Utah

Do better, Utah Department of Public Safety

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So I was checking out the missing persons listings for Utah on their Department of Public Safety site and discovered this:

(I covered her face and surname to protect her privacy, in case she turns up; I don’t want this blog entry to come back to haunt her years from now).

Crucial things are missing from this listing: namely the date and the place of disappearance. I might guess she went missing from Juab County since their sheriff’s office is handling the case, but that’s not a guarantee, and I have no idea when this lady disappeared because they won’t say. She’s not on NamUs.

It’s not the only listing on there like that either:

Where was this boy last seen? What is his height, and why do they have his weight listed for his height?

It seems like there should be a fairly easy way to make sure incomplete listings like this don’t go up. Presumably someone at the other end is making these by filling out a computer form; why don’t they just make it so you can’t submit the form until all entries are filled?

It’s not just Utah, mind you. Unfortunately a lot of missing persons databases have listings like these that lack crucial details. Every listing should have, at minimum, the date and place of disappearance, a photograph of the missing person, some basic info about their physical characteristics and a number to call if you have tips.

MP of the week: Brandon Williams

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This week’s featured missing person is Brandon Steve Williams, who disappeared from Nashville, Tennessee on May 18, 2013. He was 33 at the time. Brandon is white, with black hair and brown eyes, and several scars and tattoos described/shown on his Charley Project page.

The circumstances of his disappearance aren’t very clear to me. He was Greyhounding across the country, starting in Salt Lake City, and contacted his friends and family on the way while in Nashville. He picked up some money his sister wired to him and bought a bus ticket to Florida to continue his trip, but didn’t board the bus. And he was just gone. And the police in Nashville didn’t get involved until nearly two years later.

His family has a Facebook page set up for him.

MP of the week: Ayyub Pugh

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This week’s featured missing person is Ayyub N. Pugh, a 45-year-old black man who disappeared from Layton, Utah on August 14, 2010. There isn’t much information about his disappearance, but there apparently aren’t any indications of foul play and he could still be alive somewhere.

Pugh suffers from mental illness and could be in a mental hospital/treatment program. He has used several different alias names in the past. He has previously lived in Florida and New York. If still alive he’d be 55.

MP of the week: Edd Lope

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This week’s featured missing person is Edd Dominic “Eddie” Lope, a 28-year-old Native American man who disappeared from Washington, Utah on June 21, 2005. He was last seen at his home in Washington during the early morning hours. His truck was later found abandoned on a dirt road just across the Arizona border.

I don’t have a lot of information on this case. Lope’s right thumb doesn’t bend for some reason; there’s probably something wrong with the bone that might be an important identifying characteristic.

MP of the week: Reed Jeppson

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This week’s featured missing person is Reed Taylor Jeppson, who disappeared from Salt Lake City, Utah on October 12, 1964, at the age of fifteen. After church, he went out to walk his dogs and never came back. Neither did the dogs.

Come October, it’ll have been 55 years since anyone saw this young man. I doubt his case can be solved at this late date and I have no idea what happened to him. It is strange and interesting that the dogs disappeared as well.

Native American Heritage Month: Shrie Rowland

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In honor of Native American Heritage Month I’m featuring a Native American missing person for every day in the month of November. Today’s missing person is Shrie Marie Rowland, a fifteen-year-old girl who disappeared from Saratoga Springs, Utah on July 2, 2004. She is classified as a runaway.

I found some obituaries for members of Shrie’s family and deduced that she is of Native American (Sioux) and Puerto Rican descent. I wonder if she really did run away; it’s very uncommon for a runaway to be missing for as long as that.

There’s been a social media storm these last 24 hours

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For those who haven’t heard, there’s a woman who claims she is Jennifer Klein who disappeared in 1974. This story has been floating around the internet for about a month, but yesterday there was a YouTube video published where the woman claimed she had DNA testing done and it proved her identity.

This woman also claims her abductors were members of a Satanic cult and that they kidnapped Kurt Newton and Etan Patz (who both disappeared in the 1970s, across the country from Jennifer) as well. She says she was brainwashed and didn’t start remembering what happened until after she was injured in a car accident.

As for what I think, well, I didn’t write this editorial but it pretty much sums up my own position on the matter.

Hopefully the truth will come out over the next few days or so. Until then, that’s all I’ve got to say.

For Kindle users

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I found out the book Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer, by David Roberts, is on sale in its Kindle form for just $1.99. I’m not sure how long the deal’s going to last, though.

I had Everett on Charley years ago — he disappeared from Utah in 1934. Then there was big news cause they thought his skeletal remains had been found, and I removed him and put up a resolved notice. Then it turned out the remains weren’t his. But I’ve never put him back up.

Thought y’all would like to know about this. I’ve never read the book, but if you’ve got a Kindle and a spare two bucks, it seems worth checking out.

What the heck?

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I was in the process of drawing up a Make-a-List Monday when I went and checked the NamUs entry for Timothy Scott Parry, and on the “physical” section of his NamUs page, it says he had “Cro-Magnon eyebrows.”

Who on earth put that in? Maybe it’s just me, but I find that pretty offensive, especially given that Timothy was physically and mentally disabled. I would be offended if I was a family member or friend of Timothy’s. His eyebrows don’t even look that strange to me in the pictures, just a bit thicker than usual.

I doubt whoever put that into NamUs was trying to upset anyone. This other picture, included in the NamUs profile, is a scanned copy of a paper flier for Timothy, and it says “Cro-Magnon eyebrows.” My guess is that whoever entered the info into NamUs just copied it without thinking. But I think it should be rephrased.

