The Last Place You'd Look (2 page)

Called the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), the program allows law enforcement, medical examiners, and families to input information and grants access to the public, except for some investigatory details not released by the police. This unique, citizen-centric approach has already helped officials make several identifications.

“The government finally woke up,” says Todd Matthews, a civilian who works with NamUs.

I first heard Matthews speak at the same Wisconsin conference as the Nevada coroner. Later, we talked about his involvement with NamUs, as well as his unique take on working with missing persons and unidentified human remains.

Matthews has a deep and abiding personal interest in both subjects, and he is one of the more interesting individuals I encountered while writing this book. One of the founding members of the Doe Network, a civilian, Internet-
based enterprise that works to match human remains to missing persons, his obsession with missing persons began in 1968, when a man named Wilbur Riddle discovered the body of a woman wrapped in a green tarp discarded near a dirt road in the area of Georgetown, Kentucky. A local newspaper dubbed the young woman—thought to be between sixteen and nineteen years old—the “Tent Girl.”

The autopsy suggested she had been rendered unconscious with a blow to the head and placed in a plastic bag, where she asphyxiated. The bag was then wrapped in the tarp and tossed in the woods. Her fingerprint was obtained and an artist drew her likeness, but all attempts to identify the victim failed.

Decades passed and Riddle, the man who found the Tent Girl, retired and moved to Livingston, Tennessee, where his daughter, Lori, had a boyfriend named Todd Matthews. Matthews was fascinated by the story of the girl with no name and began working to identify her. When the Internet became available, Matthews switched his quest to an online search. Now married to Lori, he searched for clues to Tent Girl’s identity and one day he found her—Barbara Hackman Taylor, a twenty-four-year-old mother married to a carnival worker. Following exhumation and a DNA comparison with the victim’s living sister, a positive identification was made.

Barbara Hackman Taylor’s husband, who said Barbara ran off with another man, was by then deceased, and her murder has never been solved. It took three decades to identify her and put a name on her headstone, a step Matthews believes is crucial—all John and Jane Does deserve to be identified and buried with dignity and their families to mourn their losses.

“When I made the identification of the Tent Girl, I really had no idea that I had a better chance of hitting the lottery,” he says.

His job now—and that of NamUs and modern, forward-thinking coroners and medical examiners like Murphy—is to make sure the tools exist for more identifications, as well as better cooperation between law enforcement and the civilian community. The reality is that officials have not always been willing or able to cooperate with one another, much less civilians, while working missing persons cases.

For decades, the direction and depth of missing persons investigations have been determined by local jurisdictions, except in cases involving federal or state-level authorities. In fact, the local protocol regarding whether to even take such a report has varied. Some jurisdictions treat with seriousness every report of a missing person and start an immediate investigation. When a Jacksonville, North Carolina, man was reported missing by his family, county deputies completed a report and started backtracking the man’s movements. Within days it was discovered he had left of his own accord, traveling to Texas, and the case was closed. I think that’s the way it should always be done, but I realize that different agencies have different resources available.

My former department always took missing persons reports on the theory that it was easier to clear them as unfounded if the person turned out not to be missing than it was to play catch-up if the case evolved into something else (like a homicide or kidnapping), and we investigated them without delay, too. But I discovered some jurisdictions, such as the Minnesota departments contacted by Brandon Swanson’s parents when he went missing, resist filing reports.

Part of the resistance comes from their reluctance to complete what they consider unnecessary paperwork. It’s true—the vast majority of missing persons turn up in a matter of hours, their disappearances a result of misunderstandings, miscommunications, or other domestic situations. Sometimes the responding officer doesn’t believe the evidence is there, and that missed opportunity can leave families shaken and scrambling for answers when the missing loved one isn’t late coming home but in trouble.

That is exactly what happened in Brandon’s case in which a traffic mishap transformed an entire family. On May 14, 2008, when Brandon was nineteen, he was driving back to his Marshall, Minnesota, home through the flat agricultural area between his parents’ house and a town called Canby.

According to Brandon’s mother, Annette Swanson, “Brandon was living at home when he went missing. He had just completed his first year at Minnesota West Community and Technical College in Canby. He briefly visited friends in a nearby town before leaving for home—taking back roads rather than the highway. At approximately 1:50 a.m., Brandon called home asking his father and [me] to come help him. He had gone into the ditch and needed help getting his car out. Brandon told us he was near Lynd [Minnesota].”

The Swansons jumped into their truck and drove to the area where Brandon said he’d landed in the ditch but couldn’t find him. They called Brandon and asked for help locating him. Despite much back and forth, they still couldn’t connect, so Brandon decided to set off on foot and walk toward them. He remained on the phone the entire time—a forty-seven-minute call. Then, says Annette, Brandon said, “Oh, shit.”

“The call ended abruptly. Several attempts to regain contact with Brandon failed. Brandon has not been seen or heard from since,” she says.

“We encountered reluctance from law enforcement in accepting a missing persons report, searching, and investigating, but we are a stubborn, strong-minded, and determined family. Their reluctance and inadequacies would not prevent us from searching for our son,” Annette says.

Like other families facing this type of situation, the Swansons channeled their energies in productive directions: they continued to scour the area for their son, even finding a search manager to coordinate the many wilderness searches they have conducted, and they made sure other families didn’t face the same initial official disinterest as they did. Following a campaign by the Swanson family and their supporters, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty signed Brandon’s
l
aw, which requires a faster and more proactive response from law enforcement when adults vanish, to give families a better shot at locating their loved ones and affords specialized training for law enforcement.

