The Last Place You'd Look (18 page)

Privacy Act—The provisions of the Privacy Act are designed to protect the privacy and rights of Americans, but occasionally they complicate our efforts to assist citizens abroad. As a rule, consular officers may not reveal information regarding an individual American’s location, welfare, intentions, or problems to anyone, including family members and Congressional representatives, without the expressed consent of that individual. Although sympathetic to the distress this can cause concerned families, consular officers must comply with the provisions of the Privacy Act.

Michelle Bernier-Toth, director of American Citizen Services and Crisis Management for the U.S. Department of State, admits that sometimes there is little the State Department can do in missing persons cases. But she says she understands the mixed reviews.

“A lot of it depends on host country capability. We obviously do not have . . . the resources or the capabilities or the expertise to conduct missing persons searches,” says Bernier-Toth.

Bernier-Toth says the State Department receives thousands of calls every year from worried relatives who cannot find or contact family overseas. State Department consular officials do their best to locate the individual and report back to the families. Most of the reports turn out to be unfounded—a student who fails to call his mom or a case of crossed wires. The staff also takes into consideration the circumstances surrounding the individual’s disappearance: is there anything that lends special urgency to the search?

“Someone who is hiking in a remote area—that is a great concern. Someone who is a tourist wandering through Prague, perhaps not as much,” she explains.

Sometimes the strain of travel can bump travelers out of their comfort zones, causing them to wander off the grid. Schedules are off, tempers are strained, and important medications are neglected.

“The most common subject of our welfare and whereabouts calls are those who have mental illnesses and whose families are concerned,” she says.

While some, like Jeff Dunsavage, believe the government doesn’t do enough to help the families of those who turn up missing, Bernier-Toth points out that consular officials are constrained by both privacy laws and the laws of foreign countries from doing many things.

If, for instance, an individual chooses to disappear and he is located, the State Department cannot force that person to contact his family, return, or even pass pertinent information along without his permission.

“We may, at least initially, be circumspect with the information we provide back to you. If we locate your loved one . . . we will do as much as we can within the Privacy Act. We will urge them to contact the family, but sometimes they don’t want to be found,” she says. “That’s the fine wire that we walk.”

She says consular officials take a caseworker approach to their search for the missing. They use their contacts to check hotels, hospitals, morgues, tourist bureaus, and other places that might shed light on the individual’s whereabouts. But, as she points out, consular officials are not law enforcement officers and have no jurisdiction or investigative powers in foreign countries.

When a member of the U.S. Armed Forces disappears in a foreign country while on official duty, that service’s intelligence or criminal investigations unit will conduct a search there in conjunction with local authorities. There is no comparable organization for civilians, but sometimes the FBI becomes involved in these cases. In fact, each embassy has a legal attaché who is often also an agent for the FBI.

In the case of MaxGian Alcalde (see chapter 12), a child from Idaho who was allegedly abducted by his mother and taken to Nicaragua, both the U.S. Embassy and FBI were involved in the boy’s recovery and return to his father. Other American law enforcement agencies may also assist with a missing persons investigation.

“In Latin America we have a strong narcotics program, and that’s a resource where we can say, ‘While you’re out there talking to local authorities on the ground in various places could you put out the word?’ [We] try and use it as a force multiplier,” says Bernier-Toth.

Not every country wants to cooperate in a missing persons investigation. Like the victims’ families, the consular staff sometimes runs into
roadblocks that, depending on the sophistication of the nation and its relationship with the United States, can range from red tape to ignoring staff efforts.

“We keep pushing, we keep trying, and sometimes resources are very limited in those countries, and it’s really hard,” she says.

Complaints about the U.S. Department of State’s response—or lack of response—to missing persons abroad often grow out of frustration with the system. Adding to that frustration is the task of dealing with foreign customs and laws. Victims’ families are not coping with one bureaucracy but several. And the more rural and unsophisticated the area in which a loved one vanishes, the more devilish the investigation can become.

Nations like Laos, China, Syria, Somalia, and Indonesia can be difficult and dangerous for travelers. Increasing violence in some South and Central American counties also creates unsafe conditions for those who travel alone. But communist and emerging nations and countries with growing criminal elements aren’t the only places American travelers disappear. They also vanish from the streets of sophisticated cities like Rome, London, Paris, and Madrid. In fact, one of the most famous unsolved missing persons cases in Ireland is that of American-born Annie Bridget McCarrick, a twenty-six-year-old who lived in Dublin, Ireland, and disappeared on March 26, 1993. Almost two decades and many searches later, she remains unfound.

