This week’s featured missing person is thirteen-year-old Catrina Renee Jackson, who disappeared while walking to school in Sylvania, Georgia on May 30, 1986.
An article I found from just a few days after she went missing suggested she was a runaway, but the NCMEC has her case classified as a non-family abduction. In any case, I don’t have much on it. Catrina, who may be addressed by her middle name, would be 46 years old now, and, in two weeks, will have been gone for 33 years.
So I was reading David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets aka “the book that inspired the TV show The Wire” and discovered Telethia Good is mentioned in it, although not by name.
David Simon shadowed the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit for a year, from January to December in 1988, and wrote about the cases they solved, and didn’t solve. One of the most prominent homicides was that of Latonya Kim Wallace, an eleven-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted, stabbed and strangled.
The prime suspect is identified in the book only as “The Fish Man” (because he was a fishmonger). He knew Latonya Wallace and had a history of sexual assault and was just generally creepy, and there was some physical evidence that indicated he might have been involved. Obviously they didn’t have the kind of DNA testing thirty years ago that they have now, though.
The cops looked to see if they could connect the Fish Man to any other cases and at this point the book says that a nine-year-old girl who lived on Montpelier Street disappeared in 1979 and was never found, and she was “a dead ringer” for Latonya Wallace. The cops learn that the Fish Man’s business partner at that time lived on Montpelier Street and the Fish Man visited him there often. When they show the suspect a photo of the missing girl, he initially says he recognizes it, then backtracks and says he doesn’t.
In spite of the police’s best efforts, the Fish Man never confessed to Latonya’s murder, never mind Telethia’s case, and they couldn’t find enough evidence to prosecute him. According to the afterword in the book, he’s dead now.
I immediately checked on Charley to find a girl who matched the particulars of the missing child case in the book. Telethia disappeared in 1978, not 1979, and she was seven, not nine, but she did live on Montpelier Street and she does look quite a lot like Latonya Wallace.
I suppose I’ll add this info to her casefile. Shame I don’t know the Fish Man’s name. Now that he’s dead there’s no harm in releasing that info, I should think.
In honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, I am profiling one Asian or Pacific Islander MP for every day of the month of May. Today’s case is Vijaykumar Parbhubhai Patel, an eighteen-year-old who disappeared from Aurora, Missouri on March 1, 1985. He used the nickname Vijay, or the Anglicized name Victor.
Patel’s family owned and operated the Sands Motel in Aurora, and he worked at the restaurant next door. He was last seen on his way to work his twelve-to-seven shift. He never arrived, and his car has never been located either.
Not much is known about his case, which only made it onto the internet relatively recently. If anyone in his family or circle of friends wants to reach out, they can email me or post in the comments below.
The Charley Project Blog 