The interview was quite awhile ago and I barely remember it, but the article has come out: Why people of color get less attention than whites when they go missing. This Cape Cod Times article talks about the issue of missing people of color and brings up several such cases from the local area, some of whom are on the Charley Project and some who haven’t been missing for long enough to be on there.
It’s quite a well-researched article, not just saying it cause they interviewed me for it.
Wound up discarding a case I was writing up to add to Charley, although the man is still listed as a missing person on NamUs and the Florida state database. I had very little information to start with, but then I found his mom’s Facebook page and she had written many posts about his death and how sad she was about it.
It was a “few details are available” case so I didn’t know whether he’d been found deceased, or whether she just assumed he must be. His mom is the kind who has all her social media posts public, and she posted often, so it was taking awhile. Finally I went to posts from the month the son disappeared and started working up from there, as that seemed like it would be more efficient.
Eventually I found it. The mom wrote that they found a man’s body wearing a belt that his brother had hand-made and given him as a gift. The body has apparently not been officially identified (my guess is they’re waiting on DNA, which can take forever), but it seems extremely unlikely that it’s anyone other than this missing guy. I’m not going to bother listing a person where the identification is basically pending; I don’t see the point.
It’s interesting the stuff that you can find out about a person on social media, things a lot of people don’t even realize you can find out. I recently got a message from a woman who was like “where did you get all those photos of my missing sister, only family had those.” I had to explain that if someone puts a photo on Facebook and tags it with User X’s account, anyone can find it just by searching Facebook for that account. Even if the photo is not posted by User X’s account, even if User X never saw the photo themselves, a complete stranger like me can find it and its association with User X. All those pics that person thought were private, and could only be seen by family, weren’t really. I told her all this and she was like “…oh.”
Early this month Michael got his first dose of Moderna’s Covid vaccine, and yesterday he was given the second dose. In I think two weeks he will have 95% or greater immunity to Covid and I can stop worrying about him so much.
As far as how his body handled the vaccine, he didn’t feel any different after the first dose. The morning after the second dose he felt achy and super tired, to the point where he went to work late. This was probably his immune system revving up in response to the vaccine, and is a small price to pay for protection from getting that awful disease. He felt better by afternoon.
My father and my mother have had their first doses as well. No idea when I’m going to get my own vaccination. As a healthy young adult who doesn’t need to work outside the home, I’m pretty much at the bottom of the priority list, and I’m fine with that. I am not really worried about getting Covid myself, just worried about getting it and then giving it to someone at higher risk than me, in particular my loved ones.
I am hoping that everyone who can be vaccinated, will be by the end of this year. Though sometimes it feels like there’s no end to this.
This week’s featured missing person is Charles Phillip Wheat, a 34-year-old man who disappeared from Winnfield, Louisiana on March 16, 2012. He’s considered missing under suspicious circumstances, but I don’t have very much on this case. He has several tattoos and I have descriptions of them, but no photos of them. His sister created a Facebook page for him but it hasn’t been updated since 2017.
I haven’t found any news about this case since it happened. If he’s still alive, Wheat would be 43 today.
I thought I’d let y’all know that freelance journalist Jana Meisenholder did a very nice interview with me and she published it today in the Medium under the title Meaghan Good: The Most Dedicated Missing Persons Tracker.
There’s some pictures too, that Michael took, of me working at my desk.
Lee and Anthony Redgrave are working with the the DNA Doe Project to identify transgender and nonbinary murder victims. They’ve started the Trans Doe Task Force, which helps police and medical examiners with cold cases involving transgender people.
Alaska: An unusually high number of people have gone missing from Fairbanks in the past ten months. Fairbanks averages five missing persons a year, but since May 2020, eleven people have disappeared and have not been found. (I wonder if the political, economic and emotional turmoil caused by the pandemic has anything to do with it.) Five of the missing eleven are Native. The community is concerned and held a vigil about it.
Colorado: Wendy Stephens, a Denver teenager who disappeared in 1983, has been identified as a victim of Gary Leon Ridgeway, the Green River Killer. He pleaded guilty to 49 murders but is believed to have killed more than 71. Not all of his presumed victims have been found, and three that have been are still unidentified.
Indiana: This article details the uncertainty about the veracity of a suspect’s confession in the Denise Diane Pflum case. Denise was 18 when she disappeared from Connersville in 1986. Her body has never been found. In 2020, her ex-boyfriend, Shawn McClung, confessed to her killing after being offered immunity for her death and also the dismissal of two charges he was in jail for. At the time he was dying. Before he passed away a few months later, McClung retracted his confession, saying he’d only made the statement because he didn’t want to die in jail.
Louisiana: They’re still looking for Cory Marie Rubio, a 24-year-old mother of two who disappeared from Shreveport in 1999. The most logical person to look at is her ex-husband; they were in the middle of a custody battle, and he had a history of violent behavior.
New Hampshire: Authorities have determined that the remaining unidentified body in the Bear Brook murders case has maternal relatives in the Pearl River, Mississippi area. DNA testing indicates the child and her mother were descendants of Thomas “Deadhorse” Mitchell, who was born in 1836, or William Livings, who was born in 1826. The dead child also may have suffered from anemia.