Annie, who is from New York’s Long Island, moved to the British Isles and studied to become a teacher in 1987. She came back to the United States for three years and returned to Ireland in January 1993. A police investigation revealed that on the day she disappeared, Annie took a bus to Enniskerry to visit the Wicklow Mountains. Her case remains open. Some believe her disappearance is linked to an unsolved series of homicides in the area, but nothing has been proven.

Annie’s disappearance is not the only one to confound modern, municipal European police agencies. In Florence, birthplace of the Renaissance and a mecca for art students, Matthew Allen Mullaney disappeared following a night spent relaxing with friends. The Scituate, Massachusetts, native was studying art in the Italian city when he vanished after leaving a local Irish pub. Although his family has not ceased searching for Matt, who was born November 5, 1981, and went missing January 31, 2003, like Annie McCarrick, his disappearance remains an enduring mystery.

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Americans are not alone in vanishing from foreign soil. It is a worldwide problem. Each year, for example, hundreds of Britons vanish while visiting other countries—in some cases, the United States.

According to the U.S. Department of State, there are no statistics that track the number of Americans who go missing in a foreign country in a given year. The British do a better job of tallying those numbers: in 2008, 481 Brits disappeared abroad, an increase from 401 the previous year and 336 in 2006. Some of the families of missing British citizens are as unhappy with their government’s efforts as their American counterparts, but the family of Eddie Gibson, which has been working with both the British Foreign Office and the Suffolk Police, believes their government has done a good job.

Eddie, who hails from Hove, England, disappeared in Cambodia when he was twenty-two. His mother, Jo Clark, discovered her son was missing on November 1, 2004, when she and Eddie’s father went to Heathrow Airport to meet his plane.

“I was so excited to see him,” Jo remembers. After his flight landed she watched as the crowds began to exit the baggage area. As she waited for her son to appear, Jo says she began to experience a growing disquiet.

“After the last person had gone through . . . there was just emptiness. I dashed over to the Thai Airways ticket desk to ask them about Eddie. They looked at the manifest of the flight, and although Eddie’s name was on it, they told me he did not check in at Bangkok Airport. My heart [sank],” Jo says.

A handsome, strapping fellow more than six feet tall with indigo blue eyes, Jo says Eddie is an affable guy who received high marks in school and was popular with the girls. “He was often in trouble but he always smiled his way out of any tricky situations,” Jo says.

The family has made nine trips to Cambodia to search for Eddie. They’ve appeared on television and given dozens of interviews. All of that publicity has generated many tips, but thus far none of them has panned out. In addition, detectives from the Suffolk Police also traveled to Cambodia in 2006 to join forces with Thai police in their search for Eddie.

“The hardest part for me was not knowing where to start,” she says. “The whole experience has just been one big nightmare.”

Intelligence Officer Arianna Stucchi of the United Kingdom Missing Persons Bureau says families like Eddie Gibson’s have a number of nonprofits to which they can turn when crisis strikes.

“In the U.K. there are many agencies and NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] dedicated to helping families of the missing. We have, for instance, the charity Missing Abroad (www.missingabroad.org). This is a charity that has been created from individuals that have unfortunately experienced such an ordeal [and] . . . have created this charity to support those left behind. They are especially well informed on ways of getting [the] families of [the] missing to the country [where] the individual vanished from and helping them deal with such a traumatic time.” Stucchi says other charities include Children and Families across Borders (CFAB), Missing People, Reunite, and International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), and all can be found on the Web.

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“Nightmare” is the most accurate term used to describe what American Amy Bradley’s family and friends have been going through since the twenty-three-year-old disappeared from a family cruise.

The Bradley family was aboard the
Rhapsody of the Seas
, a Royal Caribbean Cruise Line ship out of Miami when they docked at Curacao, Netherlands Antilles, and found that Amy—a recent college graduate with a bright future—had vanished. That was March 24, 1998, and there is still no sign of the athletic, gregarious Amy. Her family says she had many plans for her future and no reason to leave. There has been some speculation that Amy could have been kidnapped and sold in the sex trade, but that allegation has never been substantiated.

While not common, cruise ship disappearances also are not all that rare. Since most of these disappearances take place in international waters or when the ships are docked in foreign ports, the victims’ families must not only deal with other governments, but also with the cruise companies. These companies do not welcome the scrutiny such incidents bring to their businesses.

In 2008, sources report cruise ship operators officially documented thirty unexplained disappearances on their ships in the preceding five years. While the numbers may seem small compared to disappearances on land, for the families of these missing people, the statistics are much too high. When someone vanishes on the high sea, the obvious outcome is much too grim.

