{"id":47,"date":"2005-11-20T08:33:04","date_gmt":"2005-11-20T12:33:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stacyhorn.com\/restless2\/?p=47"},"modified":"2016-05-04T18:24:17","modified_gmt":"2016-05-04T22:24:17","slug":"undeclared-homicide-and-missing-persons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.therestlesssleep.com\/?p=47","title":{"rendered":"Undeclared Homicide and Missing Persons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Losing someone is hard.  Not knowing what happened, or who killed them makes it harder.  Then there is the unbearable pain of not knowing anything at all: the missings persons case.  Someone disappeared.  That&#8217;s all the family and friends of this person know and in some cases that is all they ever will know.  They enter a nightmare limbo of waiting.  Will they hear their father&#8217;s voice, or the police telling them they&#8217;ve found his body, or nothing at all until the day they die?<\/p>\n<p>It could be a homicide, it&#8217;s almost certainly a homicide in many cases, but without convincing evidence, in many cases it&#8217;s almost impossible to get the case declared a homicide.  Instead, the case will go to missing persons, where there are limits to what they can and will do.<\/p>\n<p>As I learned writing The Restless Sleep, of all the things law enforcement does, finding people is often the most difficult.  It&#8217;s one thing to figure out who the murderer is, it&#8217;s another thing to find him.  There&#8217;s a lot of failure in missing persons work.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a big subject, and I can&#8217;t cover it all in one blog post, but I wanted to introduce the topic.  I&#8217;ve gotten more than one email about these limbo cases.<\/p>\n<p>There is an incredible group of volunteers who have set up something called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.doenetwork.org\/\">The Doe Network<\/a>.  They help law enforcement solve missing persons cases and identify unknown murder (and other) victims.  I don&#8217;t know a lot about them yet, but they seem to be a creative and resourceful group.  You can never sit back in life, waiting for someone else to do what needs to be done.  But even if you&#8217;re willing to do whatever&#8217;s necessary, it can take a long time to get up to speed and learn how to be effective.  And it&#8217;s hard to accomplish anything alone.  The accumulated and accumulating expertise in this wonderful organization addresses both issues, and I would love to see it grow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Losing someone is hard. Not knowing what happened, or who killed them makes it harder. Then there is the unbearable pain of not knowing anything at all: the missings persons case. Someone disappeared. That&#8217;s all the family and friends of this person know and in some cases that is all they ever will know. They [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[15,6],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/piV6s-L","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therestlesssleep.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therestlesssleep.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therestlesssleep.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therestlesssleep.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therestlesssleep.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.therestlesssleep.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1677,"href":"https:\/\/www.therestlesssleep.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions\/1677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therestlesssleep.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therestlesssleep.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therestlesssleep.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}