By MATTHEW RICH and
VERONICA ANDERSON
Keri Bray walked away from an Orem care center in 1986, claiming he wanted to go be a cowboy. He was found almost 21 years later, working as a cattle hand on a Texas ranch. Elizabeth Smart was taken from her home in Salt Lake City in the middle of the night and was rescued from her two kidnappers nine months later, after a citizen recognized her and notified police.
In missing person cases, no two victims are alike. The difference between a missing and a located person is often determined by the collaborative efforts of law enforcement and concerned citizens.
The search process starts locally and broadens gradually to involve multiple states, several investigative agencies and specialized resources, much like a net that grows larger over time, with threads that grow closer together as more experts join the hunt. This hunt begins the moment a missing person is reported and doesn’t end until the person has been found.
Many law enforcement specialists say the first 24 hours are the most important in gathering information that may tell them a person’s whereabouts.
“The quicker we receive the information, the quicker we can determine whether that person is endangered,” said Detective Dennis McGowan of the Salt Lake City Police Department.
Some people are under the misconception a person’s whereabouts must be unknown for 72 hours before they can legally be classed as missing, said Ronda Godard, a private investigator and the owner of ICU Investigations in Murray. This is rarely the case, Godard said, especially in situations where there is any evidence of violence or foul play.
“There’s no exact time limit that you’re supposed to wait before you report someone missing,” said Sergeant Fred Ross of the Salt Lake City Police Department. “It all depends on the circumstances and no two cases are the same.”
The system followed for a missing person changes based on whether the person in question is a child or an adult, Sergeant Ross said. But there are different pathways that evolve for each case.
“Protocol for an adult is based on individuals, timelines and things like that,” said Sergeant Mark Sharman, a homicide detective with the Salt Lake City Police Department.
“A lot of it will have to do with the history of the kid,” Sharman said.
In the case of a child who has no history of similar problems, Godard said, people may want to start worrying after as few as five hours, especially if every conceivable effort has been made to locate the child on their own and they have not been found.
Law enforcement officials have a series of questions they ask to determine if a missing person is in danger that ultimately helps them decide to start a search.
But endangered missing people are not the only ones who should be reported to local police.
There are many different types of cases that fall under the greater category of “missing persons”, said Special Agent John Wright of the FBI’s Provo field office. In the state of Utah, these cases are broken up into the following types: missing disabled, missing catastrophe, missing endangered, missing involuntary, missing juvenile and other.
The most common types of missing people, Godard said, are missing juveniles (or runaways) and missing “others.” These “others,” Godard said, are usually just regular people who decide, for one reason or another, to simply leave their daily routines abruptly without notifying anyone.
“Lots of people go missing every day,” Wright said. “I guarantee that every day, the Provo PD gets a handful of calls reporting people missing who have just decided to leave for a while.”
Surprisingly, this practice is not only common, but also completely legal if the person missing is over the age of 18.
“It’s really not illegal to go missing if you’re an adult,” Sharman said. “People do it all the time.”
However, if someone disappears into thin air and their disappearance seems out of character for them, they might belong in another category of missing person, said Nate Carlyle, a crime reporter for the Salt Lake City Tribune.
“It’s actually pretty rare that someone will walk away and never talk to their family again,” Carlyle said.
If the case involves a missing child, there are many measures in place to ensure it reaches top priority with law enforcement agencies across the board, Wright said.
An Amber Alert is one of the most common alert systems for tracking down missing children — or people under the age of 18 — who are not suspected runaways.
In the case of small children Wright said the FBI uses the Child of Tender Years Policy, which puts a priority label on small child abductions.
“We’ll pull out all the stops to help with those types of investigations,” he said.
Child Abduction Response Teams (or CARTs) are used frequently by multiple law enforcement agencies and are effective in missing child cases, Sharman said.
“Children are always placed in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children database, so they can be picked up even in different states,” Sharman said.
In addition to the myriad programs set up to inform the public and help locate missing people, law enforcement agencies have a long history of collaborating and sharing resources to find those who are lost, Wright said.
“We typically work in concert with local police agencies,” Wright said, adding they will even call in the FBI. But he made it clear the FBI is meant to help police with the investigation, not to take over.
“Don’t believe what you see on TV,” he said.
When families can afford it, private investigators are also hired to be the family’s eyes and ears during an investigation, or even to begin their own investigation on the side, Godard said.
“Private investigators can have more of a personal stake in the case,” Godard said. “The personal involvement helps them do a better job, whereas cops can’t afford to be too emotionally involved because they have a handful of cases.”
Godard said her company works mostly with runaways, tracking them down on behalf of concerned parents.
“We don’t have a lot of time or resources to handle most runaway cases,” said Lieutenant Greg Willmore of Utah’s Department of Public Safety.
Though hiring a private investigator doesn’t necessarily guarantee the case will be solved more quickly or efficiently, families seem to feel more hopeful and less helpless with their own man on the case, Godard said.
Regardless of which agency has jurisdiction in a given case, once the person is reported missing the process of locating them begins immediately.
“If someone reports a child missing, we’re going to start by interviewing family and checking with friends,” McGowan said.
The investigation branches out from there, Sharman said, widening into an intensive inter-agency search, which doesn’t end until they figure out what happened and where the person is now.
“A missing person case is not closed until that person is located, dead or alive, and it goes to trial,” said Lara Jones, a spokeswoman for the Salt Lake City Police Department.
Sometimes, Ross said, the gaps in the investigative net are filled in by regular, everyday citizens.
“In some cases, the average citizen can become the searcher,” Ross said.
Recently, Ross said, there was a case in Magna where a car was stolen, but unknown to the thief there was a young boy inside. Fortunately, the thief soon realized her mistake and left the car on the side of the road with the child still inside.
Because a local citizen had heard about the Amber Alert on the radio and decided to go looking, the car and the boy were found and he was returned safely to his family.
“You have to have the info that the public can help follow up on, such as a description of the vehicle, or abductor,” Sharman said.
Ross said he has seen complete strangers prevent a child from being abducted, merely by staying vigilant to their surroundings.
“Pay attention to the freeway signs and listen to the radio for Amber Alerts,” Ross said. “If you see an adult with a child and you suspect there’s something not right, call immediately.”
If a person is concerned and wondering whether to report someone known to be missing, police say that it’s better to err on the side of overly cautious.
“You should never feel like your concerns are invalid, just because you’re not sure,” McGowan said. “It’s better to report them to us and let us use our years of experience to decide whether or not a person is really in danger.”
Copyright Brigham Young University 2 Jun 2009
