Speaker 1: Novel.
Speaker 2: Hey, I'm Anisonfield and I'm back with another episode of
Speaker 2: The Girlfriend's Guide, where I use expert interviews, real life experiences,
Speaker 2: and research to show you how to fight crime and
Speaker 2: keep your girlfriends safe. Today we're focusing on the over
Speaker 2: six hundred thousand people who go missing every year in
Speaker 2: the United States, not to mention the troubling one hundred.
Speaker 1: And seventy thousand here in the UK.
Speaker 2: No one has really taught what to do if someone
Speaker 2: you know goes missing until now, from the teams at
Speaker 2: Novel and iHeart Podcasts. You're listening to The Girlfriend's Guide
Speaker 2: Episode two. Finding a missing person.
Speaker 3: On a Facebook group called Missing Black Persons, I saw
Speaker 3: a woman was looking for her sister who's been missing
Speaker 3: for forty two years.
Speaker 1: This is realm Montero.
Speaker 2: He's a citizen sleuth from New York and he attempts
Speaker 2: to track down missing people and identify deceeize people all
Speaker 2: across North America.
Speaker 3: She was sixteen years old, missing from Harlem and just
Speaker 3: seeing the pictures of her sister, think you automatically know, like,
Speaker 3: all right, this is this is my new obsession and
Speaker 3: it's not an obsession in a creepy way, it's an
Speaker 3: obsession in I have to do whatever I can because
Speaker 3: you're instantly compelled to help. So I reached out to
Speaker 3: the admin of Missing Black Persons and they're just phenomenal.
Speaker 3: And I also reached out to the sister this young woman,
Speaker 3: her name is Stacy Reddish, sixteen years old when she
Speaker 3: went missing.
Speaker 4: I was just so compelled.
Speaker 3: By her, by the story, by the infuriating lack of
Speaker 3: attention by NYPD in the eighties. When the family reported
Speaker 3: Stacy missing the very first night, they said, well, she's
Speaker 3: probably with her boyfriend.
Speaker 4: She'll come back. They didn't like that answer.
Speaker 3: They went home, They put missing persons flyers out all
Speaker 3: over Harlem. They went looking for her everywhere. They went
Speaker 3: back to the police station the next day.
Speaker 4: They were refused.
Speaker 3: So she'll come home eventually, you know, runaways always do.
Speaker 3: And this is the rubber stamping of in a way
Speaker 3: prejudices she's a runaway.
Speaker 4: Whatever, But just the.
Speaker 3: Refusal of the police departments to do it anything to
Speaker 3: find Stace and she's sixteen years old, that's a minor
Speaker 3: Granted it's Harlem in the eighties, which is in and
Speaker 3: of itself a terrible statement. But they just wasn't support,
Speaker 3: there wasn't.
Speaker 4: Care, There wasn't enough.
Speaker 3: Educated law enforcement officers to know what to do other
Speaker 3: than she'll come back.
Speaker 4: Well she didn't earlier this summer.
Speaker 3: Forty two years later, the family tried to go back
Speaker 3: and report her. They wanted to know what happened. You said,
Speaker 3: forty two years ago, she'll come back. She hasn't, so
Speaker 3: we want to know. And they told her at the precinct, Well,
Speaker 3: we can't do anything here at the precinct. Go back
Speaker 3: to the place you last saw her and call nine
Speaker 3: and one, which is infuriating even me repeating that makes
Speaker 3: me want to bang my head because it's so wrong.
Speaker 1: What say you called nine one one and say I'd
Speaker 1: like to report a missing person They won't miss years ago.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so they went back to the original location they
Speaker 3: made the attempt to do that. There happened to be
Speaker 3: a police officer at that location for something else, whatever,
Speaker 3: or he was just passing by, and he chuckled and said,
Speaker 3: forty two years ago, there's nothing they can do.
Speaker 2: So what can be done to help a family like Stacey's?
Speaker 2: And what should you do if your loved one goes missing?
Speaker 1: Today? That's after the.
