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Part 2: Missing-person cases are routinely ignored
By LISE OLSEN AND LEWIS KAMB, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTERS | February 17, 2003
Jim Lowry, 88, is the oldest inmate in the Washington state correctional system. He is doing time for attempted murder and authorities say he is a suspect in two missing-person cases. He is shown here in the Ahtanum View Correctional Complex, a Department of Corrections assisted-living center in Yakima. Photo: Gilbert W. Arias/Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Photo: Gilbert W. Arias/Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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Jim Lowry, 88, is the oldest inmate in the Washington state correctional system. He is doing time for attempted murder and authorities say he is a suspect in two missing-person cases. He is shown here in the ... more
The locals knew something was wrong when the Hindmans' red Ford convertible was parked all night long at the Big Y Cafe in Dryden.
Police later found blood on the walls and floor of the travel trailer in which they lived. Everything they owned was where they'd left it.
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But of Gene and Sherry Hindman, newcomers to the Wenatchee Valley who packed apples and dreamed of better days, there was no sign at all.
Seventeen years later, the Chelan County sheriff still calls it an unsolved double homicide, but the case long ago went cold. Deputies figured there wasn't much they could do until bodies turned up.
Late last year, after the Seattle Post-Intelligencer asked about the Hindmans, Chelan County for the first time added the 1985 case to a nationwide database that helps police track missing people and identify bodies found. It has yet to provide the state dental records and police reports -- key information if the Hindmans ever turn up -- that are required by state law. "We made mistakes and we're trying to do better," said newly elected Sheriff Mike Harum.
It's unclear whether county authorities ever examined two unidentified men whose remains were recovered there to determine whether one might be Gene Hindman. The county has lost all records for the bodies, which do show up on a state list.
For 17 years now, someone has gotten away with murder in Chelan County -- partly because of flaws in the system for tracking missing people.
Through hundreds of interviews and analysis of hundreds of police reports and information in three state computer databases, the P-I found that police statewide routinely botch or ignore missing-person cases, even when there are ample indications of foul play. As a result, families have been left with unanswered questions, countless dead have been buried without a name and killers have been allowed to roam free.
In the Hindman case, proper investigation might have prevented more bloodshed. The sheriff's chief detective and the county prosecutor have long suspected they were killed by their landlord, Jim Lowry, after an argument about money. But without bodies, they had no case.
In 1994, Lowry crept into a trailer on his land and shot a different tenant in the head after they argued about money. That man survived.
Lowry, a retired Merchant Marine from Cashmere, was convicted of attempted murder and is now confined to a state assisted-living center in Yakima. Squinting and sometimes laughing, Lowry doesn't deny he had a dispute with the couple but says he never shot or killed anyone. He blames his troubles on a conspiracy run by "the Masons and the IRS."
The state's oldest inmate at age 88, he likely will die in custody.
Victims of foul play
In its yearlong investigation, the P-I asked more than 270 Washington police agencies for reports on all people who had been missing for more than a year, as well as all unsolved homicides, since 1980. Ninety-one agencies sent reports.
The P-I also obtained the State Patrol's master list of more than 2,000 missing persons, which includes more than 600 people missing longer than a year.
The P-I analysis revealed that as many as 130 missing people may have been victims of foul play, with police listing at least 20 as victims of serial killers. Police said they found signs of a struggle, identified a history of domestic violence or discovered small children unattended or prized possessions abandoned. In some cases police learned of death threats or were told of hidden graves.
Some of the reports led to homicide investigations. Others fell through the cracks.
The P-I also found that police:
Routinely mishandle and lose cases: Police departments could not account for more than 100 missing-person cases still shown to be active by the State Patrol. Seattle police overhauled their system for tracking missing-person cases after they received a P-I request for information and were unable to account for 37 reports that were on the state's roll -- about half of the city's long-term cases. Now they can account for all cases. Other departments admit their records remain in disarray, mistakenly purged or destroyed.
Ignore the law: Washington police are required by law to obtain, where available, dental records for all people gone longer than a month. But state records show they failed to do so in more than 60 percent of all cases. Moreover, 45 departments have filed no follow-up reports on any long-term cases.
