The Last Place You'd Look (17 page)

Although Matt says the people with whom they dealt in Syria promised help, little was forthcoming. “They don’t want to be confronted or made to look bad in public,” he says.

Matt believes the Syrian government is not alone in its failure to act on Nicole’s behalf. He also does not think the Canadian government has been very forthcoming. Matt says the experience has shattered for his family the long-held belief that government is going to help.

“The reality is, it just doesn’t happen,” he says.

Nicole Vienneau is not a novice traveler. She’s been to more than fifty countries and seeks out unusual places on her own. She understands the safety issues confronting a woman traveling by herself, her family says, and she respects local customs and traditions. That is important in Syria, where the social expectations are different for women.

Her brother admits Nicole would have stood out in that predominantly Muslim Middle Eastern country. Unlike most Syrian women, she wore Western-style clothing. She traveled by public conveyance—buses and cabs—or she walked. She stayed in hotels that reflected the local culture and ate on the economy. Nicole is not the kind of tourist who hotfoots it to the nearest McDonald’s or checks into a room at the Marriott.

Since the day Nicole was reported missing, Matt and his family have become de facto experts in keeping her case alive in the media. They blog, give interviews, and keep the drums beating loud enough to attract reporters and the occasional book author. The Vienneaus have spent a small fortune shuttling across the Atlantic Ocean, and even though their efforts thus far have been fruitless, Matt says it is not only the right way to search, but also the only way.

“You’re going to have to do it yourself. If you’re serious about finding the person, give up whatever you’re doing with your life right then and just go wherever they went missing,” he says, adding that support at home while one is searching is both irreplaceable and a must.

“But make sure you have a presence where they went missing as fast as possible, especially if it’s a third-world country. They won’t know what to do; they won’t be investigating at the level you want. No one cares as much about it as you do,” Matt says.

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The laws governing missing persons differ from country to country, as does the individual country’s approach. In Japan, for instance, officials are compelled by law to spend three days searching for a missing person. Many investigations go on much longer. The Japanese, known for their intensity and single-mindedness in pursuit of their goals, do not throw in the towel until they find the person or are sure of his or her fate—as exemplified in the case of Craig Arnold.

When the award-winning American poet disappeared on the Japanese island of Kuchinoerabu-jima in late April 2009, the Japanese launched an intensive search. Investigators traced Arnold’s movements along a trail up a mountain where it is conjectured that he planned to view a volcano. Despite the deployment of police, professional search teams, dogs, and a helicopter for aerial search purposes, no trace of Arnold was located. Evidence found later indicated that Arnold fell, broke his leg, then plunged from a steep cliff into an area with dense forestation. Authorities say there was no possibility Arnold could have survived the fall and, considering the remote location, recovering the body would be dangerous.

In the United States there is no official time frame required for an agency to search for a missing person. Most searches are based on the feasibility of the victim’s survival, as well as the availability of resources. Some searches are brief and successful.

When forty-one-year-old Kenneth Knight of Ann Arbor, Michigan, vanished on the Appalachian Trail in 2009, searchers found him by following a brush fire he lit to attract their attention. Knight, who is legally blind, was uninjured in the brief ordeal, but not all searches end so well. When Shannon Joy Schell went missing while hiking the Tanque Verde Ridge trail in Saguaro Monument East near Tucson, Arizona, in 1994, more than 120 searchers using tracking dogs and the most sophisticated equipment of the day failed to find her, despite a prolonged search. She remains missing to this day.

In countries with fewer resources or unstable governments, the extent of an investigation or search can be disappointing. Officials at the U.S. Department of State say it’s not unusual for the family of the missing person to spring for private search teams out of their own pockets. Some have even paid for police expenses. For others, like Jeff Dunsavage, who searches for his lost brother, Joe Dunsavage Sr., off the coast of the Caribbean island of Roatan, Honduras, the process has proven both frustrating and fruitless.

Thirty-seven miles long and less than five miles wide, Roatan is known for its beautiful beaches, tropical weather, and water sports. A charming place with postcard prettiness, it is populated by the Caracol, an English-speaking mix of European, African, British, and Caribbean peoples. There is also a large expatriate population in the area, as well as a constant river of tourists.

At the time he disappeared, Joe Dunsavage Sr. was neither a tourist nor a resident of Roatan. The forty-nine-year-old New Jersey resident worked as a mortgage banker, but he also had a small glass-bottom boat business on the island, so he traveled to and from the Caribbean on a frequent basis. On May 10, 2009, Joe climbed onto a catamaran to spend a couple of hours in the shallow blue-green waters close to shore. Neither he nor his boat has been seen since.

Joe Dunsavage. Courtesy of the Dunsavage Family.

The family was told Joe had gone fishing, but Jeff says his brother did not take his fishing gear with him.

“The first couple of days we figured we’d find him—either him or his body,” says brother Jeff. But as days dragged into weeks and weeks turned into months, no sign of Joe or the boat ever surfaced. What did surface, however, was a curious story: Jeff says “credible rumors” reached them that at about the same time his brother vanished an American was being treated for dehydration in La Ceiba, a port city located on the country’s northern coast.

“The drift assessments have him making landfall within twenty hours,” Jeff says, pointing out that landing in La Ceiba is in line with those assessments.

A drift assessment is a tool often used by search-and-rescue operations conducted in large bodies of water. It employs science to estimate where the water would carry an object such as a boat, plane, or, in the worst-case scenario, a person. Based upon those projections, Joe’s family believes it possible that Joe could have been the American described in those rumors. How could Joe end up in a hospital and then vanish without a trace? The idea worries Jeff, who thinks the answer could be something better suited to a Robin Cook or Tess Gerritsen novel: he believes his brother could have fallen into the hands of criminals who traffic in illegally harvested human organs for transplants.

