It has been reported, 5-year old Jhessye Shockley wandered out of her Glendale residence on October 11, 2011 and vanished. She had been with her siblings, ages 13, 9. and 6 who had been watching her. Jhessye’s mother, Jerice Hunter, reported her child missing to Glendale Police Department after she said she had returned home from running an errand and could not find Jhessye. She reported she had left to run to a local check cashing business locking the door behind her and returned to find the door unsecured. A beautiful little girl who dreamed of being a ballerina seemingly has disappeared into thin air.
Since Jhessye’s disappearance, Glendale Police have conducted an intense investigation but have indicated leads are just not panning out. When a child goes missing it is initial investigative procedure to closely examine the family dynamics and substantiate information provided by family members in order to rule them out as suspects. The investigation into Jhessye’s disappearance has been no different. Recently, information about, Jhessye’s mother, Hunter, focused the ensuing investigation closer to home.
Soon after the child was reported missing, Hunter was pleading for the help on local and national news broadcasts and investigators began interviewing Jhessye’s siblings and other family members. Despite begging for the public to help bring her child home, it is reported that Hunter has been less than cooperative with police, even refusing a polygraph test.
Due to the time that has passed since Jhessye’s disappearance there is much concern for her safety. In fact, it has been reported that Sgt. Coombs from Glendale Police Department has stated it is not likely the child will be found alive. Given the new developments in the case, even statistically speaking the likelihood of Jhessye being recovered alive grows slimmer day by day.
Court documents that have been released have shed some light on the outcome of the police interviews of the remaining children. According to the documents released publicly, Jhessye’s older sister told police that she found her little sister in her mother’s closet, unresponsive, eyes bruised and her hair pulled out. She also states her Hunt thoroughly cleaned the apartment and her shoes in the closet after Jhessye’s disappearance. There is also a major discrepancy in the time frame the little girl may have vanished and Hunt’s delay reporting Jhessye missing. The older sibling indicates she had not seen her sister since September but Hunt only reported Jhessye missing on October 11th.
Police also discovered that Hunt has a prior history of child abuse and a report made to Child Protective Services as recent as April 13, 2011. During the initial police interview of the three siblings, all reported they saw Jhessye the day she was reported missing and told investigators they were told to help clean leaves in the rear yard but never saw their sister again.
All three remaining children were removed from the home by Child Protective Services and placed in foster care. It was while talking to the foster mother that the 13yr old sibling admitted her mother had told all the children to lie about Jhessye’s disappearance. She then admitted that Hunt had returned home one day and found Jhessye in the living room with a young neighbor boy and became furious calling 5yr old Jhessye a “Ho.” The older sister claims her mother proceeded to take Jhessye into her bedroom and she could hear her little sister screaming.
In the days following, the older sibling said Jhessye was kept in her mother’s bedroom closet but when her mother would leave she would take her little sister out and give her food and water, placing her back in the bedroom closet so Jhessye would not get in trouble upon her mother’s return. She further claimed Jhessye had several cuts and bruises to her face and body.
Jhessye’s 9yr old and 6yr old siblings also corroborate their older sister’s story, reporting seeing bruises and Jhessye’s eyes black prior to her disappearance. One of the children described Jhessye as looking like a ‘Zombie’ with her hair pulled out and said the closet looked like a grave and smelled like dead people. According to the children, Hunter placed incense in a purple and green container to hide the odor.
The children also stated their mother spent an entire day cleaning the home using soap and bleach in the closet. Credit card transactions confirm Hunter purchased several food items and bleach at Walgreens on October 9, 2011.
School records also substantiate the children’s claims that Jhessye disappearance occurred prior to the October 11th police report. School records indicate her last day of school was on September 22, 2011 and documented Hunter claimed her daughter had ringworm and then later pink eye but never confirmed by a medical professional.
Hunter was arrested November 23, 2011 and currently held on $100,000 bond. While Hunter is being held on allegations of child abuse, the Commissioner informed Hunter she was the suspect in her daughter’s homicide. Based upon information presented ,Jhessye is not expected to be found alive but her case remains an active homicide investigation.
This will not be the first time Hunter has faced prison time. She served 3 years in a California penitentiary after being convicted of abusing Jhessye’s older siblings. Released last year, Hunter moved to an apartment in Glendale, AZ.
Clearly, Jhessye’s disappearance may have been preventable had the children been appropriately interviewed and removed from the home when a report had been made to Child Protective Services in April. Jhessye’s disappearance follows an announcement by Maricopa County Bill Montgomery that a new Arizona Child Safety Task Force and CPS reform is underway that will assign a special unit of investigators to conduct the initial screening on child abuse calls.
