The Missing Missing

What this episode covers

Our world is built on memory. All of our relationships, even life itself, relies on remembering. It is how we learn, how we trust, how we work, how we create. In moving through each other’s lives, we depend on our friends and family to notice our absence. We depend on being remembered. But sometimes it doesn’t happen that way. Christine Denise James, a little girl whose age can only be estimated as 11 or 12, is just such a case. No one is even sure when she vanished from her home in Coleman, Florida, whether it be 1979 or 1980. Her life had been complicated, abusive, and she had planned on running away because, according to a story told by a friend, she was pregnant. She disappeared, yet she was never reported missing. Kenna Quinet, professor emiritus, author and a noted researcher of homicide, calls these victims “the missing missing”. She extrapolates that an estimated 1.5 million people have disappeared who, for one reason or another, fell through the cracks: foster children and wards of the state, transients, sex workers and the trafficked, addicts, thrownaways, illegal immigrants, seniors whose families have evaporated- a underground of the marginalized whose later connection to a body washed ashore or a skeleton found along the roadside can be impossible to draw, if no one knows- or cares- that you are gone. And it isn’t only the number of missing that is far greater than previously supposed. Recent studies indicate that the number of serial killers at large has also been vastly underestimated, with two researchers claiming at least 2000 active serial killers in the US today, opposed to the FBI’s official statistic of a mere 50. And while much has been made about a supposed decline in serial killing, the nationwide solve rate of homicide cases in the US has dropped as well, to a pitiful 6o percent, one of the very worst clearance rates in the world, leaving plenty of room for predators and killers to operate unimpeded. How can so many people vanish without conclusion or notice? How can statistical analysis of homicide data fill in the blanks? Why are so many homicides going unsolved? How can the most vulnerable be protected? How can the lost be found? This is a story of the less dead and the those that prey upon them, of killer truckers and the coldest trails of all. This is the story of the Missing Missing. And its Past Dark.

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