From An Empty Bed
Early on the morning of April 23, 2006, Fawn Locklear* fixed herself a cup of coffee, then padded to the guest bedroom to see if her older brother was awake. She hoped he wasn't. A complete inability to sleep for nights on end was one symptom of his illness. Until a couple of years before, when a car crash left him in a two-day coma, Freddy, 28, had been a warm, outgoing guy -- a medical equipment salesman who loved to travel, socialize, play football with his nephews and tell an uproarious joke. Although his broken bones had mended, he'd grown increasingly withdrawn and irritable, and he sometimes muttered incoherently about imagined enemies. He'd lost his job, given up his apartment and taken to staying with family members in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Recently Freddy had been diagnosed as suffering from a psychotic disorder, possibly resulting from a brain injury. To the family's relief, medication had eased his symptoms. Just the day before, he'd attended a Little League game with his sister, and he'd seemed almost like his old self again. But when Fawn, a 25-year-old loan officer, arrived at his room, the door was open and the bed empty. She made a quick circuit of her modest town house and scanned the front and back yards: nothing. Returning to Freddy's room, she saw that his wallet and cell phone were still on his dresser, his clothes in the closet and his toothbrush -- and medication -- on the bathroom shelf.
She went to the driveway and checked her car. It was there, but the backpack Freddy had left inside was gone. Fawn felt a jolt of worry. She jumped behind the wheel and began driving slowly, calling his name and asking passersby if they'd seen a tall, skinny, distracted-looking young man. "Folks were looking at me like I was crazy," she recalls. The clouds opened in a downpour, and she retreated to her house and called her parents.
By noon, the three of them had phoned everyone Freddy knew. Nobody had heard from him. Fawn's father went to the police station, but the officer in charge would only take a report and counsel patience. Back home, the Locklears anguished over terrifying scenarios. Had Freddy gone for a walk and met with some disaster? Was he suicidal? They began to argue over what to do next. Then a neighbor dropped by with some advice: "There's a lady you need to call. Her name is Monica Caison."
"My guess is that he hitched a ride,"Caison told the family. "It could take a long while before we put the pieces together. I can't promise you we'll find him. All I can promise is that you'll get 100 percent of me."
*Names and certain details have been changed to protect the family's privacy.
Giving 100 Percent
Over the past 13 years, Monica Caison has given 100 percent of herself to thousands of people like the Locklears. If that seems like a mathematical impossibility, it's because you haven't met this small, chain-smoking, salty-tongued and utterly unstoppable mother of five.Caison, 43, is founder and director of the Community United Effort (CUE) Center for Missing Persons. Based in Wilmington, North Carolina, the center takes a more ambitious approach than most missing-persons organizations. Besides advocating for victims and counseling their loved ones, CUE organizes searches, aids investigations and cajoles forensic experts into providing their services for free. It plays a role in cracking hundreds of cases a year. And though the center has a nationwide network of 7,000 volunteers, it is very much a one-woman show. CUE's 24-hour hotline connects directly to Caison's cell phone.
"Whenever I'm at my lowest lows, I call Monica,"says Gloria Denton, whose daughter, April Pitzer, has been missing since the summer of 2004. "She always gets my mind away from the sadness."April, a former federal drug witness (and mother of two), was 30 when she vanished. She may have run afoul of a dealer she once helped put away; her clothes were found in a Mojave Desert mine shaft more than a year after her disappearance.
Since taking on the case in November 2005, Caison has provided logistical as well as emotional support to April's family: finding donors to pay for Denton's flights to California, enlisting the help of local authorities, even sending spelunkers into the mine to hunt for further clues. "She's the first person," Denton says, "who I felt had the passion within her to find April."
Caison currently runs the CUE Center out of a cluttered office in her four-bedroom ranch home in Wilmington. One of her file cabinets holds a folder bulging with training certificates: search and rescue, dog handling, psychological counseling. But her most valuable preparation for the career that she has chosen -- or, as she puts it, that has chosen her -- came during the years she herself spent as a missing person.
One of 11 children of a shoe salesman and a registered nurse, Caison grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida. "We had the perfect, typical family life,"she recalls. "No cussing, hair in pigtails, clothes pressed, patent leather shoes." Then, when she was eight, her parents' marriage imploded, and her idyll came to a sudden end. Short on cash, her mother moved with the four youngest kids to one of the city's toughest neighborhoods. "It was roaches on the floor and people breaking in and stealing the little you had every Friday night,"says Caison.
