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:
- NamUs was wrong about the tattoo information.
- At some time in the years after she got the heart tattoo, the woman got a coverup tattoo changing the heart into a Chinese symbol.
- She had both tattoos, a heart on one forearm and a Chinese symbol on the other forearm.
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.