Finding Leanne Bearden

     In 1999 Leanne Hecht from Roswell, Georgia graduated from the University of Georgia. With her degree in marketing she moved to Denver, Colorado after being offered a job there. In 2008 Leanne began dating Josh Bearden, a Denver resident from Garden Ridge, Texas. Mr. Bearden graduated from Texas A & M and possessed a degree in marketing as well. The couple were married in 2009.

     Leanne and Josh, in March 2012, left their home in Denver to embark on a trip around the world. Twenty-two months later, after visiting 56 countries and blogging about their adventures, they returned to the United States.

     In December 2013, following a short stay with Leanne's family in Roswell, Georgia, the pair traveled to Garden Ridge, Texas to visit his parents. They had scheduled a flight back to Denver for January 21, 2014.

     Early Friday afternoon on January 17, 2014, Leanne left the Garden Ridge house to hike in the rugged west Texas terrain northeast of San Antonio. The five-foot, 100 pound woman with two piercings on her left ear wore hiking shoes and a pair of jeans. She did not take her cellphone but was in possession of $60 and two credit cards.

     At 5:30 PM that Friday when Leanne Bearden didn't return home from her outing, Josh reported his wife missing. At eight the next morning officers with the Garden Ridge Police Department and the Comal County Sheriff's Office, accompanied by150 volunteer civilians, a contingent of Texas National Guard members, Texas Rangers and a search and rescue team, launched a massive search for the missing 33-year-old. A pair of helicopters for three hours flew over a 23-mile-square patch of landscape that featured boulders, cliffs and caves. The search produced no clues as to what happened to Leanne Bearden.

     Leanne had been missing a week when a group in Denver held a fundraiser to solicit money to hire a private missing persons investigator named Charles Parker.

     Assuming Leanne hadn't been abducted or murdered, she either ran off, got lost or suffered an injury. She could have twisted an ankle or fallen off a cliff. It seemed rather odd, however, that given the hostile terrain and the possibility of getting injured or lost, she had left her house without a cellphone.

     On January 29, 2014 a member of the missing woman's family posted the following message on Facebook: "The pressure of transitioning from her two-year trip back into what we consider "normal" life seems to have left Leanne very anxious and stressed. As a result there is evidence that Leanne may have voluntarily left the area…We initially believed that she was somewhere in the local area. However, after much searching…no evidence has been found of her presence. If Leanne has indeed fled this area, she is extremely vulnerable. She left with only a few assets and is traveling very light. Although she is athletic, she is small in stature. Her mental and physical status is uncertain. We fear for her greatly."

     On Thursday, February 13, 2014 a Garden Ridge police spokesperson announced that Leanne Bearden's body was found in a wooded area not far from her in-law's house. Jewelry and identification cards were with the body. An autopsy would determine her cause and manner of death.

      Leanne Bearden's body was discovered hanging from a tree. The area where she was found had been searched several times by members of her family. As a result it was not included in the search conducted by law enforcement agencies, volunteers and search and rescue crews.

     On Friday, February 14, 2014 Garden Ridge Police Chief Donna O'Conner announced that the autopsy results revealed that Leanne Bearden had committed suicide.

Watery Graves: The Mystery of Foss Lake

     There's no telling how many murder victims lay on the bottom of America's lakes, rivers and ponds. Most people don't realize that these boating, swimming and fishing sites are also the unmarked graves of people who have gone missing and might never be found. It's a sobering thought.

     Whenever a lake goes dry or is drained law enforcement officers often gather to recover guns, knives, cars, safes, cellphones, computers, wallets and other potential indicia of foul play. Occasionally, the remains of missing persons are exposed as well. When that happens one mystery is solved and another is created.

     On September 10, 2013, Oklahoma Highway Patrol officer George Hoyle, while testing a sonar detection device from a boat on Foss Lake 110 miles west of Oklahoma City, discovered a pair of vehicles sitting under twelve feet of murky water.

     A week after the vehicles were detected, Darrell Splawn, a member of the state's underwater search and rescue team, dove into the lake for a closer look. At this point officers believed they had found a pair of stolen cars.

     When officer Splawn opened the door to one of the vehicles and probed its interior his hand came in contact with a shoe. He also discovered, near the car, a human skull. The diver surfaced to report his finds. When the diver slipped back into the muddy water to check on the other vehicle he saw skeletal remains inside the second car.

     Once the heavily corroded cars--a 1952 Chevrolet and a 1969 Chevy Camero--were pulled out of the reservoir they revealed their gruesome secrets. Each vehicle contained the skeletal remains of three people. Officers also recovered, among other items, a muddy wallet and a purse.

     On April 8, 1969, 69-year-old John Alva Porter, the owner of a 1952 green Chevy, went missing. In the car with him that night were his brother Arlie and 58-year-old Nora Marie Duncan. These three residents of nearby Elk City, along with the Chevy, disappeared without a trace. No one had any idea what had happened to them.

     Jimmy Williams, a 16-year-old from Sayre, Oklahoma, a town of 4,000 a few miles from the lake, owned a 1969 Chevrolet Camero. On the night of November 20, 1970 he and two friends--Thomas Michael Rios and Leah Gail Johnson--both 18, were riding in Williams' car. Instead of going to the high school football game in Elk City the trio went hunting on Turkey Creek Road. The teenagers and the Camero were never seen again.

     While the six skeletal remains were presumed to match the two sets of missing persons, it would take months to scientifically confirm their identities. Forensic scientists in the Oklahoma Medical Examiner's Office compared DNA from the bones with DNA samples from surviving family members. Dr. Angela Berg, the state forensic anthropologist, determined the gender, general stature and approximate ages of the people pulled out of the lake. She did this by analyzing leg and pelvic bones along with the skulls. This data was compared with information contained in the missing person reports.

     What the 44-year-old remains did not reveal was the manner and cause of these deaths. While the six people presumably drowned, they could have been murdered by gun, knife or blunt instrument then dumped into the lake. To rule out foul play, the forensic pathologist and the anthropologist looked for signs of trauma such as bullet holes, knife wounds and smashed or broken bones. The forensic scientists also attempted to determine if the fates of the people inside the two cars were somehow connected.

     Custer County Sheriff Bruce Peoples told an Associated Press reporter that it was possible that these underwater victims had been driven accidentally into the lake where they drowned. "We know that can happen even if you know your way around," he said. "It can happen that quick." 

     In October 2014 the forensic pathologist officially confirmed the identities of the six sets of remains. Two months later the medical examiner's office ruled out foul play. Some of the victims' family members, however, remained skeptical and suspected otherwise.

What Happened To David Bird?

     David Bird, a 55-year-old journalist with the Wall Street Journal who covered the world's energy markets--OPEC and such--lived with his wife Nancy and their two children in central New Jersey's Long Hill Township. Although he underwent a liver transplant operation in 2005, Mr. Bird was an avid hiker, biker and camper. The Boy Scout troop leader, in 2013, ran in the New York City Marathon. His children were ages 12 and 15.

     On Saturday, January 11, 2014, after he and his wife put away their Christmas decorations, David said he wanted to take a walk and get some fresh air before it started to rain. At 4:30 in the afternoon, dressed in a red rain jacket, sneakers and a pair of jeans, the six-foot-one, 200 pound, gray-haired reporter walked out of his house. Shortly thereafter it began to rain, and rain hard.

     Two hours after David Bird left the house his wife became worried. He hadn't returned and it was still raining. To make matters worse, he had been suffering from a gastrointestinal virus. Nancy Bird called the Long Hill Township Police Department to report her husband missing.

     Over the next three days police officers and hundreds of volunteers searched the neighborhood and nearby wooded areas for the missing journalist. The searchers were assisted by dogs, a helicopter and people riding all-terrain vehicles and horses. Volunteers also distributed hundreds of missing persons flyers.

     Notwithstanding the effort to locate Mr. Bird, he was nowhere to be found. It seemed he disappeared without a trace.

     The fact the missing man left his house without the anti-rejection medication he took twice a day in connection with his liver transplant made finding him all the more urgent. Without that medicine he would surely become ill.

     On January 16, 2014, police officers learned that someone in Mexico, the night before, used one of David Bird's credit cards. The card was supposedly used four days after his disappearance. Investigators, without a clue as to where David Bird was, or why he went missing, considered the possibility that his disappearance had something to do with his reporting on recent middle east crude oil price changes.