Fail to use tracking systems: Dozens of cases were never entered into missing-person databases maintained by the State Patrol and the FBI -- including several that involved missing children or adults who likely were murdered. For example, Chelan County not only failed to report the disappearance of the Hindmans, it also did not pass on data about the probable homicide of Steven Smith, who vanished from his home in 1982. A man later confessed to Smith's murder but the case was not pursued because no body was found where the man said he left it, said retired Undersheriff Daryl Methena.
Close cases with little investigation: Because of the P-I's inquiry, departments across the state "solved" more than 150 open cases.
But officers in several departments who closed cases, including Bremerton, Bellingham, Tacoma and the Pierce and Douglas county sheriff's offices, admit they didn't actually talk to the subject of the report. Bremerton detectives, for example, cleared half the department's 30 open cases last spring mostly by checking credit reports and public records -- but without making a single face-to-face confirmation.
Experts say missing-person cases should not be cleared that way.
"I'm more than anal about that," said Seattle Police Department Missing Persons Detective Tina Drain, who was assigned to handle these cases three weeks after the P-I began its investigation of the missing-person report system. Drain, a veteran domestic violence detective, has since flagged one case as a homicide, helped nail down a tricky John Doe case and called out search-and-rescue teams in another.
She's also taken classes from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children on child abductions and helped produce a video used to train patrol officers on how to pick up on signs of trouble.
Her diligence appears to be rare among police in Washington state.
"I don't think any law enforcement agency is going to dedicate those kind of resources to track down each and every missing person" without signs of a crime, said Bremerton Police Capt. Craig Rogers.
When asked about open cases, Rogers said: "Is it possible that some of these cases might end up with foul play involved? Anything's possible."
File and forget
Few know the system better than Bob Keppel, a former King County detective who investigated Ted Bundy and the Green River murders.
Keppel recalls the primitive method one major Western Washington police agency used in the 1970s: A new missing-person report went to the top of the stack and the one on the bottom went in the trash.
"These were viable cases with people who were probably murder victims," Keppel said. "No goddam work was done. Nothing. Zero."
Even now, some departments do little more than file and forget.
"There's an overriding hesitancy to investigate missing persons," Keppel said. "If they turn out to be a murder victim -- or even if they wind up dead for some other reason -- this causes the investigation to stagnate."
Despite the problems, some investigators pull off impressive coups -- such as a Seattle investigation that was solved based on a cop's gut instinct.
When Donald "Rob" Wood, then 27, disappeared in July 1998, Seattle police Detective Ray Holm played a hunch and found him. Wood had vanished after a night drinking at a Pioneer Square tavern -- his friends had lost track of him when the party moved to a loft in the same building. He later failed to show up at work or pick up his mother at the airport.
Five days after Wood disappeared, Holm returned to the building that housed the tavern and checked a seldom-used freight elevator -- and found Wood, critically hurt but alive after falling 80 feet down an elevator shaft.
Yet many other troubled people don't get the help they need, often because police discourage missing-person reports by imposing waiting periods or other dodges.
In July 1995, Ramona Fey, a 39-year-old schizophrenic, cut her own throat and drove away from her sister's Spanaway home. Family members tried to get two different agencies to take a report that day, but neither did. A report was finally taken only after they called the King County Sheriff's Office that evening.
But in the time it took to get a report filed, police already had missed a chance to help Fey. That afternoon, she drove her car into a ditch in Mount Rainier National Park. A park ranger helped her pull it out.
"He checked (the computer) to see if there were any records for her," said her mother, Shirley Angel. "No one had taken a report yet, so he had to let her go."
Later that evening, Fey's car, the motor still running, was found swathed in blood farther up the mountain. She remains missing.
Police also can be reluctant to take reports about runaways, prostitutes and drug addicts, even though they often are crime victims.
"Prostitutes and people with transient lifestyles are easy to prey on. Serial killers know that, and they know that these kinds of victims are a lot harder to track," said Wayne Lord of the FBI's Child Abduction-Serial Killer Investigative Resource Center.
A few of the state's large departments assign a detective with specialized training to handle missing persons. Some, such as the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office, have homicide detectives read reports. When a case looks suspicious, that department has two detectives check it out.
