For the Lost Blog

I have started a missing persons’ newsletter at Substack. Please share and subscribe; I update every Monday evening.

I coasted on the good feelings of Jaycee Dugard’s recovery for several months, so to start the year with the news that Carlina White, abducted from Harlem Hospital in 1987, has been found safe is very good news indeed. Carlina found herself on NCMEC after she noticed her “mother” had no birth certificate for her and she did not resemble her. It is also reported that she has a younger brother, who I hope the authorities will also check to make sure he is not an abducted child. Carlina’s case is of course different from Dugard’s in that almost all authorities involved thought she was still alive and abducted by someone who wanted a child, which is a common motivation in infant abductions. Since there was a possibility she was involved in a black market adoption (along with Christopher Dansby and Shane Walker, also young children abducted from New York in the same time period) I hope that this may lead to them coming home as well.

I was doing some web research for the case file of Gabriel Johnson, who I’ve posted about several times before and plan to add to the site in June. I learned that Elizabeth Johnson’s mother was Rosslyn Puckett. And her aunt (Rosslyn’s sister) was… Jane Puckett. Who went missing in 1977, believed to have been abducted, and was found safe last year.

Does it mean anything? Well, no, probably. But this is even weirder than the Shannon Dedrick/Paul Baker connection.

The missing infant Shannon Dedrick, whom I wrote about before due to her bizarre connection to the disappearance of Paul Baker, has been found safe. She was apparently under the bed of Paul’s stepmother (Susan Baker), in a box. The stepmother is being charged along with the mother of Shannon. I’m still not sure the mother was fully involved – both of Shannon’s parents are developmentally disabled, and it’s possible that the mother was hoodwinked in some way. After all, kidnapping is a far more serious charge than taking an abandonded baby or buying an infant.

I hope that there is some new effort to locate the remains of Paul with this new publicity.

Very recently, a seven month old girl named Shannon Dedrick went missing from her Chipley, Florida home. A person of interest has been named, Susan Baker. And she is a suspect in the presumed homicide of her stepson, Paul Baker, who went missing in 1987. She sent a e-mail to several people claiming Shannon was in danger from her parents. (They are apparently both developmentally delayed.)

I don’t know if Susan Baker is being looked at because of Paul’s disappearance, or for some other reason, but it makes one of the strangest connections between missing persons cases I’ve seen.

I just visited their home page and it now says that they will close at the end of the month. It’s one of the very first missing childrens’ organizations to exist; it even predates NCMEC. (I’m pretty sure the oldest is Child Find of America.) This is saddening news. Even though there are many more resources available now than in 1979, it was still a useful presence. Obviously this means any cases on the site not on others are going to be California Kids cases if they are eligible. Not something I want to have happen.

For the Lost is mentioned briefly in this article about the Port St. Joe Polaroids that still are unsolved to this day. I am pretty sure this is the first time the organization has been mentioned in an article about anything. It doesn’t say a great deal about it that’s new, but it’s interesting reading nonetheless.

I never wanted this to happen to family abduction kids on my site.

It now has.

All three were found dead in their father’s car, which had been run into a lake. The father was also inside. It coud be accident. It could have been murder/suicide. No one will ever know.

I’ve added the cases of Adam and Jason Shannon and Luis Munguia-Zendejas. I’ve updated the victims post. Right now I’m too depressed to do anything else.