     On March 18, 2015, at five o'clock in the evening, two men canoeing on the Passaic River in New Jersey about a mile from David Bird's home spotted a red jacket amid a tangle of branches. From that spot emergency responders retrieved a male corpse.

     Dr. Carlos A. Fonesca with the Morris County Medical Examiner's office, and forensic dentist Dr. Mitchell M. Kirshbaum, identified the remains as David Bird. The day after the discovery Morris County prosecutor Frederic M. Knapp said an autopsy would be conducted to determine Mr. Bird's cause and manner of death.

     A few days later a Morris County spokesperson revealed that Mr. Bird had drowned. Investigators found no reason to suspect foul play. Since Mr. Bird's death wasn't homicide or natural, it was either the result of suicide or an accident.

     In June 2015 a spokesperson for the Morris County Medical Examiner's Office ruled the manner of Mr. Bird's death as accidental. 

How Did Avonte Oquendo Die?

     Avonte Oquendo, an autistic 14-year-old who didn't speak, attended school in Long Island City, Queens New York. The black, five-foot-three, 120 pound student was enrolled in the school's special needs program. He lived with his mother, Vanessa Fontaine, a social services case manager and his four older brothers aged 19 to 29. Avonte's school sat on a busy street across from a playground, a dog run and a jogging path that overlooks the East River.

     At 12:40 PM on October 4, 2013 a school surveillance camera caught Avonte coming out of the building with other school kids. That was the last time anyone saw him. Reacting to the missing persons report filed by his mother, dozens of New York City police officers from the 102 Precinct, aided by two helicopters, conducted a thorough search of the neighborhood.

     Following the initial surge of police activity on the case, Avonte's mother Vanessa, working out of a donated recreational vehicle parked in front of the school, oversaw the deployment of volunteer searchers and the distribution of missing person fliers.

     Vanessa Fontaine also organized candlelight vigils and rallies, raised $95,000 in reward money from anonymous donors and appeared on several nationally broadcast television programs. While the police received hundreds of tips, nothing panned out.

     Two months after her son's disappearance Vanessa Fontaine moved her operation out of the RV and set up shop in a rented office. Thirty days after that, with still no leads on Avonte's whereabouts, activity on the case waned. There were fewer tips coming in and only a handful of volunteers showed up each day at Vanessa's missing persons headquarters.

     The missing boy's mother filed a $25 million lawsuit against New York City's Board of Education. The plaintiff accused the staff at Avonte's school of failing to protect him.

     On Thursday night January 16, 2014 body parts and items of clothing were found near the Queens shoreline. The remains were later identified as the missing boy's. The search was over and a new phase of the case, determining Oquendo's cause and manner of death, was underway.

     In March 2014, Richard Condon, the school system's "Special Commissioner of Investigation" sent a 12-page report regarding the Oquendo case to the Queen's District Attorney's Office. The report did not allege that any crime had occurred and did not recommend that any school employee should be disciplined.

     As a criminal matter the Oquendo case was closed. The official manner of the boy's drowning went into the books as "undermined". 

     In July 2018 the city settled a wrongful death suit filed by the family for $2.7 million.

Death BY Hospital Negligence: The Lynne Spalding Case

     On September 19, 2013, Lynne Spalding, suffering from a bladder infection checked into the San Francisco General Hospital. The 57-year-old native of Peterlee, England worked in San Francisco's tourist industry. The thin, frail divorced mother of two seemed confused and disoriented, perhaps from the effects of her medication. Members of the hospital staff assigned to her care were under orders to look in on Spalding every fifteen minutes.

     When one of Lynne Spalding's friends showed up at the hospital on September 21 for a visit, the patient was not in her room. Hospital employees searched the immediate area and couldn't find her. Maybe she had checked herself out. The friend went to Spalding's apartment and found it vacant. When Lynne Spalding didn't return to her dwelling the friend filed a missing persons report with the police.

     Over the next few days the missing woman's friends and members of her family looked for her at various places in the city. They posted missing persons flyers around as well. One of her friends created a "Find Lynne" Facebook page. Deputies with the sheriff's office, the agency in charge of hospital security, conducted a search of the giant medical complex. It seemed this woman had vanished into thin air.

     At ten in the morning of October 8, 2013, seventeen days after Lynne Spalding went missing from her hospital room, a hospital employee discovered the body of a middle-aged woman lying dead in a stairwell used as a fire escape. Todd May, the chief hospital medical officer tentatively identified the dead woman as Lynne Spalding. (I presume she was wearing a hospital identification bracelet.)

     The job of determining when, where and exactly how this woman had died rested in the hands of the San Francisco Medical Examiner's Office. The principal determination involved Spalding's manner of death. While it was not unreasonable to presume this hospital patient's death occurred naturally, the forensic pathologist looked for signs of physical trauma that suggested a struggle. The pathologist who performed the autopsy also looked for physical evidence of a sexual assault.

     Assuming the absence of foul play in this unusual death the Spalding case presented the obvious question as to how this sick woman had gotten from her room to the stairwell without being observed by hospital staff. Unless the stairwell where Spalding's body was found was located in an extremely remote section of the hospital someone should have detected the odor of decomposition.

     San Francisco General Hospital spokesperson Todd May, at a press conference held on October 8, 2013, said, "What happened at our hospital is horrible. We are here to take care of patients, to heal them, to keep them safe. This has shaken us to our core. Our staff is devastated."

     David Perry, Lynne Spalding's friend and the family spokesperson, told reporters that "We need to know what Lynne's condition was. We need to know what she was being treated for and frankly we need to know what medications she was on and what state of mind she was in. We're not trying to place blame. We're trying to find answers."

     On Thursday, October 10, 2013, San Francisco General Hospital Chief Operating Officer Roland Pickens announced that pursuant to the medical examiner's office report, the corpse in the stairwell was Lynne Spalding's body. A second hospital spokesperson revealed that the stairwell in question was located several hundred feet from the unit where Spalding was being treated. According to this spokesperson, Lynne Spalding was being treated in a unit where patients were not watched closely. This contradicted previous information regarding the fifteen minute patient check-ups.

     In a private ceremony held on October 21, 2013, Lynne Spalding's body was cremated. (This meant there would be no second autopsy if one became necessary.)

     On October 22, 2013 the San Francisco Chronicle reported that four days before sheriff's deputies responded to the dead woman found in the city-owned hospital's stairwell, an orderly twice stepped over her body thinking she was a homeless person. To reporters, Haig Harris, the attorney representing Spalding's children, said, "This is a hospital. Why didn't somebody put their hand on the body to see if there was a pulse?"

     David Perry, a Spalding family spokesperson said this to reporters: "The family is angry and frustrated and out of patience. While we understand the need for a thorough investigation, it has now been one month and three days since Lynne Spalding went missing...The time for answers and real solutions that will protect lives of future patients is long past due."

     A woman who had been visiting her son at the hospital in June 2013 said she had been locked in the same stairwell. She had taken the stairs instead of the elevator, entering the fifth-floor stairwell without realizing it was an emergency exit. The woman walked down to the ground level, but the door sounded an alarm when she opened it. She slammed the door shut and went back upstairs where she pounded on the door window to attract attention. A nurse who happened by let her back inside. No one had responded to the exit alarm.

     Investigators and hospital authorities did not reveal if Spalding had changed into her street clothes before leaving her room. (The fact the orderly presumed she was a homeless person suggests she had.) While the coroner still had not announced Lynne Spalding's cause of death, the family was assured she had not been the victim of foul play.

     Dan Cunningham with the San Francisco Police homicide unit reported on October 28, 2013 that four days before Lynne Spalding's body was discovered an Asian man in his thirties wearing a hospital name tag told a hospital supervisor that he had seen a person lying in the stairwell. The supervisor checked out the stairwell but didn't see anyone there. Homicide investigators were trying to identify this man for questioning. (It's not clear if the Asian man was the orderly who stepped over the body on October 4, 2013.)

     On December 15, 2013, the medical examiner's office released the results of Lynne Spalding's autopsy. According to the San Francisco medical examiner she had died of "probable electrolyte imbalance with delirium clinical sepsis." In other words, she had died from a chemical imbalance related to chronic alcoholism. According to Dr. Thomas Shaughnessey, the electrolyte imbalances, in combination with a liver that was unable to compensate from the imbalance, resulted in a collapse of Spalding's heart or brain resulting in her death. The forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy was not able to say exactly when she died.

