MP of the week: Jennifer Patterson

This week’s featured missing person (sorry it’s a little late again) is seven-year-old Jennifer Nicole Patterson, last seen walking to a neighbor’s house in Spring Lake, North Carolina on June 23, 1991.

Jennifer, at the time of her disappearance, was 4’5 and 59 pounds with sandy brown hair, brown eyes and a freckle on the tip of her nose. She was wearing a bathing suit with orange, yellow, pink and turquoise squares and squiggle shapes.

There was a custody dispute going on between her parents and the prime suspect in the case is Jennifer’s father. No one has ever been charged, though.

If still alive she’d be 41 today.

More fishing in the news archives

So I found a different sketch of David Blockett‘s abductor, which is I think of better quality aesthetically speaking but doesn’t really resemble the first sketch I had all that much. The woman in the second sketch has a narrower face and nose and straighter eyebrows than the woman in the first sketch.

Sometimes composite sketches of unknown suspects can turn out to be a dead ringer for the criminal when they’re caught; other times they totally miss the mark. Since they never identified the woman who took David, we don’t know if the sketches really look like her or not. I have put up both of course, along with a more detailed description of the abductor. The written description I found specifically said she had arched eyebrows.

I am not meaning to criticize anyone when I say this, because I know times were different back in the day. But when I read accounts of old child disappearances, I think people used to be much more naive.

I have read that in 1874, when Charley Ross (the Charley Project’s namesake)’s dad attempted to report the four-year-old’s abduction to the police, the police were initially like “Meh, the guys who did it were probably drunk and thought it was some kind of joke; they’ll give him back when they sober up. Come back to us later if he doesn’t show up.” When four-year-old Joseph Rodriguez disappeared from Manhattan, his aunt didn’t report him missing for almost 24 hours “because she thought he would come back on his own.” That was in 1936.

I remember reading a book about the 1978 disappearance of 13-year-old Genette Tate from England; the book was written in 1980 if I recall correctly. The author said he at first had a hard time believing that anyone would want to abduct Genette for sexual purposes because she looked so young, like a small child, in the first photo he saw of her. But it turned out she’d only been ten in that photo. When he saw a more recent photo of Genette, he decided a sexual motive might be possible after all because she looked like the teenager she was. Apparently this author had never heard of pedophiles who prefer pre-pubescent kids as victims.

That same year the book was written, 1980, David Blockett’s mom let a “social worker” she didn’t know take her newborn and toddler to a “children’s party” without her. In 1981, 14-year-old Carla Owens‘s parents weren’t concerned when she went for a babysitting job and didn’t call or anything for the next four days, since it was supposed to be a multi-day job and “Carla frequently stayed away from home for days at a time.”

Nowadays people seem to keep a much closer eye on their kids and are very concerned about the adults they allow their kids to be around. Like, day care facilities often have camera feeds which parents can view remotely in order to make sure everything is okay with their children. Many children aren’t allowed to walk to school or to the school bus stop alone. Parents who let their six-year-old walk to school alone, like Kathleen Shea‘s did in 1965, could potentially even be cited for neglect.

I think it goes too far sometimes. In 2014 a woman had someone call CPS and the police on her because she let her six-year-old play outside alone 150 yards from their house, and later told the media her story and said people should not waste CPS’s valuable time and resources with frivolous reports like that. A coworker of mine once said she wouldn’t let her kids spend the night with anyone else at all, not even to go camping with their own uncles whom she claimed she trusted, because “you never know what could happen when parents aren’t around.” Did she trust the uncles, or not, because in spite of what she said it sounded like she didn’t trust them. I remember reading a conversation with others on a message board; the topic was when it was okay to let a kid leave the house alone and go out and about town by themselves. “When they’re 18,” a lot of people said, which seemed excessively cautious to me. One parent claimed they wouldn’t even let their child ride in an elevator without supervision lest a “quick thinking pedophile” take advantage of that minute or two to abuse the child, something I thought sounded kind of paranoid.

I don’t know if it’s just that parents are held to a much higher standard in general now, or if all the high-profile child abductions and serial killers and all the true crime stuff that’s constantly all over the media has caused this. Technology may be a factor, since it’s much easier to keep in touch now due to cell phones and social media. That has progressed so much so quickly, particularly since the early 2000s. I know many parents install tracking apps on their kids’ phones so they can monitor their every movement if necessary. I’m sure those apps could be life-saving, particularly if the kid had disabilities or had a habit of running away from home.

It’s hard to say what I’d do because I do not, and will never, have children of my own. Kids running around outside without an adult are a lot more likely to get hit by cars than they are to be abducted by a stranger, however.

