Lost and Found
How technology, tips, and plain old luck help police solve most missing-person cases
When cultural anthropologists finally begin sifting through the sands of the summer of 2001, they may easily conclude that this was a nation riven by a plague of missing persons. They will note the nonstop attention devoted to the disappearance of Washington intern Chandra Levy. They will find that her plight heightened the urgency in other fresh cases and even renewed interest in those detectives had long considered dormant.
Eventually, however, they will stumble onto the larger truth: Thanks to some amazing advances in forensics, technology, and communications, along with greater police and corporate commitment, the unsolved case of the missing person remains a dramatic exception. Most cases are resolved routinely, easily, and quickly. Most are the product of a family dispute. Most do not generate semipermanent panels of pundits for the cable TV talk shows.
Since the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in the 1930s, a subtle fear and durable mythology about missing persons have pervaded the American pysche. It is a fear reinvigorated periodically by heartbreaking cases like the abduction and murder of children like Etan Patz, Adam Walsh, and Polly Klaas. But consider: Last year there was more than one person found for every person who was reported missing.
"Twenty years ago," says Ernie Allen, who heads the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), "if you were the parent of a missing child, you were on your own." Now the FBI, the Customs Service, and even the Secret Service are aiding in the hunt (box, Page 17). Collectively, missing-person cases are being resolved in record numbers. Indeed, it's rare that a missing person ends up the victim of foul play.
Plaintive vigils. Those successes, of course, do little to cheer families whose plaintive vigils for missing relatives are ongoing, largely private, and not the subject of Larry King Live. Dail Dinwiddie walked out of her home in Columbia, S.C., on the evening of Sept. 24, 1992, and never came back. After attending a U2 concert, she partied with friends into the early morning hours at a nightclub. As she was leaving, she told a bouncer that two men had been hassling her in the parking lot. The 23-year-old waited a bit, then left through the front door. Ever since, Jean and Dan Dinwiddie have been without their daughter. "You don't sleep; the phone rings, your blood pressure goes up," says Jean Dinwiddie. "For nine years, we've never gone to my mailbox without my stomach feeling sick and nervous, `Yes, today is the day.' "
But probably, it won't be. As time passes, the odds of finding someone dwindle. Too soon, such cases fade from view. Police cannot search forever. Friends move on. And families, though tips and tidbits of gossip cruelly renew hope, eventually become resigned to the loss. Harold Chambers, a Columbia, S.C., police investigator, is still assigned to the Dinwiddie case. The family calls him occasionally with tips, and he dutifully sends out tracking dogs and patrol officers. "They need somebody they can call on," says Chambers, "and I guess I'm it." Most families, like the Dinwiddies, nurse their grief largely in silence.
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