A Gift for Organizing
Monica hated her new home, and when her father abducted her from school, she did not resist. Her mother kidnapped her back. She bounced between parents until eventually a judge awarded custody to her dad. But by her early teens, she was running away regularly and living largely on the streets. She joined a gang, developed a taste for alcohol and tried any drug she could get her hands on -- acid, meth, prescription downers. "My only question was, How is it gonna make me feel?" She dropped out of high school after her sophomore year and got a job as a waitress. During a visit to her mother, who had remarried and relocated to rural North Carolina, she met Sam Caison, a shy, sober, God-fearing boy who adored her despite her wild ways. At 19, she moved in with him and had her first baby, though that didn't keep her from partying. When some street friends asked her to cash a few payroll checks, she thought nothing of it. Only when she was arrested, she says, did she realize that the checks were stolen.She spent six months in jail awaiting trial, then took the rap and was sentenced to time served. When she emerged, she was ready to turn her life around. She went into counseling, married Sam (who went on to prosper as a fencing subcontractor), and threw herself into motherhood and community work. Over the next five years, she had four more kids and volunteered for everything from the PTA to charity drives. It turned out she had a gift for organizing people, and soon she was chairing events at Wilmington's annual riverfront festival, which draws crowds in the tens of thousands. In her spare time, she played drums in an all-girl rock band.
In the early '90s, Caison weathered a series of health crises: the removal of a cancerous ovarian cyst, followed by thyroid disease and a ruptured gallbladder. But by 1994, she was well enough to turn outward again. She decided to start with a small fund-raiser and went looking for a deserving beneficiary. On a whim, she approached the head of the North Carolina Center for Missing Persons, an ex-cop named John Goad. He put her in touch with a Wilmington woman, Karen Brown, who ran a group that worked to publicize cases of missing children. Caison wound up helping her organize a carnival for the group at a shopping mall. She erected a memorial wall to the missing, centered on a portrait of a friend's daughter, who had been kidnapped and murdered just days earlier. She persuaded the cast of Matlock, filming in the area, to pose for the press in front of the shrine.
From that moment, Caison had a cause. For as long as she could remember, she had known families ripped apart by sudden disappearances: a childhood friend's mother, another friend's sister, yet another friend's daughter -- like Caison in her wayward years -- gone AWOL. The idea of helping to repair the damage filled her with an overwhelming sense of purpose. "I think God has a plan for everyone's life,"she says, "but people don't always heed what he's trying to show them."
Laying the Groundwork
Brown was so impressed with her new volunteer that when she moved out of state a few months later, she offered to make Caison director. But Caison had an even bigger idea: an organization that would actually try to find missing people. Brown handed her a check for $76 -- the modest bank balance for her old group -- saying, "Here's your first donation."Caison began laying the groundwork. She did research and filled out nonprofit paperwork after putting her kids to bed each night. (CUE subsists on private funding, and Caison draws no salary.) She enlisted John Goad as her guru, sometimes calling him several times a day for advice. "He told me, 'If you're serious about doing this, you better be the best damn advocate you can be.' He gave me no slack."
Before long, she was fielding teams of volunteers to assist in searches by local law enforcement. CUE scored some quick successes finding teenage runaways. But Caison continued to hone her craft, aided by a string of mentors -- detectives, dog trainers, even Indian trackers. She specialized in cases in which the circumstances were mysterious, the person was an outcast, or the trail had gone cold. The police might undertake such searches but seldom saw them through. "When law enforcement would quit, which always seemed to be within a day or two,"she explains, "these families would come to me and say, 'You can't stop!' So we started picking up the effort ourselves."
In 1998 a high-profile case won the group its first public recognition. When a bride-to-be named Peggy Carr vanished from a Wilmington parking lot while running errands, CUE Center volunteers kept up the search for seven months. Caison became the family's advisor, advocate, fund-raiser and PR manager. Eventually, police arrested a pair of carjackers, who confessed to having murdered Carr and another young woman during a crime spree; working from the killers' vague directions, a federal security officer found Carr's body. Her mother, Penny Carr Britton, credits Caison for helping her survive the ordeal. "I don't know what I would have done without her,"she says.
From then on, the center's phone rang almost nonstop.
After the foot search for Freddy Locklear failed, Caison turned to other measures. She designed flyers and had volunteers display them around Fayetteville. She sent out press releases, arranged interviews for the family with the local media, and posted notices on dozens of missing-persons websites, including CUE's. She broadcast an e-mail bulletin to her hundreds of contacts around the country. Then she -- and the Locklears -- waited.
Since CUE was started, its volunteers have handled more than 7,800 cases. Rather than speak of people found, Caison measures her progress in terms of cases closed. Last year, the center worked 540 cases; 300 were resolved. A little more than half of the formerly missing turned up alive.