The Arizona Child Safety Task Force conducted it’s first public meeting on November 16, 2011. It has been stated Governor Jan Brewer received a tip that CPS had a backlog of approximately 9,903 non-active but open cases becoming the catalyst to creating the new task force.
Meanwhile, the search continues for Jhessye and we can only hope that her tragic story, along with the so many other children who have died due to child abuse after a report and investigation was conducted by CPS does create the urgency and reform needed to save innocent lives.
Author – Kym L. Pasqualini
Founder, National Center for Missing Adults
& Social Network Advocate
Missing Persons Advocacy Network
Phone: 800-889-3463 (FIND)
The father of missing York chef Claudia Lawrence has asked MPs for more legal rights for families of missing people.
Peter Lawrence, 63, was speaking at a meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Runaway and Missing Children and Adults.
He said families currently have no way to deal with a missing person’s property and finances.
Group chairwoman MP Anne Coffey said a Parliamentary inquiry will be held into potential changes to legislation.
The meeting in the House of Commons was attended by MPs as well as representatives of the police, banking and legal sectors.
Families ‘in limbo’
Labour MP for Stockport Mrs Coffey said: “Mr Lawrence gave a very good account of what happens to families – apart from the emotional trauma of a relative going missing, they face a lot of legal and practical problems.
“For example, his daughter had a mortgage and it was difficult to get the mortgage company and bank to engage with him, the same with car insurance.
“We recognize we need to do something to support families in these situations.”
A Parliamentary inquiry will take place over the next couple of months, Ms Coffey said, with police and banking experts called to make recommendations about how the current obstacles families face can be overcome.
One option is to introduce a “guardian order” so a relative can take over a missing person’s finances.
Claudia disappeared nearly two years ago and a vigil was held on Sunday by the Archbishop of York to mark her 37th birthday.
Mr Lawrence said families are currently left “in limbo”, unable to prove a person was dead or alive.
‘Presumption of death’
Another option could be the introduction of a “presumption of death act” in England and Wales, which would allow families to resolve the financial affairs of a missing person.
Currently a person must be missing for at least seven years to be declared presumed dead.
The law change would allow anyone with an interest in a missing person’s affairs to apply to the high court for them to be presumed dead.
There would be no minimum time before they could apply, as long as they could show evidence to suggest the person had died.
Scotland already has a presumption of death act which was introduced in the 1970s.
Martin Houghton-Brown, chief executive of the charity Missing People, said: “If your house is burgled you are automatically offered emotional, practical and legal support.
Suzanne Pilley was just yards from her work in a city centre street in broad daylight, when she simply vanished. Richard Bath investigates
‘EXCUSE me sir, would you be interested in a copy of the Big Issue?” asks a young homeless man in a neat jacket and suspiciously clean trousers. He’s outside the branch of Sainsbury’s on the corner of St Andrew Square and Rose Street, and his exaggerated politeness plays well with the thousands of buttoned-up commuters who walk past him every day. His prize pitch, right in the commercial centre of Edinburgh, is strategically placed within two minutes’ walk of the capital’s main bus and railway stations. He says this is the best place in the city to sell the magazine. “Day or night, there are always tons of folk around here.”
The small Sainsbury’s supermarket that was designed to service the commuters who flood into the city each day is always packed. The busiest periods are at lunchtime when there’s a brisk trade selling sandwiches; just after 5pm when the men and women in suits pick up a bottle of wine and a ready-made meal for one on their way back to the suburbs; and first thing in the morning when the area’s office workers pop in to pick up a croissant and the milk for their day’s coffee.
Preparing for her working day was exactly what Suzanne Pilley was doing on the Tuesday morning after the May bank holiday. We know that because 12 days ago at precisely 8:51am the Sainsbury’s CCTV captured her leaving the store, carrying a shoulder bag containing her lunch and a large bottle of mineral water. From there she wandered 100 yards along the west side of St Andrew Square, across George Street and towards her office in Thistle Street. At 8:55, five minutes before she would normally be quietly ensconced at her desk, she was spotted on CCTV next to a black people carrier taxi at the junction of North St David Street and Thistle Street as it dropped off its passengers. From there, it was less than 50 yards to the front door to her employers, financial services firm Infrastructure Managers Limited.
The quietly-spoken and popular 38-year-old book-keeper never made it to her desk. Instead, somewhere between the corner of Thistle Street and her office at No11, she simply disappeared into the ether.
