by Carole Moore
Without a doubt, the mentally ill, and in particular those with concurrent substance abuse problems like Libba Phillips’s sister, Ashley, form the single greatest component of the missing and unreported population. According to Outpost for Hope, individuals with mental illness are more than twice as likely to become victims of violent crime than the general population, and about half of mentally ill homeless adults also suffer from substance abuse and dependency, which makes them even more difficult to track.
Because each jurisdiction sets its own standards for reporting a person missing, the playing field is uneven where the mentally ill are concerned. Some jurisdictions take all missing persons reports seriously and err on the side of documenting a person missing erroneously rather than failing to file a report, while others will not take a report on a missing adult without suspicion of foul play. For those families with adults suffering from mental disorders, being unable to report their mentally ill kin as missing makes it hard to search for them. Many official avenues are closed to those who don’t have an official missing persons report. And that often leads to incredible heartbreak, as in the case of Susan McDonough of Reading, Pennsylvania.
In December 2008, forty-two-year-old Susan, a victim of schizophrenia, disappeared. It was bitter cold that winter and her relatives, including her half brother Mark, were worried about her safety. Mark says he tried to report his sister missing, but in the beginning no one would take the report.
“It would have been very simple to fill out the report; it would have taken no time at all,” Mark says. “But the officer spent more time [than a report would have taken] convincing me that he couldn’t take a report because she was an adult. [Another officer] told me his brother was a drug addict [who was] missing over ten years and said they couldn’t go looking for every adult, because [missing adults] had a right to do what they wanted.”
Susan had a long, torturous history of going off the medication that kept her illness under control. After she and her mother were evicted as a result of Susan’s inability to get along with neighbors, Susan lived for a time with the man she believed to be her father (although he never acknowledged paternity) in a house on Linden Street in nearby Reading. When the home in which they lived was sold to satisfy a tax lien, Susan drifted from one living arrangement to another, but she kept returning to the Linden Street home. On December 4, 2008, she tried to camp out in the lobby of a hotel and the police were called. Police asked where she lived and she provided the Linden Street address—the place where she had once lived for so long. Her official identification corroborated her story, so the officer gave her a ride there and dropped her off. It was the last time she was seen alive.
When Susan failed to contact family members, Mark, his mother, Barbara, and other friends and family began to search for her.
“We knew something was wrong,” Mark says. Calls to the police yielded no help at first, although a later visit to the Muhlenberg Police Department resulted in an offer to file a report if the Reading Police continued to refuse to do so. At last, the Muhlenberg Police did take a report on Susan’s disappearance.
Prior to her disappearance, the McDonough family battled for years to compel Susan to take her medications and get treatment but found themselves stymied by Pennsylvania law, which, Mark says, required “a clear and present danger—like the equivalent of holding a gun to someone’s head—before they’d do anything.
“We knew she was headed for disaster but [because of the laws concerning mentally ill persons] our hands were tied. It was so, so frustrating,” Mark says.
The McDonoughs were in constant contact with local law enforcement as a result of Susan’s tendency to wander. Mark says the system made it difficult for them to help Susan. She would be institutionalized on occasion for a week to ten days and then released. “They would let her go with no follow-up,” Mark says. “Obviously, she wouldn’t take her meds; she’d be sleepy and feel horrible. She wasn’t in anywhere long enough to have a proper transition. They let them go when the side effects are full-blown.”
When Susan refused her meds, her family could do nothing legally to compel her to take them. Then December came and Susan vanished. The family couldn’t get help when she was wandering and couldn’t get anyone to care that she was nowhere to be found. It was the ultimate bureaucratic catch-22: no one seemed willing to help Susan or her family.
“They ‘can’t do anything.’ It’s the same mantra everywhere. I don’t know how much of it is the law, but I know that putting the mentally ill on the streets causes more problems, and ultimately costs more,” Mark says.
But Susan didn’t stay on the streets for very long that frigid December. Instead, investigators later theorized, the night she got the ride from the police officer or not long afterward, she broke into the little house where she had lived on Linden Street. The home stood empty and deserted, having been sold for unpaid taxes, but to Susan McDonough, the freezing little place was still her home. So she curled up on the floor of the kitchen and went to sleep. It was a sleep from which she would never awaken.
On May 30, 2009, a man contracted to renovate the Linden Street home for the new owner found Susan’s body. She had been missing for almost six months. Mark remains angry about the circumstances that led to her death and his family’s inability to access help for her.
“She had a great smile and was very generous. She took care of our grandma. Whenever anyone was sick, Susan always wanted to help. People loved her and wanted to be with her. This disease [schizophrenia] made her into someone we didn’t know,” Mark says.
Mark admits to frustration with the system, which he believes failed his sister in many ways. “The Reading Police said because she was homeless she wasn’t really missing from anywhere,” he says.
