ORIGINAL ARTICLE, PHOTOS, AND MORE INFO CAN BE FOUND HERE:
http://www.indystar.com/article/20110717/LOCAL/107170329/Missing-without-a-trace

Most who disappear never get media attention
9:26 PM, Jul. 16, 2011
Written by John Tuohy

Some names quickly fall into the national memory bank.

Elizabeth Smart; Caylee Anthony; and now, Lauren Spierer.

But the vast majority of missing persons are bound to be forgotten, if they ever get mentioned at all. Despite several high-profile cases recently, most of the missing vanish without a peep of publicity.

One reason is the sheer volume and variety of cases reported to police. Nearly 700,000 people were reported missing in 2010, but only a fraction were gone for more than a few days.

Those who are missing have to compete for finite media coverage, the attention of overworked cops and fickle public tastes. The loved ones who want to find them often discover that what makes headlines can depend on race, class and social status.

"Some of these families just don't know the steps, and they face roadblocks when they try to get a response from the media," said Gaétane Borders, president of Peas in Their Pods, a group that tracks missing black children and adults.

The media glare on Spierer's affluent parents is the exception, not the rule. Most endure the void privately, searching on their own or passing along to detectives any tiny nugget of newly gleaned information that might help end the ordeal.

Heavy caseloads

With six detectives and three supervisors, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department's Missing Persons Unit is typical of many larger departments. In addition to missing persons, the unit receives 3,200 runaway reports a year, 90 noncustodial abandonment cases and five to eight kidnappings.

Of those, the unit handles about 800 reports a year, but only about 45 are open, credible cases, said Capt. Lorenzo Lewis, who oversees the unit.

For example, Detective Karen Dague was assigned 29 cases in June. Only one of those is still open.

"A lot we find within a couple of hours," Lewis said. "And a lot of times the people don't want to be found by the people reporting them missing."

Many of the missing suffer from depression or substance abuse. Others have medical conditions. Some are homeless, by nature a transient population.

In the past few weeks, IMPD found a man at his mother's house in Fort Wayne whose children had reported him missing three weeks ago; found an elderly woman on I-465 who had run out of gas after she went out for a drive; and arrested a man after finding him inside a ransacked home.

"We often find a person who doesn't want to be found," Lewis said. "We track them down and they say, 'Don't tell my family where I am.' They are adults, so they have the right to leave if they want."

The search for attention

Often the families hope publicity will bring help.

When they succeed in getting attention, it is by persistence and nagging. But attention doesn't guarantee anything.

Molly Dattilo was a 23-year-old student at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis when she disappeared in Indianapolis in 2004.

Dattilo's family launched a media blitz six weeks after her disappearance because they were frustrated with the pace of the police investigation. It helped get Dattilo's story out.

"It is up to the family to keep pushing," said Keri Dattilo, 37, Molly's cousin. "You have to keep coming up with new ideas to keep it in the news, anything to get another story out and keep their face in the news."

She said the public pressure also can put heat on police, citing missing Indiana University student Spierer as an example.

"The eyes of the nation are now on the Bloomington Police Department," Keri Dattilo said. "That's the kind of thing that gets law enforcement to really work for you."

But Lewis said police treat all cases equally, regardless of the publicity.

"We work them all the same," he said. "Our progress is determined on how much information we have coming in. But it doesn't have to be on the news for us to work it hard."

And the publicity did not bring Dattilo back.

"We are here 71/2 years later, and we don't have anything more than we did the first day," her cousin said.

However, the family won a small victory in November, when a suspect in Molly's disappearance, John Shelton, was ordered by a Marion Superior Court judge to pay them nearly $3.5 million in damages.

Money, race and influence

Neatrice Billingsly, whose son Jason Thomas Ellis went missing in Indianapolis in 2006 at the age of 20, said race and class have a lot to do with media coverage.

"Unfortunately, people stigmatize each other according to where you are from, what you are and your nationality," said Billingsly, an African-American who lives in Gary. "It's just another black child missing a lot of the time."