Last year, there were 43,780 incidents of people being reported missing in Scotland, with 75 per cent being found within 48 hours, many of them children who had simply got temporarily lost, or had lost track of time while out playing with friends. This case, however, is far from ordinary. A spokeswoman from the charity Missing People admitted that it is “extremely unusual” for someone to vanish without any underlying cause, yet nothing that the police have so far turned up in her background has suggested that Pilley has any of the issues that commonly explain disappearances. No drugs, no alcohol, no stress, no mental health issues, no debt, no violence, no job loss.
On the contrary, Pilley was an almost model citizen, a font of contentment. Her employer Alan Jessop, the managing director of IML, spoke of a “lovely lady” and a “very valued member of staff” who had an unblemished employment record and who had never missed work without getting in touch beforehand. There was, he stressed, nothing in her behaviour or demeanour in the days leading up to her disappearance that suggested that she had any problems at work, or away from the office. “We’re obviously very concerned at Suzanne’s disappearance,” he said, as forensics officers scoured the office in vain for any signs that Pilley had ever made it there.
Her 67-year-old parents, Sylvia and Robert, were equally dumbfounded. The Pilleys are a very close family, Suzanne living just around the corner from her parents in the city’s Stenhouse area. Ever the dutiful daughter, she would ring or text her mother every day just to keep in touch. It was her parents who alerted the police that evening when she didn’t return home.
Last week they spoke of a healthy young woman who lived life to the full and a “proud Scot” who filled her life with exercise and doing good for others. Her father spoke of the family’s hurt, of how her disappearance was completely out of character for a daughter whose life had stability and routine. Her mother spoke of a daughter who “loves the great outdoors and is always cycling, walking and loves keep fit”, of a woman who “is a great fundraiser for charity, even abseiling off the Forth Road Bridge recently”.
As Sylvia Pilley talked about her daughter, she reacted as any parent would, with a palpable sense of pre-emptive grief and trepidation. “We miss her terribly,” she said. “The past week has just been like our worst nightmare – we almost cannot believe it is actually happening. Every morning you wake up and wonder, is this really happening? You never think it’ll happen to you. You see it on the television with other people, and you feel sorry for them, but you don’t really understand the grief. We just don’t know what’s happened. We just want to find out, get to the bottom of things and put our minds at rest.”
The reaction of the police would have done little to reduce their sense of unease. Throughout the week the Lothian & Borders force screened the CCTV footage of her movements on a big screen in St Andrew Square and dozens of officers questioned passers-by about possible sightings. A large-frame ad trailer depicting Pilley was placed in George Street, and, this weekend, a Facebook appeal page was launched by concerned friends.
The depth of the concern felt at her abrupt disappearance, and in particular the fact that her bank cards have not been used since she left Sainsbury’s, was underlined by Detective Chief Inspector Gary Flannigan. The man who heads up the investigation said that “we have very grave – and I must underline the word grave – concerns for the wellbeing of Suzanne. We are desperate to speak to anyone who saw her last Tuesday. A large team has carried out extensive inquiries in the last week, and I have to say there are strong indications that a criminal act could account for Suzanne’s disappearance.”
The clear implication was she could have been abducted. If so, the time and the place – daylight in a busy city centre street – suggests it was by someone who knew her and her daily routine. This is a line of inquiry being mined by the police, who are trying to unravel her private life.
The focus of the investigation has now moved to the unmarried 38-year-old’s apparently complicated romantic life. According to neighbours, a boyfriend had been sharing her home for the past six months, with his Vauxhall Vectra parked outside every evening until around six weeks ago. Police sources, however, say that this relationship had ended and a new one had started. Amid speculation that she was involved in a “love triangle”, police have prioritised tracing anyone who was romantically involved with Pilley, scouring her mobile phone records in an effort to try and reconstruct her life.
YET if an abduction by a current or ex-boyfriend seems to be the main line of inquiry, officers have not discounted the possibility that Pilley has simply disappeared in the wake of a failed relationship and doesn’t want to be found. Research in 2003 suggested that 30 per cent of people who went missing did so because of a failed relationship. These people were also the most resistant to being found or reconciled with friends and family when they were tracked down, with 58 per cent refusing go back to their former lives when located by the National Missing Persons Hotline.
However, the lack of any apparent plans to vanish, the fact that she was so clearly on her way to work, and the fact that her bank and credit cards haven’t been used, have led police to suspect the worst. Certainly, the tenor and style of the investigation is more like that for a major crime than a missing person. Specially trained officers from four Scottish police forces have been called in to form a major incident co-ordination and development unit, while 60 detectives from Lothian and Borders Police are now working full-time on the case, poring over 300 hours of central Edinburgh CCTV footage and speaking to Pilley’s friends, family and colleagues.