Speaker 5: Break as an investigator, missing person cases is a big puzzle.
Speaker 2: This is Captain Urbanski. He spent years working as a
Speaker 2: detective in the New Jersey Missing Person's Unit. When local
Speaker 2: police departments and agencies reached a dead end on their
Speaker 2: missing person's cases, Abanski was the guy they're cool.
Speaker 5: I think missing person cases are harder than any type
Speaker 5: of homicide because why I say that is a homicide.
Speaker 5: You have evidence, It could be a bullet, a knife,
Speaker 5: interviews witnesses. Now, think about a missing person that goes boom,
Speaker 5: goes vanishes.
Speaker 1: What do you have?
Speaker 5: What could you bring into it to find your answers.
Speaker 5: Now I go to a missing person's house and saying, hey,
Speaker 5: Susan Brown, walk up and she's gone.
Speaker 1: That's it.
Speaker 5: Just think about that gone. No evidence, know nothing, you have,
Speaker 5: no witnesses, you have no DNA, have nothing like that.
Speaker 2: Things have changed a bit since Urbanski first started out
Speaker 2: back in nineteen ninety five, but the basic advice for
Speaker 2: the first twenty four hours are the same. If you
Speaker 2: believe a missing person is in danger, report them missing
Speaker 2: right away. This opens up resources to the family, and
Speaker 2: the sooner you get help, the better you do not
Speaker 2: have to wait twenty four hours to report them missing. Anymore,
Speaker 2: that's old news, and if anybody tells you that that's
Speaker 2: the case, it's rubbish. Next, while the memory is fresh,
Speaker 2: make a note of everything you know. Call all friends, coworkers, neighbors, family,
Speaker 2: anyone who may also know something about their whereabouts or
Speaker 2: mental state. Look for any notes or other clues, and
Speaker 2: ring around local hospitals. It's not unusual for the police
Speaker 2: or authorities to still tell you that you need to
Speaker 2: wait twenty four hours to see if the person turns up,
Speaker 2: especially if they don't deem them vulnerable.
Speaker 1: But you know your loved one best.
Speaker 2: If the police won't help you, post on social media
Speaker 2: attempt to drum up interest from the press.
Speaker 1: That's people like me.
Speaker 2: Hand out flyers and keep pestering the authorities to set
Speaker 2: up a profile on their national databases for missing people.
Speaker 1: In the US, that's called nameus.
Speaker 2: The good news is, according to research, eighty seven percent
Speaker 2: of missing UK adults are found within the first two days,
Speaker 2: and only one percent are missing for longer than a month.
Speaker 1: What about that.
Speaker 2: Final percentage, Well, then you might need to start looking
Speaker 2: at specialist websites.
Speaker 5: You have websites like Charlie projects like the dontwork your
Speaker 5: people out there that actually have an interest in missing
Speaker 5: person's world, And I'll actually get on no sites and
Speaker 5: look at people's cases and read a narrative on it
Speaker 5: and kind of get me interested and call the police
Speaker 5: department and start to get the reports and review it.
Speaker 5: It's something I use to help me sell my keys.
Speaker 2: So essentially, while it's important to keep all avenues open,
Speaker 2: after a while you have to consider the fact that
Speaker 2: your missing person has died. This means their body could
Speaker 2: have been found already, but nobody knows who they are.
Speaker 2: If you're in the States, you should be able to
Speaker 2: find a relevant listing on the National Unidentified Body Database NAMOUS,
Speaker 2: which we've mentioned before, or some of the other websites
Speaker 2: have Banski mentioned, But keep your options wide. If they
Speaker 2: have sadly died, you won't know where or when they're
Speaker 2: will was discovered. They may have gone missing in Arkansas
Speaker 2: in twenty seventeen, but their body could have been discovered
Speaker 2: in Tennessee in twenty twenty two. But then you can
Speaker 2: run into difficulties like if it's been years and your
Speaker 2: loved one didn't die soon after going missing, there's every
Speaker 2: chance they're going to look different in recent pictures to
Speaker 2: how you remember them.
