On a clear, cool Monday morning in the fall of 1998, a worker mowing beneath a highway billboard in Orange County, N.C., spotted a pair of white sneakers. Hesitating, he moved closer. Then he saw the bones. It didn't take long for detectives to swarm the area, cordoning off the badly decomposed body. What they had found upset them all: The remains belonged to a child. An autopsy concluded the remains were from a boy between 10 and 12 years old, but there were no reports of a missing child of that age in the area. Twelve years later, the police still hadn't identified the boy, so Tim ... Read More
An Effort to Find the Missing Missing
January 29, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
A bill currently wending its way through the U.S. Congress seeks to simplify the way state and federal officials keep track of missing persons, as well as help keep family members informed of the progress of their cases. The "Help Find the Missing Act" has been dubbed "Billy's Law," after Billy Smolinski, a 31-year-old Connecticut resident who went missing in 2004. Co-sponsored by Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, and Rep. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., the bill would combine the National Missing and Unidentified Person System database, or NamUs, the only federal missing persons and unidentified remains ... Read More
FBI Hits the Road for the Missing Missing
April 6, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
The FBI has publicized a program it's had active for the past five years, a 'Highway Serial Killers Initiative,' with both its own release and a fascinating story by the Los Angeles Times' Scott Glover. The upshot is that there are a lot of unsolved murders out there, and many of them may be traced to people whose livelihoods revolve around long-distance driving, like truckers. As the FBI puts it in a surprisingly readable press release: "The victims in these cases are primarily women who are living high-risk, transient lifestyles, often involving substance abuse and prostitution. ... Read More
‘Missing Missing’ and Serial Killers
February 12, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
When Washington state’s notorious Green River Killer was arrested in 2001, police estimated he had murdered 48 women. But at least one academic thinks he accounted for a lot more victims — upwards of 50 more. Kenna Quinet, an associate professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, points out that at least one-third of the killer’s known victims had never been reported missing, were absent from police missing-persons databases or remained unidentified. Many were female prostitutes or teenage runaways. Referring to ... Read More