Sometimes all it takes to find someone is a sharp eye and a bit of luck. A few years ago, a Kentucky woman and her children -- a nine-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy -- were abducted by a man she knew, who was wanted for arson and armed robbery. An aunt with a degree in criminal justice tracked the woman, through credit card transactions, to a convenience store near Caison's home in North Carolina. When a TV reporter asked Caison if she could help, she called the aunt and offered her services.
Hot on the Trail
Caison talked the store clerk into giving her surveillance-camera footage taken during the group's visit and turned it over to the police. She engaged a pilot to do a flyover in search of the getaway car -- a white minivan with chrome bumpers -- and designed posters with pictures of the mother and kids as well as a description of their vehicle. A volunteer named Angela Hinckley took a few to hang up around town.Hinckley, a 32-year-old church secretary, was heading to a CUE board meeting that evening when she stopped for gas at a different store. Inside, a customer who smelled of beer gave her a friendly "Hello, ma'am." When Hinckley got back to her car, she nearly fainted -- there, at the pump, was the white van. Inside were the two children and their mother, who seemed to be waiting for the boozy man to return. Hinckley quickly called Caison, who confirmed the license plate number and patched her through to 911. The dispatcher asked Hinckley to follow the van and stay on the line. For 30 miles, through the busy streets of Wilmington and along I-40, Hinckley trailed the van, keeping a discreet distance and relaying her location so that police could set up a roadblock. "I'm thinking, I have children at home," Hinckley recalls. "What am I doing?" Finally, sirens wailed, and a phalanx of squad cars forced the van onto the shoulder. Sheriff's deputies arrested the man and handed the kids teddy bears that CUE distributes to law enforcement for such occasions.
Caison called the children's father, who was driving to North Carolina to meet with her. "He pulled over to the side of the road,"she says, "and he was just bawling."
In other instances, the pursuit is considerably more difficult. While conducting searches, Caison has had poisonous cottonmouth snakes lunge at her. She's been lacerated by thorns and threatened by the shotgun-wielding father of a kidnapping suspect. Sometimes finding a missing person can be a searingly painful emotional experience as well.
In January 2000, a nine-year-old boy named C.J. Wilkerson didn't come home after school one day in Wake Forest, North Carolina. His stepfather, Derrick Glover, was the last person known to have seen him, but Glover -- who'd been alone in the house with C.J. that morning -- was missing too. So was a car belonging to C.J.'s mother, Tracey. She had been married to Glover for just three months and had recently discovered that he was still married to someone else. The day before her son's disappearance, she had ordered Glover to move out. Perhaps, she thought, he had abducted C.J. to spite her.
Because Glover was C.J.'s legal guardian and had no history of violence, the police treated the matter as a domestic dispute. Six days later, Glover called Tracey from a gas station, saying he'd taken C.J. in order to hurt her as badly as he had been hurt. Investigators traced the call, and the next night they found Glover in a parking lot, near death from hypothermia and an overdose of sleeping pills. He was arrested on kidnapping charges but refused to discuss C.J.'s whereabouts. Over the next three weeks, as Glover held his silence, the police carried out massive searches, while C.J.'s relatives -- led by the boy's father, construction worker Clarence Wilkerson, Jr., who'd remained part of his life long after breaking up with Tracey -- conducted smaller ones of their own. Relations between the two sides deteriorated, each accusing the other of being uncooperative. Finally, social workers called in Caison.
A Grim Discovery
"Monica tries to bridge the gap between families and law enforcement,"says Marc Benson, a former Wilmington detective (and longtime mentor) who's now a private investigator. "Not many people step up to the plate the way she does."Her background helps her win the trust of people who might be wary of cops and to pick up nuances that other observers might miss.Caison made sure the case stayed in the press, hoping to generate tips, keep investigators digging and pressure Glover into talking. She held fund- raisers for the family -- including a "chain of love," in which hundreds of Wake Forest residents linked arms, holding portraits of C.J. She made herself available day and night, even as she juggled other cases. "Sometimes I'd call at 9 p.m., and it would be 1 a.m. before we got off the phone,"says Wilkerson. Caison brought in highly trained dog teams to help with the searches. And she kept her eye out for clues.
One cropped up when the police returned Tracey's blue Honda Civic. "See that dent in the bumper?" Tracey asked Caison. "That wasn't there before." Caison urged her to call investigators and tell them about the dent and the fact that a large suitcase was missing from her house. After finding a bit of beige paint in the damaged area on the Civic, investigators traced it to a commercial van, whose driver said he'd had a fender bender with a Honda on the day C.J. vanished. The location of the crash was near the home of a woman who turned out to be a girlfriend of Glover's.
