Sean Munger writes about two Charley cases on his blog

My friend Sean Munger runs Charley’s official Twitter account and YouTube channel. (Hey, you! Make more vids!) He has blogged about Charley Project missing persons in the past, and did two more entries, one just today and another from a few days ago.

Today’s entry talks about Michael Owen, an apparent metal head who disappeared three years ago this month. Sean also wrote about Margaret Kilcoyne, a cardiologist who disappeared from her Nantucket home more than thirty years ago after she apparently went off the deep end.

I’m pretty sure Dr. Kilcoyne killed herself, although perhaps not intentionally. No clue about Michael Owen; there just isn’t enough information. He wasn’t even reported missing for more than a year.

The local TV people saw my article

I wrote about appearing in the local newspaper (thanks to Dad, who alerted the media to my post-Cleveland fame). Well, the local TV people saw the article and emailed me and they are sending a camera crew to my mom’s house tomorrow to interview me.

Article about David Miera…and my own public record digging

The Albuquerque Journal has profiled David Miera in this article. Until now I hadn’t known whether “Zerfas” was the mom’s boyfriend’s first name or his last name. Turns out the man’s full name was Leon Zerfas but he went by his initials, LG. The article includes a great deal of information, including pictures of both Zerfas and David’s mother Genevieve.

The article says Leon was “the estranged son of an Indiana physician who apparently chose a darker, wilder course.” I found this obituary on Find a Grave for a Dr. Leon G. Zerfas from Indiana, who died in 1978. He had a PhD as well as an MD, AND he studied law, AND he donated a million bucks to Indiana University, his alma mater. (That was in 1972. The modern equivalent would be something on the order of $3.4 million. Way to go, Dr. Z.) Dr. Zerfas, in addition to being an Indiana physician like the article said, would be the right age to be LG Zerfas’s father, and if they had the same name that would explain why LG went by his initials…but the obituary lists only one child, a Dr. Charles Zerfas, who it says also lived in Indiana.

Looking further, I found a picture of Dr. Leon Zerfas and he resembles the photo of LG Zerfas from the Albuquerque Journal article. I’m almost certain that’s his father, in spite of what the obituary said. Maybe the obit doesn’t list Dr. Zerfas’s other son because of the estrangement?

(UPDATE 8/10/2013: A person who wishes to remain anonymous has informed me that LG Zerfas was NOT Dr. Leon Zerfas’s son or even a close relative, and all those things I mentioned that match are merely coincidental. I’ll be darned.)

In any case, the Leon Zerfas that was Genevieve’s mother’s boyfriend died in 2005, taking whatever he knew to the grave. I can’t find anything about the circumstances of his death. All the articles I can find when I search for that name are about a Utah teen who was murdered twenty years earlier.

I also looked up “Zerfas” the surname because I’d never heard it before. Turns out it’s German, a respelling of “Serfass.” Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Serf Ass. And on that note, I’m sorry, I can’t resist:

More facts out of Cleveland

The Dayton Daily News (one of my brothers used to work for them, not as a journalist but to run their computers) has published a list of “Seven Creepy Things You Didn’t Know” about Ariel Castro. (Why am I suddenly reminded of Zefrank‘s wonderful “True Facts About The ____” series?)

The “things you didn’t know” are all things I either did know or could certainly have guessed, and I’m not even following the case all that closely:

1. He blames his victims, saying what he did to them was their fault cause they got in his car.
2. He’s a hypocrite.
3. The victims watched TV news about their kidnappings while locked up in Castro’s house. This is not, technically, a fact about Ariel Castro himself, but whatever.
4. He abused his late ex-wife horribly. (That I had heard already.)
5. One of his daughters is in prison for attempted murder. (Ditto.)
6. He helped search for Gina DeJesus. (Ditto x2.)
7. Gina’s friend who was the last person to see her, is Castro’s daughter. (x3.)

My boyfriend had told me that Charles Ramsey, the man who rescued the girls, was eating in a McDonald’s across the street when he heard the screams and ran to help. When he came back, someone had taken his Big Mac. In response, they were offering Mr. Ramsey a “Chuck card” which he could present to any restaurant in Cleveland for a free burger for life. Well, it seems Ramsey has turned them down. He also says he doesn’t want the reward for finding the victims. Actually, what he said was, “You know I got a job anyway. Just went picked it up, paycheck.” He said the women should get it.

As I have said before, the girls are going to need all the financial help they can get. Certainly they’re not going to be capable of getting their own paychecks for the foreseeable future.

Enterprising journalists dug up Ramsey’s background and found out he was in jail for domestic violence, like, ten years ago. He served his time, got out and did not re-offend. BIG FRIGGIN’ DEAL. The man learned his lesson and his actions on May 6 more than balance out his prior mistakes. Charles Ramsey should be an inspiration to us all. I’m not the only person who thinks that. In fact, one agency that reported on his criminal record has apologized for doing so.

