Per Annie of For the Lost: the 2011 Hague Convention compliance report. (The Hague Convention is an international civil treaty that basically says that if a child is abducted by a non-custodial parent and taken to another country, that country will return the child to their country of habitual residence.)
The report might be summed up as: No one is complying.
Quite a few Charley Project cases are mentioned in this report, although not by name.
Missouri and Nebraska have been completely cleaned of subversive elements. A handful of cases from Texas, California, Ohio and Washington have also been dispatched to the gulags in Siberia.
Gosh, this REALLY needed done.
It is an extremely boring job. But I will keep at it.
Got an email from a woman whose two children are listed in the resolved section of my site, as abducted by their non-custodial mother and now found. She says she always had custody, the kids’ father abused the system, and she is suing him. She wants me to remove the resolved notice, or she’ll add my name to the lawsuit.
I’ve heard that story many times before. But who knows, her story might be true. My response:
You will, I hope, forgive my skepticism, but I have gotten many similar claims before about other cases. Very few held water. But if the information is really untrue, of course I don’t want it on my site. Could you produce papers or something to support your claim and explain how, if you had full custody, your children were listed as missing and yourself as a parental abductor? I’m not asking for anything confidential, and certainly nothing you wouldn’t have to produce in court anyway, if you did in fact sue me. If you can provide some support, I will promptly remove the children’s resolved notice.
UPDATE: Wow, she actually delivered.
I found this Montana Missing Persons Clearinghouse profile for Susan Elizabeth Pearson, noted as missing from Missoula since 1992. But when I ran her name through NewspaperArchive I found a bunch of articles from 1966 about a person by that name missing from Missoula. I’m pretty sure it’s the same one, too: both Susans are 5’0 and 97 pounds. And they disappeared on the same day, just not the same year.
I suppose maybe she disappeared twice, but that seems unlikely. I’m going with the 1966 date.
I had previously written about how the man convicted of killing Donna Jou was about to get early release from prison. He had only been sentenced to five years anyway, because without Donna’s body and other crucial evidence, they were forced to just accept his story that she’d died of a drug overdose. And then he was going to serve just half of those five years.
Not so fast.
John Burgess, to the relief of everyone, is not getting out after all. He will be released from prison, but delivered immediately to the custody of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and spend at least a year in their jail. The article I linked to provides a great summary of Donna’s disappearance and Burgess’s crimes.
It’s better than nothing, I guess.
Because it’s not like I have anything else to do with the Charley Project right now, I’ve decided to embark on a purge. This will involve going through all the databases like the California DOJ and the Missouri Highway Patrol, etc., checking to see which of my cases have been removed from the source, and then removing those from Charley because they’ve probably been found.
This is going to be an enormous pain in the butt, but it’s necessary. I haven’t done a purge in a long time.
So if you notice that a whole bunch of cases mysteriously vanished, that’s why.
I have it back. I feel so happy. My laptop has been thrown around quite a bit but it can roll with the punches.
Now I will have to start on the 450943890 updates that happened in the last thirteen days.
Brittanee Marie Drexel, 17, disappeared two years ago this week while on spring break in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Jamie showed me this article about others missing from Myrtle Beach. It talks about Charley cases Shanta Marie Johnson, Woodrow Taylor and Lisa Ann Myers Neugent, as well as several other people. They have a few pictures in the “gallery” link, including one of a woman who isn’t on Charley yet. I wish they had pictures for everyone.
Both Phillip and Nancy Garrido have pleaded guilty in Jaycee Dugard’s abduction. Neither have been sentenced yet, but Phillip faces up to 431 years in prison and Nancy, 36 years to life. They will most certainly die in prison — probably in solitary, because I’m sure the other inmates would turn on them.
I’m glad about this; it seems like the best thing for all parties involved. Jaycee and her children (now aged 13 and 16) won’t have to testify. And it wasn’t a long drawn out case; it moved about as fast as you can expect in our sluggish criminal justice system. Whereas in the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping, it was six years before Wanda Barzee was sentenced and seven before Brian David Mitchell was sentenced. Of course, a lot of the reason for that was that Barzee and Mitchell were both psychotic, but it’s still rather harrowing for Elizabeth and her family, hanging in limbo all that time.
This article says Jaycee is writing her memoirs. I would totally read them when they come out. I have read the memoirs of Belgian kidnap victim Sabine Dardenne, but have yet to get around to Natascha Kampusch’s 3,096 Days.
The part the repair shop needed finally arrived today. When I called, the guy said he was fixing my computer right then and it would be ready for pickup first thing tomorrow.
Unfortunately, with gas at $4 a gallon, I don’t think I can justify making the trip to Fort Wayne just to pick up the computer. That would be two trips in one day, because I have an afternoon class at Ohio State, and then I’m planning to go to Fort Wayne after that to spend the weekend with Michael. By the time I get there, the shop will be closed. So I will have to pick up the computer on Friday. I figure I’ll survive until then.
Mom’s lent me her laptop for a bit — it’s better than Dad’s, though hardly ideal.
Right now I’m keeping myself busy with school and reading. I’m reading Life Sentences: Rage and Survival Behind Bars, which is about the Louisiana State Penitentiary. It’s written by two convicted murderers who spent decades behind bars there.
The Charley Project Blog 