Young Women Gone Missing
By JESSICA WEHRMAN
Scripps Howard News Service
Suzanne Lyall was a sweet-faced college sophomore when she was last seen stepping off a city bus at the Albany campus of the State University of New York on March 2, 1998.
Campus police, thinking she'd stayed with a friend, started looking for her, but waited almost 48 hours before telling state police she had disappeared. Her family, stuck in an endless nightmare, argues the time lost was crucial. Lyall has not been found.
Lyall, 19, like Washington, D.C., intern Chandra Levy, 24, presented officers with a challenge many face when dealing with missing persons in their 20s. What's the best way to deal with a missing person who is legally an adult, but socially not unlike a teen-ager?
While some young adults are abducted, others run off, forging a new identity with their newfound independence and money in their pockets. Others kill themselves and are not found for months. Regardless of the circumstance, because they are older than 18, it's often more difficult to find them.
"Every adult has the right to disappear," said Kym Pasqualini, founder of the Center for Missing Adults in Phoenix, Ariz. "And we respect that right."
As of June 1, the FBI was investigating 98,456 missing-persons cases. Most missing persons _ 39,224 _ were ages 15 through 17. The second-largest group _ 17,598 _ was between the ages of 18 and 29. Teens 10 through 14 were the third-largest group _ 14,033.
Missing adults, Pasqualini said, do not get the focus _ or the resources _ that children and teens do.
"When people think of the word 'missing,' they think of children that have been victimized," she said. "It pulls at America's heartstrings. That sensitivity for missing adults is not there."
Pasqualini said missing persons older than 30 are more likely to be men. Missing persons 18 through 30, she said, are more likely to be women.
Andrea Gibby, executive director of Child Quest International, based in San Jose, Calif., said young women are often abducted by acquaintances.
"Often times, young women become very comfortable with people that they meet," she said. "At that age you're not thinking about danger as much as you should. You're just sort of infallible."
Those abducted by strangers, she said, are rarely seen alive again.
Not all missing persons are abducted. Emotional or mental health issues, such as depression, can cause young adults to run away. Cathleen Carolan, marketing manager for the Chicago-based National Runaway Switchboard, said many runaways leave home because of problems with their families. Others simply leave.
"Some kids just decide they're old enough to try this, and see what happens," she said. "It's not typical behavior, but it's not out of the ordinary. Kids just say, 'Let's see what the world is like,' and they go."
Those cases are agonizing for families, said Stephen Miller, deputy director of operations for the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigations.
"There are family members desperate to find out if their loved ones are OK, or all right, or why they vanished off the face of the earth," he said. "The not-knowing issue is probably the toughest thing for the families to deal with."
Because of the right to privacy, those missing do not have to tell loved ones where they are when they are found, said Joe McKey, program administrator for Texas' Missing Persons Clearinghouse.
"You're talking about people 18 to 35, they're not under anyone's thumb," he said. "Is the person missing because he didn't come home from work last night, or was it a child who didn't come home from school?"
Because of this, criteria including disability, catastrophe or endangerment is often required before databases list young adults as missing.
For years, little information was available on missing adults. That might change thanks to the passage of a federal bill last year aimed at establishing a national clearinghouse for information on missing adults. The bill will feed federal funds to Pasqualini's center. It was created after the mother of one missing teen could not receive help from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children because her daughter was 18.
Congress is now trying to find the $1 million a year it will take to pay for the center over four years.
A 1999 New York law requires all colleges and universities to have plans that will allow them to swiftly investigate missing-student cases. Lyall's parents fought for the law.
The federal money brings some relief to Roger Chiang, whose sister, Joyce, 28, disappeared from Washington, D.C., in January 1999. Her body was found in the Potomac River in nearby Northern Virginia three months later. The cause of death remains undetermined.
More than two years after her death, he still wonders if police didn't take the case seriously enough because she was an adult. He is frustrated by FBI suggestions that she killed herself _ they have no evidence to conclude she did, he said.
Teresa Vanderheiden of Clements, Calif., said officials were quick to believe her daughter, Cyndi, ran away when she disappeared in 1998. Cyndi, 25, was at a bar the night of her disappearance. Her car was found the next day in a cemetery.
"The first thing they want to say is she ran away or she just didn't come home that night," Vanderheiden said. "Getting people to pay attention and get it out there that she isn't a runaway, that there definitely was something wrong, was very hard."
Police never found Cyndi Vanderheiden's body, but one man is on death row and another faces trial in her death. Yet Teresa Vanderheiden can't quite say goodbye.
"I still have this hope she'll come walking through the door," she said.
http://www.missingadults.org/
http://www.global2000.net/suzy/
http://www.lodinet.com/cyndi/
http://www.childquest.org
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com)
AP-NY-07-13-01 1403EDT
B>bc-missing-net(sh)

Casting a wide Net in the search for missing persons

Scripps Howard News Service
With NETRESOURCES
With photo/graphic: SH01G204MISSINGNET; SH01G205MISSINGNET
By LISA HOFFMAN
Scripps Howard News Service
She had dark, wildly curly hair, a married boyfriend, and stood on the cusp of a new life. Then, inexplicably, she vanished. Though her parents pressed them to act quickly and focus on the boyfriend, police were slow to investigate.
