Though my website is very well known in online true crime spaces, I tend to personally avoid such spaces myself. This is in part because I wish to pursue other interests on social media and don’t want my algorithm choked with missing persons stuff when I’m “off the clock” and in part because people in true crime forums can be extremely judgmental.
There are soooo many criticisms of missing people’s families, by people who have never had a missing person in their family. So many very serious accusations made based on vibes rather than evidence.
The other day I took the uncommon step of posting about a disappearance on Reddit, not in a true crime sub cause this case isn’t thought to be criminal in nature. My post generated a lot of responses and some of them just made me really sad because people were casting judgment on the missing woman’s family and it was clear that many of them simply had no idea what they were talking about.
The missing woman was a type one diabetic and disappeared without her insulin. In type one diabetes, insulin is a life sustaining medication. She wouldn’t have lasted a week without it. About three weeks or so after she went missing her parents published an obituary for her, which lamented the lack of support services available for people like her; she was autistic as well as diabetic.
Some people were suspicious that her parents decided she was dead and put out the obituary in less than a month (that’s the sort of thing I mean when I say “based on vibes”), but it made perfect sense to me: they didn’t know exactly what happened to her but they did know she did not have insulin and they knew she couldn’t have possibly survived very long without it. One person was like “The stuff about the lack of support services is a lie, there are plenty of support services for people like her!” They basically made that up. There is in fact a severe lack of support services for autistic adults nationwide, and the fact that they were insisting this was not the case was a clear indication they had no idea what it was like to be an autistic adult or a caregiver for one. Another person was like “No one just runs off into the abyss!” Um… autistic people do all the time. There’s even a name for it, “eloping.”
It is also true that the general tone of the discussion was expressing sorrow about what happened and talking of the difficulties of caring for an autistic adult. The people who were making judgmental and/or ignorant statements were mostly downvoted and criticized. But the fact that many people were making such comments still made me sad.
The missing woman’s disappearance is thought to have been a tragic accident; there’s no evidence that it was not and no evidence that her parents didn’t care about her. They’d been managing her diabetes, an indication that they were generally responsible. They made a mistake, yes, but if they had known what the result what would be they would not have made the choice they did. Disabled people should get as much freedom as they can given the limitations of their disability, and her parents appear to have made a choice that, 99 times out of 100, would have turned out just fine. But this 1 time it did not and I’m sure they will regret this for the rest of their days and already feel bad enough about it without the remarks of internet strangers adding to their guilt.
It’s possible I feel especially sensitive about this because this woman was 23, and when I was 23 I was going through some serious issues with my mental illness, in and out of psych hospitals. I was hospitalized three times in like six months. I went on a trip to see a friend one time and wound up in the hospital under psychiatric observation due to a misunderstanding/overreaction. A few months later I went on another trip to see another friend and I was raped. My parents were extremely concerned and saying maybe I shouldn’t leave home anymore and I was extremely annoyed at what I saw of them constantly hovering around me. No 23-year-old wants their parents around them all the time and I wanted to enjoy all the freedoms other young adults have. (Frankly, because of the issues in my family that I have previously mentioned on this blog, being around my family made my mental health worse.) I’m sure the missing woman in this case felt the same way. She was more disabled than I was but she too didn’t want to be around her parents 24/7.
I think a lot of people don’t like admitting mistakes happen and accidents happen and will come up with some person to blame, or some theory as to why it wasn’t really an accident, because they don’t want to think that something like that could happen to them or someone they love.
I’ve seen this tendency when I’ve posted case reports of accidental deaths to Reddit. There’s always someone in the comments being like “I don’t think that’s what happened, I think XYZ happened instead.” And I am like, Sir, you are a random Redditor and per your post history you are a carpenter and you have read all of a two-page article about this case; do you really think you know more about this case than the medical examiner who did the autopsy and the police who investigated the death?
I understand that people can’t help but form opinions and I understand they want to talk about those opinions. And I’ve probably cast judgment from time to time when I should not have. But I think of how easy it would be for the relatives of those missing/deceased people to find those posts and how hurtful it would be for them to read.
What I mean is, be careful what you say, particularly when it’s on a public forum literally anyone can read.
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