The Last Place You'd Look (23 page)

Burgess, who is a convicted sex offender, was once again arrested in the state of Florida. This time he was charged with a multitude of offenses, including theft. Again he was brought back to Los Angeles where he was sentenced to prison for three years in connection with another California case. Meanwhile, a large search-and-rescue effort throughout the Santa Monica Mountains was conducted. No clue as to Donna Jou’s whereabouts was found.

While the Jou family continued seeking their daughter, Burgess was released from prison on March 14, 2009. The state then ordered him arrested in connection with Donna’s disappearance, and he was charged three days later. On May 6, he pleaded guilty to a felony count of involuntary manslaughter and misdemeanor concealment of an accidental death. He was sentenced to five years in prison followed by three years of probation for his role in Donna’s death. The Jou family was told he could be released as early as 2011—serving about two years.

Burgess told investigators that he and Donna were partying the night of her death and that she wanted drugs. He says she used a mixture of heroin and cocaine and he left her sitting there, on a drug high, while he went to bed. When he awakened the next morning, he said, he found the bright, young college student dead in a chair in his living room. He says he panicked because he was on probation for performing a lewd act on a child, so he placed Donna’s body in a bag. Burgess told investigators he put the bag with her body into the bed of his truck and drove to the waterfront. Then he moved Donna’s remains to a boat, took her to an area in the vicinity of Cabrillo Bay and Wilmington Marina, and dumped her in the water. A police spokesman later told the press that others at Burgess’s house during the party corroborated both Donna’s presence at the party and her drug use. The Jous believe the people at that party covered for Burgess.

Reza has hired a private company to search the waters for his daughter’s body because he does not believe the story Burgess told police. For one thing, he says, his daughter has no history of drug use. He does not believe she would ever have taken drugs—especially a mixture of such strong and potentially lethal narcotics. Donna was a pre-med student. She understood the effects of drugs like heroin and cocaine. Why, Reza asks, would an ambitious, intelligent, otherwise levelheaded individual like Donna allow herself to be drugged with a highly addictive substance like heroin? Other parts of Burgess’s story don’t add up for the Jous, either.

“He said he put her in a bag and put her in the bed of his truck, and the truck was there parked on the side of a narrow street in his overcrowded neighborhood from the early morning hours of Sunday until Monday evening, in June, all night long, and nobody could smell anything or see anything in the bed of that truck? And he drove through the narrow streets to San Pedro and lowered her into a boat and dropped her into the water near a lighthouse and no one saw anything. It’s so crowded [in those areas] it’s impossible for somebody to do those things and nobody sees anything,” Reza says.

Reza believes Burgess fabricated the story in order to hide what really happened to his daughter. But whether Burgess is telling the truth or lying in order to draw the least possible sentence, as the Jou family suspects, there is one thing that can help Reza Jou come to terms with what has torn his life to pieces: finding his daughter’s remains—if she is dead.

Without a body, there is always reason to hope, no matter how strong the evidence to the contrary. That is one reason Reza persists at the task of searching for Donna.

“[Police] told me many times their job is not to look for Donna; their job is to put Burgess behind bars. They are not looking for my child,” says Reza.

Reza says the experience changed his life in ways he cannot articulate. “Sometimes I have difficulty recognizing myself. The pain is unbelievable: her image is always in front of my face,” he says.

“She had such a promising future and now this person gets two years’ prison time [the amount of time Burgess most likely will have served by the time he is released] and he gets the chance to do it one more time to other families,” says Reza.

He will not rest until he finds Donna or her body. “I’m not alive anymore. It’s the new me, not the same person I used to be. Now I live only to be a champion for Donna,” Reza says.

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Deborah Bowen, coauthor with Susan Strickler of
A Good Friend for Bad Times: Helping Others through Grief
, says for many it is impossible to move on without recovered remains, even when there is no doubt the loved one is gone. “It’s an individual thing, but for some people [a body] is really important for them to let go,” says Bowen.

Those with a missing loved one say there is no such thing as closure, but crippling grief inhibits the ability to live one’s life. Siblings of lost children often see dramatic shifts in family dynamics, particularly when a case is unresolved. Although not the hoped-for ending, in worst-case scenarios finding the loved one’s remains can allow the grief process to run its natural course.

