Missing persons news

I’ll cover the recovery of the Yates girls in their own entry, but here’s some other missing persons news:

• This accountant’s hobby? Identifying missing people through his drawings
  My friend and Irregular Carl Koppelman has been featured in the Orange County Register. He does wonderful sketches of UIDs and was instrumental in identifying Cali Doe as Tammy Alexander. Congratulations, Carl!
• Trial date in 20-year-old cold case pushed back to October
  A year and a quarter ago ago, more or less, Kirsten Renee Hatfield‘s two-doors-down neighbor was charged with her murder. The headline of this article is pretty self-explanatory, and the news story explains why: the suspect has new lawyers now who need time to review the evidence.
  Kirsten’s case, for whatever reason, fascinated me back when I was a child and first started getting interested in missing persons. I had a website when I was twelve or so, with some poems and stories I wrote, and one of them was a poem called “Missing, Presumed Dead” and it was based on Kirsten’s disappearance, as I explained on the site. Kirsten’s mom found it and emailed me, saying she was touched that a little girl in Ohio was thinking of her and her lost daughter, but she didn’t believe Kirsten was dead.
• Judge orders suspect in cold case homicide to trial in district court
  Apparently the motive for Cari Lea Farver‘s homicide was a love triangle; both she and the suspect, Shanna Goylar, were seeing the same man. According to prosecutors, after Goylar killed Cari, she burned the body and then went on Cari’s social media accounts and tried to make it look like she was still alive.
• Missing Oklahoma woman found more than 20 years after disappearance
  This case isn’t one of mine. It’s a really awesome story, though, how hard Shelly Jennings’s daughters looked for her, and how she was found largely through their efforts. Twenty-three years after she walked away from her family in Oklahoma, she turns up at a bus station in Modesto, California. I hope they can reconcile, although given Shelly’s mental illness, this may not be possible.
• For families of missing persons, not knowing is excruciating
  This is about the disappearance of Cody Henry Turner, who went missing from Washington in 2015.
• Missing Minnesotans: Susan Swedell
  Obviously, an article about Susan Anne Swedell (for whom I recently posted an updated AP).

Latest in the MP news

I’ve finally managed to pull my nose out of the birthday books (though they’re not all finished arriving in the mail) and plan to update today. I also made a huge score on Amazon’s free Kindle books. A publisher made their ENTIRE COLLECTION of Holocaust memoirs available for free, 35 in all. I snatched up every one of them.

Anyway, on to the news:

One Anthony Joseph Palma has been arrested and charged with Kirsten Renee Hatfield‘s abduction and murder. Kirsten disappeared in 1997, taken from her bedroom in the middle of the night. Palma was almost a literal next-door neighbor of Kirsten’s; he lived two doors down. His arrest has made news as far away as France. Right now they’re looking for Kirsten’s body at his house. I hope they find it. Kirsten’s disappearance was one of the earliest MP cases I remember reading about, and it really touched me. I wrote a poem about her when I was twelve or thirteen (that would be in 1998 or 1999) and posted it on the internet, and her mom found it and emailed me.

Moving on: Toni Ann Bachman‘s husband Norman has confessed to strangling her during an argument and he’s pleaded guilty to manslaughter. His son Frederick, Toni’s stepson, is awaiting trial in another murder. Frederick was ten when Toni disappeared. All in all…pretty awful.

Authorities have located Lee Jan Marie Kratzer, who disappeared from Roanoke, Louisiana in 1982. She wasn’t reported missing until 2014. Lee had walked out of her life, changed her name to Lisa Neese and given birth to a daughter, and then died of cancer in 2008, at the age of 46. I wonder if her post-disappearance daughter will establish a relationship with her pre-disappearance children.

Sabine Musil-Buehler’s killer, William Cumber, has confessed to her murder and lead authorities to her body in Holmes Beach, Florida. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and got a 20-year sentence, with credit for time served. As Sabine’s daughter noted, it’s pretty stupid, given that some non-violent drug offenders in Florida get more than that.

Barry Whitton was convicted of his first wife’s murder last month, and the other day he got sentenced to life in prison. Barry is also a suspect in the disappearance of his second wife, Kimberly Whitton, and her daughter, Haleigh Culwell, who vanished from Section, Alabama in 2007. I fear we may never know what happened to them, unless they give Barry an incentive to talk by reducing his prison sentence.

Article about Kirsten Hatfield

An Oklahoma TV station has run an anniversary story for eight-year-old Kirsten Hatfield, who’s been missing for thirteen years this month. She disappeared from her bed in the middle of the night. But apparently — this is the first I’ve heard of this — the police think the abduction was staged. Now that I think of it, it does seem unlikely that someone could sneak into Kirsten’s bedroom and take her without a sound (and with her sister asleep in the same room) or any struggle. This was an eight-year-old, not a baby or toddler. The cops believe Kirsten was harmed by someone close to her, possibly a relative.

I wrote a poem about Kirsten Hatfield when I was twelve or thirteen and posted it on my personal website that I had at the time, which had stuff about me and some short stories and other poems I’d written. Some time later, Kirsten’s mother found the poem and emailed me about it. She said she was sure her daughter was still alive. I felt very sorry for her.