Missing Without A Trace

by Rider, Tanya

  CHAPTER THREE

  Your Loved One is Missing

  I was five years old and my brother was two. We were playing in our yard in Placentia, California, when a man tried to abduct us. My mother called the police, who came to our home. I gave as good a description as I could of the man.

  Later that same year, Stephen came tumbling out of an orange grove about a mile from our house. Witnesses watched him cross a busy intersection while two young Boy Scouts were trying to catch up with him to make sure he was okay. We never knew whether Stephen wandered away from our house—and walked a mile to the orange grove—or if someone took him and dumped him among those trees.

  I was too young to understand what any of these things meant. But my mother knew. And, of course, as I grew up and had children of my own, I came to understand all too well.

  When a child goes missing, many parents feel that their worst nightmare has come true. And, whether your child, spouse, dear friend or another loved one is missing, it will not matter why, but that they are. You will likely feel hopeless, helpless and uncertain. You will probably not know what to do or what to expect and, like Tom Rider, you will probably bounce back and forth—over and over—between an urgent adrenaline rush and a sickening sense of powerlessness. Unable to eat, you will be weak with hunger and, unable to sleep, you will be drunk with fatigue. And you will probably find yourself afraid to leave the telephone and tending to gaze out the window or down the street, wishing that your loved one would just show up.

  Despite the chaos of the emotions you will endure, you will get through it. And it is very important that you do because you will play an important role in solving the puzzle of finding your loved one. Your involvement can be key in bringing your loved one home.

  When someone is missing from your life, it is a sad comfort to know that you are not alone. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (and Adults) (NCMEC) reports that, on average every year, 58,200 non-family abductions occur where a juvenile is held for longer than an hour. Forty percent are taken from a vehicle or from the street and 16 percent are taken from their home or yard. Approximately half are sexually assaulted and a third physically assaulted. In the vast majority of these cases—71 percent—the abductor was a stranger, and 21 percent of the time, the abductor was a slight acquaintance. Of the tens of thousands of children who are grabbed and held for at least an hour, less than one-fourth are reported to police. For several reasons, the rest of the cases go unreported. Many of those who are taken and released are afraid to tell their families or the authorities, since abductors often claim to know where families live and threaten to kill family members. Also, as a result of what the perpetrator did to them, some kidnap victims feel dirty and unworthy of rejoining their family so, often, they keep their ordeal a secret. Still others return to tell their families, who might discount the story and not believe what has taken place. As a result, just over twelvethousand abductions are reported to law enforcement annually.

  Several hundred-thousand juveniles and adults go missing every year. This encompasses all cases, from runaway reports to stranger abductions. The statistics are staggering and they are real, and they indicate that Americans are enduring an incredible loss of loved ones in greater numbers than ever before.

  As a result, countless resources are available to help people search for their missing loved ones. Across the country, government entities, nonprofit organizations, and consultants advocate for improved systems that will help us prevent abductions and accidents and, when they do happen, provide help and support in the work to recover the missing. Police, state patrols, and federal agents have developed and constantly utilize ever-better tools for investigation, tracking, and publicity, and, at all levels—local, state, and national—we have more laws and more effective laws to help turn the tide of abductions.

  Still, the system is not perfect. It failed Tanya and Tom Rider. In a country where hundreds of thousands of people go missing every year, each of us must consider that, one day, it could be our neighbor, our child’s friend, or our loved one who slips through the cracks and disappears. Yes, it is alarming.

  While none of us wants to live in constant fear or act paranoid, we must be diligent. It is important to be prepared and one of the best ways you can do that is to arm yourself with information. Take simple steps to avoid getting lost. Know what to do if you are in an accident, trapped in your car. Carry emergency supplies. And if the unthinkable happens and someone you love goes missing, know what to do. If you are caught in a situation like the one Tom Rider faced, you would have an important advantage if you are aware of a few essential facts. Be familiar with the laws that govern missing persons investigations. Know the truth about filing missing persons reports—to whom you should report, when to file a report and where to go for help, for example. And know your rights. Find out what you can do if the local police department claims that your loved one wasn’t in their jurisdiction or if they refuse to file a report.

  Efforts to Bring the Missing Home

  I am a 911 dispatcher. Trying to make a difference, I teach law enforcement classes on active shooter incidents and crisis negotiations for the non-profit Association for Public-Safety Communications Officials, APCO International. I am also a volunteer instructor for NCMEC. As one of a handful of APCO adjunct instructors, I teach telecommunicators the best-practice protocol in handling child exploitation calls and incidents involving missing or abducted children and adults. The NCMEC sends me and other unpaid volunteers to travel across the country on our own time, doing everything we can to teach dispatchers how to give missing persons the best chance of returning to their loved ones.

