Make-A-List Monday: MPs who disappeared before they were to testify in court

This list was created by regular Charley Project blog commenter Mion. Mion notes, “Of those who disappeared, 54% were male and 46% were female. 75% (21) were white, 17% (5) were black, 4% (1) were Hispanic and 4% (1) were of two or more races. Most of the defendants they were to testify against were charged with drug offenses, or were being sued for financial reasons.”

Woodrow Judge Allen
Calvin Michael Anderson
Louis Balas
Henry Louis Baltimore Jr.
David Barlow
Sandra Denise Barrington
Ramona Lisa Beal
Kelsey Emily Collins
Joshua Scott Curry
Linda Sue Davis
Anthony Vivien Fox
Kevin R. Harkins
Glenn Richard Hustin Jr.
Gailon Leak
Michael D. Mansfield
Ruth L. Martin
Oliver Wendell Munson
Rachel Geraldine Pratt
Sheryl Lynn Rucci
Angelica Esperanza Sandoval
Daniel Sites
Melissa Maureen Sloan
Brenda Starr Snouffer
Lutricia Steele
Thomas Gene Trotter
Angie Denise Tucker
April Susanne Wiss

There’s an honorable mention as well:
Cindy Marie Lesko: “Although she wasn’t officially scheduled to testify against her husband, she was recently given the ability to do so.”

Okay, I had better not update right now

Even though I’m awake and feel like updating, I think I had better not. I am making a LOT of typos and wrong words and so on at the moment and keep having to go back and correct them. I think any casefiles I try to write will turn out a wreck. It reminds me of the time when I was taking valium and it turned me into a semi-literate imbecile. (Which, by the way, I initially wrote as “imbelice.” See what I mean?) Oh well, I guess I’ll have to web-surf or read books instead.

Not sure when I’ll have time to update later on. This weekend is my boyfriend’s bi-annual family reunion and I’m going. It’s a huge affair, with people flying in from as far as Guam to attend.

One of the changes I need to make, when I do update, is that they found Nancy Daniel, a fourteen-year-old I just added to Charley two weeks ago. Or, rather, they found her six months after her 1976 disappearance but didn’t identify her until now. And in the same city! Inexcusable.

Flashback Friday: Maurice Kneifl

This week’s Flashback Friday case is Maurice P. Kneifl (and no, I have no idea how to pronounced his surname). Mr. Kneifl vanished from Sioux City, Iowa in 1983, at the age of 58. If still alive, he’ll be ninety in August. But I don’t think he’s still alive.

The police think Kneifl was the victim of a homicide, but they haven’t released any information on a possible motive and I can’t find one from the information I have. He appears to have been a well-liked gentleman, a pillar of his community even. He operated his own business. He used to live in the town of Hartington, Nebraska, an hour away from Sioux City, and got elected mayor there.

So what happened? We may never know. Given as it’s been thirty years, perhaps whoever did it, or whoever knows who did it, has passed on.

This is just to say

I thought awhile about whether I should post this, and concluded, why not?

I found out that Rollo is out of prison but not free. He’s locked up in maximum security immigration detention and actually may be worse off there than he was in prison, since his prison was medium security. I had to get some help from one of you, and make a lot of phone calls to various officials, to find out this information. Finally I found a guy who knew whom I was talking about before I even told him Rollo’s name. I could positively feel the man’s visceral disgust when he spoke about this particular detainee.

He’ll have a deportation hearing, of course, just a formality since you know they’re going to send him back to Sudan anyway (preferably by catapult), but I’d like to find out the details of that so I can maybe write a letter to the judge and have it entered into the official record what Rollo did to me. Might be cathartic.

Finding out the information I need — date, judge etc. — has turned out to be harder than I thought. Everybody wants Rollo’s A-number (short for alien number). And the A-number is kind of classified; no one is supposed to know it except the government and Rollo himself and anyone whom he chooses to tell. And obviously he’s not going to tell me.

(It annoys me that he’s still here. And it annoys me that he actually came to this country legally; he got some kind of visa. For a person from Sudan to get a visa to the United States must be akin to winning the lottery. And look what he did with it. They could have given that precious visa to someone else who would have worked hard and become a good American and not gone around raping people. But that’s a rant for another time, I suppose.)

My latest Executed Today entry

A particularly sad case: Jan Creoli, executed in 1646 for sodomy. I say “sad” because his child victim was also punished, though not so harshly.

Almost forgot to do my MP of the week

It’s 11:30 and I just uploaded my missing person of the week. This week it’s Rachel Hanna Ziselman, an eleven-year-old who disappeared from California in 1977. It looks like she was abducted, but I don’t have that much information about her case.