Bowen says different people need different things to get through the “not knowing.” Some find solace in religion. “All the world’s religions believe in life after death and the spirit lives on: it’s a good thing to focus on that point,” she says.

“Grief can keep you from moving on,” Bowen says. Even if solace is found through religion or other pursuits, Bowen recommends counseling. She says, “It doesn’t mean you are going to quit grieving.” But it may help kick-start the healing process.

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Melisa Brady Sloan. Courtesy of Merle B. Brady.

Melanie Brady Drury of Cincinnati, Ohio, and her sister Michele Walker of Gallatin, Tennessee, each devote part of their day to searching for their sister, Melisa Brady Sloan. Melisa, a petite blond with brown eyes and a warm, generous smile, had moved with her husband, John, from Kentucky to Orlando, Florida, where she found employment as a nurse. But on May 1, 1994, the twenty-three-year-old vanished.

Police went to the home she shared with her husband at the request of her worried family and found Melisa’s car there, along with her pet cat. Her husband told the officers that Melisa left him for another man. Melanie says Melisa’s credit cards and Social Security number have not been used since she disappeared. Official records confirm the marriage was troubled—police responded to calls at their home at least twice in the months preceding Melisa’s disappearance.

John divorced Melisa eight months after she vanished. Melanie says he has remarried and lives on the other side of the country. Orlando detectives reviewed Melisa’s case again in 2007, obtaining DNA samples from the Brady family for future use. Melisa is listed as “missing endangered.”

“Not knowing where Melisa is probably is the most frustrating [thing] of all,” Melanie says.

Melisa’s family struggles to keep her name in front of the public. They don’t want their bubbly sister with the outgoing personality and a knack for music forgotten. And the Bradys understand all too well how important it is to keep a case alive: their father, Francis “Frank” Brady, was kidnapped and murdered in October 1991. His killers were apprehended following a broadcast of
America’s Most Wanted
.

“The thing about having two tragedies happen to your family is that you never, ever seem to feel like you come up for air. It’s never over. It never leaves you. It’s always there,” says Melanie. “We just want to bring Melisa home and place her beside my father.”

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On the other side of the country, in Niagara Falls, New York, Sharon DeLuke understands Reza Jou’s emotions. She has walked in his shoes, and it was a painful journey.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1990, Sharon’s seventeen-year-old son, Ron, laid his glasses on a table in the home he shared with his family and left to go to a friend’s house. His family would never see him alive again.

A happy-go-lucky young man with brown hair and a stocky build, Ron loved racquetball, the family dog, and riding the four-wheeler he bought with money he earned from his paper route. He was a good student and one of Sharon’s five children. A senior in high school, he hoped to become a math teacher. Ron’s future was brimming with possibilities, and he couldn’t wait to move to the next phase: college.

But that’s one place he would never go. Ron DeLuke vanished as he traveled the short distance between his house and that of his friend.

When they discovered him missing, his family mounted a search. The local media printed photos of Ron, and television stations ran stories on his disappearance. He was entered into the police database as a runaway—something standard to police departments when the missing individual is a teenager. But his mother and family knew that Ron DeLuke never ran away. He was too well adjusted and happy to abandon his life and dreams.

The family did everything they could think of to find Ron and bring him back home. There were helicopter and ground searches in and around the Niagara Gorge, which lies blocks from the DeLuke residence. Nothing was found. Sharon even consulted psychics who claimed to have information on Ron, but she came away disappointed and despairing. “We turned over every stone looking for him,” she says.

Meanwhile, everyday life became a nightmare. “It was tough to get up and go to work; in fact, it was hard to go anywhere. All I kept thinking of was that I had to find him, that someone was holding him hostage, someone beat him up—you can’t control what you are thinking,” she says.

Sharon never gave up hope that her son was alive, yet she understood implicitly that the longer he was missing, the worse the possible outcome. That outcome crystallized on Easter Sunday in 1993, about two and a half years after Ron vanished. Sharon, who works in a hospital lab, says a nurse told her that a body had been found in Niagara Gorge, which is part of the state park system. Goose bumps rose on Sharon’s arms. She knew without being told that the discovery was connected to Ron’s disappearance.