A great deal of attention has been paid to piecing together her journey to work that Tuesday morning. The detail they have managed to collate has been impressive, but not so far illuminating. They know it was a day much like any other for Pilley, one that began with the usual bus journey from her home in Whitson Drive in Saughton, to the West End. She had caught a No2 bus from Stevenson Drive at 8:20, texting her mother to say she was on her way to work. Twelve minutes later she got off the bus on the Dalry Road opposite Caledonian Terrace, catching the No4 bus into town three minutes later.
Three minutes after stepping off the bus outside Jenners at 8:48, she was caught on CCTV in Sainsbury’s, which she left at 8:51. By 8:55 she was caught on CCTV at the corner of Thistle Street, wearing a light blue waterproof jacket, red fleece top, light blue trousers or jeans, and trainers. Despite intensive searches of the lanes behind Thistle Street and the high-profile publicity drive, that’s where the trail abruptly goes cold.
As the face of Madeleine McCann became a cause célèbre among the many children abducted each year, so the smiling photos of exuberant everywoman Suzanne Pilley have become the face of the disappeared. It is a strange and macabre sort of fame she and her family neither sought nor want. For the rest of us, it is an unwelcome reminder that even in the middle of the day, in the middle of one of the busiest streets in the capital, no-one can take their safety for granted.
Missing
A 2004 study found of the 1 per cent of missing people unresolved after a year, most will be people who have “drifted” away, but a proportion will be people whose disappearance was sudden and out of character.
• A 1999 study found that the number of people who went missing each year was 3.6 per 1,000 members of the population.
• A 2005 study by Parents & Abducted Children Together (PACT) estimated that more than 100,000 children go missing every year, or “one every five minutes”.
• The under-18 age group accounts for about two-thirds of all missing person reports.
• 71 per cent of 13-17 year olds reported missing are female, whereas 73 per cent of those over 24 who go missing are male.
• 75 per cent of missing cases are solved within 48 hours. Some 99 per cent of missing people are found within one year, while 0.6 per cent of missing people are found to have died.
• Since 2002, police have recorded between 600 and 1,000 child abductions every year.
Police hope to generate new tips on open missing-person cases.
Melanie Drury yearns for the day when she’ll be able to bring her missing sister home.
It’s been almost 16 years since anyone has heard from Melisa Brady Sloan — a pretty, 23-year-old newlywed who disappeared in Orlando in May 1994. Her husband, Gulf War veteran John Sloan, was the last person to see her alive.
Melisa Sloan’s unsolved disappearance is one of Orlando Police Department’s 16 open, missing-person cases that date back as far as 1982. Half of the missing people are thought to be dead, or foul play is suspected, but police said investigators can’t close the case until it’s solved.
On Wednesday, Orlando police announced its new Missing Persons Tip Line — a 24-hour phone line dedicated solely to receiving tips in cases like Sloan’s.
“Every family needs closure, but closure is not the primary motive for the work that we do,” said Chief Val Demings, who was flanked by investigators and officers. “The driving force behind the work that we do is the victim.”
The announcement came a day after missing 11-year-old Winter Springs girl Nadia Bloom was found, four days after wandering away from home and into the woods. Orlando police did not investigate her case.
But it also came just days after detectives revealed that they had no further leads in the case of missing Orlando woman Jennifer Kesse. The 24-year-old woman disappeared from her condo near the Mall at Millenia in January 2006.
Until just a few weeks ago, a detective worked full time on the Kesse case. Demings met with Kesse’s parents and told them there were no more viable leads.
Homicide detectives Andre Boren, Patrick Schneider and Joel Wright on Wednesday highlighted the department’s 16 open cases. They start with that of Gwendelyn K. Goode, who was reported missing in February 1982 and represents the department’s oldest missing-person case. The 39-year-old woman was a heavy drinker and may have walked away from her life to become a transient, police said.
Investigators believe she is dead.
Another case involves 80-year-old Rayfield Crume, who suffered from the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. He never showed up to meet his wife at a store in June 2004. His truck was later found abandoned and stuck in the mud near Fort Myers at the edge of a swamp.
Searches turned up nothing, but he is believed to be dead, Boren said.
Investigators think the Missing Person Tip Line will generate more leads and help close some cases. Detectives urge anyone with information about missing people to call the tip line at 407-246-2916.
For Drury, the tip line renews her hope that her sister’s body will be found.
Detectives said they think Sloan was murdered and her body dumped, likely somewhere near her apartment on Kirkman Road in west Orlando. Search crews have combed the woods on several occasions in recent years, but nothing has turned up. Source
