Free, to a good home

Yesterday morning, when my dad was taking the family’s two dogs for a walk, they were accosted by two puppies. He went around knocking on doors and found out the puppies had been wandering around town for days — evidently abandoned; no one would claim ownership. He’s a good soul, my dad, and he took them home, and judging from the fact that they ate half their weight in dog food, they must have been starving. I think it’s highly likely that, if he hadn’t found them, they wouldn’t have survived another night, cold as it was and hungry as they were. They are presently staying in my parents’ laundry room.

Mom and Dad took the puppies to the vet, who said they were both girls, healthy, and about nine months old. They are obviously sisters and both are black with white spots. A problem, however: the dogs are obviously at least half pit bull. Pit bulls, rightly or wrongly, have a bad reputation. These two are extremely friendly, however. I went over to see them today and they jumped on me and tried to lick my face off. (I think a dog’s capacity for forgiveness is something we humans ought to aspire to. These two were horribly mistreated by their previous owner, abandoned in the January cold and snow and left to starve/freeze to death. But they still love humans.)

Mom and Dad, having two dogs already, aren’t keen on keeping these two around forever. So they’re going to post ads and stuff. I thought I’d do my part: would any blog reader here, residing in northwest Ohio or northeast Indiana, be interested in taking one of these girls and giving her a forever family? Or does anyone know anyone who would?

And incidentally, I firmly believe there is a special place in hell reserved for people who abandon animals outside in the winter.

Public records and criminal records

I signed up for another website that offers all the public records you want for a flat lifetime membership fee of $40. So far I’ve been finding little bits and scraps of information for my missing people. Mainly I’m looking up criminal records, those of the missing and also people associated with them. If an MP has a criminal history in this database, I can find their date of birth that way also.

I looked up the criminal record for Robin Lunceford, a possible (but probably not) witness in the upcoming Rilya Wilson murder trial. Dang, this woman has no idea how to stay on the right side of the law. I found a slew of convictions for robbery, burglary, prison escape and weapons possession, all in Florida. It looks like she had run-ins with the police in Illinois and Nevada too. The Florida offenses got like 70-plus years in prison between them, but of course it doesn’t work out that way in real life cause of things like concurrent sentences and parole. Well, she’s been LWOPed (life without parole) now. I think she probably didn’t really hear Geralyn Graham confess to murdering Rilya. I think she just wanted to get benefits for herself and jerk the police around.

Before they were missing

It’s amazing what you can find out about people using the internet (as one of my blog readers demonstrated to me some weeks ago). I always enter a person’s name into Google as part of my research when I write up their case. A lot of times, when I write up more recent cases of missing persons, I find traces they left online before their disappearances.

Back in the days when Jennifer Marra ran the MPCCN and we weren’t even really friends yet, I stumbled across the personal website of a young college student who had vanished without a trace. The site, which used webspace provided by her student account, had some pictures of her and some general information and some poems she wrote. The last was the day before she disappeared. It also had her AOL instant messenger screenname, which I added to my own buddy list, in case she should pop up on there. She never did. She’s still missing and it’s been nine or ten years. Her website is no longer extant.

Just today, as I was writing up a new case from 2008, I saw the missing woman quoted in a newspaper article from 2007. Ironically, it was an article about another missing person whose case she, a police officer, was investigating. Now the police officer herself is missing. In another case, I stumbled across a website about joining the Peace Corps where a missing man I was writing about had posted a short account of his own volunteer experience back in the seventies.

With MySpace and Facebook and such places, it’s getting easier to see the person behind the poster. One man who’s been missing since late this past spring posted on Facebook just a month or so before he vanished, writing about his conservative politics and predicting Barack Obama would go down as the worst president in history. I occasionally take missing people’s photos off of their own MySpace accounts to help find them. I hope they don’t mind.

It’s a bit eerie when this happens — kind of like seeing ghosts.

Okay, this is a bit scary

I am working on today’s updates and just wrote up a bizarre case from NamUs about a young man who was last seen when he got arrested following a domestic dispute. He was booked on some minor charges. The next day when his dad came to see him at the jail, they told him he’d been transferred to another jail in a nearby town. So Dad went over there and they didn’t have his son and didn’t know anything about the supposed transfer. The man hasn’t been seen or heard from since. This was in 1973.

I think there’s got to be more to the story than that — at least I hope so. How can a small-town police department simply lose a prisoner and NEVER FIND HIM? I can imagine this sort of thing happening in, say, Turkey, or Latin America, but in the United States?

I’ve passed 8,000

A man emailed me a few days ago giving a list of cases where the birthdates and/or ages are wrong. He said he’d counted and I now have 8,010 cases on Charley.

I’m pretty sure that makes Charley by far the largest online database of missing persons, public or private. The California DOJ has a little over 2,000. NamUs as well. The NCMEC has 3,770 listed, if you count all countries. I didn’t count those classified as unidentified, but many cases that are not in that classification are actually unidentified live children (abandoned kids outside the US, generally). I don’t know how many cases the Doe Network and the North American Missing Persons Network have, but I’m quite sure it’s less than what I’ve got.

And yet, 8,010 is perhaps just ten percent of the people currently missing in this country.

Adji Desir’s family still looking for him

Adji Desir, a developmentally disabled six-year-old Haitian-American boy, has been missing from his grandmother’s home in Immokalee, Florida for exactly 363 days now. He was playing outside with other children when he vanished, seemingly without a trace. No witnesses. No hard evidence of any crime. Just a little boy with the mind of a two-year-old, a little boy who could barely talk at all and couldn’t even say his own name, gone.

