Amateur Sleuths Name Anonymous Dead

This is a shameless plug. Running this weekend is an Associated Press article about The Doe Network. I am included in this article - but this is not about me. It's about why that article includes me and others like me who are desperately searching for clues to bring closure to families with missing persons and to identify the nameless dead and bring them home.

The still-unidentified toddler, known locally as "DuPage Johnny Doe", is mentioned in the article. Not mentioned are the thousands of other Illinois missing persons and the hundreds of unidentified dead. Sometimes their cases are profiled briefly in the media - some cases become media magnets - and still others never get a mention.

At Doe Network, the cases are the same - a missing person that needs to be found and reunited with loved ones, an unidentified body, stumbled upon and examined, with no clues as to identity. Our members search just as hard for each and every one.

Helen O'Neill's article provided a glimpse into the lives of a few of our members, but there are hundreds more behind the scenes, not mentioned but who's work is as tireless, as important and as needed.

Area Directors across the U.S. and internationally reach out to law enforcement and other agencies for information needed to update the databases of the missing and the unidentified. I am blessed here in Illinois to have a number of law enforcement officials that provide assistance and support. I am grateful for each and every one of you.

It is my fervent hope that more Illinois agencies will be compelled by Helen's article to join the rest of their peers here in supporting our efforts by giving us access to their cases involving missing persons and unidentified bodies so that our members can begin the work of sending them home.

Johnny Doe Tribute

Producer: "Help Me Find Them" in association with The Doe Network

He is "Dupage Johnny Doe"...for now. Somewhere he has a mother and father - siblings, perhaps. Maybe grandparents or aunts and uncles, cousins. Somewhere a neighbor passed him on the street, a clerk in a store smiled at him or a stranger patted his head. He would have been learning to speak - spanish perhaps or english. He probably had a favorite toy or a favorite blanket -but none accompanied him.

He was dressed in blue Faded Glory pants and a matching shirt and placed in a blue canvas laundry bag and abandoned on the side of a road..2 years ago. He was found on October 8th, 2005. Since then investigators with the Dupage County Sheriff's Office have worked tirelessly to identify him.

As a parent, I cannot fathom how this little boy could have been discarded but it's not my place to judge how or why it happened. Someone needs to do the right thing now. This little boy didn't live in a vacuum - someone came in contact with him. Extended family, family friends, neighbors, a store clerk, a nurse...someone has to realize that he is no longer where he should be. Someone needs to make the call - as heart wrenching, as painful as it might be - it's the right thing to do.

Now, he will be buried, surrounded by some of the people that have tried so hard to give him back his given name.

Funeral services will be held Monday, October 15, 2007 at 2:00 PM at Assumption
Cemetary, 1 S 610 Winfield Road, Wheaton Illinois.

One of my fellow Doe Network members has put her incredible spiritual presence into the video you see here - her tribute to this child - and it is my fervent hope that someone will find the strength and the courage within it and themselves to finally make the call that gives this little boy back his identity.

He is someone's child.

Valina McGhee - A Child Forgotten

Valina McGhee is missing. Google her name and you get zero hits. Searching the Chicago newspaper archives resulted in one mention - a 2001 article by Chicago Tribune news reporter, Kim Barker. Valina's disappearance was 3 sentences long in a story on Chicago's missing children:

And on June 28, 1989, Valina McGhee, 13, never came back to the South
Side home she shared with her mother. Her name and a few sketchy details linger
in the Chicago Police Department's files. But her disappearance never made it to
the news. She never made it into the state database of missing children, never
landed in the log of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children--an
oversight that police can't explain.

Ms. Barker went on to explain that, "Back then, the police and the public had just started changing their attitudes toward such cases, in large part due to efforts by John Walsh, whose son was kidnapped from a Florida shopping mall and murdered in 1981. His work launched the national clearinghouse for information on missing children."

The article that mentions Valina McGhee was written 20 years after the disappearance of Adam Walsh; seventeen years after the establishment of the NCMEC. The police couldn't explain how Valina was overlooked when the reporter did her story in 2001. Can they explain it now, another six years later? Valina is still not in NCMEC. She could be. "Better late than never" was the reply I received when I whined to Jerry Nance, Cold Case Manager at NCMEC.

I called around, trying to get someone to give me some details on Valina - maybe a picture forgotten in the meager file that remains in some storage box held by the Chicago Police....some stats, something....I couldn't get anyone to help me.

I want to add Valina to the cases of the too many missing on The Doe Network. I want to see her entered as a missing child into NCIC and NCMEC. I want Valina's family to know that we care - we care about Valina and we care about them. I'd like to ask them to contribute DNA to include in the national CODIS database for families of the missing - maybe Valina's DNA is already there.

I'm not bashing the Chicago police. I've had many good friends that were or still are among their ranks. I've met some wonderful men and women who go above and beyond in serving this city. They are overworked and understaffed and there are too many cases. But someone has let Valina down...for eighteen years. It's time we made up for that.

If she's alive, Valina is 31 years old. The chances are more likely that she is not...but if she is among the nameless dead we have no hope of finding her unless we recognize that she is among the missing. She is someone's child.