This week’s featured missing person is Brandon Steve Williams, who disappeared from Nashville, Tennessee on May 18, 2013. He was 33 at the time. Brandon is white, with black hair and brown eyes, and several scars and tattoos described/shown on his Charley Project page.
The circumstances of his disappearance aren’t very clear to me. He was Greyhounding across the country, starting in Salt Lake City, and contacted his friends and family on the way while in Nashville. He picked up some money his sister wired to him and bought a bus ticket to Florida to continue his trip, but didn’t board the bus. And he was just gone. And the police in Nashville didn’t get involved until nearly two years later.
This week’s featured missing person is Lisa Ann Littles, a 28-year-old woman who disappeared from Little Rock, Arkansas on September 27, 1994. She’s described as black, with black hair, brown eyes, pierced ears and a small scar on her forehead. She was wearing a white blouse with the logo, burgundy pants and black shoes.
Little info is available in the case: after an argument with an unspecified person inside a car, she calmed down, got out of the car to use the bathroom and never came back. She is also listed in the Arkansas state missing persons database, but without details.
Sorry it’s late. My pukes are finally gone though. Yay.
Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome sucks. I took my dog for a long walk yesterday and came home thirsty. I drank. Half an hour later I suddenly felt a certain kind of way, and…
I’ve learned there’s nothing to be done but wait these episodes out. Drink fluids to keep dehydration at bay but expect that anything that goes down will probably come back up. It doesn’t matter whether I consume anything or not: it comes back up, and when there’s nothing I will throw up nothing.
I try to live anyway. It’s just that other people get concerned. I was in physical therapy for my arm (desk worker’s shoulder) during the last episode and I actually had to puke during a session. I apologized, sat down, whipped out my bag and emptied my stomach. Then after it was empty continued retching with tears coming down my cheeks, my whole body trembling, as the physical therapist stared bug-eyed. Then I recovered, put the bag down and resumed my physical therapy exercise.
Today I’ve not puked yet but I know I am going to. I drank a whole bottle of water while out with the dog today and can feel it in there. Waiting.
It’s so exhausting as well. After an episode of puking I often drag myself to the bed, soaked in sweat, shaking, and just lie there.
Here’s a picture I took today of Patrick on his walk. He loves the pond. The big geese swam in front of the goslings and honked at him: “Come at me, bro!” He wisely decided to keep his distance.
Patrick encounters a family of geese
I am trying to cultivate my fur-son’s budding interest in nature as Michael and I have noticed he’s been better behaved at home since he’s started visiting the pond and nearby park area to hunt for critters. Ever since he caught a mouse last week he’s been obsessively hunting for more furry friends. No carnage results; he let the mouse go unharmed.
This week’s featured missing person is Anthony Lamar Horner, who was last seen in Santa Rosa, California on February 4, 1989. He was eighteen years old at the time and wearing a black rock band t-shirt, jeans and sneakers.
The combination of Anthony’s rock band shirt, his tattoos (a peacock, a mushroom and an inverted cross) and the fact that he’s listed as having left of his own accord make me wonder if he was following a band, maybe the Grateful Dead, on tour. But I have no idea. In any case, no band tours for as long as this.
I hope everyone is doing ok. I’ve been very depressed these last few months but I start psychotherapy again tomorrow. I’m really hoping that will help.
I’ve just been really struggling to get anything done. Tired all the time, too tired to do much, but at the same time not sleepy. Then I feel like a useless slug for my lack of productivity and get even more depressed.
Today is the first day in a bit that I’ve felt well enough to get anything properly done. Instead of just lying there playing on my phone and feeling horrible.
I found a report of an awful case in Nepal where a four-year-old girl was walking home from school through the woods when a 16-year-old boy, who also attended her school, grabbed her and attempted to sexually assault her. He didn’t get very far, just lifted her dress when she screamed and he slashed her throat and ran away. Fortunately the wound was relatively superficial, as far as attempted murders go, and the girl survived. The report, titled “Futile Sexual Homicide in Nepal“, describes her injuries and the treatment in medical detail with photos. Considering the resource-poor setting, I thought they gave the girl very good care.
I was quite appalled that someone as young as sixteen was going around already trying to rape and kill little girls. I mean, I’ve heard about this sort of thing before, but I get appalled every time.
I posted the report on Reddit, and remarked that the offender needed psychological treatment very badly and he needed it now. Then I had a few people saying I seemed disturbingly concerned about the offender’s well-being, as opposed to the victim’s.
I look at it from a utilitarian perspective: the girl got the help she needed, now we must help this boy. Because they can’t keep him locked in prison forever — even life terms in Nepal are fixed at 20 years — and it would be nice if, when he got out, he was less dangerous than when he came in. I know juvenile sexual offenders can sometimes be salvaged with appropriate treatment and become law-abiding and productive adults with normal sex lives. It would benefit the community as well as this boy if he were to get treatment.
