I’ve been informed of this article that went out yesterday: Carlene Sessions Tengelsen‘s mother died on December 21, at the age of 83. This is her obituary, which says Carlene preceded her in death, along with another daughter. Carlene still has two living siblings though.
I wish the NCMEC would make a poster for her. I wish we could find out what happened. It’s been almost 45 years, and Carlene would be sixty years old in the unlikely event that she’s still alive.
You’ll recall my “let’s talk about it” post about the Guthrie family last month: Leslie and her children Julie and Timothy, who’ve been missing for forty years come February. Well, I wanted to draw your attention this comment that was posted today.
Boy, am I excited. I really, really hope this is the real deal. I mean, it’s terrible really to say “I hope it’s a car and I hope it has three bodies inside it” but after forty years this is really the best anyone can hope for.
Here’s a list of others like her, who were abducted by strangers as babies and may very well be still alive out there not knowing who they are. I’m including cases of children 3 and under where non-family abduction is either the only explanation or is more likely than not, and it’s also more likely than not that the abductor(s) intended to either raise the child or give/sell it to someone who would. I’m not counting cases where it could be a non-family abduction but I have virtually no evidence available to say what happened.
*Okay, Mary Moroney’s probably dead now just because of the passage of time, but there’s no reason to believe she didn’t live to adulthood.
Honorable mentions: Tiffani Claudette Wise, 2, and her half-sister Brandi Jondell Summers, 5, who would now be 41 and 45 respectively. It looks like the girls were taken by Brandi’s dad, Roy, but the case is, ah, a bit complicated, not a simple family abduction, and it’s likely they were raised by others. Brandi had cystic fibrosis, a very serious condition that is life-shortening even now and was much less treatable in 1977, and so she may be dead. But I haven’t seen any evidence that either of the children were murdered.
This has been all over the news so chances are you’ve heard it already: one of my oldest family abductions, the 1985 case of ten-month-old Kelly Ann Yates and her big sister, 3-year-old Kimberly Ann Yates, has been solved. The girls, who are of course now adults, turned up alive and well in Texas.
I haven’t removed their casefiles yet; you can still read them for now. This article from the Providence Journal also provides a really good grounding in the case.
And I want to address an issue that has come up time and time again in family abduction cases, particularly cases where the children were taken by their mothers: the assumption so many people make that the abductor must have been “saving” the children from an unfit and/or abusive parent.
Several of the news articles (such as this one) have brought up the fact that, before Elaine Yates took the children and vanished, there was a domestic argument between herself and Russell, and he struck her. However, if you check out my casefiles for the girls, I include the information that, according to Russell, he only kicked his wife in self-defense after she attacked him first and struck him several times.
I’ve had people being like “How do you know that’s really true” and “How do you know that’s the ONLY incident, maybe there was more.”
I don’t know. That’s the thing. But just because I don’t know does not mean I am going to assume, based on a single incident that did not result in charges and that may have been self-defense, that Russell was an abusive husband and father.
What is DEFINITELY true is that Elaine committed a serious crime and put Russell through a lot of pain and grief for the past 30+ years. Elaine’s offense is much worse than Russell’s offense, which was basically simple assault.
Elaine will get a chance to tell her side of the story in time, but until then, I am a bit sickened by how some people people are automatically giving her the benefit of doubt. People don’t generally do this for most other crimes. Someone commented on my Facebook page about this case saying “some people do this [kidnap their own children] for a good reason.” Well, sometimes people who rob banks do it for a good reason — perhaps they have seven children and no food in the kitchen and they’re behind on the mortgage and about to be turned out of house and home into the frozen cold, and they really, really need the money. But nobody makes such remarks in response to news stories about bank robbery.
I cannot speak specifically on the Yates case because I don’t have all the facts. What I can say is this: in most family abduction cases, the abducting parent is not trying to protect the child or give it a better home. Most abducting parents take their children in order to spite the other parent. They hate their ex and want to hurt them in the worst way possible, by taking away the most precious thing in their lives.
Furthermore, parental abduction is child abuse. Most of the victims are lied to, told that the left-behind parent is dead or doesn’t want them anymore. In many cases the children are shifted from pillar to post, forced to live a lie, use false names, etc. Many times they don’t have access to education or health care while they’re missing, aren’t allowed to have friends, aren’t allowed to live a normal childhood.
I hope Kelly and Kimberly Yates prove willing to at least give their father a chance to get to know them again. That’s most important. I think it’s also important, though, that they follow through with prosecuting Elaine. I don’t think people should be allowed to get away with this sort of thing. The fact that it’s been thirty years does not lessen the gravity of what she did.
I’ll cover the recovery of the Yates girls in their own entry, but here’s some other missing persons news:
On March 15, 1982, Carmen Maria Burhans Garcia, her husband Diego Garcia, and Carmen’s nine-year-old daughter Barbara Burhans departed their Los Angeles residence into the unknown.
The family lived in the same house as Carmen’s mother; Carmen’s mother lived in the upstairs apartment, and the others lived downstairs. That morning — which was a Monday, presumably a school day for Barbara — Carmen’s mother came downstairs to see them while they were eating breakfast and noticed her daughter was crying but didn’t ask why. She never saw any of them again. They left that afternoon, leaving everything behind, including their dog.
One month and ten days later, the family’s car turned up in a snowbank 500 feet down a gorge in the San Gabriel Mountains, near Big Pines, California. Google Maps says that by today’s routes, Big Pines is 80-ish miles from the Garcias’ home, about an hour and a half by car. There’s two interesting things worth noting here:
There are a few colorful details here, including a rumor that Carmen, a newly minted Mormon, had gotten involved in a MUCH different religion prior to her disappearance, one involving chicken sacrifice. (Santeria maybe? For what it’s worth, Santeria has Caribbean origins, and Diego was born in Cuba.) Another rumor was that Diego had gotten into criminal activity and the whole family had up and left for Miami.
The whole thing makes me think of the Mary Celeste. It appears that SOMETHING seriously spooked the family that morning, enough to have Carmen crying, enough to keep Barbara from going to school, enough to have them pile into their car and leave everything behind. But what was it? And what happened next?
Let’s talk about it.
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