She spoke to the doctor in charge of the hospital’s forensics unit, and he confirmed that he believed the body to be Ron’s. Sharon, her police officer nephew, and her former husband (Ron’s father) went to identify the clothes and personal items found on the remains, which some kids playing in the gorge had stumbled across on the night before Easter.

“They had his clothes lying on the floor and his wallet,” she said.

Examination of the skeletonized remains proved the victim was indeed Ron DeLuke. Because so much time had passed, the medical examiner could find little in the way of how he might have died. All Sharon knows is that his clavicle was broken.

Does she suspect foul play? She has her opinion about what happened to Ron but realizes that chances are she will never know the truth. Ron never made it to his friend’s house the night he disappeared, and he didn’t like the gorge, says Sharon. She finds it hard to believe he would go anywhere near it, especially by himself, in the dark.

“When you have a missing child, you don’t know if he’s hungry or hurt or if he has a warm bed,” she says. But until his body was found, she never gave up on him nor did she believe he could be dead.

“At least God gave him back to me and I was able to give him a decent burial. That was the most important thing, to give him a proper burial,” she says.

Sharon says she knows that her son is at peace now. During his funeral she looked up at the window in the church and saw a column of sparkling dust in the air against the backdrop of stained glass. She believes it was “angel dust.”

“I saw his spirit leave and go to heaven, and that’s when I got my peace. I knew he would be all right and God would take care of him,” Sharon said, her voice breaking as she recalls that long-ago moment.

“It’s very important to be able to bury your child. Some people never have that,” she says.

You will never close the hole in my heart.—Clark County, Nevada, Coroner P. Michael Murphy quoting the family of a missing person.

T
he last time Kelly Jolkowski saw her son, Jason, he was in the process of leaving his childhood behind. At nineteen, Jason wanted to be a radio sportscaster. A sweet boy who had never been in trouble, he was earning money to return to college in the fall by working at a local restaurant. He lived with his mom, dad, and younger brother, Michael, in Omaha, Nebraska.

Kelly says Jason suffered from some minor learning and speech issues, but he’d tried hard to overcome them. While a student at the local community college, Jason had discovered a gift for working as a disc jockey at the school’s student-staffed radio station. Combined with his almost encyclopedic knowledge of sports trivia, Jason believed he’d found his calling.

The Nebraska youth didn’t drink or smoke. His idea of a great time was to play video games with his brother. Michael, who is seven years younger than Jason, worshipped his older sibling. The two were as close and inseparable as fingers on the same hand.

On June 13, 2001, after Kelly and her husband, Jim, left for their respective jobs, Jason received a call from his place of employment asking him to come in early. Jason told his boss his car was in the shop and he didn’t have a ride. His boss said he would send another employee to pick him up.

Jason directed the coworker to the high school where he graduated, which was about seven or eight blocks away. He said he would meet her there because she wasn’t sure where his house was. But first, before he left, he had a chore to do.

Jason Jolkowski. Courtesy of Kelly Jolkowski.

It was Jason’s job to put the trash cans away after the sanitation trucks came and went. At about 10:00 that morning, Michael glanced out the window and saw Jason, dressed in his work clothes, rolling the trash cans to their usual place. Michael had no idea his brother would soon vanish into that hot summer morning.

The first inkling Kelly had that something was wrong came when Jim called her at work sometime in the afternoon asking if she’d had a call from Jason. “And I am thinking, ‘Why would I?’ I had no idea this stuff had transpired,” she says.

After her husband explained Jason had not shown up for work, Kelly says she grew concerned. “That was not like him. Jason would not promise to do something and then not do it.”

They called his cell phone and he didn’t answer. They drove the route Jason would have walked and found empty sidewalks.

“I had a dark, horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach,” Kelly says.

Believing they had to wait twenty-four hours to file a missing persons report, Jim and Kelly spent a sleepless night searching for their son, then called the police the next morning.

