Seeing Ida Mae Lee living…maybe

I’ve decided to add a bunch of super-old cases to Charley today, beginning with Ida Mae Lee, who disappeared in 1956. She was working at a hotel at Grand Canyon National Park at the time.

Anyway, I went to Newspapers.com and searched for the phrase “Ida Mae Lee” Arizona and found some interesting results:

The Arizona Republic, December 1, 1953:

(There were several other mentions of Ida Mae Lee attending Arizona State; an October 1953 article says she lived in Nutrioso, which has a current population of 26. There’s also articles from January and March name Ida Mae Lee among the honor roll students at Round Valley High School, which is in Eager, Arizona, a 21-minute drive from Nutrioso. And in 1952, Ida Mae Lee and some of her fellow Round Valley HS students staged a fashion show.)

And then there’s this, from the Arizona Republic, September 21, 1955:

I’m pretty sure the Ida Mae Lee who married Mr. Jones is the same one that attended Round Valley High School and Arizona State; note the reference to Nutrioso in the marriage announcement. And I think that photo looks an awful lot like NamUs’s picture of the Ida Mae Lee who vanished in 1956 — though I’m not prepared to swear to that, I am not good at all at identifying faces.

So, the 64k question then, assuming all these Ida Lees are in fact the same person: what happened to Mr. Jones during the 14 months before Ida vanished? The fact that she’s listed as missing under her maiden name suggests they were separated or divorced by then.

I did find this obit for a Niles Lee Jones who died in Mesa, Arizona in 2011, age 76. No mention of any survivors, but a search of addresses for Mr. Jones mentions Nutrioso, Arizona as well as other cities.

 

Little updates continue apace

New pics:

1. Donna Marie Barron
2. Robert Richard Lepsy
3. Alicia Bernice Markovich

APs:

1. Crystal Lynn Ortega
2. Misty Dawn Ortega

Flashback Friday: Robert Lepsy

This week’s Flashback Friday case is Robert Richard “Dick” Lepsy, who disappeared from the small town of Grayling in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula on October 29, 1969. He worked at a supermarket, left on his lunch break and never came back. He had four kids.

An interesting thing about Lepsy’s case, left off his Charley Project page: there’s a theory that he was actually D.B. Cooper, who in 1971 hijacked a plane flying between Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington, ransomed the passengers for $200k (the equivalent over over a million dollars in modern money), parachuted his way to freedom and vanished without a trace. Author Ross Richardson has put forth this theory in his book Still Missing: Rethinking the D.B. Cooper Case and other Mysterious Unsolved Disappearances, which costs $14.99 in dead tree edition, or $4.99 on Kindle, or $0.00 if you have Kindle Unlimited. I suppose I ought to read it.

It’s hard for me to compare pictures, but I suppose if Lepsy lost a lot of weight he would resemble the D.B. Cooper sketch. I don’t feel like I ought to cover the whole skyjacker theory on his casefile until I’ve familiarized myself with it, which I haven’t, yet.

On the other hand, the articles about this have turned up several more pics of Lepsy which I do plan to add forthwith.

Much muttergrumbling

So I was going through Charley’s runaway cases today, making another Make-a-List Monday for them (coming next week!) and purging cases at the same time, and I came across a certain missing girl. She was still on the NCMEC database but she’d been missing an awfully long time, so I decided to run her name through Google and see what came up. A lot of times when a runaway’s been missing for years and years like she was, they write an article about it.

I didn’t find anything about her disappearance, but lo! Someone with the right age, the right first, middle and last name (except for a spelling difference of one letter) and a striking resemblance to the runaway girl got arrested for credit card fraud just a few months ago! This was in a small town a five-hour drive from the major city where she disappeared.

I immediately called up the NCMEC. And they were like, “Um…thank you, but she’s, erm, not missing. She got recovered.”

And I was like, “So why is she still listed as missing on your website?”

So I told them about how you can find her listed on missingkids.com, and they had me read her case number off the poster, and promised to “pass it on” to the appropriate people.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, either.

[EDIT: Wow, that was quick. I just got a recovery notice for her.]