The woman told investigators she'd seen a big green suitcase in Glover's car that day and had noticed it was gone when he returned from an errand. All these developments found their way into news reports that Glover could watch in his cell. It is difficult to convict a man for murder before a body is found. But if that body is located before the murderer has confessed, he loses any hope of using it as a bargaining chip. That's why, on May 10 -- four months after C.J.'s disappearance, and the day before Caison planned to conduct a search of the site -- Glover led police to the suitcase in the woods.
He admitted that he had strangled C.J. that morning in January in a fit of rage against the child's mother. In exchange for his confession, prosecutors agreed to reduce the charge to second-degree murder. Glover is serving a prison term of 48 to 60 years.
Clarence Wilkerson, Jr., for his part, is now a board member of CUE, helping other parents through similar travails. "Monica is an angel," he says. "I love her from the bottom of my heart."
"Somebody Wants Them Back"
Eight months after Freddy Locklear's disappearance, the case seemed to have stalled. "We kept praying and hoping," says his sister, Fawn. Yet in all that time, there had not been a single sighting. Caison's vocation requires great patience. To find the long-missing, she combs police reports and other files for areas that were inadequately searched, witnesses who were never questioned, DNA samples that were never registered. She pores over diaries and personal correspondence in search of revealing sentences. She tours the country each summer, holding rallies in the towns where her subjects vanished, in hopes of revitalizing flagging investigations and turning up new leads.The oldest case she has solved came from a Washington, D.C., homeless shelter, whose staff wanted to send the ashes of a deceased drifter to his relatives; all they knew was his name and that he was from North Carolina. A hunt for official records proved fruitless, but Caison got a tip that the man had grown up in a poor neighborhood of Wilmington. Trolling the streets, she found someone who'd known the man's late grandmother and eventually tracked down his one surviving brother, who had moved to Pennsylvania. The man, it emerged, had wandered off ten years earlier from a mental institution. His brother, who gratefully took possession of the urn, told Caison, "I always wondered where he was at."
Caison recently took on the case of Melinda Harder, a childhood acquaintance in St. Petersburg, Florida, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1980, at the age of 21. "If I can solve that one, it will bring my life full circle," she says.
Others waiting to be accounted for include Patty Vaughan, a mother of three who vanished from a bloodstained van in La Vernia, Texas, on Christmas Day, 1996, and Allison Jackson-Foy, an assistant manager at a Wilmington hotel -- with two kids at home -- last seen leaving a bar in 2006.
Some of Caison's cases are drug addicts, like 28-year-old Crystal Soles, who vanished in 2005 after a night spent smoking crack in Andrews, South Carolina. Many missing-persons groups refuse to get involved with such people. But to Caison, they all deserve attention. "Every one of them,"she notes, "has somebody who wants them back."
Ready to Come Home
The faces of the missing haunt Caison around the clock. To ward off nightmares, she sleeps with the TV on, preferably tuned to Forensic Files. Although she's passionate about her family, she occasionally forgets to pay bills, shop for groceries or buy presents for her children's birthdays ("I tell 'em they got to remind Mama," she says). But the kids -- all grown now -- support her, sometimes accompanying her on investigations or helping out at rallies. So does her husband. "He's the even keel I always needed," Caison says. "We're never in a bad mood at the same time.""I'm proud of her, man," says Sam. "When she comes home from a search, I'll give her a massage and cook her dinner and see she gets her rest."
And when Caison finds someone, she says, there's no better feeling in the world. Last November, she got a call from a detective in East Texas, with whom she'd worked on another case some years earlier. The two had clashed over turf before. ("I'd said to him, 'One of two things is gonna happen here today: Either you're gonna help me find my missing person, or I'm gonna find him without you.' ") Now Caison's first thought was, Am I in trouble?
But the detective was calling with news of Freddy Locklear, the young man who had disappeared from his sister's Fayetteville home nearly a year earlier. The lawman had stopped at a mom-and-pop restaurant in town and could have sworn that the guy washing dishes -- with his curly black hair and rimless glasses -- was the man Caison had e-mailed him about a few days before. " I about broke my leg running out to phone you," the detective said.
When Caison called Freddy's sister at work with the news, Fawn let out a yelp so loud that her office mates burst into cheers. Stepping outside, she had a good cry, then phoned the restaurant and asked for her brother. Freddy couldn't explain exactly how he'd gotten to Texas, but the folks who owned the place had given him free room and board, and treated him like a member of their family. Now he missed his own family. "I was hoping you'd find me," he said. "I'm ready to come home."
That's the kind of thing that keeps Caison searching. "I may not be in church on Sunday," she says, "but I'm not at home gossiping on the phone. I'm out in the woods -- looking for somebody."