The McDonough family has lobbied for changes in the way their state handles the mentally ill who enter crisis mode, but no amount of legislation will restore Susan to their lives or assuage their grief. “She was such a beautiful person when she was doing okay,” he says. “We are tormented and very angry about it.”
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Emma Carroll raised eleven children before her mind began to suffer the ravages of age-related dementia. Carroll, whose husband perished in a car accident in 1975, brought her children up with lots of love, the good cooking for which she was famous, and an unwavering faith in her God.
But at age eighty-three, Emma was losing her sharpness: she couldn’t remember recent events and, to the sorrow of her extended family, was becoming more and more socially withdrawn. On July 18, 2009, the elderly African American woman who also suffered from hypertension walked away from her Pembroke, Georgia, home. She has not been seen since.
Unlike many who suffer from mental disorders, Carroll’s granddaughter says there was an immediate, massive ground and air search for her grandmother.
“Over two hundred volunteers, air patrol, four-wheelers, canine patrol, and law enforcement from eighteen state and local agencies searched from sun up to sundown for eight straight days,” says Dawn Williams. In the end there was no sign of Emma, no evidence of where she’d gone.
The family hopes that someone saw Emma and picked her up. They’ve hired a private investigator, held candlelight vigils, and distributed flyers emblazoned with her likeness. Based on the theory that Emma could have left the state with help, they’re expanding their search into nearby areas of Alabama, South Carolina, and Florida.
“We will continue to look for her until we have a reason not to,” Williams says.
NAMI says African Americans are less likely to receive proper diagnosis and treatment for mental illness. However, when it comes to dementia, there seems to be no racial lines and few differences in the rate at which individuals seek treatment.
Perhaps the reason the missing who suffer from dementia now grab more attention is because over the past few decades, awareness of mind-robbing diseases, including Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia, has gravitated from the backs of medical journal
s to the front pages of newspapers. Ronald Reagan, one of this country’s most iconic presidents and world leaders, suffered from Alzheimer’s in his last years, a fact both he and his family acknowledged.
When an elderly individual with a diagnosis of dementia wanders off, most law enforcement agencies begin an immediate search. In many states, this is done under the auspices of a “Silver Alert” program.
Suggested by Oklahoma State Representative Fred Perry (R–Tulsa) and modeled on the Amber Alert program, which initiates a widespread public notification when a child goes missing, the Silver Alert was adopted by the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety and signed into law in April 2009. It is used to inform the public, news media, and various agencies when a qualifying individual goes missing.
Various forms of the Silver Alert exist from state to state, but almost all of them are aimed at elderly persons with dementia or other mental impairment. They aim to find the missing senior as fast as possible, and in many cases they succeed. Georgia has a successful program known as “Mattie’s Call,” named after a sixty-eight-year-old woman who wandered away from her Atlanta home. Her body was found eight months later a few hundred yards from her home.
While not all states employ an alert system for seniors, many experts believe they should because these systems work. In Georgia the Mattie’s Call system helped return seventy of seventy-one missing seniors during a three-year period. Federal legislation to create a national Silver Alert system was stalled at the time of this writing, but supporters hope to push it through Congress.
For some, though, there is no bright and shiny piece of legislation to bring their families help and hope. Like Libba Phillips’s sister, Ashley, their situations don’t spark an immediate response by searchers. Instead, reactions tend to fall into the “he got what he deserved” category, and that adds more pain into the mix.
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It took one word for the responding officer to stop taking notes on Troy Spencer Marks’s disappearance: addict. Ashley Marks, Troy’s wife and the mother of his two boys, admits her missing husband has demons, but she says he is trying to get straight and that no matter what substances he chose to abuse, he deserves to have someone out there looking for him.
Troy Spencer Marks. Courtesy of Ashley Y. Marks.
“I was interviewed for less than five minutes by a motorcycle officer from Ascension Parish [Louisiana]. I told him that [Troy] was an addict. Once I did this, the report was ended,” Ashley says. “He even told me that I was better off.”
Ashley says the officer also said an investigating detective would touch base with her the next day. “It’s been three-and-one-half years, and I am still waiting for that detective to interview me,” she says.
Like the mentally ill, those addicted to drugs and alcohol are more often than not given short shrift by an overburdened criminal justice system. For many officers, looking for individuals who disappear under circumstances involving drug abuse is an endless chore and one they have neither the resources nor the time to pursue.
But Ashley insists her husband is a good man, despite his chemical dependencies, and it is true that many addicts suffer from concurring, but often undiagnosed, mental disorders. While Troy has not been diagnosed with mental illness, Ashley says he fought to remain sober and never came home to his children when he was under the influence.