But in most places, reports may never be reviewed at all.
And because police know that most people turn up on their own, some officers indiscriminately close cases in less than a month to avoid the chore of checking to see whether the person is still missing, filing supplemental reports, and tracking down dental records to send to the proper authorities, said Kirk Mellecker, an investigator with the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or ViCAP.
Lax police work isn't "done with sinister intentions," said Marvin Skeen, a former Bellevue detective now with the state's Homicide Information Tracking System, or HITS.
"It's more like naiveté," Skeen said. "With a lot of agencies, officers aren't trained and probably not even aware of the laws."
Lackluster follow-up doesn't matter in most cases, which routinely solve themselves when people return home or are otherwise located.
But such investigative failures can also help a killer.
Verification of missing-person reports can be especially important. Often, killers file the reports themselves to throw off suspicion, Keppel found in a 1987 study.
The Yakima Police Department assigns a trained detective to scrutinize all missing-person reports. Yet important cases -- including probable homicides -- still are overlooked, said Detective Tim Bardwell, who noted that patrol officers without training often fill out the reports.
Patricia Rodriguez was 33 when she went missing from Yakima in February 1983. She was having financial troubles and her husband was in jail -- problems that suggested to officers that she had taken off on her own.
But her family believes she never would have abandoned her four children, ages 2 to 11.
Employees of the family business called police. Officers checked her home and noted the children had been home alone for two days. Yet it wasn't until her mother and sister arrived from another state that authorities filed a formal missing-person report -- 10 days after she vanished.
Six months passed before her family could talk a detective into looking into the case, Bardwell said. The investigator quickly uncovered evidence of a dispute between Rodriguez and her husband's co-workers -- the very people who called the police, and who remain suspects in her still-unsolved disappearance.
"Nothing was really checked into," said Rodriguez's sister, Bev Evanson. "It was just assumed she'd left on her own, which we knew she never did. As long as there's no body -- you can't get help."
Mostly teenagers
The vast majority of missing person reports concern teenagers -- hundreds of thousands of whom disappear nationwide, only to reappear a few days later. Because of that, police seldom act. If a teen is a chronic runaway or has a history of misbehavior, they take even less interest.
But the system is supposed to be better for missing juveniles than it is for adults, thanks to federal legislation passed after a national furor about child abductions in the early 1980s. By law, local police cannot require a waiting period before taking a missing-juvenile report, and must immediately enter all such reports in state and national databases.
In recent years, a few high-profile abductions have prompted several areas, including Washington state, to also adopt "Amber Alert" systems to quickly spread the word. But few other missing-person cases generate that level of rapid response or attention.
Generally, the quickest response comes in the rare cases in which a small child can't be found. Washington's database of missing persons lists only about 10 unsolved abductions by strangers of children younger than 12.
Older children often are presumed to be willing and able to disappear on their own, and police generally do little to check them out.
Two cases "solved" after the P-I asked about them show that older youths get little attention -- even in suspicious circumstances.
Cecelia Garibay, a Douglas County teen, was last seen in the company of a known sex offender before she was reported missing in October 2000. Yet investigators considered her a runaway and did no follow-up for nearly two years. Only after the P-I asked about the case did authorities check and discover that she had returned home long ago.
Similarly, Ronald Porkalob, a 17-year-old model student from Bremerton, vanished in 1988. He remained "missing" for 15 years -- until the P-I asked about him and police determined he was alive and well in Seattle.
Not all cases harmlessly fall through the cracks.
When 14-year-old Misty Thompson ran away from a Cowlitz County foster home in 1993, the Sheriff's Office initially assumed that there was no need for any special action: Foster kids run away all the time.
But there was more to the Thompson case. State regulators were already aware of problems at the home, which eventually lost its foster care license. Girls placed at the home had complained of inappropriate relationships, including time Misty had spent with the adult son-in-law of the home's owner. Social workers had asked the man, a Mexican facing deportation, to move.
Police learned three months later that Misty and the man had left at about the same time. By then, they were investigating allegations that the man had impregnated another teen, according to a Department of Social and Health Services report and Cowlitz County sheriff's records.
