The Last Place You'd Look (27 page)

In Florida, an eleven-year-old girl with Asperger syndrome disappeared in a swamp infested with alligators near her Winter Springs home. Searchers blanketed the area, but after four days even the most optimistic among them discounted the chances of finding Nadia Bloom alive and unharmed.

Sometimes things do go right: a volunteer who attends church with the Bloom family spotted the little girl on a dry patch of land in the swamp. Nadia was dehydrated and covered in bug bites but otherwise fine. It was the happy ending for which her family had prayed.

Three years earlier the prayers of another family were answered when rescuers discovered a starving and fragile Ora Doris Anderson just days shy of the memorial service scheduled on behalf of the missing seventy-six-year-old woman. Ora vanished in the wilderness of the Wallowa Mountains in Oregon in what rescuers described as “extremely rough terrain.” She had spent thirteen days without food or water in thick brush. Although she sustained a hip injury, medical authorities said Ora was in good shape for someone who had spent the better part of two weeks unable to move.

Ora and her husband, Harold, were on an elk-hunting trip when their truck became stuck in the mud. The couple started to walk for help, but Ora became fatigued and turned back to wait in the truck. She lost her way and ended up stranded, spending evenings in temperatures that plunged into the thirties.

Harold later told the press that he would never hunt elk again.

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Some reunions between searchers and the lost are bittersweet. Parents can’t help but mourn the time that was stolen from them along with their children. But getting their loved ones back alive trumps everything else. For others, finding a missing family member, even though the outcome is not good can be a relief. It lets the family complete the circle, no matter how sorrowful the journey.

Although it may seem counterintuitive to include the recovery of the body of a missing person in a chapter about happy endings, for families who already are aware that the outcome will not be good, finding their loved ones’ remains can help them move on with their lives. As Sharon DeLuke, whose ordeal in losing her son Ron was described in chapter 10, puts it, “Knowing was terrible, but not knowing was worse.”

To the families of lost loved ones whose bodies were never recovered in times of war, the simple act of bringing them home for proper burial is monumental. The case of Michael Blassie illustrates how science is helping to bring our boys home, where they belong.

Blassie was a first lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force when he was shot down in 1972 while on a mission over South Vietnam. The twenty-four-year-old was an Air Force Academy graduate from St. Louis, Missouri, who came from a close-knit family of five children.

Although attempts were made to find Blassie after the crash of his A-37B Dragonfly, they were unsuccessful. Later, South Vietnamese army troops discovered human remains and artifacts that, because of their location, could have belonged to the missing pilot. But tests were inconclusive and rather than rule the remains as Blassie’s without sufficient scientific proof, they were placed in the Tomb of the Unknown at Arlington National Cemetery in 1984.

As time and scientific know-how progressed and the use of DNA to identify human remains became more refined and standardized, Blassie’s family asked that the remains in the Tomb of the Unknown be tested. The results were a positive match against family DNA. In 1998, more than a quarter of a century after his death, Michael Blassie was buried in Jefferson National Cemetery, a stone’s throw from where this true American hero spent his childhood.

Michael Blassie is not the only American service member to be identified and returned to his family through the application of DNA testing. Stories of remains found in Vietnam and Laos that are matched with identities surface all the time. The U.S. Armed Forces make identifying their lost service members a priority. They now have a method to ensure that those killed in the service of their country are identified.

Since 1992, the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology has built and maintained a DNA registry that holds DNA samples of all personnel serving on active duty. The registry, established due to problems that arose from matching human remains during the Gulf War, will prevent situations like the one faced by the Blassie family from recurring.

The DNA is maintained in a huge warehouse located in Rockville, Maryland. Stored as tiny blood samples, they are kept in vacuum-sealed envelopes and frozen to ensure their integrity.

Officials say the samples will be used only for identification purposes, but they are sometimes asked to compare DNA for missing service members whose disappearances are not connected to a military action. The DNA is not released, however, and the comparisons are done on-site. DNA samples are maintained for at least fifty years and are not released to law enforcement, except by court order.

