This week’s featured missing person is Richard Victor Clark II, one of the few cases I have never updated in the nearly twelve-year history of the Charley Project. Clark was 21 years old when he disappeared from the central Texas city of Temple on August 7, 1992. If he’s still alive he’d be 45.
I doubt he’s still alive, though. I don’t have much on his disappearance but it really doesn’t look good.
This is a list — or series of lists, more like — of cases where I’ve got more than one person on Charley with that first and last name. In a few cases the MPs were related to each other, but usually not.
I might have missed a few. This is kind of hard to search for unless you know where to go. I just found this list of common U.S. surnames and checked the first 50, and also added a few others from memory.
Two people — named Andi and Andy, oddly enough — have asked me to do Brian Neil Hooks for Select It Sunday. The 21-year-old has been missing from Florence, South Carolina since September 24, 1988 — nearly 28 years ago. He may go by his middle name.
Andi thinks Brian may be a John Doe whose skeletal remains were found in in St. Louis, Missouri in 1992. The decedent, who is estimated to have died sometime between 1989 and 1992, had been stabbed to death. About that suggestion, I have no comment. Matching MPs with UIDs has never been my thing.
Someone, a relative I think, set up a Facebook page for Brian. The most recent post as of this writing, dated June 24, would resonate with anyone who has a missing loved one:
I would do anything to talk and hug you one last time! You cross my mind more than I see your face, I pray for you more than you may hear my voice, I miss you more than you think and I love you more than you know sometimes you just have to be strong ..to keep yourself from breaking You will never know how much you miss hearing a voice until that voice is silenced forever…the worst thing in this world is not knowing where you are we miss you an love you so much the pain of you not being here is unreal at times it’s been to long for us not to know what happen to you […] The worst goodbyes are the ones that are never said, And never explained…
Brian was either gay or bisexual, and had a boyfriend at the time of his disappearance. The boyfriend claims he simply “ran off” without saying where he was going, and never came back. That’s a story I’ve heard many times before. Another source I found claims Brian’s boyfriend gave three different stories to explain Brian’s disappearance, and also says the man had been convicted of murder.
That certainly doesn’t look good. Almost 30 years of complete silence looks even worse.
The Virginia State Police has put up a TON of MP cases I haven’t seen/heard of before. I added seven today and I’m nowhere near done. Except the next few updates to be Virginia-dominated. For some existing cases, I got extra photos from the VSP. Oh, and the NCMEC has sent a few APs as well. The lists:
NEW PHOTOS
AP PHOTOS
Apropos of nothing, I thought I’d talk about a tricky issue I often have to deal with in writing up casefiles to put on Charley.
A lot of the MPs on the Charley Project met their end through domestic violence — either child abuse or intimate partner abuse. Of course the abuser is not going to admit to murder, so he (I’m using the male gender pronoun merely for convenience) will say his partner simply left him, or his child ran away or was abducted.
And then as the investigation progresses, the police will poke holes in the abuser’s story. Sometimes the cops will talk to the media about the inconsistencies and evasions and so on, and announce that the abuser is the prime suspect in the disappearance. But not always. Sometimes the police say nothing at all.
A few months ago I saw a Facebook post about a certain missing child. The child’s parents say he simply disappeared during the night; the police think otherwise and believe his parents murdered him. The Facebook post said my casefile for this boy was “full of lies” and they put up a screenshot of the casefile with the word “LIES” in big red letters across it.
I went back to that casefile and had a look, trying to figure out what the Facebook person was talking about, and I realized they were upset because I put the parents’ version of the disappearance on there. And then — this is the important part — I said that basically everything I’d just written probably did not happen and here’s what the police think REALLY happened, and summed up the evidence against the parents and so on.
That’s what I usually do in cases like that: I sum up the suspect’s version of what happened, followed by what the police believe happened. So it’s two different stories I’m telling. I feel like I have to include both in order to give the complete picture. So yes, in a way, that boy’s casefile was “full of lies”, lies his parents told. But I made it clear that those particular statements lacked credibility.
I’m doing the best I can with what I have to work with, and I think the whole “telling two stories” is a good policy. But the problem arises when the police have said little or nothing about a case.
Awhile back I got an email from an MP’s sister. She said she wanted me to change some things in the MP’s profile because her boyfriend, the last person known to have seen her, was the prime suspect in her disappearance and the cops didn’t believe she had ever been to the store that day like the boyfriend said.
The problem, though, was that I have nothing to back that up. The police have never gone public saying the boyfriend’s story is a lie and he might have murdered the MP. I could find not a single database entry or news article that said that. And if I can’t get an on-the-record source, I have to leave things as they are, with only the boyfriend’s story given, because that’s the only account that’s out there right now.
