The GirlfriendsThe Girlfriends S2/Bonus 3 - The Girlfriends’ Guide to: Finding a Missing Person
In the third instalment of the Girlfriend’s Guide we turn our attention to the over 600 thousand people who go missing every year in the United States. With the help of a citizen sleuth and former Missing Persons Detective, Producer Anna Sinfield lays out what to do if someone you know goes missing.
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The Girlfriends is produced by Novel for iHeartRadio.
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Novel.
Hey, I'm Anisonfield and I'm back with another episode of The Girlfriend's Guide, where I use expert interviews, real life experiences, and research to show you how to fight crime and keep your girlfriends safe. Today we're focusing on the over six hundred thousand people who go missing every year in the United States, not to mention the troubling one hundred.
And seventy thousand here in the UK.
No one has really taught what to do if someone you know goes missing until now, from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts. You're listening to The Girlfriend's Guide Episode two. Finding a missing person.
On a Facebook group called Missing Black Persons, I saw a woman was looking for her sister who's been missing for forty two years.
This is realm Montero.
He's a citizen sleuth from New York and he attempts to track down missing people and identify deceeize people all across North America.
She was sixteen years old, missing from Harlem and just seeing the pictures of her sister, think you automatically know, like, all right, this is this is my new obsession and it's not an obsession in a creepy way, it's an obsession in I have to do whatever I can because you're instantly compelled to help. So I reached out to the admin of Missing Black Persons and they're just phenomenal. And I also reached out to the sister this young woman, her name is Stacy Reddish, sixteen years old when she went missing.
I was just so compelled.
By her, by the story, by the infuriating lack of attention by NYPD in the eighties. When the family reported Stacy missing the very first night, they said, well, she's probably with her boyfriend.
She'll come back. They didn't like that answer.
They went home, They put missing persons flyers out all over Harlem. They went looking for her everywhere. They went back to the police station the next day.
They were refused.
So she'll come home eventually, you know, runaways always do. And this is the rubber stamping of in a way prejudices she's a runaway.
Whatever, But just the.
Refusal of the police departments to do it anything to find Stace and she's sixteen years old, that's a minor Granted it's Harlem in the eighties, which is in and of itself a terrible statement. But they just wasn't support, there wasn't.
Care, There wasn't enough.
Educated law enforcement officers to know what to do other than she'll come back.
Well she didn't earlier this summer.
Forty two years later, the family tried to go back and report her. They wanted to know what happened. You said, forty two years ago, she'll come back. She hasn't, so we want to know. And they told her at the precinct, Well, we can't do anything here at the precinct. Go back to the place you last saw her and call nine and one, which is infuriating even me repeating that makes me want to bang my head because it's so wrong.
What say you called nine one one and say I'd like to report a missing person They won't miss years ago.
Yeah, so they went back to the original location they made the attempt to do that. There happened to be a police officer at that location for something else, whatever, or he was just passing by, and he chuckled and said, forty two years ago, there's nothing they can do.
So what can be done to help a family like Stacey's? And what should you do if your loved one goes missing?
Today? That's after the.
Break as an investigator, missing person cases is a big puzzle.
This is Captain Urbanski. He spent years working as a detective in the New Jersey Missing Person's Unit. When local police departments and agencies reached a dead end on their missing person's cases, Abanski was the guy they're cool.
I think missing person cases are harder than any type of homicide because why I say that is a homicide. You have evidence, It could be a bullet, a knife, interviews witnesses. Now, think about a missing person that goes boom, goes vanishes.
What do you have?
What could you bring into it to find your answers. Now I go to a missing person's house and saying, hey, Susan Brown, walk up and she's gone.
That's it.
Just think about that gone. No evidence, know nothing, you have, no witnesses, you have no DNA, have nothing like that.
Things have changed a bit since Urbanski first started out back in nineteen ninety five, but the basic advice for the first twenty four hours are the same. If you believe a missing person is in danger, report them missing right away. This opens up resources to the family, and the sooner you get help, the better you do not have to wait twenty four hours to report them missing. Anymore, that's old news, and if anybody tells you that that's the case, it's rubbish. Next, while the memory is fresh, make a note of everything you know. Call all friends, coworkers, neighbors, family, anyone who may also know something about their whereabouts or mental state. Look for any notes or other clues, and ring around local hospitals. It's not unusual for the police or authorities to still tell you that you need to wait twenty four hours to see if the person turns up, especially if they don't deem them vulnerable.
But you know your loved one best.
If the police won't help you, post on social media attempt to drum up interest from the press.
That's people like me.
Hand out flyers and keep pestering the authorities to set up a profile on their national databases for missing people.
