The Beaumont children’s father has died

57 years after the disappearances of his children, Grant Alfred “Jim” Beaumont died in Adelaide, Australia on April 9 at 97 years of age. The obituary notice refers to his missing kids Jane, Arnna and Grant, and says they are “reunited in heaven.” Jim and the children’s mother, Nancy Beaumont, split in the seventies, and Nancy died in 2019.

It’s such a sad story and I don’t understand how three children could have disappeared at once, and from a public place, without anyone seeing or hearing a thing. And I think it’s unlikely the case will be solved, simply due to the passage of time.

Interesting article in the Lancaster/Smith cases

This article has come out in the disappearances of Jennifer Lancaster and her baby daughters Monique Smith and Sidney Smith. The case is peculiar to say the least. I mean, an entire family doesn’t usually just vanish.

There are indications that they left on their own to start a new life (the removal of clothes and blankets on a pretext, the secretive removal of other belongings, the comment card filled out in another state), and also indications that something bad may have happened (the fact that they’ve all completely dropped off the map for the past 23 years).

I have to wonder if someone who wanted the kids lured Jennifer to her death. They were both so young: Sidney was going on fourteen months and Monique was just five weeks old. It could be a situation like with Holly Marie Clouse: the parents murdered and dumped, unfound or unidentified, while the baby survived to grow up in someone else’s home.

Or, given as Monique’s paternity seems to be disputed, perhaps Monique’s dad did not want to pay child support and decided to dispose of all three of them. That’s definitely happened before.

I cannot imagine the grief of Jennifer’s family, to have lost all three of them at once like that. I hope they get answers.

MP of the week: David Marko

This week’s featured missing person is David Alexander Marko, one of the oldest open family abduction cases the Charley Project has. David was three and a half when he was abducted by his non-custodial mother, Norma, from Burbank, California on April 17, 1993 — thirty years ago next month.

I suppose there’s no reason to suppose the boy is dead; most family abduction cases end with the missing child being found alive. But thirty years is a long time to be gone.

David is Hispanic, with brown hair and brown eyes, and a birthmark on the inside of his left thigh. Norma is also Hispanic, 5’2 to 5’4 and 160 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. She would be 64 if still alive today; David would be 33. Norma may use the last names Diaz, Garcia and/or Limon. She and David may travel back and forth over the Mexican border at Laredo, Texas, and may be in Houston, Texas.

If he’s in Mexico, that might explain why David is still listed as missing after thirty years. Our ability to find people is severely limited outside our own national borders.

Hope everyone is ok. I’m still dealing with the vomiting problem and was up all last night puking. I think I’m super depressed. I put my name in for therapy but I don’t get to meet the therapist until May.

Born to Lose

When I have one of my vomiting cycles, there’s not much I can do but lie in bed and try to be as still as possible. One of the few things I can do, is read, as long as it’s on my phone or a Kindle and not an actual paper book. (Holding the book up and turning pages takes enough movement that it makes the nausea worse.) During the most recent episode of the pukes, I read the Kindle edition of James G. Hollock’s Born to Lose: Stanley B. Hoss & the Crime Spree That Gripped a Nation.

Hoss was pretty much the worst of the worst. Like, I’m against the death penalty and I’ve said that many times, but Hoss is the kind of person the death penalty was made for.

In prison, doing a life sentence in the most secure part of the facility, having already killed a cop and presumably also Linda Mae and Lori Mae Peugeot, Hoss tortured a guard to death for no reason. I know that a malicious guard can make a prisoner’s life a misery, but Hoss and this particular guard didn’t have a problem with each other. Hoss and a few of his friends brutally murdered that poor man just because they could. What else can you do with such a person, besides kill them?

It’s kind of up in the air as to whether Hoss was created by nature, or nurture. I think some people ARE born bad. Hoss’s family were, for the most part, not criminals, and there’s no evidence that he was abused as a child. But there were indications that something was “off”. One of the few people Hoss cared about was his big sister Betty, and the way he and Betty were with each other gave rise to open speculation of incest from many people. We’ll never know the truth because both Hoss and his sister are dead now. But I wouldn’t be surprised.

The book had info about the kidnapping of the Peugeots and what Hoss told the cops about where he put their bodies. But I think it’s very unlikely they’ll ever be found, even if Hoss wasn’t jerking the police around, which he probably was. Crazy to think he traveled with them for days. He claims he took the baby all the way from Delaware to Kansas. Perhaps an Amber Alert, if it had existed in 1969, would have saved her and her mother.

