Another unreported missing child

I found a series of articles about Tia McShane, who would be eleven years old today, if she is still alive, which she probably isn’t. She had cerebral palsy, was confined to a wheelchair and really couldn’t do anything for herself. Tia’s mother died this past June and then her father, who hadn’t seen Tia since she was three, began looking for her.

Tia was last seen in the fall of 2006. In the past five years she hasn’t used her Medicaid card, and her mother, Alicia McShane, said she’d given her daughter into foster care. Alicia said she gave her up because she couldn’t take care of her medical needs. The story wasn’t true, but no one questioned it until Alicia died and Tia’s dad, William, tried to find her.

Well, they found a storage unit Tia’s mom had rented. She stopped making payments in March 2009. Inside the unit were human bones. No prizes for guessing whose.

I really need to make a list of children who weren’t reported missing for months or years after their disappearances. Offhand I can think of Qua’mere Rogers, Rilya Wilson and several others.

Articles about Tia:
WKRG 5
Fox 10 TV (with picture)
Fox 10 TV again (with another picture)
The Pensacola News-Journal

Article about missing trio from Fort Worth

I found this article about one of Charley’s more bizarre cases: the disappearances of seventeen-year-old Mary “Rachel” Trlica, fifteen-year-old Lisa “Renee” Wilson and nine-year-old Julie Ann Moseley, who vanished from a Christmas shopping trip at a mall in Fort Worth, Texas two days before Christmas in 1974.

Three people vanishing off the face of the earth all at one time is weird enough. Nobody seems to have seen or heard anything. They left their car in the mall parking lot with Christmas presents inside it. The two older girls didn’t even know Julie all that well. Rachel had recently married (girls married young back then) and Renee had a serious boyfriend. There was no indication of trouble in their lives or families, but that hasn’t stopped sordid rumors of family involvement.

The day after the disappearances, Rachel’s husband got a letter supposedly from her, saying she, Renee and Julie “had to get away” to Houston and would be back in a week. There’s considerable doubt as to whether Rachel actually wrote the letter, however. For one thing it was addressed to “Thomas,” and Rachel always called her husband “Tommy.”

God only knows what happened to those girls. Their disappearances could have a book made of them.