To not be able to stop wondering about this unidentified woman?

[SirWibbles209]

I remember coming across this case back in 2010, a woman's body discovered in Manchester. She remains unidentified and they theorize she was murdered many years before possible 1970-1980. They called her the angel of the meadows.

I guess my aibu is how can she still be unidentified? How has nobody reported her missing? I think what gets me the most is that the area she discovered is a pretty busy one and she lay undiscovered for all those years in central Manchester!

www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/angel-meadow-murder-mystery-victim-8846364.amp

What are your thoughts?

I get that Ophelia it just seems a bit sad if thats the case for most of these people. I understand how some people dont have family or lack contact for a long time. It just seems sad especially when bodies used to be classed as "runaways".

I do guess, as PP have mentioned if she was a prositute she may have been estranged from her family and on the margins of society. A common theme I notice is that people don't seem to care when prositutues go missing/ are murdered. Had anyone watched the killing season documentaries in relation to active serial killers in America? Completely blew me away how they can get away with serial murder in this day and age!

To be honest Martha it can happen surprisingly easily. If I hadn't married DH I could well be rotting in a flat somewhere. Must remember that next time he annoys me!

It can happen easily. I'm now estranged from my siblings, I don't imagine any of them will speak to me again. Our grandparents who brought me up are dead. Our parents are also dead. We hadn't had any contact with our mother's family since I was 7 and our father was an only child so no cousins etc.

If I wasn't married with children then I would have no-one to look for me if I went missing, or to claim me if my body was found.

It isn't that people don't care exactly.

There are numerous, thousands, of exceptions. But many prostitutes and their male counterparts - homeless and petty criminals - will have grown up in foster care so family relations severed right there. They will have run away numerous times before turning 18, and only half hearted attempts will be made to find them. They will stop attending school or be expelled. They will be introduced to drugs, may be evicted numerous times from accommodation, be in and out of prison.

It's hard with the best will in the world to keep tabs on people like that, and that line is 'said' with compassion.

I was at university in Manchester and once offered a prostitute a lift. Daft retrospectively but i was 18 and pretty daft. She turned out to be the saddest, most broken person I ever met. Really sad.

I know a few times when younger I did low paid shit jobs and a few times I just didn't go back as I couldn't face it. Maybe they would ring my phone a handful of times but that was it.

All it takes to vanish is to only sub exist in the first place.

Thats true and awfully sad. I think theres the other element to of people are reported missing and never found. Just vanish into thin air. Makes the world seem a sad and scary place sometimes.

The thing is, if she was prostituted, some people will have noticed that she had gone. Some may have missed her. But many prostitutes are pretty transient. Pimps move them about to different cities. So they would not have automatically thought she had been murdered.

If she had been found sooner, there probably would have been people about who knew about her. It is the length of time that makes it really difficult.

And yes, some types of employers are used to people just not coming back to work.

Not necessarily brasty

Fiction presents prostitutes as knowing one another quute well but more often than not, they don't.

There is a book about how they identified the final victim of the Kings Cross fire. It's a fascinating read. The effort the authorities went too to find who he was was amazing.

Plus would anyone want to own up to knowing a prostitute regularly enough to notice her disappearance? Curb crawlers and pimps wouldnt come forward. :(

its not as easy as it would seem.dh was a retired u.s.military intelligence soldier.he was also an amazing computer geek.he wrote a series of programs for searching legal databases for missing people.
first thing we learned missings are the bottem of the law inforcement pile./once in a while you get a detective or officer who cares but the numbers are overwhelming.
dh was able to "find" about 100 of the "missing" .before he passed on the information he did background checks on whoever was linked to the missing.found a few that were suspicious/abuse types of stories/found a couple who just disappeared because they wanted to.
others that had died and were buried in paupers graves.it is a strange and disturbing mix.
on the otherhand he reunited a dozon or so people.
just before he went into the hospital/he was searching for a young man who disappeared from the east coast(usa) about 20 yrs ago.
his landlord reported him.
after days of searching the name ,disambiguating all the men with that name,then he could search for the right one.he found the gentleman in england happy with a wife and children.
we never knew the outcomes/details of these stories,but my disabled dh was so happy when he could solve one of these.even if it was to tell the families that the person had passed.was in prison,another country,just plain NC.
DNA is not a quick fix/the data bases are few and huge.the testing is expensive and doesnt gaurentee results,so law enforcement has to have specific reasons,to justify the expenditures.
sad but true/we have the technology but it requires monies/proper training of people doing the searching.its not a just google it kind of thing.altho dh did find 2 by doing just that!

This thread is making me feel really sad.

Same just. Its making me want to contact everyone i know to make sure they are ok

It's really sad.

I know a guy who went out shopping in a UK city and never returned. He was approached by a cult who had a stall in the street and was swept up in it all in one afternoon.

Which cult, sunny?

Hi Enid
I'm not sure as was cctv images and they couldn't make out the wording on the literature.
He rang a couple of times a few years in to and wouldn't give any information as to where he was, who he was with etc

In a lot of these cases someone knows something.They just don't say anything.

These cases are so sad.

A member of my family disappeared for 40 years then just turned up at another family member's front door one day. They'd made no effort to contact anyone in that time, everyone had assumed they were dead because no-one could find them and then suddenly they turned up out of the blue. They were in touch for about 18 months then suddenly the contact stopped again. Turns out, he had terminal cancer, seems he knew that but didn't tell any one and just wanted to see his original family one last time before he died. It wasn't until about six or seven years after he died that we found out he was dead. He never explained his reasons for being 'missing' for that long, never explained all of the secrecy. Never explained anything to his family about us either, so there have never been any answers - it's a genuine mystery for the entire family that will never be solved

Back on topic, I often think about this lady:
www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-21875096

Her family knew her and still hope her killer will be found, but my heart aches that "no-one saw anything", and that even after all of this time no-one has been brought to justice.

Sunny, it may well have been 'the moonies' I think they were called. I was approached by them many years ago and remember it well. Thankfully I never gave in to their very full on persuasive methods but I do recall their 'pull' if that makes sense. It was a very odd experience.

What amazing work your dh did wingless

Wow singing do you mind me asking about your encounter with the moonies?

Hi singing
Quite possibly. It was about 18 years ago now :(

This thread is sad

I just can't comprehend someone going missing and unreported for so long. There are of course many reasons, as PP have said, but it's just hard to imagine.

I remember Andrew Gosden. Such a strange, strange case.

It's very easy these days to think that we know every inch of the country. We don't have the miles of wilderness they have in the states, and with social media, we assume people are always in reach. But people can still vanish, apparently into thin air.

Sadly, I can imagine people disappearing and never being found. There are three homeless people near my work (two women, one man). I regularly buy them a coffee and some food and stop for a quick chat. All three are estranged from their families and have no contact with anyone other than other homeless people, and it's an extremely transient population. I notice when I don't see one of them for a few days, but knowing how they move around, would I call the police and report them missing? Probably not.

I don't think it's as hard to drop off the radar as people imagine, and that makes people vulnerable.