Wanted to recommend this Reuters special report

I wanted to let you all know you should read this article about how Russia is stealing Ukrainian kids and sending them into Russia to get their names changed and get adopted by Russian people loyal to Putin’s regime.

Every time a war or natural disaster breaks out, people say things like “the poor orphaned kids, I wish I could adopt them” but there are very good reasons not to. To begin with, many of the “orphans” are not orphans at all, but just temporarily separated from their families due to the chaos that results from wars and natural disasters, and it’ll take awhile to sort out who is even eligible for adoption. A lot of orphans are taken in by members of their extended family, and it’s usually better for them if that happens than if they are adopted by strangers. Also, those who are indeed orphaned and eligible for adoption are much better off being adopted by people from their country and their culture.

For an invading country to take away the available children and send them off for adoption by others — as Russia is doing here with Ukrainian children — is actually an act of genocide. If you go to this United Nations link and scroll down, you’ll find the legal definition of the genocide according to them and it says it’s genocide if there’s “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” including “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” The Nazis did the same thing during World War II, stealing the most attractive babies and little kids from their families in Eastern Europe and sending them to Germany to be raised by Nazi families. It was wrong then and it’s just as wrong now.

As the Reuters article says:

The deportations have come at an enormous human cost: siblings have been divided, vulnerable youths have been turned against each other, and preschool children – with no blood relatives to claim them – have been hidden from view in Russian-held territory. Returning these children is an arduous task, volunteers and officials in Ukraine say, and the job gets harder with every day that passes, as the children get older, and are more exposed to Russian influence.

Unfortunately a site like the Charley Project can’t do much about such state-sponsored disappearances. But it’s a great article.

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.

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.

Somerton Man identified?

Researchers in Australia claim they have identified the Somerton Man, a very mysterious case of a John Doe who died of unknown causes on Somerton Beach south of Adelaide in 1948. It’s also known as the Tamam Shud case cause those words (Persian for something like “it is finished”) were written on a scrap of paper in his pocket.

They’re saying his name is Charles Webb, who went by Carl. He was an electrical engineer from Melbourne. Honestly I was expecting the Somerton Man to be have had a more interesting occupation than this.

Why Webb was sitting against the seawall on Somerton Beach, with a scrap of paper bearing Persian words in his pocket and all the labels on his clothes removed, and what he died of, remains a mystery.

The police have yet to confirm the ID, hence my question mark in the title of this blog post. It makes me nervous that they haven’t commented yet. I’ve been burned so many times.

Some articles from a variety of sources, both paywalled and not, pick your poison:

• Mystery of Somerton man’s identity solved after 73 years, researchers in Australia say (The Guardian)
• DNA Researchers Name the Somerton Man, Australia’s 73-Year-Old Cold Case (The New York Times)
• A body found in 1948 became an Australian obsession. Now, there’s an ID. (The Washington Post)
• Identity mystery of Australia’s ‘Somerton Man’ solved with DNA after 74 years (UPI)
• Somerton Man identified as Melbourne electrical engineer, researcher says (ABC Australia)
• Mystery of Australia’s ‘Somerton Man’ solved after 70 years, researcher says (BBC)

Since I’m in Facebook Jail again, here’s the news

Facebook didn’t like a meme I posted — despite the fact that it’s elsewhere on Facebook — and gave me 30 days in jail. But then they changed their minds and decided the meme is okay after all, but forgot to remove my 30-day sentence. Shrug. It is what it is. Facebook is broken.

In California:

• The biological parents of Classic and Cincere Pettus, later known as Orson and Orrin West, have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the state of California, alleging the state wrongfully removed the Pettus boys from a safe home and placed them with the people who have since been charged with their murders.

In Massachusetts:

• They’re still looking for Debra Marie Melo, who disappeared from Weymouth in 2000.

In Michigan:

• They’re still looking for Brandon Darquice Anderson, who disappeared from Battle Creek in 2005.

In Minnesota:

• There’s a new podcast about the disappearance of Joshua Cheney Guimond, a St. John’s University student who disappeared from the university’s Collegeville, Minnesota campus in 2002.

In New Hampshire:

• They’re still looking for Harmony Montgomery, and her father Adam’s lawyers have asked for police body cam footage of his arrest. Adam is charged with abusing Harmony prior to her disappearance, and with failure to report her missing. A little over a week ago the police searched Harmony’s old apartment and removed items, including a refrigerator. My guess would be they’re checking anything large enough to conceal a five-year-old child’s body.

In New York:

• On this coming Saturday, the New York City Medical Examiner is holding an event to publicize missing persons in NYC. At the event, the ME’s office will accept “will accept any voluntarily shared information, like photos and DNA samples to help identify missing people.”

In South Carolina:

• They interviewed the lead investigator in Shelton John Sanders‘s disappearance and presumed murder, asking him why they were unable to get convictions in that case. The investigator still thinks the suspect in guilty.
• They have identified remains found at a recycling plant as Duncan Gordon, a missing man. He was last seen sitting on top of a shredding machine, and “a substance that looked like ground up flesh” was later found in that machine. Sounds awful; I hope it was quick. I’m predicting Gordon’s family files a lawsuit and OSHA hands out fines for this.