I can understand the reaction, though, because of the brutality of the attack on the little girl. It does make you want to throw away the key.
And sadly, because of the aforementioned resource-poor setting, I doubt the boy is going to get the kind of treatment he needs to contain his urges to attack people. So his life will go down the drain, more or less, and he’ll try to take more people with him. Very sad situation.
Most people weren’t yelling at me about my concern for the boy, though. They were just mad that I said the attack on the four-year-old was carried out by “another child” and they were expecting like an eight-year-old, not a sixteen-year-old. I should probably have said “teenager.” I will make a note of this.
And now, in the missing persons news:
Somebody in Texas is claiming to be Diamond Bradley, a three-year-old girl who disappeared with her ten-year-old sister Tionda from Chicago back in 2001. I doubt this is the real Diamond, but presumably this will be investigated.
The police will start searching a reservoir tomorrow, trying to find the body of Madeleine McCann. Suspect Cristian Brueckner had visited the reservoir. I don’t know if they have an specific reason to think Madeleine’s there, besides the fact that he had visited.
In New Zealand, there will be a hearing to decide whether John Breckenridge and his eleven-year-old stepson Mike Zhao-Breckenridge, are dead or not. John picked up his stepson from school in 2015 and a week later they found the car in the ocean surf; it had gone off a cliff. No bodies. Mike’s mother hopes he’s still alive.
Christine Lester has been identified. The young Navajo woman, who was 24 when she disappeared in 1987, was found lying on the side of a rural road in California just sixteen days after she was last seen. Her murder is still an open investigation.
Peggy Anne Sweeten‘s husband James, who as far as I know is the only person of interest in her disappearance, has killed himself. This may or may not be connected to the discovery of a burn barrel which may or may not have contained Peggy’s remains.
Because there is no justice in this world, Ronnie Busick is somehow out of prison despite his involvement in the murder of four people and the kidnapping and rape of two of them. I’ve written before about my thoughts on the Freeman/Bible case. My opinions have not changed.
It’s been five years since the abductions of Luis and Kahmila Ramirez, though this is the first I’ve heard of the case. It was a family abduction case. The kids were in foster care and their parents, Luis Herrera-Ramirez and Andrea “Vanessa” Ramirez, kidnapped them during a supervised visitation. They may be in Mexico.
Patrick Michael Combs has been located. Cattle ranchers in Washakie County, Wyoming found his skeletal remains.
This week’s featured missing person is Debbie Lynn Prosser, a 25-year-old woman who disappeared from Fort Lauderdale, Florida on May 15, 1984. 39 years ago yesterday.
The above photo is of Debbie when she was in high school, about eight to ten years prior to her disappearance. I couldn’t find any more recent photos of her that were of decent enough quality to post a large version. She has brown hair and gray eyes, is 5’6 tall, and weighed 116 pounds when she disappeared. Very thin build.
Debbie had a boyfriend, Julio Alfonso, and she had moved out of his home six weeks prior to her disappearance. There was some domestic violence going on in the relationship, I’m not sure from which side, with prior police involvement. They’d argue and her stuff would get tossed out on the lawn.
She disappeared the day after Alfonso was found murdered in his home in Pompano Beach, shot multiple times in his head and upper torso. No signs of forced entry. Articles about Debbie’s disappearance said police were seeking her for questioning as a material witness in the murder and also feared she could be in danger as well. The borrowed car she was driving was found abandoned in Pompano Beach. No sign of Debbie. I don’t know if the murder was ever solved.
I have no idea if Debbie shot Julio and went on the run, if she was another victim of Julio’s murderer, or if her disappearance had nothing to do with Julio’s murder and the timing was just a coincidence.
If still alive, she’d be 63 today. Turning 64 on the 21st of this month.
Ylva Annika Hagner’s case is back in the news. The Stanford graduate student, a Swedish immigrant, has been missing since 1996. (Here’s an essay by a Stanford student who knew her), and I haven’t seen any news about her this century, until now.
Ylva
They have searched the Palo Alto, California home of her then-boyfriend, to see if she’s buried there. I’m not sure what prompted the search, whether some new evidence came up or they just felt like dusting off Ylva’s cold case file. The search didn’t turn up anything, unfortunately.
Some people would update Ylva’s casefile to add a sentence or two about the search. But I don’t see the point. Police search in a lot of places for missing persons, sometimes on evidence or a tip, sometimes on a hunch. And many times they find nothing. If I were to update the casefiles every time the cops learned yet a new place where the missing person is not, well…
Perhaps this search will still lead to something, even if they didn’t find Ylva. I hope so. She sounds like a lovely, interesting person. I’d love to be able to write a big update to the case. Better still, resolve it.
As a person who has read (I keep records) at least 848 crime books and counting, I’m glad to say my serial killer game is on point.
