Oooooh, this is frustrating…

I’ve spent much of today combing through Newspapers.com looking up stuff on specific old MP cases when I came across a column in the March 27, 1983 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, written by someone named Elinor Klein. It was about how her brother disappeared when he was 17 years old, and the devastation it caused in her family.

I’m pretty sure I have never heard of this case. But I’m not 100% sure because Elinor Klein never said what his name was, or the town he disappeared from. Just that he was 17, a freshman at an unspecified, possibly Ivy League college, and that he was born on February 22, 1937 and disappeared on November 8, 1954. She even includes his picture with the column. But not his name!

I checked NamUs; there’s only two 1954 disappearances in there, and both are of females. I would love to be able to put this young man on Charley if I can. If he was still missing in 1983 — nearly thirty years after he was last seen — he’s probably still missing now.

I looked up more information about Elinor Klein hoping that would lead me to her brother’s identity. Turns out Elinor was still alive as of 2008 and her maiden name was Friedman. I also learned she had a son named Willy at age 40; the St. Louis Post-Dispatch column says, “When my child was born a few years ago… I named my son after my brother and my father.”

Still not enough to go on. Darn it.

See the below images screenshot from Newspapers.com’s PDFs, the column about the missing boy (Willy Friedman?):

On the bright side, Ms. Klein’s column did yield at least one nugget of information that’s of use to me: there were pictures of random missing children scattered across the bottoms of the first two pages, including one of Holly Hughes that’d I’d never seen before. It even shows her teeth! I added it.

Another AP dump

1. Douglas Charles Chapman
2. Allyson Corrales
3. Amber Nicole Crum
4. Carlos Alberto Reyes
5. Sarah Rachel Tokier
6. Jacqueline Vasquez

Also, Norma Houghland has a new picture, courtesy of Peter Henderson’s Facebook page.

[EDIT: And the number of photos of Lucero Sarabia has doubled from six to twelve, thanks to this recent TV bit on her and this Facebook page set up in her memory. Seven years ago I blogged about Lucero. Not about her case exactly but about the awful judgy things people said about her, about how she had DARED to go to a party to celebrate Thanksgiving and SHE DYED HER HAIR OMG I MUST CLUTCH MY PEARLS and so on.]

I had hoped to add some new cases today, but I’ve only been working five hours and my upper back is starting to go. I do, however, have a fine set of updated cases warming in the oven.

Select It Sunday: LaMoine Allen and Kreneice Jones

Way back in the day in July 2014, commenter “Purple Prowler Book Reviews” suggested I run LaMoine Jordan Allen or Kreneice Marie Jones for Select It Sunday. These two toddlers disappeared together on May 10, 1992 from outside Woodville, a little southwestern Mississippi town near the Louisiana border.

Both LaMoine and Kreneice’s respective families actually lived over the border in Edgard, but that day they made the approximately two-hour trip to Woodville to attend a Mother’s Day church service. The kids — LaMoine was two and Kreneice, three — vanished together while playing outside a store after the event was over. It appears they were abducted.

Frustratingly, I can find VERY little about this even after combing through paid news archives. And there are contradictions in what I do have — as of this writing the Charley Project says the kids’ families were friends, but many reports have it that LaMoine and Kreneice were, in fact, cousins. Of course, those things are by no means mutually exclusive, and probably not a factor in their actual disappearances, but it would be nice to know whether there was in fact a blood relationship or not.

This is a case that might have been solved much earlier had the Amber Alert existed in 1992. I just wish I knew more about it. I will keep digging.

Heard from the cops about Kenneth Welch

I got an email from a detective with the Flagstaff, AZ police department asking me where I got my photo of Kenneth Lawrence Welch, since the Flagstaff police had none available. Welch’s case has never been updated and may have been created by Jennifer Marra back in the MPCCN days.

I was able to tell him where I got the photo — the CDOJ — and now I’m going to have to correct Mr. Welch’s casefile, because Flagstaff says the date of disappearance was April 3, 1980, not April 5, 1990. Whoops.

I’m feeling a lot better. When I took Dad back to his apartment yesterday, we had dinner (my first meal since Monday!) and he gave me a sack of apples to take home with me.