Grr, this is very annoying

I am trying to write up a casefile for one Nichole Marie Millsaps and the problem is I can find practically nothing on her. The only information is this poster. Okay…no exact date of disappearance. No date of birth. No hair/eye color — it looks like her hair’s brown, but photos can be deceiving, and it’s impossible to tell about her eyes. Worst of all, not even a city or county of disappearance. Last seen somewhere in Alaska. Alaska is 586,412 square miles in size.

I think she lived in Anchorage or the vicinity. Partly because almost half the people in Alaska live in or near Anchorage, but mostly because if you Google your name you can see that someone with the same name and the right age was arrested in the Anchorage area last fall. But that’s hardly definitive. Even if she did live in Anchorage, she could have disappeared somewhere else.

Way to be helpful, Alaska State Troopers. Well played.

A bit of a shock

I got a letter from a guy who says a woman listed on Charley, Dawnia Howard, is his ex-wife. They divorced back in the seventies and he Googled her name to see if he could find a Facebook page or something for her, see what she’d been up to all this time. He found out she’d been missing for the past 25 years, probably killed by another ex-husband.

Nasty shock it was for him.

The suspect, Richard Clinton Howard, subsequently wedded, bedded and murdered another wife, Cora. He is in prison for her murder, but I just learned that he’d up in parole in January. After ten lousy years. I hope the parole board realizes he’s the prime suspect in Dawnia’s case as well.

Murder charge in Lynsie Ekelund case

Christopher McAmis, a friend of Lynsie Leigh Ekelund, has been charged with capital murder in her case. Because authorities believe he killed her after a rape attempt, he’s eligible for the death penalty. No word on whether the DP will actually be sought by prosecutors.

Lynsie, a 20-year-old community college student, had disappeared from Placentia, California back in 2001. There has been nothing new about her case in a very long time — her Charley Project casefile had not been updated even once in the six years the site has run. But the police were quietly chipping away at it in the background.

Articles:
The Mercury News
The Southwest Riverside News Network
The Orange County Register
Orange County Weekly

2500-year-old missing persons case solved?

Okay, this article is almost a year old, but I just found it: according to Herodotus, in 525 BC a Persian army crossing the desert en route to attack Greece vanished entirely in a massive sandstorm and were never found. Well, archaeologists may have found the army, or part of it anyway, buried in the sand right around the place where they were said to have vanished. The archaeologists sound awfully sure that these are the ones.

Shannon Dedrick’s mom pleads to misdemeanor charge

I had written about the Shannon Dedrick case earlier: a baby, given by her mother to another woman who kept her hidden in a small, unventilated box for hours and hours before the baby was rescued. That woman was Susan Elizabeth Baker, the stepmother of Paul Baker, and the prime suspect in his 1987 disappearance.

Susan was convicted of three felony charges earlier this month in connection with Shannon Dedrick’s kidnapping. Well, yesterday, Shannon’s mother, Chrystina Mercer, pleaded no contest to one misdemeanor charge of providing false information to the police. This is almost exactly one year since Shannon’s disappearance. Chrystina got the max, 364 days in jail, but with credit for time served, she was released immediately. She got off easy. She had been facing much more serious charges, but the substance of those were the statements of Susan Baker, whose reputation for honesty is, shall we say, questionable.

Shannon is now in a foster home. Her father has surrendered his parental rights and Chrystina isn’t allowed to have contact with her at this time.

Where is Paul?

Articles:

The Miami Herald
WJHG 7
The Panama City News Herald
WMBB 13

Albert Pitkethly found dead

Albert Jay Pitkethly’s mom wrote to me to say he had been found deceased. 42 years old, he had been missing from Gimlet, Idaho since September 2001. I looked for articles and I assume Albert is the skeletal remains found by hunters earlier this month, which are spoken of in this article and this article.

Other than that I don’t know anything. Those who are in the know are keeping pretty quiet.

All the animals in the zoo

I used my trusty cell phone to take some not-very-good quality pictures of my ani-pals tonight.

Presenting Carmen, who is a cat, obviously, a little more than one year old. Carmen is one of those cats that actually grew more attractive as she got older. She was a cute kitten of course — all kittens are cute — but she grew into a beautiful adult cat.

And my rats, Gypsy and Harriet. Unfortunately they wouldn’t cooperate with the camera and only Gypsy deigned to show us her face. You can see their home in the background. They like to sit in the blue triangular hammocky thing. Both of them will squeeze themselves in there at once.

And this, alas, is Gypsy’s mammary tumor. It’s enormous, but it does not seem to be bothering her yet. Unless she’s climbing the side of the cage, you can’t see it at all except for the funny way she walks. Michael and I are monitoring her closely and when she begins to suffer we will send her to the big Rat Burrow in the Sky. But why hurry? She seems happy enough at present.

Gaaah, this isn’t looking good

Cluster headache struck like lightning early this morning. At a really bad time, too: I was trying to write a paper that’s due in two and a half hours. I took a Tramadol pill, but within half an hour I was screaming. (I am alone, thank goodness.) I took another. The pain lessened somewhat but was still very much a presence. I threw caution to the wind and took a third pill. I think that’s as good as it’s going to get. 150 milligrams of Tramadol and my headache is still there. I’ll probably have to take more in four to six hours when the first three wear off.

Carl Woracker found dead

Carl Derek Woracker has been found dead. His ex-wife emailed me with a link to this article. Carl, who was 26, had been missing from Spokane, Washington since 1998. One of his shinbones was found in a wooded area in 2004, and the second shinbone and two thighbones turned up in 2009, near where his car was abandoned, but nothing else was located. DNA testing just identified the bones.

No word on whether foul play is suspected or not. Given the passage of time and the fact that only the legs were found, we may never know. I find it a bit odd, however, that pieces of Carl’s legs were found in separate places.

Sweet, Werner Lippe was convicted

Werner Lippe has been convicted of murdering his wife, Faith, who’s been missing since October 2008. Werner was a jeweler who had designed pieces for celebrities, and he had quite a lot of money. (Wikipedia says the median income for a family living in their hometown is close to $90,000. That’s like twice the national average.) He and Faith were going to get a divorce, and perhaps he didn’t want to share his wealth. Their own son had to testify against his father at the trial.

I was a bit concerned that Werner might not be convicted, because the previous jury had deadlocked at 7 to 5 for acquittal. But justice was served. He faces 25 years to life in prison.

Articles:

Mid-Huson News
The Journal News
The Journal News Again
The Patch