Michael is recovering pretty well. He’s lost a ton of weight and has a new “heart-healthy” diet full of such oddities as “dry toast” for breakfast and “a cup of soup with low-sodium crackers” for dinner. Zounds.
He’s taking a bunch of new medications and has appointments with some specialists. He plans to go back to work full time on Monday. (He had started part time Thursday.)
Today the police released an interesting phone recording related to the unsolved 1974 disappearance of Margaret Ellen Fox, a fourteen-year-old girl who disappeared 45 years and one day ago from Burlington, New Jersey, after going to meet with a man who said he wanted to hire her to babysit.
After her disappearance was reported, the police tapped Margaret’s parents’ phone in hopes that someone would call with information or a ransom demand or whatever. Someone did, a man who said, “Ten thousand dollars might be a lot of bread, but your daughter’s life is the buttered topping.”
That caller has never been identified, and the police held back all that info — the fact that they recorded calls, the call itself, all of it — until today, forty-five years later.
You can listen to the clip here. It’s very short: that sentence, followed by someone else saying “Who is this?” I am not sure — and perhaps the police are being deliberately vague here — whether that’s the entire call and the caller then hung up, or whether that’s not the whole call but it’s all they were able to catch on tape, or whether there’s more to the call that they decided not to release.
I posted articles about this on the Charley Project Facebook page, and a few commenters groused about the cops waiting 45 years to release the recording.
However, to that I have to say two things:
Now, about the call itself.
For those who are unaware, The word “bread” is or was occasionally used as slang for “money”. (The Oxford English Dictionary finds the first usage in 1935 and notes it may be criminal slang.)
The call sounds a little rehearsed to me. It sounds like something a character in an action movie might say, not someone in real life, and when you actually analyze the statement, it doesn’t even really make sense. (Obviously the guy meant “$10,000 is a lot of money but your daughter’s life should be worth more to you” but buttered topping is no good without any bread to put it on, so his analogy just falls apart.)
I think whoever made that call thought up that phrase ahead of time, trying to sound impressive.
Which doesn’t, of course, mean that the call WASN’T from someone with knowledge of the case. The police obviously think there’s a good chance that it was, or they wouldn’t have made a big deal of releasing this recording.
I hope this leads to something, anyway. The abductor could very well be deceased, but if at the time of Margaret’s abduction he was under, say, forty years old, he could also still be alive. And even if the abductor is dead, perhaps he told someone Margaret’s fate before his passing. When people get old they often start to fear eternal judgment.
This week’s featured missing person is Letitia Nuchelle Regans, a 29-year-old woman who disappeared from St. Louis, Missouri on November 16, 2006.
Unfortunately I don’t know squat about the circumstances of her disappearance; it’s a “few details are available” case. I’ve got a description of her clothes, and a tattoo, and that’s it.
If she is still alive, Letitia Regans would be 42 years old today. She’s been missing twelve and a half years.
Brendt Christensen has been convicted of the murder of 26-year-old doctoral student Yingying Zhang, whose body has never been found.
Of course Yingying’s Charley Project casefile has the basics. I also recommend this Washington Post article, which links to a partial transcript of the trial. And there’s plenty of other news articles about this available.
There remains the punishment phase: LWOP, or the death penalty? (The state of Illinois abolished the death penalty in 2011, but because Brendt was tried in federal court he can be executed.) The defense’s primary objective, as they said from the outset of the trial, is to save Brendt from the death penalty. I have a hard time imagining how they’re going to accomplish this.
Given the recorded confession and the blood found at Brendt’s apartment, the defense in this case is waging an uphill battle with a 50mph wind in their faces. But even so, their argument strikes me as pathetically weak: Brendt totally isn’t a vile human being and would-be (or, perhaps, actual) serial killer, not at all! He only kidnapped, raped, murdered and decapitated a complete stranger because he was depressed and flunking out of college and felt like a failure!
To which I say: SO WHAT? Lots of people are depressed. I’ve been depressed since I was in middle school. Lots of people flunk out of college. Most people feel like a failure at some point in their life. That isn’t an excuse to go out and murder some poor woman you don’t even know.
In other news, yesterday John Bayerl’s murder trial began in Wisconsin (which happens to be Brendt Christensen’s home state). John’s wife, DonaMae, disappeared in 1979 and was never seen again. Suspicion hovered over him for decades before he was finally arrested early this year.
I’m a bit surprised they’re going to trial so quickly; in most murder cases (as in Yingying’s) years pass between arrest and trial. But John is 79 and not getting any younger; I suppose he’s hoping they’ll acquit him and he can return to his retirement home in Florida and die on a beach instead of in jail.
John is another absolute turd and I firmly believe he killed his wife. I just hope the prosecution can prove it.
Charley Project Facebook user Michelle S. found this article about the 1987 disappearance of Ronald Oquilluk (who was not on Charley) and how he was identified over thirty years after he went missing. It’s a very good article and there’s a bit at the bottom about the recent identification of missing hunter Patrick Chambers.
Oquilluk’s case reminds me of the 2016 disappearance of Walter Hawk, another Native Alaskan man with special needs who wandered into the wilderness and never came back. What’s particularly frustrating in Hawk’s case is that searchers actually saw him in the days after he went missing, just hoofing it across the tundra, but apparently they weren’t able to get his attention. So close, yet so far.
I’ll say it again: Alaska eats people.
Oquilluk’s remains were found a full 450 miles from where he was last seen, and I wonder whether Hawk wandered as far as that. He disappeared during the summertime, and if he knew how to live off the land he might have been able to survive for an extended time period.
So Michael is still in the hospital and they’re thinking he will be until Monday. There’s a lot of fluid backed up around his heart that they’re trying to flush out.
