MP of the week: Corey Kelly

This week’s featured missing person is Corey Tahj Kelly, who was 19 and within days of becoming a father when he disappeared from North Charleston, South Carolina on September 11, 2017. He left his mom’s home to stay at his sister’s, then left his sister’s place and never came back.

Corey is black, 6’0 and 165 pounds, with black hair, brown eyes and a tattooed arm there’s a photo of, as well as other tattoos.

He had a history of drug abuse and mental illness, both possible causes for his disappearance, but his family doesn’t think a voluntary disappearance is likely because his baby was born just ten days later and he wouldn’t have abandoned his daughter.

MP of the week: Khori Richards

This week’s featured missing person is Khori Navor Richards, missing from Miami, Florida since November 4, 2014, when he was 29. Khori is black, 5’7 – 5’9 tall and 110 to 130 pounds, with black hair, brown eyes and a possible goatee. He has a tattoo of a treble clef on his hand.

I don’t have many details in his disappearance. He simply walked out of the house and didn’t come back, so they say. If he is still alive, today, Khori would be 39.

That “bully farm” must be incredibly haunted

So yesterday I was just doing random updates when things took an abrupt left turn after I found an article describing a rural Oklahoma property known as “the bully farm” (because it was once used as a puppy mill for bulldogs) that has been linked to, like, a zillion disappearances. They’ve found burned bone fragments scattered there. The place is like Treblinka but scaled down to “meth-fueled white supremacist prison gang hideout” size.

That Mikell Smith sounds like an absolute monster, managing to commit multiple murders by proxy from behind prison walls; he’s described as the most dangerous inmate in the Oklahoma state penitentiary. Yet he cares about his mom anyway, enough to take a hit on his brother to avoid Mom catching covid.

It’s just so sad, so many lives ruined, people sucked into that darkness. Cindy Mulligan saying please tell her daughter she loves her. Zip-tied in her bedroom with an “enforcer.”

I didn’t add all the people from the article to Charley cause I couldn’t find missing persons reports for all of them. But I did add many of them. Will add the rest if I can find reports for them.

I am going to Wisconsin next month to attend their missing persons awareness event. I’m the keynote speaker this year. I gotta start saving now: need gas for the drive and Airbnb money as well. My husband says he’s going with me too and that’ll help the driving. That means we have to put the dog in a boarding kennel. I’ve never done that before.

I haven’t had any puke episodes since February. I certainly don’t miss them.

MP of the week: Albert Haft

This week’s featured missing person is Albert Charles Haft IV, last seen in Columbus, Ohio on December 12, 2014. Haft was 52 then, and would be 61 now. He has black hair and green eyes.

Haft had been staying in a transitional home after being discharged from a psychiatric hospital. He was caught drinking which was against the rules of the home, and they kicked him out. This was a few days before he was last seen. He wound up with a room in a motel, but had gone missing by morning.

His sister believes he could be dead. Certainly that’s possible, even likely by now. But I wonder if he is still adrift in the homeless community somewhere.

So. Resolved cases. Who has been found lately?

1. David Leonard McMicken, William Earl Clifton and Michael Fay Norman have almost certainly turned up inside their Camaro in Jack’s Creek. I don’t really understand what happened here because according to what I’ve got, the Camaro turned up stolen in New York and someone was actually arrested. Perhaps a paperwork mistake? Because the VIN on the Jack’s Creek’s Camaro matches the missing men’s.
2. Mary Jane Vangilder, who walked out of her old life and into a new one, one including marriage and more children, and a long life and death of natural causes in her old age. I actually got invited to attend the press conference for this but it was a five hour round trip and I couldn’t really afford to go even before I got sick on the day of the press conference. This article has side by side photos of Mary Jane Vangilder as was, Mary Jane Sebren she became. Reminds me of the story of Ragna Esther Gavin.

Regarding Mary Jane:

When I started this blog I was 23. I am now 38 and I’ve sort of grown up blogging, and I see how my perspective has changed on things.

I used to be disgusted by the behavior of people who simply walked away from their lives without a word, particularly when minor children were left behind unattended. I read about the extreme pain and devastation this amiguous loss causes the loved ones of the missing person/runaway and it made me very angry.