Much as I would have liked to, I knew it would be a bad idea to change the MP’s casefile in that way just because a non law enforcement source emailed me and told me to do it. If my source was lying or mistaken, publishing such info could get me in a lot of trouble. Even if it was accurate information, the police were probably keeping quiet about it for a reason and I wouldn’t want to hinder the investigation.
So there you go.
This week’s FF case is Grace Loretta Zoeller, who disappeared from Phoenix sometime in August 1960 — not sure when. In fact I’m not even 100% sure it was August; NamUs says she went missing “around August.” Sigh.
There are two photos, one of which seems to be a wedding picture. And a notation that Grace left behind nine children — NINE! At 29 years old!
Given that they have the approximate address where Grace was last seen, I don’t know why they’re unsure as to the date. Beyond that I’ve got doodly squat.
If she’s still alive Grace would be nearly ninety years old now. I don’t have enough information to speculate whether she met with foul play, or merely walked away.
I updated Winifred Long‘s case today with info I snagged from a newspaper archive. The new information is pretty significant, I think.
The only obvious theory that presents itself here is that her husband killed her. I’m not saying that because I believe it — I believe nothing. I only think it would just be the simplest explanation.
Yet there is a problem with that: Mr. Long (his first name was Alvin, btw) was a war veteran and lost both of his legs to a grenade blast. His arms and hands worked just fine, well enough for him to make a living as a carpenter, so he could still have killed his wife. But I don’t think it would have been possible for him to dispose of the body so thoroughly without help.
And who knows, it could very well have NOT been him at all. Over a million couples get divorced per year; very few of those divorces result in murder. Perhaps Winifred met a random predator at the bus stop; perhaps he offered her a ride home in his car and that’s why she didn’t buy a ticket.
What I would REALLY like to know is this: did the police test-drive Winifred’s car? And if they did, did the car in fact have a faulty transmission?
This week’s featured missing person is Heather Marie Riggio, a 20-year-old woman missing from North Miami Beach, Florida since May 6, 2007 — nine years.
Heather had a troubled life prior to her disappearance; she was seeing a married man and she was involved with drugs, prostitution, and, far more disturbingly, human trafficking. I don’t know whether that means she herself had been trafficked (that, forced into prostitution) or whether she merely associated with known traffickers, or even whether she actually was implicated in trafficking cases. In any case, not good. She has a criminal charge pending against her for felony drug possession.
I doubt this young woman is still alive. It seems like she would have resurfaced, or at least called home, if she could have.
Red hair, says Wikipedia, occurs naturally in only one to two percent of the human population. I thought I’d do a list of the redheads on Charley.
This is a relatively long list. And…predominantly female. If I were to guess why that is, I’d say that probably a lot of them dyed their hair. Women color their hair more frequently than men. I excluded from the list people whom I knew for a fact had dyed their hair red, but I’m sure there are a lot of cases where I just don’t have that information. I also excluded people with ambiguously red hair — i.e. “blond/red” or “brown/red” etc.
When I’m writing up a casefile, in terms of hair and eyes, I will go by whatever colors my source says they are regardless of what the photo looks like. If my source doesn’t have that information, but I have a color photo, I will hazard a guess from the photograph as to hair color, but not to eye color unless it’s a super close up picture. With Asians and African-Americans, absent evidence to the contrary, I assume their hair is black and their eyes, brown.
(Question: suppose a person dyes their hair some other natural hair color, and they disappear before any roots start showing, and then their body turns up — short of DNA testing, is there any way for the medical examiner or whomever to tell their hair was dyed?)
Sheldon Boyd has a new picture, as does Nicole Evelyn Silvers, and Shaliegh Sharrie Phillips has an updated AP, and Jesse Yancey‘s date of disappearance has been corrected; it had said May 31 but NamUs says it was actually May 28. I’ve also corrected his race; I had said he was white but NamUs says he’s Native American.
Now…is it just me or does Nicole Silvers’s disappearance look kind of suspicious? She was sixteen and the police claimed she was an emancipated minor. To quote this legal site:
A minor who is “emancipated” assumes most adult responsibilities before reaching the age of majority (usually 18). Emancipated minors are no longer considered to be under the care and control of parents — instead, they take responsibility for their own care… If a young person under the age of majority is emancipated, the parent or guardian no longer has any say over the minor’s life. An emancipated minor can keep earnings from a job, decide where to live, make his or her own medical decisions, and more.
In other words, if she was emancipated, Nicole did not need to run away.
There’s a bit of a rub, though — I saw a post on Websleuths from someone who said “According to her parents, Nicole was NOT emancipated.”
I don’t know what means — if she wasn’t emancipated why would the police claim she was? Was she in the process of getting emancipated? Or was it just a completely incorrect statement from the cops/media? I don’t know and I wish someone who does could get in touch with me. I haven’t said anything in Nicole’s profile about the disputed info because “info shared by police to the media” trumps “second-hand statement posted on Websleuths” in my mind.
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