Misty's foster mother, Arlotte Noble, told authorities that Misty had called to say she was fine, but wouldn't say where she was. Much later, she told the P-I that she believes Misty went willingly with the man.
Still, eight years passed before a detective asked about Misty. Noble told him that in 1997 she was called by U.S. government officials in Mexico who said Misty had died, though she received no written notification. She said she passed word on to the state -- which DSHS said it cannot confirm.
Police have never been able to determine what happened to Misty.
The P-I also found at least three homicides in which parents say police initially refused to search for their daughters, insisting the girls were runaways. Two remain unsolved.
On July 18, 1994, Tanya Frazier, 14, disappeared after leaving Seattle's Washington Middle School. Her mother, Theresa Frazier, has remained troubled by the idea that her daughter might have been alive even as she was trying to convince police and the media to publicize the case and make a more active search. But Frazier long said her daughter was dismissed as a runaway -- until a man walking on Capitol Hill found her body five days later.
The same appears true for 14-year-old Misty Copsey, who vanished in 1992 after attending the Puyallup Fair. Copsey has never been found, though volunteer searchers recovered some of her clothing. Copsey's mother repeatedly has complained that police treated the case as a runaway and refused to search, though Copsey disappeared after missing a bus and attempting to walk home alone late at night. Her family never believed she left on her own.
Volunteers also had to take the lead in the September 1986 search for Tracy Parker, 16, in Kitsap County. Sixteen years later, Barbara Parker-Waaga still gets angry when she thinks about the deputies who wouldn't lift a finger until volunteers found Tracy's clothing in the woods -- three days after she tried to file a missing-person report.
"The deputies were rude," she said. "They insisted she was a runaway and would turn up in a few days. But there were so many clues that something wasn't right."
Detectives focused on Brian Keith Lord, a 25-year-old who had been convicted of murder in California and who was doing carpentry work at the home where Tracy was riding horses the day she vanished.
Deputies arrested Lord on Sept. 30, 1986 -- about the time a horseback rider found Tracy's nude body in the woods. Trace and blood evidence were said to link Lord to her murder.
Former Kitsap County Sheriff Pat Jones said he knows his department failed to act appropriately in the Parker case, and in doing so lost one of the most valuable assets of any missing-person investigation.
"When you get a case like this," he said, "you need a good relationship with the family. They are one of your best sources of information."
Lord's July 1987 conviction and death sentence were overturned on appeal. He will be retried this year.
Not a crime
A missing-person report is not a crime report. Nor does filing a report mean that anyone will go looking for the subject -- there's no law that says adults have to be where someone thinks they should be.
The report is a tripwire to alert police of a possible crime, and in many cases it is a way to reach across time and distance to identify any human remains that might turn up years later, hundreds of miles away.
After a hiker found a partial skull in the Olympic National Park in June 2000, a pathologist examined the remains and sent dental X-rays to the state's Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit in Olympia. When those records were put into a state computer, it spit out the name of Douglas Gibbs.
Gibbs, a 33-year-old man with a history of mental problems, had been reported missing to Seattle police in October 1998. Detectives had followed through by tracking down his dental records and sending them to the state.
The case "demonstrates how well the system can work when each party does what they are supposed to do," said King County forensic pathologist Kathy Taylor, who worked the case. "The information was there to compare to when we found his remains. Ironically, we had very little of him but got a positive ID. The system works if agencies use it."
The case also shows why police are required by law to seek dental or medical records for people who remain missing longer than 30 days, and to send the records to the state -- which doesn't always happen.
The reason? Reading the paperwork, tracking down doctors and dentists and retrieving medical files is time-consuming and tedious. Police say they're spread thin and have better things to do.
"Police view missing persons as a low priority case," said John Turner, chief investigator of the state's HITS program. "In reality, Part 1 crime -- your murders, rapes and robberies -- that's what's driving police departments and budgets. Missing persons are not a Part 1 crime."
At the same time, the law is toothless -- no penalties for officers or agencies that ignore it.
State records show that some of the agencies with the worst compliance records are some of the largest -- Tacoma and the Pierce County Sheriff's Department.
