Missing (page 2 of 8)

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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.