by Carole Moore
The Dunsavage family is a vocal bunch. They don’t believe in treading lightly and haven’t done so in this case. Jeff says they wasted no time contacting their U.S. congressional representatives and insisted someone help them find their son, brother, and father.
“After the military pulled out, the embassy told us they were mobilized and had people on the ground. We thought they were reaching out to the [very large] expat community,” he says. “But there was no indication that was the case. We had to build from the ground up.”
Jeff says they cast a wide net for information, contacting everyone they could think of who might shed light on Joe’s fate. Along the way, he discovered his brother wasn’t the only foreigner to disappear in the area.
“We had the idea that it was this charming Caribbean island. There was this impression that it was fairly safe down there. Then we found that seven [people] have gone missing [recently] and that doesn’t even take into account the murders,” he says.
Jeff points to mysterious vanishings in both Honduras and Costa Rica that he categorizes as “disturbing” and, he charges, not well explored by the U.S. government. Among them is the disappearance of a Chicago-based doctoral student who went missing about three months after Joe.
According to reports, on Tuesday, August 11, 2009, David Gimelfarb parked his rented car at the entrance to the Rincon de la Vieja National Park outside of Liberia, Costa Rica, then entered the rambling 34,800-acre park and vanished like a drop of water on a hot sidewalk.
“You could not just wander off that trail; in places it’s so thick you would need a machete [to walk],” Jeff says. “He vanished without a trace and, like my brother, there’s been no ransom [demand]. [David’s] money and passport were still in the car, securely locked up.”
David’s parents have made several prolonged trips to Costa Rica to search for their son. Thus far, none has proven successful, although there has been at least one report of a sighting of a dirty, homeless man who bore a resemblance to David. Although that lead has not borne fruit, the Gimelfarbs have refused to abandon their search.
Another American searching for a loved one lost in a country south of our border also refuses to quit. Jeff says his friend Cindy Scheepstra, wife of missing Dutch American Ron Scheepstra, continues to search for her missing husband despite discouraging results.
Ron, forty-nine, went missing on April 11, 2009, while on a fishing trip with friends in Xcalak, Mexico. It was an area with which Ron, whose home is in Lufkin, Texas, was very familiar: a longtime sports fisherman, he had visited that wild and remote part of Mexico three times in as many years. On the day he vanished, his friends and fellow fishermen said Ron told them he was going to change locations to fish in a more remote spot in hopes of improving his luck. He has not been seen since.
Both his friends and wife believe Ron was abducted. They say they found nothing at the scene to indicate otherwise. Officials have indicated that they believe Ron may have planned his disappearance, a charge his family disputes. Cindy, his wife, is now stuck in a curious and difficult limbo: the couple was looking forward to retirement and had refinanced their home in order to put in a new swimming pool, according to Jeff Dunsavage. With Ron gone but not declared dead, she can’t sell the house or do anything else with it. Jeff says Cindy works three jobs to make ends meet, while continuing to look for her missing husband.
“Cindy and her daughter flew down to Mexico and where Ron disappeared is a pretty remote area on the Yucatan. The American Embassy told them what bus to take to get there. It’s a $200 bus fare and they didn’t offer them any help at all. Because Ron has dual citizenship, though, the Dutch Embassy provided them with a car and driver and took them to where he went missing. When they got there, they were bullied by local authorities, locked in a room, and made to sign documents in Spanish [that they didn’t understand],” Jeff says.
Jeff says Mexican officials accused Scheepstra of engineering his disappearance and Cindy of helping him. They offered no further assistance to the women.
The car Ron drove was found, but it was worthless in terms of evidence. The authorities in that area have no forensics capabilities, but also, according to Jeff, local police officers drove it around for days. If there had been any evidence to recover from the car, it would have been destroyed.
Jeff believes Americans who go missing in Mexico and Central America do not receive adequate help and support from their government. He says families must struggle with foreign legal systems, corruption, and customs they do not understand. He believes things can be better handled, and that is one of the reasons he founded the Missing Americans Project (www.missing
americans.ning.com).
In the process of obtaining nonprofit status, Jeff says the Missing Americans Project will advocate for improved government response and better attention to the needs of the families of the missing. He claims current official responses are all over the map.
“They say, ‘What do you want us to do?’” Jeff says. “When my brother disappeared, we had to reinvent the wheel throughout our entire experience. Every [other] family we have dealt with has come up with a similar story.”
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According to its Web site, this is the U.S. Department of State’s official policy on “American citizens missing abroad”:
As concerned relatives call in, consular officers use the information provided by the family or friends of a missing person to locate the individual. We check with local authorities in the foreign country to see if there is any report of a U.S. citizen hospitalized, arrested, or is otherwise unable to communicate with those looking for them. Depending on the circumstances, consular officers may personally search hotels, airports, hospitals, or even prisons.