     Members of Spalding's family immediately disputed the allegation that she was an alcoholic. They were therefore outraged by the contents of the medical examiner's report.

     In February 2014 the Centers For Medicare and Medicaid Services, a federal agency that decided whether hospitals met minimum standards to be eligible for Medicare payments, announced the results of its investigation into the Spalding tragedy. According to the report, hospital nurses failed to act on a doctor's order this patient be watched around the clock. Federal investigators also blamed the sheriff's department for not having an emergency plan worked out with hospital staff. Investigators concluded that the hospital's "chaotic and poorly coordinated response had contributed to patient Spalding's death."

     The sheriff, in the wake of the hospital scandal, fired one member of the agency's hospital staff and suspended two others. Five more deputies were disciplined administratively. No hospital employees were punished for the Spalding fiasco.

     The Spalding family filed a wrongful death suit against the hospital and the city. In December 2014 the city of San Francisco settled the case for just under $3 million.

The Brenda Heist Missing Person Case

     In 2002, forty-three-year-old Brenda Heist and her husband Lee were going through an amicable divorce. The couple had two children, a daughter who was eight and a twelve-year-old son. They lived in Lititz Borough, a small Lancaster County town in southeastern Pennsylvania. Brenda worked as a bookkeeper at a local car dealership.

     In an effort to finance her own apartment Brenda applied for state housing assistance. The agency denied her request. Depressed, overwhelmed and distraught, Brenda, after driving the children to school one day in February 2002, drove to a nearby town and parked her car in a bus station lot. From there she walked to a park where she sat on a bench and cried.

     Brenda did not go back to her car and drive home that day. To her family and friends, and to the local police, she became a missing person.

     Four days after Brenda dropped her children off at school, police found her car parked in the bus station lot. When a mother takes her kids to school and doesn't return home the police assume she has been abducted. As days went by without anyone hearing from or seeing Brenda Heist, detectives began to think that she may have had been murdered. At this point the missing persons case turned into a homicide investigation. As in most missing wife cases the suspicion in Brenda's disappearance fell on her husband.

     As psychic detectives and other whack-jobs flooded the Heist missing persons investigators with false leads, homicide investigators focused on Lee Heist as their primary murder suspect. As a result Mr. Heist lost his job. He ran into financial difficulties and eventually lost his home. After several years as a suspect in his wife's disappearance and murder, following a series of polygraph tests, investigators cleared Lee Heist of wrongdoing in the case. His wife remained missing, however, and was presumed dead.

     In 2008 the Lancaster County Major Crimes Unit began investigating the Brenda Heist disappearance as a cold-case murder. Two years later Lee Heist petitioned a Lancaster County Court to declare his wife legally dead. With Brenda officially declared "missing and possibly deceased", Mr. Heist was able to marry another woman.

     As it turned out, while Lee Heist was put through hell as a suspect in his wife's murder, Brenda was alive in south Florida. On the day of her disappearance she was approached by two men and a woman who saw her crying on the park bench. After she related her tale of woe they invited her to join them on a hitchhiking trip to Florida. She accepted their offer.

     Brenda Heist spent her first two years in Key Largo, Florida living under bridges and eating restaurant garbage. She entered a new phase in her life when she moved into a camp trailer with a man she met on the street. For the next seven years Brenda lived with this man in Key West. They both worked as day laborers cleaning boats and doing odd jobs for cash.

     In 2011, after her relationship with her trailer roommate soured, Brenda was back on the street. She worked odd jobs and hung out on the beach. In December 2012, under her alias Kelsie Lyanne Smith, Brenda got a job as a live-in housekeeper for a family in Tampa Bay. (According to her employer she had good references.)

      A few months after landing the housekeepers job a police officer pulled Brenda over for driving with an expired license plate. The officer found drugs in her car. She served two months in Pensacola County Jail on the drug possession offense. Following her release from jail she spent a few weeks behind bars in Santa Rosa County on an identify theft charge. At one point she lived in a tent community run by a Florida social service agency.

     On Friday, April 26, 2013 Brenda Heist surrendered herself to the Monroe County Sheriff's Office. Thinking that there were warrants for her arrest out of Pinellas County, the 54-year-old told the Monroe County deputies that she was at the end of her rope, and tired of running. She informed the officers that eleven years ago she had walked out on her family in Lititz Borough, Pennsylvania.

     The Florida authorities called Lititz Borough Sergeant John Schofield with the news that Brenda Heist was not dead and no longer missing. Her children, now college students, still had a mother.

     On May 3, 2013 Brenda was sent back to the Santa Rosa County Jail on various theft related charges. Morgan Heist, her 19-year-old daughter, told reporters she has no interest in reuniting with her mother.

     On June 11, 2013 a judge in Pensacola, Florida sentenced Heist, known in the Santa Rose court system as Kelsie Smith, to one year in jail in connection a probation violation. She pleaded no contest to failing to check in with authorities after leaving the Pensacola area following her release from jail in April. She'd been on probation for using someone else's identification during a traffic stop.

The Man Who Kidnapped Himself

     On Thursday October 23, 2014 Paul Kitterman, a 53-year-old construction worker from Kremmling, Colorado, a town 100 miles north of Denver, was in the mile high city with his stepson and two of his stepson's friends to watch a Broncos-San Diego Charges football game. Mr. Kitterman and his 22-year-old stepson, Jarod Tonneson, were seated in the stadium's south bleachers section. They were among 70,000 fans attending the game. Jarod Tonneson's friends watched the game from another part of Sports Authority Field.

     At the beginning of the third quarter Tonneson and his stepfather visited the public restroom. When Tonneson came out of the men's room Mr. Kitterman was not there waiting for him as agreed upon. The stepfather was not in the restroom and had not returned to his seat in Section 230.

     Jarod Tonneson and his friends searched the stadium inside and out until one-thirty the next morning. They found no trace of the man who had accompanied them to the game. Mr. Kitterman, without possession of a cellphone or credit cards, had simply vanished. He had been carrying about $50 in cash.

     Mr. Kitterman was not intoxicated and not suffering from a mental problem. This raised the possibility that someone had kidnapped him. Or perhaps he had just gotten sick or lost in the stadium. There seemed to be no other logical explanations for his disappearance. The concerned stepson filed a missing person report with the Denver Police Department.

     On Monday October 27, 2014 a police spokesperson announced that a football fan had seen Mr. Kitterman in the stadium during the third quarter, but the witness couldn't remember where in the stadium he had seen him. Investigators viewed hours of stadium surveillance video footage for clues regarding the missing man's whereabouts. In the meantime the stepson and his friends posted fliers around the city of Denver.

     On Tuesday night October 28, 2014 someone called the police in Pueblo, Colorado regarding a man believed to be Mr. Kitterman. Shortly after the call, five days after he had gone missing from the football stadium located 112 miles north of Pueblo, police officers found Mr. Kitterman in a K-Mart parking lot.

     Paul Kitterman had not been the victim of foul play and other than being tired he was in good physical condition. The object of the five-day missing persons search told officers that he walked and hitchhiked to the city of Pueblo. He said he slept in parks and wooded areas. Along the way he disposed of his Broncos hat to avoid being recognized. He apparently had not wanted to be found.

     Detectives asked Mr. Kitterman the question that was on everybody's mind: Why did he slip away from his stepson and travel to Pueblo, Colorado? Surely he knew that walking off like that would trigger a police manhunt and cause his friends and family a lot of stress.

     Mr. Kitterman told the officers that because he hadn't watched television for five days he had no idea people were looking for him. When asked to explain why he had made himself a missing person he said he had gotten his "fill of football" and simply wanted to walk to someplace warmer.

     Because the missing man's actions reflected some form or degree of dementia the authorities in Denver decided not to file charges against him. And even if he was of sound mind what crime did he commit? You don't go to prison for kidnapping yourself. 

Petra Pazsitka: Lost Then Found

     In 1984 when 24-year-old Petra Pazsitka, a computer science student attending college in Braunschweig, Germany, failed to show up at her brother's birthday party her parents reported her missing. The police in this northern German city launched a massive hunt.

     About a year after the student's disappearance the missing persons case was featured on a popular German television crime show. The public exposure did not create any tips that led to Pazsitka's recovery.

