Legions of the disappeared

My friend Sean Munger, who runs Charley’s Twitter feed, has published another blog entry — one in a series of four so far — profiling some of the Charley Project’s more puzzling and frustrating cases.

This time he wrote about:

Wojciech Fudali (22, missing from Rhode Island since 2008, I’ve blogged about him before);
Myoung “Mike” Noah (60, missing from California since 2007);
Asha Degree (9, missing from North Carolina since 2000);
Benjamin Cannon (20, missing from Nebraska since 1995);
Anna Christian Waters (5, missing from California since 1973); and
Ruth Baumgardner (22, missing from Ohio since 1937).

He’s got some intriguing info on Mike Noah that I don’t have on Charley. I wonder where he found it.

When people shouldn’t mind their own business

Today I posted the disappearance of Jonathan Dorey, a British guy who was studying abroad at Virginia Commonwealth University when he disappeared in March. His case is viewed — with good reason — as a probable suicide. A person saw a man matching Dorey’s description “swimming” in a local river. In early March. On a rainy/snowy day when the temperature hovered around 30. And apparently this individual took no action, and all this didn’t come out until weeks after Dorey’s disappearance.

Kind of similar is the December 2008 disappearance of a recent college graduate, Wojciech Fudali. It’s not clear what ultimately happened to him, but after a party he apparently stripped down to his skin and walked out of a friend’s home into the cold. Some neighbors saw him nearby that morning. Two hours later some friends saw him running on the grounds of a bird sanctuary. Both times he was stark naked. Yet, as far as I can tell, no one so much as bothered to speak to him and ask what was going on.

If I saw a person swimming outdoors on an icy-cold day, I would probably call the police. If the person was from Siberia or something and just felt like some bracing exercise, fine, no harm done, but someone should at least check. If I saw a naked person standing around in public in any weather, I would DEFINITELY call the police. I mean, indecent exposure, anyone? Both of these young men are probably dead. And if someone had just taken five minutes out of their day to intervene in what was clearly a very strange if not life-threatening situation, both of these young men might still be alive/not missing now.

I’m all for not poking your nose in someone else’s business. But there are limits.

Another for the ???? Category

I’m writing today’s updates and recorded the case of Wojciech Fudali, who disappeared from Rhode Island last December after a late-night party with friends. Sounds typical on the surface, except that Fudali was stark naked when he vanished. He left his shoes and every stitch of clothing behind. In New England. In December.

This article says, “While police interviewed some of his friends at the East Shore Road house Sunday afternoon, a friend arrived and said he saw Fudali running nude near the Galilee Escape Road around 11:30 a.m. Saturday but did not report it to police.” What’s going on there? If I saw any of my friends running in the buff down the road at any time of year, never mind the dead of winter, I’d probably call 911 on the spot. At the very least I’d be yelling, “Hey! What’s going on? Why are you naked? Are you okay?”

Other articles say Fudali was a “nature lover,” so perhaps he dabbled in nudism before. But being naked in public in suburban Rhode Island IN DECEMBER is not normal, even for nudists.

I think he’s got to be dead. A naked person could not survive more than a couple of hours outside in below-freezing temperatures. What caused him to leave the house in that condition, I wonder? Was he depressed and trying to commit suicide by hypothermia? If so, why didn’t he go off somewhere where no one could see him, not lounge around in public places? Was he whacked out on some kind of drugs or something, did he have a psychotic episode? That poor guy. He had just gotten his college degree, too.