Ahem, a brief announcement

I will no longer make updates to my casefiles that are solely height and weight alternatives provided by NamUs, unless these are substantial differences (i.e. 160 – 200 pounds, not 160 – 170 pounds). The reason being that there are so many of those alternatives in one-inch and ten-pound increments, and I suspect that whoever posts them is just trying to provide a greater range for John/Jane Doe matching purposes. Which is fine and dandy, but I’m swamped in case updates as it is.

4 thoughts on “Ahem, a brief announcement

  1. Princess Shantae February 23, 2011 / 10:13 am

    I meant to ask you about that sometime but kept forgetting. There’s some cases on your site and on other sites where it sounds like the person was in decent contact with their family or friends, but they’ll have their height listed as like five-three to five-seven, or their weight will be like 100-150 pounds.
    If you know somebody you will know about how tall they are, and somebody that’s five-seven doesn’t look like somebody that’s five-three. And you can’t be off by fifty pounds if the person is even close to normal weight. That always bothered me.
    Like on Doe Network they’ll have a Jane or John Doe and they give an age range from 18 to 99. Did nobody even look at those bones? B/c it’s supposed to be pretty easy to tell between a bone of a teenager and one from somebody that’s realy old.

    • Meaghan February 23, 2011 / 10:42 am

      Sometimes the height and weight will be so varied as to be useless — like, “5’0 – 6’0, 100 – 200 pounds” and I won’t even put it up. Because it’s obvious they’re not even trying.

      Ann Rule did once write about a young woman who disappeared, and her family swore she was 5’3 with blue eyes. They were right about the blue eyes and had photos to prove it. A 5’7, brown-eyed Jane Doe was pulled from a river and out of desperation, I guess, the police checked dentals. Match. The family apparently hadn’t quite realized just how much their teen daughter had grown lately. As for the eyes, all they could think of was that the river was very polluted and the chemicals in the water must have changed her eye color after death.

  2. Sara Huizenga May 21, 2011 / 12:48 am

    Have you ever considered adding cases and updates to NamUs instead of the other way around?

    • Meaghan May 21, 2011 / 5:45 pm

      No. I like working on my own site. Diversity is a fine thing, and many of the case details I put on Charley aren’t really appropriate for NamUs. It looks to me like NamUs is meant primarily to identify bodies, whereas Charley is to spread awareness and tell the stories of the MPs and their lives and disappearances.

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