It reminds me of another MP case profiled on another website, not NamUs, where it said the female MP had a “tramp stamp.” That’s a derogatory term for a tattoo on a woman’s lower back. The term, in addition to being offensive, could also be confusing for people, perhaps non-English speakers, who don’t know what a “tramp stamp” means. They should have just said she had a tattoo on her lower back. With Timothy, they could say he has a protruding brow ridge or something that doesn’t sound like they’re making fun of him.

(If you’re wondering, btw, why I sometimes talk on this blog about issues I think NamUs should fix, it’s not to make them look bad. I think NamUs is a great resource, as evidenced by how often I use it for Charley Project research. Rather, it’s because some of the people who volunteer for it don’t like me and have made this abundantly clear, and I’m afraid they wouldn’t listen to me if I emailed them privately about the issue.)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

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Some MP news highlights while I was gone:

  • Mark Duane Woodard has been found. Or rather, he was found in 1977, 23 months after his disappearance, but not identified till now. The aforementioned news link uses his Charley Project pic, and asked me permission first. (Thanks!) This link has another photo of him, a much better quality one, as well as more details about his disappearance. He was murdered, shot to death. His sister is the only surviving member of the immediate family.
  • In the state of Thuringia in central Germany they have found a missing girl, Peggy No-Last-Name-Released [edit: per a UK article supplied by a commenter, it’s Knobloch], who disappeared mysteriously fifteen years ago, at the age of nine. A mushroom picker found her bones in the forest nine miles from Peggy’s hometown of Lichtenberg. According to this article and one other I found about the case, this had been a murder-without-a-body (MWAB) case: In 2004, a mentally disabled man was convicted of Peggy’s murder. He was later acquitted in a retrial due to lack of evidence after a key witness retracted his statement.
  • Corry Ehlers, a guy who disappeared while hiking in Utah in 2012, has also been found deceased. His skeletal remains, found “in a steep, rocky spot near Alta Ski Resort” last summer, were identified in late June. They think Corry fell off a cliff.
  • Three days ago it was fifteen years since sisters Diamond and Tionda Bradley vanished mysteriously from Chicago. The Chicago Tribune has done an anniversary article about it, with quotes from Diamond and Tionda’s two other sisters, Rita and Victoria: The girls disappeared just a day before Victoria Bradley’s ninth birthday. Until recent years, Bradley, who turns 24 on Thursday, said she was unable to celebrate her birthday because of her depression over the anniversary of their disappearance. I have not updated the girls’ casefiles in over a decade, and last time was just to add some more pics. I will give a look and see if I can find any developments that have taken place in the intervening years.
  • Two more recent anniversaries: eleven years since Stacy Ann Aragon and her boyfriend Steven Bishop disappeared from Arizona (see article; Stacy has been reported missing but it appears Steven has not been), and ten years since Roxanne Paltauf disappeared (article) from Texas.
  • The NCMEC reports that two of my oldest family abduction cases have been resolved, with the children located alive. One was Jacquelina Ann Gomez, who was abducted from Illinois by her father in 1992 at the age of 3. She would be 27 now, 28 in September.
  • The other case involves two brothers who disappeared with their mother and stepfather from Blairsville, Georgia in 1996, when the boys were 2 and 3. A day or so before I left for Minneapolis I got contacted by a very excited reporter who ran a story on Rick Tyler, a man who’s running for Congress under the odious slogan “Make America White Again.” She said after she ran the story she was deluged with emails from people who believed Rick Tyler was probably the same Rick Tyler who was listed as the missing Blairsville kids’ stepfather. She also said the police were now claiming that the boys’ mom DID have custody of them when they disappeared, after all. Well, then the day I left Minneapolis I got an NCMEC notice saying the boys were recovered. I’m not going to say their names on here or put them on the resolved page because I’m not sure about the custody issue, but it should be easy enough to determine who they are from the info I just provided.
  • The state of Arkansas has a brand shiny new MP database with 510 people on it, many whose names I don’t recognize. I am very happy about this. I believe every state should have their own publicly searchable online database, as large and comprehensive as possible. Many of the people listed in this new database have no pics though. I hope this situation improves.
  • Morgan Keyanna Martin, a pregnant teenager who disappeared in 2012, is now considered a MWAB case. Jacobee Flowers, the father of the unborn child, has been charged with her murder. Homicide is the most common non-natural cause of death for pregnant women in the US and from what I have read, all around the world, the murder of pregnant women — usually by their baby’s father — is a universal problem.
  • HuffPo has published a photo essay about the 1998 disappearance of SUNY-Albany student Suzanne Lyall. It’s a mysterious case; no obvious suspects, no answers. 19 years old, promising future, and then gone.
  • Kidnap survivor Jaycee Dugard has been in the news again, going on TV and talking about how her life’s going and how she’s raising the two daughters she had with her kidnapper Philip Garrido. The link I just gave provides lots of news articles to read, more than I can summarize here. But here’s one quote from this article to show what a resilient woman and amazing mother Jaycee was and still is: As she and her daughters grew older, Dugard said she planted a flower in front of the shed and set up a little school to teach them as much as she could with only her fifth-grade education. “They’re so resilient, and they’re beautiful and loving, and I’m really lucky,” she said. Dugard has protected her daughters’ privacy and said some of their friends don’t even know of their past. She said the three of them are able to talk about what happened with each other.