Fishing in the newspaper archives

As you might be able to tell from the recent updates posted, I spent yesterday and today “fishing” on Newspapers.com, by which I mean I was running name after name through their database of archived news to see if I could find additional information on those missing persons. Newspapers.com adds more newspapers to their archive all the time, and it had been years since I went on a fishing expedition there.

Yesterday one of the cases I updated was that of eleven-year-old Karen Tompkins, who has been missing since 1961. One of the things I added was the story of a possible suspect who was investigated in her case.

This gentleman was seeing driving his car around town with a sign on it saying “Have you seen this girl” and newspaper clippings about Karen’s disappearance on the sign. (Timothy Bindner, who was a suspect for years in the disappearance of Amber Swartz-Garcia and other young girls, did something similar.) As the man didn’t know Karen, the police were a bit suspicious about the sign and the news clippings, searched his car and found a pair of panties in the trunk. Panties about the size an eleven-year-old girl would wear. The man was asked why he had a little girl’s panties in his car trunk and he claimed he was using them to clean his car windows. The police were like, “Hmm.”

After reading this in the newspaper I was so flabbergasted that I actually went to my roommate and immediately told him the story and how flabbergasted I was. My roommate is a middle-aged man. For what legitimate reason, I asked him, would a grown man want ANYTHING to do with children’s panties, never mind carry a pair around in his car? (Unless they were his own daughter’s panties and he was driving to the laundromat to do the laundry or something like that, which wasn’t the case here.) What a very weird and pedophile-coded thing to do. My roommate agreed and said he wouldn’t even want to touch those things, never mind drive around with them and use them as a washrag. Newspapers are better for clearing car windows anyway.

This guy with the panties did have a criminal record, with multiple arrests, but they were all for burglary, not any attacks on children or sex offenses. He was cleared in Karen’s case, I guess; as you can see in her Charley Project they now know who probably kidnapped and murdered Karen and it wasn’t this guy. But I think he probably wasn’t really using those panties to wash his car windows.

MP of the week: Jesse Minott

This week’s featured missing person is Jesse Oswald Minott, a 32-year-old man who disappeared from Morro Bay, California on September 6, 2020. He’s black and Filipino, with black hair and brown eyes, and was last seen wearing a white t-shirt, shorts and rubber shoes. He’s 5’10 and was 150 pounds at the time of his disappearance.

There isn’t much info in Jesse’s case, other than which high school and university he attended, and the fact that his car was found abandoned. If still alive he’d be 37 today.

Some interesting missing persons articles I saw today

In the city of Świętochłowice in southern Poland, 27 years ago, a couple’s 15-year-old adopted daughter, Mirella, dropped out of sight. Her parents said she’d run away back to her biological parents. They were lying. Mirella has resurfaced and has quite a tale to tell. She was never missing. The entire time, her adoptive parents had been holding her against her will in their own home!

Per this People Magazine article which has links to a bunch of Polish language articles about the case, Mirella was kept confined to a small room and didn’t have access to the basic things needed to maintain hygiene, such as menstrual supplies or underwear. When she was found she was emaciated and looked “like an old lady”, and she was sent to a hospital. No charges have been filed against the parents but the case is still under investigation. It reminds me of the Josef Fritzl case. Horrific.

In Santa Barbara, California, they’re searching for a nine-year-old girl who hasn’t been seen in a year but wasn’t reported missing by her family. Her name is Melodee Buzzard and a school official notified the authorities of her “prolonged absence”. When the police went to check on Melodee’s welfare at her home, she wasn’t there and her mom had “no clear explanation” as to what happened. I really hope she’s still alive but it sounds like she probably is not and that her parent or parents did something to her.

Five months ago, Petros Krommindas disappeared from a beach in New York, leaving a towel and other stuff behind on the beach. He was training for a triathalon and his family thinks he went for a swim to practice and got in trouble. Krommindas was running for an elected position as a Democrat in Nassau County, New York at the time of his disappearance, and although he is presumed dead, his name has not been removed from the ballot. The local Democratic Party tried to have him removed in September, but two voters filed a lawsuit to stop them, and a local judge sided with the voters, saying that because Krommindas has not been declared legally dead (and can’t be, not for at least three years after his disappearance), the law requires his candidacy to continue. In response, the local Democratic Party is campaigning for Krommindas’s election. His family has also urged voters to elect him.

The article mentions a previous case where missing person Nicholas Begich (also a Democrat, incidentally) was elected to Congress two weeks after he disappeared from Alaska and was presumed dead. Later that year he was declared legally dead and another election was held. Begich was never found. I just updated his casefile to add the “Jr.” appelation to his name, which is mentioned in the article about Krommidas.