     Not long after the airing of the TV segment a man named Gunter confessed to the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl from the neighborhood where Pazsitka had disappeared. This man also confessed to kidnapping and murdering the missing college student. But after Mr. Gunter was unable to lead homicide investigators to Pazsitka's body the suspect took back his confession and that case was closed.

     In 1989, five years after Pazsitka's disappearance, she was officially declared dead even though her body had not been recovered.

     In September 2015 police in Dusseldorf, Germany were called to an apartment to investigate a burglary. At the scene they spoke to the victim tenant, a 54-year-old woman who identified herself as Mrs. Schneider. Investigators, when they learned that Mrs. Schneider didn't possess a driver's license, social security card, passport, bank account or any other form of personal identification, turned their attention on her.

     As it turned out Mrs. Schneider was Petra Pazsitka. After staging her disappearance 30 years ago Pazsitka lived in several German cities under numerous assumed names. She paid all of her bills with cash and didn't drive a car.

     When detectives asked Petra Pazsitka the obvious question of why she had voluntarily disappeared causing a massive police hunt as well as pain and suffering for her family, she said she wanted to start a new life. She offered no explanation beyond that. Her father had since died. When asked if she wanted to reunite with her mother and brother she said she did not.

Ray Gricar: The Missing District Attorney

The Ray Gricar Missing Person Investigation

     In Bellefonte, Pennsylvania at 11:30 in the morning of Friday, April 15, 2005, Ray Gricar, the 59-year-old district attorney of Centre County, the home of Penn State University, called his live-in girlfriend to inform her he was on a pleasure drive through an area in the region called Penns Valley. Twelve hours later his girlfriend, Patty Fornicola, called 911 and reported him missing.

     The next day Mr. Gricar's red Mini Cooper was found parked near an antique mall in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania 55 miles east of Bellefonte. The interior of the vehicle reeked of cigarettes. Gricar, who didn't smoke, didn't like that smell. The car had been locked and Gricar's cellphone was inside. According to a Lewisburg shop owner whose antique store Gricar had patronized in the past, the district attorney, on the day he left Bellefonte was walking around the mall with a tall, dark-haired woman in her late 30s or early 40s. Investigators made no effort to identify and question this woman. Because this information wasn't published until 13 months after the district attorney's disappearance the police received no help from the public in identifying this possible witness. By the time the story came out the case had grown cold.

     In July 2005, three months after Ray Gricar drove off in his Mini Cooper and didn't return, his county-issued laptop was found in the Susquehanna River not far from the abandoned car. Three months after that the hard drive turned up in the same area of the river. Water had damaged it to the point that no data could be retrieved.

     Following the recoveries from the river the investigation of Gricar's disappearance, conducted by the Bellefonte Police Department (the Pennsylvania State Police didn't want the case and the FBI wasn't involved) ground to a halt. In the summer of 2008, with Ray Gricar still missing and no clues as to what happened to him or where he was, two of his colleagues, Bob Buehne Jr., the district attorney of Montour County and prosecutor Ted McKnight of Clinton County, held a press conference in Lewisburg where Gricar's vehicle had been found. Both men were highly critical of the Gricar missing person's investigation. The neighboring prosecutors said they couldn't understand why the information about Gricar and the mystery woman at the mall hadn't been made public until May 2006.

     On April 14, 2009, four years after Ray Gricar's disappearance, investigators discovered that someone using the missing man's home computer had, shortly before he went missing, searched the Internet on "how to fry a hard drive," and "water damage to a notebook computer." Assuming Mr. Gricar had made these inquiries, one of the more innocent explanations behind the Internet search was that Gricar, in contemplation of his retirement in nine months, wanted to clear his computer before handing it back to the county. This didn't explain, however, why the computer and hard drive ended up in the river. A more ominous motive was that before killing himself Mr. Gricar wanted to destroy data he didn't want anyone to see.

     On July 25, 2011 at the request of Ray Gricar's daughter, a Centre County judge declared him legally deceased.

Theories of Ray Gricar's Disappearance

     There are three schools of thought regarding what happened to Ray Gricar. He could have been murdered, committed suicide or walked off to start a new life under a different identity. The two most popular murder theories featured a mistress who lured him to the Susquehanna River where he was murdered by the woman's husband. The second murder scenario involved a criminal murdering the district attorney out of revenge. Since prosecutors are rarely murdered by people they have prosecuted or planned to put behind bars, the latter theory was the most improbable.

     Suicide seemed more likely than murder in this case. Ray Gricar's brother, Roy J. Gricar, committed suicide in May 1996 by jumping off a bridge over the Great Miami River near West Chester, Ohio. If Ray Gricar had jumped from a bridge across the Susquehanna River, what were the chances his body would have been found? Some believed the odds were great that his body would have been recovered. Others disagreed. To have an opinion on this question, one would have to know the ins and outs of the Susquehanna River.

     The so-called "walkaway" theory, that Mr. Gricar walked-off to start a new life under a new identity, while quite intriguing, didn't make much sense. For one thing he didn't clean out his bank account and drove off without tying up a lot of loose-ends. Following his disappearance there were more than 300 false sightings of him. Those who subscribed to the walkaway theory pointed out that Mr. Gricar had been fascinated by the 1985 disappearance of an Ohio police chief. Inside the chief's car, parked near Lake Erie, searchers found his wallet and his badge. They never found the chief's body. Some of those who believed that Mr. Gricar was still alive believed he could be hiding out in the federal government's witness protection program. (This possibility is out of the question because prosecutors are not eligible for the program.)          

Ray Gricar, The Man

     Ray Frank Gricar was born on October 9, 1945 in Cleveland, Ohio. He attended Gilmour, a prestigious Catholic high school in Gates Mills, Ohio. In 1966 while attending the University of Dayton he met his future wife, Barbara Gray. They were married in 1969. After graduating from Case Western Law School in Cleveland Mr. Gricar started his career as a prosecutor in northwest Ohio's Cuyahoga, County.

     In 1980 the couple and their daughter Lara moved to Bellefonte, Pennsylvania when Barbara landed a job at Penn State University in nearby State College. Shortly after that David Grine, the district attorney of Centre County, hired Ray as an assistant prosecutor. Five years later Mr. Gricar ran for the office of district attorney and won.

     Barbara and Ray divorced in 1991, and five years later Ray married his second wife, Emma. Following a tumultuous marriage he and Emma divorced in 2001. Two years later Ray Gricar moved in with Patty Fornicola, an employee of the Centre County District Attorney's Office who lived in a section of Bellefonte called Halfmoon Hill. By April 2005, having served several terms as district attorney, Ray Gricar was planning to retire in nine months.

     Although a private, somewhat distant person, District Attorney Gricar's colleagues considered him an outstanding career prosecutor with high ethical standards. Because he never had political ambitions beyond the district attorney's office he was not, according to his legal colleagues, subject to political pressure or influence. On a personal level he was known as a bit of a ladies' man.

Ray Gricar and the Jerry Sandusky Pedophilia Case

     In May 1998 when Jerry Sandusky was still an assistant football coach under Joe Paterno at Penn State University and active in his organization for troubled youth called The Second Mile, two 11-year-old boys told their parents that coach Sandusky had fondled them in the Penn State locker room showers. The mother of one of the accusers contacted Detective Ronald Schreffler with the University Police Department. Shortly after receiving the complaint, Mr. Schreffler, on a pretext, got Mr. Sandusky to meet the mother at her house where she confronted him about his being nude in the shower with her son. With the detective in the next room recording the conversation the boy's mother asked Jerry Sandusky if he had been sexually aroused by his physical contact with her son, and if his "private parts" had touched the boy. Sandusky did not deny showering with her son. Regarding the arousal question, he said, "I don't think so--maybe. I was wrong. I wish I could get forgiveness. I know I won't get it from you. I wish I were dead."

     A child psychologist who interviewed the boy concluded that his account, and coach Sandusky's response to the mother's interrogation indicated to him that he was "likely a pedophile." A second psychologist, Dr. John Seasock, after analyzing the same information came to a different conclusion.

