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TwitThisLaying 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.
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