They’re saying his is a mild case. They think chances are he caught some kind of virus last winter and it lay in wait for a few months and then decided to start kicking his butt. If the congestive heart failure was caused by a viral infection — which is usually the case with younger patients like Michael — he can make a full recovery.
My own father developed severe congestive heart failure out of nowhere six or seven years ago, and they were predicting he’d die or at least need a transplant, but then he inexplicably got better just as quickly and mysteriously as he’d gotten sick, and his cardiologist called him a medical miracle. They think Dad’s CHF was also caused by a virus.
I saw Michael today and he looks and feels a lot better, though he’s tired and spends most of his time sleeping. He was chronically sleep deprived anyway, and this whole “sleep sitting up” thing the last several weeks hasn’t helped. While at the hospital I signed papers to be his medical proxy if necessary.
Our friends have been awesome, helping both of us out a lot. They were worried about me but I’m doing fine actually. He’s in the hospital, he’s where he needs to be, and he’s getting better. There’s nothing more I can do for him at this point, besides visit, and I’m doing that.
I think our pets are confused by Michael’s absence. Our one cat, Carmen, keeps wandering around looking in all the rooms and I swear she’s looking for him.
Yeah, for the last few weeks Michael has experienced some pretty bad shortness of breath. He was having to sleep sitting up, because he had such a hard time breathing while lying down. I had been encouraging him to see a doctor but he hates seeing doctors, apparently more than he hates not being able to breathe.
Finally, on Monday, he agreed to let me make an appointment for him. While he was at work, I called his doctor and tried to make appointment. But when the nurse found out his symptoms, she thought he should be seen immediately and told me to tell him to go to urgent care ASAP.
So he went after work on Monday. Urgent care checked his oxygen levels, which were surprisingly normal. They shrugged and wrote an order for him to get tests on Tuesday.
Tuesday he called in sick to work (between having to gasp for breath and having to sleep sitting up, he was absolutely exhausted), slept all day, then when he woke up in the afternoon we went to the hospital to get the tests done. He got a chest X-ray, and they drew blood, then sent us home and said they’d call with the results.
Wednesday, while he was at work, he got a message on his cell phone from the hospital saying to please give them a call about his test results. He told me about the message that evening. Thursday, when I woke up in the morning, Michael had gone to work already.
I called his doctor’s office to ask about the test results for him, and they told me they thought he had a pulmonary embolism which might decide to kill him dead at any moment. He needed to be in the ER, like, yesterday. Literally yesterday, since that was when they’d figured this out, and I do wish they’d said so in their message to him or at least said something about it being an emergency.
I tried to call Michael and got no answer. I wasn’t sure how to reach him in that case. He teaches at a residential treatment center for at-risk youth and you can’t exactly just waltz right into the building; it’s locked up pretty tight. I was sitting there trying to figure out how to go about this when Michael called me back. I told him about how he must go to ER cause he might die at any moment, then hopped in my car and went there to meet him.
I was doing pretty good until I got to ER and couldn’t find his room. Then I went immediately full-on autistic meltdown and then the nurses freaked the heck out because they didn’t know who I was or what I was doing and I was being too autistic to tell them. But then Michael heard me fussing and so we found each other. A coworker had driven him to the hospital.
Cue tests and endless waiting and terrible hospital wifi and Michael’s parents (who arrived shortly after I did) being annoying. His father asked me if I would like a blanket. I said no. His father gave me a blanket, because of course he did, and then kept trying to adjust it for me, without saying a word to me as he did it. His mother said she thought she’d left the stove on, and she and his dad sat around idly speculating about whether their house had caught fire. (Spoiler alert: it had not.)
Eventually the hospital decided Michael didn’t have a pulmonary embolism after all, and instead he had congestive heart failure and they could cure fix it. They have admitted him for the next day or two.
I went home for a few hours, then came back with some of Michael’s stuff. By then, word had gotten around, and some of our friends were visiting when I arrived. (Michael’s parents had left by then, thank god.) Then I went home again. I’ll visit him tomorrow.
Everyone was all worried about me and our friend Larissa kept saying I should have my dad come and stay over, but I’m fine. Trying to keep busy and take care of the animals and all that.
I’m just hoping that from now on maybe Michael will actually heed my advice and see a doctor sooner rather than later when one of his vital life functions inexplicably starts to fail.
This week’s featured missing person is Clinton Carlos Seymore, a 44-year-old man who disappeared from Fort Walton Beach, Florida on January 15, 2007. Unfortunately that’s basically all I have on him; his is one of the “few details are available” cases. He has some tattoos: a Virgo symbol (the maiden) on one arm, and on the other arm a woman and a hundred-dollar bill.
If still alive, Clinton Seymore would be 56 today.
Yeah, so if a missing persons case is reasonably recent (like within the last ten or twelve years or so) I check and see if they have accounts with Facebook or MySpace or whatever. Those accounts are a great source of MP photos, and sometimes I’ll get pics of their tattoos, scars, whatever as well.
Last night I had a missing persons case from a year ago. I looked for her on Facebook and found three accounts of varying age, the oldest one from back around ten years ago, and the newest going all the way up to her disappearance. (Her last Facebook post was made the very day she went missing, saying she was no longer with some guy and that he had thrown her out.)
In the oldest account, several photos of her showed the outline of a heart on her forearm. However, the MP’s NamUs page didn’t mention a heart and said she had a tattoo of a “small Chinese symbol” on her forearm.
I thought there were three possible explanations:
Not knowing for sure what was going on there, I said on her casefile that she had a Chinese symbol OR a heart tattoo on her forearm.
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