Privacy Act—The provisions of the Privacy Act are designed to protect the privacy and rights of Americans, but occasionally they complicate our efforts to assist citizens abroad. As a rule, consular officers may not reveal information regarding an individual American’s location, welfare, intentions, or problems to anyone, including family members and Congressional representatives, without the expressed consent of that individual. Although sympathetic to the distress this can cause concerned families, consular officers must comply with the provisions of the Privacy Act.
Michelle Bernier-Toth, director of American Citizen Services and Crisis Management for the U.S. Department of State, admits that sometimes there is little the State Department can do in missing persons cases. But she says she understands the mixed reviews.
“A lot of it depends on host country capability. We obviously do not have . . . the resources or the capabilities or the expertise to conduct missing persons searches,” says Bernier-Toth.
Bernier-Toth says the State Department receives thousands of calls every year from worried relatives who cannot find or contact family overseas. State Department consular officials do their best to locate the individual and report back to the families. Most of the reports turn out to be unfounded—a student who fails to call his mom or a case of crossed wires. The staff also takes into consideration the circumstances surrounding the individual’s disappearance: is there anything that lends special urgency to the search?
“Someone who is hiking in a remote area—that is a great concern. Someone who is a tourist wandering through Prague, perhaps not as much,” she explains.
Sometimes the strain of travel can bump travelers out of their comfort zones, causing them to wander off the grid. Schedules are off, tempers are strained, and important medications are neglected.
“The most common subject of our welfare and whereabouts calls are those who have mental illnesses and whose families are concerned,” she says.
While some, like Jeff Dunsavage, believe the government doesn’t do enough to help the families of those who turn up missing, Bernier-Toth points out that consular officials are constrained by both privacy laws and the laws of foreign countries from doing many things.
If, for instance, an individual chooses to disap
pear and he is located, the State Department cannot force that person to contact his family, return, or even pass pertinent information along without his permission.
“We may, at least initially, be circumspect with the information we provide back to you. If we locate your loved one . . . we will do as much as we can within the Privacy Act. We will urge them to contact the family, but sometimes they don’t want to be found,” she says. “That’s the fine wire that we walk.”
She says consular officials take a caseworker approach to their search for the missing. They use their contacts to check hotels, hospitals, morgues, tourist bureaus, and other places that might shed light on the individual’s whereabouts. But, as she points out, consular officials are not law enforcement officers and have no jurisdiction or investigative powers in foreign countries.
When a member of the U.S. Armed Forces disappears in a foreign country while on official duty, that service’s intelligence or criminal investigations unit will conduct a search there in conjunction with local authorities. There is no comparable organization for civilians, but sometimes the FBI becomes involved in these cases. In fact, each embassy has a legal attaché who is often also an agent for the FBI.
In the case of MaxGian Alcalde (see chapter 12), a child from Idaho who was allegedly abducted by his mother and taken to Nicaragua, both the U.S. Embassy and FBI were involved in the boy’s recovery and return to his father. Other American law enforcement agencies may also assist with a missing persons investigation.
“In Latin America we have a strong narcotics program, and that’s a resource where we can say, ‘While you’re out there talking to local authorities on the ground in various places could you put out the word?’ [We] try and use it as a force multiplier,” says Bernier-Toth.
Not every country wants to cooperate in a missing persons investigation. Like the victims’ families, the consular staff sometimes runs into
roadblocks that, depending on the sophistication of the nation and its relationship with the United States, can range from red tape to ignoring staff efforts.
“We keep pushing, we keep trying, and sometimes resources are very limited in those countries, and it’s really hard,” she says.
Complaints about the U.S. Department of State’s response—or lack of response—to missing persons abroad often grow out of frustration with the system. Adding to that frustration is the task of dealing with foreign customs and laws. Victims’ families are not coping with one bureaucracy but several. And the more rural and unsophisticated the area in which a loved one vanishes, the more devilish the investigation can become.
Nations like Laos, China, Syria, Somalia, and Indonesia can be difficult and dangerous for travelers. Increasing violence in some South and Central American counties also creates unsafe conditions for those who travel alone. But communist and emerging nations and countries with growing criminal elements aren’t the only places American travelers disappear. They also vanish from the streets of sophisticated cities like Rome, London, Paris, and Madrid. In fact, one of the most famous unsolved missing persons cases in Ireland is that of American-born Annie Bridget McCarrick, a twenty-six-year-old who lived in Dublin, Ireland, and disappeared on March 26, 1993. Almost two decades and many searches later, she remains unfound.
Annie, who is from New York’s Long Island, moved to the British Isles and studied to become a teacher in 1987. She came back to the United States for three years and returned to Ireland in January 1993. A police investigation revealed that on the day she disappeared, Annie took a bus to Enniskerry to visit the Wicklow Mountains. Her case remains open. Some believe her disappearance is linked to an unsolved series of homicides in the area, but nothing has been proven.
