Flashback Friday: James Hires

This week’s Flashback Friday case is James William Hires, age 18, who disappeared from Cherry Hill Township, New Jersey on October 17, 1981. It looks like he may have left on his own: he was carrying $1,100 in cash (almost $2,900 in 2015 money, according to the Inflation Calculator), his car was found parked at the Philadelphia Airport, and he was supposedly sighted in San Francisco in 1983. No sign of James since then, though.

I can’t find much on this disappearance. The Whereabouts Still Unknown blog has an entry about James, although it doesn’t really say anything I didn’t know already. If James is still alive, today would be his 53rd birthday.

Fox News article

This is the article I got quoted in: Parents indicted in cold case murder of Hawaiian boy by Malia Zimmerman.

“It was just absolutely horrifying the torture this child was subjected to,” said Meaghan Good, founder and editor of The Charley Project, a website that is tracking 9,500 unsolved murder cases including that of Peter Boy Jr. “I read all 2,000 pages about the case released by the Department of Human Services in 2005, and it very obvious what happened to Peter Boy Jr.”

Happyhappyjoyjoyjoy

Peter Kema‘s parents have been charged with murder. About. Fracking. Time. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is a copy of the indictment which a nice reporter sent to me. The same reporter interviewed me on the phone, asking what I thought of the case and so on.

I told her about my corpus delicti lists and how there were way more convictions than acquittals, theorizing this was because, without a body, the other evidence in the case has to be VERY strong. The reporter asked how Peter’s case lined up with other child abuse  homicides on the Charley Project. I said I knew a lot more about Peter’s case than most other cases due to the DHS releasing his file, but it didn’t seem at all dissimilar to other child abuse homicides in terms of the severity and so on. (Colton Clark‘s foster parents, according to Colton’s brother, shocked the boys’ genitals with a cattle prod.) I did say I found it slightly unusual that Peter appears to have been singled out by his parents for abuse, even though he was his father’s biological son and named after him, and there were stepchildren in the family. (Armchair psychologists: might this suggest that Peter Kema Sr. was working out some self-hatred by abusing the son that shared his name?)

Anyway, articles:

Parents of ‘Peter Boy’ Kema charged with murder
‘Peter Boy’ Kema’s parents indicted, 19 years after his death
“Peter Boy” Kema’s parents indicted on murder charges
Murder Charges Filed Against Parents of ‘Peter Boy’ Kema
After 19 Years, Parents Of Vanished Peter Boy Kema Charged With Murder
Parents in custody for death of ‘Peter Boy’