Rebecca Doisy murder trial in progress

Johnny Wright is on trial as of this writing in the presumed murder of Rebecca Doisy, a 23-year-old waitress who disappeared from Columbia, Missouri in 1976. The way Wright got apprehended is kind of funny. Nine years after Rebecca disappeared (that is, in 1985), a witness came forward and on the strength of that evidence the police charged Wright with second-degree murder. He had skipped town by then and no one knew where he was, and apparently nobody tried terribly hard to find him, because he remained an unwitting fugitive from justice until 2009. In 2009, Wright was in Georgia and he was applying for some job that required a background check, so he went to the police station and asked them to do one. And then, whoops, it turns out he’s wanted for murder.

Guess he didn’t get the job then.

Fun fact: Rebecca is the granddaughter of the guy who co-discovered Vitamin K and co-won the 1943 Nobel Prize in Medicine as a result.

Anyway, articles:

Trial of Johnny Wright Poses Challenge for Mo. Prosecutors; Victim Vanished in 1976, Body Never Found
Detective testifies about poem found in Wright’s car
Jurors hear testimony in Doisy murder trial
Witnesses’ testimonies piece together trail up to Johnny Wright’s arrest
Original investigator of Doisy disappearance testifies during Wright trial
Trial for murder of former MU student begins
Trial starts in 35-year-old murder

Jovanna Crawford article

I found this article about Jovanna Stacey Crawford, who’s been missing from Bridgeport, Connecticut since June 5, 1981. (That’s the same Bridgeport where Carlina White was raised after her abduction. Doubt that has anything to do with it, though.) As far as I know, this is the first time Jovanna has been in the news in many years. There have been no new developments in her case, but it’s been close to thirty years now and the police are appealing the public for tips.

Jovanna’s mother’s boyfriend, Ronald Garrett, says a young boy he didn’t know came by the house and said Jovanna’s grandparents had sent him to pick her up. Garrett gave Jovanna to the boy and that was the last anyone saw of her. So went his story, but the boy was never identified and there’s no evidence that he even existed. Garrett was convicted of felony risk of injury to a minor in connection with Jovanna’s disappearance. He served a year in prison, but never changed his story.

Jovanna was only 19 months old when she disappeared. Assuming Garrett didn’t kill her, she may very well be still alive with some other family, like Carlina. The NCMEC made two APs for her in 2009 — with different hairstyles, and one with her mouth open, one with it closed.

Zachary Ramsay now legally dead

Over the objections of his mother, Zachary was declared legally dead today. His father filed the petition earlier this month, seeking “closure” and also wanting to collect on Zach’s $20,000 life insurance policy. Mom insists that Zach is still alive. I think she’s a tad delusional.

Zach has been missing since 1996, when he was ten years old. Authorities have good reason to believe that he was butchered and eaten by super-scary [alleged] child serial killer Nathaniel Bar-Jonah, who was responsible for God knows how many deaths over the years. Bar-Jonah was actually charged with Zachary’s murder, but the charges were dropped for lack of evidence, in part because of Zachary’s mother’s campaigning. Fortunately, Bar-Jonah is no longer wasting oxygen; he died in prison in 2008. He was in prison not for murder, but for sex assault. I don’t think he was ever convicted of a single murder, but they know he did a lot of them. Zachary appears to have been one of the last, maybe the very last.

Allyson Corrales

The Examiner has run this article on four-year-old Allyson Corrales, who has been missing for nearly two years. This is a family abduction case, but an unusually dangerous one: Allyson was abducted after the murder of her mother, and her abducting father is the prime suspect and has warrants out for his arrest for murder.

As the article points out, in spite of the situation — or rather, because of it — the police were initially unable to charge Luis Corrales with kidnapping his daughter. With Allyson’s mom dead, custody of her automatically went to her father, so he had a legal right to take her anywhere he liked. It wasn’t until DNA testing linked him to the crime scene that they could officially list Allyson as a kidnap victim rather than a missing child. By then, months had passed.

It seems like there should have been some way around this. Luis can hardly have been the first guy to murder his ex-wife or girlfriend and take off with their kid.

Chances are they’re no longer in the country. They were last seen boarding a bus en route to El Salvador. Luis is originally from Honduras (he was in the US illegally) so they could be there too.

Whaddaya know, I updated today after all

Nothing spectacular, just some APs and two minor case details of disappearance updates (one of which I’d been sitting on for a few days). No case adds.

My goal each day is 10 adds and 10 updates. Of course that takes a loooong time to do, several hours, and often I don’t reach it. I do the best I can.

What about the other ones?

When Carlina got found, I was really hoping her case could be used as a springboard to bring other cold cases of missing infants to the public eye again. Unfortunately, so far that hasn’t happened. Apparently the NCMEC has been flooded with tips about missing babies, but all that’s been in the news is Carlina, Carlina, Carlina. Hers is a fantastic and certainly newsworthy story, but there are other kids out there who are still missing and this kind of media attention might well lead to their recovery, and they are still being ignored.

