Efforts under way to find missing adults

I was just calling to say hello to my brother, who lives near Dallas.

“They found a woman’s body less than a mile from our house... in the woods” he said.

That wasn’t what I expected to hear and had no idea what he was talking about.

The woman, 40-year old Susan Loper, had been missing for a day, after leaving a health club where she worked as a Pilates instructor. There were signs of a struggle and that she had been abducted.

A suburban patrolman found her body last Wednesday morning, about 250 yards away from the North Dallas Tollway beneath a tree line. She was a single mother of an 8-year old boy.

The next morning, closer to home, came reports that a woman was missing from a suburb north of Chicago.

Melissa Ann Best had gone grocery shopping and was seen driving on surveillance camera video near her home in Round Lake Park. Melissa, married and the mother of two teenagers, hasn’t been seen and neither has her car.

There are other missing women from metro Chicago. Many others. Stacey Peterson of Bolingbrook is just the most notable name the past few years, mostly because police consider her husband, Drew, the prime suspect in her disappearance and presumed murder.

But there are also Tyesha Bell from Aurora, missing since 2003, and Laura Johnson, last seen in Arlington Heights in 1990. They are among 17 Illinois women currently listed as missing by the National Center for Missing Adults. There is also Lisa Stebic from Plainfield, who will have been missing for four years this Saturday.

It is difficult to get a fix on the precise number of women who are actually missing against their will in the U.S.

Trying to sort through those who leave on their own, getting away for whatever reason they have, is often difficult.

The FBI’s missing persons statistics are overwhelming at first. In 2010 there were almost 700,000 reports of missing persons entered into the FBI’s National Crime Information Center’s (NCIC.) When you break down the numbers, 98 percent are teenage runaways. The majority of the missing are located alive and the cases cleared.

At the beginning of this year though, the FBI had more than 86,000 active missing persons cases on the books — some having been there for decades. That number includes thousands of reported cases of women either disappearing without a trace of evidence or after being the victims of some hostile encounter.

Numerous agencies and databases attempt to track the reports and cases, but for almost every state there is different data. Some missing women are listed in one database while not in another.

Women aren’t alone – or even the biggest problem. According to federal records, there are more men reported missing every year than women.

The real problem with missing adults, however, is that missing children get all the public attention.

This is not to say that children who are lost, run away or taken don’t deserve and shouldn’t receive immediate responses. For all of its false alarms and initial overuse, the Amber Alert system has successfully intercepted children who might have suffered dismal fates.

But there should be no age bias when it comes to missing adults, especially those who are the likely victims of forceful abductions and sex crimes.

The National Center for Missing Adults, a much less well-known version of a missing children’s group by a similar name, has an excellent website effort called “Let’s Bring Them Home.” Through the site, they provide services and coordination between various government agencies, law enforcement, media, and the families of endangered missing adults.

The organization has also just launched a Missing In America Campaign, described as a yearlong public relations effort “to bring national attention to those with no voice: missing adults.”

The campaign is built around a Missing in America calendar project. The calendar showcases 25 missing persons from across the United States and lets families submit their loved one’s missing dates to be recognized in the calendar. It is intended to create awareness for missing adults cases.

”We encourage those who purchase the calendars to donate them to their local law enforcement agencies and media stations to keep these featured cases and all missing persons cases top of mind,” said LaDonna Meredith, President and Co-Founder of Let’s Bring Them Home.

There is also a lobbying effort under way to expand what is known as the Silver Alert Act which was reintroduced this year by Congressman Lloyd Doggett of Texas. The federal legislation would “encourage, enhance, and integrate Silver Alert plans throughout the United States, to authorize grants for the assistance of organizations to find missing adults.”

The families of missing men and women may not even realize the most frustrating part of the story. As they wait for some word about their loved one, there are 40,000 sets of human remains in medical examiner and coroner offices across the country... unidentified.

Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC 7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by email at chuckgoudie@gmail.com and followed at twitter.com/ChuckGoudie