Although he was not a member of the U.S. Armed Forces, DNA helped another family put to rest a loved one who had been missing for six decades. Joseph Van Zandt, a merchant marine who died in a plane crash in Alaska on March 12, 1948, was identified through his mother’s familial DNA.

Van Zandt was one of twenty-four merchant marines who were passengers on a flight from China to New York City when the DC-4 they were in crashed into the side of Mount Sanford. The plane, its passengers, and six crew members vanished on a nearby glacier.

Fifty-one years later, two pilots—Marc Millican and Kevin McGregor—would discover mummified remains. The remains—a mummified arm and hand—were turned over to Alaskan authorities. Although attempts were made to identify them, they proved unsuccessful. But in 2006, through new techniques, usable mitochondrial DNA was obtained.

Because thirty individuals perished on that flight fifty-eight years ago, finding relatives with whom to compare the DNA was a formidable task. Forensic genealogists working on the case tracked down family members connected to sixteen of the victims but there were no matches. In the meantime, scientists worked to rehydrate the fingers in order to secure a fingerprint match—the merchant marines’ fingerprints were still on file at Arlington’s National Marine Center. After all those years, they were able to identify the remains as belonging to Van Zandt. A DNA comparison to a relative they located made the ID complete, and the remains could be brought home to rest.

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Every case in which a missing person is found has an angel of some sort. In some it’s an observant witness, in others a dedicated investigator. Many times it’s a family member who refuses to give up—like Heather Miller.

Heather’s cousin “Mike” grew up on the West coast, while she calls Pennsylvania home. Heather says she always knew Mike suffered from mental illness and the two weren’t close growing up, but he’s family, and when his life turned upside down, she made it her business to find him and assume the role of his advocate. A social worker by profession, Heather understands the system better than most.

Mike’s current problems began after his mother passed away and his father became very ill. Unable to cope, he vanished. When she couldn’t locate Mike, Heather filed a police report with authorities in the town where he lived.

“We were lucky they found him,” Heather says of his disappearance, but her relief would not last long. Unstable and incapable of making good decisions, Mike then bounced from one apartment to another. Then he made the decision to leave home and travel to Pennsylvania to see Heather.

Once again Mike disappeared from the radar for several months, resurfacing in a state where he had no real ties. Heather tracked Mike there and tried to stay abreast of his situation, which changed almost daily and included incarceration. Her biggest fear was that he would disappear again.

“Most of his arrests stemmed from trespassing. He has an inability to get food and shelter. He didn’t understand when he was doing the wrong thing,” Heather says.

She says some of the police both she and Mike dealt with were great—and others not so much. “Many don’t really understand how to deal with people with paranoid schizophrenia,” Heather says.

“Back then, everyone told me I should not get involved with this: he has a brother; he has a sister. Everyone said it was going to be a nightmare. The homeless advocacy people told me, ‘Do you know what it is like, keeping an eye out for him, but probably not being able to do anything?’” she says.

Heather secured a good lawyer through the local bar association and she was able to gain emergency conservatorship of Mike. By becoming his guardian, she also waded into more red tape than she ever imagined.

“I understand why family members back off from this. It took about a year [to obtain permanent guardianship]. I got emergency guardianship three times before I obtained it permanently. He had to be served the petition in person, and we only knew where he was for sure when he was in jail. As it turned out, he was kind of grateful someone was willing to be involved,” Heather says.

Despite the bureaucratic issues that accrue with her guardianship of Mike and the struggle to keep him from vanishing again, Heather persists. Heather has flexed her social worker’s muscles to help her cousin: she managed to get records of his visits to emergency rooms, shelters, and hospitals. Most followed a pattern of him asking for help and getting something short of what he needed: a bus pass, a cursory examination, a bed for the night—a short-term patch job instead of a real, long-term fix.

