Missing (page 7 of 8)

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"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."