The Naples Daily News has just run an anniversary article about Adji’s disappearance. His mom and stepdad have had another child, a baby girl they named Adjiani after her brother. Adji’s grandmother, who was babysitting him that day while his parents worked, no longer lives in the same apartment. She’s moved in with Adji’s mother and stepfather due to health problems. Adji’s bio-dad lives in Haiti and as far as I know, he hasn’t said anything in the press; nor, I believe, is he considered a suspect in his son’s disappearance.

It’s looking more and more like Adji was kidnapped, although there were no witnesses and no suspects. If he had wandered away I think he would have been found by now. If he was abducted I suppose there’s reason to hope he’s still alive. A disabled child who cannot speak is unlikely to give his kidnapper(s) away, so they could have kept him around. I hope he’s alive, somewhere. It’s unlikely, I admit, but people like Jaycee Dugard, Shawn Hornbeck, Elizabeth Smart and Shasta Groene can testify otherwise.

Arkadiy Tashman missing almost five years

As this Village Voice blog entry notes, seventeen-year-old Arkadiy Tashman will be missing for five years on January 26. He is missing under rather unusual circumstances: he was last seen leaving a friend’s home at 2:45 a.m., and never made it back to his own home on Staten Island. Later that day, his parents found a note in his bedroom that said, “Sorry about his. No wake, no funeral.”

But Arkadiy’s body, if he killed himself, has never been found, and as far as I know there aren’t any real indications that he was suicidal prior to his disappearance. His girlfriend said he had considered suicide before, but nearly everyone does at some point in their lives, and there’s no word on just how far that consideration went. Of course, plenty of people kill themselves without displaying any warning signs beforehand. But where in New York City could you kill yourself without your body ever being found?

Arkadiy doesn’t fit the profile of a runaway, either. He didn’t come from a troubled home and he had no history of running away. He was a high school junior at the time of his disappearance, but I’m not sure how good a student he was. I read somewhere that he had to repeat a year due to excessive absences. (It might be worth noting that he stayed at his friend’s house till nearly three in the morning on a school night.) He is originally from Russia and emigrated to the US at age eleven. His older sister set up a blog about his disappearance, but it hasn’t been updated in over a year.

Perhaps, like in the case of Richard Massey, his body has been found and remains unidentified. I certainly hope not. I hope Arkadiy is still alive and I hope he gets in touch with his family soon. I have no no clue what happened to him, but it doesn’t look good.

Oh, brother

Now Martha Jean Lambert‘s brother David, who confessed to killing his sister back in 1985, has joined his mother in denial: his confession, he says, was a lie. David said the cops were anxious to close the case and he only told them what he wanted to hear, and he has no idea what really happened to Martha.

The cops are having none of this, of course. They believe David’s confession, and so do I. Maybe it didn’t happen like he says, but I’m quite sure David caused Martha’s death. If David lied, why did he retract his statement only now, four months after he first made the confession? It can’t be because he was afraid of his mom, because he made the confession on tape in her presence, and at that time she appeared to believe him.

Another article says this isn’t the first time David has said he was responsible for Martha’s death. Back in 2000 he said he buried her in a coquina mine, but the cops couldn’t find anything there. Hmm.

I don’t doubt that David is an attention-seeker. He should stop jerking everyone around.

Richard Massey’s family suing the city of New York

I once had a young British man named Richard Massey profiled on Charley. He was in his twenties and working as a computer programmer in New York City when he disappeared in December 2002, after suffering an apparent nervous breakdown. His family filed a missing persons report with the NYPD and sent them all of his particulars, and searched for him for five long years. But Massey’s body was pulled out of the Hudson River just four months after he vanished. The cops don’t know the cause or manner of his death, and it looks like they didn’t even attempt to identify him. Just buried him as a John Doe, and there he rested until a private detective hired by the Massey family found out about the body on his own. Massey has been re-interred in Doncaster, England.

Now, Massey’s family has filed a lawsuit accusing the NYPD, the city medical examiner and the city in general of negligence for failure to investigate his disappearance and failure to identify him sooner. They’re seeking unspecified damages. As the article and Gaelle’s blog Unsolved in the News notes, this is far from the first time the NYPD has screwed up in this manner.

I hope the Massey case and resulting lawsuit results in changes around New York with the way bodies are identified. In some cases it looks like they didn’t even try.

Yesterday I read a book about disappearances in Alaska (which is such a severe place that it basically eats people on a regular basis). There was a quote in there from another source:

If you know your husband or father or brother is dead, you can bear the loss. But if you picture him year in year out dying by inches on some desert island or wandering with lost memory on some distant shore, a bitter anguish haunts you night and day.

From this cause I have seen aged men die; gay young wives grow old and grim; mothers weep their hearts out until the grave relieves their despair; and both sisters and brothers turn cold shoulders to a happy world in the awful thrall of a never-ending hope.

This about perfectly sums up the devastation a missing person wreaks on their family. The Massey family’s anguish could have been over a lot faster if those in charge had only done their jobs.

Little Kelly Hollan

I found this article about six-year-old Kelly Hollan, a boy who disappeared from his front yard in Hindman, Kentucky 28 years ago next month. It’s a good piece and has some information I had not seen previously.

The police seem to think Kelly’s family or the neighbors were involved. It’s worth noting that his mom didn’t report his disappearance until midnight. She says she went to her boyfriend’s grandmother’s home to call the cops (no phone in her own home?), but they didn’t let her call for hours. I think I can buy that. The article says most of the locals were involved in criminal activity, and there is a LOT of marijuana in rural Kentucky. I am thinking that perhaps they wouldn’t let Kelly’s mother call the cops until they had gotten rid of their stash.

With this in mind, I wonder if perhaps Kelly stumbled across some kind of criminal behavior like an illegal pot operation and someone killed him. This is all speculation, but I think this idea has as much merit as any other.