Sorry for the recent silence

Yeah, I haven’t updated in a bit and I’m sorry. The last week has been super busy, mainly with wedding stuff. Michael and I are getting married Saturday.

I picked up my dress at the alterations place yesterday and it fits me perfectly. In my completely unbiased opinion I’m going to be the most beautiful bride in the world. There’s not going to be any honeymoon because of Covid. Michael will go back to work on Monday and so will I.

So, in lieu of Charley Project updates, here’s a sample of the more interesting recent missing and unidentified persons news:

1. A woman whose body was found off Interstate 5 in Sacramento, California in 1981 has been identified as 26-year-old Lily Prendergast, who was last seen when she left her family’s Texas home in late 1980.
2. John Michael Carroll disappeared from Victor, Idaho in 2005. His skeletal remains were found “in the general area” where he lived in 2013, and were identified this month.
3. Hollis Willingham has been arrested in the murder of Jim Craig Martin, who disappeared from Normangee, Texas on August 6, 2007. It doesn’t look like Martin’s body has been found, however.
4. Thomas Drew disappeared from Salisbury, Connecticut in 2007. He used to be on Charley but then his daughter asked me to remove the case. She didn’t like what I’d written, I guess. Anyway, he is still missing, and his daughter has recently published a memoir, Searching for My Missing Father: An American Noir. It sounds very interesting and I added it to my wishlist.
5. Blackfeet Community College, in corroboration with Montana’s Missing Indigenous Persons Task Force, has launched a website to help streamline missing persons reports of Native American people: “The website [linked here] allows families and friends to complete a Contact Information Form about the missing person online. In the past, missing persons’ loved ones have expressed reluctance to report missing individuals directly to law enforcement. The BCC reporting system will serve as the go-between for those reporting and all levels of law enforcement. Once the form is submitted on the website, an automatic notice will be sent to local tribal law enforcement.”
6. A woman’s torso found washed ashore in the seaside community of Benicia, California in 1979 has been identified as Dolores Wulff, who disappeared from Woodland, California that year. Dolores’s husband Carl Wulff Sr. had actually been charged with her murder in 1985, but the charge was dismissed later that year and he died in 2005.
7. A skull found on Mount Hood in Oregon in 1986 has been identified as that of Wanda Ann Herr, who had left a Gresham, Oregon group home a decade earlier at the age of nineteen. No missing persons report was filed at the time and the most recent photo available showed her at age twelve. The police are asking anyone who knew Wanda or has any info on her 1976 disappearance to contact them.
8. The police have identified a new suspect in the 1973 disappearance of Barbara Jean Aleksivich from Bath, New York. The suspect, Richard W. Davis, is now dead, but he was recently identified through DNA as the killer of Siobhan McGuinness, a Missoula, Montana six-year-old who was kidnapped, raped and murdered in 1974. Barbara, who was 24, was way out of Richard Davis’s preferred age range for victims, but he did live in Bath at the time Barbara disappeared. A previous suspect in her case, who still lived in the Bath area last I knew, has been cleared.
9. The body of Ethan Bert Kazmerzak, who disappeared from Hampton, Iowa in 2013, has probably been found. At least they found his car submerged in a local pond, with human remains inside. The remains have been sent to the state medical examiner to be identified, but it’s highly unlikely it’s anyone but Ethan.

Article about Tom Drew and old people in general

91-year-old Thomas Drew wandered confusedly away from his rural Connecticut home five years ago last Saturday and never returned. This article talks about his disappearance within the context of the problems trying to take care of old people who can’t really take care of themselves, but are not in nursing homes.

Drew’s kids had hired a live-in companion for him and also another, backup caretaker, but neither of them were licensed. The live-in guy was out all afternoon and when he returned, the other caretaker said Drew had “gone for a walk” just a few minutes before. He was never seen again.

I wonder how the old man, who reportedly had very limited mobility (wrote “nobility” at first, ha), suffered a lot of falls and couldn’t even get out of his church without assistance, could have “gone for a walk.” And more to the point, how he could have vanished so completely. This is not to imply that Mr. Drew met with foul play or that anyone lied about the circumstances of his disappearance. I know that people with dementia have been known to wander tremendous distances. My opinion, though, is that Mr. Drew probably isn’t very far from home. He’s probably lying out in the woods somewhere nearby. Sometimes people disappear and their bodies turn up, years later, only a hundred or two hundred yards from where they vanished.

Anyway, the article explains how it’s difficult to make sure elderly people get the care they need. Thomas Drew was apparently well-to-do (he’d been a clothing designer who graduated from the prestigious Fashion Institute of Technology) and his daughters, neither of whom lived nearby, had power of attorney over his affairs, so presumably they could afford to hire people to look after him. Of course, even that proved to be not enough. And what about old people who aren’t wealthy and don’t have living relatives, or their relatives don’t know or don’t care that they’re into such bad shape? Earlier this month I wrote about two old ladies, one of them more than 100 years old, who vanished and weren’t missed for YEARS.

In Connecticut at least, there are “mandated reporters” who, if they know an elderly person can’t manage on their own anymore, are required to tell the state so the state can provide assistance. It’s just like with child abuse. But according to the article, only “licensed physicians and nurses, physical therapists, pharmacists and anyone providing care through a nursing home or agency are among mandatory reporters.”

Both of Thomas Drew’s caretakers weren’t licensed, so they weren’t mandated to report anything and they didn’t. Perhaps they thought they could handle it; perhaps they simply didn’t have enough experience to realize just how bad things had gotten; perhaps they didn’t know you could report this sort of thing, who knows. And, as Charley Project readers are well aware of, even if a person is in a nursing home, that doesn’t mean they can’t disappear.

It’s a big problem, and it’s going to get worse because the U.S. has an aging population.

I just think it’s really sad that Thomas Drew, who had lived to be more than 90 years old, had to (presumably) die under those conditions.