Carlina stated she had been having doubts about her origins for years. I wonder if the same is true with a lot of people, but they don’t take the actions she did because they don’t want to disrupt their lives and the lives of the people who raised them. I mean, Carlina made that call to the NCMEC, and now suddenly her mom’s in jail, and her mom’s not her mom, and she has a whole new family, and she’s a world-famous celebrity. Life will never be the same for her again. I wonder if maybe there are are others who have just as much reason as her to believe they were abducted as infants or small children, but they keep their heads down because they don’t want trouble. And there is no way to investigate this kind of thing without causing trouble.

In any case, I’ll list them again: these are, I believe, all the MPs on Charley who were victims of a non-family abduction when under the age of 1 year, where there’s no reason to believe they’re dead:

Christopher Enoch Abeyta, 7 months, missing from Colorado Springs, Colorado since 1986
Sabrina Paige Aisenberg, 4 months, missing from Valrico, Florida since 1997
Andre Terrance Bryant, 1 month, missing from New York City since 1989 (whoever did it killed his mother)
Annalycia Maria Cruz, 4 months, missing from Chiloquin, Oregon since 1994
Allyson Kathleen Dalton, 2 months, missing from Strasburg, Virginia since 1998 (whoever did it killed her mother)
Bryan Dos Santos-Gomes, 3 weeks, missing from Fort Myers, Florida since 2006
Raymond Lamar Green, 5 days, missing from Atlanta, Georgia since 1978
Shannon Patrick Ketron, 8 months, missing from Cordell, Oklahoma since 1982
Alexandra Marie McIntire, 7 months, missing from San Diego, California since 1994
Donel Jacoby Minor, 2 months, missing from Inglewood, California since 1984
Kamiyah Mobley, 1 day, missing from Miami, Florida since 1998
Marlene Santana, 3 days, missing from New York City since 1985
Aleacia Di’onne Stancil, 9 months, missing from Phoenix, Arizona since 1994
Tavish Sutton, 1 month, missing from Atlanta, Georgia since 1993
Jacqueline Vasquez, 3 months, missing from Avondale, Arizona since 2001

And those are just the infants. I didn’t include toddlers who are presumed to have been abducted for the same purpose, like, say, Melissa Highsmith. I think if you kidnapped and kept a kid younger than about four, chances are they’re not going to remember much of anything of their past — certainly not enough to identify their biological family. Steven Stayner was seven when he was taken by Kenneth Parnell, and Parnell didn’t have much trouble convincing him that his family had given him away because they didn’t want him anymore.

I also didn’t count babies like Jeremy Lee Dages or Ashley Nicole Conroy, who disappeared with their mothers.

Chances are excellent that most or all of the children I named on that list above are alive and well out there, somewhere. The oldest, Raymond, would now be 32 years old. Most of the rest are in their teens at least — old enough to start wondering. I wish CNN or somebody would run a story on one of these kids, if only so they would know that someone is still looking for them.

Status update

I have been generally slacking and behaving irresponsibly these last several days and I don’t know when that will change. Possibly today. Possibly a week from now. Who knows? I just really don’t feel like updating Charley right now, though god knows the updates are piling up again.

So far the Topamax has given me acne and made soda pop taste bad. I’m really, really hoping the latter is a temporary thing, because pop was my main beverage and I know of no other that is so cheap, tasty and easily obtainable. Grape juice, which is very good and healthy, is $5 a gallon. Milk is cheap, but it’s so filling that I can’t really drink enough to keep myself hydrated.

Yesterday I had a really, really bad headache starting around ten o’clock or so. I went home from school at noon, missing two classes, then lay around moaning till six-thirty, then asked Dad to take me to the urgent care clinic. They gave me a shot of Nubain, which was effective. Today I called Dr. Easley’s office and asked for another script for MS Contin. I’ll pick it up on the way home. Hopefully by the time I run out of that again, the Topamax will be kicking in.

I have a math test this afternoon. I made up my mind that if the headache returned I would ask the professor to let me take the test early, so I could just get out of here. But it hasn’t come back, thank goodness.

Ann Pettway surrenders

Per ABC News, Ann Pettway has turned herself over to the police in Bridgeport, Connecticut, which is where her family lives and where she raised Carlina for a time after the abduction. It sounds like that’s the first sensible thing she’s done in a long time.

Article about Salena Tackett

Someone sent me this Tennesseean article my way, which gives some more information on the mysterious 2003 disappearance of new wife and mother of two Salena Tackett. She had been married for all of a week when she apparently got up in the middle of the night and decamped for parts unknown, never to be seen again. She left behind two kids, one of whom was only three. I wonder who’s taking care of them now. Salena’s mother died after her disappearance. No one seems to know where her husband is now.

The police seem to think she met with foul play, but there isn’t a lot of evidence there. I don’t even have a height or weight for this woman.

Tania Marie Murrell’s mother has died

According to the Toronto Sun, Vivian Murrell died on New Years Day. She was the mother of Tania Marie Murrell, who disappeared from Edmonton, Alberta at the age of six in 1983. Tania was never found and there were never any strong leads regarding her disappearance.

Vivian Murrell was only 55 years old. Her death was unexpected and they’re still awaiting the autopsy results, though it seems to have been natural causes. Tania’s father, Jack, died in 2005.

There remain two siblings. This article says a sister, Elysia, lives in Ontario and a brother, John, “has spent his life in and out of jail.”