I nodded. Not much else to say.
Back at my car, I wasn’t so lucky. Cars had triple parked around mine. I climbed in, cranked the windows down, and sat in the shade watching people stroll back to their cars as if they’d just been to a church softball game rather than a near-death experience. Odd way to spend a Sunday. I wondered if Fran was spending the day with her parents.
I noticed a message on my cell phone. Lydia’s voice said, “Frank’s fired up the grill for hot dogs and hamburgers. Mom and Dad are coming, and Letha, Hattie, and Vinnia. Let me know how many hot dogs you want.”
I hit redial. A family cookout sounded like just the ticket. I’d stop for a bag of marshmallows.
Missing and Unidentified persons
According to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), more than 50,000 missing-person cases were open in the United States in 2007, and more than 6,200 unidentified-remains cases were active.
In researching Hush My Mouth, I wanted to understand the search for missing persons and the identification of remains. I first became aware of the poignant realities and the staggering statistics when I met Dr. Emily Craig, the state forensic anthropologist for the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
Dr. Craig, a medical illustrator before she studied forensic anthropology with Dr. Bill Bass at the University of Tennessee’s legendary “Body Farm,” brings an artist’s eye—and an artist’s heart—to her work as a scientist. In her book Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America’s Most Infamous Crime Scenes (Crown, 2004), she talks about the power of the Internet in matching the names of the missing to the unidentified remains—and bringing murderers to justice.
The NCIC is a national clearinghouse available to law enforcement, but it has limitations. Sometimes missing persons aren’t reported because family and friends don’t know they are gone or are embarrassed to report they’ve run off. Because the database records information by code, it requires proper coding in both the missing-person report and the unidentified-remains report. So much of what identifies us as human beings, though, is in the eye of the beholder. Is the hair dark blond or light brown? Is she tall because she always wears heels? The most important identifiers—such as a tattoo or unusual teeth or habits—might be missing because someone forgot to mention them. Another problem, too, is that investigators can have overwhelming workloads that give a low priority to logging the information into the database.
Over the last few years, thanks to dedicated and tireless work by law-enforcement officials and families missing loved ones, resources have become available to the general public, not just to law enforcement. One of the best-known organizations, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (www.missingkids.com), provides a database of cases, an online support group for families, and resources for law enforcement.
Because NCMEC focuses only on children, the National Center for Missing Adults was formed (www.theyaremissed.org). This organization was promoted through the dedicated efforts of Kristen Modafferi’s family in Charlotte when the lack of resources hampered them after their eighteen-year-old daughter disappeared in San Francisco.
Resources also exist to help give names to unidentified remains. The Doe Network (www.doenetwork.org) catalogs both U.S. and international cases. The site also allows geographic searches, and the list of resolved cases includes happy endings of families reunited, sometimes years after the disappearance. Many states also have individual sites covering unsolved cases in their jurisdictions.
Though the reporting sites—for both the professionals and the public—are far from complete, they represent a quantum leap in the amount and quality of information available. As a result, more of the stories have endings—some happy, some predictably sad, but closure nonetheless.
Table of Contents
Cover
Halftitle
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Monday Morning
Monday Morning
Midday Morning
Monday Afternoon
Monday Evening
Tuesday Morning
Tuesday Morning
Midmorning Tuesday
Tuesday Afternoon
Wednesday Morning
Wednesday
Thursday Morning
Thursday Aternoon
Thursday Afternoon
Late Thursday Afernoon
Friday Morning
Friday Afternoon and Evening
Saturday Morning
Saturday Afternoon And Evening
Saturday Night
Late Saturday Night
Sunday
Missing and Unidentified persons
Hush My Mouth Page 24