So my father-in-law’s funeral is over and this past weekend I went to the Wisconsin Missing Persons Awareness Event, where I gave the keynote speech and the Charley Project was awarded a plaque from the organization. It was a really awesome event; they get bigger every year and every year more people show up.
Now I’m home again. And have a bunch of cases to resolve.
I suck at capitalism. I think of ways I could make more money off the Charley Project, like merch and stuff, and wind up not doing anything because I get to feeling horribly guilty because
1. It seems like there is no way to make money without the risk of exploiting others. Like merch. How do I know my merch wouldn’t be made by enslaved Uyghurs in Chinese labor camps (that’s who makes all the Temu stuff from what I’ve heard) or by child laborers in Bangladesh or something?
2. I don’t want anybody to ever be thinking I started the site as some kind of grift for donations. I’ve been accused of it before and though I know it’s not true and that no one who actually knows anything about the Charley Project would think it was true, it’s really hurtful every time it happens. I am actually a lot more sensitive to criticism than any of you know. The reputation of this site is worth more to me than making loads of money.
I would never put the Charley Project behind a paywall. Even if I wanted to do so, which I don’t (since it would make the site a great deal less useful to the public), I am pretty sure the internet would hate me for it.
Lately, the way things have been, I’ve been feeling like the Charley Project is akin to the Great Barrier Reef: providing a true crime ecosystem that many podcasters, YouTubers etc, feed off of, but suffering from over-exploitation and at risk.
Because no one wants to pay for content on the internet. Everyone wants it to be free. Like, how many people ACTUALLY donate to Wikipedia every year? They get the impression it’s a free public service but it’s not; it relies on grants and on donations. Imagine how upset people would be if Wikipedia vanished—but how many people would pay $3 a month to keep it?
I don’t want ads either. There don’t seem to be many products that would be appropriate to advertise on the grim catacombs of my site.
Patreon has been suggested. I don’t know much about it but I know Patreon supporters get offered rewards and I don’t know what I could offer for rewards. I know one true crime podcaster offered behind-the-scenes police homicide file content as a Patreon reward. Which on the surface sounds like a good reward given the content they were producing , but then the podcaster got canceled because the behind-the-scenes stuff included crime scene photos of a murdered child and people got upset. You can see how this can be problematic.
PayPal is taking more of a cut than they used to, and people are donating less. Because times are hard. The economy is supposedly going well but the middle class is shrinking and most people I know personally say they’re struggling. I saw in the news that they’d figured out how much it costs to live “comfortably” in my city, and that amount was more than twice the average income of a worker in my city.
I know I could make more if I officially registered as a nonprofit but I don’t really know how and only know that it involves lawyers and lawyers cost. Plus I don’t even know if a “nonprofit organization” can be legal if it consists of just one person.
I am exceedingly grateful to everyone who chips in, knowing they don’t have to and that most people do not. Several years ago some true crime people did a big fundraiser for the Charley Project and I was so grateful I cried. This money kept the wolf from the door for a long time when my husband lost his job. I don’t know what we’d have done without it.
I don’t know if the Great Barrier Reef thing is a very good metaphor but I’m tired and I’m cold and I’m writing on my cell phone in a dark room cause our power got shut off today. I hadn’t expected it but my husband didn’t seem surprised when I texted him at work about it. He says he’ll get us reconnected tonight. He handles the bills so until the disconnect I didn’t realize things had come to this.
And late this month I’m supposed to go to Wisconsin and give the keynote speech at their missing persons event and I am trying to figure out how to make this work financially: twenty hours of driving round trip, an Airbnb, and putting Patrick in a boarding facility while I’m gone. My sister and mom can’t take him cause of their own pets, Michael’s parents are not physically capable of handling him, my dad lives in a pet-free apartment. He will have to board.
I just suck at this. I’m sorry.
Spent some time writing up the Jeanette Ray disappearance/Renay Ray murder and was quite appalled by the dad’s behavior. It sounds like he may very well have been a serial killer. I think the minimum “body count” is three, and there’s Renay, almost certainly Jeanette as well, and probably poor Doreen Heskett too.
I try to keep the Charley Project’s narrative “voice” as neutral as possible, but I’m pretty sure a reader of Jeanette’s casefile can sense my loathing and contempt for Claude.
I remember reading the articles and gradually getting a sense of the story and how bad things were. They interviewed Marlene and talked about the other kids in the family… Why is the oldest daughter living with “another family” (as the article put it)?… Claude had been charged with incest. So that’s why the daughter isn’t at home. And so on.
The daughter testified at the trial and the papers named her. I didn’t, though it was a bit awkward just calling her “the daughter.” I thought about giving her a pseudonym but didn’t want to deliberately put up an inaccuracy. So she was “Claude’s oldest daughter”. I hope she’s alive and still and doing ok. 1965 was quite awhile ago.
There are so many tragedies I’ve covered on Charley that I wish some journalist or criminologist could write a book on. Because chances are the people mentioned in Jeanette’s Charley Project page were not Claude’s only victims, and maybe more publicity, even at this late date, could lead to something. I think it would make a good book, if nothing else.
This week’s featured missing person is Danielle Idaly Jimenez, a three-year-old girl who was abducted by her non-custodial father, Leandro Jimenez, after he (allegedly) killed her mother, Sonia.
That was in 2006. There’s been no sign of Danielle or her father since then. My guess is they’re in Mexico. Danielle may not know that she’s a missing child or that her dad killed her mom. She is 21 now, wherever she is.
This guy looks white to me too. But the Virginia State Police have him listed as black, and his name is the sort of name that much’s more common among black people than among white ones. So I put him down as black. My guess is he has mixed ancestry, but I can’t go around putting down my guesses. That’s not a way to run an accurate website. I just wanted y’all to know I did not make a mistake here.
