia? If so, why didn’t he go off somewhere where no one could see him, not lounge around in public places? Was he whacked out on some kind of drugs or something, did he have a psychotic episode? That poor guy. He had just gotten his college degree, too.

The Stuart family revisited

One of my regular informants located this article about the 1977 cases of little Fannie and Jessie Stuart and their mother Mary, whom I just added to Charley yesterday after finally obtaining her picture. As ever, the husband/father, Byron Stuart, is the prime suspect. Unfortunately for the case, he’s dead. He died in 1996 at age 48.

I was curious to see what caused Byron to die at such a young age, so I looked for and found his obituary. He apparently never remarried or had any other children, though the obit does mention a girlfriend. The obit does not mention Mary, Fannie or Jessie at all. Byron was an alcoholic and a drug addict. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1991 and went off substances after that, and become a local community activist for AIDS sufferers. He died of hepatitis in 1996.

Anyway, with Byron dead, at this point all the police can really expect is to maybe find the mother and children’s bodies. It’s the children that particularly horrify me — why harm them? A one- and two-year-old could not be expected to be witnesses, even if they did see what happened to their mother.