In Virginia:

• They’re still looking for La-Teasha LaMone Brooks, who will have been missing for twenty years this August. The picture in the article is an age-progression of how she’d appear at 40.
• They’ve created an online cold case database. Mostly homicides but some missing persons as well.

In Washington state:

• Othram has identified two more unidentified bodies: they are Blaine Has Tricks, who disappeared in 1977, and Alice Lou Williams, who disappeared in 1981. I know with Alice they got some help from the Charley Project; I know because the guy who owns Othram told me so.

In Canada:

• They’re still looking for Vernon George Martin, who disappeared in 2009 after a fire at the airport hangar he co-owned. He could be missing or he could be on the run, as he’s wanted for sex offenses.

In New Zealand:

• They’re still looking for a woman named Annabell Tumanako, who disappeared in 2007. They think she was murdered.

In the UK:

• The father of Claudia Lawrence, who disappeared in 2009, died in February, and in his will he left £10,000 to a charity for missing persons.
• They found Michael Anthony Lynch, a man who had been missing for 20 years. It appears he drove his car into Lough Erne, near Corradillar Quay, in Northern Ireland.

Things can always be worse

From Sunday to Tuesday I was down and out with a stomach upset. In between lying in bed groaning and making many many trips to the bathroom, I was reading a book about the African nation formerly known as Swaziland, renamed Eswatini a few years ago.

Now, I do not wish to get into a political discussion on here but due to some current events a lot of Americans right now are very concerned about political officials’ corruption and abuse of power. But I’m here to remind you that there are parts of the world where things can be a lot worse, and there’s a missing persons element to the story as well.

Twentyish years ago, an 18-year-old Swazi high school student didn’t return home from school one day. She’d been about to take her A levels (the university entrance/placement exams in the British education system; Eswatini is a former British colony) and planned to go to university and eventually become a lawyer. But then she was gone.

It turned out the king had decided he had a liking to her, and wanted to marry her. His way of proposing was to have some of his palace guards (goons) kidnap the girl off the street, force her into a vehicle and drive her to the royal compound.

Days passed before her family found out where she was and what had happened.

The girl’s mother (a single parent, dad had died) was extremely upset by this, as you might imagine, especially because her daughter was a minor (21 is the age of majority there) and the king had acted without consent from either mother or daughter. She actually went to the courts to try to get her child back, but the case didn’t go anywhere, because in Swaziland/Eswatini the king’s word is law. He’s an absolute monarch.

The kidnapping did not come out of nowhere. The king had previously expressed his interest in the girl, who did NOT want to marry this lout and be condemned to a life of (as the book I was reading put it) “luxurious tedium”. She and her mom contemplated leaving the country to avoid something like what wound up happening, but decided to stay after finding out that, per Swazi tradition, the king cannot marry a woman who’s a twin. This girl was a twin; she had a twin brother. So she thought: Whew, I’m safe.

Well, it turns out Swazi tradition is whatever the king says it is. And if he decides Swazi tradition will make an exception in this case, it will. Hence, the abduction and forced marriage. The eighteen-year-old Swazi girl became his tenth wife, all her career and education dreams gone.

I want to emphasize that this occurred in like 2001 or 2002. The same century in which we live now. It sounds straight-up medieval.

As bad as things have gotten here with corruption and abuses of power… I can walk safe in the street knowing no U.S. president will ever have his goons kidnap me and force me into marriage, and no U.S. court would ever let the president do it if he tried.

Where There Is Evil

I wanted to drop a book recommendation: Sandra Brown’s memoir Where There Is Evil. Sandra’s dad, Alexander Gartshore, is the prime suspect in the notorious 1957 disappearance of Moira Anderson. It’s one of the most notorious child disappearances in Scottish history.

Sandra is the one who turned him in after he made suspicious comments about Moira’s disappearance to her in 1992. She was already somewhat aware by then what sort of man her father was, and when she investigated his background she learned he molested numerous young girls, including all her girl cousins. She already knew he molested her friends when she was little, because he wasn’t very discreet about it and would do it right in front of her. She was too young to know what she was looking at, at the time.

Mind you, Sandra shouldn’t have had to turn in her dad. The police should have been onto him from the start. Alex Gartshore was, at the time of eleven-year-old Moira’s disappearance, out on bond awaiting trial for the rape of his children’s thirteen-year-old babysitter. Furthermore, Alex was a bus driver on the job on the night Moira disappeared, and Moira was last seen (as far as anyone knows) at a bus stop.

The fact that the police did not investigate him, didn’t so much as interview him one time, is suggestive of either corruption, or incompetence so extreme it might as well be corruption. The only thing Sandra can think of is that her dad belonged to a certain social club whose local membership was 90% cops, and so they covered for him.