In the US, that's called nameus.
The good news is, according to research, eighty seven percent of missing UK adults are found within the first two days, and only one percent are missing for longer than a month.
What about that.
Final percentage, Well, then you might need to start looking at specialist websites.
You have websites like Charlie projects like the dontwork your people out there that actually have an interest in missing person's world, And I'll actually get on no sites and look at people's cases and read a narrative on it and kind of get me interested and call the police department and start to get the reports and review it. It's something I use to help me sell my keys.
So essentially, while it's important to keep all avenues open, after a while you have to consider the fact that your missing person has died. This means their body could have been found already, but nobody knows who they are. If you're in the States, you should be able to find a relevant listing on the National Unidentified Body Database NAMOUS, which we've mentioned before, or some of the other websites have Banski mentioned, But keep your options wide. If they have sadly died, you won't know where or when they're will was discovered. They may have gone missing in Arkansas in twenty seventeen, but their body could have been discovered in Tennessee in twenty twenty two. But then you can run into difficulties like if it's been years and your loved one didn't die soon after going missing, there's every chance they're going to look different in recent pictures to how you remember them.
You got to keep all these things in mind when you're reviewing and looking at pictures even from back then. But your features, your face, your cheeks, your facial features, that don't change. I mean, you can gain weight, you can lose weight, you could grow your hair a little longer, but you can kind of get the sense that it has some type of relativity.
Once you start looking into your case as a potential doe case. There's also a few important things you can do to help others make the connection, like having relatives submit their DNA to the NAMESS database. That way, genealogists or detectives can also make possible matches.
Really helped out the missing person's world. They unidentified and missing person's world. See in New Jersey, they have what they call Patricia's Law. And I'll explain to your real quick what Patricias law is. Patricia Viola went missing up in Bergen County, and what happened was he went to report his wife missing and they wouldn't take a missing person report.
This was back when the police would say you had to wait twenty four hours.
Now it became law. So if you came in, you make it mister purse report. You got to take that report, and you have to do DNA within thirty days. And that's where names comes in, because name is these family reference samples. So if there's unidentified or if you have a missing person's you get mom and dad's side and you put those family reference samples into names.
Lebanski's most important advice is to not lose hope that eventually you will get answers.
If my daughter went missing. I got two daughters, and if they went missing or something, I would never give up on it.
After the break, we'll hear what how all Montero did when he stumbled across Stacy Reddish's forty two year old missing person's case.
So let's catch up.
Raoul Montero recently stumbled across a post on Facebook from the family of Stacy Reddish, who went missing forty two years ago. The police didn't appear to care about the case back in the eighties, and when Stacy's family tried to report her as missing again decades later, they claimed that the police refused to take any action.
When I read that in the Facebook group, I went into a war mode. Because it's just not done that way. It's just wrong to do that. You have to take a police report. So when I finally got in contact with her sister and she shared all that with me, like I was enraged, and I got information about Stacy, I said, tell me what you can about Stacy, because there's a path forward to getting her a missing person's report, And once she has that missing person's report, then she could be on names and then she can have much more exposure. But then more resources open up, and because she's a minor, she can get on the National Center for Missing and Endangered Children, where the resources become exponential. But we couldn't do any of that without a police report. Meanwhile, as I got information about Stacy, her life, her physical characteristics, the map was tugging at me.
The map is an online resource Raoul has created. We've put a link in the description.
He's populated it with every missing person's case and every unidentified body in New York. He includes things like key characteristics, locations, photos, that sort of thing. It means you can see really obvious links between cases in things like time, location, appearance. Because it's blindingly obvious when two markers on a map, one for missing and one for an unidentified body seemingly sit on top of each other. So when we're all here's about Stacy, his mind starts racing.
I know who she is has to be absolutely has to be this unidentified Jane Doe.
Why are you so convinced?
So a couple of things. So person goes missing.
Let's just say January first, twenty twenty three, and then let's say June first, twenty twenty three, an unidentified body is found. The PMI, which is postmrdal interval, which will tell you basically how long they believe that he's been out there or deceased, And so January one June one PMI is a six month interval.
Then you get to physical characteristics, the height, the estimated weight. Six months.
There's probably no discernible characteristics like eyes or anything like that, but it's possible. So then there's eye color, hair, hairl lasts for much longer, even after death. Hair will still grow a little bit, but it's more scientifically measurable. So if it's ten inches when they're found, it could have been eight inches when this person died.
So it's a little clues like that.
