Where do all the missing people go?

[Basketofkittens]

I’ve been watching some programmes recently on missing people and reading various sites on the internet. It’s interesting but also really sad.

Where do they go? I suppose some are murdered or commit suicide but everybody else? Do they start new lives or move abroad although with modern technology and IT it seems increasingly harder to do that without being traced.

There’s also a police website with details of 1000 bodies found and nobody knows who they are.

There’s a research project about this based at Glasgow University: www.gla.ac.uk/research/impact/impactsonsociety/wheredomissingpeoplego/

DifficultPifcultLemonDifficult
I’m glad things are going well for you now. You can never know peoples real stories.

How does that missing persons organisation manage to weed out fakes if it's just asking for a message that the person is alive? Anyone could do that.

DifficultPifcultLemonDifficult
Thank you for responding. I do get the wanting nothing from them.

I actually walked away myself as a child but at the time I didn't have any family acknowledging me as theirs.

Is it because the final act of taking responsibility for cutting the strings is too much?

I don't feel I have a responsibility to my birth family at all. I'm not sure why I would or why I would assume "lots of people" would continue searching for a teenager who walked out one day as I was but if you're concerned about my parents - a quick google says that as of 5 years ago, my mother - who spent pretty much my entire childhood telling me how she couldn't wait until I left so she could be unburdened and really live - worked in a charity in my hometown and LinkedIn says my father, who was literally in the middle of selling the house I had been living in so he could move on with his latest wife, is a VP of one of the big US banks. True, this information could be out of date and they could be dead for all I know last week when my hometown was involved in a mass shooting & I had a lot of feelings, but I just waited like everyone else for the names, talked about the city under a username with some other people who knew the city online, and continue recognizing that part of being gone is that the not knowing - and both the good and difficult of that - goes both ways.

I 'disappeared' with a bag and savings and I don't actually think it's as hard as people think it is even with modern tech. Most CCTV is crap and difficult to search, especially outside of very major cities, and most people just rely on social media and google. Those dodgy websites that come up when googling for someone are really inaccurate. A new name and a bit of caution on using it online plus not being where people will recognize you, and I don't think it would be hard for most.

One of the bonuses of modern tech is being able to look up if anyone reports us missing or - more important for me - attempts to use that identity. I regularly search for myself on all known names in public records in my birth country and so far, nothing comes up (and I have heard, at least in other countries - don't think I've heard of it in the UK, of parents using their kids details to do shit like rack up debts and such.)

People posting on facebook doesn't mean any official organization is involved or that they're actually looking. Plenty of abusive people post fake missing reports on various social media to get information on people who left or to milk the sympathy and attention which is why, as others said, one should only repost from an official source. Telling those of us who have left those kinds of situations that we should at least let our birth families know, that we have a responsibility to make sure they're not looking for us, and how we would hate it if it was our kids - such attempts to guilt reminds me of relatives who always excused abuse because of the ~importance of family~, to consider their feelings and that I'd understand it one day - it was horseshit then and still horseshit now. It can suck, but no one has the right to that information.

@StillmissingStillmissed

There’s a new law that came into effect last week that might help your family’s problem with the bank account.

www.missingpeople.org.uk/latest-news/1088-guardianship-becomes-law-today.html

Yes I agree that someone who walks away from an abusive family owes that family nothing.
I do think if you see yourself in a proper missing site that you should let them know you are not missing though. Just to stop any waste of resources.
But the police know that plenty of people just walk away from their families. Maybe if you have a lovely family and all your friends do too it can be hard to understand this. But plenty of people don't have that family set up and rightly think there is nothing to be gained from staying in touch with their family.

Nc for this as possibly outing.

I was reported as a missing person by a well-meaning neighbour in the same block of flats when I was 18.

I had actually moved in with my then boyfriend - the flat belonged to someone else and I was living in it whilst they were abroad, so it wouldn't have looked like I had moved out, so to speak.

It took the police a month to track me down - despite going to work as usual, all my family and friends knowing my boyfriend and having contact details, going round and contacting family and friends regularly... Just continuing on as normal, really. I'd even been back to the flat a few times, but must have missed the neighbour.

They eventually tracked me down to my local pub, where I was sat with my boyfriend and mother. They'd got in touch with my dad, who I wasn't talking to at the time, and he'd given them the number of an old school friend, who said I regularly drink at a certain place on a Saturday afternoon. It was quite a shock!

And now I always tell the neighbours if I'm going to be away for any length of time.

