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.
As a person who has read (I keep records) at least 848 crime books and counting, I’m glad to say my serial killer game is on point.
I was looking on NamUs yesterday when I saw the case of this boy, seventeen-year-old Mark Steven Scott, missing from Houston since 1972.
I thought: “Hmm… early seventies… teenage boy… Houston. That sounds like one of Dean Corll’s victims.” I knew Dean had been preying on adolescent boys in Houston during that very time period.
I would not normally have been very hopeful in trying a newspaper archive search for a name as common as “Mark Scott” as any articles about this Mark would be likely to drown in a sea of unrelated results. But I put in “Mark Scott Dean Corll” and discovered he was actually not just suspected but actually a confirmed victim. I hadn’t known that Corll even had confirmed victims who were still missing, but he did. (There’s also Norman Prater, whom I did know about, but he’s only a good guess rather than a confirmed victim.)
Poor Mark was actually misidentified, and by the time they corrected this error, in was too late to find him.
One of Corll’s accomplices, Elmer Wayne Henley, said Mark was buried at High Island Beach with a bunch of other bodies of Corll’s victims. There were two other burial sites, one of which was a boat shed. One of the boat shed bodies is unidentified to this day. The other was misidentified as Mark in 1993.
A DNA comparison was done between this boy and Mark’s mother, and the results indicated there was a 98% chance they were “related.” Whatever that means. We’re all related to a degree.
This identification was accepted by everyone except, apparently, Henley, who insisted Mark had been buried at the beach and not the boat shed. There was also the minor fact that the body was missing two teeth (and they could tell they’d been extracted during life and not just fallen out during decomposition) and had dark brown hair while Mark had light brown/blond hair and no missing teeth.
In 2011, another DNA test was done with more advanced technology. Thus, the dead boy with dark brown hair was identified as another 17-year-old, Steven Kent Sickman.
Dean Corll got away with his crimes for three years with impunity because the Houston police were terrible. Imagine having to go to Mark’s parents and tell them he was missing again and would never be found.
Because there was no more High Island Beach, you see, by 2011. High Island Beach, and whatever secrets it carried, had been lost to Hurricane Ike in 2008, and Mark Scott was taken with it. He’s under the ocean and it’s not really possible to recover his remains.
Putting up Mark’s case has made me interested in Corll and now I’m reading a book about his crimes. I’m only a few chapters in.
My current impressions from what I know of him and his crimes are that his juvenile accomplices are a lot more interesting than Corll himself is. I have a degree of sympathy for both of them, because they had been so young when they were recruited by Corll. David Brooks was only about twelve. I believe I read they had suffered sexual abuse at his hands.
But I am sympathetic only to a degree. As in, “life in prison rather than the death penalty” degree. After awhile you have to start taking responsibility for yourself—which I suppose Henley ultimately did, in a way, by killing Corll.
Henley is the only one of them who is left alive. He’ll die in prison and he deserves it.
This week’s featured missing person is Cassandra Ann LaLonde, aka Candy. On April 1, 1988, Cassandra ran away from her family’s home in Buras, Louisiana. She was fifteen at the time. In July, after her sixteenth birthday, her family got a call from a man who said he lived with Cassandra at a rural home in Alabama and that she had walked out on him. Her whereabouts after that are a mystery.
If still alive, Cassandra would be 50 today. She was 5’3 and 130 pounds in 1988, but may have grown taller since then, as she was only fifteen. She is white and has brown hair, brown eyes, pierced ears and a large scar on her leg from where she had stitches.
I hope everyone is well. I got sick with the pukes again but I’ve gotten better.
This featured week’s featured missing person case is Wayne Jason Ausa, a 16-year-old Filipino-American boy who disappeared from San Francisco, California on April 16, 2016.
We know exactly what happened to Wayne: he and another boy, Grisham Duran, were walking in the San Francisco surf with friends when the current grabbed the boys and carried Wayne and Grisham out to sea. The surf there can be horribly dangerous and this is not the only such case I have on Charley.
The casefile doesn’t say anything about Grisham’s remains being located and I can’t find any news articles to that effect but they must have been, because Wayne is still listed in the CDOJ missing persons database and Grisham is not.