     On June 2, 1998 District Attorney Ray Gricar decided not to prosecute the Penn State football coach. Four years later, the boy, referred to as victim # 6, took the stand at Sandusky's sexual abuse trial and described how the coach had lathered him up with soap then said, "I'm going to squeeze your guts out." Ronald Schreffler, later with the Department of Homeland Security, testified in June 2012 that he had wanted Ray Gricar to prosecute Sandusky in 1998 but was overruled.

     Had Ray Gricar prosecuted Jerry Sandusky for indecent assault, corruption of a minor and child endangerment, more victims, ones Mr. Sandusky had raped, might have come forward. Even if they hadn't, the district attorney would have exposed a pedophile within the Penn State system.

     In 1999 Jerry Sandusky retired from Penn State. He was awarded the title professor emeritus and given an office in the football building. He had full access to all of the sports facilities and used this access and his youth organization to attract and molest young boys.

     If Ray Gricar was not murdered or was still alive, he must have killed himself. The question was, did his decision not to prosecute Jerry Sandusky weigh on his conscience and play a role in his suicide? Between the time the prosecutor closed the case on Sandusky and his disappearance, Mr. Gricar must have been aware that accusations against the coach were still being made. Did he have regrets? Was he second-guessing himself?

     On June 23, 2012 a jury in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania found 68-year-old Jerry Sandusky guilty of sexually assaulting ten boys over a period of fifteen years. The judge sentenced him to 30 to 60 years in prison.

     People who have had access to Ray Gricar's papers say there was no reference in them to Jerry Sandusky. If this were true, whether or not Jerry Sandusky's pedophilia and Ray Gricar's disappearance were in any way connected will remain a mystery.

     On April 13, 2018, a spokesperson for Pennsylvania State Police Troop G announced that a new investigator, Trooper Dana Martini, had been assigned to track down leads in the 13-year-old Gricar disappearance. 

     As of August 2022, Ray Gricar remains missing and is presumed dead.

Heather Elvis: Missing and Presumed Murdered

     Heather Elvis, a 20-year-old employee of a bar and restaurant in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, lived with a female roommate at the River Oaks Apartments in the city. Her parents, Terry and Debbie Elvis, lived nearby. At three in the morning of Wednesday, December 18, 2013 Heather called her roommate from her cellphone about 45 minutes after being dropped off at River Oaks by her date. She called to report how the evening with the young man had worked out.

     On December 19, 2013, Heather Elvis' abandoned 2001 Dodge Intrepid was found parked at the Peachtree Landing along the Waccamaw River in the town of Socastee just outside of Myrtle Beach. The dark green vehicle had not been involved in an accident. Parked about nine miles from the River Oak Apartments, the car did not contain Elvis' purse or her cellphone.

     On Friday December 20, after Heather Elvis failed to show up for her scheduled shift at the Tilted Kilt Pub and Eatery, her parents Terry and Debbi Elvis reported their 5-foot-1 inch, 118-pound daughter missing.

     The next day, under the supervision of the Horry County Police Department, 300 people spent ten hours combing the woods and ponds in the vicinity of the abandoned car.

     On January 3, 2014 another search party made up of law enforcement officers and volunteers, aided by several K-9 units and searchers riding horses and ATVs, continued the hunt for the missing young woman.

     Lieutenant Robert Kegler with the Horry County Police Department, on January 6, 2014, told a Fox News reporter that detectives had questioned several people in connection with the disappearance. While the young man who had dropped Heather off at her apartment after the date in the early morning hours of December 18 was not a suspect, some of the uncooperative men interviewed by detectives were being scrutinized.

     At 8 PM on Monday, January 6, 2014, television crime host Nancy Grace devoted a segment of her show to the Heather Elvis missing persons case. A $25,000 reward was posted for information leading to the discovery of the missing young woman.

     At seven o'clock on the morning of Friday February 21, 2014, officers with the Horry County Police Department, South Carolina State Police and the U.S. Marshal's Office executed a search warrant at a house in Myrtle Beach occupied by 37-year-old Sidney Moorer and his 41-year-old wife Tammy. Officers spent eleven hours at the dwelling. Cadaver dogs searched the property without result. Two pickup trucks were taken away from the house and officers were seen placing several boxes into a white police van.

     A prosecutor, following the search of the Moorer house, charged Sidney and Tammy Moorer with indecent exposure and obstruction of justice. It was reported that Tammy Moorer, angry at Heather because she and Sidney had been involved in a sexual relationship, sent her nude pictures of herself and Sidney. In January 2014 Tammy Moorer told a reporter that Sidney had sex with Heather Elvis in his car "a total of three times." According to Tammy, Sidney ended the relationship when he realized that "something wasn't right about her."

     On February 24, 2014 a Horry County prosecutor charged Sidney and Tammy Moorer with Heather Elvis' kidnapping and murder. They were held without bail. Elvis' body had not been found.

     In 2016 the Horry County prosecutor, without Heather Elvis's body, dropped the murder charges against the Moorer couple. That year Sidney Moorer was tried for the kidnapping of Heather Elvis. That trial ended with a hung jury. A few months later a jury found Sidney Moorer guilty of obstructing justice in the Heather Elvis kidnapping case. The judge sentenced him to ten years in prison.

     In October 2018 Tammy Moorer was tried for kidnapping. After testifying on her own behalf the Horry County jury found her guilty. The judge sentenced Tammy Moorer to 30 years in prison.

     In September 2019 Sidney Moorer was retried on the kidnapping charge. The jury found him guilty and the judge sentenced him to 30 years behind bars.

     As of April 2024 the body of Heather Elvis has not been found.

Where Is Relisha Rudd?

     In 2014 eight-year-old Relisha Tanau Rudd resided in the D.C. General Homeless Shelter in Washington with her 27-year old mother, Shamika Young, her stepfather and her three brothers. The family had lived in the shelter a year when Relisha's mother on March 1, 2014 arranged to have 51-year-old Kahlil Malik Tatum and his wife Andrea take the girl in and care for her. Kahlil Tatum worked at the homeless shelter as a janitor where he had a reputation of paying a lot of attention to the young girls who lived there.

     On March 19, 2014, after Relisha missed several days of school, the authorities launched a missing persons investigation. Mr. Tatum had also vanished. The janitor and the girl were caught on a D. C. area Holiday Inn Express surveillance camera walking down a hallway on February 26, 2014, a few days before the girl's mother gave her  up.

     Detectives learned that Tatum, on March 2, 2014, had purchased a carton of black 42 gallon self-tie contractor trash bags.

     Police officers on March 20, 2014 found Andrea Denise Tatum's body in a motel room at an Oxon Hill, Maryland Red Roof Inn. She had been killed by a gunshot to the head. Her husband and Relisha Rudd were nowhere to be found. Homicide detectives uncovered evidence linking the dead woman's husband, Kahlil Tatum, to the homicide.

     A Prince George's County prosecutor charged Kahlil Tatum with first-degree murder. On March 26, 2014 the FBI added the fugitive homicide suspect to its "Most Wanted List" and offered a $70,000 reward for information regarding his whereabouts. The Prince George's County Police Department posted a $25,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.

     On March 27, 2014, shortly after a witness reported having seen a man meeting Tatum's description with a girl in Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens in northeast D.C., a party of more than 100 officers searched the 700-acre park. Four days later a searcher came across Mr. Tatum's body. He had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with the gun used in the murder his wife. Searchers found no signs of Relisha Rudd. On April 3, 2014 the park search was called off.

     The D.C. City Council Committee of Human Services, in the course of reviewing the hiring policy at D.C. General, found that Kahlil Tatum possessed an extensive criminal record. He had been convicted in 1983, 1986, 1987, 1991 and 1993 of various crimes including breaking and entering and grand larceny. He was last convicted of a crime in 2004. In those days he went under his birth name Karl Lee Tatum.

     According to the administrator in charge of hiring at the D.C. homeless shelter, Mr. Tatum, because his last conviction was ten years old, was eligible for employment at the facility. Had any of his offenses involved children he would have been automatically excluded regardless of the date of the conviction.

     Social service authorities, following Relisha Rudd's disappearance, took away Shamika Young's three boys and placed them into foster care. The mother, who herself had grown up in the Virginia foster care system, had been shuttled between foster homes, group homes and mental health facilities. Diagnosed in middle school as "mildly retarded," Shamika reported hearing voices telling her to kill her foster family and herself. She also suffered from depression and a variety of other emotional problems.

