Happy New Year, everybody!

I hope you guys have a happy last night of 2019 and a good upcoming year. I never thought I’d still be running the Charley Project, fifteen years down the line, but here I am.

I’ve been doing pretty well, pretty stable. My bipolar disorder etc. has been kept well under control with my current medication regimen, and I haven’t needed a medicine adjustment in over a year. And I’ve got the mysterious nausea and vomiting under control again.

I’ve made some new real-life friends this year as well as new online friends. My dog Kinsey, whom I adopted in 2018, is still with us, happy and healthy, at the ripe age of fifteen.

Michael has gotten much better since his health scare in June. He has been fat all his life, but at the urging of his doctors he went on a diet and stuck to it, and he’s lost over 100 pounds! He’s still fat, but he’s still losing weight. I’m proud of him and we are very happy together.

A few times I’ve mentioned a long term “project” I’m working on for the Charley Project, that I’m afraid I can’t be more specific about at this time, only to say it should be done in the coming year.

A lot of John and Jane Does have been identified this year, including three of the four Bear Brook victims, Malyse Honeychurch, Marie Vaughn and Sarah McWaters; Debra Jackson aka “Orange Socks”; Myoung Hwa Cho and her son Bobby Whitt aka “the Boy Under the Billboard”; and Peggy Johnson aka Racine Jane Doe.

Happy New Year.

MP of the week: Jessica Ortiz

This week’s featured missing person — the last of the decade — in Jessica Eileen Ortiz, a 29-year-old woman who disappeared from Pueblo, Colorado on April 12, 2007. If still alive she’d be 42 today.

It’s not likely Jessica is still alive, though. She had advanced cervical cancer, something she was unaware of when she disappeared. And the man she was last seen with, her longtime boyfriend, Wade Albrow, has a long history of violence. This was probably yet another case of fatal intimate partner violence, something that appears in the Charley Project’s pages a lot.

MP of the week: Monico Hernandez

Tonight I’m going to Michael’s parents’ house and will be spending Christmas over there. So I decided to do the missing person of the week a day early, since I won’t have access to my PC tomorrow.

This week it’s Monico Urquidi Hernandez, a 45-year-old man who disappeared from Phoenix, Arizona on December 8, 2011. He left home, saying he might go to Mexico, and was never heard from again. I don’t have anything else on this case.

Merry Christmas!

Okay, Paul Fronczak definitely HAS been located

Last weekend I had posted about how there was a report that Paul Fronczak, an infant kidnapped from a Chicago hospital the day after he was born in 1964, had been found, but the paucity of information and the fact that only one news outlet was reporting this made me suspicious of the report’s veracity.

However, today a little additional news came out, with a quote from the FBI verifying the info. Very little information is available, just that Paul is alive, lives somewhere in rural Michigan, and does not want to go public at this time. I’m sure he’s shocked.

I hope more information will become available in time. Who knows, maybe the abductor is still alive and could be prosecuted.

I just wanted to say thanks

As Christmas approaches, I wanted to say thank you to all the people who have donated to the Charley Project since I asked for voluntary subscription fees back in May.

I’ve been running this database since I was a teenager. Now fifteen years’ running, it takes a lot of my time and I’m very proud of its value as a resource to the true crime community, law enforcement, missing persons’ families, and others. The Charley Project has always been a labor of love, but I am really happy that I’ve found myself a way to make a small living off of it, thanks to you guys. I really appreciate being appreciated.

I’ve been working on a long term project involving the Charley Project. This project has been almost two years in the making and I hope it will be completed in the coming year. I can’t divulge any more details about it at this time but you guys are going to be delighted by it.

MP of the week: Darleta Hurt

This week’s featured missing person is Darleta Kay Hurt, a 48-year-old woman who disappeared from St. Albans, West Virginia on December 10, 1986, 33 years ago. She left her son’s home that day and drove her own apartment building, and has never been heard from again. Her glasses and shoes were found outside the building on the lawn.

It looks like a case of what a friend calls “suspected spousal snuffage”: Darleta was separated from her husband, Robert, and he is a suspect in her disappearance. He had threatened her, and she disappeared five days before a court hearing about their pending divorce.

Unfortunately, Robert suicided in 1987, taking whatever secrets he had to his grave.

Has the real Paul Fronczak been found? I’m uncertain.

