I think I might have set a record for “smallest part of a person recovered”

I found out the other day that they discovered an itty bitty piece of Richard William Moss‘s body: a single vertebra (one of the sections of your spine) not far from where his car turned up a little over a year ago.

I think this is the smallest partial remains recovered where I resolved a case. I have a case up where they found a woman’s finger, but you can easily live without that.

Frankly I’m surprised they found even that much of Moss. He accidentally ran his car off a cliff in coastal California known as the Devil’s Slide in May 2017, but the accident wasn’t witnessed and no one realized what had happened until July. The rest of him has presumably been claimed by the ocean.

Moss isn’t the only person on Charley who met his end at the Devil’s Slide. In 1945, a 14-year-old girl named Thora Chamberlain was murdered and thrown off there. They never found her body, only her socks, wedged in the cliff face. Her murderer was identified, confessed and was executed.

Technical problems, please stand by

So M and I are having a bit of an internet issue at the moment. We are behind on our bill due to a car repair, but they promised not to suspend our account if we promised to pay in full on the fifth.

Instead something weird is happening: I can access some sites but not others, and I can access pages on my cell phone that I can’t access on Orville. Like, I can go to Google and Facebook on my PC, but a visit to Papajohns.com prompts a referral to my internet provider telling me to pay the bill. But I can access Papajohns.com on my cell phone. Meanwhile, the streaming apps on TV aren’t working at all. Shrug. And last night I couldn’t access Charleyproject.org but now I can.

I tried calling the service provider but they won’t tell me anything cause my name is not on the account. Shrug.

Hope this gets fixed soon and I can resume updates.

MP of the week: Ken Lee

This week’s featured missing person is Ken Casey Lee, a 38-year-old man who disappeared from Seabeck, Washington on October 24, 2002. Foul play is suspected; he was involved in the drug world and it’s possible that his disappearance was drug-related.

Sigh, this is just so sad and so common

Earlier this month, Anthony Tyrone “Burt” Woodson‘s uncle was charged with his murder. The five-year-old has been missing since 1981, and it’s likely that he will never be found.

Some good articles about the case:

• He said his nephew was kidnapped 37 years ago. Now he’s charged with the boy’s murder
• Man admitted he and wife killed nephew, police say. ‘She started it and I finished it’
• Uncle who reported 5-year-old missing in 1981 admits beating boy to death, police say

I knew almost nothing about Anthony’s case before, and it turns out that the official story had been a lie. Anthony’s uncle Terry said they went to a 7-11 in the middle of the night and Anthony disappeared from the car at some point. Well, Terry DID go to the 7-11, but only after his nephew was already dead.

The police were suspicious of the 7-11 abduction story but couldn’t disprove it, until 2017 when his uncle cracked and admitted Anthony was dead. He’s changed his story a bit since then, but the gist has always been the same: Anthony’s aunt and uncle beat the crap out of him with an electric cord, he died, and they dumped the body and concocted the 7-11 story.

Two childhood friends of Anthony reported that he was beaten badly and often enough that they’d come to recognize the sound of the electric cord and the screaming and crying and would know when a beating was taking place. Even by “Texas in the early 1980s” standards, this level of “discipline” seems excessive to me. But apparently nobody bothered to call CPS.

Justice has come too late for Della Woodson, Anthony’s aunt. She’s dead. And from the sounds of it, Terry might not live to see his trial. His sister, Merlene, says he’s in very poor health with severe diabetes and kidney problems, and that he’s on dialysis.

And it looks like there’s probably nothing left to bury, according to one of the articles:

Authorities have searched for any remains of the boy but have so far found none.

Experts, including anthropologists from the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification, have told police the remains would have been dragged off and scattered by animals and likely may never be recovered.

Too little, too late.

What not to do when you want something corrected

So I got an email today from a complete stranger saying this:

[Missing person] was not a drug addict and your story about what happened is not all correct. The police also have not acquired any phone records from any phones.

This was literally all it said. There was no introduction. There was no signature. There was no information on to what exactly was wrong in my “story about what happened” (it was not the part about the phone records, because I never said anything at all about that), and no indication of how the person knew that the MP wasn’t a drug addict and that there were other mistakes in the casefile.

Why should change my casefile, disregarding the information from my other sources, just because some random person writes me an email like this? I don’t know if this person knows what they’re talking about, or if they even knew the MP. I tried Googling the sender’s name along with the MP’s to see if the sender is mentioned in any articles about him, and found exactly nothing.

I get a LOT of emails. If you have a correction to make, and you don’t know me and have never written to me before, it would be a good idea if you were to introduce yourself to me, and let me know how you know I’m wrong.

Things like “I am the MP’s friend/relative” or “I am a cop investigating the case” or “I found this article saying the opposite of what your casefile says, here’s a link to it” are helpful. This can all be accomplished in a few sentences and will make it much more likely that I’ll give you the time of day.

ET on Sunday: Five men at York Castle

I had an Executed Today entry posted on Sunday: Five men were hanged at York Castle on August 19, 1786. They had all committed relatively minor offenses by today’s standards, thefts, not violent crimes, but under England’s Bloody Code it didn’t much matter.

MP of the week: Sandra Fisher

This week’s featured missing person (which I didn’t get around to changing yesterday, sorry) is Sandra Flynn Fisher, who was last seen at the Russell County Fair in Russell Springs, Kentucky on August 3, 1978. She was 31 at the time, and if still alive she’d be in her seventies today. She left behind at least one child.

I got quoted in a Torrington Register Citizen article

Like a month ago I was interviewed about the Connie Smith case, and the articles about it are finally coming out. This one came out on August 13; now the second one has been released, and it contains a quote from me:

Meaghan Good, 32, of Ohio, has been administrator for The Charley Project website since 2004. The site profiles approximately 10,000 “cold case” missing people, mainly from the U.S., from the 1800s up until now, with 10, 671 cases currently open.

Good posits that Connie likely met with foul play: “You see this a lot, especially in the 10-to-13 age group,” she said. “They start becoming more independent but they are still pretty naïve.”

“It is very, very sad,” she said. “The father lived to be a Biblical age and never found out about her. The suspect would likely be dead now. But it is possible for the case to be solved. Technology makes it resolvable.”

 

MP of the week: Bobby Adams

This week’s featured missing person is Bobby Eugene Adams, a 31-year-old cab driver who disappeared from Charleston, West Virginia on November 30, 1991. It looks like a homicide, possibly at the hands of his last fare. They found a large amount of blood in his cab.

ET August 11, 1853

I’ve got a new Executed Today entry up: Hans McFarlane and Helen Blackwood, a pair of common murderers in Scotland who actually got MARRIED while standing on the platform with ropes around their necks.