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.
The Levy family is suffering publicly, under the seeming 24-hour gaze of television cameras. In fact, the family's strategy of seeking attention is probably one reason that police have devoted so much time to tracking their daughter down. "This is not going to go away," Susan Levy, Chandra's mother, told U.S. News late last week.
Levy's case also has helped other families faced with recent disappearances to confront police with a potent question: "What about our missing person?" Chicago bookstore owners Ellen and Ulrich Sandmeyer are trying to find their daughter Christina, 22, a Stanford University student and avid bicyclist. She disappeared July 13 after a bike trek through the mountains near Santa Cruz, Calif. "We have gotten tremendous coverage as the media tried to find similar cases," says Ellen Sandmeyer. "That's lucky for us."
The attention on Levy enabled Tracey Bradley to get word out on national television about her two daughters, Tionda, 10, and Diamond, 3. The girls have been missing since July 6, when they vanished from their home on Chicago's South Side. "Word would not get out as quick or as far," says Al Kindle, chief of staff to Chicago Alderman Toni Preckwinkle, who represents the ward where the girls live. "Levy has brought the case of the missing person to the forefront and made it possible in this case to get media attention." As of late last week, the girls had not been located.
Agonizing as these stories are, they are the notable exception. Last year, 876,213 persons were reported missing by police to the FBI's National Crime Information Center. But 882,163 persons were reported found, a number that includes cases cleared from previous years. As of July 1, there were 98,697 active files of missing persons in the NCIC. Who are all these missing people? Nearly 60 percent are juveniles, and overall, 55 percent are female. Ultimately, 99 percent of missing people return on their own or are found. "It's not all gloom and doom," says the NCMEC's Allen.
Police departments cite a 75 percent to 99 percent success rate for finding missing persons--far exceeding that of solving thefts and burglaries. But in some respects, the data are misleading. Because so many missing persons return voluntarily, says Robert Keppel, a homicide consultant and former veteran cop, the cases are really "resolved without police investigation."
Many cases, however, are solved--even when the missing person doesn't want to be found. Joel Cuaresma, a 31-year-old pharmacist from Corona, Calif., vanished after his lunch hour in March of 2000. His wife, Elaine, enlisted help from police, a private detective, and psychics. Weeks later, a security camera showed Cuaresma making a purchase with his American Express card at a store in Mexico City.
Gut instinct. And for all the high-tech wizardry available to police, gut instinct often carries the day. Donald "Rob" Wood's mother reported her 27-year-old son missing in July 1998 after he failed to pick her up at the Seattle airport. Detective Ray Holm ran the routine checks. Wood didn't seem like the typical missing person. He had a full-time job, close relationships, and no criminal background. "I was perplexed," says Holm. After five days, Holm rechecked a freight elevator shaft near Dutch Ned's bar, where Wood had been drinking. Horrified, he saw body parts splayed on the elevator floor, but then a finger moved. "Rob," he called. "Yeah, man," came the somewhat stupefied reply from Wood, who had fallen 80 feet. Wood's mother was so happy to have him safely returned that she donated $15,000 to the Seattle police. "If you work hard enough, you get lucky," says Holm.
Cracking a missing-person case can be a life-changing event. In 1985, Bill Thomas, a social worker with the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, was assigned the case of 9-year-old Inez Jean McCarney. The girl's foster mother told Thomas that Inez had described vivid dreams of her mother in Florida. Most important, the little girl recalled a night when a strange woman woke her up and took her away. After three months of interviewing Inez, Thomas took a long shot and contacted the NCMEC. He was stunned. The agency had an Inez Jean Sanders in its files. She had been reported missing by her mother. A woman her mother had met at a truck stop in Arizona, it turned out, had abducted the child and then abandoned her. When the FBI brought Thomas a picture of Inez, it was a match. Two days later, the girl was reunited with her mother, still living in Florida. Last week, choking back tears, Thomas recalled the moment. Getting Inez back to her mom, he said, "was the highlight of my social work career." It also taught him that "no matter what a kid is telling you, it means something. You have to pay attention to it."
Abductions by strangers understandably generate the most fear and attention, but such kidnappings are only the fourth-largest category of missing children reported to NCMEC. According to the Center's Ben Ermini, runaways are first, followed by family abductions, those lost or otherwise missing, and finally, nonfamily abductions. In the past decade, the center has resolved 925 nonfamily cases. In those cases, 191 children--about 21 percent--were found murdered. Though the speculation that swirls around cases like Chandra Levy's surely may make it seem otherwise, most cases of missing children and adults aren't the result of foul play. When a crime has been committed, however, the cops' record of success at rescuing the person isn't great. "Police response varies throughout the nation," says Keppel. "It varies towards the bad."
