Article on Missing Persons
PARENTS OF MISSING CHILDREN KE
.. 10/21/01 Publication: The Sunday Gazette Section: Lifestyles Edition:
Final Published: 10/21/01 Page: H-01 Caption: DAVID J. ROGOWSKI Gazette
Photographer J. Douglas Lyall, father of missing Albany student Suzanne
Lyall.

Tammie McCormick
Parents of missing children keep on waiting

Byline: By DAPHNE STEIN
When your child is missing, no news is not good news.
And the parents of Tammie McCormick and Suzanne Lyall say they are tired
of living day to day with no news. They say they just want their daughters
back -- alive or dead.
McCormick vanished in 1986. She was 13 years old.
Lyall disappeared in 1998 a month shy of her 20th birthday.
Both families say that for their own sanity, they try to maintain life as
it was before their daughters disappeared. But no amount of trying to achieve
normalcy can alter the fact that their lives have been indelibly changed.
McCormick's mother, Nancy Hieber, hasn't seen her daughter in more than 15
years. "She's been gone longer than I knew her," Hieber said.
Since that day in mid-April so many years ago, no one -- from the Saratoga
Springs Police to Gerald Nance, the case manager at the National Center for
Missing and Exploited Children in Alexandria, Va., to McCormick's family --
has heard a word from or about her.
Odds are poor that McCormick, who would now be 29, is still alive.
Nance, a "cold case" expert who is assigned disappearances in which few or
no leads exist, said that in 74 percent of cases where a child is abducted by
ch few or a stranger, victims are dead within three hours of being snatched.
Perhaps that's why Hieber said: "I would be happy to find a body." She
knows it doesn't make sense to hope for anything else. "She's not going to
wal knowk in the front door."

Suffering endures

She doesn't articulate those thoughts often, though. Speaking for her
entire family, Hieber said: "We try not to discuss it. When you have
something like this, you think about it every day of your life. Life goes on.
thingYou cannot dwell on it, or I would be so depressed I would not be able
tothing function."
At the same time, however, Hieber said: "It would be wonderful if she is
still alive, but that would be really having my hopes up."
Although McCormick has been missing about four times longer than Lyall,
Lyall's parents, J. Douglas and Mary Lyall, already know the danger of
getting their hopes up.
In a recent interview at their Ballston Spa home, the couple said they
can't put a finger on the worst moment since Suzanne's March 1998
disappearance from Crossgates Mall. One of the worst moments since their
daughter, a University at Albany student, went missing was when a campus
police officer called and said a body fitting Lyall's description had been
found.
"We had to wait four or five days for [police] to identify the body. And
then it turned out not to be her," Doug Lyall said, sinking back into his
chair.
With every new lead, which are getting less frequent, the Lyalls wonder if
this time their suffering will end.
While she waits, Mary Lyall theorizes that Lyall, then 19, might have
become pregnant and gone away in shame. Lyall's disappearance closely
followed the announcement that her older, married sister was expecting.
"We're not disregarding any possibility, because we don't know. In our
minds, anything is possible, including alien abduction," said Doug Lyall, a
retired rehabilitation counselor for the Capital District Psychiatric Center.
Even so, Mary Lyall has trouble accepting that her daughter ran away. "She
left her room as if she was coming back. Her computer was still running. I
can;She 't imagine why she would run away -- why she would hurt us this
long," Mary Lyall said.
The Lyalls said they have heard stories about parents of missing children
dying from the stress of day-to-day life without their loved ones. That is
something they refuse to let happen to them.
"We have to keep ourselves very busy. That's how we do it," Mary Lyall
said.
Activities that have kept the couple busy in recent months include golf
and bowling for Doug, portrait painting and helping friends with wedding
preparations for Mary and, together, establishing a nonprofit foundation
called The Center for Hope. The center will be a resource for families of
missing children, providing services such as grief counseling and a place for
people with similar situations to come together to learn to move on with
life.
Five categories

A case manager at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
said that the Federal Bureau of Investigation's National Crime Information
Center records reports of about 900,000 disappearances each year nationwide.
According to research developed by U.S. Department of Justice, of those
reports, approximately half are runaways. Half of the 463,000 runaways return
within two days.
Missing children cases are placed in five major categories by the National
Crime Information Center:
-- Juvenile -- in which there is no evidence of foul play.
-- Endangered -- defined as missing while in the company of another person
under circumstances endangering the child's physical safety.
-- Involuntary -- defined as missing under circumstances indicating that
the disappearance was not voluntary, such as an abduction.
-- Disability -- defined as a person with a physical or mental disability
who is missing and considered to be in immediate danger.
-- Catastrophe -- defined as a person who has been reported missing
following a disaster.

Statistics for last year provided by the National Center for Missing and
Exploited Children indicated that the number of juvenile cases had gone up
about 0.2 percent over 1999 numbers, for a total of 685,617. Endangered cases
had risen by nearly 6 percent to 120,726, and involuntary disappearances were
down by 1.1 percent to 31,539 cases. Numbers for the other two categories
were not provided.
Statistics on how many nonrunaways are found were not available, but a
variety of search groups have reported success in finding missing people,
children and adults.
That raises the question: Can a person really disappear?
"They really can," said Hieber. "Tammie disappeared from our vision -- we
don't see her, don't know where she is. So she has disappeared."
"We are a living example of someone vanishing," Doug Lyall said.

What parents can do

Hieber and the Lyalls agree that there is no way to emotionally prepare
for the possibility of a child's disappearance.
Parents can, however, prepare physically. Nance recommended having
personal information such as fingerprints and an up-to-date photo on file.
"Two percent of kids who go missing are found alive, even after years,"
Nance noted.
Though they could not provide hard numbers, case managers at the National
Center for Missing and Exploited Children all agreed that the longer the
wait, the worse the odds become of finding a person alive, regardless of how
old the person might have been upon disappearing.
"When a child is missing for a long time, you have to prepare for [the]
eventuality that the child may have to be identified through DNA," he said.
With that in mind, Nance said: "Parents should collect DNA samples from
their children." DNA can be extracted from the roots of hair strands, blood
and the soft inner tissue of teeth, among other sources. Nance suggested
savinod ang a bloody bandage, or keeping a baby tooth in a Zip-loc bag.
It's too late for Hieber and the Lyalls to follow those tips. But these
parents said until they get closure they will continue to talk about their
missing children and let them know, if they're still out there, that their
parents love them and want them home regardless of what they might have done
while missing.
Doug Lyall acknowledged that if his daughter comes home, it will take time
to get used to who she now is. He and his wife would be delighted to cross
that bridge, if only they can get to it.
"We're stuck right now. We need to know [what happened]. That would allow
us to move forward," Doug Lyall said.
Source: Gazette Reporter