So I suspect that the amount of effort police put in would depend on the circumstances - I presume if I was reported missing by immediate family etc rather than a neighbour they'd have found me much more quickly...which is worrying I suppose as some people don't have that network of people around them.

BiBabbles I asked the question because it seems illogical if someone feels it would be 'pretty disastrous' to be found, not to do something to make people less likely to help search for someone.?

IME many missing people I've come across, on the streets specifically, come from difficult chaotic backgrounds. Some are simply abusive, but many are more from more chaotic love/hate situations and I've come across plenty of people saying 'they don't care, they aren't even looking for me.'
Sometimes their families have been looking and they know and it's been reassuring to the person whose missing, but they have no intention of letting the family know they're OK. Sometimes that's because they want them to hurt, which is logical enough, but often it's rather more complicated and it appears to be to do with responsibility for making everything it final even though they say it is and take steps to stay hidden.

MORVEN It may sadly be too late for us, but maybe it's still rescueable. Thank you so much.

DifficultPifcultLemonDifficult I hope life is better for you now only you know the reasons so I think that people telling you to contact your birth family are being unfair.

I do know how it feels to have a loved one go missing, but that doesn't mean I think everyone who goes missing is obliged to give a reason to those they leave behind. Sometimes they're fleeing, sometimes the people left behind are the problem. It's not black and white.

In my friend's case, she went missing in the June of 2008, and it was absolute torture, because we KNEW that whatever else she'd have done, she'd never, ever have left her Mum and Dad worried as they were so close. I remember telling a police officer at the time that she'd walk away from everything and everyone but not them, never them. I told him that as she'd been missing for 9 months she wasn't going to be found alive and he kept offering platitudes and hope. I knew her, they didn't. We knew she was dead, we just didn't know how or where she was.
Trigger warning - graphic

Cops weren't interested, despite her being vulnerable until her hand was found in a hedge 16 months later, then the rest of her dismembered body was discovered in the home and garden of the scumbag who killed her.

The media spoke about her as if she was an irrelevance, a scatty girl who brought it on herself. Lived a "haphazard" lifestyle apparently, and was known to be trusting, which was enough for them to blame her for her own death.

10 years later it still angers me greatly that the police didn't take it seriously and that the media shredded her in death as that scumbag had done in life.

She mattered, she was loved and she had a life to live that was taken from her and she was taken from us.

Her name was Samantha (Sam) Wright and she mattered.

@InTheHeatofLisbon that is so sad

drinkswineoutofamug the worst part of all of it was that he was out on life licence for killing a man in the 1970s, that knocked us all sick.

She was bloody wonderful, scatty and daft and lovely and just a scream.

But all that got lost in the salacious reporting. Ugh.

I wonder how many missing are fleeing abuse too? That seems to me a good reason to disappear and never go back, never tell anyone.

www.missingpeople.org.uk/help-us-find/jacqueline-o-loghlen-93-000038 This lady struck me for some reason, she has been missing since 1985. I wonder if she still has family and friends worrying about her 34 years later?

There is nothing on the internet about her, no background info, just a post on the Websleuths forum.

InTheHeatofLisbon

My person was born into chaos and dysfunction, and because of the interests of others to hide it, she actually never really stood a chance. But that isn't how the police see her.They see her as chaotic, criminal, a failure, their "client base."

She was first failed by all her family, some of whom where horribly young and compounded things by making the mistake of asking for help at a time when underage mum's where seen as 'teenage Lolita's' and much older husbands where 'lucky bastards'.

She (and those who asked for help escaping) where then horribly failed by social services.
Instead of helping those trying to get away, took her away for disclosing he'd abused her, wouldn't protect her siblings from him, then locked her up for kicking off and running away from care, then dumped her back, badly damaged, after she'd developed a serious drug addiction in their care.

Maybe, miracles did happen for her, and she suddenly went from serious addict self funding by selling herself, to clean and serene. The police favor that along with 'maybe a rich client rescued her.'

We find both highly unlikely and she'd have also needed a personality transplant to stay entirely away from her much loved siblings, and never show anyone what she'd achieved. No one who knew her believes it.

Her estranged father took money for supposed info, and tormented her mother with grim stories, but it came to nothing. Then he died, and her possessions with her name on turned up at an auction house placed for sale by a local child care worker. Auction was stopped. Police weren't interested because seller said I could have her things, free.

He claimed to have got them from an 'unadvertised house contents sale' that he'd 'randomly come across' then claimed he couldn't remember where it was. Police continued to have no interest, including when more of her things emerged elsewhere. They told me not to pay for them or for info, but wouldn't investigate.