MP of the week: Dulce Alavez

This week’s featured missing person (which I forgot to post yesterday cause I got the days mixed up, so sorry) is Dulce Maria Alavez, a five-year-old girl who was abducted from a park in Bridgeton, New Jersey on September 16, 2019. She’s Hispanic and at the time of her disappearance she was about 3’5 and 60 to 70 pounds. She was last seen wearing black and white checked pants with a flower pattern, white sandals and a yellow t-shirt with the image of an elephant on the front in white. A photo of the t-shirt is posted at the case summary.

Someone saw a man, described as 5’6 to 5’8 and thin, with acne on his chin, putting Dulce into a red van with a sliding door and tinted windows. She was never seen again. Her mom had bought her some coconut water ice, and the treat disappeared with Dulce. There is also a second person of interest or witness in her case, and a description and sketch of that person is at the case summary.

Dulce’s parents aren’t considered suspects in her case and her dad definitely couldn’t have done it because he was in Mexico. The police believe she was abducted by an “opportunistic predator.”

I suppose it’s possible she could still be alive. She was young enough that she might not remember much, or anything, about her pre-abduction life, and I’m sure there are more people out there like Phillip Garrido and Ariel Castro.

If still alive she’d be eleven years old now.

I feel really gross talking about this but ChatGPT is apparently spreading misinformation so I thought I should say something

So I had a conversation on Reddit the other day with a misinformed person and they told me they had gotten this misinformation from ChatGPT. I told them what the actual truth was and that ChatGPT was wrong and I’m not sure they believed me. But blog readers know me as a source of reliable information so maybe you guys will believe me.

We were talking about the definition of CSAM, child sexual abuse material. They used to call it child pornography but lately the wording has switched to CSAM. I really hate talking about this but I don’t want people going around relying on ChatGPT’s wrong definition. So here goes, a myth-buster for you:

It is perfectly legal to take photos or videos of children without any clothes on. It is also perfectly legal to post said images onto the internet.

Mere nudity is not enough to make a photo or video CSAM. Context is key: there has to be a sexual element to the image, something meant to arouse the viewer.

To give some examples of photos of nude children which are not CSAM:

The photographer Anne Geddes has taken numerous artsy photos of babies and toddlers who are often naked, and her photos can be seen on calendars and in books. This photo for example. That’s not CSAM. Or this one which was on the cover of a magazine.

Photographs taken in a medical or forensic context are also not CSAM. I am still posting medical case reports to Reddit daily and I sometimes encounter such images in the reports.

For example, I found a case report of a very rare condition called Caudal Duplication Syndrome where structures in the lower part of the body are duplicated, including the gastrointestinal and genitourinary organs. The patient in question was born with multiple sets of genitalia and the case report described and showed, with photos, how they removed one of his two penises and surgically turned the two scrotums into one scrotum. The final image was of the patient as a toddler, standing there nude (and picking his nose), and you would never have guessed he had been born with anything unusual “down there” because it all looked normal. The photos in the case report were necessary, to teach other doctors how to fix this particular problem, and there was nothing sexual about it, not any more than if they had been images of them removing a superfluous arm. (Also, I feel obliged to say the patient’s parents would’ve had to consent for the publication of those images.)

Family photos of a child in the bathtub, or a nude baby having some tummy time, or a nude baby nursing? Also not CSAM. There’s a photo like that at my mom’s house, of me. One time I scanned it into my computer and decided to send it to any man who sent me unsolicited requests for nudes (something that happens to a lot of women online). Fortunately I’ve never gotten any such requests.

If it’s zoomed in on the child’s genital area, that might be CSAM. Although again, it depends on the context. I read an article, I think in the Washington Post, a few years ago where they interviewed a man whose young son developed a rash down there and this was during covid lockdown when it was hard to see a doctor in person. So the man took a photo of the rash and emailed it to a telehealth doctor who prescribed medication for it. Google, like many online platforms, has AI technology designed to automatically check images for CSAM, and the Google decided this photo was CSAM and banned the father’s Gmail account and also notified the police in his jurisdiction. The police investigated and quickly decided no crime had taken place, but the guy did not get his Gmail account back. The father said he understood why Google reported him since it was a close-up photo of a child’s genital area and the modbot didn’t understand it was for medical purposes, but he thinks Google should have given him his Gmail account back once he was exonerated.

Now, if the image shows a child with an erect penis, or if the child in the photo is touching themselves down there, that’s CSAM cause there is a sexual element to the image in that case. If there is an adult in the image also with an erect penis, that’s CSAM. If there is sexual activity happening in the image, well, obviously that’s CSAM.