     After Shamika Young signed herself out of foster care at age 18 she gave birth to four children from two men. She had no training on how to be a good mother and no way to make a living. Prosecutors over the past years, on three occasions, had charged Young with child abuse and neglect. The cases were all dismissed.

      After Relisha Rudd's disappearance Shamika Young fought to get her three sons out of foster care. This created a heated debate among child protection advocates and Young's extended family, some of whom blamed her for Relisha's disappearance.

    In January 2018 the police received a tip that led to a six hour search for Rudd's body in parts of the Anacostia River. The effort failed to locate the missing girl's remains.

     As of this writing Relisha Rudd remains missing. 

What Happened to Kristi Richardson?

     In 1979 Ronald Richardson and his wife Kristi started the Richardson Trucking Company, a Casper, Wyoming business that specialized in the transportation of oil and gas industry equipment.

     On April 29, 2013 Ronald Richardson, at age 63, died. Kristi, his 60-year-old widow took control of the company. She resided in an affluent suburb of Casper, a city of 55,000 in the central part of the state that had become the center of a booming oil and gas industry that had brought crime and violence to a community with a traditionally low crime rate.

     Late in the afternoon of October 6, 2014 Kristi Richardson drove to her daughter Amber's house a block from her residence to drop off a birthday card and visit her grandchildren. At seven-forty that evening she took a routine call from one of her drivers. The next call, one made to Kristi's cellphone at eleven that night, went unanswered.

     The next morning when Kristi Richardson didn't show up for work at the trucking company, an employee called the house. When no one picked up the phone the employee notified the owner's daughter.

     Because all of the doors were locked at Kristi's house, her daughter gained entry into the dwelling by using a garage door opener. Kristi's car sat in the garage and her purse, containing her credit cards and $800 in cash, lay on the kitchen counter.

     In the bedroom Amber found her mother's cellphone lying on the bed. The only items missing from the home were Kristi's garage door opener and a hoodie she regularly wore. The daughter reported her mother missing to the Casper Police Department.

     Over the next several days officers with the Casper Police Department, Natrona County Sheriff's Office, fire and EMS personnel and citizen volunteers searched for the missing woman. The authorities used a helicopter to search parts of Casper Mountain.

     Members of Kristi's family who believed she had been the victim of foul play because she never left the house without her car, posted a $25,000 reward for information regarding her disappearance and whereabouts. Kristi's daughter told a reporter that "I believe someone was at the house before she got home."

     The Casper Star Tribune reported that crime scene investigators had found traces of blood and urine on the missing woman's bed. Detectives were looking into the possibility that Kristi had been abducted and murdered by either an employee, customer or business competitor.

     On May 5, 2017, with Kristi Richardson still missing and no arrests in the case, the mayor fired Casper Chief of Police Jim Wetzel. Reporters covering the case believed there might have been a police cover-up regarding a locally influential person of interest. On May 18, 2017, interim Chief of Police Steve Schultz turned the Richardson investigation over to the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation.

     As of this writing Kristi Richardson remains missing and no arrests have been made. The missing woman's family has offered a $250.000 reward for information regarding her disappearance.

The Kyron Horman Missing Person Case

     In 2000, 26-year-old Kaine Andrew Horman, an engineer in Portland, Oregon, married Desiree Young. The marriage did not work out. Within a year the couple discussed separating. But in January 2002, when Desiree learned that she was pregnant, she and Kaine decided to give their marriage a second chance. But it still didn't work. In August 2002 Desiree filed for divorce and moved in with her parents in Medford, Oregon.

     A month after the separation, Desiree gave birth to Kyron. The divorce became final in 2003 and a year after that Desiree moved to Canada where she received treatment for a kidney ailment. When she returned to the U.S. two months later she relinquished custody of 2-year-old Kyron to her ex-husband, Kaine Horman.

     The toddler, in 2004, began living with his father in a house on Sheltered Nook Road in a rural section of northwest Portland. Because of Kaine's demanding job at the Intel Corporation's Jones Farm Campus in Hillsboro, the father arranged day care for Kyron. For that job he hired a friend of his ex-wife's named Terri Moulton.

     Terri Moulton grew up in Roseburg, Oregon, a town three hours from Portland. After graduating from high school in 1988 she attended Umpqua Community College where she met Ron Tarver. Terri and Ron were married in 1991 and three years later had a son named James. A year after the birth of their son Terri and Ron divorced.

     In 1996 Terri married Richard Ecker in Springfield, Oregon. Four years later she graduated from Northwest Christian University with a bachelor's degree in education. From March 2001 to June 2002 Terri worked as a substitute teacher in the Hillsboro School District. In 2002 she divorced Richard Ecker.

     In 2004 Terri Moulton moved into the home on Sheltered Nook Road with Kaine Horman and his 2-year-old son. She had been taking care of the boy for more than a year. Kaine's divorce from Desiree Young had been finalized a year earlier.

     In April 2007 Kaine and Terri were married. Their daughter Kiara Horman was born in 2009.

     Kyron, in 2010, was a second grade student at Portland's Skyline Elementary School two miles from his home. On most days Kyron rode the bus to school, but on June 4, 2010, Terri drove her stepson to class. That day Kyron wanted to set up his Red-Eyed Tree Frog exhibit at the school's science fair.

     Terri and the boy arrived at the elementary school at eight in the morning. They were last seen together fifteen minutes later near Kyron's science exhibit. That day Kyron's teacher marked him absent. At 3:45 in the afternoon of June 4, 2010, Terri Horman reported Kyron missing after he didn't come home from school.

     Students and teachers at the school told detectives that no one had seen Kyron after 8:45 AM. According to Terri, she left the school just before the morning bell. She told detectives that Kyron told her he was leaving the exhibit site en route to his classroom. She said that was the last time she saw him.

     Teachers and staff described the three-foot, eight-inch 50 pound boy as too timid to have left the school on his own. That morning he was dressed in a black T-shirt with "CSI" in green lettering and an image of a handprint. The boy with the metal rimmed eyeglasses wore cargo pants and sneakers trimmed in orange.

     In the week following Kyron's disappearance police officers and others searched the school building, its grounds and the surrounding neighborhood. It seemed the 7-year-old had vanished into thin air.

     From the start, detectives operating on the theory that Kyron had not been abducted by a stranger, focused on Terri Horman's activities on the morning of his disappearance. The police became particularly suspicious when a search of her cellular phone records revealed that she wasn't where she said she was that morning. In fact, her cellphone showed she had been on Sauvie Island five miles from the school. This led to a massive search of the island for the missing boy. Again, no trace of Kyron.

     Interrogated by detectives as a suspect in the case, Terri maintained her innocence. She reportedly took and failed two polygraph tests. Detectives, looking for physical evidence of foul play, seized and searched her car. They found nothing incriminating.

     On June 26, 2010, 22 days after Kyron's disappearance, detectives approached the boy's father with startling information about his wife Terri. According to these investigators, Terri, five months before Kyron went missing, asked a landscaper named Rodolfo Sanchez to kill her husband.

     Sanchez, in reporting the murder solicitation, claimed that Terri told him that Kaine Horman physically and mentally abused her. The would-be hit man's compensation was supposed to be the $10,000 in cash Kaine always carried on his person. To help facilitate the murder-for-hire scheme, Terri allegedly provided Sanchez details regarding her husband's daily routine. She suggested that Sanchez make the hit look like a mugging.

     On the day he learned of the alleged plot against his life, Kaine kicked Terri out of the house. Two days later he filed for divorce and served his estranged wife with a restraining order. Terri moved back into her parents' house in Roseburg, Oregon. (No charges were filed regarding the murder-for-hire allegation.)

     In 2011, with her son still missing and no charges filed in the case, Desiree Young posted missing person's fliers around a strip mall in Roseburg not far from Terri's residence. She also asked the reclusive suspect's neighbors to grill Terri about Kyron's disappearance. Desiree told the Roseburg neighbors that Terri had blamed her failing marriage on Kyron, that she had grown to hate her stepson.

     The Oregon legislature passed a law in 2011 inspired by the Kyron Horman case. The new legislation required school officials to notify parents by the end of the school day if their child had an unauthorized absence.

     On June 1, 2012, Desiree Young filed a lawsuit against Terri Horman claiming that the defendant was "responsible for the disappearance of Kyron." The plaintiff sought $10,000,000 in damages. On July 30, 2013, Young dropped the lawsuit. She said she didn't want the civil action to jeopardize the continuing police investigation into her son's case.