Speaker 5: You got to keep all these things in mind when
Speaker 5: you're reviewing and looking at pictures even from back then.
Speaker 5: But your features, your face, your cheeks, your facial features,
Speaker 5: that don't change. I mean, you can gain weight, you
Speaker 5: can lose weight, you could grow your hair a little longer,
Speaker 5: but you can kind of get the sense that it
Speaker 5: has some type of relativity.
Speaker 2: Once you start looking into your case as a potential
Speaker 2: doe case. There's also a few important things you can
Speaker 2: do to help others make the connection, like having relatives
Speaker 2: submit their DNA to the NAMESS database. That way, genealogists
Speaker 2: or detectives can also make possible matches.
Speaker 5: Really helped out the missing person's world. They unidentified and
Speaker 5: missing person's world. See in New Jersey, they have what
Speaker 5: they call Patricia's Law. And I'll explain to your real
Speaker 5: quick what Patricias law is. Patricia Viola went missing up
Speaker 5: in Bergen County, and what happened was he went to
Speaker 5: report his wife missing and they wouldn't take a missing
Speaker 5: person report.
Speaker 2: This was back when the police would say you had
Speaker 2: to wait twenty four hours.
Speaker 5: Now it became law. So if you came in, you
Speaker 5: make it mister purse report. You got to take that report,
Speaker 5: and you have to do DNA within thirty days. And
Speaker 5: that's where names comes in, because name is these family
Speaker 5: reference samples. So if there's unidentified or if you have
Speaker 5: a missing person's you get mom and dad's side and
Speaker 5: you put those family reference samples into names.
Speaker 2: Lebanski's most important advice is to not lose hope that
Speaker 2: eventually you will get answers.
Speaker 5: If my daughter went missing. I got two daughters, and
Speaker 5: if they went missing or something, I would never give
Speaker 5: up on it.
Speaker 2: After the break, we'll hear what how all Montero did
Speaker 2: when he stumbled across Stacy Reddish's forty two year old
Speaker 2: missing person's case.
Speaker 1: So let's catch up.
Speaker 2: Raoul Montero recently stumbled across a post on Facebook from
Speaker 2: the family of Stacy Reddish, who went missing forty two
Speaker 2: years ago. The police didn't appear to care about the
Speaker 2: case back in the eighties, and when Stacy's family tried
Speaker 2: to report her as missing again decades later, they claimed
Speaker 2: that the police refused to take any action.
Speaker 3: When I read that in the Facebook group, I went
Speaker 3: into a war mode. Because it's just not done that way.
Speaker 3: It's just wrong to do that. You have to take
Speaker 3: a police report. So when I finally got in contact
Speaker 3: with her sister and she shared all that with me,
Speaker 3: like I was enraged, and I got information about Stacy,
Speaker 3: I said, tell me what you can about Stacy, because
Speaker 3: there's a path forward to getting her a missing person's report,
Speaker 3: And once she has that missing person's report, then she
Speaker 3: could be on names and then she can have much
Speaker 3: more exposure. But then more resources open up, and because
Speaker 3: she's a minor, she can get on the National Center
Speaker 3: for Missing and Endangered Children, where the resources become exponential.
Speaker 3: But we couldn't do any of that without a police report. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: as I got information about Stacy, her life, her physical characteristics,
Speaker 3: the map was tugging at me.
Speaker 1: The map is an online resource Raoul has created. We've
Speaker 1: put a link in the description.
Speaker 2: He's populated it with every missing person's case and every
Speaker 2: unidentified body in New York. He includes things like key characteristics, locations, photos,
Speaker 2: that sort of thing. It means you can see really
Speaker 2: obvious links between cases in things like time, location, appearance.
Speaker 2: Because it's blindingly obvious when two markers on a map,
Speaker 2: one for missing and one for an unidentified body seemingly
Speaker 2: sit on top of each other. So when we're all
Speaker 2: here's about Stacy, his mind starts racing.
Speaker 3: I know who she is has to be absolutely has
Speaker 3: to be this unidentified Jane Doe.