A list of kidnapping memoirs

For your edification, here’s a list of all the memoirs I can find that were written by victims of kidnapping. A lot of them are “by [kidnap victim] with [ghostwriter]” but I decided that counted. I also decided to include books by people whose kidnappings wouldn’t have wound up on Charley — like victims of terrorists.

The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival by Stanley M. Alpert
Buried Memories: Katie Beers’ Story by Katie Beers
Anatomy of a Kidnapping: A Doctor’s Story by Steven L. Berk
Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle by Ingrid Betancourt
Price of Life by Nigel Brennan
I Choose to Live by Sabine Dardenne
A Stolen Life: A Memoir by Jaycee Dugard
Memoir of a Milk Carton Kid by Tanya Nicole Kach
Kidnapped: A Diary of My 373 Days in Captivity by Leszli Kalli
3,096 Days in Captivity: The True Story of My Abduction, Eight Years of Enslavement, and Escape by Natascha Kampusch
Finding Me: A Decade of Darkness, a Life Reclaimed: A Memoir of the Cleveland Kidnappings by Michelle Knight
Abducted by Charlene Lunnon and Lisa Hoodless
Scarred: A Memoir by George Mohlo
Kidnapped In Yemen: One Woman’s Amazing Escape from Terrorist Captivity by Mary Quin
Shattered: Reclaiming a Life Torn Apart by Violence by Debra Puglisi Sharp
My Story by Elizabeth Smart
Deliver Us From Evil: The True Story of Mexico’s Most Famous Kidnapping by Ernestina Sodi

Of these, I’ve only read Michelle Knight’s and Sabine Dardenne’s books. Someone mailed me a copy of the Jaycee Dugard book yonks ago, but it’s still sitting on my shelf unread because I am a lazy, ungrateful person.

Read Michelle Knight book

I haven’t updated in the last few days, partly because Michael and I have both been sick (throat infection, taking antibiotics) and partly because I had to read the book about Susan Powell and also Michelle Knight’s memoir by today because I had to give them back to the library. Well, I managed to finish both in time and will thus avoid the fine.

Michelle’s memoir is called Finding Me: A Decade of Darkness, a Life Reclaimed: A Memoir of the Cleveland Kidnappings. It says “by Michelle Knight with Michelle Burford” but I’m pretty sure Burford (described on her website as a “ghostwriter and story surgeon”) was the true author.

Not that it much matters: the more important thing is the quality of the book itself and that, I’m happy to say, is spot-on. I finished this story much more quickly than I did the Susan Powell book, moving at a fast clip (and not just because I was on a deadline). The story covers Michelle Knight’s sad childhood and adolescence in detail but without taking up too much page space, since the book is supposed to be about her ordeal with Ariel Castro. The descriptions of what she went through after the kidnapping were vivid and harrowing, but no more so than they needed to be.

In conclusion, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in MPs. Even those who are not involved in the missing persons world, or even big true crime fans, would enjoy it.

Update on my computer

Computer Guru Jamie has put together a quote for how much my snazzy new desktop will cost: $940.53. Which is just peachy with me. Click on the image for details.

Make-A-List Monday: Mothers of Many Children

I come from a large family. My mother had seven children altogether (five boys, two girls) and would have had more if she could have. I’m the youngest and I’m pretty sure I won’t have kids of my own, for health reasons mainly. Of the six above me, one has died, one has yet to reproduce and the other four have got ten offspring between them.

I thought I’d make a list of missing women who had five or more children. This list is certainly incomplete, because a lot of times I just don’t know how many kids a woman has. But I’m giving it my best shot.

Five children:
Cynthia Linda Alonzo
Doris Ann Brown
Josephine Carroll Chatraw
Dymashal Lashon Cullins
Barbara Jean Dreher
Angelina Joy Evans
Marion Fye
Marion Gonangnan
Cheryl Laverne Grose
Heather Elaine Klett
Linda Evans Lunsford
Shelly Renee Markley
Mary Jean McLaughlin
Marcie Tokeysha Peterson
Kelli Renee Rice
Bertha Beatrice Smith
Shirley Elizabeth Stevens
Vernette Lorraine Wester
Misti Michelle Whitfield

Six children:
Christie Marie Cales
Regina Marie Garcia
Angela Marie Gilbert
Frances Blanche Groves
Geanna M. Jones
Brigitte Renee Mitchell
Maria De Lourdes Pahl
Juanita Ritchie
Ollie Lee Roberts
Mae Catherine Rocker

Seven children:
Ann Lombard
Jacqueline G. Simpson
Georgia Ann Clock Smith

Eight children:
Jeanette DuPriest

Ten children:
Geneva Verneal Adams
Bertha Marie Tidd Newell
Verna Marie Richardson

Eleven children:
Roxanne Lacson