  I do this work because I want to answer the calls—and help others to answer the calls—that I could not make as a child and young adult. Growing up in a transient family, I had a secret: Despite appearances, my childhood was a disaster because my father was abusive. He remains in prison today as retribution for his crimes against me and many others.

  To navigate the missing person system, it is important to be knowledgeable about how that system works, what is available, and how agencies interact and share information. At the national level, missing person reports are entered into a computerized database called the National Crime Information Center (NCIC). The NCIC began in 1967 and added missing persons records in 1975. NCIC has grown to include a variety of records and today, for example, it includes stolen property, people on the National Sex Offender Registry, known or suspected terrorists and more. The NCIC averages 7.5 million transactions per day and, by the end of 2009, it contained more than fifteen-million active records within nineteen files.

  When a person is reported as missing, the information is entered into the NCIC. This information can include name, date of birth, height, weight, eye color, hair color, sex, race, social security number, scars, tattoos, a photograph, and the name and contact information for the case’s investigators. NCIC retains each missing-person record until the individual is located or until the law enforcement agency that entered the record cancels it.

  As of December 31, 2009, NCIC had active missing-person records on 96,192 individuals, more than half of whom were juveniles. During the 2009 calendar year, 719,558 missing persons were entered into NCIC; this was down from 778,161 entered in 2008. The NCIC classifies missing persons into six distinct categories of persons who:

  • have a proven physical or mental disability (classified as Disability—EMD);

  • are missing under circumstances indicating that they may be in physical danger (classified as Endangered—EME);

  • are missing after a catastrophe (classified as Catastrophe Victim—EMV);

  • are missing under circumstances indicating their disappearance may not have been voluntary (classified as Involuntary—EMI);

  • are under the age of 21 and do not meet the above criteria (classified as Juvenile—EMJ);

  • are 21 and older and who do not meet any of the above criteria but for whom ther
e is a reasonable concern for their safety (classified as Other—EMO).

  In 1999, the NCIC implemented an optional Missing Person Circumstances (MPC) field, which allows the law enforcement agency entering the data to code the missing person as Runaway, Abducted by Non-Custodial Parent or Abducted by Stranger.

  Once local law enforcement enters the missing person data into NCIC, the information is accessible nationwide. During a search, any criminal justice agency or federal, state or local law enforcement agency can pull up the file, instantly. But, before acting on any information obtained in the NCIC, an inquiring agency must contact the agency that originally entered the report into the database to ensure that the information is accurate and up to date. After confirming the record, if the inquiring agency has made a match, they can return the missing person to their home. For persons who are not located, initiating law enforcement agencies are required to send a validation report to the NCIC annually, stating the cases that are still open. To keep the database pristine, the NCIC removes from the database any records that the originating agencies do not confirm or validate.

  In some cases, the NCIC records do not include sufficient information to identify a person. In May 2005, to address this problem, the NCIC implemented another field in the missing person database, allowing law enforcement agencies to store, access and supplement dental records. The National Dental Image Repository (NDIR) field helps to facilitate the identification of missing, unidentified, and wanted persons.

  Law enforcement can also file a report with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which can assist with making and distributing wanted posters and age-enhancement technology, tracking, notifications and research. Families can also contact NCMEC on their hotline at 1-800-THE-LOST for help and support.

  Another important tool at the national level is the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs). Developed to help solve cases, NamUs is the first online repository for records on missing persons and unidentified persons. Accessible to the general public, NamUs provides access to coroner and medical examiner offices, and allows you to narrow search results by searching multiple characteristics, such as sex, race, dental information, and tattoos.

  Suzanne’s Law

  Prior in 2003, law enforcement agencies were only required to report missing persons who were under the age of eighteen. As a result, countless numbers of missing people over the age of eighteen stayed missing and many of them still have not been found. One such person is Suzanne Lyall, a student at State University of New York at Albany. She has been missing since she exited a bus at Collins Circle on the University at Albany Uptown Campus on March 2, 1998. Police did not begin investigating until nearly two days after her disappearance and, as a result, her family has waited for answers for more than twelve years.

  Suzanne’s case inspired President George W. Bush to sign “Suzanne’s Law,” which requires police to notify the NCIC immediately when someone between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one is reported missing. Suzanne’s Law also amended Section 3701 (a) of the Crime Control Act of 1990, eliminating twenty-four-hour waiting periods, which were common practice for most law enforcement agencies. Now, law enforcement agencies cannot enforce any waiting period before they begin an investigation of a missing person under the age of twenty-one.

  In August 2008, President Bush took Suzanne’s Law a step further, signing a bill entitled The Suzanne Lyall Campus Safety Act, which amended the Higher Education Opportunity Act and required colleges to have policies outlining roles for law enforcement agencies at the campus, local and state level in the event of a violent crime on campus. The Suzanne Lyall Campus Safety Act was designed to minimize delays and the confusion of roles in investigation.

