MP of the week: Kimberly Riley

This week’s featured missing person is Kimberly Ann Riley, missing since December 23, 1998 from Lorain, Ohio. She was 19, 5’2 and 122 pounds. She’s white, with blonde hair and blue eyes.

Kimberly was originally listed as missing with her boyfriend, Omar Seymore, who is also the father of her two kids. Seymore turned up in California in 2004. As for Kimberly, the details are at the casefile but the circumstances look very bad and it’s likely Seymore killed her. He was found liable in a wrongful death suit (basically by default, since he didn’t defend himself) but has never been charged in her disappearance.

If she’s still alive, Kimberly would be 44 today. She’s probably a grandmother by now.

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.

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.

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.

Faces of fentanyl

Added, among others, quite a wretched case today: two addicts got together to shoot up fentanyl, one died of it, and the other threw her body in a dumpster and stole her stuff to pawn, presumably for more fentanyl.

Don’t do drugs, people. The victim’s pre-existing heart condition probably didn’t help matters, but every time you use fentanyl (outside a medical setting, obviously) you’re poking Death in the eye with a stick. Death is going to poke back eventually.

In spite of the callous behavior of the suspect in this case, I couldn’t help but pity him when I looked up his mug shots on Arrests.org.

Here he was in 2011:

And here he was eleven years later, in 2022:

This is a terrible sickness that overcame both of them, like a living death, and it swept her away entirely. And you know they didn’t just wake up one day and decide out of the blue to start using fentanyl and ruin their own lives. You know it was a situation that just gradually (or perhaps not so gradually) spun out of their control.

Rest in peace, Alyssa.

MP of the week: Rebecca Pauline Gary

This week’s featured missing person is Rebecca Pauline Gary, who disappeared from Baton Rouge, Louisiana on December 27, 1988. She was 32 years old at the time.

She called her sister that day and said she was moving to Shreveport. She was never heard from again, and wasn’t reported missing immediately cause she lived with just her young daughter, whom she’d sent to Shreveport to spend the Christmas holiday with relatives.

Rebecca’s daughter, Jamie Williams, thinks four-term Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards (D) was involved in her mom’s disappearance and that Rebecca had been having an affair with Edwards and planned to end it. Edwards denied the affair and said he had no idea what happened to Rebecca. He later served a prison term for corruption, and died in 2021.

Before her disappearance, Rebecca had had an envelope that her family was supposed to open if anything happened to her. It seems to have disappeared at the same time she did; no one could find it.

Jamie Williams is still trying to find out what happened to her mom and has a Facebook page for her.

If still alive, Rebecca would be 67 today.

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.

MP of the week: Debbie Prosser

This week’s featured missing person is Debbie Lynn Prosser, a 25-year-old woman who disappeared from Fort Lauderdale, Florida on May 15, 1984. 39 years ago yesterday.

The above photo is of Debbie when she was in high school, about eight to ten years prior to her disappearance. I couldn’t find any more recent photos of her that were of decent enough quality to post a large version. She has brown hair and gray eyes, is 5’6 tall, and weighed 116 pounds when she disappeared. Very thin build.

Debbie had a boyfriend, Julio Alfonso, and she had moved out of his home six weeks prior to her disappearance. There was some domestic violence going on in the relationship, I’m not sure from which side, with prior police involvement. They’d argue and her stuff would get tossed out on the lawn.

She disappeared the day after Alfonso was found murdered in his home in Pompano Beach, shot multiple times in his head and upper torso. No signs of forced entry. Articles about Debbie’s disappearance said police were seeking her for questioning as a material witness in the murder and also feared she could be in danger as well. The borrowed car she was driving was found abandoned in Pompano Beach. No sign of Debbie. I don’t know if the murder was ever solved.

I have no idea if Debbie shot Julio and went on the run, if she was another victim of Julio’s murderer, or if her disappearance had nothing to do with Julio’s murder and the timing was just a coincidence.

If still alive, she’d be 63 today. Turning 64 on the 21st of this month.

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.

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.