So that's what Raoul started doing with Stacy's case. He begins comparing the characteristics of the Jane Doe on his map with details he'd learned from Stacy's family. But the smoking gun for Raoul was a necklace that this Jane Doe was wearing. The pendant was a single letter, the same initial as Stacy's boy friend.
Everything just seems to add up.
That to me is.
A bigger lean towards confirmation. So things like that, I get very assured. And then there's for me, it's like a hunch, like you feel it, like you know it.
But as much as Role has a track record in solving cases, he needs to work in tandem with law enforcement to actually close them. So he passes his findings onto the cold case unit handling Stacy's case, and then he just has to wait. But as I'm recording this in July of twenty twenty four, Stacy's case is still unsolved. If the cold case detectives buy Rolls theory, they should be able to take DNA samples from Stacy's relatives and compare them to the does. And we know Stacy's relatives are keen. But none of that's happened, and you have to wonder why. Maybe it's because they've found some other reason why the cases can't be linked, like either Stacy or the dough are actually part of an active investigation, or and this feels more likely to me, maybe the police just aren't prioritizing Stacy's case. Stacy's family say at the time of her disappearance, the police refuse to take the missing person's report. They suggested she was just a runaway. According to research by attorney Jada Moss, black children are more likely to be labeled as runaways than their missing white counterparts. If children are categorized as runaways rather than potential victims of abduction, they do not qualify for the Amber Alert system, which is America's missing broadcast emergency response. It sends out things like text messages broadcast on TV and radio, and uses highway signs to alert the public about a missing child who may have been abducted. The system has helped over twelve hundred children be found since its launch in nineteen ninety six, but so called runaway children don't benefit from this service if they've never been categorized as possible a ductees. When you get far enough down the rabbit hole of missing persons. You do see depressing patterns black women, Indigenous women, sex workers, drug addicts, the elderly and marginalized.
It's no wonder Raoul gets obsessed.
It can feel like he's the only person in the world outside of family and friends who wants to help, which means role has to take the winds where he can.
It's closure for me in some part, you know, because I know that this Jaine Doe is resolved, She'll still stay at Jane Doe right now because the process, the investigative process, the genetic comparison process, is long and drawn out. But in my case, I can move beyond this Jane Doe and this missing person. What I do now is I stay very close to the family because getting them to share intimate parts of their loved one's life or to relive things that they haven't even remembered in thirty forty years can be very emotional for them. And I think that's part of my intuition, is that I take on a lot of these people's emotions and it's not the same. I haven't lost somebody in those methods, and I keep that awareness, but I take some of that with me and that becomes part of me, which is in a way the closure, because I have their sorrow and their confusion and their angst over everything, and I have this unidentified that nobody's looking for. And I say that grandly because I'm sure that there are but you know, in my case, I believe that I'm the only one for some of them, and I'm very focused on bringing that together, and in my mind, I have a certain sense of closure.
That's the end of the girlfriend's guy to finding a missing person. I hope that it was useful. More I hope you never need to use this information. This series isn't meant to overinflate the risk of horrible things happening in your lives. The reality is it's incredibly rare that anyone goes missing at all, let alone for more than a couple of days. So I hope this hasn't made you panic or worry. But I do believe in DIY resources and the fact that we never know when we're going to need them or maybe somebody we love it. I guess what I'm saying is I believe we're better off kicking doors down together. But you knew that already, because that's kind of the girlfriend's mantra. If you do end up with an ongoing case, there are support groups that you can find online and in your area. Not only will they be able to really understand what you're going through, but they'll have tips and contacts of their own that are specific to where the case happened.
Those sort of tips are gold dust.
Finally, remember it can often be hardest on the people left behind, so put your own mask on first.
It will help you in the long run.
Until next time time, hold your girlfriend's type. The Girlfriend's Guide is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more from Novel, visit novel dot Audio. This episode is produced and hosted by me Anna Sinfield.
Our assistant producer.
Is Madeline Parr and we've had some fantastic additional production by Lee Meyer, the Ona Hamid and Zaianna Yusuf. Max O'Brien is our executive producer. Production management from Shrie Houston and Charlotte Wolfe. Sound design, mixing and scoring by Daniel Kempson and Nicholas Alexander. Music supervision by me Anna Sinfield and Nicholas Alexander. Original music composed and performed by Louisa Gerstein and produced by Louisa Gerstein and You Guess Nicholas Alexander. The series artwork was designed by Christina Limcool. Story development by me Ana Sinfield. Willard Foxton is creative director, and our executive producers at iHeart are.
Katrina Norvelle and Nikki Etoor.
Special thanks to Ali Cantor, Carrie Lieberman, and Will Pearson at iHeart Podcasts, as well as Carl Frankel and the whole team at WMEC.
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