Woman missing for over half a century is found alive

Lucy Johnson, who disappeared from Surrey, British Columbia all the way back in 1961, has been found alive. The police had thought her husband killed her — he didn’t report her disappearance for four years, which naturally looks suspicious — but it seems she took off on her own and started another family. She is 77 years old and lives up north in the Yukon now. That province borders Alaska, where Lucy was originally from.

Lucy Johnson’s husband died in the nineties, but she has two children and her daughter is still alive; I’m not sure about her son. From the article I can’t tell if they have reunited or not. If I were her children I would be both happy and angry. I don’t have a lot of respect for anybody, man or woman, who walks out on their kids without a word.

This case reminds me very much of Ragna Esther Gavin, another long-term missing and presumed woman who turned out to have simply walked out of her life. Yet another reminder that with the missing, you can never really give up hope.

Status update

Y’all might have noticed that I’ve been updating every day since the 9th, a better record than I’ve had in a long time. This is mostly because I decided to reduce my quota of cases to add from ten down to five per update. Usually by the time I’m getting up to ten cases I’m weary of the whole business and just drag myself through. But with five, I can maintain my enthusiasm and such and zip along. Ten cases two or three times a week versus five cases every day: it evens out in the end.

My computer power port is still broken and I still have not taken it to the shop. I asked a friend of Michael’s who works at a computer place and he said they charged a flat rate of $130 to replace a power port. Best Buy, where I bought the computer, quoted something similar. With a price like that I might as well get a new computer altogether. I have no complaints about this one (besides the power port that is), but it’s a year and a half old and the microphone port is also starting to go, and it was inexpensive to begin with, so it’s probably not even worth $130 now. The computer industry evolves so fast that your brand-new top-of-the-line computer becomes obsolete within like five minutes.

Michael says, if I do get a new computer, I should go with a desktop. This would be less convenient than a laptop, obviously. But I am very clumsy and very hard on appliances, always dropping this or tripping over that, and a laptop is a delicate instrument. A desktop would be sturdier, last longer.

For ages now, people have urged me to set up a thing so people can donate money to the Charley Project. I have refused donations in the past, but lately I’ve been giving the idea some serious thought. I am very poor and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Although my father bought me a five-year contract as a birthday present in 2010, which will cover my monthly hosting fees until October 2015, the Charley Project still costs money to run. There’s subscriptions to various news sources, there’s the cost of the occasional books I read as sources, and there’s the internet service and the computer, which I think qualify as Charley Project expenses because the majority of my computer time is spent working on the site. To say nothing of the time I put into it. It would be nice to at least get Charley to at least pay for itself.

It’s just a thought for now. But don’t be surprised if a Charley Project PayPal account appears sometime soon.

UPDATE: Clarification. No matter what, the Charley Project is not going to become a subscription site and there will always be open access to everyone. The donation thing I’m thinking of is just that, a voluntary donation for people who feel like giving.

Flashback Friday: James Anthony Galloway

For this Flashback Friday I present the case of James Anthony Galloway, who disappeared from the small town of Habit, Kentucky on February 15, 1979. He was 38 years old. He had brown hair and hazel eyes, but the only photo I have of him is of such poor quality it’s hard to tell what he looked like. It looks like he might have some male pattern baldness but I’m not sure. He does have one notable physical characteristic though: one leg is shorter than the other.

Little is known about James Galloway’s disappearance, but there’s pretty strong evidence of foul play: after his disappearance his truck was found abandoned on Winkler-Mount Zion Road and inside was a bloodstained piece of human bone wrapped in a towel. The blood was Galloway’s type, but I don’t know any details about the bone. In 1979, they probably wouldn’t have been able to prove it was his. If it still exists and hasn’t been lost or destroyed in the more than thirty years since, they should be able to test it now. But I don’t know if this has been done.

What happened to James Galloway — and where’s the rest of the body?