That's especially true in smaller police departments that operate with limited resources. And because the cases are so infrequent, there is a general lack of experience and readiness. But David Klinger, a University of Missouri criminologist, says police are unfairly criticized. "It's the tail wagging the dog," says Klinger. He argues that police can't be faulted for waiting a period of time to see if a person is indeed missing. After all, it's not a crime for an adult to disappear. Even parents wait an average of two hours before reporting that a child is gone.
This go-slow approach, while understandable, can cost plenty. "In the most serious cases," says the NCMEC's Allen, "time is the enemy." Nearly 25 percent of homicides begin with a missing-person complaint, and nearly three quarters of child-abduction victims who are murdered are killed within three hours of being grabbed, says Keppel. A 1990 U.S. law has barred waiting periods by police departments (some departments even had 24-to-72-hour mandatory waits in the past) for missing-child cases, requiring an immediate police report and NCIC entry in every missing-child case. And generally if it's a young child, under age 10, police react quickly.
Police handling of missing-child cases has long been controversial, particularly because so many of the cases are really battles between the child's parents. In the early 1980s, several high-profile abduction cases began to change the way police operated. Among the first was that of Etan Patz, 22 years ago. Just recently, Etan's parents finally signed papers declaring him legally dead (box, Page 18). The case of Adam Walsh, in 1981, showed in horrifying detail how unprepared police were to handle child abductions. Many of these abductions led to passage of new laws (table, Page 14). Media accounts claimed that as many as 1.8 million children disappeared every year and that 50,000 were snatched by strangers. A series of made-for-TV movies fueled the perception of an unrelenting flood of missing children. In 1986, 2,800 shopping malls participated in a weeklong push to fingerprint 10 million children. During the 1980s, photos of missing kids first began to appear on utility bills, pizza boxes, and, most famously, milk cartons. In 1985, President Reagan declared May 25 National Missing Children's Day. But there were a few thousand cases shy of an epidemic. In 1986, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series in the Denver Post revealed that the vast majority of kids labeled "missing" actually were involved in custody disputes or had run away. Rather than 50,000 kids abducted each year by strangers--the number circulated by the nonprofit Child Find organization--the paper reported that just 67 cases of abductions by strangers had been investigated by the FBI the previous year. "Still," says Allen, "all of these kids are at-risk kids."
And not just at risk but also increasingly much harder to find because of a sharp rise in international abductions. In such cases, the FBI, the Customs Service, the Secret Service, and Interpol get involved. Agents from all these agencies are detailed to the NCMEC. Secret Service senior analyst James Rutherford, who is detailed to the center, says last year there were 1,697 international cases, a 67 percent increase over the previous year. Of those, 1,374 children were located with the assistance of the Secret Service. "I've recovered a million dollars," says Rutherford, who used to investigate currency fraud. "But when I recovered my first child, wow!"
Over time, police have assembled a protocol for teaching officers what to look for when a child has been abducted, and how best to conduct a search. Stephen Steidel, a former longtime Long Island cop who now trains police for NCMEC, says the typical kidnapper is a 27-year-old white male, a transient construction worker or day laborer with marginal social skills. An abductor might leave telltale signs in a car, such as duct tape on the passenger's-side seat belt that might disable the unlock button. When Robert Keppel trains police departments to solve child homicides, he tells cops that when they fan out looking for a body, they must be only 3 feet apart when searching for a child. He also tells police officers that the killer often lives near the scene of the murder or near the victim's home.
The guy next door. And yet, says Keppel, in 1995, when 9-year-old Jimmy Ryce got off the school bus and disappeared near Homestead, Fla., searchers fanned out far and wide but failed to look at farmhand Juan Carlos Chavez's trailer just 6 miles from Jimmy's home. Three months later, Chavez's landlady, visiting his trailer, found Jimmy's backpack and called police. Chavez confessed he had taken Jimmy to a second abandoned trailer just 2 miles from the boy's home. There he raped and murdered the boy, dismembered him, and buried his body parts in cement planters in an avocado grove nearby. Chavez is now on death row for the murder. Says Keppel, "The answer was right there next door."