“I don’t like to think about it, but I can’t rule it out,” he admits. “With no money on him and no ransom request, what other value could he provide?”

The Dunsavage family has advocated for Joe since the moment they heard he was missing. Jeff says they encountered little assistance from the U.S. Department of State or anyone else from the U.S. government. According to him, no immediate search was launched, but after three days the Dunsavage family managed to secure a little help from the U.S. military. Search aircraft deployed from the U.S. Southern Command (SouthCom), based in Miami. The Blackhawk helicopters failed to find any sign of the missing man or his boat.

The Dunsavage family is a vocal bunch. They don’t believe in treading lightly and haven’t done so in this case. Jeff says they wasted no time contacting their U.S. congressional representatives and insisted someone help them find their son, brother, and father.

“After the military pulled out, the embassy told us they were mobilized and had people on the ground. We thought they were reaching out to the [very large] expat community,” he says. “But there was no indication that was the case. We had to build from the ground up.”

Jeff says they cast a wide net for information, contacting everyone they could think of who might shed light on Joe’s fate. Along the way, he discovered his brother wasn’t the only foreigner to disappear in the area.

“We had the idea that it was this charming Caribbean island. There was this impression that it was fairly safe down there. Then we found that seven [people] have gone missing [recently] and that doesn’t even take into account the murders,” he says.

Jeff points to mysterious vanishings in both Honduras and Costa Rica that he categorizes as “disturbing” and, he charges, not well explored by the U.S. government. Among them is the disappearance of a Chicago-based doctoral student who went missing about three months after Joe.

According to reports, on Tuesday, August 11, 2009, David Gimelfarb parked his rented car at the entrance to the Rincon de la Vieja National Park outside of Liberia, Costa Rica, then entered the rambling 34,800-acre park and vanished like a drop of water on a hot sidewalk.

“You could not just wander off that trail; in places it’s so thick you would need a machete [to walk],” Jeff says. “He vanished without a trace and, like my brother, there’s been no ransom [demand]. [David’s] money and passport were still in the car, securely locked up.”

David’s parents have made several prolonged trips to Costa Rica to search for their son. Thus far, none has proven successful, although there has been at least one report of a sighting of a dirty, homeless man who bore a resemblance to David. Although that lead has not borne fruit, the Gimelfarbs have refused to abandon their search.

Another American searching for a loved one lost in a country south of our border also refuses to quit. Jeff says his friend Cindy Scheepstra, wife of missing Dutch American Ron Scheepstra, continues to search for her missing husband despite discouraging results.

Ron, forty-nine, went missing on April 11, 2009, while on a fishing trip with friends in Xcalak, Mexico. It was an area with which Ron, whose home is in Lufkin, Texas, was very familiar: a longtime sports fisherman, he had visited that wild and remote part of Mexico three times in as many years. On the day he vanished, his friends and fellow fishermen said Ron told them he was going to change locations to fish in a more remote spot in hopes of improving his luck. He has not been seen since.

Both his friends and wife believe Ron was abducted. They say they found nothing at the scene to indicate otherwise. Officials have indicated that they believe Ron may have planned his disappearance, a charge his family disputes. Cindy, his wife, is now stuck in a curious and difficult limbo: the couple was looking forward to retirement and had refinanced their home in order to put in a new swimming pool, according to Jeff Dunsavage. With Ron gone but not declared dead, she can’t sell the house or do anything else with it. Jeff says Cindy works three jobs to make ends meet, while continuing to look for her missing husband.

“Cindy and her daughter flew down to Mexico and where Ron disappeared is a pretty remote area on the Yucatan. The American Embassy told them what bus to take to get there. It’s a $200 bus fare and they didn’t offer them any help at all. Because Ron has dual citizenship, though, the Dutch Embassy provided them with a car and driver and took them to where he went missing. When they got there, they were bullied by local authorities, locked in a room, and made to sign documents in Spanish [that they didn’t understand],” Jeff says.

Jeff says Mexican officials accused Scheepstra of engineering his disappearance and Cindy of helping him. They offered no further assistance to the women.

The car Ron drove was found, but it was worthless in terms of evidence. The authorities in that area have no forensics capabilities, but also, according to Jeff, local police officers drove it around for days. If there had been any evidence to recover from the car, it would have been destroyed.

Jeff believes Americans who go missing in Mexico and Central America do not receive adequate help and support from their government. He says families must struggle with foreign legal systems, corruption, and customs they do not understand. He believes things can be better handled, and that is one of the reasons he founded the Missing Americans Project (www.missing
americans.ning.com).

In the process of obtaining nonprofit status, Jeff says the Missing Americans Project will advocate for improved government response and better attention to the needs of the families of the missing. He claims current official responses are all over the map.

“They say, ‘What do you want us to do?’” Jeff says. “When my brother disappeared, we had to reinvent the wheel throughout our entire experience. Every [other] family we have dealt with has come up with a similar story.”

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According to its Web site, this is the U.S. Department of State’s official policy on “American citizens missing abroad”:

As concerned relatives call in, consular officers use the information provided by the family or friends of a missing person to locate the individual. We check with local authorities in the foreign country to see if there is any report of a U.S. citizen hospitalized, arrested, or is otherwise unable to communicate with those looking for them. Depending on the circumstances, consular officers may personally search hotels, airports, hospitals, or even prisons.