A third set of disappearances from an institution

In 2009 I wrote about the now-defunct CEDU school, which has three of its students disappear and end up Charley: 17-year-old John Christopher Inman in 1993, 14-year-old Blake Wade Pursley in 1994 and then Daniel Ted Yuen in 2004.

There’s also the New Lisbon State School, now called the New Lisbon Developmental Center, which I also blogged about in 2009. It also has three residents missing: 17-year-old Steven Eugene Anderson and 12-year-old David Edward Williams vanished from there in 1975, and in 1982 Kenneth Arthur Schweighart wandered off campus and was never seen again.

Now, as I’m wrapping up the Virginia State Police page’s cases, I find a third such institution with multiple disappearances: the Hairston Home for Adults, a retirement/nursing home in Martinsville, Virginia. VSP now has Howard Kenneth Woolwine, a 73-year-old missing since 1998, on their page. Whilst researching Mr. Woolwine I found a 2014 article (which, unfortunately, I can’t link to) that says Earnest Thomas Mitchell, 61, disappeared from the same facility in 2004 and was never found. Mitchell is not listed on VSP or NamUs or anywhere else for that matter, but he’s probably still missing — if he was still missing in 2014 but had turned up since then, I think I would have found something that said so.

I should emphasize that (with the exception of Blake Pursley) there’s no indication that ANY of the people I’ve named in this entry met with foul play. They just all fall into a particular rare category, that’s all.

I did all the updates for September 3 and 4 on September 3, and posted 4’s updates right after midnight tonight, and almost immediately got to work on September 5. Howard Woolwine, and the last of the Virginia cases, will go up September 5.

(I’m going to have see about that photo though. Does this look like a 73-year-old white man to you? It’s tiny and poor quality, but that looks like a young man to me — possibly white, but equally possibly Hispanic or a light-skinned African-American. VSP has matched the wrong photos to their MPs before, as you may well remember.)

And if you wonder what’s going on with that… I’m manic. I’m flying at the moment, dazzled, on fire. I’m higher than a kite right now. Which is great for you. Not so much for me.