Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Some MP news highlights while I was gone:

• Mark Duane Woodard has been found. Or rather, he was found in 1977, 23 months after his disappearance, but not identified till now. The aforementioned news link uses his Charley Project pic, and asked me permission first. (Thanks!) This link has another photo of him, a much better quality one, as well as more details about his disappearance. He was murdered, shot to death. His sister is the only surviving member of the immediate family.
• In the state of Thuringia in central Germany they have found a missing girl, Peggy No-Last-Name-Released [edit: per a UK article supplied by a commenter, it’s Knobloch], who disappeared mysteriously fifteen years ago, at the age of nine. A mushroom picker found her bones in the forest nine miles from Peggy’s hometown of Lichtenberg. According to this article and one other I found about the case, this had been a murder-without-a-body (MWAB) case: In 2004, a mentally disabled man was convicted of Peggy’s murder. He was later acquitted in a retrial due to lack of evidence after a key witness retracted his statement.
• Corry Ehlers, a guy who disappeared while hiking in Utah in 2012, has also been found deceased. His skeletal remains, found “in a steep, rocky spot near Alta Ski Resort” last summer, were identified in late June. They think Corry fell off a cliff.
• Three days ago it was fifteen years since sisters Diamond and Tionda Bradley vanished mysteriously from Chicago. The Chicago Tribune has done an anniversary article about it, with quotes from Diamond and Tionda’s two other sisters, Rita and Victoria: The girls disappeared just a day before Victoria Bradley’s ninth birthday. Until recent years, Bradley, who turns 24 on Thursday, said she was unable to celebrate her birthday because of her depression over the anniversary of their disappearance. I have not updated the girls’ casefiles in over a decade, and last time was just to add some more pics. I will give a look and see if I can find any developments that have taken place in the intervening years.
• Two more recent anniversaries: eleven years since Stacy Ann Aragon and her boyfriend Steven Bishop disappeared from Arizona (see article; Stacy has been reported missing but it appears Steven has not been), and ten years since Roxanne Paltauf disappeared (article) from Texas.
• The NCMEC reports that two of my oldest family abduction cases have been resolved, with the children located alive. One was Jacquelina Ann Gomez, who was abducted from Illinois by her father in 1992 at the age of 3. She would be 27 now, 28 in September.
• The other case involves two brothers who disappeared with their mother and stepfather from Blairsville, Georgia in 1996, when the boys were 2 and 3. A day or so before I left for Minneapolis I got contacted by a very excited reporter who ran a story on Rick Tyler, a man who’s running for Congress under the odious slogan “Make America White Again.” She said after she ran the story she was deluged with emails from people who believed Rick Tyler was probably the same Rick Tyler who was listed as the missing Blairsville kids’ stepfather. She also said the police were now claiming that the boys’ mom DID have custody of them when they disappeared, after all. Well, then the day I left Minneapolis I got an NCMEC notice saying the boys were recovered. I’m not going to say their names on here or put them on the resolved page because I’m not sure about the custody issue, but it should be easy enough to determine who they are from the info I just provided.
• The state of Arkansas has a brand shiny new MP database with 510 people on it, many whose names I don’t recognize. I am very happy about this. I believe every state should have their own publicly searchable online database, as large and comprehensive as possible. Many of the people listed in this new database have no pics though. I hope this situation improves.
• Morgan Keyanna Martin, a pregnant teenager who disappeared in 2012, is now considered a MWAB case. Jacobee Flowers, the father of the unborn child, has been charged with her murder. Homicide is the most common non-natural cause of death for pregnant women in the US and from what I have read, all around the world, the murder of pregnant women — usually by their baby’s father — is a universal problem.
• HuffPo has published a photo essay about the 1998 disappearance of SUNY-Albany student Suzanne Lyall. It’s a mysterious case; no obvious suspects, no answers. 19 years old, promising future, and then gone.
• Kidnap survivor Jaycee Dugard has been in the news again, going on TV and talking about how her life’s going and how she’s raising the two daughters she had with her kidnapper Philip Garrido. The link I just gave provides lots of news articles to read, more than I can summarize here. But here’s one quote from this article to show what a resilient woman and amazing mother Jaycee was and still is: As she and her daughters grew older, Dugard said she planted a flower in front of the shed and set up a little school to teach them as much as she could with only her fifth-grade education. “They’re so resilient, and they’re beautiful and loving, and I’m really lucky,” she said. Dugard has protected her daughters’ privacy and said some of their friends don’t even know of their past. She said the three of them are able to talk about what happened with each other.

Select It Sunday: Roxanne Paltauf

Selected by Suzie: Roxanne Elizabeth Paltauf, missing from Austin, Texas since July 7, 2006. She was eighteen and a half at the time.

It’s a familiar story: she got into a fight with her boyfriend. He said she just walked away, leaving all her belongings behind except her ID. She has never been heard from again. The boyfriend has a criminal record and a history of violence. An Austin Chronicle article, copied here, provides details of the case and Roxanne’s background.

Her family has set up a Facebook page for her. The case is still active and the police conducted a search for her body as recently as this past March.

Roxanne seems like a responsible, hardworking young woman, not the type who would just vanish into thin air voluntarily. If she’s still alive, she would be 26 years old today. But I think she’s still eighteen.

The latest MP news

This article about Erik Patchin has two new pictures of him. Last seen in Tallahassee, Florida, He’s been missing for nineteen years, nearly as long as he had been alive before he disappeared. His sister was quoted in the article, talking about how awkward it was to explain whenever someone asked if she had any siblings. Reminds me of Etan Patz‘s parents, who have three kids including him. Post-abduction, when asked how many children they had, his father would say: “Two, I guess.” His mother would say, “We have two at home.”

There’s an article about the disappearance of Kemberly Ramer, who’s been missing almost sixteen years. The police are still actively searching for her and believe she was abducted from her father’s Opp, Alabama home by someone she knew. The NCMEC put up a new AP for her a few months ago.

A newspaper in Illinois has run an article talking about several MP cases local to that area, including Michelle Bianco and Keith Ryan. The other names it gives, I don’t recognize and I’m not sure where they come from; I don’t see them on NamUs.

Sunday was the seventh anniversary of the disappearance of Roxanne Paltauf from Austin, Texas. The case has gotten a reasonable amount of attention over the years and got an anniversary article here.

Sunday was also the sixth anniversary of 19-year-old community college student Brian Sullivan‘s disappearance, and his family had a vigil to commemorate it.

This article mentions not only Brian but also two missing young black men, Domonique Tyshawn Holley-Grisham and Jonathan Tyrone Granison-Bradley. As I note on their Charley Project pages: Domonique is classified as a runaway, but he didn’t take any belongings and his family doesn’t think he left on his own. Jonathan has a life-threatening medical condition and needs medication to survive; he hasn’t refilled his prescriptions since his disappearance eight years ago.

Michelle Angela “Angie” Yarnell‘s killer has been freed. He got a whopping seven years for her murder (a plea bargain) and has been released four years after his sentencing; I think he must have gotten credit for time served and perhaps time off for good behavior as well. (Why is it that we always release the rapists and the murderers and the child abusers but keep the drug users behind bars?) Angie’s body has never been found.