The Last Place You'd Look (9 page)

Another success story for Miller and NCMEC was the case of Alexander Hillman, who was abducted from West Tisbury, Massachusetts, at age eight. Hillman, along with eight other abducted children, was featured in a piece about Miller and age progression that appeared in a 2002 issue of
People
magazine. Someone recognized Hillman, ten years old at the time, from the photo, leading to the little boy’s recovery.

It doesn’t matter to Miller how much the photo he doctors looks like the person being sought, as long as it’s good enough to lead to his or her recovery. For him, his job is not about being good at what he does; it’s about connecting with a witness, because that’s what brings children home.

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When the Boy in the Box was autopsied by Philadelphia Medical Examiner Dr. Joseph Spelman, he discovered the child had been beaten. Dark bruises covered his head, chest, arms, and legs. Moreover, the person who committed this crime has managed to conceal the boy’s identity for more than five decades.

Thirty-one years later, when the Boy in the Bag was found, an autopsy revealed that human beings had not outgrown their enormous capacity for cruelty: he, too, had been beaten. The autopsy reported the child died from wounds inflicted by a blunt object on his neck and head, but it was obvious from the proliferation of old, fractured ribs that the preschooler lived with nightmarish violence.

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Across the country, medical examiners and coroners’ offices hold thousands of cases of unidentified, recovered remains. Historically they stand little chance of positive identification. For the families of these silent, missing dead, each new sunrise brings fresh anguish.

Until recently, no national protocol existed for handling the dissemination of information in regard to recovered bodies. Instead, each jurisdiction dictates its own rules, which translates into a general dearth of information in the national pipeline and reduces the number of people outside a jurisdiction with access to that information. The fewer people who know about a case, the less likely the chance of resolving it and bringing the deceased back home.

According to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), about one hundred thousand open and active missing persons cases are on the books in this country each day. Many of them are resolved, but as old cases are cleared, new ones spring up to take their places, so the numbers remain nearly constant.

Medical examiners and coroners’ offices hold more than forty thousand sets of unidentified remains. To put this in perspective, that number is large enough to represent a small city.

In the last century alone, thousands of other recovered bodies were buried, cremated, or otherwise destroyed—a tragedy that cannot be rectified. This forever leaves some grieving families without the tools to identify or recover their lost loved ones’ remains. Part of the problem is that states don’t all use the same medical examiner system.

A 2004 Bureau of Justice report showed that there are about two thousand medical examiners or coroners’ offices in the United States, but the staffing levels, qualifications, duties, and budgets vary, from elected coroners with no medical training covering large rural areas with miniscule budgets, to large, modern facilities with statewide jurisdiction, manned by forensic pathologists with staffs of investigators and budgets sufficient to do the job.

Considering that these offices receive almost a million cases annually (and accept about half of them), it’s easy to see that the system is overworked and understaffed. What falls through the cracks here are the nameless dead.

For decades, medical examiners and coroners were not allowed to place unidentified remains on NCIC, the national database accessible to police across the nation. As a result, positive identifications were mostly the result of dogged determination or luck.

Enter the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). In 2005, the NIJ sponsored a conference convened to look at this issue. Organizers pulled together a vast sampling of individuals involved in missing persons investigations. Medical examiners, coroners, detectives, and family members of the missing and the found joined with scientists, criminologists, and others to hash out a plan to bridge the critical gap that would link unidentified remains to reported missing persons.

They made many recommendations. Out of those came a system that has already helped resolve at least three cases. And what is so revolutionary is that the mail carrier and the store clerk, the lawyer and the cab driver, the student and the readers of this book all have access to a lot of information once only available to law enforcement agencies. It can be viewed now on one central Web site, www.namus.gov.

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Had the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) existed
back when the Boy in the Box was found, his story might have had a dif
ferent outcome. But that child’s body was found more than fifty years ago, a month after the inauguration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and six months before state and federal troops faced off in Little Rock, Arkansas, over racial integration
.

On February 25, 1957, there was no DNA database available to detectives, nor much in the way of communication between agencies. As a result, missing persons were identified most often because they were local, because someone in their family had reason to believe they were in the area, or because the case received massive publicity that paid off.

