Flashback Friday: Billy Sena

This week’s Flashback Friday case is eleven-year-old Billy Sena, who disappeared from Albuquerque, New Mexico with his nine-year-old cousin, Mary Lou, in 1979. They were last seen en route to the post office; they never made it. This case is somewhat unusual. If you don’t count runaways, family abductions and accidents, the Charley Project doesn’t have that many cases of children who disappeared together like that.

The Sena children’s cases didn’t come to my attention until a couple of years ago, and there hasn’t been any press about them in some time. Last I heard, which was in late 2011, the police were trying to locate and question Billy’s mom’s then-boyfriend as well as another woman who had lived at the Sena residence at the time. I have no idea whether authorities have located these people or if they’re even still alive or what.

But I assume the investigation is still active, even if it hasn’t been in the news. It’s not too late to find out what happened to Billy and Mary Lou Sena.

Yay, an update…and MP news overview

First since the 21st. I suddenly realized I had just enough time to take care of that huge stack of APs before the clock struck midnight and…voila.

As for the latest news in the MP world:

There is, at last, an article about the 1983 disappearance of Clifton Leonard. This is the first press I’d seen on him. Clifton was 16 and had been diagnosed with schizophrenia several years prior, and took an antipsychotic drug, Thorazine. He disappeared a few days after his release from the hospital. He went out to go to the lake with some friends and never returned. His parents don’t think he ran away, since he left everything behind and he was happy at the time of his disappearance, glad to be out of the hospital, looking forward to school, etc.

(I don’t know anything about Clifton’s mental illness but it is worth noting that a lot of people who were diagnosed with “schizophrenia” back in the early 1980s and before would not be diagnosed with that disease today. Schizophrenia at the time was a kind of catchall term for any serious mental illness with psychotic features. The label is not as frequently used now as it used to be.)

Russell Smrekar, an imprisoned murderer who is terminally ill, has confessed to killing his college classmate Michael Mansfield back in 1975, and Ruth Martin in 1976. Mansfield disappeared right before he was supposed to testify against Smrekar in a matter regarding a stolen guitar. Smrekar was later convicted of murdering Robin and Jay Fry, a married couple (Robin was pregnant) because they had witnessed him shoplift from a grocery store and were going to testify against him. Martin, another witness in that case, disappeared, and Smrekar is presumed to have killed her too, but he was never charged and her body was never found. Christ, so many murders over a few piddling little thefts. How much time could he have possibly gotten for stealing a guitar and a couple of steaks? He got 200-600 years in prison for the murders.

There’s an article about David Blockett, a two-week-old baby who was abducted by a woman pretending to be a social worker back in 1980. I heard from the reporter in this case and she said it was her TV channel that convinced the cops to reopen the case and put David back on the NCMEC. New details: David’s brother remembers a little bit about the abduction and thinks a man was also involved.

The police have a suspect in the 1979 disappearances of cousins Billy Sena, 11, and Mary Lou Sena, 9. The suspect is Billy’s mother’s then-boyfriend, Michael Cordova. Cordova grew marijuana in the family’s backyard and sold it. Shortly before Billy’s disappearance, one of the plants came up missing. Cordova blamed Billy and was reportedly furious and beat the crap out of him. The idea is that maybe he killed the two kids and staged the abduction. But right now the police don’t know where Cordova is, or even if he’s still alive.

There’s an article about Aleacia Stancil, who disappeared from Phoenix, Arizona in 1994 at the age of 9 months. The article has some more details about her mom, Toni, who was addicted to drugs and allegedly gave Aleacia to an unknown woman who never returned her.

Kendrick Jackson‘s dad has been convicted of his murder and was sentenced to life in prison. Two jailhouse informants said Kendrick’s dad told them the boy deserved it because he’d peed on himself. Yes, 3-year-olds should be expected to maintain perfect bladder control.

The family of eight-year-old Sebastien Metivier, who disappeared from Quebec 27 years ago, have held a memorial service for him.