Me and the light of my life

Today I scanned a portrait photo of myself and my boyfriend, taken for his family’s church bulletin in late September. Presenting me and Michael! (I thought about just posting it on here, but that would mess up the current “no pictures” status of this blog. Plus it’s a pretty big image.)

So now I have a recent photo for Mom to give to the cops if I should ever disappear myself. I know it’s unlikely, but of course it has occurred to me. The last time I had my picture taken was in January 2008, back when my hair was still long.

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 article 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.