The Boy in the Box received massive publicity, but it was fruitless. Over the years, investigators continued to follow up, engendering new leads through shows like
America’s Most Wanted
and by asking the Vidoq Society, a distinguished national crime-solving group, to investigate. But the fact remains that if two things had been possible in the days before President Richard Nixon betrayed his office and pilot John Glenn flew fighter jets instead of spaceships, the child might now have a name. Those two things are the extraction and use of DNA for genetic comparison and the creation of NamUs.

To explain the thinking behind NamUs, consider the history behind the first fast-food chain, McDonald’s. The restaurant started as a drive-in, quite traditional for that era, with carhops serving customers in their cars. But when the brothers who opened the first restaurant took a closer look at their business, they saw a way to maximize profits by simplifying the menu and speeding up service. They dumped the carhops and broke the menu down to hamburgers, fries, and drinks.

NamUs does something similar: it creates a simpler, faster, and more efficient way to conduct the business of connecting human remains to their identities. To speed things up, NamUs allows direct access to its database.

Rather than wait for all components of NamUs to go online, its developers smartly went active on an incremental basis, says Kristina Rose, acting director of the National Institute of Justice. It’s sort of like McDonald’s perfecting its hamburgers and selling them before they have the fries down pat.

As a result, cops, medical examiners, coroners, families, and those with an interest in the plight of missing persons can now access the database. Here is how Rose describes the problem and solution.

“Victims’ families, members of the public who had missing loved ones . . .
had to go to all kinds of offices: law enforcement, medical examiners, coroners’ offices. The need was identified to create a central repository of those missing persons and unidentified dead and coming up with a technical solution to make those databases speak to each other so that matches could be [made] when data was entered into the database.”

Medical examiners, police, and civilians can all enter information into NamUs. The information is quality controlled by NamUs supervisors. In addition, families of the missing can submit DNA profiles, as can medical examiners and coroners.

The DNA profiles are created at no cost to the DNA donor by the Center for Human Identification (CHI) at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth.

All the information goes into the huge, searchable database. The system itself looks for matches, but like any system, it is fallible.

Consider the case of a sixteen-year-old boy who was thought to have disappeared in 1995. Missing persons posters were created, DNA samples were taken, and law enforcement conducted massive searches for the youth.

“There were no good leads, no good hits,” says Rose.

In March 2008, the Virginia Medical Examiner uploaded a case into the NamUs database. The description of the deceased was a man between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. He had been found on June 6, 1995, prior to the date the young man had been reported as missing.

Then the Doe Network got involved. Members of this private organization that seeks to reunite the missing with their families search online for matches. A Doe Network member was scrolling through NamUs and saw the boy’s case.

“Even though the information showed that the unidentified decedent’s case actually came before the missing person report, there was so much . . . that was similar, they went ahead and contacted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,” Rose says.

It was a match—a match based on a hunch, persistence, and a unique public-private partnership. And although the fledgling agency’s efforts are still evolving, the program had three matches in the first full month of its operation.

“There are three families that we were able to bring some information and give them—I don’t want to call it ‘closure,’ because closure doesn’t really exist in these types of cases—but it certainly helped them to understand what happened; now they know where their loved one is,” Rose says.

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As the Boy in the Box rests nameless under a tombstone etched with the words “America’s Unknown Child,” another Philadelphia grave holds the other little boy who suffered such a similar fate. But more than time separates the two slain children—one has a name, one still does not.

In the case of the Boy in the Bag, despite investigators’ efforts and widespread media coverage, it took eleven years before the sweet-faced child was identified. The year was 2005; that’s when an uncle who had been out of town for many years began to ask questions about the boy’s whereabouts.

Looking through online databases, the uncle found the Boy in the Bag case and told officials the child was Jerell Willis, a Camden, New Jersey, resident who lived with his mother and her boyfriend.

The brutalized four-year-old died after undergoing terrible beatings, and even more disturbing, not one person, official or otherwise, appeared to notice when he disappeared. If not for his uncle and the online database, the boy might have remained a John Doe forever.

Later, the child was linked to his mother through his mitochondrial DNA. The mother, Alicia Robinson, pleaded guilty in connection with his murder, but she received a light punishment. The other individual charged in connection with the child’s death was scheduled for trial in 2009.