Tacoma police failed to report whether it even tried to get dental records in more than 90 percent of its cases. Pierce County failed to report in 84 percent, the P-I found in an analysis of cases that were 30 days old or older. When asked about the lapse, supervisors from both the Tacoma police and sheriff's departments said they weren't aware of the law.
Dozens of cases have been neglected, including that of Alexander Welcher, 72, who vanished from his Tacoma gun shop in February 1986. Tacoma police say they routinely send form letters to families of missing people to ask for dental records. But Welcher's son, John, said his family was never contacted and any dental records are now long gone.
"There are . . . bodies that have been found, that could be him," Welcher said. "But how would they know without these records?"
Tacoma police Lt. Tom Strickland said he doesn't know whether officers ever tried to get Welcher's records. The detective who handled the case is long retired, he said. The case languishes, even though police and family members assume Welcher was murdered.
"You call down there and it's like, 'That book has been closed,' " Welcher said.
Although Seattle has an excellent record for providing records for older missing-person cases, the department still fails to meet the 30-day requirement to report about the availability of dental records in 77 percent of its cases, records show.
Department officials said the high volume of reports makes it almost impossible for them to meet the deadline, though they try to report back within two or three months on all cases.
Unfortunately, for many runaways -- especially foster children -- there are no dental reports to find, they said.
'Waste of time'
An integral part of a missing-person investigation is sharing the data, because victims often turn up in another county or state -- some as corpses. Dental records, physical descriptions and other facts fed into computers are supposed to help police put together the puzzle.
The system is run by the Justice Department's National Crime Information Center, or NCIC.
The missing persons part of the NCIC system, launched in 1975, is outdated and flawed. Some data entry categories are useless or misleading and its automatic search engine is unreliable.
"It's just a big waste of time," said Skeen, a former Bellevue homicide detective who now works for the state HITS program. "You're basing everything on descriptors, and you can generate hundreds and hundreds of names of potential matches that never pan out."
Federal officials have improved other parts of NCIC but the missing-person section remains largely unchanged, despite widespread knowledge of its failures and limitations.
Although many improvements are now scheduled, advocates have argued that the national computer should be replaced or upgraded with modern, Web-based tools featuring standard reports, photos, dental information and availability of DNA.
"There are easier ways to do this," said Bill Haglund, a former King County Medical Examiner's investigator. "Once you have a system you've paid millions of dollars for in place, there's a lot of resistance to change it."
Regardless of the technical flaws, human factors can also defeat justice. Every month the State Patrol sends a form asking departments to verify active cases. All cases are supposed to be reviewed over the course of a year.
Yet the P-I found many departments had trouble finding records, some of which are deleted in error.
For a case to remain active, an agency must respond to the State Patrol's letters. If it doesn't, reports can be removed.
But experts say police routinely ignore the letters.
Conversely, agencies often fail to notify the state when a case is legitimately closed, allowing invalid reports to clog databases with information that doesn't belong there. After the P-I inquired, Pierce County checked the 116 missing person cases the state has listed as active for the department. Detective Ed Troyer, the sheriff's spokesman, said many of the cases have indeed been cleared and blamed the state for not updating its records.
However, system guidelines clearly show that the burden of clearing reports is on the originating agency -- in this case the sheriff's office.
To try to keep its data manageable, the FBI and state also notify local police when a reported runaway has been "emancipated" at the age of 18. In theory, departments are supposed to review the case and get a signature from the family and re-enter it into the system if the teen is still missing.
The local police are also supposed to retain records for teens who may have been abducted or who were otherwise endangered, regardless of the date of their emancipation.
But those labels are subjective and the follow-up takes time.
So many of the cases are simply purged, regardless of the circumstances.
Gerald Nance, an investigator for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said land mines in missing-person cases are plentiful -- but many problems relate to lack of knowledge or indifference.
"It comes down to you as an officer, as a person really, making the wrong decisions that become the reason why a case is not going to be solved," Nance said.
And timing is everything, said Robert Ressler, a former FBI agent and expert on serial killers.
"When somebody's missing, you have to make a concerted effort to determine why," Ressler said.
"The same mistake is made over and over again. But if (police) don't get their s--- together within the first 24 hours, it's usually a lost cause."