Let’s talk about it: Juanita Oxenrider

Charley Project Irregular Katherine B. suggested I do a “let’s talk” feature where I post some of the most bizarre Charley Project cases there are to offer, and let people have free rein speculating about them in the comments. I don’t think I have enough super-bizarre cases to make a regular weekly go of this, but here’s the first one anyway:

Juanita Marie Oxenrider, a pregnant 29-year-old who disappeared after she, her husband Donald, and a friend, Thomas Maynard, took a ride out on the Oxenriders’ boat on the Patapsco River in central Maryland in 1976. The boat mysteriously exploded and sank in broad daylight in only fifteen feet of water, but no bodies were immediately recoverable.

Six months later, in the river about a mile downstream from where the boat sank, Donald Oxenrider’s body turned up. They were too severely decomposed to determine the cause of death. In an even more crazy detail of this case, the other passenger, Thomas Maynard, turned up a decade after that, alive and well — the guy was facing serious criminal charges at the time of his disappearance, and he’d jumped the country and had been in Canada all that time.

But what happened to Juanita? You decide. It’s worth noting that she has been declared legally dead. But if she’s still alive she’d be about 69 today, and her baby would be 41 39.

Let’s hear it from the comment crowd. All theories are welcomed.

I wanted to thank everyone

I just wanted to put up a special post thanking everyone who has come to my support about a certain troll who, since early this year, has criticized and attacked everything I do, both in terms of my missing persons work and my personal life. This person has literally never had a single nice thing to say about what I do or who I am.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t completely ignore his comments and usually did respond in some form, it’s because I like to give people a chance to rethink what they did and maybe change their opinions or at least they way they say things. I try to tell myself that a lot of people aren’t stupid, they’re just ignorant. An ignorant person might be willing to learn what the facts are. Stupid people just don’t care.

Sometimes it works. Once, a Twitter troll was saying nasty things on my personal twitter account. I had a photo of myself posted on there and the troll was like “your skin looks all nasty and filthy, you need to moisturize and when was the last time you had a bath, you’ve got dirt all around our mouth and on your forehead.” And I explained about my melasma and how the “dirt” he saw was actually the product of an incurable skin condition. And the Twitter troll was mortified and deeply apologetic.

But the whole “engaging the troll” thing obviously hasn’t worked with here, so I blocked him today. (I say “him” out of convenience, by the way; this troll might be female.) Assuming the blocking thing actually works — I don’t know, cause I’ve never blocked anyone on here before since I started this blog almost ten years ago — all future comments from him will go straight into Spam without me having to even look at them. And if it doesn’t work and this person keeps sending in comments, I’m just not going to approve them. And if WordPress posts them automatically without going through the referral thing, I’m going to delete them as soon as I find out. I’ve just had enough.

But what I really meant to say was… you guys have no idea how much it means to me when you stand up for me like that. I’ve been online long enough to recognize trolls when I see them, and weigh their statements appropriately (that is, 0.0), but it’s nice to know other people have got your back. Thank you.