Heather knows that Mike will vanish forever or die on the streets without substantial intervention. People who are homeless and have no one to advocate for them often don’t stand a chance, and that is even truer in places where the winters are long and harsh and the facilities for the homeless in short supply.

“They take most people into the shelter there on cold nights. However, if you’re asked to leave, then you can’t go back for four months. So I asked, ‘Where do people go?’ The response I got was, ‘I don’t know,’” says Heather.

Mike is different from some of the homeless and mentally ill, though. His family has managed to keep up with him and remains his advocate. Although Heather says that while sorting out all of the bureaucratic red tape associated with her cousin’s problems is like handling flypaper, she persists, and because of that persistence, she also makes progress.

Throughout her efforts to help Mike lead a safe, productive life, Heather has run into government roadblocks, particularly where privacy issues are concerned. Heather went to deal with the issue on Mike’s home turf. She received help from Libba Phillips’s organization, Outpost for Hope (www
.outpostforhope.org). Outpost for Hope works with families of missing persons who fall into several categories neglected by traditional agencies, including the homeless, mentally ill, and substance abusers. Now Heather has reason to believe that she will one day settle Mike in a safe and loving environment where he can live out his life without fear.

“I’m not a hero, just a cousin doing the right thing. If I don’t do it, who will?” Heather asks.

Although he is a work in progress, Mike is a success story because, as a result of Heather’s devotion to his cause, he went from missing to found. And Heather has no plans to give up on Mike, even though many tell her she is “crazy for doing this.”

“It’s the right thing to do,” she says.

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For Marco Alcalde, the right thing to do was to never stop searching for his missing son. And on Tuesday, March 30, 2010, Marco boarded a flight to Managua, Nicaragua, as part of the last leg of a sixteen-month journey to find and bring the boy, MaxGian (pronounced Max-Jon), back home to Boise, Idaho. Father and son were reunited in that Central American country after federal agents, following a lead, found the child there with his noncustodial mother.

MaxGian is an adorable little boy with bright blue eyes, brown hair, a shy smile, and an affinity for baseball. After an acrimonious divorce, a judge awarded Marco and his ex-wife joint custody of their only child. On November 26, 2008, Marco dropped his son at school, where later in the day his mother, Margaret Sanchez Meija Dunbar Alcalde, picked him up for a twelve-day visit. It was right before Thanksgiving and MaxGian told Marco that his mother, who goes by the nickname of Maika, was taking him to visit family friends in Nevada. They never made it.

Marco believed that Maika, fluent in Spanish and well traveled, had left the country. After filing a missing persons report, Marco concentrated his search south of the U.S. border.

“My ex-wife speaks five languages. She has traveled all over the world. She has money, intelligence, and the skills to survive,” Marco says. He knew finding Maika and MaxGian would be daunting. It was.

Marco retained an attorney. He pushed authorities to look for MaxGian. And he set up a Web site that displayed the child’s photograph and also tracked the ISP addresses of those who frequented the site.

“We were sure [Maika] was hitting the Web site and tracking what was going on, but she was using technology that hid where she was,” he says.

Marco says he knew Maika would watch what he was doing from a distance. “It is human nature to look over your shoulder,” he says. He hoped she would slip up and make a mistake.

A mechanical engineer by profession, Marco approached his son’s abduction and recovery with the analytical skills and precision he uses to earn his living. Marco says he survived with support from his friends and neighbors and he held regular brainstorming sessions with them.

“That was very helpful. It was a very emotional time and I was looking for action. I wanted activity; I wanted motion,” he says.

False leads and dead ends piled up, especially in the first year. “It was very draining. I cried every day,” Marco says. “You have to let the emotions out. If you don’t, if you pretend [it doesn’t bother you], then it will destroy you.”

During the lengthy investigation, Marco traveled to both Costa Rica and Panama in search of MaxGian. He also hired private investigators, talked to hundreds of people, and continued his Internet campaign. Then someone came forward with information on MaxGian’s whereabouts.