Speaker 1: Why are you so convinced?
Speaker 4: So a couple of things. So person goes missing.
Speaker 3: Let's just say January first, twenty twenty three, and then
Speaker 3: let's say June first, twenty twenty three, an unidentified body
Speaker 3: is found. The PMI, which is postmrdal interval, which will
Speaker 3: tell you basically how long they believe that he's been
Speaker 3: out there or deceased, And so January one June one
Speaker 3: PMI is a six month interval.
Speaker 4: Then you get to physical characteristics, the height, the estimated weight.
Speaker 4: Six months.
Speaker 3: There's probably no discernible characteristics like eyes or anything like that,
Speaker 3: but it's possible. So then there's eye color, hair, hairl
Speaker 3: lasts for much longer, even after death. Hair will still
Speaker 3: grow a little bit, but it's more scientifically measurable. So
Speaker 3: if it's ten inches when they're found, it could have
Speaker 3: been eight inches when this person died.
Speaker 4: So it's a little clues like that.
Speaker 2: So that's what Raoul started doing with Stacy's case. He
Speaker 2: begins comparing the characteristics of the Jane Doe on his
Speaker 2: map with details he'd learned from Stacy's family. But the
Speaker 2: smoking gun for Raoul was a necklace that this Jane
Speaker 2: Doe was wearing. The pendant was a single letter, the
Speaker 2: same initial as Stacy's boy friend.
Speaker 1: Everything just seems to add up.
Speaker 4: That to me is.
Speaker 3: A bigger lean towards confirmation. So things like that, I
Speaker 3: get very assured. And then there's for me, it's like
Speaker 3: a hunch, like you feel it, like you know it.
Speaker 2: But as much as Role has a track record in
Speaker 2: solving cases, he needs to work in tandem with law
Speaker 2: enforcement to actually close them. So he passes his findings
Speaker 2: onto the cold case unit handling Stacy's case, and then
Speaker 2: he just has to wait. But as I'm recording this
Speaker 2: in July of twenty twenty four, Stacy's case is still unsolved.
Speaker 2: If the cold case detectives buy Rolls theory, they should
Speaker 2: be able to take DNA samples from Stacy's relatives and
Speaker 2: compare them to the does. And we know Stacy's relatives
Speaker 2: are keen. But none of that's happened, and you have
Speaker 2: to wonder why. Maybe it's because they've found some other
Speaker 2: reason why the cases can't be linked, like either Stacy
Speaker 2: or the dough are actually part of an active investigation,
Speaker 2: or and this feels more likely to me, maybe the
Speaker 2: police just aren't prioritizing Stacy's case. Stacy's family say at
Speaker 2: the time of her disappearance, the police refuse to take
Speaker 2: the missing person's report. They suggested she was just a runaway.
Speaker 2: According to research by attorney Jada Moss, black children are
Speaker 2: more likely to be labeled as runaways than their missing
Speaker 2: white counterparts. If children are categorized as runaways rather than
Speaker 2: potential victims of abduction, they do not qualify for the
Speaker 2: Amber Alert system, which is America's missing broadcast emergency response.
Speaker 2: It sends out things like text messages broadcast on TV
Speaker 2: and radio, and uses highway signs to alert the public
Speaker 2: about a missing child who may have been abducted. The
Speaker 2: system has helped over twelve hundred children be found since
Speaker 2: its launch in nineteen ninety six, but so called runaway
Speaker 2: children don't benefit from this service if they've never been
Speaker 2: categorized as possible a ductees. When you get far enough
Speaker 2: down the rabbit hole of missing persons. You do see
Speaker 2: depressing patterns black women, Indigenous women, sex workers, drug addicts,
Speaker 2: the elderly and marginalized.
Speaker 1: It's no wonder Raoul gets obsessed.
Speaker 2: It can feel like he's the only person in the
Speaker 2: world outside of family and friends who wants to help,
Speaker 2: which means role has to take the winds where he can.