Law enforcement wastes no time when a young child is involved, but adults—even young adults like Brandon—are a different story. An eighteen-year-old is an adult in most states, although three—Alabama, Delaware, and Nebraska—consider nineteen the age of majority, and in Mississippi it is twenty-one. Some states also grant majority to those who have graduated from high school or joined the service.

Not all police take reports when an older child or young adult disappears under circumstances not considered suspicious. Many departments already operate on paper-thin resources and don’t have the personnel to look for those old enough to leave on their own. Also, few agencies have dedicated missing persons units; in fact, the majority of officers have little or no specialized training in the field. I received none and believe my experience is typical of local police.

Jesse Ross. Courtesy of Don and Donna Ross.

Because of this, older teens, including Jesse Ross, are often labeled as runaways, even when their families know better. Like Brandon, Jesse was nineteen and a college student at the time of his disappearance on November 21, 2006. The tall redhead, whom his family characterizes as “never dull,” was attending a Model United Nations conference in Chicago and had called his mother, Donna, the day before to give her an update on the trip. It was the last time they would talk.

A good student with an internship at a local radio station, Jesse majored in communications and minored in politics at the University of Missouri–
Kansas City. One of more than one thousand students attending the confer
ence, Jesse and the other “delegates” were called to a mock emergency meet
ing at 2:00 a.m. at the Four Points Sheraton Hotel. Cameras on the premises caught the teen, dressed in a white T-shirt, jeans, and a green warm-up jacket, as he walked toward the hotel’s exterior doors about half an hour later.

Jesse’s hotel was a ten-minute walk from the Sheraton, where the conference was held. The Ross family says Chicago police claim no foul play is involved, yet they fear the worst: there has been no activity on their child’s credit cards or telephone since he was last seen.

Jesse was missing for twelve hours before anyone “decided something was wrong” and contacted the Rosses, says Donna. Jesse’s family has staged events and rallies, given interviews to many different media outlets, put up flyers, and visited the scene of his disappearance, looking for clues as to his whereabouts—all without success.

As for the police, says Donna, “No family is happy when their loved one is missing. We hoped police would ask for help . . . when they could find no clues. So far, they are keeping the case open, so our [private investigator] can’t see the files, but they are not working a single lead.”

I need to clarify that it’s not the intention of this book to indict police and the way they operate—or to defend them, for that matter. I understand the difficult jobs they face, but some departments are better at working these cases than others. In law enforcement, like sports, there are differing levels of competence even though everyone is playing the same game. The good ones take the initial reports, are sympathetic to the families, and investigate and touch base with families so they don’t feel forgotten. Agencies with excellent missing persons bureaus staffed with well-trained and competent officers are most often found in larger cities, but even a department without the resources for a missing persons unit can do a great job on these tough investigations.

One example of how efficient a well-trained missing persons unit can be is evident in an October 2009 case, when a transit police officer in New York City found Fernando Hernandez Jr. in a Coney Island subway station. The thirteen-year-old boy, who is diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, had been hiding out in the city’s subway system unnoticed for eleven days. He rode the trains to avoid going home, where he was fearful he would get in trouble following an incident at school. His mother, a Mexican immigrant, was quoted in the
New York Times
as saying she believed her lack of English and legal status affected the response from police—a charge police denied.

In fact, the New York Police Department did launch a search for the boy. Officers took a report almost as soon as they were notified he was missing by his parents. They chased down leads and interviewed witnesses. After the child had been missing for six days, his case was transferred to the department’s crack Missing Persons Squad. The squad focused its efforts on finding the child, and those efforts paid off.

His mother says her son’s disability makes it more difficult for him to judge the appropriateness of his actions. When individuals with mental disorders disappear, police and families face a different type of investigation, and because current laws give the mentally disabled the right to terminate their medications, families often find themselves hamstrung in what they can do, even if police do find them.

Alicia Digna’s mother, Pam Digna, says her missing daughter suffers from autism and a potpourri of physical ailments that range from a tumor to multiple sclerosis. Pam is worried about her sweet-faced daughter and her probable lack of medical treatment.

Alicia, who is twenty-six, disappeared from Romulus, Michigan, on August 27, 2008. Born with multiple birth defects, she has ongoing medical issues that combine to increase the likelihood of brain damage as her untreated conditions are exacerbated. Without Alicia’s medication, Pam fears her daughter will not survive.

“We felt that there is a good possibility that Alicia has died and that we are now searching for a body,” says her mother.

But my research shows that those with mental disorders aren’t the only people who receive short shrift in the U.S. missing persons system. Substance abusers often receive little attention from authorities and little sympathy from the press or public.

Stacy White understands all too well because she and other family members have been searching for her husband Bobby’s missing sister, Tabitha Franklin, since she disappeared on August 13, 2009.

The mother of three children and a resident of Cullman, Alabama, “Tabby” was twenty-eight years old when she vanished. Her family has put up posters and led several searches, but thus far they’ve found no sign of the bubbly blond who favors long, dangly earrings. While police have said they do not believe foul play was involved, Stacy says her sister-in-law has been the victim of domestic abuse in the past and the family suspects it might also be the case this time.