Per the book, Linda’s mother suicided from grief. Hoss destroyed so many people’s lives.

It was a good book. I recommend it.

MP of the week: Trenton Duckett

This week’s featured missing person is Trenton John Duckett, who disappeared from Leesburg, Florida on August 26, 2006, just two weeks after his second birthday.

This case is a fairly well-known one. Trenton went missing in the middle of his parents’ contentious divorce, and both parents publicly accused the other one of being behind his disappearance. The investigation quickly focused on his mother, Melinda, as Trenton was in her care when he disappeared. After her son went missing, Melinda apparently threw out his photos and some of his toys, which is odd to say the least.

Unfortunately, things ground to a screeching halt after Melinda’s suicide on September 8, thirteen days after her son’s disappearance. After getting aggressively grilled on national TV by Nancy Grace about her missing boy, Melinda hid inside her grandparents’ closet and shot herself.

Melinda’s family subsequently sued Nancy Grace and her network for wrongful death. The suit was settled out of court. It’s worth noting that Melinda had a history of depression, suicidal ideation and psychiatric hospital stays, so I don’t think her death can be put down to Nancy Grace’s interview, but that certainly didn’t help matters.

Trenton’s mother took whatever she knew to her grave. And since then there hasn’t been much activity in Trenton’s case. The cops seem to think Melinda probably killed him.

If still alive, Trenton would be 18 now. He would probably have no memory of his pre-disappearance life and, perhaps, no idea he’s listed as a missing child.

Trenton is half-white, half-Korean, with brown hair and brown eyes. I hope he’s still alive, but I think it’s unlikely.

SMH at the ineptitude of the cops in Cory Bigsby interview

So today is (allegedly, we’ll get to that) the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of four-year-old Codi Bigsby from his father’s home in Virginia. No charges have been filed in the case, but the police zeroed in on Codi’s dad, Cory, as a suspect very quickly and he is still a suspect. They have said they think Codi disappeared earlier than his dad claimed, although I haven’t seen anything about when he was last seen by anyone outside the household. (Which consisted of Codi, Cory, and three of Cory’s other children.)

When writing up the case I was kind of appalled to see how Cory was treated during his first police interview after he reported his son missing. I was just facepalming.

Now, in my opinion Cory is not a person easy to sympathize with. He was previously arrested for domestic violence against Codi’s mom, and he admits he left his kids (the oldest of whom was only five) home alone for hours at a time because they were “a handful.” But without a doubt, his Constitutional rights were violated in that police interview and that matters.

The interview lasted between 9:30 p.m. and 4:45 a.m. That’s over seven hours, during which Cory was not, technically, under arrest. (On February 3 he was arrested, but not for anything to do with Codi’s disappearance. He was arrested for child neglect for leaving the kids home alone.) During this time, on more than TWENTY occasions Cory said he was tired and wanted to go home to sleep. The police told him “going home is not an option.”

This was a lie: Cory was in fact legally free to stop the interview and go home. But after the very first time he said he wanted to leave and the cops refused to let him go, he was basically under duress and there’s a good chance anything he said would not be permitted to be used in court.

The law asks: would a reasonable person feel like they were being detained and were not permitted to leave? And in that situation, of repeatedly asking to leave and being told it’s “not an option”, I think a reasonable person would definitely feel that way. (This, incidentally, is why those “how to handle a law enforcement encounter” advice people say you should directly ask the police if you are being detained.) A statement has to be “free and voluntary” to be used in court and by this point Cory wasn’t there voluntarily anymore.

Furthermore, TWICE Cory said he wanted to see an attorney, and TWICE his request was ignored. Big no-no. Once a suspect invokes their right to counsel, the police are supposed to immediately stop the interview and not ask any more questions of the suspect until the requested attorney arrives on scene.

Now, a lot of you may be thinking “I don’t care about this person’s so-called rights, I don’t care how they were treated, they’re a child neglecter/abuser and possible murderer.” But you should care. Not only because what happened to Cory could easily happen to you, but also because this botched interrogation may (assuming his father killed him, which the police seem to think he did) prevent Codi from ever getting justice.