Little Jerell’s story is poignant because it also proves that even in the face of the worst that humanity has to offer, there are also many good and caring people. The child’s body remained unidentified and housed in the morgue until 2001, when an elderly Philadelphia woman, the late Mary Peck, concerned that he continued to be unclaimed, paid for a funeral and headstone. When he was identified, a new headstone carved with his name replaced the first one.

The Boy in the Bag and the Boy in the Box lived and died about forty years apart. One case was solved, but the other continues to challenge investigators and scientists today. The difference between the two cases can be found in the time frame in which they took place.

Yesterday’s science fiction has become today’s reality.

He’s not missing. He knows exactly where he is.—an old police expression

O
n the day John Stonehouse, British Labour Party member of Parliament, folded his clothes and placed them into a neat little pile on a beach in Miami and then walked away, he was doing more than reacting to a troubled life: he was trading it in, much the same way one would swap an old car for a new one. To the rest of the world, including his wife and political allies, Stonehouse drowned in the Atlantic Ocean. To police, who nurtured a suspicion based on past experience, he was missing. To Stonehouse, however, the act of disappearing represented the key to a new start as a different person, unencumbered by the detritus of his previous life.

The British politician chose drowning because it is difficult to produce a suitable corpse while the “dead” person still inhabits it, as evidenced by many fake suicides before and since. The convenient thing about large bodies of water is that they are unpredictable: they either surrender remains or conceal them forever. The nature of a watery grave helps those who stage their own deaths get around that pesky question of what happened to the body.

A former postmaster general and the son of a mayor of Southampton, Stonehouse appeared to possess a brilliant future. He studied at the prestigious London School of Economics and served as the secretary to the minister of aviation; however, the young man whose rise to prominence under Prime Minister Harold Wilson had been steady as a drumbeat planned to climb even higher, aspiring to Wilson’s office. Every move Stonehouse made in his early days supported that trajectory, but when problems in his personal and political life arose, his real agenda played out. Instead of making history as Britain’s prime minister, Stonehouse would be remembered as one of the world’s most infamous missing persons.

The circumstances of that disappearance would rival the plots of one of Stonehouse’s favorite authors, Frederick Forsythe. In fact, Stonehouse drew inspiration and more than a little practical help in leaving behind his former life from Forsythe’s novel,
The Day of the Jackal
.

In the book, the main character, an international assassin, creates a new identity by stealing that of a dead child. Stonehouse copied the technique Forsythe described when he created his own alternate identity: A. J. Markham. Later, the Parliament member masqueraded as Markham, trying out his new persona before slipping into it on a permanent basis. Stonehouse planned to evolve into Markham after staging his death by pretending to drown.

Trapped in an unhappy marriage and longing to join his lover and secretary, Sheila Buckley, Stonehouse obtained a passport under the new, false identity and opened foreign bank accounts to channel hidden funds. Then, on a trip to Florida in November 1974, he staged his disappearance, leaving those stacked clothes on the fine white sand.

Everyone bought it at first. His wife, Barbara, and other family members were inconsolable. Police searched the ocean but found nothing. Although some expressed early doubts, the public and members of Parliament believed him dead. However, police both in the United States and Great Britain were more suspicious. Rumors floated that Stonehouse might have been involved in espionage.

Meanwhile, near the same time Stonehouse staged his disappearance, another prominent Brit, Richard John Bingham, the wealthy and troubled seventh Earl of Lucan, also vanished. Descended from the third Earl of Lucan (held responsible for the deaths of six hundred cavalry during the Crimean War’s infamous Charge of the Light Brigade), Lord Lucan attended Eton College and lived a life of privilege. He married and settled into the tony Mayfair area of London with his wife, Veronica.

Veronica, who had given birth three times, suffered from postpartum depression and had difficulty adjusting after each of the births. Lucan, however, was more concerned with feeding his growing gambling habit—a habit that became both his obsession and profession.

Lady Lucan sought treatment for her depression, but the couple grew apart, as Lord Lucan’s gambling drew them deeper in debt. In 1972 they separated, prompting Lord Lucan to attempt to obtain custody of the couple’s children. Despite his efforts, the children remained with their mother, in the care of their nanny, a woman named Sandra Rivett.