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For the families of individuals missing in foreign lands, frustration is a continent—or two—away. They must deal with multiple government agencies from various jurisdictions, most of the time at a distance. Depending on the area of the country in which the person disappeared, forensic and investigative techniques can be light-years behind the curve. And then there is the delay: often families don’t even realize their loved ones are missing until days after they have vanished. That leaves them far away from the center of the investigation, playing catch-up in a game that unfolds on anything but a level playing field.

Searching in a foreign country is also expensive. Families report that, in addition to time away from work and the expense of hotels and flights, they often must retain an attorney or private investigator in the foreign country to keep the lines of communication open with the authorities.

The U.S. Department of State helps—but often finds local laws and the Privacy Act tie their hands. Some families claim they don’t do enough, but officials counter that they do what they can, although admitting it’s often not as much as the families would like. And what the families would like most of all is quite simple: to find their missing loved ones alive and safe, then bring them back home.

Ill deeds are doubled with an evil word.—William Shakespeare

O
n a stifling summer’s day in 1990, Helen Aragona’s life crashed with the savage velocity of an out-of-control airliner. There were no sirens or blinking lights, no forewarnings at all, not even a fleeting moment’s intuition her universe was about to buckle and break around her.

Up until then, Helen had defined her life as ordinary, perhaps pedestrian. She cooked, cleaned house, worked, spent time with her kids and friends, and made the occasional trip back to her hometown. Helen’s roots were in New York, where many of her Italian Catholic relatives still lived.

Widowed by the death of her Italian husband, Gildo, in 1984, Helen has dwelt for decades in the same unpretentious, square brick home in the quiet Bryn Marr subdivision of Jacksonville, North Carolina. Until Gildo died, he and Helen ran a tiny restaurant where New York-style pizza with basil-infused tomato sauce sold at a gratifying pace to Jacksonville’s mostly marine clientele.

Jacksonville leans against not one, but three Marine Corps installations: Camp Lejeune, which bills itself as the world’s largest amphibious marine base; Camp Johnson, a training facility for bright, shiny recruits fresh from boot camp; and Marine Corps Air Station New River, home base to thousands of helicopter and Osprey pilots and their support personnel.

In 1990, Helen’s eldest of six children, thirty-year-old Phyllis, lived fifteen minutes from her mother on a narrow paved road in the southwest community, which skirts the nearby air station. Phyllis shared a small, wood-frame house with Scott Gasperson, her fiancé, who was a few days shy of his twenty-sixth birthday.

Physically, Scott and Phyllis embodied the Chinese concept of yin and yang: Phyllis stood under five feet; Scott, well over six. Phyllis was delicate and fair; Scott was dark and bearish, with liquid eyes and an easy, generous smile. Although different in appearance, the two had been together for several years and shared a common work ethic and unbreakable family values. They also planned to spend the rest of their lives together. Their future wedding occupied a good portion of Phyllis’s spare time. She liked to leaf through bridal magazines and look at invitations in preparation for those nuptials. Phyllis had no way of knowing there would never be a wedding.

Scott and Phyllis’s home sat well off Ben Williams Road, on a spacious rural lot with plenty of room for animals. Phyllis decorated the little house in the casual country style so trendy in southern homes in the mid-1980s: lots of blues and pinks, ribbons and lace, ruffles and bows. It was girly—like Phyllis.

Cats, dogs, and chickens roamed their land, and the pasture hosted Phyllis’s horses. She couldn’t pass up a stray. Once, after a mother hen died, Phyllis housed a batch of baby chicks in the bathroom, treating the tiny peeping birds as her own babies. Scott tolerated the menagerie well; he was a gentle soul. The couple’s shared reverence for life was one of the things that brought them together. Phyllis could never love a man who wasn’t kind. And Scott’s kindness extended not only to the woman he loved, but also to her family.

Scott enjoyed sliding by Helen’s house for a meal. Jennifer, Helen’s youngest child and an almost eerie echo of her older sister, often cooked his favorites for him. As a teen, Jennifer enjoyed Scott’s affectionate banter and gentle teasing. Of all the Aragona children, then-fifteen-year-old Jennifer was the sibling closest to Phyllis and Scott. In fact, Phyllis, who was twice Jennifer’s age in 1990, acted as a sort of surrogate mother to the family’s baby, doting on the little sister who worshipped her. Jennifer embraced her sister’s boyfriend not only because he was funny and paid attention to her, but because she knew he loved Phyllis as much as she herself did.