The law says if a suspect invokes their right to counsel and isn’t given counsel, everything they say after that cannot be used in court. The suspect could confess to the most vile criminal offenses, to being a serial killer even, and their words would not be allowed to be used against them. I have no idea what Cory told the police during his interview, but if he admitted to anything incriminating after he was refused an attorney, those admissions cannot be used against him.

These are not obscure procedural rules. This is Police Interrogation 101. I can’t even with the incompetence here.

The police have since admitted they Did A Bad, and the detective who botched the interview was “punished”… by being pulled off the case and placed on paid administrative leave. So they were punished for their terrible policing by being given a paid vacation from work.

It’s been a year and no one knows where Codi is. I hope this interrogation did not reduce our chances of finding out what happened to him.

This article talks about what went wrong in the interview; it’s a good one.

MP of the week: Hattie Jackson

This week’s featured missing person is Hattie Yvonne Jackson, a six-year-old girl who disappeared from Washington D.C. on July 21, 1961. She was black, with black hair and brown eyes, and was last seen wearing a white long-sleeved blouse, brown and white checked shorts, pink sandals and a blue ribbon in her hair.

Hattie was apparently abducted; witnesses saw two men pulling her into a car. For some reason there’s only a description and sketch for one of the men, the driver. He had approached Hattie and some other children earlier that day and offered to give them a ride, but they’d turned him down.

Unfortunately there hasn’t been anything about Hattie in the news for a very long time. I don’t know if any of her relatives are even still alive. I don’t know how seriously the police looked for her in 1961, or if any suspects in her case have ever been identified.

If she is still alive, Hattie would be about 67 years old today.

Have heard the news about Melissa Highsmith

According to everybody, Melissa Suzanne Highsmith, a toddler who was abducted by a phony babysitter from her family’s Fort Worth, Texas home in 1971, has been found alive and well and has reunited with the Highsmith family. She had been living under the name Melanie Warren.

This is obviously terrific news. She had been missing for 50 years, 51 years in August!

I am going to wait on official police confirmation on this because past hoax “finds” have made me wary. But it is really awesome news. Her family will have her home for Christmas.

MP of the week: Sabrina Aisenberg

This week’s featured missing person is Sabrina Paige Aisenberg, who was abducted from her crib in Valrico, Florida on November 24, 1997, aged just four months old.

Her parents were subsequently charged with some stuff in the case, but the charges were dropped after it turned out there was basically no actual evidence against them. And there the matter rests.

I know there’s been a lot of suppositions and stuff bandied about on the internet about this case. I once spoke to a man who had been posting a certain photo of a young woman on social media, claiming she was an adult Sabrina. The police had already looked into the matter and told the man she was not Sabrina, but he kept posting the picture and making this untrue claim. I figured if someone was doing that with my photo, I’d want to know about it, so I contacted the woman and told her what was going on. She was horrified.

I doubt Sabrina’s parents were actually involved in the case at all. It seems more likely that the baby was kidnapped by someone who wanted to raise her, or by someone who wanted to sell her for adoption purposes.

Sabrina, if still alive — and there’s really no reason to think she isn’t — would be 25 years old today. She has some Y-shaped marks on her shoulder which might be used to identify her as an adult.

Haleigh Cummings’s dad released from prison

Ronald Cummings, the father of Haleigh Cummings who disappeared from her home in 2009 at age 5, has been released from prison. He had been serving a fifteen-year sentence for drug trafficking. His now ex-wife, Misty, who was watching Haleigh on the night she disappeared (Ron was at work) is serving 25 years for the same offense.

I had always thought that those drug sentences were very severe, and wonder if they were mandated sentences left over from the “get tough on drugs” years in the 90s. I mean, 15 years, 25 years for selling some pills on the street? You can get less time than that, sometimes, for MURDER.

There had been hope that the drug defendants would try to cut their sentences down by offering information on Haleigh. But this never materialized.

With Misty, anyway, there’s a sense that she was sentenced for the wrong crime: if she didn’t outright cause Haleigh’s disappearance, she knows what happened and isn’t saying. But that’s not how things are supposed to work in this country. You’re supposed to be sentenced for the crime you were found guilty of, and ONLY that crime.

In any case, Ron’s release got Haleigh’s name back in the news where it hadn’t been in quite awhile. Maybe something will come of that. I’ve blogged about Haleigh numerous times, but the last time was over ten years ago.

There’s a four-episode podcast about Haleigh, by the way. I haven’t listened to it so can’t comment on the quality.