So earlier this week there was an article on from a Las Vegas news outlet saying Paul Fronczak, the one that was stolen from the hospital as a newborn in 1964, has been located and is living in Michigan. The article promised more information later.

(The case is incredibly complicated and I recommend you check out Paul’s casefile on Charley. In a nutshell:

Paul was stolen from a Chicago hospital on April 27, 1964, just 36 hours after birth, by a woman who has posed as a nurse and has never been identified. In late 1965 an abandoned toddler was found wandering around a Newark, New Jersey store and was thought to be Paul Fronczak. There was no DNA testing available at the time to prove this definitively, but baby Paul’s parents accepted him as theirs and raised him.

In 2012, however, a DNA test established that this man was NOT actually the biological child of Mr. and Mrs. Fronczak. Not-Paul, as I call him, enlisted help from a genetic genealogist, and in 2015 he was identified. He and his twin sister were born into an abusive family, and shortly after they turned two, both twins disappeared and their three siblings were warned to never speak of them again. Their disappearances were never reported.

Not-Paul has published a book about all this, titled The Foundling: The True Story of a Kidnapping, a Family Secret, and My Search for the Real Me. I own a copy on Kindle but haven’t read it yet.)

Getting back to the report that the real Paul has been found… well, it’s been several days and there’s no further information released. Furthermore, that article I linked to above is the ONLY article I can find that talks about this alleged recovery. You’d think this would be explosive news that would make headlines all over the world, but nope.

Even if the actual Paul didn’t want his identity released, you’d think there’d still be something printed like “Paul now lives in a small town in Michigan and works as a Blank. He began having doubts about his origins because Reasons. His presumed abductor raised him as her own son and is now deceased. He would like his privacy respected at this time.” SOMETHING.

I’m beginning to wonder if this “recovery” was a hoax. Though, for what it’s worth, baby Paul isn’t listed on the NCMEC site anymore.

I really don’t know; the whole thing is very puzzling to me. Any ideas?

Lost at sea

So yesterday I added a case of six commercial fishermen who disappeared off the coast of Alaska when the fishing vessel Destination sank in 2017 with the loss of all hands on board. I think this was the largest “lost at sea” group of disappearances, and possibly the largest group of “lost/injured missing” people I’ve put up: Kai Jamal Hamik, Jeffrey Hathaway, Charles “Glenn” Jones, Lawrence Vincent “Larry” O’Grady, Darrik Monroe Seibold and Raymond Jay Vincler.

I also added Eric Lawrence Eder, an Alaska fisherman who fell off a fishing trawler off the coast of Alaska, and Angela Chingliak, whose body was never found after her boat sank in Goodnews Bay off the coast of Alaska.

I’m sure you’re sensing a pattern here. I got all those names off this list of missing persons in Alaska, which has 1,231 entries as of this writing. It’s just names and dates of disappearance, nothing else. The list of active missing persons bulletins, which has fliers with photos and the standard info, is much shorter. It has I think 117 people, unless I lost count.

Alaska DOES have a pretty high crime rate, but a lot of the missing persons on its list are only “missing” in a technical sense: their fates are known, and in many instances so are their approximate whereabouts. They’re just on the lists in case their bodies turn up and need to be identified.

I’m not sure how far I’m willing to go with groups of lost/injured missing people. I mean, six is one thing, but I know there’s one ship that sunk in the Bering Sea and with like 45 people on board, almost all of whom perished, and they never found the bodies. I wouldn’t want to put up THAT group, and those 40-some people may very well be on that list of Alaska missings.

I guess it’s just a judgment call.

List of MP Facebook links tops 800

I’d just like to draw your attention again to the links at the very top of this blog. One of them is a list of Facebook pages created for individual missing persons. I just added the 801st person’s page to the list today.

There’s also a list of state and local missing persons listings, divided by state, but there aren’t nearly so many links on that list.

MP of the week: Jamal Mohammed

This week’s featured missing person is Jamal “James” Mohammed, a Tampa, Florida dance club owner who disappeared on October 17, 2007. I’ve got a pretty broad weight range for him, 145 to 220 pounds. From his photo (which, admittedly, only shows his face and neck) I’d be guessing he was at the lighter end.

He was last seen on his way to the club he owned. He was never seen again and his car turned up abandoned with some of his stuff inside. Foul play is suspected.