It seems like we ought to at least try

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Patrick Michael Combs has been located. Cattle ranchers in Washakie County, Wyoming found his skeletal remains.

Probably won’t be updating Ylva Hagner’s case

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.

If still alive she’d be 68 today.

Got a strange email

The internet is back up, finally. I’m not sure what was going on with it.

The NCMEC sent me a strange email. They asked me I knew a certain name. Apparently they’ve been corresponding with some guy who claims he’s associated with the Charley Project. They wanted to confirm this association.

I told them the person was lying to them and so was anyone else other than me who claimed to be associated with the Charley Project. I didn’t even recognize his name.

Not sure what’s going on with the Internet

There probably won’t be a missing person of the week or update today as the Internet has been on and off, mostly off, all day. The longest it’s been on was like twenty minutes. I’m writing this on my cell phone using data, cause that’s the only thing that’s reliably connected.

We aren’t sure what’s going on but if it keeps up tomorrow we’ll have to make a service call.

So that’s that.

One of the few online hobbies I can still indulge in with only a phone is Reddit posting. The last year or so I’ve been posting a lot of Medical Gore. I started out specializing in neglected cancers (and they’re still a big hit) but have branched out quite a bit since then.

Today I put up a bear mauling, an inflamed eye that had to be removed, a cancerous scrotum which also had to be removed, and a bunch of squamous cell carcinoma surgeries and reconstructions. Other highlights for the past week include a teratoma, gastroschisis (a congenital defect where a baby is born with its organs leaking out of a hole in its abdomen, surprisingly survivable), an exploding tire that took out a guy’s eye, a thing called a giant orf that I had never heard of before I found the case report, two nasty snakebites and an honest-to-god REAL vaccine injury where a patient got necrotizing fasciitis caused by the fact that the vaccine vial had been partially used and then left out for a week before being injected into the patient.

I’ve also recently added a bunch of historical photos from the Library of Congress website to some historical subreddits.

I really wanted to update Charley but I am at the mercy of the connection.

More updated APs

I’ve been trawling the NCMEC site and here’s a list of cases with updated age-progressons:

1. Stephen Shawn Austin
2. Ilias Badys
3. Amber Renee Barker
4. Donna Michele Barnhill
5. Kristina Renae Bishop
6. Eitan Ariel Blasingame
7. William Walter Brooks Jr.
8. Andre Terrence Bryant
9. Everlyse Cabrera
10. Abraham Ignacio Campos
11. Mindi Chambers
12. Tilwanda Denise Cheatham
13. Jovanna Stacey Crawford
14. Gabrielle Nicole Dahm
15. Christopher Gage Daniel
16. Joshua Jayvaughn Davis Jr.
17. Ameera Deadrick
18. Krista Maria De La Rosa
19. Kimberly Sue Doss
20. Deklon Ford
21. Giovanni Ernesto Gonzalez
22. Shaunda Renne Green
23. Equilla Lynn Hodrick
24. Jeremiah George Huger
25. Gabriel Scott Johnson
26. Tricia J. Kellett
27. Jason Andrew Knapp
28. Adam Benjamin Lake
29. Ta’Niyah Monique Leonard
30. Chloie Rhianna Leverette
31. Deborah A. McCall
32. Charles Edward Melendez
33. Kelly Eileen Morrissey
34. Michelle Meredith Mulcahy
35. Crystal Lynn Ortega
36. Misty Dawn Ortega
37. Pamela Ann Pedro
38. Pearl Jean Francis Pinson
39. Sandra Kay Powell
40. Eric Wayne Pyles
41. Henry Rodriguez
42. Jonathan Rodriguez Marina
43. Kristy Rita Rosario
44. Lissy Yaris Rosario
45. Luis Enrique Rosario Jr.
46. Sean Isaac Sidi
47. Brandon Lee Wade

There are so many missing kids on the NCMEC that I have almost no info for, only whatever was on the poster, and that’s hardly anything. “May be with her mother.” “Last seen on such-and-such date.” “Last seen by an adult male in his home.” So sad. And every once in awhile a new poster appears, of some kid who has been missing for decades.

Some updated age-progressions and stuff

The other night I updated some APs in cases. I forgot to write them all down but here’s the names I do remember:

1. Sabrina Paige Aisenberg
2. Ebrahim Bozorgi
3. Zafar Bozorgi
4. Mary Jo Burnette
5. Andrea Leigh Cotten
6. David Allen Crabtree
7. Jeremy Lee Dages (his mom Bonnie got one also but since hers was a new one instead of merely a replaced old one, she’s on the updates page)
8. Thomas Estevis
9. James A. Hendrickson
10. Sabrina Mae Kahler
11. John Francis Lango
12. Teekah Latres Lewis
13. Daniel A. Naylor
14. Michelle Lois Prasek
15. Sophie Elizabeth Reeder
16. Setina Princess Weddles

I’ll be working on that today as well so the list may grow.

Things are fairly quiet at the moment. But the harassment/abuse/libel that I wrote about last year, from that mentally disturbed girl that my husband taught math to, hasn’t stopped. Generally, I refer to it as “the CB situation.” C stands for Crazy. B stands for a word that rhymes with witch.

