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13-year-old girl missing since 1994 found alive

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Christina Marie Plante, who disappeared from Star Valley, Arizona on May 16, 1994 at the age of 13, has been found alive. They won’t provide any more details as to where she is now or what she’s been up to in the last 32 years, out of consideration for her privacy, but she’s breathing apparently.

It bothers me that I had never heard of this girl’s disappearance, when it’s kind of my job to have heard of everyone’s disappearance. Why was she not on the NCMEC? Why was she not on NamUs? I don’t understand why some police departments have cold case missing persons that they never bother to add to major online databases, when the internet has helped find so many missing persons.

I’m glad she’s alive. Hopefully she will reunite with her searching family.

Whoops. I feel a bit foolish right now.

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For the past several days I’ve been archiving Charley Project cases. I also asked a friend to help and she farmed some of the work out to her Discord server and they started working on the earliest cases on forwards, and now all cases up through the 60s are archived and many of the 70s cases are too. Me, I’m going backwards from my most recent updates and so far I’m up to June 2025. It’s something that can be done while watching TV or whatever, and is a great alternative to doomscrolling. My mental health in the past month has been so much better and I think it’s because I’ve been keeping busy and trying to do anything other than doomscroll.

Anyway, I clicked on a certain case I’d updated in June 2025, and was like “wait a minute, why is this still listed as an active case, I know this woman was identified in September.” I’d ever posted on Reddit about her being found! But somehow I’d forgotten to list her Charley Project case as resolved.

I feel rather like an idiot for having forgotten that. Her case will go in today’s updates as resolved. Sorry for that oversight, Michelle. RIP, and I’m glad your family now has you back and knows what happened to you.

MP of the week: George “Buddy” White

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This week’s featured missing person is George Gilbert White Jr., nicknamed Buddy. He was 33 years old when he was last seen in Grandview, Texas on September 3, 1975. Fifty years ago now. He’s white, with brown hair and blue eyes. He was 6’0 to 6’2 and 180 to 190 pounds in 1975 and dressed in Western-style clothing, including a cowboy hat and cowboy boots.

White, a veterinarian, disappeared with an acquaintance, James Durwood Grisham. They were last seen leaving a bank together. A few days later White’s wife got a “cryptic” note saying saying something like “sorry about what happened” and to go see her father. We don’t know the exact wording of the note because it’s been lost.

In December 1975, Grisham’s body was found. The cause and manner of his death have never been determined, but in 2010 the authorities said they thought both men had been homicide victims. White has never been located.

Missing man reappears after suspects mistakenly arrested for his “murder”

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So I wanted to call everyone’s attention to this New York Post article about a British case. 46-year-old Ismail Ali went missing from Bradford, England in May 2020, and earlier this month five people were arrested on suspicion of his murder. After news of this arrest hit the airwaves, Ismail Ali went to the police station to explain to them he was not dead. The article didn’t say why he went missing or where he’s been these last five and a half years.

I know that in the UK, because the legal system there is different, people are “arrested on suspicion” a lot of times and then held for questioning and then released without charge. This doesn’t happen nearly as often in the US. I have to wonder whether there would have been charges brought against those five suspects if Ismail Ali hadn’t suddenly popped up and been like “I’m not dead, guys!”

Some interesting missing persons articles I saw today

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In the city of Świętochłowice in southern Poland, 27 years ago, a couple’s 15-year-old adopted daughter, Mirella, dropped out of sight. Her parents said she’d run away back to her biological parents. They were lying. Mirella has resurfaced and has quite a tale to tell. She was never missing. The entire time, her adoptive parents had been holding her against her will in their own home!

Per this People Magazine article which has links to a bunch of Polish language articles about the case, Mirella was kept confined to a small room and didn’t have access to the basic things needed to maintain hygiene, such as menstrual supplies or underwear. When she was found she was emaciated and looked “like an old lady”, and she was sent to a hospital. No charges have been filed against the parents but the case is still under investigation. It reminds me of the Josef Fritzl case. Horrific.

In Santa Barbara, California, they’re searching for a nine-year-old girl who hasn’t been seen in a year but wasn’t reported missing by her family. Her name is Melodee Buzzard and a school official notified the authorities of her “prolonged absence”. When the police went to check on Melodee’s welfare at her home, she wasn’t there and her mom had “no clear explanation” as to what happened. I really hope she’s still alive but it sounds like she probably is not and that her parent or parents did something to her.