During that time period, Helen slept over at Phyllis and Scott’s little home once in a while. Her car was out of commission, so it was easier to let Scott or Phyllis drop her off and pick her up than to ride with one of her coworkers. Helen worked the graveyard shift at Charles McDaniel Nursing Home, a new complex at the time, located on the edge of town. Helen’s 11:00-to-7:00 shift as a nursing assistant meant she slept during the hot, humid Carolina days, which was fine with her. She liked the night shift.

On July 11, 1990, Helen spoke with Phyllis on the phone as she always did, but decided not to stay the night with her. Instead, for no particular reason, Helen chose her own bed. It was a small, insignificant decision, but it saved her life.

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At 8:50 p.m. on Wednesday, July 11—–the same day Helen chose to sleep at her own home—Scott spoke with his father, Robert Gasperson, for what would be the last time. Later, Robert remembered how unremarkable the conversation was. He would muse that he would not have recalled a word of their exchange if things were different. Now, two decades later, Robert can still repeat every single syllable they exchanged. And although he had a good relationship with his son, he still agonizes over the things he wishes he’d said.

But on that July day in 1990, ten minutes after Scott and his father hung up from their phone conversation, Phyllis finished closing the business where she worked. She managed one of the seven pawnshops owned at the time by Scott’s father. Scott ran Woodson Music and Pawn, also one of his father’s stores. Even then, Robert was a veteran of the pawn industry, a lucrative enterprise in this military town, where young marines often hock their valuables to get them through until the next payday.

Sometime between the moment after Phyllis would have turned the key in the massive bolt that locked the heavy glass doors at the pawnshop before driving home and the seconds that held back the succeeding day, Helen tried to call Phyllis again. The phone in the small house on Ben Williams Road rang, but no one answered. With no success, Helen gave up and returned to her duties in the dim nighttime halls at the nursing home, not sensing this day marked the beginning of a change in her life as abrupt and final as a played-out game of Russian roulette.

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By dawn the next morning, Thursday, July 12, it was clear the day would turn blisteringly hot. The pitiless coastal sun and shirt-drenching humidity drove local residents off the streets and back into offices, banks, or stores, where overworked air conditioners were kneecapped by the typical midsummer weather. Sitting behind the wheel of an open-window car was like piloting a coffin. Outdoor work crews labored in glistening sweat with kegs of water nearby, but most stayed off the streets and avoided the crushing heat.

On the outskirts of Jacksonville, Cyrus Brinson pulled out of his driveway onto Ben Williams Road and passed the house where Scott and Phyllis lived. In this part of the county, everyone knew everyone, as well as everyone’s business, but it wasn’t simple nosiness that caused people to note the comings and goings of their neighbors. Instead, in this sparsely populated area where sons built next door to their fathers and family land rarely sold to other than blood kin, there was a strong sense of obligation to each other. Brinson drove by Scott and Phyllis’s home that morning and noted neither of their cars—a blue Chevy Blazer and a red Chevy Beretta—were there. The time was 5:30 a.m.

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Paul Wiedner arrived at Woodson Music and Pawn to clean the business as he did most other mornings, but on this day no one was there to let him in. Wiedner wrote a quick note and stuck it in the metal gate that stretched across the front. After lingering a bit outside, Wiedner decided Scott was running late and left.

Meanwhile, a little red Beretta streaked down narrow, twisty, sometimes congested Rocky Run Road—away from the pawnshop. The car passed a woman named Vicky Barber, who registered the driver’s recklessness as a small irritation, the kind that’s common in a military community resplendent with platoons of nineteen- and twenty-year-old males.

Kimberly Paulson also observed the red Beretta as it roared past her and noted its multiple occupants. Paulson didn’t see it, but after the red Beretta went by, the car veered off Rocky Run, making its way down another, more isolated, dirt road.

Paulson worked with Scott and was supposed to help him open the business that morning, but was behind schedule. When she arrived at the store, it was still locked, but the metal gate to the front door was open. Peering through the thick glass, Paulson saw a jewelry box on the floor. Concerned, she drove to the home of the store’s assistant manager, Donald Whalen.

Alarmed by Paulson’s story, Whalen headed for the store, and discovered it had been ransacked. The safe was open, and an inventory would reveal thousands in cash and jewelry taken from the business. The most ominous discovery, though, was not the open safe nor the items scattered about the store, but a pillowcase. The percale material was covered with bloodstains.

