Missing Persons
People vanish for a variety of reasons, whether intentionally or accidentally. Many of these people don’t realize they’re absent at all. They’ve moved on and away. Others may be gone for a while then suddenly return. Occasionally there are happy reunions.
But then there are those who are gone forever, as if picked up by Dorothy Gale’s tornado and whisked off to the Land of Oz.
The idea that people could be misplaced, like an umbrella or a glove, puzzled me when, as a teenager, I developed a keen interest in true crime. Decades of investigations have taught me the ways and reasons a loved one, or a not-so-loved one, disappears.
Much of my professional work has involved finding people and learning about their backgrounds. Clearly some of them didn’t want to be found, or their secrets revealed.
My fascination with missing persons began in the late 1960’s when Charles Manson became a fixture of American popular culture. At the same time, in 1968, Barbara Mackle, the daughter of a prominent Florida land developer, was abducted from the hotel room she shared with her mother and held for ransom. A frantic national audience collectively exhaled when she was found alive, buried underground in a ventilated box. Patty Hearst, the newspaper heir, was kidnapped at gunpoint by members of a San Francisco cult and swiftly became a bank robber, a federal crime for which she served a prison sentence. The headlines of my teen and college years were filled with tales of The Zodiac and Green River killers, The Hillside Stranglers, and Ted Bundy, a man I met one cold January night in Tallahassee, Florida. Until I moved five hundred miles away from home to attend college, my parents set strict guidelines and curfews to keep me safe: no hitchhiking, no motorcycles, no drinking and driving, and be home on time or else.
I’ve always found loopholes within the rules.
Mysteries excite me. I am intrigued by the tales of people who are here one day and gone the next. Even now, when a prospective client calls me, I get an adrenaline rush when I hear the words “can you help me find…”
“It all depends,” I say, eager to know the details, cautious to manage expectations.
As an investigator I have worked on countless cases that begin with a missing person. The majority of these are garden-variety cases, benign, sometimes sweet: a childhood friend who moved to a different state; a high school love who went off to college and never returned for class reunions; a military ‘battle-buddy’ who left the service after discharge. Most are straight-forward jobs, easily resolved with a handful of clues like name, last known address or city, and approximate date of birth. I have no idea of how often I’ve helped reunite old friends.
My best investigative tools are database subscription services available to licensed private investigators, process servers and lawyers. These allow me to conduct nationwide searches and there are a handful of these in the marketplace: IRBsearch, TLO, and Delvepoint are three I’ve used. For over twenty years I have subscribed to at least one service to assist my civil and criminal casework. These databases are invaluable tools to glean information about people: where they live, who they live with, if they pay their bills or if they are criminals. While the services don’t provide credit information, it is quite easy to assess a person’s financial stability by reading reports based on public records.
In recent years I have acquired a group of clients I call The Lonely Hearts—people, usually widowed or divorced, and financially secure, who join online dating sites and then, as romance blossoms, want to know if their love interest is stable and truthful, or a gold-digging fraudster.
Schemers plague those dating sites. I’ve discovered married men and women posing as singles while continuing to live with their spouses. I’ve found people who owe thousands of dollars in civil liens and judgements—not wise choices for clients who have worked hard to own their homes and build secure retirement assets. I’ve also uncovered career criminals who posed as victims fleeced by ruinous ex-partners. But fraudsters aside, several of my clients have found, if not true love, then at least someone to spend time with.
The second level of missing person work involves running background checks to try to find a family member who has disappeared. Recently a man from Cleveland contacted me to locate his son. The client was the executor for his deceased father’s estate. The missing son was a beneficiary of a life insurance policy. There was a deadline to claim the proceeds of the policy, and the man wanted his son to receive the funds.
They had not spoken for over a decade. He gave me his son’s full name, date of birth and Social Security number. I accessed a database and found both his current address and telephone number. He lived in a nearby town. I called the landlord to verify he was still a tenant. The client was dismayed that his son lived a short distance away but had been absent from all family functions for years. His voice grew thick with sorrow and anger. And relief, as he had long feared his son was dead. I offered to call the young man, to explain the situation, but the client wanted to carefully compose his thoughts, then send a letter. Days later I received a check, drawn on an estate account, which softened the uneasy feeling I get when I solve this kind of case, because sometimes people depart to escape terrible situations, and I don’t want to be responsible for shattering their safety. An occupational hazard I suppose, but I never wish or intend to cause harm to anyone.
What had transpired to so alienate this father and his son? I ponder these situations, sometimes for years. People hire me to solve problems and sorrow often shadows this work.
In 2009 I was retained as a mitigation and fact investigator on behalf of a man on Alabama’s death row. He came from a large family and grew up in the northeastern part of the state. My initial tasks included interviewing the man’s maternal grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who knew him as a child and teenager. His mother invited me to a Sunday dinner, a weekly event where the family gathered after church services. My daughter, a college graduate, home that Sunday to do laundry, reluctantly accompanied me.
The farmhouse was secluded on heavily wooded acreage, with no nearby neighbors, miles from a town or major highway. We were greeted warmly—after all, my job was to help remove their loved one from Death Row—and the small house teemed with people. My client’s grandmother, clad in a nightgown, lay dying on her bed. I introduced myself, then stood uncomfortably while she moaned and thrashed. His grandfather sat stonily on the couch, a plate of food on his lap, eyes fixed on a televised football game. I explained why I was there.
“That boy needs to be put down like a rabid dog,” he muttered, never once looking at me.