     Desiree and a small group of supporters, in November 2013, staged a demonstration outside of Terri Horman's house in Roseburg. Terri's mother called the police who came and disrupted the demonstration.

     On December 31, 2013, a Multnomah County judge finalized the divorce of Kaine and Terri Horman. The couple still had to resolve the issue of who would get legal custody of their daughter Kiara who was now 5-years-old.
   
     According to Terri Horman's attorneys she was not the last person to see Kyron alive. Moreover, they believed the murder-for-hire allegation against their client was bogus. According to her neighbors, Terri seldom left the house in Roseburg. A lot of people reviled this woman and a few supported her. But for most people familiar with this case, it was hard not to suspect that Terri Horman was somehow responsible for her stepson's disappearance and presumed death.

     In June 2014 the missing boy's mother told reporters that Horman, when asked by a polygraph examiner if she had knowledge of the disappearance, failed the lie detector tests. That month, a family court judge granted Kaine Horman custody of 5-year-old Kiara Horman. Terri Horman, after her daughter received counseling to facilitate a relationship with her mother, would be able to visit the girl under court-ordered supervision.

     Terri Horman, in August 2014, petitioned the court to change her name to Claire Stella Sullivan. She wanted to make the change to avoid what she called the stigma of the Horman name. In addressing the judge, she said, "Kyron Horman is missing. He needs to be found. I love my stepson, I want him home more than anything." She also reminded the judge that she had not been the last person to see Kyron alive. She said her attorneys could prove that. The judge denied her request.

     In December 2014, the head of a residential care facility for mentally ill adults hired Terri Horman as a Mental Health Support Specialist. The Eugene, Oregon company, the Shangra-La Corporation, hired Horman with full knowledge of her status as a suspect in her stepson's disappearance. According to Shrangra-La Chief Executive, "Terri was hired because she has the skills and training that enables her to provide excellent support in the critical area of need."

     On February 20, 2015 Terri Horman petitioned a Lane County judge to issue a temporary protective order against a person named Stacy Green. Horman objected to the 35-year-old's posting of missing child posters outside her place of employment. The petitioner claimed that Green and her associates had been obsessively stalking her for four years. "They are now escalating in this behavior to where I fear they will kill me," she claimed. The judge denied Horman's request for the protection order.

     Terri Horman, on February 21, 2015, quit her job at Shangra-La. She said the denial of her anti-stalking order was the reason she left the residential care facility.

     In a January 2016 interview with a correspondent with the television show "Inside Edition," Terri Horman said, "I never harmed my son. I'm speaking now because nobody is looking for my son anymore. I want Kyron home. I love my son." She admitted to the reporter that she had failed the polygraph test, explaining that because she was deaf in one ear, she didn't hear the questions properly.

     On June 4, 2021, eleven years after her son went missing, the boy's mother, Desiree Young, posted the following message on her Facebook page: "Things are too quiet and it sounds like Multnomah County may not even know they are still searching for Kyron. This is not acceptable and I will be taking it to their doorstep. Kyron--I love you. I will never stop fighting for you."

     Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt, in response to Desiree Young's Facebook posting, tweeted this: "Bringing Kyron Horman home is our number one priority in this case and we will never lose sight of that."

     As of August 2023, Kron Horman remained missing. No charges in the case have been filed.

Where is Tiffany Michelle Whitton?

     On March 7, 2011 25-year-old Tiffany Michelle Whitton, a resident of Marietta Georgia within the Atlanta metropolitan region, showed up in Dalton Georgia with two other women and a man named Matthew Stone. That night Tiffany Whitton, Tracy Chambers, Casey Renee Cantrell and Matthew Stone broke into a woman's house and terrorized her with a tire iron. The victim managed to lock herself into the bathroom and call 911. Before fleeing the dwelling Tiffany Whitton and her crew stole the woman's purse that had been lying on the couch. It contained $60.

     When questioned by detectives Whitton claimed the owner of the purse owed her money. She and her friends had gone to the house to collect what was hers. Investigators suspected that the victim and the four intruders had been in a drug deal. Whitton, a user of illicit drugs, had paid the woman for pills and when the supplier didn't deliver the goods she and her friends raided the house to get her money back.

     A prosecutor charged Tiffany Whitton and her accomplices with armed robbery, burglary and possession of drug-related objects. Following her guilty plea the judge gave Whitton  a probated sentence.

     Tiffany Whitton, a former Hooter's waitress in Kennesaw, a suburban community north of Atlanta, disappeared on September 13, 2013. The mother of a 6-year-old daughter was last seen at two in the morning in the parking lot of a Walmart store not far from her home in Marietta Georgia. Since that night she has not made contact with family members or friends. She was last seen with her boyfriend Ashley Caudle. (A few weeks after Tiffany Whitton's disappearance police arrested Caudle in a meth raid at his mother's house.)

     The missing woman's mother created a Facebook page called "Find Tiffany Whitton."

     On February 20, 2014 Marietta police officer David Baldwin, in referring to the multi-tattooed five-foot-two-inch 100-pound Whitton said, "What really worries us is that she literally vanished without a trace."

     In July 2014 detectives executed a search warrant at Caudle's mother's house in Marietta where workman dug up her back yard looking for Tiffany Whitton's remains. The searchers came up empty handed.

     So what could have happened to Tiffany Whitton? She could have run off to start a new life. However, because of her daughter that didn't seem likely. It was also unlikely that some abductor was holding her captive. If dead, she could have killed herself in some remote location or accidentally overdosed on drugs. If none of these events took place someone may have murdered her. As a drug abuser Tiffany Whitton rubbed shoulders with unsavory and dangerous people. Did she fail to pay a drug dealer? Did her criminal associates come to believe that she was a snitch?

     If Tiffany Whitton was murdered her case would not move forward until someone who knew something about her disappearance called the police or someone stumbled upon her body. Finding a person who is dead is a lot more difficult than finding someone who is alive. Where do you even begin to look for a corpse?

     As of August 2022 Tiffany Whitton's whereabouts remain unknown. There have been no arrests in the case.

Searching for Missing Children

When you're searching for missing or abducted children, you have to look in any place where a child might fit. Not any likely place, but any possible place, which means kitchen cabinets, trash cans, the refrigerator, the freezer, and the oven, all locations where children have been subsequently located, alive or dead.

Adam Plantinga, 400 Things Cops Know, 2014 

What Happened to Guma Aguiar?

     Guma Aguiar's parents immigrated to the United States from Brazil in 1979 when he was two-years-old. The family, from Rio deJaneiro, settled in Pompano Beach, Florida. After college, Guma, a born-again Christian, moved to Texas where, working with his uncle in the oil and gas business, he made a fortune.

     In 2012, the 35-year-old millionaire was living in Fort Lauderdale with his wife Jamie and their four children. The family resided in a $5 million, six-bedroom mansion located in the exclusive oceanside neighborhood called Rio Vista.

     Aguiar, after converting to Orthodox Judaism, began donating millions of dollars to charitable causes in Jerusalem where he was considered a hero philanthropist. Others considered Aguiar a rich, eccentric man who was losing touch with reality. (Aguiar, according to reports, had spent some time in various mental wards.) His marriage to Jamie, whom he'd met in high school, had become a tumultuous relationship. On one occasion he had sued Jamie for divorce, then later withdrew the petition. In April 2012, Jamie Aguiar's attorney challenged the prenuptial agreement she had signed. The following month, Guma transferred guardianship of his $100 million estate ("in the event of my incapacity") from his wife Jamie to his mother, Ellen Aguiar. This, too, was challenged by Jamie's legal representatives.

     On June 18, 2012, Jamie Aguiar informed Guma that she intended to file for divorce. An hour later, at 8:30 in the evening, Guma was seen driving his twin-engine, fiberglass powerboat "T.T. Zion" through Port Everglades toward the Atlantic Ocean. Just after midnight, employees of a beachfront bar called Elbo Room spotted a boat in rough seas drifting toward the beach. The craft came to rest on shore with its navigation lights still on, the shifter in gear, and the keys in the ignition. Guma Aguiar was not in the boat.