Annie’s disappearance is not the only one to confound modern, municipal European police agencies. In Florence, birthplace of the Renaissance and a mecca for art students, Matthew Allen Mullaney disappeared following a night spent relaxing with friends. The Scituate, Massachusetts, native was studying art in the Italian city when he vanished after leaving a local Irish pub. Although his family has not ceased searching for Matt, who was born November 5, 1981, and went missing January 31, 2003, like Annie McCarrick, his disappearance remains an enduring mystery.
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Americans are not alone in vanishing from foreign soil. It is a worldwide problem. Each year, for example, hundreds of Britons vanish while visiting other countries—in some cases, the United States.
According to the U.S. Department of State, there are no statistics that track the number of Americans who go missing in a foreign country in a given year. The British do a better job of tallying those numbers: in 2008, 481 Brits disappeared abroad, an increase from 401 the previous year and 336 in 2006. Some of the families of missing British citizens are as unhappy with their government’s efforts as their American counterparts, but the family of Eddie Gibson, which has been working with both the British Foreign Office and the Suffolk Police, believes their government has done a good job.
Eddie, who hails from Hove, England, disappeared in Cambodia when he was twenty-two. His mother, Jo Clark, discovered her son was missing on November 1, 2004, when she and Eddie’s father went to Heathrow Airport to meet his plane.
“I was so excited to see him,” Jo remembers. After his flight landed she watched as the crowds began to exit the baggage area. As she waited for her son to appear, Jo says she began to experience a growing disquiet.
“After the last person had gone through . . . there was just emptiness. I dashed over to the Thai Airways ticket desk to ask them about Eddie. They looked at the manifest of the flight, and although Eddie’s name was on it, they told me he did not check in at Bangkok Airport. My heart [sank],” Jo says.
A handsome, strapping fellow more than six feet tall with indigo blue eyes, Jo says Eddie is an affable guy who received high marks in school and was popular with the girls. “He was often in trouble but he always smiled his way out of any tricky situations,” Jo says.
The family has made nine trips to Cambodia to search for Eddie. They’ve appeared on television and given dozens of interviews. All of that publicity has generated many tips, but thus far none of them has panned out. In addition, detectives from the Suffolk Police also traveled to Cambodia in 2006 to join forces with Thai police in their search for Eddie.
“The hardest part for me was not knowing where to start,” she says. “The whole experience has just been one big nightmare.”
Intelligence Officer Arianna Stucchi of the United Kingdom Missing Persons Bureau says families like Eddie Gibson’s have a number of nonprofits to which they can turn when crisis strikes.
“In the U.K. there are many agencies and NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] dedicated to helping families of the missing. We have, for instance, the charity Missing Abroad (www.missingabroad.org). This is a charity that has been created from individuals that have unfortunately experienced such an ordeal [and] . . . have created this charity to support those left behind. They are especially well informed on ways of getting [the] families of [the] missing to the country [where] the individual vanished from and helping them deal with such a traumatic time.” Stucchi says other charities include Children and Families across Borders (CFAB), Missing People, Reunite, and International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), and all can be found on the Web.
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“Nightmare” is the most accurate term used to describe what American Amy Bradley’s family and friends have been going through since the twenty-three-year-old disappeared from a family cruise.
The Bradley family was aboard the Rhapsody of the Seas, a Royal Caribbean Cruise Line ship out of Miami when they docked at Curacao, Netherlands Antilles, and found that Amy—a recent college graduate with a bright future—had vanished. That was March 24, 1998, and there is still no sign of the athletic, gregarious Amy. Her family says she had many plans for her future and no reason to leave. There has been some speculation that Amy could have been kidnapped and sold in the sex trade, but
that allegation has never been substantiated.
While not common, cruise ship disappearances also are not all that rare. Since most of these disappearances take place in international waters or when the ships are docked in foreign ports, the victims’ families must not only deal with other governments, but also with the cruise companies. These companies do not welcome the scrutiny such incidents bring to their businesses.
In 2008, sources report cruise ship operators officially documented thirty unexplained disappearances on their ships in the preceding five years. While the numbers may seem small compared to disappearances on land, for the families of these missing people, the statistics are much too high. When someone vanishes on the high sea, the obvious outcome is much too grim.
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For the families of individuals missing in foreign lands, frustration is a continent—or two—away. They must deal with multiple government agencies from various jurisdictions, most of the time at a distance. Depending on the area of the country in which the person disappeared, forensic and investigative techniques can be light-years behind the curve. And then there is the delay: often families don’t even realize their loved ones are missing until days after they have vanished. That leaves them far away from the center of the investigation, playing catch-up in a game that unfolds on anything but a level playing field.
Searching in a foreign country is also expensive. Families report that, in addition to time away from work and the expense of hotels and flights, they often must retain an attorney or private investigator in the foreign country to keep the lines of communication open with the authorities.