According to British newspaper reports, Rivett was similar in build and height to Lady Lucan, which police believe may be the reason the nanny was beaten to death in the basement of Lady Lucan’s residence on the night of November 7, 1974. Reports say Rivett was struck multiple times with a blunt object (later determined to be a length of pipe covered in tape). Lady Lucan told police that she, too, had been attacked that night and identified her attacker as her husband, Lord Lucan.

The not-so-noble lord didn’t help his case. He claimed he stepped in a pool of Rivett’s blood while aiding Lady Lucan. Several individuals received calls from Lord Lucan the night of Rivett’s slaying, and investigators, following Lucan’s known trail, found bloodstains. The lord himself vanished.

Not long after Lord Lucan disappeared, a teller at an Australian bank became suspicious when a new customer made a sizable deposit. The police were brought in, and soon the suspicious man, John Stonehouse, was under surveillance. Police noted that he read English newspapers and suspected he might be the missing fugitive, Lord Lucan. When they requested photographs of Lucan, they also requested a photo of John Stonehouse, just in case.

Stonehouse was identified and arrested on Christmas Eve, a little over a month after he faked his disappearance, and all because another Englishman chose the same time to vanish in a blaze of worldwide publicity.

As for Lord Lucan, at the time this was written, he remains a fugitive from justice.

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Thousands of people disappear each day, most of them by choice. Although juvenile runaways are by far more prevalent, plenty of adults also decide to vanish. Most do so without national attention, but some, like the American Jennifer Wilbanks, attract the white-hot glare of the public spotlight as infallibly as a cobra responds to a snake charmer’s tune.

Wilbanks, who became known as the “runaway bride,” disappeared five days before her April 30, 2005, wedding. The young woman vanished while out jogging, triggering a massive media response. As reporters tripped over themselves questioning her husband-to-be, her parents, and her bridesmaids in her home state of Georgia, Wilbanks traveled by bus through Las Vegas and other western cities, leaving in her wake plans for a lavish nuptial ceremony that included a wedding party of twenty-eight bridesmaids and groomsmen and a guest list of more than five hundred.

Police say her escape was well planned: she purchased a bus ticket from her Duluth, Georgia, home to Austin, Texas, cut her hair, and instructed a cab to pick her up from a random location to take her to the bus station. Wilbanks covered her tracks like a pro.

She called Georgia on the day of her wedding and claimed she’d been abducted—a story concocted to make it easier to return home. Wilbanks admitted she lied, but the search-and-rescue bill for the city was calculated at a cost of more than $40,000. She and her fiancé, John Mason, initially reconciled, but parted after selling their story for a reported $500,000.

Many who “disappear on purpose” do so because they’re trying to avoid detection of criminal activity or arrest. One of the most famous and successful intentional disappearances in the United States is that of James J. “Whitey” Bulger, who has been on the run for more than a decade.

Bulger, a Boston-based gangster who goes by numerous aliases, disappeared in connection to an investigation that revealed he had an FBI agent on his payroll. In addition to nineteen counts of murder, Bulger is wanted today for drug trafficking, extortion, and numerous conspiracy charges. He vanished on December 23, 1994, after being tipped off about federal indictments by John Connelly, an FBI agent and Bulger’s man on the inside. Sources say Bulger planned for his future disappearance well: he established safe deposit boxes containing alternate identification, money, and other valuables in numerous places.

Despite being featured on the FBI’s ten most wanted list, becoming the subject of numerous books and articles, and having his story appear on television episodes of
America’s Most Wanted
, as far as anyone knows, Bulger remains alive and on the run. A $2 million reward has been offered for information leading to his arrest.

Bulger was notorious before he went on the lam, but he certainly is not the only well-known individual to intentionally vanish over the years. Although she did resurface, many questions about the disappearance of mystery writer Agatha Christie were never resolved. Christie vanished in 1926. Her car was later found abandoned while police continued to search for the authoress, one of England’s biggest celebrities. She later turned up at an inn, registered under another name. The British writer never fully explained or discussed her disappearance, although for decades her fans have speculated about her reasons. Personal problems, not legal ones, were the most plausible impetus.

