The Last Place You'd Look (15 page)

Outpost for Hope, the organization Libba founded to champion the rights of the thousands of unacknowledged missing in the United States, claims there are approximately one million unreported missing persons in this country alone, and that is a conservative estimate. Libba believes that many of these unreported missing are victims of human trafficking and other exploitative situations. Others are shunted aside as mentally ill, homeless, street people, or kids in foster care—people who fall through the cracks of the social system.

Many times the “missing missing” Libba Phillips refers to are those whose lives play out on a different stage than the one the average American sees: in back alleys, slums, and the wrong sides of the tracks. She notes that the prime modus operandi for Gary Leon Ridgeway, a serial murderer known as the Green River Killer who preyed on women in Washington State, was to pick victims who would not be noticed and reported as missing. He did a good job: among the forty-eight dead women and teenagers whose demises are attributed to Ridgeway, several still remain unidentified years after their slayings.

Without a doubt, the mentally ill, and in particular those with concurrent substance abuse problems like Libba Phillips’s sister, Ashley, form the single greatest component of the missing and unreported population. According to Outpost for Hope, individuals with mental illness are more than twice as likely to become victims of violent crime than the general population, and about half of mentally ill homeless adults also suffer from substance abuse and dependency, which makes them even more difficult to track.

Because each jurisdiction sets its own standards for reporting a person missing, the playing field is uneven where the mentally ill are concerned. Some jurisdictions take all missing persons reports seriously and err on the side of documenting a person missing erroneously rather than failing to file a report, while others will not take a report on a missing adult without suspicion of foul play. For those families with adults suffering from mental disorders, being unable to report their mentally ill kin as missing makes it hard to search for them. Many official avenues are closed to those who don’t have an official missing persons report. And that often leads to incredible heartbreak, as in the case of Susan McDonough of Reading, Pennsylvania.

In December 2008, forty-two-year-old Susan, a victim of schizophrenia, disappeared. It was bitter cold that winter and her relatives, including her half brother Mark, were worried about her safety. Mark says he tried to report his sister missing, but in the beginning no one would take the report.

“It would have been very simple to fill out the report; it would have taken no time at all,” Mark says. “But the officer spent more time [than a report would have taken] convincing me that he couldn’t take a report because she was an adult. [Another officer] told me his brother was a drug addict [who was] missing over ten years and said they couldn’t go looking for every adult, because [missing adults] had a right to do what they wanted.”

Susan had a long, torturous history of going off the medication that kept her illness under control. After she and her mother were evicted as a result of Susan’s inability to get along with neighbors, Susan lived for a time with the man she believed to be her father (although he never acknowledged paternity) in a house on Linden Street in nearby Reading. When the home in which they lived was sold to satisfy a tax lien, Susan drifted from one living arrangement to another, but she kept returning to the Linden Street home. On December 4, 2008, she tried to camp out in the lobby of a hotel and the police were called. Police asked where she lived and she provided the Linden Street address—the place where she had once lived for so long. Her official identification corroborated her story, so the officer gave her a ride there and dropped her off. It was the last time she was seen alive.

When Susan failed to contact family members, Mark, his mother, Barbara, and other friends and family began to search for her.

“We knew something was wrong,” Mark says. Calls to the police yielded no help at first, although a later visit to the Muhlenberg Police Department resulted in an offer to file a report if the Reading Police continued to refuse to do so. At last, the Muhlenberg Police did take a report on Susan’s disappearance.

Prior to her disappearance, the McDonough family battled for years to compel Susan to take her medications and get treatment but found themselves stymied by Pennsylvania law, which, Mark says, required “a clear and present danger—like the equivalent of holding a gun to someone’s head—before they’d do anything.

“We knew she was headed for disaster but [because of the laws concerning mentally ill persons] our hands were tied. It was so, so frustrating,” Mark says.

The McDonoughs were in constant contact with local law enforcement as a result of Susan’s tendency to wander. Mark says the system made it difficult for them to help Susan. She would be institutionalized on occasion for a week to ten days and then released. “They would let her go with no follow-up,” Mark says. “Obviously, she wouldn’t take her meds; she’d be sleepy and feel horrible. She wasn’t in anywhere long enough to have a proper transition. They let them go when the side effects are full-blown.”

When Susan refused her meds, her family could do nothing legally to compel her to take them. Then December came and Susan vanished. The family couldn’t get help when she was wandering and couldn’t get anyone to care that she was nowhere to be found. It was the ultimate bureaucratic catch-22: no one seemed willing to help Susan or her family.

“They ‘can’t do anything.’ It’s the same mantra everywhere. I don’t know how much of it is the law, but I know that putting the mentally ill on the streets causes more problems, and ultimately costs more,” Mark says.

But Susan didn’t stay on the streets for very long that frigid December. Instead, investigators later theorized, the night she got the ride from the police officer or not long afterward, she broke into the little house where she had lived on Linden Street. The home stood empty and deserted, having been sold for unpaid taxes, but to Susan McDonough, the freezing little place was still her home. So she curled up on the floor of the kitchen and went to sleep. It was a sleep from which she would never awaken.

On May 30, 2009, a man contracted to renovate the Linden Street home for the new owner found Susan’s body. She had been missing for almost six months. Mark remains angry about the circumstances that led to her death and his family’s inability to access help for her.

“She had a great smile and was very generous. She took care of our grandma. Whenever anyone was sick, Susan always wanted to help. People loved her and wanted to be with her. This disease [schizophrenia] made her into someone we didn’t know,” Mark says.

