Wanda J. Evans, a 76-year-old woman missing from Meridian, Idaho, has been found in the Peyette River. Or, to be more precise, her prosthetic hip has been found. The authorities were able to match its serial number to her. They searched for the rest of the body but haven’t turned up anything.
They think the death was probably an accident, though obviously it’s impossible to tell for sure at this point. Wanda’s family said she was showing signs of Alzheimer’s Disease before her disappearance.
The family of Mouy Tang, a North Carolina resident who disappeared in 2008, is seeking $750,000 in damages from Unique Living, the nursing home where Mouy lived at the time. Mouy was 46 years old, young for a nursing home, but she had severe mental and physical problems and on top of it all she didn’t speak English. The doctors say she could have not have survived without her diabetes medicine.
The nursing home was shut down a week after her disappearance, and deservedly so. From Mouy’s Charley casefile:
Other residents of Unique Living have gone missing from the facility for days at a time, and two have died inside the home from accidents. One resident, Kelly “Buck” Whitesides, disappeared from there in 2006, only a week after he moved in. His body was found eight days later, less than 1,000 feet from the facility; he had diabetes and a history of strokes and heart problems and had died of natural causes. A month after Whitesides’s body was located, another Unique Living resident signed himself out and didn’t return. He was found safe 100 miles away.
The facility was considered troubled. It had a poor sanitation rating and was repeatedly cited for violations. […] A committee working for the state Division of Health Service (DHS) recommended that the home be fined $50,000 for alleged safety violations.
And from another article:
Testimony from DSS officials, which has been previously documented in The Star, painted a picture of negligence well before Mouy’s disappearance.
Johnson said the facility’s revenue included roughly $1,000 per each of the more than 60 residents per month. Yet bills went unpaid.
Utility bills weren’t paid and neither was staff, Johnson said. DSS repeatedly had to intervene to prevent water and heat service from being terminated, she said. Even a dishwasher was repossessed.
Some doors that were supposed to be secure were broken at the time of Mouy’s disappearance, which enabled her to walk out the door and off grounds without being noticed.
It’s a terrible story.
My grandpa lives in a nursing home. I saw him today in fact. Grandma lived there too, until she died last summer. I think it’s a good place — Grandpa seems cheerful enough there — and there are coded locks on all the doors. I feel fortunate that he’s in a good facility and not one of those dungeons I’ve heard about.
Jamie Michelle Fraley was missing for three years on April 8.
Included in her casefile is the story of how the prime suspect in her disappearance met his death. Normally I would think it too far removed to be included, but the story was so wonderful I couldn’t resist. The guy was an abusive, violent stalker type. He climbed into his ex-girlfriend’s car’s trunk, apparently with the intent of ambushing her, but he got stuck in there and died of heat stroke. Impaled on his own sword, so to speak. And his ex-girlfriend drove around for several days without realizing he was in the trunk.
I reckon she must have freaked when she found him. I mean, anyone would freak to find a mysterious dead body in the trunk, but imagine her call to the cops: “My ex-boyfriend’s, um, dead body is in the trunk of my car. And I have no idea how it got there. Honest…”
Unfortunately, whatever he knew about Jamie’s disappearance, he took to the grave with him.
Today is the tenth anniversary of the disappearance of Branson Perry. As I noted before, his mother died earlier this year. His father died several years ago.
Branson’s case reminds me a lot of Jason Jolkowski‘s. I’m not saying the two are connected, they just remind me of each other. Jason disappeared a few months after Branson. They were almost the same age. Clean-cut young men, stable, happy, with no reason to walk out of their lives. And they both vanished as thoroughly and bewilderingly as if they had been abducted by aliens.
Four men have been charged in connection with the disappearance last spring of Kristin Spires, a 20-year-old from Michigan. It’s a bit weird though. The defendants, named Anthony Walker, Anthony Darnell Rollin, Thomas Vernnon Bennett, and Kepha Yaaqob Stutzman, have been charged as “accessories after the fact” in Kristin’s disappearance. From article:
Police think that Spires is dead and are trying to determine how she died and where her body has been hidden, the Pioneer reported.
The men are accused of being involved in delivering a controlled substance to Spires and assaulting her with intent to commit great bodily harm, according to the Pioneer.
The Pioneer quoted Jaklevic as saing the four delivered cocaine and possibly marijuana to Spires and that the men are charged with hiding her body to hide the crime.
According to the Pioneer, Walker had been sentenced in January to nine months in jail for obstruction of justice, with court records indicating that he was charged for “telling a false story to police in a missing person case, which resulted in police executing two search warrants, a large use of manpower by the Michigan State Police Crime Lab and an invasion of privacy on those who did not need to be searched.”
The accessory after a fact charge carries a sentence to five years in prison.
I also found this video of an interview with Kristin’s family.
John Steven Burgess, who pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the death of Donna Jou, is about to be released from prison, having served half of a five-year sentence. From the article:
With an overcrowded prison system, it is common for state prisoners to be released after serving half of their sentences with good behavior. [Donna’s mom] Nili Jou said she received a notice in February that Burgess is scheduled to be released April 15.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I’m frustrated. I’m angry.”
[…]
On the Jous’ website, donnajou.com, the family has posted the letter it received from state corrections about Burgess’ release. According to the letter, Burgess is to be paroled in Los Angeles.
It’s pretty disgusting. Mostly because I don’t believe, and Donna’s parents don’t believe, and many others don’t believe Burgess’s story as to how she died. According to him, she accidentally ODed on some heroin and cocaine he gave her. But Donna had no history of drug use. She was a very responsible, intelligent young woman, a pre-med student, who knew perfectly well the dangers of using hard drugs. And Burgess is a sex offender and the last time anyone talked to Donna, she said he was “freaking her out” and she had locked herself in a bathroom to get away from him. Oh, and he supposedly left her body lying in the bed of his pickup in a residential neighborhood for a couple of days before disposing of it. In southern California. In June. And nobody saw or smelled anything.
Riiight.
But what can you do? The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has spoken. Somehow I don’t think there’s any rehabilitating HIM.
The father of Kianna and Gunnar Berg wrote to me today. He didn’t recognize one of Kianna’s photos and wanted to know its origin. He said he thought it might provide clues to her location. Unfortunately I had to disappoint him; the photo came from Kianna’s NCMEC poster.
Gunnar and Kianna were taken by their non-custodial mother to Japan 20 months ago. They haven’t had contact with their father since then and he doesn’t know where they’re at, though given the recent problems in Japan he must be worried sick. But I have heard that there’s the possibility that American citizens in Japan (including parental abduction victims) may be evacuated to the US in the light of all that’s been going on there. I told Mr. Berg that — in case he didn’t already know. I hope that happens, and a little good can come of all that tragedy.
Out of curiosity, I checked to see how many family abduction kids on Charley are thought to be in Japan. I believe there are about 20. A few have been gone for over ten years.
As always happens when I take a few days off, I have 49834897436 things piled up to work on for my website. Question: do y’all like it when the daily updates consist of a lot of updated cases, a lot of new cases, or some more or less equal mix thereof?
About an hour ago I finished reading The Last Place You’d Look: True Stories of Missing Persons and the People Who Search for Them. I will write a longer review later. The short version: other than the fact that it says Todd Matthews is “one of the founders” of the Doe Network (I don’t know why that story keeps popping up when it’s contradicted by their own website), it’s very good and very thorough. The author interviewed loads of MPs’ family members and talked about all different kinds of disappearances, from foul play to family abductions to people who wandered off as a result of mental illness and/or drug addiction, etc. The writing’s not bad either.
The Charley Project Blog 