Ah, plagiarism, lovely

I found this article about the disappearances of Cynthia Gooding and Teresa Alfonso. They found a few bone fragments that might be from one of the girls, though besides the location there’s really no indication that it’s Cynthia or Teresa. Anyway, in the article I count three sentences that were copied word-for-word from their Charley casefiles:

Investigators initially believed Gooding and Alfonso had run away from home, as one of them had a history of such behavior.

and

The police file for the girls was destroyed in a fire sometime after they vanished.

and, just from Cynthia’s file:

She had moved from her mother’s Portsmouth, Virginia home to Florida to be closer to her father and older brothers.

No attribution, of course. Hrmph.

Alas, no new leads in Jacob Wetterling case

This past summer there was a lot of activity in the Jacob Wetterling kidnapping case. He was eleven years old when he was abducted at gunpoint by a masked man in 1989, and there’s been no trace of him since. The cops were searching a local property pretty extensively, where a “person of interest” had lived. Everyone hoped for a break in the case.

But it was not to be. This article quotes the police basically saying their search found zilch, nothing, nada. As to whether the person of interest — an elementary school music teacher — is off the hook, no word. Of course he maintains his innocence.

Two murder trials

The trial has begun for Dennis Tetso, accused of murdering his wife Tracey Gardner-Tetso, who disappeared from Maryland in 2005. According to this Baltimore Sun article, Dennis was suspicious of Tracey and thought she was having an affair. (And, indeed, she was.) He did not participate in the search for her, and this article says he even ripped down missing person fliers for his wife. Way to look innocent.

This article has a picture of Dennis, though not a very good one. His defense is going with the “no body, no crime” gambit.

Meanwhile, in New York, Werner Lippe is going through his second trial in the presumed death of his wife, Faith, who went missing in 2008. There was a mistrial earlier this year when the jury was unable to reach a verdict. The couple’s children were 12 and 14 at the time of Faith’s disappearance. Their son, now 16, testified against his father. Lippe’s defense, like Dennis Tetso’s is playing up the reasonable doubt thing. A good quote from his attorney in this article: “You can’t convict someone on maybe.” But the fact that Werner actually confessed to a (wired) friend is a major strike against him.

I hate it when this happens

Stephanie and Marifer Garcia, whom I currently have listed on my resolved page, have not been found after all. The NCMEC sent me a recovery notice, but they just put up their poster again. I’ll have to remove the resolved notice and re-list them. The two girls were abducted by their mother in 2005.

It sometimes happens that a kid runs away, I put them on Charley, they get found, I put up a resolved notice, and like two days later they run away again. The NCMEC has several chronic runaways they keep listing and removing and listing again. I see their poster and think, “Oh, you again.”