Another literary luminary, Ambrose Bierce, did his disappearing a little earlier than Agatha Christie. Born in 1842 in Horse Cave, Ohio, Bierce was a respected Civil War veteran who became a well-known San Francisco columnist and writer. After being posted in Washington, D.C., Bierce revisited the Civil War battlegrounds in Virginia, dined with presidents, and developed a caustic but respected outlook on war and politics. In 1913, Bierce departed the nation’s capital on his way to El Paso, Texas. From there he crossed the border into Mexico. The celebrated writer’s final communication to the world was a letter he wrote on December 26, 1913. No trace of Bierce, then seventy-one years of age, has ever been found. While some believe he met with foul play, others think he vanished intentionally—theories that may never be debunked or proven.

Another well-known writer who took a hike was Ken Kesey, hippie author of
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. Kesey faked his death by suicide during the 1960s in order to avoid drug charges but was revealed as a sham after only a few months in hiding.

Kesey and John Stonehouse’s preferred method of vanishing, by faking one’s demise, is a popular vehicle for escaping an unhappy life—or the consequences of that life. In a case that grabbed headlines in 2008, disgraced hedge fund manager Samuel Israel III, son of a wealthy and well-known New Orleans family, pretended to have jumped to his death from a New York bridge rather than go to prison in connection with a plot to defraud thousands of investors. Authorities put little stock in Israel’s staged death, unmasking his plan after Israel turned himself in at the urging of relatives.

Celebrities and criminal masterminds aren’t alone in occasionally walking away from their lives. News reports are full of ordinary people who disappear and then resurface, sometimes many decades after they were last seen.

The relatives of an Indiana man missing for fifteen years ended their ordeal when a determined Indiana State Police investigator reopened the old case of his disappearance, using his driver’s license to track him down.

Monty Stutzman, who vanished in 1993 at the age of twenty-three, was reunited with his family at his Mississippi home after Indiana State Police Detective Scott Jarvis played a hunch and tracked Stutzman through a driver’s license check. He was found living with his new family in Mississippi and reportedly told investigators he fled the area because he faced a probation violation.

Fear that he was the target of law enforcement also allegedly drove a Florida man to emulate John Stonehouse and stage his own drowning. Bennie Harden Wint failed to return from a dip in the ocean, leaving his fiancée frantic and the beach patrol on a fruitless search—fruitless because investigators say Wint swam down the beach, walked out of the water, and hitchhiked to a new life in North Carolina.

Wint, who went by the name of William Sweet, was unmasked in January 2009 when police pulled him over for a minor traffic violation in the Tar Heel State. Booked into jail because he couldn’t produce any official identification, Wint was identified by authorities as the man who “drowned” off the Florida coast on September 24, 1989.

For those who manufacture elaborate alter-identities, the point of vanishing is to close forever the previous chapters of their lives. They intend to live as someone else—a moderately difficult feat in 1974. Today, in this high-tech, information-driven society, to establish a new identity and live without detection is a much more complicated proposition.

Wired
magazine writer Evan Ratliff chronicled the pitfalls of disappearing and avoiding detection after he wrote a story about people who do so (
Wired
, issue 17.12, December 2009). Ratliff went “on the run” in August 2009; his story appeared in the magazine the following November. Ratliff and
Wired
then turned the article into a real-life reader’s challenge: Ratliff would disappear for a month, and the reader who found him before the month’s end would win $5,000.

In the piece he wrote for the magazine after his unmasking, Ratliff documented the preparations that went into turning himself into James Donald Gatz (a name based on a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
). Ratliff created his new identity and established misleading clues to spark reward hunters to look in all the wrong places. He succeeded in remaining “missing” for twenty-five days before a couple of guys combined their information and found him. But Ratliff’s experiment, while interesting, was made more complicated by virtue of its high profile.
Wired
provoked readers to try and find him, the kind of attention people like Stonehouse eschew. Most who disappear—with the exception of celebrities and well-known criminals—try to do so with as little fanfare as possible.

Frank Ahearn reigns as the sultan of intentional disappearances, an enterprise he knows and understands from both sides. After years of working as a skiptracer (a term for people who find others), Ahearn decided to put his considerable knowledge of the skills it takes to vanish into practice, and now he not only looks for people who’ve skipped out, but also advises others on the proper way to disappear. Ahearn and his partner, Eileen Horan, have authored a book,
How to Disappear
, which presents advice on the ramifications and pitfalls of vanishing. The upshot: it takes a lot to complete a convincing vanishing act, and it’s not as easy as movies and books make it appear.