Jeffrey Walkenford maybe also found

Jeffrey Scott Walkenford, aged 41, disappeared from Juneau, Alaska on May 15, 2010. Per this Alaska Dispatch News article, they’ve probably found him. Or, at least, they found human remains with some of Walkenford’s things nearby, including his clothes and his cell phone with selfies of Walkenford in it.

However…

“The human remains have not been positively identified as being Walkenford. Positive identification is estimated to take approximately 6 months,” [Juneau Police Department] said in a Wednesday release.

The police department sent the remains to the State Medical Examiner’s Office in Anchorage for analysis, but identification requires DNA testing outside of Alaska.

I’m not sure whether to pull him yet or not, then. I probably should. I mean, what are the chances that some guy who was dressed like Walkenford would die next to a pile of Walkenford’s stuff and NOT be Walkenford?

Cynthia Day identified

I’ve still got her on Charley but not for much longer: Cynthia Louise Day, a 37-year-old mother of two who disappeared from National City, Illinois on August 10, 1990, has finally been identified.

Her remains were actually recovered in Pike County, Missouri (about an hour and a half away from National City), just sixteen days after she disappeared. Due to some error, an official missing persons report wasn’t filed for Cynthia for 14 years, which certainly didn’t help when it came to finding her.

All that was left of Cynthia was “a box of bones”, they were able to get one usable fingerprint and that was enough. It’s a good thing they were able to get that print, because lab technicians had BOILED the bones and that ruined chance of recovering DNA evidence. Apparently this boiling thing was common practice before DNA technology came onto the scene.

(Reading about that kind of thing reminds me of a historical TV medical drama I saw once, set in 1905, where the hospital was showing off their brand new X-ray machine, the latest thing in medical technology. The TV characters were like, “You have to hold your hand in front of the machine for about ninety seconds, and then you can see all the bones inside it. Isn’t it neat? Want to try it again?” And I was wincing and thinking “Nooooo! Don’t do it!” By the end of the show, the X-ray technician had died of radiation poisoning.)

Anyway… now begins the murder investigation. Cynthia was allegedly involved with prostitution and drugs, and she had a rocky relationship with her boyfriend, who disappeared shortly after she did and later ended up in prison. That’s a lot to be getting on with.

But at least Cynthia’s daughters can bury her.

A semi-tangent: Boys Town

As I’ve mentioned before, I am on an NCMEC mailing list where they email me every time they issue a new poster or take an existing poster down. (Though that list isn’t perfect; a lot of notices don’t seem to reach me.) I was going through the 25 or so NCMEC emails today when I noticed Boys Town, Nebraska yet again.

Given that Boys Town has a population of 745, people seem to go missing from there an awful lot. In fact, if you search for “Boys Town” on the “missing from” line on the NCMEC’s search page, as of this writing, FOUR kids are missing from there. One Hispanic boy, one Native American boy and two black girls. One has been missing since last October, almost a year.

I can only conclude that they were residents of Boys Town, the residential treatment center for troubled youth whom the actual village of Boys Town was named after. It’s kind of a famous place and I think they made a movie about it or something. According to its history, It was founded in the nineteen-teens by a priest named Father Flanaghan who got the idea that if he removed people from the blighted inner cities to a remote country location, they might do better in life. Those were super-racist, xenophobic times, but Father Flanaghan welcomed all boys regardless of race or religion.

Boys Town now accepts girls as well, obviously. In fact, I thought they had changed their name to “Boys and Girls Town” but maybe I was wrong or maybe they changed it back or something. I know Daisy Coleman, of “Maryville Rape Case” fame, spent 90 days at the facility while trying to recover from the gang rape and ensuing fallout. (By the way, for those who are interested, I found an article from a few months ago about Daisy and she’s doing much better now. She’s in college studying art and plans to become a tattoo artist; she’s already landed herself an apprenticeship.)

And unlike the other children’s homes I’ve written about, I haven’t heard anything horrible about Boys Town.

I just hope those four missing kids turn up soon. I bet they will; of all the Boys Town disappearances I’ve seen per the NCMEC, none of them have ever stayed missing long enough to get posted on the Charley Project.