My husband had lost multiple jobs due to this girl’s lies. Once a school becomes aware of an accusation like the ones she has made, a teacher cannot count on any support, because no school wants to deal with that kind of noise. They don’t care that he’s innocent, that child protective services says he’s innocent. They don’t care that some of the claims the girl has made violate the laws of physics. They just don’t want to be accused of employing a pedophile. And I understand that completely.

We’ve seen a lawyer who says he’ll take the case, but he wants to be paid thousands of dollars up front because this kid is aged out of foster care and presumably has no money to pay us in damages. So the lawyer, who needs to eat, wants paid in advance. And I get that. It’s just hard to get the money when her accusations keep getting my husband fired from job after job. He’s given up teaching for now and was working a temporary position in another field, but that’s about to end and he has to find something else.

My husband has gotten death threats. I’ve been threatened (not my life, my career). We’ve filed multiple police reports about this girl. We’ve taken security measures. I am afraid she or one of her stupid friends is going to learn our address, post it online and send a lynch mob to our house. People have been killed over far less than this. My dog Patrick is probably more than capable of defending us from intruders, but not if they’re armed.

This has been happening, off and on, since June 2021 and to a certain extent it’s just life now. I don’t think I’m going to realize how incredibly stressful it is until after it’s over. And I don’t think it’ll be over for awhile yet. Because we are going to get the money somehow and get a judge’s order that she must stop telling these lies. She’s over 18 now and needs to face some grown up consequences for her actions. She may be mentally disturbed or whatever — she has to be, if she was attending that school — but she knows she is making untrue statements and she knows that’s wrong.

I don’t really like talking about it, which is why I’ve only mentioned it once on the blog before. But it’s been heavy on my mind lately and I thought I’d bring it up again, in case anyone hears from this girl. She’s threatened to bring down the Charley Project because I’m “sleeping next to a predator”, you see.

Just hours after my last update…

…I heard from a guy who used to date a person I’d just added to Charley in that update. He says he knows people who are in current contact with the lady listed as missing.

I sent him a screenshot of her missing persons listing on the state police website and advised him to get word to his ex to contact the police and get the matter cleared up.

This happens sometimes. In one case the missing lady had run off to the South Pacific and was presumably lying on a sunny beach sipping a cocktail. She was in contact with her family by social media but the police refused to remove her missing persons report unless she personally went to the station to identify herself. She did not feel any obligation to do this (and I wouldn’t either, since this would involve a minimum of 16 hours on a plane, the cost assumed by the flier) and so remained “missing” for years.

What’s a barracuda?

So yesterday I was looking for cases on NamUs and found a 1979 one where the missing man was said to be wearing a “blue barracuda” at the time he disappeared.

I was very confused because as far as I knew, a barracuda was a species of fish and nothing else. I wondered if they actually meant a balaclava, a type of ski mask.

I googled it and discovered Barracuda is a clothing company, but they make all kinds of clothes and I don’t think the company existed in 1979.

I called my mom, who was a grown woman in 1979, and asked if she had any idea what it could be. She did not, but told me a Barracuda is also a type of car. This was an interesting factoid but not very useful information.

I shrugged and posted the question to social media. In the meantime, I posted the case but omitted the barracuda from the clothing description.

Social media provided several answers (I learned that Barracuda is a name for an email screening software) but the only one that made any sense was from someone who asked their father and was told that sometimes back in those days, denim jackets were referred to as barracudas.

This is a pretty good example of why police reports shouldn’t use slang terms or regionalisms. Because people outside that particular time and place may have NO IDEA what they are.

Added a bunch of Virgin Islands cases today

Today I added twelve (as of this writing) cases from the U.S. Virgin Islands, working off this list of cases that came out in November. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find enough photographs and information to make casefiles for each of the names on that list.

Most of the people missing from the USVI are persons of color, which makes sense because the general population of the territory is mostly black and Hispanic.

I think it’s telling that the most famous missing persons cases from there–Hannah Upp, Sarm Heslop and Lucy Schuhmann–are all white women and none of them are originally from the USVI. Hannah moved there a few years prior to her disappearance to take a teaching job, and Sarm and Lucy were both tourists. There are quite a few islanders missing but very little press about those cases. Missing White Woman Syndrome strikes again.

I haven’t added Sarm to the Charley Project yet. I expect I’ll get to her tomorrow or something. Hannah I added in 2019. It’s likely she had another dissociative fugue state and went to the water like she had always done, and this time her luck ran out and she drowned. Why she moved to the USVI, when she knew she’d had repeated episodes of losing herself and turning up in water, is a mystery to me. If I were her I would have moved to someplace very far away from any body of water larger than a puddle.

A few years ago I actually spoke to one of Hannah’s island acquaintances on the phone and I asked her if it was possible for a person to go missing without a trace and without leaving the islands, since they’re so tiny. She said it was extremely possible due to the thick jungle terrain. She told me a story about a sheep or something that went missing and how its body was found months later; it had been lying unburied within yards of its home the entire time but nobody had found it before because of how thick the vegetation is there.

This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for you

Without all of you, the Charley Project would have no meaning or purpose at all. It would be like a pile of puzzle boxes sitting abandoned in a dark room, with no one to try to put the pieces together.

So I thank all of you.

Happy Thanksgiving and stay safe.