Others covered for him as well. Sandra found out, post 1992, that her grandfather had suspected his son in Moira’s case and gone so far as to search various places associated with Alexander, ripping up floorboards even, trying to find Moira’s body. But he never went to the police with his suspicions. Or if he did, they were not noted down in the file due to the previously mentioned corruption/incompetence.

And when Sandra told her family she thought Alex had killed Moira Anderson and she was going to police, many of them were not exactly thrilled about it and some of them got extremely angry at her. Not because they thought Alex was innocent really — they all knew what sort of man he was, like I said he wasn’t discreet — but because of being embarrassed and not wanting the public to connect Alex with them. It was a small town, you see, and Alex and his relatives were the only people in it with his highly distinct surname.

The book is about Sandra’s childhood with such a father, then the 1992 revelation and search for answers and justice. It is well worth a read.

MP of the week: Tiffany Westford

This week’s featured missing person is Tiffany Susan Westford, a 2-year-old girl who was abducted by her non-custodial mother, Marie Catherine Dominique, from Amityville, New York on November 13, 1993. This is one of the Charley Project’s older family abduction cases.

Tiffany and her mother are both black, and I think they are of Haitian descent, given that Marie speaks Haitian Creole and they could be living in a Haitian-American community if they haven’t left the country altogether. Tiffany has a two- or three-inch scar below her navel and may use one of several alias last names. Marie may also use any of a number of alisas. She’s described as 5’3 – 5’4 and 130 – 140 pounds. She worked as a CNA (certified nursing assistant) though I suppose her license would have expired by now.

Tiffany would now be 30 years old, and her abductor would be 57. There’s a good chance Tiffany has no idea she’s a missing child, and given the passage of time I think it’s unlikely that Marie would face any charges if they were located.

Theodore Kampf identified

So it’s been in the news in several places: Theodore Frederick Kampf, a 46-year-old man who was last seen in Oaklyn, New Jersey in July 1981, has been identified.

I was just talking to David Mittelman, the Othram Inc. guy, and he says it was in part cause of Charley that Kampf was identified. He was identified through DNA, but I guess Kampf wouldn’t have even been on the list of possibles except his Charley Project page notes he was road-tripping to Canada and was supposed to cross the border on July 13.

His body was found in the Yukon, you see. Specifically, “in a wooded area near the North Fork Dam and Dempster Highway in Dawson City.” Which is about as far away as it is possible for him to be and still be on the same continent. I looked it up and Dawson City, Yukon Territory is a 63-hour drive from Oaklyn, New Jersey — and that’s only if you take a direct route (which Kampf didn’t, since he was last known to be in Washington State). The direct route is 6,382 kilometers, or almost 4,000 miles.

After forty years I think it’s unlikely his murder will ever be solved. The killer could even be dead by now. But at least he’s coming home.

Two long-missing people turn up alive and well

Just another one of those “never give up hope” reminders: Nicole Denise Jackson, a Birmingham, Alabama woman who dropped out of sight in 2018, and Sajid Thungal, a man from Kottyam in the state of Kerala in India who was last heard from in 1974, have both resurfaced alive.

Neither of these people were ever listed on the Charley Project: Sajid because he didn’t disappear on American soil, and I’m not sure Nicole was ever officially listed as missing. They also have something else in common, in that both of them vanished after leaving their home countries.

Nicole stopped contacting her family after moving to Germany to be with a guy she met online. Her family finally hired a private investigator who was able to locate and speak to Nicole’s employer and landlord, and as a result Nicole went to the authorities with her ID and verified that she’s ok. She hasn’t gotten in touch with her family though. I don’t know if there were prior family problems, if she’s in a bad situation, if she’s embarrassed or what. But I’m glad to hear she’s alive and has a job and a place to live, anyway.

Sajid left home to make his fortune in the United Arab Emirates, taking a job managing a group of entertainers who were also Indian nationals. At some point in the ensuing few years he lost touch with his family. Then a plane with the entertainers he’d been managing crashed in Mumbai with the loss of all onboard. His family thought, given the circumstances, that Sajid might have died in the crash as well. However, that wasn’t the case.

The truth was that Sajid hadn’t made his fortune after all and was embarrassed by his poverty, and didn’t want to return home with his tail between his legs. And I suppose the more time passed without him writing his family, the more difficult it became to get started, and he just never did it. Until now. His father had passed away in the intervening years but his mom, wife and brothers are still alive.

When a person vanishes voluntarily like that, and then reappears after years have passed, re-integration into the family unit is often difficult. This Washington Post article from 2019 (which I’m quoted in) talks about several real-life cases of a missing person resurfacing and encountering bumps along the way.

The family members, though delighted that their loved one is back in their lives, may also be very angry at the them for causing them so much pain by not picking up the phone. Often, whatever problems that led the no-longer-missing person to go missing in the first place (be it mental illness, family issues, etc.) are still there when they return, and the person might have picked up some new problems along the way while they were missing. Furthermore, they may have built another life for themselves in the meantime, a life which didn’t include their family, and now they have to find a way to fit their family into that life.

It’s a big adjustment and I recommend individual and family therapy in such cases.