New Mexico: They’re still looking for Robert Marcos Romero, an eight-year-old boy who disappeared from Santa Fe in 2000. The most plausible theory is that his brother Ronnie killed him accidentally while under the influence of drugs, but nothing has been proven and Ronnie died over a decade ago.
New York: They believe the car found in the Muscoot Reservoir, which I wrote about earlier, is that of Brenda Kerber, a 40-year-old woman who disappeared from White Plains in 1989. I’d never heard of this case before.
Also New York: They’re still trying to identify a Jane Doe found in Chautauqua County. She now has her own Facebook page.
Oklahoma: They’re still looking for Darian Michelle Hudson, age 23, who went missing from Stillwater in 2017. She was going through a lot of personal problems and may have had a mental breakdown. Her family thinks foul play was involved in her disappearance, but the police say they aren’t sure.
Also Oklahoma: A proposed missing persons bill, House Bill 1790, is being called the Aubrey Alert, after missing transgender Native woman Aubrey Dameron. Aubrey was 25 when she disappeared from Grove in 2019. The Aubrey Alert bill, if passed, would require “critically missing” adult cases to be investigated immediately. The text of the bill can be read here.
Oregon: They’re still looking for Jodie Marie Anderson, a 29-year-old woman who disappeared from Crescent City in 2017. She may be in the Linn County area.
South Carolina: They’re still looking for Shelton John Sanders, a 25-year-old man who disappeared from Columbia in 2001. He now has a Facebook page.
Tennessee: They’re still looking for married couple Kristie Wilson, 39, and Henry Wilson, 45, who disappeared from Monterey in 2018. Their car was found at the bottom of a ravine months after they went missing; it had been there so long there were plants growing in it. No sign of either of them. There have been multiple tips that the Wilsons were murdered, but no solid leads.
Texas: They’re still looking for Fredrick Joseph “Little Joe” Boehm, age 23, who disappeared from Marshall on this day twenty years ago. He was temporarily staying with a friend when late one night he got a mysterious phone call, changed from his pajamas into street clothes and left, saying he’d be back later. He never returned.
Also Texas: They’re still looking for Andrea Leigh Cotten, a seventeen-year-old girl who disappeared from Corsicana in 2004. She left her cousin’s house in the night and never returned. She disappeared the day before she was supposed to visit her child, who was in foster care, and her family doesn’t think she would have missed that on purpose. Since she went missing there’s been no activity on her Social Security number, which is ominous.
Canada: The four-month-old disappearance of 30-year-old Megan Michelle Gallagher from Saskatoon is now being investigated as a homicide.
England: The brother of Suzy Lamplugh, a 35-year-old woman who disappeared from London in 1986, has issued an appeal for answers in her case.
Remember how I said Facebook had said they would let me out of jail on January 23 but this was their third date change and I doubted it was going to happen? Well, it didn’t. They changed the date. Now it’s February 8. And remember, I should have been out in December.
This is obviously some kind of glitch, one that might get fixed in an instant by some customer service person. Except Facebook doesn’t have customer service. So I am still locked out of the Charley Project’s Facebook page.
I’m trying not to get all upset about it because there’s nothing I can do. This isn’t even a huge honking social media catastrophe, by Facebook standards. There are people I’ve read about who have run businesses through Facebook, investing gobs of money, only to lose said businesses overnight when Facebook canceled their accounts without warning. And they have no more recourse than I do.
They’ve found human remains in a car at a reservoir in Katonah, New York. They’re not saying much about it yet, but they did say the car is “connected to an old missing persons case that is still open.”
There’s only one missing persons case out of Katonah on the Charley Project: the 1977 disappearance of Leslie Anne Guthrie and her two children, six-year-old Julie Anne Guthrie and three-year-old Timothy Patrick Guthrie Jr.
Leslie’s car disappeared with them and has never been found.
Seven-year-old Alexis S. Patterson disappeared from Milwaukee, Wisconsin on May 3, 2002. Her stepfather, LaRon Bourgeois, was the last person known to have seen her. Because of that and because he had a criminal history, the police looked pretty hard at him in her case. Nothing came of it, though, and I’m not sure if he’s still a suspect.
Well, LaRon has died and so has his wife, Michelle Bourgeois, whom he married sometime after he split with Alexis’s mother in 2005. Their bodies were found together and it looks like overdose. Some suspected drugs and drug paraphernalia were found at the scene, and Michelle had a history of heroin use.
It’s very unfortunate and sad, and I feel sorry for their loved ones.
This week’s featured missing persons case is Sheila Annette Pauley, a twenty-year-old woman who disappeared from Ehrenburg, Arizona on September 1, 1980. She was last seen leaving a bar and restaurant, followed shortly afterwards by members of a local motorcycle gang, which sounds ominous. She has never been heard from again
Pauley left behind an infant son. If still alive (which seems unlikely) she’d be 60 years old today. I don’t have any more information on her disappearance.
The Charley Project Blog 