I was looking on NamUs yesterday when I saw the case of this boy, seventeen-year-old Mark Steven Scott, missing from Houston since 1972.
I thought: “Hmm… early seventies… teenage boy… Houston. That sounds like one of Dean Corll’s victims.” I knew Dean had been preying on adolescent boys in Houston during that very time period.
I would not normally have been very hopeful in trying a newspaper archive search for a name as common as “Mark Scott” as any articles about this Mark would be likely to drown in a sea of unrelated results. But I put in “Mark Scott Dean Corll” and discovered he was actually not just suspected but actually a confirmed victim. I hadn’t known that Corll even had confirmed victims who were still missing, but he did. (There’s also Norman Prater, whom I did know about, but he’s only a good guess rather than a confirmed victim.)
Poor Mark was actually misidentified, and by the time they corrected this error, in was too late to find him.
One of Corll’s accomplices, Elmer Wayne Henley, said Mark was buried at High Island Beach with a bunch of other bodies of Corll’s victims. There were two other burial sites, one of which was a boat shed. One of the boat shed bodies is unidentified to this day. The other was misidentified as Mark in 1993.
A DNA comparison was done between this boy and Mark’s mother, and the results indicated there was a 98% chance they were “related.” Whatever that means. We’re all related to a degree.
This identification was accepted by everyone except, apparently, Henley, who insisted Mark had been buried at the beach and not the boat shed. There was also the minor fact that the body was missing two teeth (and they could tell they’d been extracted during life and not just fallen out during decomposition) and had dark brown hair while Mark had light brown/blond hair and no missing teeth.
In 2011, another DNA test was done with more advanced technology. Thus, the dead boy with dark brown hair was identified as another 17-year-old, Steven Kent Sickman.
Dean Corll got away with his crimes for three years with impunity because the Houston police were terrible. Imagine having to go to Mark’s parents and tell them he was missing again and would never be found.
Because there was no more High Island Beach, you see, by 2011. High Island Beach, and whatever secrets it carried, had been lost to Hurricane Ike in 2008, and Mark Scott was taken with it. He’s under the ocean and it’s not really possible to recover his remains.
Putting up Mark’s case has made me interested in Corll and now I’m reading a book about his crimes. I’m only a few chapters in.
My current impressions from what I know of him and his crimes are that his juvenile accomplices are a lot more interesting than Corll himself is. I have a degree of sympathy for both of them, because they had been so young when they were recruited by Corll. David Brooks was only about twelve. I believe I read they had suffered sexual abuse at his hands.
But I am sympathetic only to a degree. As in, “life in prison rather than the death penalty” degree. After awhile you have to start taking responsibility for yourself—which I suppose Henley ultimately did, in a way, by killing Corll.
Henley is the only one of them who is left alive. He’ll die in prison and he deserves it.
This week’s featured missing person is Elmer Edward Booth, an 81-year-old man last seen in Colfax, California on April 5, 1993. It was noted that he appeared “confused” that day, but I don’t know if he suffered from dementia or any other medical conditions.
Booth has no known relatives; it was his landlord who filed the missing persons report. He was last seen wearing a coat and boots, and he has a full set of dentures. His nickname is Boots. He has gray hair and gray eyes, and is 5’9 tall and 160 pounds.
Whatever caused his disappearance, he’d be 111 years old today so definitely not still alive. I wonder if, while on his daily walk to town, he might have had some kind of age-related medical event and collapsed. My guess is he’s not far from where he disappeared.
I hope all of you are well. I wrote a blog entry for last week’s missing person of the week but then it didn’t go up for some reason, entry disappeared. Last weekend I attended the annual Wisconsin missing persons awareness event as I do every year. It’s a very heartwarming event with lots of families coming together. They want me to be the keynote speaker next year.
This week’s featured missing person is Terry Edward Reeves, a 37-year-old man who disappeared from Nottoway, Virginia on August 31, 2016.
I’ve decided to, when possible, find and post a large image of the missing person of the week on their blog entries. Not just small headshots like the Charley Project casefiles have. I won’t be able to do this with every case but I can do it with Terry:
That photo is from Donna McIntyre, the Missing and Not Forgotten lady, who posts a lot of info about missing persons on her social media. She’s a great resource. Regarding Terry she says he “got up and left only wearing his pajama bottoms, he was not even wearing any shoes. He’s a father of three children and his family knows he would not willingly just walk away from them.”
If Terry is still alive, he’d be about 44 today. I found significant discrepancies in his listed height; it was anywhere from 5’9 to 6’0, with the weight given as somewhere between 140 and 155 pounds. He has several different tattoos (there’s a photo of one of them at the casefile) and, at the time of his disappearance, he had a long beard. His nickname is Chuck.
I don’t have much information on Terry’s case, but the fact that his family doesn’t think he would have left them, and the fact that he was wearing only pajama pants, suggests that whatever happened to him was bad and that he’s no longer alive.
The Charley Project Blog 