When members of the Onslow County Sheriff’s Department arrived, they wrapped the outside of the store in crime-scene tape. After ascertaining that Phyllis also failed to show up for work, deputies issued an all points bulletin (APB) for both Scott’s and Phyllis’s vehicles.

Investigators didn’t yet know what they had, but whatever it was, they knew it couldn’t be good.

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Deputies drove to the home Scott and Phyllis shared and found the back door ajar. Once inside, it was obvious they were encountering another crime scene. Among the evidence collected that day was a plastic wrapper discarded from a roll of duct tape and a piece of tape stuck to one of the beds.

Helen Aragona was told her daughter and Scott were missing. The bearer of the news was a deputy who watched for Helen’s reaction. Fear slithered into her stomach and knotted there. She wanted to stay positive for teenaged Jennifer’s sake, so Helen tamped down the panic as best she could. Her oldest daughter was missing, not dead—that’s what she kept telling herself. For the moment, at least, there was hope and that had to be enough.

When questioned by deputies, Jennifer recalled that Phyllis and Scott came separately to eat lunch with her the previous day, Wednesday, July 11. In good spirits, they both spoke about the future and their upcoming wedding plans. There was no hint of anything amiss, nothing that would have indicated anything was wrong.

At 3:00 p.m. on Thursday, July 12, after Helen and Jennifer were interviewed, Phyllis’s Blazer was found abandoned behind the Econo Lodge, a hotel a couple of miles away from the pawnshop. Helen performed mental surgery, trying to suture this development into a positive outcome, but she couldn’t quite do it. Nausea swept in and threatened to overwhelm her. She wanted to stay strong for Phyllis, but all she could think about was that her child—her baby, her firstborn—was missing, and each new development was taking her closer and closer to a dark place where she did not want to go.

Where was Phyllis? Where was Scott? And what in the name of God was going on?

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Whenever the telephone in the Aragona house rang, Jennifer pounced on it. Like all teens who came of age before cell phones evolved into common currency, Jennifer’s life was predicated on the sound of the household phone. When Phyllis disappeared, Helen started to guard it. If and when Phyllis called, she wanted to be the one to answer. She also didn’t want Jennifer to take a call if the news was bad.

Helen daydreamed that she would pick up the receiver and Phyllis would be on the other end, alive and healthy and with a good explanation for whatever happened in that store. She was afraid to leave the house because she didn’t want to miss that call. Until Helen could speak to Phyllis, her life was as off balance as a car with two wheels speeding along a mountain road.

Helen’s mind kept circling the investigators’ implications. She worried about where the evidence might lead them, and worse—where it might take Phyllis. She believed that if she thought the worst, it might come true.

Helen knew it was irrational to believe dark thoughts could inspire a similar outcome, but she couldn’t help herself. In the back of her mind, the niggling idea that her missing daughter could be dead sat like a cancerous tumor, draining her reserves. If she allowed herself to confront the idea that Phyllis was gone forever, then it was like giving up on her. Still, the mother in her couldn’t help but acknowledge how afraid Phyllis must be. She prayed Phyllis and Scott were still together. He would comfort her. He would stand by her. He would protect her.

In those first few desperate hours after the news of Phyllis’s disappearance broke, there was nothing Helen could do but wait and pray. If the phone rang, it was most often a detective calling to check a detail or ask another question. Some of what law enforcement officials wanted to know drove Helen crazy. She didn’t understand why they asked these things about Phyllis, her relationship with Scott, her bills, her habits. Helen answered them as best she could, reasoning the deputies were, after all, on her side, and they shared the common goal of wanting to find Phyllis alive and well and as fast as possible. They had not said so, but she knew time worked against them. The longer it took to find Phyllis and Scott, the worse their chances of being whole and unhurt.

As Helen prayed someone would find her missing child, what deputies discovered, instead, was Scott. And the news sent Helen into a downward spiral unlike anything she had ever experienced.

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Sergeant David West of the Onslow County Sheriff’s Department was one of the dozens of law enforcement officers fanned out in the county searching for the couple that Thursday in July. The investigation into Scott and Phyllis’s disappearance was hours old and already the day had grown long and intense. West, like the rest of the officers in his department, scoured parking lots, streets, and wooded areas for signs of the missing couple’s vehicles.

Old leaves crackled under West’s shoes as he made his way through the woods. Tree branches and bushes snatched at West’s light, mud-brown uniform, now wet with perspiration. Mosquitoes buzzed, delighted at the intrusion. West swatted them away as he pushed farther into the musty-smelling underbrush. Off the road, he could hear the sounds of cars approaching and passing the spot where he’d parked his patrol car on the road’s shoulder.