A handsome man with a shaved head and a goatee, Troy has blue eyes that sparkle with wit and a couple of distinctive tattoos, including one of Yosemite Sam holding a gun and a football. When he disappeared, Troy lived in New Orleans, where he worked concrete in the rebuilding efforts following Hurricane Katrina. On June 6, 2006, a friend dropped him off near North Dourgenois Street. Later that day, Troy failed to show up for work. He has not been heard from since. Some time later, his abandoned truck was located in the parking lot of a Baton Rouge apartment complex under suspicious circumstances.
Ashley says she knows deep in her heart of hearts that her Troy met with foul play. She understands better than anyone that his drug habits often led him to go to dark places where he should not have been. But she also believes that Troy’s bad choices in life shouldn’t result in his marginalization as a human being; nor, says Ashley, should it affect his status as a missing person.
She thinks law enforcement responds faster to missing persons who are mentally ill than to missing addicts and alcoholics—that they are society’s last priority.
“I believe people look at drug addicts as low[lives],” Ashley says. “I want the world to know that regardless of what a person is, an addict or a mental patient, these are people. These are sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, wives, husbands. They do not deserve to be dismissed because they are not perfect members of society.”
Ashley did get someone to listen to her—the police in Baton Rouge, where her missing husband’s truck was found. Ashley believes the detective assigned to her husband’s case (Detective Larry Maples of the Baton Rouge Police Department) wants to find Troy—or find out what happened to him. “He keeps the communication lines open and respects my opinion,” Ashley says of Detective Maples. “I believe that is how we even the playing field: take the defects of character out of the [missing person] and focus on the fact that they are a person who happens to be missing.”
Ashley is not naive enough to believe Troy is going to walk in her door any minute, alive, well, and sober. But she is hopeful that she will someday have answers. She wants her boys to know their father didn’t desert them, that he loved them, wanted them, was proud of them.
“My sons need to know that Daddy did not leave them, because I do not believe he would ever just walk away,” Ashley says.
Lisa Hodanish is another who doesn’t believe a loving father would walk out on his children, even though her dad was approaching seventy when he disappeared and his children were grown.
David Neily, a slight man with a gray beard and piecing green eyes, has a history of mental illness, but his family had years of experience dealing with his disorder and his tendency to go off his medicine. Lisa says her father would cycle off his prescriptions, suffer an episode, get picked up by the local sheriff’s department (Neily lived in Westport, California), and be confined to a mental hospital. “They would put him on lithium until he was stable and then release him to a relative,” Lisa says.
David, diagnosed with bipolar disorder after years of shifting diagnoses, disappeared under circumstances that his children—five of them from two marriages—believe are suspicious. But because their father suffered from mental illness and had a history of disappearing, Lisa says law enforcement has also been slow to investigate their dad’s situation.
“I think this case isn’t important to authorities . . . because of his age,” says Lisa. She adds that, despite his condition, he charmed those who met him. “He was at my wedding and no one could tell he had a mental illness. Everyone loved him and he loved to dance and dance,” Lisa remembers.
Like Susan McDonough, David Neily also traveled through that revolving door of treatment and release that those with more serious psychiatric disorders often experience. After stabilizing as an inpatient, he’d go home. Lisa says, “They simply release the patient after about a week on meds just to be put back into the world and be responsible for taking their meds on their own.”
Lisa says this didn’t work for her father. And she, along with many families with adults who face mental disorders, believes that the current philosophy supported by law and adopted by the mental health system in this country does little but add to the population of missing persons—especially older ones.
“I think . . . not much is done for missing persons who are elderly. The cases that are more highlighted are missing children and pregnant women. I believe all missing persons deserve to be found, no matter what their age or mental stability,” Lisa says.
David Neily. Courtesy of Lisa Hodanish.
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The child snatched from a playground, the young housewife who vanis
hes leaving her kids behind, the college student who never returns from an evening out with friends—these are the kinds of cases that grab the headlines. When people suffering from mental illness or substance abuse disappear, they often attract little interest, either from the media or officials, although their numbers are thought to be in the hundreds of thousands. Advocates such as Outpost for Hope’s Libba Phillips and Oklahoma politician Fred Perry work to give these missing individuals parity with the rest of the missing, but for now the sidewalks of this nation’s cities are crowded with people someone, somewhere loves and misses but has no way of ever finding.
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Far and Away: Disappearances Abroad
Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance.—Italian writer Cesare Pavese
On March 13, 2006, a couple of months shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, Ryan Chicovsky disappeared from the guesthouse where he had been staying in rural Xieng Kok, a port on the Mekong River in northwestern Laos, within sight of the Laotian border with Burma (officially the Union of Myanmar).
Ryan grew up on Lopez Island in Washington State, attending a close-knit high school with a graduating class of fewer than twenty. Raised as part of a small, rural community, he led a secure, outdoor-oriented life. He snowboarded, sailed, backpacked, and played soccer. After high school he attended Western Washington University in Bellingham, but his mother, Judy Frane, says it wasn’t until he began studying Chinese that something clicked for him. He had a natural facility for the language and a deep, abiding interest in both the people and their country.