I feel really gross having to explain all this. But apparently ChatGPT is telling people, or at least it told that Redditor I was talking to, that taking or posting any child nudity images in any context whatsoever is a crime and that’s simply not true. You can make your own decisions as to whether it’s wrong or exploitative to post such images online, but it’s not a criminal offense.

Now I’m going off to take a shower and try to think about anything other than this, for the rest of the day.

Alice Mae Sullivan identified after almost 40 years. I don’t understand why this didn’t happen sooner.

So Alice Mae Sullivan was 20 years old, the mother of a toddler, and a sophomore at Tennessee State University when she disappeared from Nashville in 1986. She has just been identified. Her skull was found on Stokers Lane in Nashville in 2004.

I don’t really understand why this didn’t happen earlier. You find a skull, it seems like the logical next step is to start checking the local missing persons cases and see if it’s any of theirs. It seems they didn’t do that. For 21 years.

I wonder if cost was an issue. The article I linked to says the skull was identified by the forensic scientists at the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification. If I recall correctly, in the last several years there have been government grants issued to police departments to send their unidentified bodies to the UNT for DNA testing. If Alice’s skull lacked a mandible, they might have needed DNA rather than dental records for the identification. And DNA testing is not cheap.

RIP, Alice. If your death was a homicide (as seems likely), I hope they find out who did it.

21 years of Charley Project. 40 years of me.

So on October 5 I turned forty years old. And the Charley Project is going to turn 21 on October 12. I have now been running it more than half my life.

I really can’t imagine doing anything else. And the site, in addition to helping find missing people, supports a whole ecosystem of online true crime content creators. That was not something I would have thought it could do, back when I started it in 2004. But I don’t know if “content” was really a thing in 2004. I don’t think there was YouTube then, for example.

One of the reasons for this blog is to educate people about mental illness and stuff and I wanted to talk about my recent mental health care changes.

I’m seeing a new therapist as the previous one left her position at the psych clinic. So far I’ve seen the new one three times. She thinks I might need my meds adjusted cause of my depression and anxiety about the future. I think my depression and anxiety about the future is perfectly appropriate given that I believe we are living through a slow motion societal collapse. But I can’t do anything about the collapse. No individual person can, really. I just stay in my little corner of the world trying to do what good I can with the resources I have.

One of the things the psych clinic hooked me up with was a social worker, who has been seeing me for a little over a year for “additional support.” He is very nice. He came to my house every two weeks. I’ve always been slightly puzzled as to what he was supposed to be doing for me. He’d show up and ask how I was and what content I’d been posting on Reddit lately, and tell me to stop worrying about everything, and listen to me rant about politics. If I needed groceries or to fill prescriptions he’d give me a ride to the store/pharmacy (since our transportation situation is less than ideal still).

Then he would leave. It seemed like just when the dog finally calmed down and stopped barking at him it was time for him to leave. It felt like the appointments were not long enough for anything to be accomplished.

I felt like I was wasting his time and wondered what the point was. But I didn’t mind the visits and also figured: these are experts and if they say I need this “additional support”, maybe I do. I wonder if it was really just to keep an eye on me given how rapidly I can decompensate, when I do.

The social worker visited last week and I asked him if there were any programs for low income people to get home repairs made because our front door was refusing to lock, even with the deadbolt, and I thought the door had broken and needed replaced but we couldn’t afford it. The social worker asked for a screwdriver and a hammer, did something to the door, and somehow got it to lock again.

It was probably the most useful appointment with him I ever had. And it was the last. After fixing my door he declared I had “graduated” and that I didn’t need this level of care anymore. From now on I will be seeing some other social worker, once a month instead of every two weeks, and by tele-health instead of a house call. I’m still seeing the therapist every two weeks though.

My days are long and kind of lonely. I work on the Charley Project, I read books, I walk the dog, I wait for my husband to come home. When he does, he and I and our roommate have dinner together and I tell them what I read/posted that day and then we watch TV. I wish I could get more socialization. I do have two local friends but we don’t see each other all that often cause they’re busy and cause of the transportation issue. We had dinner together to celebrate my birthday.

A few people have asked about presents. If you want to get me a birthday present I have an Amazon wishlist of books I want in paper form, and an Amazon wishlist of books I want in Kindle form. There’s also PayPal.

The Patreon I set up has been going well so far. And the Charley Project itself has been going well. I think the technical problem I posted about yesterday is fixed.

I was in another podcast

Check out my interview on episode 24 of Tragedy — A True Crime Podcast. I talk about the Charley Project and how it helps solve cases, and talk about a few of the cases that have most strongly affected me. The podcasters are great people and I had a good time talking to them.

Also, I added the Charley Project’s 17,000th missing person last night.