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.

Why is this woman on NamUs? She was identified in 2017.

Yesterday I happened to see this case on NamUs and included in the casefile was a link to this article, explaining that her body was found in 1970 and she was semi-identified in 2014 — by fingerprints, not by name. They were able to match her fingerprints to an arrest record, but as this woman was arrested under a bunch of different names, they still didn’t know her name.

I looked further and found this article from 2017, explaining they had now identified this lady. Her name was Evelyn Moore, one of the aliases she was arrested under, and a family member of Evelyn identified her photo and said the family hadn’t heard from her since 1969 but had never reported her missing. DNA was pending, said the article. That was in 2017; surely they’d have gotten around to testing that DNA by now. She’s been identified.

Yet she is on NamUs as missing.

There are a lot of people who get added to NamUs as “missing persons” after they were already found dead and identified. I have no idea why this happens. I understand that sometimes (often) only partial remains are found, but come on! A person whose skull has turned up cannot be considered missing anymore. It seems to me if they want to add partial remains cases they should do so in some kind of third category, so you don’t have people wasting their time thinking a person might be still alive, or trying to match them to various bodies.

I once spoke to some NamUs official about this and he wanted me to send him a list of names of found people that are still on NamUs. I admit I never did, thinking that a database with the backing of the federal government ought to clean up their own house and I shouldn’t have to do their work for them.

Rant over.

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.

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.

One of those cases where everyone did it right except the authorities

I put up the Nakota Kelly case today. I don’t know how I missed it earlier; perhaps because it isn’t on the NCMEC site?

Anyway. It is quite horrible. And it’s one of those cases where civilians (except the murderer obviously) did all the right things and the authorities (in this case Indiana DCS and the police) did it wrong.

I highly recommend WRTV’s three part series in the case: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3. Though you might cry, reading it.

I feel so bad for Nakota’s mom. She was trying to do right by her son and abide by the court’s orders and she couldn’t do both. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like to her, having to drop him off for visitation when Nakota had already said his father was going to kill him this weekend. His mom notified Indiana DCS of his fears but they did nothing. If she had not complied with the court-ordered visitation she would have lost custody altogether and Nakota would have been full time with his abusive dad.

And then, when Nakota’s dad told a relative he had killed his son, the relative did the right thing and immediately called the police. Who went to the dad’s apartment… then noped off back to the station when no one answered the door, even though they heard movement inside, even though there was a report of a murdered child. (The supervisor who made that judgment has since retired.) Had they forced entry they would probably have caught Nakota’s dad midway through a dismemberment, which isn’t terrific but which at least gives Nakota’s mom something to bury.

I don’t even know why Nakota’s dad wanted anything to do with the kid in the first place. He didn’t attend Nakota’s Little League games. He didn’t seem very interested in Nakota at all. It seems to me that his insistence on visitation was more about causing trouble for Nakota’s mom, and maybe also a defense against deportation to Nigeria: “You can’t boot me out, I’ve got an American citizen child who depends on me.” Despicable.

And about Nigeria… since when are countries allowed to refuse to take back deportees? I don’t understand that at all.

Pretty awful. That poor little boy.

In another case I put up today I was extremely annoyed after I found the missing person’s Facebook page and couldn’t use any of the photos of her because EVERY SINGLE ONE had that stupid dog face filter on it. Of course, the MP does have the mental capacity of a seven-year-old, which makes sense. Strange case; I wonder if she’s been trafficked. A young woman with the mental capacity of a first-grader would be very vulnerable.

MP of the week: Lisa Littles

This week’s featured missing person is Lisa Ann Littles, a 28-year-old woman who disappeared from Little Rock, Arkansas on September 27, 1994. She’s described as black, with black hair, brown eyes, pierced ears and a small scar on her forehead. She was wearing a white blouse with the logo, burgundy pants and black shoes.

Little info is available in the case: after an argument with an unspecified person inside a car, she calmed down, got out of the car to use the bathroom and never came back. She is also listed in the Arkansas state missing persons database, but without details.

Sorry it’s late. My pukes are finally gone though. Yay.

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: Kayla Rodriguez

This week’s featured missing person case is Kayla Rodriguez, who disappeared with Justin Winfrey and his small red and white single engine Piper Arrow plane off the coast of California on October 23, 2019. The pair are presumed to have been killed in a plane crash, but they never found either of them or the plane.

Kayla was 27 when she disappeared; Justin was 43. If still alive, they’d be 31 and 46 today. Kayla is described as Hispanic with brown hair and brown eyes. She was 5’5 and 205 pounds at the time of her disappearance. Justin is black, with black hair and brown eyes; he was 5’11 and 203 pounds.

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: Bob Austin

This week’s featured missing person is Bob Perry Austin Jr., a 19-year-old man who disappeared from Jefferson, Louisiana on March 10, 1995. He was, for some reason, “fleeing” Ochsner Hospital, headed in the direction of the levee. He was never seen or heard from again.

Bob is black, 5’10 and 155 pounds, and was last seen wearing green flowered shorts and white socks. No shirt or shoes apparently. I wonder if he was a psychiatric patient who escaped.

Unfortunately that’s all the info I have for this young man. If still alive, he’d be 47 today.