     That morning, while investigators searched Aguiar's boat, the Coast Guard launched a search-and-rescue operation. Inside the abandoned craft, officers recovered the owner's wallet, his iPhone, a black T-shirt, and a pair of flip-flops. According to the boat's GPS system, Aguilar had traveled at high speeds two miles northeast of his house before the craft turned around and started drifting back to the shore. Aguiar had left his wedding ring at home.

     After three days, the Coast Guard called off the search-and-rescue mission. Several weeks after Guma's disappearance, Jamie Aguiar engaged in a battle against her mother-in-law for control of the $100 million estate, fired her missing husband's chief financial officer. At this point in the case, everybody had a lawyer which was costing the family $1 million a month in legal fees. (In big money disputes like this, the lawyers are always the big winners.) The Rio Vista mansion was put on the market along with Aguiar's 75-foot yacht, and his twin-engine powerboat.

     So, what happened to Guma Aguiar? Did he go out for a quick swim and drown? (Did taking an evening swim in the ocean by himself conform to past behavior?) Did mental illness and a hatred for his wife drive Guma to suicide? Assuming he went into the sea, was it unusual that the Coast Guard searchers didn't find his body? Why hadn't his corpse washed up on shore somewhere in this populated area?  Could he be alive?

     Jamie Aguiar's attorney told reporters that he believed that Guma, after faking his own death, fled to the Netherlands where he was hiding out, or living under a false identity. The attorney suspected that Guma was in the Netherlands because a close business associate of his had recently relocated there.

     On December 29, 2015, a judge in Broward County declared Guma Aguiar legally deceased. This paved the way for the settlement of his estate. A court in Israel where Aguiar owned property would decide whether to accept the Florida court ruling.
 
       While possible, it's unlikely that Guma Aguiar faked his own death, then disappeared into thin air. It seems the money trail would eventually lead investigators to him. He probably either drowned accidentally or committed suicide. His history of mental illness pointed to suicide, but statistics suggest a drowning accident. (Eighty percent of all drownings are accidental.) There are those who believe the Florida millionaire was murdered. However, there doesn't seem to be evidence of foul play in this case--blood on the boat and so on-- but anything is possible when a lot of money is involved.

     As of this writing,  Mr. Aguiar's disappearance remains a mystery.

When You Can't Find Your Child Check Under His Bed

     Police say a 10-year-old Pennsylvania boy wasn't missing as his mother feared, but was simply hiding under his bed, apparently while playing hide-and-seek. The boy's mother called for help on Friday January 30, 2015 when she couldn't find the boy for an expanded period of time. Police in Blair Township 90 miles east of Pittsburgh began assembling a search-and-rescue team early Saturday January 31 when they learned that the boy had been found.

     No charges have been filed in the case.

"Boy Missing Was Playing Hide-And-Seek," Associated Press, February 3, 2015 

Amber Alert Systems

The Amber Alert System originated in Arlington, Texas in 1996 following the abduction and murder of 9-year-old Amber Hagerman. In 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice established a guideline for when local jurisdictions should initiate the missing child alert system. The guideline sets outs the following criteria:

* Authorities believe the child may have been abducted
* The child is 17 years old or younger
* The child is in imminent danger of injury or death
* There's enough information about the child and the abduction for an alert
* Case details have been entered into a national missing persons database 

     In 2019, there were more than 3,500 Amber Alerts in the United States.   

The Lisa Irwin Missing Person Case

     In Kansas City, Missouri, during the early morning hours of October 4, 2011, Jeremy Irwin told the police he had gone into his 10-month-old daughter's room and found her missing from the crib. He said he had last seen the baby, Lisa Irwin, around 10:30 the previous night. When he arrived home from work the next morning (he worked the 11 PM to 3 AM shift), he found his front door unlocked and most of the inside lights on. He had also discovered, he said, an open front window, presumably the kidnapper's point of entry.

     The missing baby's mother, Deborah Bradley, at home that night, had put the baby to bed. She and her husband had not called the police immediately upon discovering the crime because, according to their stories, someone, presumably the intruder, had stolen their three cellphones. On Friday, October 7, 2011, Bradley, appearing on "The Today Show," said that on Thursday the police had informed her she had failed a polygraph test. At that point the parents stopped cooperating with the authorities investigating the abduction of their daughter.  In the meantime, local police and FBI agents were searching for the missing child.

     It has not always been the case that babies stolen by strangers was a rarity. During the 1920s, kids from wealthy families were regularly kidnapped by organized racketeers who returned the children after receiving the ransom money. The families, relieved to have their infants back, rarely reported the crimes. The so-called "snatch racket" ended after the Lindbergh case in 1932. Following the intruder's abduction of 20-month-old Charles Lindbergh Jr., kidnapping became a federal offense investigated by the FBI. Today, kidnapping for ransom is committed by stupid people who almost always get caught when they show up for the ransom money.

     On October 18, 2011, while appearing on three national television shows, Deborah Bradley informed her interviewers that she was drunk and on anxiety medicine the night her baby was abducted. Perhaps she had blacked out. Bradley also changed her story regarding when she last saw Lisa. She now said she last saw the infant at 6:40 PM. This meant the baby could have been snatched anytime between 6:40 PM and 4:00 AM the next morning.  She had also retained a celebrity defense attorney and had a private investigator working on the case.

     In January 2012, Deborah Bradley and Jeremy Irwin appeared on the "Dr. Phil" television show. The mother pleaded with the abductor to return her child. "Nobody takes a baby to hurt her," Bradley said. "She's coming home." The couple also reiterated their previous denials that they had anything to do with their daughter's disappearance.

     A month after appearing on "Dr. Phil," Bradley told an Associated Press reporter that, "She's out there somewhere, and I am desperate to find her…I just want my daughter home. People don't understand just how difficult it is to wake up and find out that someone has come into your house and taken your baby, and then you are accused of doing something to her or covering something up."

     In early February 2012, detectives had their first interview with the couple since they questioned them on October 8, 2011. According to a spokesperson with the Kansas City Police Department, the interview didn't produce anything new.

     Notwithstanding a $100,000 reward offered by an anonymous benefactor and the running down of 1,500 leads generated by the TIPS Hotline, Lisa Irwin's whereabouts was still a mystery. As the volume of investigative tips faded, detectives returned to working on other cases.

     In December 2014, a former CIA interrogator questioned Deborah Bradley and Jeremy Irwin and concluded they did not exhibit any behavioral signs of deception when they denied involvement in the disappearance of their daughter. However, some people familiar with the case, inside law enforcement and out, still considered Deborah Bradley a viable suspect who had not revealed everything she knew about what happened to Lisa Irwin.

     As of February 2020, no arrests had been made in the case. Lisa Irwin remained missing. 

The Lambert Corpse in the Refrigerator Murder Case

     In June 2014, Patrick Lambert, his wife Anastacia, and their 6-month-old son moved into the Braeswood Oaks apartment complex in southwest Houston, Texas. Anastacia had been born and raised in West Africa and Patrick had lived in New York City, Clearwater, Florida, and Hawaii.

     On September 2, 2014, Anastacia Lambert called 911 to report a domestic disturbance at the second-story Braeswood Oaks apartment. To the responding officers with the Houston Police Department, she accused her husband with threatening her with a knife. The police did not take Patrick Lambert into custody and no criminal charges were filed against him.

     On November 20, 2014, the utility company turned off the power to the Lambert apartment for lack of payment. Because neighbors hadn't seen Anastacia, her husband, or their 11-month-old son since the end of November, they thought the family had moved out. Because Anastacia didn't have family in the country and didn't work outside the home, there were no relatives or fellow employees to report her missing.

     At two in the afternoon of December 8, 2014, maintenance workers at the Braeswood Oaks complex detected a strong odor of death coming from unit 822, the Lambert apartment. The workers called 911.

     Upon entering the apartment, police officers discovered a large quantity of dried blood on the kitchen floor. They also found 27-year-old Anastacia Lambert's corpse stuffed inside the refrigerator. She had been stabbed to death and her son was not in the apartment.

     On the day police found the body in the refrigerator, the authorities issued an Amber Alert for the Lambert child and his 38-year-old father. Police described the missing murder suspect as a five-foot-elven inch black male. The police did not have a description of Lambert's vehicle and had no idea regarding his whereabouts or the whereabouts of his son.

     Police officers had the crime scene refrigerator transported to the Houston Crime Lab for forensic examination.