She matters, she will always matter. We as her family accept the judgement rained on us for who we are and our failings. We don't want sympathy, we think she's probably dead, but want to be certain she isn't held somewhere and suffering, and if there is anything left we could do for her, we would, including not trying to find her.

As long as we are alive she will matter and we will keep searching unless we believe she didn't want us to.

I don't understand how posting an anonymous message on the missing persons website would stop police checking bodies etc. If that was the case surely the first thing you'd do if you murdered someone is post on the website "I am alive but don't want to be found"?

Stillmissedstillmissing

I'm sorry that your person endured that, and that agencies were so bloody judgemental and useless.

I'm also sorry for you and your family, because not knowing is the most horrid kind of limbo there is.

I hope that one day you find out the answers, even if it's just to know once and for all.

It sounds stupid but even knowing that Sam is dead, and all the horror that came with it, isn't as awful as not knowing because now, at least, there is an answer. It's not what we wanted, but it's an end.

I hope your family have peace one day too.

I always wonder about Andrew gosden, if he's alive out there, if he is there must have been something bad going on....he must see his picture and appeals on TV still.

Sorry I need to place mark so I can read this thread later! Thanks for the interesting post OP. X

An old friend of mine was eventually identified as an unknown man whose body had been washed up on a beach. He was identified relatively quickly, but there had been a search for info over a few weeks - they released an artist's sketch of him (presumably done from his remains?) and CCTV footage of the last time the 'unidentified man' was seen - it was very strange to see afterwards. The inquest found it to be suicide - such a sad and lonely way to die.

With Andrew Gosden, wasn't there a theory that he may have met someone online, maybe gaming, and arranged to meet them in London? I don't know what the evidence is for that, but I came across it somewhere.

My dad went missing in the 1980s when I was 12. He was overseas for work literally on the other side of the world. It came to light when he failed to check out of his hotel, and when they went in the room all his stuff was there, passport, cash, wedding ring etc.

To this day we still have no idea what happened to him, I have the police reports and they had no leads at all. The most likely theory is that he went swimming in the sea and drowned, but obviously no one knows for sure. I still wonder whether he'll knock my door one day but really I can't see that happening; either something happened to him and he died, or he chose to disappear and has stayed so for over 30 years.

Pallisers
I don't know how exactly it works but it does seem to. I'm sure it wouldn't stop the police ever checking but it seems to reduce some work for them. It may be that once someone does that, police check things like NI numbers etc, I don't know.

What it does do is when someone posts a social media message and well meaning folk start saying I might know them, others can redirect to missing persons website, which might lower unwanted contact and interference.

InTheHeatofLisbon
You've got it. Apart from an inevitable desire to know once and for all for ourselves, we settle into thinking she must be dead and resolve ourselves that at least any suffering is over for her.
Then another story of found captured, enslaved, controlled or trafficked people, hits the news and we think, Have we done enough to be sure of that?

@SweetMelodies

Not really, at least not at the time. The only official records were the Deed Poll documents I kept. It’s true that there would have been a way to trace me via e.g. National Insurance number/tax records, but I chose to update them IYSWIM. It’s quite tricky now to get a new National Insurance number, but it wasn’t that hard 20 years ago. They really tightened it up due to terrorists assuming new identities. There no one central place where it had to be recorded.

Plus for a long time, even though I told the National Insurance people, they just created a duplicate record with the new name and the same National Insurance number, rather than change the name on the same record. It took me ages (literally years) to get it sorted out when I checked my state pension records a few years later- it wasn’t until, by luck, a colleague’s husband was working as a management consultant in the Central NI Office in Newcastle that I managed to be it changed. And only because he actually walked into the right office, told someone to look up both records and stood over the, whilst they merged the two. It kind of shocked me how chaotic it all was.

It’s a bit different in Scotland. When I moved back to Scotland (I was born there) I applied to have my new name recorded on the record of my birth held in central records at the Registry Office in Edinburgh (this was because I was scared I’d lose the Deed Poll document in a house fire or something and wanted it to be recorded somewhere official). But I had to request that and pay a fee, so I guess a lot of people wouldn’t bother. And there definitely would n’t have been anyone chasing me if I didn’t bother.

How long after someone disappears is it assumed for legal reasons they have past?
Say they leave a spouse, when could that spouse remarry?

habibihabibi I believe there's a process by which family/spouse can apply to have the missing person legally accepted as dead in order to manage estates or remarry. 7 years is springing to mind but I'm not sure.