  In response to Suzanne Lyall’s disappearance, New York also enacted its state’s Campus Safety Act in 1999. This Act requires all colleges in New York to “have formal plans that provide for the investigation of missing students and violent felony offenses committed on campus.”

  Adam Walsh Act

  On July 27, 2006, President George W. Bush signed another important piece of legislation, the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006. This Act was named after Adam Walsh, the six-year-old son of John Walsh, creator and host of America’s Most Wanted. Adam disappeared while shopping with his mother, Reve Walsh, in July 1981. Two weeks later, after extensive searches, a fisherman found the boy’s severed head in a Florida irrigation canal more than one-hundred miles from home.

  Two years later, a drifter named Ottis Toole confessed to killing Adam Walsh. Though Toole told police that he and his lover—serial killer Henry Lee Lucas—abducted and killed Adam, the details didn’t add up. Police began interrogating harder and learned that Lucas had an alibi: He had been in a Virginia jail on a car-theft charge and could not have been involved in the case. Faced with the evidence, Toole admitted that he had lied about Lucas’s involvement and, finally, police had the kidnapper/murderer, and a confession. Toole even provided details of the case consistent with police findings and described a wooded area where he claimed to have left Adam’s body. But police were unable to locate the child’s remains and they had no physical evidence to validate the confession. The state attorney declined to prosecute the case. Toole subsequently changed his story and, three months later, he recanted his confession.

  According to John Walsh and others, sadly, several lapses (including the loss of DNA evidence) marred the investigation. Though Toole twice confessed to killing Adam, he never served time for murdering the boy, though he served five life sentences for other murders. On his deathbed in 1996, he confessed to his niece that he was, indeed, the killer. In 2008, authorities finally announced that they had closed the case on Adam’s murder after definitively determining that Toole had killed him.

  Two years before authorities closed the case, John and Reve Walsh hoped to save countless other families from dealing with the horror they had endured. They set forth the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, legislation that established a national sex offender registry and made significant changes to sexual abuse, exploitation and transportation crimes. The act also created new substantive crimes, expanded federal jurisdiction over existing crimes and increased statutory minimum and/or maximum sentences. As part of this program, the Act established a three-tier classification system for sex offenders:

  • Tier III. The highest tier is “a felony sex offender convicted of aggravated sexual abuse or sexual abuse, or abusive sexual contact of minor under age thirteen; non-custodial kidnapping; or any sex offense committed after the person becomes a tier II offender.”

  • Tier II. This includes “a sex offender convicted of a felony charge or attempt to commit sex trafficking, coercion and enticement, transportation with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, or abusive sexual contact; if it involves use of a minor in a sexual performance, solicitation of a minor to practice prostitution, or production or distribution of child porn; or any sex offense committed after a person is labeled a Tier I offender.”

  • Tier I. This covers any sex offender not classified under the second or third tier.

  Depending upon the classification level, sex offenders must remain registered for a specific period of time, and it is a felony for a sex offender to fail to register. Tier I sex offenders have a registration requirement of fifteen years but they can appeal for reduction after five years or removal after ten years. Tier II registrants are required to register for twenty-five years, and Tier III offenders must register for life, though they can appeal for removal or reduction after twenty-five years.

  National and State-based Alert Systems

  The actions and options available to families and law enforcement are slightly different if the missing person is a child or an adult.

  In cases of missing children, law enforcement agencies can issue an AMBER Alert if the case meets certain criteria. First, law enforcement must confirm that an abduction has happened and assess the
level of risk to the child. If the child is abducted by a stranger, the level of risk is much greater than if the child was abducted by a family member. So, authorities can release an AMBER Alert if:

  • a child is at risk for serious bodily harm or death;

  • there is sufficient descriptive information on the missing child or possible abductor;

  • and the child is seventeen years or younger.

  In these cases, AMBER Alert data is immediately entered into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and the case is flagged as a Child Abduction. This expands the search from the local level to the state, regional or national level, increasing chances that the child will be located. A Child Abduction flag will also trigger an immediate response from the FBI and NCMEC, which will contribute resources to aid in locating the child.

  For missing persons over the age of seventeen, other alert systems are available and, often, these vary by state. (This chapter includes resources in specific states.)

  State of Washington Procedures

  In the State of Washington, police will go into action if an adult is missing under certain circumstances. To activate an EMPA in Washington:

  • the person must be missing under unexplained, involuntary, or suspicious circumstances;

  • the person must be believed to be in danger because of age, health, mental or physical disability, in combination with environmental or weather conditions, or is believed to be unable to return to safety without assistance;