Five months ago, Petros Krommindas disappeared from a beach in New York, leaving a towel and other stuff behind on the beach. He was training for a triathalon and his family thinks he went for a swim to practice and got in trouble. Krommindas was running for an elected position as a Democrat in Nassau County, New York at the time of his disappearance, and although he is presumed dead, his name has not been removed from the ballot. The local Democratic Party tried to have him removed in September, but two voters filed a lawsuit to stop them, and a local judge sided with the voters, saying that because Krommindas has not been declared legally dead (and can’t be, not for at least three years after his disappearance), the law requires his candidacy to continue. In response, the local Democratic Party is campaigning for Krommindas’s election. His family has also urged voters to elect him.

The article mentions a previous case where missing person Nicholas Begich (also a Democrat, incidentally) was elected to Congress two weeks after he disappeared from Alaska and was presumed dead. Later that year he was declared legally dead and another election was held. Begich was never found. I just updated his casefile to add the “Jr.” appelation to his name, which is mentioned in the article about Krommidas.

Alice Mae Sullivan identified after almost 40 years. I don’t understand why this didn’t happen sooner.

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So Alice Mae Sullivan was 20 years old, the mother of a toddler, and a sophomore at Tennessee State University when she disappeared from Nashville in 1986. She has just been identified. Her skull was found on Stokers Lane in Nashville in 2004.

I don’t really understand why this didn’t happen earlier. You find a skull, it seems like the logical next step is to start checking the local missing persons cases and see if it’s any of theirs. It seems they didn’t do that. For 21 years.

I wonder if cost was an issue. The article I linked to says the skull was identified by the forensic scientists at the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification. If I recall correctly, in the last several years there have been government grants issued to police departments to send their unidentified bodies to the UNT for DNA testing. If Alice’s skull lacked a mandible, they might have needed DNA rather than dental records for the identification. And DNA testing is not cheap.

RIP, Alice. If your death was a homicide (as seems likely), I hope they find out who did it.

I did want to address a famous case on the other side of the world which resolved recently

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I felt I should acknowledge the Phillips children’s disappearance, even though it happened in New Zealand. The violent crime rate is pretty low in New Zealand and this case is quite sad.

A man abducted his three children and they melted into the New Zealand countryside, believed to be living out there in the wilderness. For almost four years (this happened in December 2021). They were found finally, but only after a confrontation with the police in which the abductor, Tom Phillips, was shot dead and a police officer injured. One of the children he had kidnapped was with him at the time. Two other children were found at a campsite in the remote forest hours, later.

The children would be now about 9, 10 and 11 years old and they’re going to need a lot of help to recover from this, both mental and medical help; it wouldn’t be surprising to me if they’d gotten parasites or something in the forest and they might be malnourished. Plus the trauma of what their father did, and his violent loss.

Nobody wins in a case like this. But I am glad the children are alive.

Audrey Good Backeberg has been found, has no regrets apparently

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So I listed this case as resolved a few days ago but wanted to talk about it because it’s a pretty rare thing for a person to be found alive after being missing for over sixty years. Audrey Good Backeberg, a 20-year-old woman who went missing from Reedsburg, Wisconsin has been found alive and well somewhere outside the state. She had run away from home back in 1962, leaving behind her two young children and her husband, whom she had told the police had been abusing her.

Audrey is now in her eighties and apparently “does not want to be found”, in that she doesn’t want the public to know her whereabouts. I get the impression that her searching family still doesn’t know her whereabouts either, though the police passed their contact information on to her in case she wants to give them a call.

I used to be very critical of adults who abandoned their minor children and disappeared in this way; you can see this in a blog entry I wrote in 2009 about a similar case. Since then, I’ve experienced more of life and also read about and written about a lot more missing persons cases, and I don’t have the same feelings I used to have. Audrey told the police her husband had threatened to kill her, and women who wanted to flee abusive marriages in the 1960s didn’t have the rights and resources that such women do today. For example, it wasn’t until 1974 that it was made illegal for banks to discriminate on basis of gender. Before then, it was much harder for a woman to get a line of credit, than for a man to get one. This made it harder for women to do things like rent their own apartments and such.

Perhaps Audrey felt she had to leave, that her life was at risk from her husband. Perhaps she felt she wasn’t able to take the children, or thought they’d be better off in his care. I don’t know and I don’t want to cast judgment on her since I’ve never walked in her shoes, or any similar shoes. Never had kids, never had an abusive partner, never lived in the 1960s which was a much different time than now.

I’m glad her family at least knows now that she is alive and isn’t in a shallow grave in some Wisconsin cornfield.

Lori Paige found deceased, dad charged with murder

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22 months ago, a 12-year-old girl named Lori Paige disappeared from Tallahassee, Florida. I didn’t really have much info on her disappearance; she was simply gone.

Well, her remains have been found “remote, brush-covered area of Thomas County, Georgia, known locally as a plantation” and her dad, Andrew Wiley, has been charged with her murder. Some “questionable internet searches” on his phone were what led police to Lori’s body.

That poor child. RIP. Much sympathy to Lori’s mom.