The whole racial classification thing, when you look at the history of it, is pretty nonsensical anyway. Like, in South Africa under Apartheid, for people with afro-texture hair they determined whether a child could be classified as black or “colored” by sticking a pencil in their hair and seeing if it fell out, or stayed. If the pencil fell out they were colored and therefore in the middle of society, with more rights and privileges than black people but fewer than white ones; if it stayed in they were black and at the bottom. In some cases families were split up, with one child classified one way and their sibling classified another way even though they had the same parents. In the United States under Jim Crow they had now-offensive terms like “octoroon” to mean a person of 1/8th black ancestry and 7/8th white, or “quadroon” to mean 1/4th black, 3/4ths white. Obviously a person who is 7/8ths white is going to appear to be white, but legally they were black (they called this the “one drop” rule) and were supposed to use the schools, water fountains etc. for black people under the “separate but equal” rule. In Nazi Germany, some people who were half Jewish or less served in the Wehrmacht, and some of them got sent to Auschwitz.
So I’m looking up info on a missing guy’s Facebook page and find an argument going on in the comments of a five-year-old photo of the guy and his then pregnant girlfriend. Here is basically what it said:
GRANDMA OF GUY IN THE PHOTO: I know you are so happy about this baby hon but I’d feel better if you got paper.
GUY’S PREGNANT GIRLFRIEND: Excuse me? You want what?
GRANDMA: A paternity test. How do I know your baby is my grandson’s?
GIRLFRIEND: Are you saying I am a loose woman?
GRANDMA: I am not saying anything. I just want paper.
GIRLFRIEND: No, you are calling me a whore. I have been with your grandson since we were in high school. How dare you.
On and on this emotional and intimate family argument went, and if I could see it, so could everyone else. I really should not be able to see this, this is the kind of thing you don’t want visible for someone from another state to come across years after the fact. Makes me feel like a voyeur. All I wanted was some pics of the guy.
I once got an email from someone who was not angry so much as perplexed that I’d managed to get my hands on “private family photos” of her missing sister that the family did not intend to become public. The person was stunned to go to the Charley Project and see these photos and asked me where I got them. I had to explain about photo tagging and Facebook privacy settings and stuff and how these photos they thought were private, hadn’t been for years and years. And they were like “oh.”
Here’s to hoping for a pleasant 2024 and many cases solved.
So I guess John Lordan and maybe some other people reached about the financial plight and people responded with donations and I really, really appreciate that. I also got some kind messages of support I appreciate too.
Given how many charities and individuals that people’s donations could be sent to, it’s kind of an honor they decided on this one.
I’m still feeling really down but I will be updating tomorrow and maybe that will improve matters. One of the reasons I haven’t been lately, besides my low mood in general, is I’ve also been super tired all the time. Like, unable to sleep, but so tired I couldn’t really think and just sat there watching drama videos on YouTube where terrible people get canceled. Like, I’ve never heard of these people before in my life but by the end of the video I thought they were a turd who had gotten their comeuppance by being shamed on YouTube. This was about the extent of my intellectual capacity at the time.
But now I have a bit more energy. Maybe it’s the new medication working.
I’m just going to go back to work and pretend I don’t have depression and maybe if I ignore it, it will go away.
When I think of someone who is poor I think someone who is sleeping in the woods, who doesn’t have enough to eat. I tell myself that we are not living like that so we are fortunate.
But it is a fact that our cell phones have been shut off, that I wasn’t able to afford all my medication this month. I’ve been so depressed lately that my psychiatrist added another prescription to my regimen and that pushed the price of my meds from $60 to $120. And I didn’t have it so I got what meds I could afford and left the rest.
Monday I saw my nurse practitioner about my stomach sickness and was crying and distressed about my health and my husband’s inability to find full time work. The nurse practitioner gently asked if I’d like to go to the hospital psych ward as I was so distressed. I said no. She was able to get the medicine I needed, that I couldn’t afford, so I have it now. She’s going to refer me to specialists to discuss my stomach issue.
I’d get a job myself—the Charley Project doesn’t make much—were it not for this stomach sickness. I used to work at a warehouse. They kept me three and a half years and were satisfied with my work. But now I am out of commission for several days in a row, every single month, puking my guts out. No employer would find this acceptable. I need to get this problem in hand. I don’t even usually write on this blog about it every time I get sick like that cause no one wants to read about vomiting.
The FBI wants to talk to me about that tip I called in to the NCMEC the other day but they will have to wait. I cannot call or text anyone.
Yesterday after spending a long time in bed crying and in much misery I borrowed a neighbor’s phone and called my dad. Bless him, he came over from an hour and a half drive away just to hang out with me cause I felt so miserable and lonely. He’s a good person, my dad.
I figure things have to get better. Eventually my husband will find work again. He keeps getting interviews and even second interviews but then they pick someone with experience cause that’s what happens when you change careers. I know he’s trying. And hopefully the specialists I’ll see about my stomach problems can help.
I just feel like a failure is all. I should not be struggling like this, I’m a grown up person. My neighbor that lent me her phone to call my dad told me to grow up and “practice adulting” cause my dad won’t be around forever.
My parents decided to give me one of those kreeaytiv spellings of a common name, condemning me to a lifetime of repeatedly spelling out my name for everyone I meet who has to put it on a form. It’s annoying. Please consider this when naming your children.
Today I called the NCMEC hotline with a tip and after I gave them the information I had they were like, “So we need your contact info” and then without my saying anything the guy was like “It’s M-E-A-G-H-A-N right?” I’ve called before. They know me.
I hope something comes of this tip. It’s an old case, 1980s, one with almost no info.
The Charley Project Blog 