Mark admits to frustration with the system, which he believes failed his sister in many ways. “The Reading Police said because she was homeless she wasn’t really missing from anywhere,” he says.

The McDonough family has lobbied for changes in the way their state handles the mentally ill who enter crisis mode, but no amount of legislation will restore Susan to their lives or assuage their grief. “She was such a beautiful person when she was doing okay,” he says. “We are tormented and very angry about it.”

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Emma Carroll raised eleven children before her mind began to suffer the ravages of age-related dementia. Carroll, whose husband perished in a car accident in 1975, brought her children up with lots of love, the good cooking for which she was famous, and an unwavering faith in her God.

But at age eighty-three, Emma was losing her sharpness: she couldn’t remember recent events and, to the sorrow of her extended family, was becoming more and more socially withdrawn. On July 18, 2009, the elderly African American woman who also suffered from hypertension walked away from her Pembroke, Georgia, home. She has not been seen since.

Unlike many who suffer from mental disorders, Carroll’s granddaughter says there was an immediate, massive ground and air search for her grandmother.

“Over two hundred volunteers, air patrol, four-wheelers, canine patrol, and law enforcement from eighteen state and local agencies searched from sun up to sundown for eight straight days,” says Dawn Williams. In the end there was no sign of Emma, no evidence of where she’d gone.

The family hopes that someone saw Emma and picked her up. They’ve hired a private investigator, held candlelight vigils, and distributed flyers emblazoned with her likeness. Based on the theory that Emma could have left the state with help, they’re expanding their search into nearby areas of Alabama, South Carolina, and Florida.

“We will continue to look for her until we have a reason not to,” Williams says.

NAMI says African Americans are less likely to receive proper diagnosis and treatment for mental illness. However, when it comes to dementia, there seems to be no racial lines and few differences in the rate at which individuals seek treatment.

Perhaps the reason the missing who suffer from dementia now grab more attention is because over the past few decades, awareness of mind-robbing diseases, including Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia, has gravitated from the backs of medical journals to the front pages of newspapers. Ronald Reagan, one of this country’s most iconic presidents and world leaders, suffered from Alzheimer’s in his last years, a fact both he and his family acknowledged.

When an elderly individual with a diagnosis of dementia wanders off, most law enforcement agencies begin an immediate search. In many states, this is done under the auspices of a “Silver Alert” program.

Suggested by Oklahoma State Representative Fred Perry (R–Tulsa) and modeled on the Amber Alert program, which initiates a widespread public notification when a child goes missing, the Silver Alert was adopted by the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety and signed into law in April 2009. It is used to inform the public, news media, and various agencies when a qualifying individual goes missing.

Various forms of the Silver Alert exist from state to state, but almost all of them are aimed at elderly persons with dementia or other mental impairment. They aim to find the missing senior as fast as possible, and in many cases they succeed. Georgia has a successful program known as “Mattie’s Call,” named after a sixty-eight-year-old woman who wandered away from her Atlanta home. Her body was found eight months later a few hundred yards from her home.

While not all states employ an alert system for seniors, many experts believe they should because these systems work. In Georgia the Mattie’s Call system helped return seventy of seventy-one missing seniors during a three-year period. Federal legislation to create a national Silver Alert system was stalled at the time of this writing, but supporters hope to push it through Congress.

For some, though, there is no bright and shiny piece of legislation to bring their families help and hope. Like Libba Phillips’s sister, Ashley, their situations don’t spark an immediate response by searchers. Instead, reactions tend to fall into the “he got what he deserved” category, and that adds more pain into the mix.

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It took one word for the responding officer to stop taking notes on Troy Spencer Marks’s disappearance: addict. Ashley Marks, Troy’s wife and the mother of his two boys, admits her missing husband has demons, but she says he is trying to get straight and that no matter what substances he chose to abuse, he deserves to have someone out there looking for him.

Troy Spencer Marks. Courtesy of Ashley Y. Marks.

“I was interviewed for less than five minutes by a motorcycle officer from Ascension Parish [Louisiana]. I told him that [Troy] was an addict. Once I did this, the report was ended,” Ashley says. “He even told me that I was better off.”

Ashley says the officer also said an investigating detective would touch base with her the next day. “It’s been three-and-one-half years, and I am still waiting for that detective to interview me,” she says.

Like the mentally ill, those addicted to drugs and alcohol are more often than not given short shrift by an overburdened criminal justice system. For many officers, looking for individuals who disappear under circumstances involving drug abuse is an endless chore and one they have neither the resources nor the time to pursue.

But Ashley insists her husband is a good man, despite his chemical dependencies, and it is true that many addicts suffer from concurring, but often undiagnosed, mental disorders. While Troy has not been diagnosed with mental illness, Ashley says he fought to remain sober and never came home to his children when he was under the influence.

A handsome man with a shaved head and a goatee, Troy has blue eyes that sparkle with wit and a couple of distinctive tattoos, including one of Yosemite Sam holding a gun and a football. When he disappeared, Troy lived in New Orleans, where he worked concrete in the rebuilding efforts following Hurricane Katrina. On June 6, 2006, a friend dropped him off near North Dourgenois Street. Later that day, Troy failed to show up for work. He has not been heard from since. Some time later, his abandoned truck was located in the parking lot of a Baton Rouge apartment complex under suspicious circumstances.