Thought I’d recommend these articles I found yesterday

There should be a trigger warning, I suppose, for child sexual abuse. The headline of the first I found is “7 things I learned about being a man, from talking to child abusers: How we can fix the boom in downloading of child abuse material.” By “child abuse material” they mean sexual abuse.

Though all the downloaders the journalist identified and interviewed were Norwegian (as is the reporter), I would assume that his conclusions, if correct, would apply to men from other countries as well. The reporter spent five years researching and writing about child abuse, and the article links to two much longer articles with accompanying documentaries.

And I have to say, those two longer articles are just… horrifying. So I’m warning you again: prepare to feel pretty sick.

One is Breaking the Dark Net: Why police share abuse pics to save children and the other is The Downloaders: Norwegian men pay to download videos showing children being subjected to extreme sexual abuse. They are the end users in an industry that uses children as sexual commodities. They think they are invisible. But we found them.

Yeah, it’s pretty awful. But I think people need to know this stuff.

MP of the week: Miller Harlow

This week’s featured missing person (which I forgot to add yesterday, sorry) is Miller Smith Harlow, a 62-year-old man who disappeared from Gordonsville, Virginia on August 28, 1991. He was last seen standing in front of a funeral home in town, possibly on his way to a local restaurant where his cousin was supposed to pick him up.

He was retired, lived alone, had never driven a car and would get around on foot, on his bike or by getting rides from people. He had very regular habits and because of this the police thinks something bad happened to him.

If still alive he’d now be in his nineties.

Thought I’d give a shout-out to this article

The other day Vox came out with a fascinating article called “The Man Without a Name“, subheading reading: “Robert Ivan Nichols simply disappeared from his average, 1960s Midwestern life — until, using DNA, sleuths uncovered the truth. But were they digging where they shouldn’t have been?”

It is quite fascinating, and I think you guys would enjoy it. Though contrary to what the URL would have you believe, Robert Ivan Nichols was not the Zodiac Killer.

Just helped find a missing person alive

So I need to be vague about the details to protect the guy’s privacy, but the Charley Project helped find a live missing person the other day. It’s the first time that I know of that this has happened. The website has been used before to match missing persons to unidentified ones, who were returned to their families, but all those people were deceased.

A flight attendant wrote to me to say there had been a passenger on her plane who (she didn’t say why but I assume he was acting strangely) caused the entire crew to be worried about him. They took care of him as best they could during the flight and, when the plane landed, delivered him to the custody of an airline employee who promised to look after him.

Once the cabin crew and the passenger parted ways, the crew was still concerned about him and decided to Google him and see if they could find out more about him. And when they did, his name and face popped up on the Charley Project: he’s been missing for years.

They chased down the airline employee they’d left him with. The employee was still with him, so the crew explained the situation and the airline employee and the man agreed to go to the local police department and get the situation sorted. He’s over a thousand miles from home but presumably that police department will make contact with the ones in his hometown.

The situation the man left sounds awful and he may be better off now, but he also clearly needs help. I’m hoping the authorities can reunite him with his family and get him the services he needs.

Alissa Turney’s stepdad has been arrested

Michael Turney is honestly one of the creepiest missing persons suspects I’ve ever written about. He was extremely possessive of his stepdaughter Alissa: he regularly searched her belongings, monitored her phone conversations, sat outside her job while she worked, set up surveillance cameras in the family home “for security reasons”, and forced Alissa to sign weird “contracts.”

Now, if Alissa was a problem child who was involved with drugs and the wrong crowd, I could see a parent taking these kind of measures. But Alissa wasn’t a problem child. She was a good kid mostly, did well in school and had no history of running away.

Alissa allegedly told several people that Michael–who was, incidentally, her only parent since her mom died of cancer when she was little–had sexually abused her. This information never made it to the ears of Child Protective Services, but in 2000 Michael himself called CPS to pre-emptively declare his innocence, just in case Alissa should ever claim he was abusing her.

A year later, in the spring of 2001, Alissa disappeared at the age of seventeen. Michael said she ran away, but if she did it seems really weird that she left behind all her belongings including $1,800 in the bank, and never contacted her siblings, friends or boyfriend ever again.

In 2008, the police executed a search warrant on Michael’s home looking for evidence in Alissa’s case. I don’t know if they found any, but they did find 26 homemade bombs and a van filled with gasoline cans. It turned out Michael had been planning to blow up a local International Brotherhood of Electrical Works union hall and take his own life in the process.

He was sentenced to ten years, served seven, and was out by 2017. This afternoon he was arrested and charged with Alissa’s murder.

I don’t know anything about what in the way of evidence they have against him, as this is breaking news, only minutes old. But I’m thrilled to death.

MP of the week: Angel Rose Avery

This week’s featured missing person is Angel Rose Avery, a 35-year-old woman who disappeared from Kennett, Missouri on September 1, 2018. Hers is a “few details are available” case; I know nothing else about the case. I was able to snag a few additional photos of her from social media.

If still alive, Angel would be 37 today.

Interesting article from the BBC about why and how people disappear

Thought I’d share this BBC article, which was prompted by the police locating a man who disappeared in 2015. They found him alive and well, living in the woods near a town called Wisbech in the Fens. The man, an immigrant to the UK who was originally from Lithuania, had apparently gone missing on purpose because he was being “exploited” which in this context I think means enslaved.

For the article the BBC interviewed, among other people, a University of Glasgow professor who is “an expert in the geography of missing people.” From the article:

Most missing people, she said, disappeared for a day or two. Cases of long-term missing people were far less common.

Smartphones, social media, CCTV and bank cards can now document our every move, making it more difficult to escape.

But in her study of 40 missing people, many were “very aware” of the locations of CCTV cameras and avoided travelling by bus or train where their image might be caught on camera.

“It surprised us how, in the midst of a crisis and when big emotions are happening, these people managed to navigate such things,” said Prof Parr.

“People are incredibly resourceful.”

Prof Parr said many of those who had disappeared kept moving while missing.

Far more rare, she said, were cases of people “making home”, whether in a deserted building or in woodland, for example.

MP of the week: Jerome Robinson

This week’s featured missing person is Jerome David Robinson, a 21-year-old black man who disappeared from Tunis, Texas three days after Christmas in 2001. He’d won a lot of money gambling at a bar, the Team Club, and had some of his winnings already, and that night he went there to collect the rest.

It looks like he never emerged from the bar alive, but his body has never been found and no charges have been filed against anyone in his case.

Article out of Australia about the reasons people walk away

Thought I’d give a shout-out to this article, where they talk about some of the reasons people choose to walk out of their lives. The information was obtained through interviews with Australian people who had done this and then returned. The article notes that

Nearly all missing persons (97%) return within two weeks, which causes these cases to be seen, by both the public and police, as simple search operations. Viewing missing persons in this way ignores the underlying issues that trigger disappearances, making prevention strategies more difficult to put in place.

Most of the people who were interviewed said they left during “periods of distress or poor mental health, as well as in response to trauma in their families.” Half of them returned of their own accord and half were found by the police. Support services ought to be provided when they get back, but rarely are.

Because this isn’t suspicious or anything…

I invite all Charley Project blog readers to also read this article about the 2019 disappearance of Angela Green from Prairie Village, Kansas. It’s a pretty interesting story to say the least. And it stinks. Badly. I’m sure the police are every bit as suspicious as I am but it seems like there’s not a lot of evidence; it’s as much about what ISN’T there as what is.

I feel deeply sorry for Angela’s daughter; she’s in a bad position right now and through no fault of her own. I really hope she gets answers soon.