Tragedies have yielded breakthroughs in finding other missing children. In 1996, 9-year-old Amber Hagerman was kidnapped in Arlington, Texas, and killed even though an eyewitness saw the abduction and called police. "Police realized their eyes weren't enough--they needed the community's help," says Allen. Amber's murder led to an innovative program, known as the AMBER (America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response) Plan, created in 1996 by Dallas/Fort Worth radio managers and Texas law enforcement agencies. In serious abductions, police fax the information to broadcasters who alert communities nearby using the Emergency Alert System. The AMBER Plan has since spread to other states and been credited with recovering 16 children. This fall, the NCMEC will take the program nationwide. The Federal Communications Commission is expected to issue a specific code for the plan by the end of the year.
"Code Adam." Corporations have also joined in. Using simple but effective ways to generate publicity, they have been particularly helpful in disseminating children's photographs. According to the NCMEC's Ermini, 1 in every 6 children recovered is found as a direct result of someone's looking at a photo. The center has created the technology for making sophisticated age-progression and age-regression photographs of children, which often are very accurate. Other companies, like the Connecticut-based direct-marketing company Advo, are using "Have you seen me?" cards, combining ads for products or services with pictures of missing children that reach 80 million mailboxes. So far, the cards have been credited with leading to the recovery of 110 missing children. Kathleen Mooney, a 5-year old Pennsylvania girl, was reunited with her mother in July 2000. Her father had abducted her and traveled with her for 18 months, ending up on the Honduran island of Roatan. An anonymous tip from an American tourist led to the child.
Wal-Mart also has several successful missing-children initiatives. Stores invoke a "Code Adam" policy every time a child is reported lost. Employees stop working, immediately staff the exits, and search for the child. Wal-Marts also display missing-children bulletin boards that have led to the recovery of 56 children. Last May, Alberta Morris, 59, and her friend Glenda Thomas, 52, were washing Morris's throw rugs at a laundromat in Connerville, Okla. They were drawn to a little girl who was playing as her dad did her laundry. The women later drove to the Wal-Mart in nearby Ada, to shop. As Morris wheeled her cat food bags out the door, she says she heard her friend screaming, "Get back here! Look at this!" There on the Wal-Mart bulletin board was a picture of the girl, 19-month-old Marissa Meuse, from Port Orange, Fla. The girl had been abducted by her father during a bitter custody dispute. Morris and Thomas alerted police. Meuse was returned to her mother. The mother subsequently got a job at, where else, Wal-Mart.
Missing and action
High-profile cases of missing children and adults have often spurred congressional action.
Charles Lindbergh Jr.
ABDUCTED: March 1, 1932, from home in New Jersey
LEGISLATION: Congress moved to establish federal jurisdiction over interstate kidnapping cases. The Lindbergh baby was found dead near the family's home. The case was solved in 1935 but endured as perhaps the nation's best-known kidnapping case.
Etan Patz
ABDUCTED: May 25, 1979, in SoHo, New York
ACTION: The public outcry over Etan's disappearance became a catalyst for a missing children's movement. Etan's case prompted the appearance of photos of missing children on milk cartons. He was declared legally dead in late June.
Adam Walsh
ABDUCTED: 1981 from a Hollywood, Fla., shopping mall and later murdered.
LEGISLATION: Congress ordered law enforcement agencies to enter missing children in the FBI's National Crime Information Center database. In 1984, Congress launched the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Polly Klaas
ABDUCTED: 1993 and then murdered
ACTION: Two months after Polly's abduction, Congress passed the International Parental Kidnapping Crime Act, which made international child abduction by a parent a federal offense. Klaas's killer, Richard Allen Davis, was sentenced to death.
Kristen Modafferi
DISAPPEARED: The 18-year-old disappeared in San Francisco in June 1997.
LEGISLATION: In a bill known as Kristen's law, Congress created a national center for missing adults. It also authorized the attorney general to make $1 million grants for four years to public and private agencies to find missing persons over 18.
On the missing trail
Advances in forensic technology have enabled police to solve even the most vexing cases.
LEADING EDGE. Age-progression technology produced from a photo at age 3 a composite of Katrina Mattson at 7 (center) that closely resembled how she looked when found at the age of 8.
RECONSTRUCTION.
Working from a skull, investigators use clay to depict how the person might have looked. Then they create a composite photo to compare it with a missing person.
With Michael Schaffer, Randy Dotinga and Ingrid Lobet
This story appears in the August 13, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.