Neither grandparent was helpful, but at least I attempted to interview the old couple who had provided much of my client’s care while his mother worked. I scratched their names from a list of potential testifying witnesses.
The kitchen counters were piled high with potluck fried chicken, potato salad, coleslaw, biscuits and gravy, pies and fruit cobblers. Gallons of heavily sugared iced tea and cans of sodas chilled in coolers. My daughter was delighted by the aunts, the conversations and the food. The twenty-three-year-old who rode shotgun with me for hours in sullen silence became her animated and charming self once she entered this house. Her cultivated southern accent deepened as the afternoon wore on.
My client’s mother had four sisters and four brothers. There were at least a dozen cousins, but my client had been on death row for a decade so many of them were too young to have clear memories of him. Three of the brothers, my client’s uncles, were at the house that day, and the two older ones gave me thumbnail sketches of their upbringing, and their recollections of my client. The third brother pulled up a chair and joined his sisters and two older female cousins, with my daughter and I, in the huge country kitchen, for an intensive afternoon conversation.
In the two years I worked on this case, the client never warmed to me. He was monosyllabic about his childhood, never admitting to drug or alcohol use, nor conceding that his formative years had been anything short of wonderful. But there, in that kitchen, tales of severe physical, mental, alcohol and drug abuse were told, unedited and without shame. Scars were shown. Violence, chaos and red-dirt poverty were constant childhood companions. The uncle, several years older than my client, told how, as youngsters, they would sneak bottles of the old man’s moonshine, often drinking late at night in the woods until they passed out, then refilling the bottles with water from the barn hose to avoid being caught. The aunts laughed. Most had experienced that moonshine too. The uncle described how he and my client would inhale gasoline fumes to get high, and explained that when the gas can was empty, they’d run a hose into the gas tank of the four-wheeler or the farm truck to get high. According to these stories, my client was six years old at the time when he first huffed gasoline to get high. The uncle had spent his adult life in and out of jail, chasing sobriety, getting therapy, making amends. He cried that day, deeply remorseful and ashamed, owning responsibility for introducing my client to substance abuse.
All told of being sexually molested by their father. Their mother, the woman dying in the nearby bedroom, didn’t try to stop the rapes or protect her children. The old man threatened to kill them if they told anyone what happened routinely in that house. None of these children, now deeply wounded adults, had completed high school.
As pies were cut and ice cream scooped, the youngest aunt lifted her blouse to show us her horribly scarred torso. She described how, at the age of fifteen, she was so distraught by the rapes that she took her father’s shotgun, sat down on the ground outside the kitchen door and used her big toe to fire the weapon. The pellets tore through her midsection, her shoulders, neck and her face. A story was hastily concocted for the authorities. She underwent multiple surgeries. Her life was saved. No one investigated the shooting. And there she was, years later, seated at her parents’ dining table, as she did every Sunday.
Horrifically, these women, as young adults, brought their own children to their mother while they worked. All four sisters were employed by a chicken processing plant in a nearby town. The women, unskilled and uneducated, couldn’t earn enough money to pay for childcare, so they trusted the monsters they knew to care for their babies.
“I prayed every time I left my kids with Mama and Daddy,” one said. “Please, God, I’d say, please watch over my babies.” The others nodded in agreement. “Amen to that,” another said.
A six-year-old drinking and huffing gasoline until he passed out?
That was my takeaway from the afternoon.
Clearly much had happened to my client although he never gave me any details. This was the most dysfunctional family situation I had ever encountered, and I’ve seen plenty.
There was a brother, my client’s next-to-youngest uncle, missing from the table that day. As I gathered information for the family tree and the mitigation chronology, there was an occasional remark about Eddie.
“Where is Eddie,” I asked. “How can I get in touch with him?”
Slowly the story came out, how Eddie caught the worst of the abuse because he was angry and combative, openly defiant, furious about the violence and chaos. One day, a Sunday like this one, Eddie and his father came to blows. Eddie hadn’t changed the tire on the truck the previous day as he’d been told to do. The father and son fought in the kitchen and the old man grabbed a butcher knife and stabbed Eddie in the shoulder, while the others watched, not daring to intervene. The boy, sixteen years old, injured, distraught and barefoot, left the house and vanished into the woods. The girls were ordered by their mother to clean up the blood.
That had happened twenty-three years earlier. There had been no news, no sightings, nothing about Eddie in all that time.
I asked for his information. One sister grabbed the family Bible, which contained birthdates for these siblings. The brother went into his bedroom and came out with Eddie’s wallet: inside was a driver’s license and Social Security card. There was a five-dollar bill and four singles. A folded piece of paper with a girl’s name and phone number, written in faded blue ink.
While they imagined Eddie enjoyed a great life somewhere else, someone suggested Key West, logically they assumed he was dead.
“I think Daddy killed him, buried him in the woods,” one sister said. The brother said he’d often looked for signs of a grave over the years and suspected his father had taken the body and dumped it in a reservoir. I jotted down Eddie’s full name, date of birth and SSN. Later that night, unable to sleep, I opened one of the databases and searched for any trace of Eddie. Then I searched a second database.
But there were no clues, no indications that he was either alive or dead.
Every few years I look for him again, hoping to find an address, a cell phone number, something to indicate his vital statistics were used to begin electric service or buy a cellphone or a car. I’d love to be able to provide his siblings with a bit of good news; at least the knowledge their father wasn’t a murderer. Eddie vanished that day and was simply gone, without a trace.
A mystery that may never be solved. Just one of the few I think about late at night, when sleep eludes me.