Once in awhile it happens that I’m writing up a case and discover that, lo, it’s connected to another one. Sometimes the MPs are relatives; sometimes they have some other shared feature, like how Mary Margaret Cook and Peggy Wynell Byars-Baisden both lived on the same street, although there’s no indication those two cases are connected. Most often, though, the connection is through a third party, usually a suspect in the case.
Today I added two of those: Valarie Sloan and Janis Sanders. Both of these women had been mentioned on the site already in the casefiles of others — Stacey Morrison and Janeice Langs respectively — but I didn’t have any photos or anything for them to have their own files. The same suspect, a serial killer named Joseph Miller, has confessed to killing Valarie and Stacey but hasn’t faced charges and probably never will. In the case of the Two Jans, the same guy, Gerald Libertowski, was actually charged with the murders of his ex-girlfriends Janeice Langs and Janis Sanders, but he got off both times. I tried to find out what he got up to after that, whether he’s still alive, but couldn’t find anything on him.
Possibly the most unusual connection noted on Charley is that of Robert Black, Richard Davison and Patricia Laxer. Those three, plus a woman named Goldie Swanger, all disappeared going either to or from an appointment with the same doctor. Goldie turned up in 2004, but I have no info as to the circumstances. There seems to be no indication of foul play in the Case of the Disappearing Patients, but the whole thing is very Twilight Zone. I only wish I knew more about those cases, though I suspect that at closer look they would turn out to be disappointingly much less mysterious.
The Charley Project Blog 