“The police officer who took the report said, ‘Oh, he’s probably just spending the night at a friend’s house and will be back any minute,’” Kelly says. At the time she felt the remark trivialized what the family was going through but now says, “I understand he was trying to be comforting.” Ten days later detectives came out and interviewed the family.

When Jason still didn’t come home and no trace of him was found, extended family members traveled to the Jolkowski’s Omaha home and helped distribute flyers. In the meantime, Kelly and her phone were inseparable. She was afraid Jason would call and she wouldn’t be there to answer it. For the first six months after he went missing, she even carried it into the bathroom when she showered.

Her days blurred. “I became an emotional zombie,” she says.

Even worse, she didn’t know where to turn for help. Other than dealing with the police, there was no real guidance, nothing to help her figure out where to go, what to do, how to search for Jason.

“There were never any leads, never any clues. It was an absolute zero,” she says. Police interviewed friends and coworkers and turned up nothing. No witnesses, no possibilities.

The family called in the media. Stories ran in newspapers and on television, but no solid leads developed. It was as if Jason had dropped off the map. Kelly couldn’t stand to talk about it—she asked that coworkers not discuss the case with her until she was ready. They complied. But her desire to not talk about it with the people in her life didn’t undercut her obsession with finding Jason.

Kelly found accounts on the Internet of other missing persons and was determined, “That would never be us. We wouldn’t be like those families. I told myself that one day he would be home,” she says.

In educating herself about missing persons, Kelly found little in the way of organized help for families but knew the Internet could be a good resource. She built a site for Jason and once again attracted widespread media attention. Others with similar situations also contacted her. Kelly—working on a budget—began looking for ways to publicize their disappearances without breaking the bank: Project Jason was born.

A nonprofit that offers assistance, advice, and a place for the families of missing persons to communicate with others who are going through the same heartbreak, www.projectjason.org is often one of the first places families turn to for help.

Over the years, Kelly has initiated programs like the 18 Wheel Angels, in which long-haul truck drivers distribute posters of the missing as they travel. Other Project Jason programs developed by Kelly include

• Awareness Angels Network, a source where the public may access and disseminate printed posters for the missing;

• Come Home, in which posters of the missing are distributed in homeless shelters around the country;

• Faces of the Missing, profiles and images of the missing are posted on projectjason.org for public viewing and to help get the word out; and

• an annual retreat to teach families of missing persons coping strategies.

Kelly and Project Jason also work with law enforcement and other agencies to ensure that appropriate training is available. She doesn’t limit her reach to helping police—she also has worked on legislation in a number of states to make individuals who have disappeared a police priority.

Kelly cautions those with missing friends or relatives to check out an organization before engaging with it. Although there are hundreds that claim to be able to help, some are run by individuals with questionable motives and even more questionable skills and advice. Families of missing adults can check the organization’s resource page for trained and ethical nonprofits.

When dealing with missing children, she recommends checking to see if the organization or nonprofit belongs to the Association of Missing and Exploited Children’s Organizations (AMECO) at www.amecoinc.org. AMECO has stringent membership qualifications. Project Jason is a member.

Dynamic and untiring, Kelly has turned her tragedy into a source of strength for thousands. Stephanie Cook is one of the many who have turned to Kelly and Project Jason for guidance.

“The most helpful thing for me was Project Jason. Kelly Jolkowski helped me get in touch with the missing persons clearinghouse in my area to submit DNA. Kelly also had an age progression done on my mom of what she may look like now,” says Stephanie.

Stephanie’s mother, Bobbi Ann Campbell, disappeared in late December 1994. The twenty-four-year-old blond had gone to pick up her paycheck and stop at the grocery store, leaving behind her five-year-old. The petite young woman has not been seen since, but her car was found not too long after her disappearance, abandoned near the Jordan River in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Stephanie has not stopped looking for her mom, whom she says once worked at a zoo and loved animals. She remembers camping and fishing together and reminds the public that a missing person leaves behind heartache and uncertainty. “All missing adults have a family and friends. People love them,” she says.

In June 2010, Stephanie channeled her grief and longing for her mother into a memorial service to commemorate Bobbi Ann’s life. But she still hasn’t given up on finding her.

“The hope gets harder every year that passes,” Stephanie says.