While those circumstances are similar to aspects of the globally watched Chandra Levy mystery, the 3-year-old unsolved case of missing Staten Island, N.Y., receptionist Anna Marie Scivetti has attracted far less attention.
Scivetti, 35 and petite, disappeared Aug. 10, 1998, after moving out of the apartment she shared with her allegedly abusive boyfriend Charles Chorman. He maintains his innocence in her disappearance and says there's no proof a crime was even committed, even though police strongly suspect foul play. Chorman was the last person Scivetti was known to speak with, and no sign of her has surfaced since.
But on the Internet, Scivetti _ and dozens of other missing adults desperately sought by grieving family and frustrated police _ are very much alive.
FriendsofAnna.com, founded by Scivetti's sister Angel DeRuvo, is an emotional archive of the Scivetti case as well as the cyber-headquarters of DeRuvo's advocacy movement to increase public awareness of missing people, lobby for reform of police practices and help families of those who have disappeared.
"The only way to ensure that the missing aren't forgotten by the community is to provide constant reminders," DeRuvo wrote on the Web site.
Dozens of other sites are devoted to the disappeared. And law-enforcement experts say the Internet offers one of the best tools they now have for disseminating information quickly and widely about the missing _ tacks considered crucial in cracking these notoriously difficult cases.
_Many sites are maintained by families and friends caught in the nightmare limbo of having a missing loved one, in some cases for five, 10, 20 years. A co-worker of Jodi Huisentruit, a 27-year-old Iowa television news anchor who failed to arrive for work June 27, 1995, and has been missing since, dutifully updates the Web chronicle of her case and reminds the world she still has not been found.
"6/27/01 _ 6 years _ still no answers," is the latest entry on the site. (http://showcase.netins.net/web/keithh)
_ Virtually every major police department _ and many smaller ones _ have their own missing-person sites displaying photos and descriptions of the cases they are trying to solve and requesting the public's help.
The Belmont, Calif., police department, for instance, highlights the Oct. 14, 1996, disappearance of Ylva Hagner, 42, a product manager at a Palo Alto, Calif., software company and a Stanford University graduate student. Her car was found abandoned near a small motel a few days later but she has never been heard from since. (http://www.belmont.gov/localgov)
_ The FBI has one, too, where Levy ranks No. 1 on the current 20-person roster. (http://www.fbi.gov/). Also on the list is Kristin Denise Smart, 19, who was last seen at 2 a.m., May 25, 1996, when was walking back to her dorm room at California State Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo from an off-campus party. Wearing black surfing shorts and a cropped T-shirt, Smart had neither money, credit cards nor identification with her. Police suspect foul play.
_ Several nonprofit operations have established cyber-clearinghouses that link inquiries from worried families with police information.
One is Missing Persons Throughout the World, a one-man Web site fueled by occasional donations from grateful relatives. Ken Richards, a former British coroner's and crime-scene investigator who now is a Web designer in Portage, Mich., has developed his site into a clearinghouse that police and families around the world turn to as an informal central databank.
The free site _ http://www.mispers.com _ gets 200 to 300 visits a day, with nearly 200,000 in all since Richards launched it in 1998.
As a resource for law enforcement and families, the Internet is "absolutely superb," serving as a worldwide alert system that can solve a case in a fraction of the time it took in pre-Internet times, Richards said. It is especially useful in matching unidentified bodies with missing people.
Kathy Kupka also calls the Internet a godsend. Her sister, Kristine Kupka, 28 and pregnant by her boyfriend and former Baruch College teacher, disappeared on Oct. 24, 1998. She had left Kathy a phone message that she was going to help her married boyfriend clean his new Queens, N.Y., apartment. She was last seen walking off with boyfriend Darshanand "Rudy" Persaud. No sign of her has surfaced since.
Kristine, who had told her sister that Persaud feared her pregnancy would ruin his life and begged her to have an abortion, intended to raise the child alone. Still, Kristine harbored some fear that Persaud might take matters into his own hands, Kathy Kupka said.
Even so, it took New York police five days to even begin to investigate Kristine's disappearance. Neither Persaud nor anyone else has ever been charged. Frustrated, Kathy Kupka put up a billboard on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, offering a $25,000 reward for information.
In February, she also created a Web site _ http://www.kristinekupka.com _ full of photos, details of the case, suggestions for getting involved and links to other missing-persons Web sites.
"It's incredible. We've already had 20,000 hits," Kathy Kupka said. Not only is she heartened that word of her sister's sad fate has been so widely spread, but encouraged by the messages of hope that have poured in from strangers around the world.
"It really makes me feel so good that people really care," Kathy Kupka said. "It makes me feel Kristine is not forgotten."