If you wonder why I would bother to put Wayne on Charley when his fate is known and we know, more or less, what happened to his remains… the ocean might still give up its dead. Wayne may wash up on shore some day and if he does, someone has to be able to know that a boy matching that description is still unaccounted for, so that they can identify his remains. This happened in the case of Percy Carson, a drowned swimmer whose bones washed ashore months later and weren’t identified for over 20 years.
Wayne was a junior at Vallejo High School. If he were still alive today he’d be 23, perhaps a college graduate, perhaps a husband or father by now. The ocean took his future away.
I hope everyone is doing ok. I have been sick (the vomiting cycle again, they won’t quit) but hope to feel better soon and back to work.
This week’s featured missing person is Patricia Marie Small, who was last seen when she was dropped off at Liberty High School in Liberty, Texas on May 11, 2002. She was eighteen years old at the time, white, with brown hair, blue eyes, and a tattoo of a heart with a ribbon reading “Jennifer Best Friends 4 Ever.”
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much info about her disappearance; it’s like she just vanished into thin air after being dropped off. No apparent evidence of either runaway or kidnapping.
If still alive, Patricia would be 39 today. There is a Facebook page set up to try to find her.
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.
This week’s featured missing person is Myron Timell Traylor, a 13-year-old boy who disappeared on the way to his grandparents’ house in Phoenix, Arizona on July 27, 1988. He and his mom were going there with a bag of laundry to wash when Myron stopped to get a drink at a store while his mom continued on ahead. He was last seen standing outside after buying a soda, carrying a bag of laundry.
Myron’s mom’s boyfriend is a possible suspect in his case. He was at the place where Myron bought his soda, and he is a violent man; he murdered two people in 2009 and is serving a 42-year prison sentence. But he has refused to be interviewed about Myron’s case so there’s not a lot to go on.
If still alive, Myron would be 48 today. He’s black and was about 5’5 or 5’6 in 1988 with a slender build, only about 110-ish pounds. He’s black and he has a half-inch scar on the right side of his head, and a lovely smile you can see in the photos.
The verdicts in the Kristin Denise Smart murder-without-a-body case are back, and have been announced. Although father and suspected accomplice Ruben Flores has been acquitted, son Paul Flores was convicted of Kristin’s murder and faces 25 years in prison.
I bet he wishes he’d taken that plea deal they offered him, where he’d show them where he put Kristin’s remains and would only get six years. He’d be out by now, with that unpleasantness all behind him, young enough to start over.
Now he’s middle-aged–45 years old–and the 25-year prison sentence he’s facing might amount to the rest of his life.
It’s a sentence Paul thoroughly deserves, after he spent that same amount of time torturing the Smart family and accumulating drunk driving arrests and (allegedly) drugging and raping other women.
This week’s featured missing person is Anita Mary Luchessa, an 18-year-old college student who disappeared from Berkeley, California on May 7, 1972.
What happened to her is not a mystery: she was a victim of the serial killer Ed Kemper. Anita and a friend, Mary Anne Pesce, were hitchhiking when he picked them up. He later said he strangled and stabbed both of them to death, dismembered their bodies and dumped them near Loma Prieta Mountain. Mary Anne’s skull was found on the mountain in August 1972, but Anita has never been located.
Sometimes people ask me why I have cases on the Charley Project of people who are obviously deceased. Two reasons:
To help identify them, if their remains are found.
In memory of them.
If Anita Luchessa had not been murdered fifty years ago, she would be 68 today.
This week’s featured missing person is Aron Holmes Silverman, a 17-year-old boy who disappeared from Norfolk, Virginia on June 5, 1993. He went to a party that night, left with a dancer he’d met, and was never seen again.
His case is still classified as a runaway, due to his age and due to the fact that he was having some problems in his life: drug usage, parents separated etc. But it would be very unusual for a teenager to run away and not contact his family for almost THIRTY YEARS now. Unless things were VERY bad at home.
I hope Aron is still alive. If he is he’d be 46 today. In 1993 he was 5’10 and 130 pounds, but he might have grown taller since then. He has blond hair, blue eyes and numerous brown moles.
I hope everyone is ok. I’m sorry for my lack of activity, I’ve been very sick. My stomach again.
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