Kathy Wormington understands Stephanie’s reference to time all too well: more than three decades have passed since Kathy saw her father, Frederick Leach. Like Stephanie, Kathy also turned to Project Jason when she saw no progress in her dad’s case.

Frederick vanished under suspicious circumstances on March 17, 1976, from Laytonville, California, where he lived and worked as a mechanic. Kathy says the facts surrounding her father’s disappearance have led her family to believe he was murdered, although no body has surfaced. After years of dealing with law enforcement agencies and searching on their own, the family asked Kelly Jolkowski for help.

“We realize it’s been a long time,” Kathy says. But she, like many others, has learned to put her faith in grassroots efforts like Project Jason, Outpost for Hope, and the Doe Network.

The Doe Network (its full name is the Doe Network: International Center for Unidentified & Missing Persons) is operated by a volunteer administrative team and concentrates on missing persons and unidentified recovered remains in North America, Europe, and Australia.

The organization’s Web site, www.doenetwork.org, posts cases online and gives amateur sleuths a platform from which to do some of the difficult searches and comparisons that law enforcement often has neither the time nor the manpower to accomplish.

Todd Matthews, who is also with NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, has a long affiliation with the Doe Network. He says the Doe Network was founded because “until NamUs came along, there really was nothing out there. The Doe Network was born of a need.” The volunteers are still vital, he says. “The existence and progress of Doe Network proved it is possible to harness the power of the people.”

Doe Network volunteers work from their homes. They are store associates, cooks, homemakers, teachers, mechanics, nurses, lawyers, and college students all united by one goal: they want to help people find their loved ones.

“Families are sometimes under the impression they can make the report [that someone is missing] and sit back and do nothing,” Matthews says. He urges them to avoid adopting the “wait-and-see approach.” Instead, he pushes people to become proactive in the search and to demand accountability from law enforcement.

The Doe Network has about five hundred volunteers, according to Matthews. He admits that they get their share of people who don’t understand the organization’s goals.

“‘I’ve seen every episode of CSI. I want to match up photographs.’ We get a lot of that,” he says.

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Brian Sullivan’s family says they will find him no matter how long it takes. Brian vanished on July 8, 2007, from Rochester, New York. A community college student, he was in the process of deciding whether to continue school or to move and go to work. Brian’s mom, Barbara Sullivan, says his red 1995 Pontiac Sunfire was found on a dead-end street, his wallet and bank cards on the seat. Brian’s cell phone, iPod, and car keys were not found. Nothing in the nineteen-year-old student’s apartment was disturbed, and some expensive mail order purchases he had made were delivered soon after his disappearance.

Barbara stresses that Brian was neither unhappy nor depressed in the days prior to his disappearance. Like many young people, he was exploring his options and hoped either to go into some aspect of the music business or to become a social worker.

Brian is a gentle soul, according to his family. He cooks perfect fried chicken, has a broad interest in music that ranges from hip hop to jazz, and loved his late cat—Congo—who used to sleep with him. Brian, who is remembered as a sensitive, considerate kind of guy, also has a goofy sense of humor.

“He has a way of making you laugh when you [are] mad as heck at him,” says his mom.

Barbara and the rest of Brian’s family have searched nonstop for him without success. She says they are pleased with the way local law enforcement has handled his case. The police stay in constant touch with the Sullivan family, and a poster seeking information on his whereabouts was even put up in the jail, in hopes that someone might recognize him and come forward.

Barbara claims that of all the individuals who go missing, adult males get the least amount of media attention. She’s right. Children, young women—and in particular, pretty, young, white women—and celebrities monopolize the news. Those whose loved ones fall into different demographics must work hard to keep them in the public eye. Barbara urges them to never give up.

“We have relied on many outside agencies: NCMEC, Project Jason, Center for Hope,” she says. The family also has created a MySpace page for Brian and he is featured in the New York deck of missing persons playing cards distributed to prisoners. (Created by the parents of missing college student Suzanne Lyall, the playing cards feature photos of missing persons and are given to jails for the inmates to use.)

“We are devastated,” says Barbara with a simplicity that underscores how terrible these situations are for families. “As with many that go missing, the answers are a long time coming.”