A lot of people think the worst possible thing is for a parent to have their child die, and I don’t believe that’s true. My parents have buried two children. And as a family we mourned our losses and we moved on with our lives. Our family doesn’t worry about my dead brothers because they’re dead, and therefore cannot suffer. We don’t wonder where they lay their heads at night or if they’re even alive or rotting in a shallow grave somewhere. They were respectably buried and sometimes we visit the gravesites. I do not wish to trivialize what a horrific loss those deaths were. However, you can process them and do whatever rituals are done in your culture/faith/family to deal with death and then you move on.

I believe the worst possible thing is to have your child go missing and never be found. That’s much, much worse than the kind of loss that death is. There is no ritual for this. Like, people understand death and there are support groups for grieving people of all kinds. But the kind of loss like what happens on the Charley Project is so vanishingly rare that it must be very hard for the families to find people who can even understand their pain. These traumatized left behind families would have more in common with people in war zones.

In spite of all this, all the pain it causes when a person walks away and intentionally vanishes, I now feel a lot more sympathy for them than I did when I was 23. I view such cases as, sometimes anyway, a symbolic form of suicide: a person’s desperate attempt to escape some unbearably difficult situation, when they get tunnel vision and can’t see any other way out. And the longer they’re gone, the harder it is to call home.

Reunions, when they happen, can be so painfully awkward that at least some of the involved parties are left wishing they had not reunited, because often whatever situation that caused the person to run, is still there waiting for them when they come back. It’s so hard to come back from the dead. It might be a fairy tale, for like a week. Then reality sets in.

I saw this with a case in the last couple of years in a long term runaway case, so long they were beginning to think she hadn’t really run away, she made contact with her family and reunited. The woman sent me an email asking me for help, advice, something, because it wasn’t going very well. The situation that caused her to run away from home from had not been addressed but had festered and now everyone was feeling some very complicated emotions I guess; she didn’t really go into details but I got the general idea of a lot of tension. I am trying to protect her privacy and wouldn’t speak on it at all but I know the complicated reunion got press coverage so I think it’s ok to discuss. If I recall correctly, when the woman asked for my help I suggested that that she ask the NCMEC if they offered post-reunion family therapy. I don’t know what happened after that.

So there’s so much pain on both sides no matter what happens. I look at these situations now with a lot less anger/disgust and a lot more compassion for everyone involved.

I’m sure Mary Jane missed the children she left behind.

MP of the week: Montel Aker

This week’s featured missing person is Montel Veshawn Aker, who was last seen in Rantoul, Illinois on August 10, 2011, when he was 19 years old. He’d be in his thirties today, if still alive. Montel is described as black, 5’11 and between 140 and 170 pounds. He has a tattoo of a Capricorn sign on his chest and a tattoo of a dragon on his left arm. His nickname is Mookie.

He planned to get another tattoo on the day of his disappearance.

MP of the week: Aaron Johnson

This week’s featured missing person is Aaron Scott Johnson, a 34-year-old man who disappeared under kind of strange circumstances from Birchwood, Wisconsin on October 12, 2020.

After getting into an argument with his wife on October 10, he spent the night with friends. At 6:00 p.m. on October 11, his friends dropped him off near his car, which had mechanical issues but was still driveable. On October 12, someone saw Johnson walking down a remote logging road wearing only his undies: boxer shorts, a tank top and socks. In Wisconsin in October. The witness was weirded out by this and took this photo:

The witness asked Johnson if he needed help, and Johnson said no. He walked down the road and off into oblivion. Never seen again.

I think Johnson’s disappearance is probably drug-related, as he was battling a meth addiction. He may have taken off his outer clothes because he was high and disoriented. I checked the weather in that area during the time he disappeared and the highest temperature that day was 65, which is pleasant enough but isn’t really the greatest weather to be wandering around in when one is just in their undies. The day’s lowest temperature was 40, and the average for the day was 52. If a person is outside in those temperatures for an extensive time period dressed in what Johnson was wearing, there’s a chance they could develop exposure, especially if they happened to get wet. A lot of hypothermia deaths happen on days when it’s not really that cold, it’s just that the victim was outside for too long and/or was under-dressed for the temperature and/or got wet.

Johnson has loads of tattoos and would be recognizable by them. I have photos of them on his page. If still alive he’d be 37 today.

MP of the week: Brandon Williams

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.

His family has a Facebook page set up for him.

MP of the week: Anthony Horner

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.

If he’s still alive, Anthony would be 52 today.

MP of the week: Elmer Booth

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.