She said her son's disappearance got no coverage when it happened, and no search parties were formed. Billingsly said she went looking through trash bins and ponds herself near the spot where he was last seen.

She has since tried to interest the newspapers in Northwest Indiana in her plight, to no avail.

In December, Billingsly came to Indianapolis, passed out fliers and had a news conference. She said four television stations and one radio station covered it.

"I know my son probably is dead," she said. "But I just want to know where he is."

Jonathan Rossing, an assistant professor at IUPUI, said connections, determination and organization play a part in the media coverage. But he said other factors also contribute.

"It has to be a compelling story," Rossing said. "There is a bias toward stories that are unexpected. Where the audience says, 'How can that happen in my neighborhood?' A missing person of color from an impoverished area is not as exciting for a large portion of the audience to hear about, nor do they want to hear about it.

"But it doesn't mean we are all racists, and saying only pretty white girls get coverage is simplistic," he said. "But it does mean we have a bias toward race and class and privilege."

And the poor are often ill-equipped to drum up publicity for their cause.

"If you are from a lower-income family who doesn't have access to a computer or even a telephone," said Borders, the president of Peas in Their Pods, "it can be very frustrating."

Attention comes and goes

Keith Connors, the news director at WTHR (Channel 13), The Indianapolis Star's news-gathering partner, said the determining factor in coverage of missing people is the amount of community interest and involvement.

"In the Spierer case, we are talking about huge search parties, divers and a large amount of involvement by the community," said Connors, who assigned reporters around the clock for two straight weeks to the case. "It is the largest university in Indiana, and a lot of parents of a lot of kids down there wanted to know what's going on."

Dennis Ryerson, editor and vice president of The Star, agreed, saying the Spierer case is of interest to thousands of Hoosier families who send their offspring to college each fall, expecting only good things.

Connors said viewer feedback on WTHR's Facebook page and website has been strong throughout.

"I know there are hundreds of other missing people, and we cover them whenever there is community involvement or the police ask us for assistance," Connors said. "This story had drama and mystery."

He said he'd make no apologies for the wall-to-wall coverage. "I think it was appropriate," Connors said.

Patti Bishop, the stepmother of another longtime missing Indianapolis woman, Karen Jo Smith, said she doesn't begrudge families such as the Spierers who get a lot of attention.

"It is sad, though," that some families don't get any attention, Bishop said. "At some point during the Casey Anthony trial I wanted to say, 'The media is really overdoing it. Can't we use that airtime for some other cases?' "

Smith was 35 when she vanished Dec. 27, 2000. She was last seen at 10:30 p.m. in the 800 block of Weghorst Street on the Near Southside.

Bishop said the family had just begun to gain some media attention for Smith's case when the oxygen got sucked from it in May 2001 by another missing-persons case -- Chandra Levy, an intern in Washington, D.C., who was linked to a U.S. congressman.

"That kind of ended it," she said.

In 2004, Smith's former husband, Steven D. Halcomb, was convicted of murdering her and received a 95-year prison sentence. Her body has never been found.

Bishop went on to found IN Hope, Indiana Missing, an assistance group for families of missing people. The organization, formed in 2006, teaches families of missing people what to expect; explains their rights; and supplies manpower, expertise and technology to help law enforcement agencies with searches.

Though attention comes and goes, Bishop said, the anxiety of not knowing what happened to a loved one never disappears.

"It is like a roller coaster. You have about given up hope that they'll be found, and then something comes up that gives you new hope, a person being found. When it doesn't turn out to be yours, there is new grief," she said. "There is also gratitude that some other family got some answers.

"But to tell the truth, there is a little envy, too."

Call Star reporter John Tuohy at (317) 444-6303.

RELATED LINK:
Indiana Missing Persons file: 1965 - 2011
http://www.indystar.com/interactive/article/20110717/NEWS/110713033/Indiana-Missing-Persons-file-1965-2011

Copyright © 2011 www.indystar.com. All rights reserved.