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.