I’ve been doing a lot of purging these last few days, carefully checking cases to make sure they’re still active. Just because nothing’s showing up on the updates page, doesn’t mean I’m doing nothing. I’m working on Charley just about every day in some fashion or another — if not writing up cases, then checking for new ones, etc.
I’ve identified quite a few cases that have got to go.
On his blog my friend Sean has written about Scott Hilbert, a young man who’s been missing for 25 years. Scott, a student at Morehead State University in Kentucky, left a note saying he was going to visit some friend at Ohio State University in Columbus. He never arrived and, bizarrely, his car turned up in ARIZONA three weeks later.
I looked it up, and the wilderness area where Scott’s car was found is a whopping 1,800 miles from his last known location in Cincinnati. That’s the equivalent of driving all the way the heck across Europe from Paris, France to Belarus.
Not counting the cases sitting in my “purge” and “resolve” folders waiting to be removed, as of right this minute the Charley Project has 9,475 cases profiled.
I had hoped to make an even 9,500. The site hasn’t grown much in the last year or so, or even the year before that. I haven’t been updating as often as I once did. First there was the Great Headache Crisis and then there was a kind of change in priorities, trying to catch up on all the life I missed during the GHC.
This first Flashback Friday (see my explanation of it here) is really featuring two people. I selected Pamela Mayfield, but she disappeared with her brother Michael and you can’t talk about one without the other.
Pamela and Michael were both kindergarten students; Pamela was five, and Michael was six and repeating kindergarten. (This shouldn’t necessarily be taken as a sign that he was mentally slow or learning disabled or anything like that; a lot of kids repeat kindergarten. Sometimes their parents even request it.) They disappeared from their hometown of Houston, Texas on January 10, 1985, while walking back home from Betsy Ross Elementary School. They were apparently alone. Very few modern American parents would think of letting five- or six-year-old children walk alone to or from school, especially in the city, but this was a more innocent time.
Eyewitnesses saw the siblings get into a green van with a male driver; this was the last trace of them. It’s a presumed non-family abduction, but the police believe they knew their abductor(s). The children’s relatives all cooperated with the investigation and were ruled out as suspects.
This case seems to have been totally forgotten; there hasn’t been any mention of these two in the media in many years, at least not that I know of. The statistics indicate Michael and Pamela were most likely killed a short time after their abduction. But there’s no hard evidence that they’re dead, and they were just young enough that maybe they’re alive and grew up under other identities, not knowing who they really were.
Michael and Pamela Mayfield would both be in their mid-thirties today, if they are alive. Michael just turned 35 earlier this month and Pamela will be 34 in two weeks.
Lindsey Baum vanished from the town of McCleary, Washington (pop. 1,600 and change) four years ago today. Like so many other missing children, she was last seen walking home from a friend’s house. She was ten years old. Lindsey, if she is still alive, will turn fifteen in a little less than two weeks. The NCMEC just came up with an age-progression for her, which I plan to post next update.
I’ve decided to institute, in addition to Make-a-List Monday, another weekly post on my blog: Flashback Friday. For Flashback Friday, I profile a case that’s older than I am. In other words, the person must have disappeared on or before October 5, 1985. I will alternate weeks, male-female, like I do with my missing person of the week.
Since I always mention my featured MP of the week on my blog on the day I post it, which is Tuesday (in theory anyway…), I guess that actually makes THREE regular weekly posts on this blog.
So stay tuned for Friday and my first flashback. I already have the first two posts selected.
My boyfriend, my father and I went to the local zoo on opening day in April. We both took pics with our camera phones, but his phone is much better than mine — a smart phone — with a much better camera. After some nagging on my part, he finally sent me the photos. I present myself as I really look like from day to day. Most of the other photos I’ve shown to y’all have been posed, and I take my hair down and let it loose, because I think it looks better that way and what’s the point of growing it out like that if you can’t show it off. But I can’t stand it getting in my face, really, and on most occasions I have it pinned up, or at least kept back with a headband. Or both, like that day at the zoo.
Here’s me in the Australian exhibit, having crammed myself into a fake kangaroo pouch designed to fit children no older than early elementary school age. Very uncomfortable.
Here’s me in the petting zoo area, getting my jacket eaten by a goat. The purple thing I’m holding in my other hand is a brush I was brushing the goat with.
And here’s me and the goat again, after I realized Michael was snapping photos. The goat is still eating my jacket. No, in spite of its appearance, it wasn’t pregnant. I asked and the zoo staff said it just had some winter fat.
For the first time in over a month, maybe two months, I got to choose my own missing person of the week. I’ve had a lot of people requesting different cases lately, and I could hardly refuse them. But there are no requests at present.
This week’s featured MP is Dorothy Smith Kelley, a lady in her sixties who disappeared from her house in Texas twenty years ago this month. I don’t have much on her.
Lately NamUs has added a lot of cases of migrants who disappeared crossing the Mexican border. Presumably the desert ate most of them. I’ve read a few articles about the missing migrants and it always inspires all kinds of people in the comments section to make racist remarks and say why are we bothering to look for them when they weren’t even allowed to be here. Well, news flash, people: if these people disappeared on American soil, whether we wanted them there or not, it is our responsibility to find them.
Anyway, I have yet to post a lot of missing migrants on Charley but here are the few border crossers I do have:
Sandra Yaneth Aguilar-Granados
Melvin Eduardo Turcios Cedillo
Miguel Angel Cisneros
Delfina Soledad Esiquio Guzman
Jose Rafael Henriquez-Diaz
Dilver Maldonado Dearcia
Armando Rivera Noriega
Jose Francisco Fuentes Pereira
Julian R. Quinonez
Vicente Rios Quinonez
Claudia Natali Rodriguez
Tomas Rodriguez-Romero
Efren Ramirez Sandoval
Executed Today and written about by me: four murderers in Tennessee, three black and one white.
I ripped the twenty-second clip off of Life of Brian and put it on YouTube myself, after discovering YouTube didn’t have a clip of this already. (And before you start going on about copyright, 25 seconds totally qualifies as “fair use.”) It just seemed so appropriate to the situation. Yes, I know the quality of it isn’t great. I couldn’t figure out how to make it better. It took a long time for me to figure out how to rip the clip; for the first few tries I either got sound but no picture, or picture but no sound.
The Charley Project Blog 