And this week’s MP is….

Maleina Quitugua Luhk. Maleina was nine when she disappeared with her ten-year-old sister, Faloma, from the Northern Mariana Islands on May 25, 2011. I don’t have much on them; they were just gone. Authorities have said that a relative by marriage is considered a person of interest in the case. Maleina is short for her age and has a distinguishing birthmark on her cheek; it kind of looks like she smeared a bit of chocolate there.

Until I heard about those girls I didn’t even know the Northern Marianas, which are in the south Pacific, were part of the US. I think this may very well by the first MP of the week to come from a territory of the US, not a state.

Guy in South America claims to be Ruben Herrera

A South American organization emailed an El Paso newspaper claiming they’ve got Ruben Herrera, who disappeared in 1983 at the age of 14. From the article:

Marcel Ramirez Rhor, with Fundación Papá por Siempre (Father for Life Foundation) in Colombia, said in a May 21 email that Herrera is indigent and needs to fix his immigration status in a country outside the United States.

Ramirez said his organization wants to help Herrera and for that reason requested a street address for Herrera’s relatives in El Paso and a Social Security number for him.

He also said the missing El Pasoan was unwilling to provide further details that might help to confirm his identity. “He is not very sociable, and we are the ones who insisted on him regularizing his status, but so far he has not cooperated,” Ramirez said. “After he told us his story, we began to search on the Internet for information. We saw that everything he told us was true, and we thought it was necessary to contact his relatives.”

The man who says he is Herrera indicated in emails to the El Paso Times that he does not wish to return to El Paso, reunite with his Texas relatives or disclose where he lives. “I just want to find my two sisters,” he said.

Now, it would be really cool if this guy IS in fact Ruben, even if he doesn’t want to be in touch with his family. At least they can close the case and know he’s alive. From what little I know about his disappearance, he COULD be Ruben. But, frankly, this person sounds like a con artist who wants to get his hands on an American Social Security number at the expense of torturing Ruben’s family.

(Fun fact: Ruben might not actually have an SSN. I know they didn’t used to automatically give them out when babies were born, not back then, and often you didn’t get one until you got a job. When I was six years old and at the university with my father, some student of his kept asking me questions and was amazed that I could answer them all correctly. She finally said, “What’s your Social Security number?” I looked at her blankly and she laughed at me. Then Dad said, “Actually, she doesn’t have one.” He explained that I had not gotten one when I was born and as far as he was concerned, there was no reason for a six-year-old to have one. Maybe I didn’t get assigned one right away because I was born at home and not in the hospital. Of course I have one now. And no, I’m not telling you what it is.)

Another blog shout-out

I thought I’d tell y’all about Let’s Find Them, a missing persons blog I discovered just now. The more people publicizing the cases, the better.

Another thing that I hate when it happens

I’m working on a list for a future Make-a-List Monday that requires me to basically look at every single casefile to see if it qualifies for the list. (I might have mentioned this before, not sure.) Anyway, the list involves the place the MP disappeared from. I googled “Oakland Township, PA” for Andrew Armstrong…and discovered there are THREE Oakland Townships in Pennsylvania.

And I have no idea which one he disappeared from.

Sandra Baker disappeared from Delaware Township, Pennsylvania. And there are FIVE of those.

MPs named Mohammed

They say that Mohammed, if you include all its variations, is the most popular boys’ name in the world. (You’d be hard-pressed to find a Mohammed in a non-Muslim family, though. In fact I’ve never heard of any. If any blog readers know of some non-Muslim Mohammeds, let me know, out of curiosity.) Anyway, for this Monday I thought I’d do all the people on Charley who have the name Mohammed in their name, or any of its spelling variations that I can think of.

Saif Sayed Mohammed Ahmed
Amena Mohammed El Sayed
Mohammed Ata Hakimi
Mohamed-Ali Hilal Jaafar
Jamal Mohammed
Petra Loretta Muhammad
Aesha Amera Muhammed
Mohammad Reza Shirazi
Muhammed Saad Siddiqui

Quite a short list here. Probably because it’s a Muslim name and Muslims are a small minority in the United States — no more than one and a half percent of the population, sez Wikipedia. But I think it was a worthy topic anyway.

Meaghan makes the local paper

In the wake of my fame re: the Cleveland thing, Dad had emailed all the local newspapers and told them about me. The Van Wert Times Bulletin interviewed me and I got an article yesterday. I first found this out from my therapist on Saturday. I went in to see him and he told me that on the way to work he’d stopped to get gas and inside the station, in the newspaper rack, he saw a headline: “Venedocia woman’s site simplifies the search for missing people” and thought, “Meaghan.”

Michael’s parents gave me their copy of the paper. Maybe I’ll clip out the article and then scan it for posterity.