Speaker 3: It's closure for me in some part, you know, because
Speaker 3: I know that this Jaine Doe is resolved, She'll still
Speaker 3: stay at Jane Doe right now because the process, the
Speaker 3: investigative process, the genetic comparison process, is long and drawn out.
Speaker 3: But in my case, I can move beyond this Jane
Speaker 3: Doe and this missing person. What I do now is
Speaker 3: I stay very close to the family because getting them
Speaker 3: to share intimate parts of their loved one's life or
Speaker 3: to relive things that they haven't even remembered in thirty
Speaker 3: forty years can be very emotional for them. And I
Speaker 3: think that's part of my intuition, is that I take
Speaker 3: on a lot of these people's emotions and it's not
Speaker 3: the same. I haven't lost somebody in those methods, and
Speaker 3: I keep that awareness, but I take some of that
Speaker 3: with me and that becomes part of me, which is
Speaker 3: in a way the closure, because I have their sorrow
Speaker 3: and their confusion and their angst over everything, and I
Speaker 3: have this unidentified that nobody's looking for. And I say
Speaker 3: that grandly because I'm sure that there are but you know,
Speaker 3: in my case, I believe that I'm the only one
Speaker 3: for some of them, and I'm very focused on bringing
Speaker 3: that together, and in my mind, I have a certain
Speaker 3: sense of closure.
Speaker 2: That's the end of the girlfriend's guy to finding a
Speaker 2: missing person. I hope that it was useful. More I
Speaker 2: hope you never need to use this information. This series
Speaker 2: isn't meant to overinflate the risk of horrible things happening
Speaker 2: in your lives. The reality is it's incredibly rare that
Speaker 2: anyone goes missing at all, let alone for more than
Speaker 2: a couple of days. So I hope this hasn't made
Speaker 2: you panic or worry. But I do believe in DIY
Speaker 2: resources and the fact that we never know when we're
Speaker 2: going to need them or maybe somebody we love it.
Speaker 2: I guess what I'm saying is I believe we're better
Speaker 2: off kicking doors down together. But you knew that already,
Speaker 2: because that's kind of the girlfriend's mantra. If you do
Speaker 2: end up with an ongoing case, there are support groups
Speaker 2: that you can find online and in your area. Not
Speaker 2: only will they be able to really understand what you're
Speaker 2: going through, but they'll have tips and contacts of their
Speaker 2: own that are specific to where the case happened.
Speaker 1: Those sort of tips are gold dust.
Speaker 2: Finally, remember it can often be hardest on the people
Speaker 2: left behind, so put your own mask on first.
Speaker 1: It will help you in the long run.
Speaker 2: Until next time time, hold your girlfriend's type. The Girlfriend's
Speaker 2: Guide is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more
Speaker 2: from Novel, visit novel dot Audio. This episode is produced
Speaker 2: and hosted by me Anna Sinfield.
Speaker 1: Our assistant producer.
Speaker 2: Is Madeline Parr and we've had some fantastic additional production
Speaker 2: by Lee Meyer, the Ona Hamid and Zaianna Yusuf. Max
Speaker 2: O'Brien is our executive producer. Production management from Shrie Houston
Speaker 2: and Charlotte Wolfe. Sound design, mixing and scoring by Daniel
Speaker 2: Kempson and Nicholas Alexander. Music supervision by me Anna Sinfield
Speaker 2: and Nicholas Alexander. Original music composed and performed by Louisa
Speaker 2: Gerstein and produced by Louisa Gerstein and You Guess Nicholas Alexander.
Speaker 2: The series artwork was designed by Christina Limcool. Story development
Speaker 2: by me Ana Sinfield. Willard Foxton is creative director, and
Speaker 2: our executive producers at iHeart are.
Speaker 1: Katrina Norvelle and Nikki Etoor.
Speaker 2: Special thanks to Ali Cantor, Carrie Lieberman, and Will Pearson
Speaker 2: at iHeart Podcasts, as well as Carl Frankel and the
Speaker 2: whole team at WMEC.
Speaker 1: A gu