UBC: Nash, Among the Missing

Among the Missing: An Anecdotal History of Missing Persons from 1800 to the Present by Jay Robert Nash

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For what it is and when it was written, this is a pretty good book.

It is not (what I realized belatedly I had been hoping for) a history of missing persons investigations. It's a series of anecdotes about people who go missing, whether it's for hours or years, whether it's voluntary or involuntary, whether they turn up alive or dead or not at all. The book shows its age in its cheerful disregard for source citation, and it is distinctly a book for dilettantes, not written for people like me who want to delve deeply into every subject they read about.

But for all that, it's a fascinating book. Some of the cases in here I'd read about, like Charley Ross, (Little Charley Ross: The Shocking Story of America's First Kidnapping for Ransom) Brooke Hart (Swift Justice: Murder & Vengeance In A California Town), and Bobby Franks, although I would not have described that as primarily a missing persons case (For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago). (Oddly, I had just come to the section on Percy Harrison Fawcett when I found The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, which I paused this book to devour.) Some of them I knew about (Judge Crater, Amelia Earhart, the Mary Celeste, the Bermuda Triangle, Ambrose Bierce). Some of them I'd never heard of, like the terrifying case of Dorothy Forstein, who was attacked and brutally beaten in her own home by an assailant who was never identified. Five years later, she disappeared, again from her own home. The case has never been solved. Or the disappearance of Dorothy Arnold--again, never solved. Or the awful, baffling disappearance of Orion Williamson (the only case in the entire book which Nash insists he has verified), who disappeared in full view of his wife and neighbors while walking across a field in Selma, Alabama, in 1854. Nash also talks about fraudulent kidnappings and faked deaths, people who go missing for all kinds of reasons, or no reason at all.

Mostly, it's a book that pointed me toward cases I want to learn more about.

Including one that itself seems almost to have disappeared. In the back of Among the Missing, Nash has a chronology of "the most distinctive and notorious disappearances" from 1800 to 1977. Under 1972, he lists: "Nineteen-year-old Robin Lee Reade, of Lake Forest, Illinois, disappears on March 27 while on a trip to California and Hawaii. Her parents hire two detectives, who turn up nothing. The Reades then employ mystic Peter Hurkos, who takes them on a tour of Oklahoma, Buenos Aires, Argentina and Honolulu. Though Hurkos points out several buildings to the Reades, stating that their daughter is buried somewhere inside, nothing is uncovered. Chicago private detective Anthony J. Pellicano, who specializes in missing persons cases, is employed by the Reades in March 1977. Within one month, he finds Robin Reade's grave on the side of a mountain outside Honolulu" (411). And there's a picture beside the entry, captioned "Private investigator Anthony J. Pellicano, who specializes in missing-persons cases, explains how he solved the Robin Reade case in 1972." (Of course, by Nash's own narrative, he didn't solve the case in 1972. He solved it in 1977.) If you Google for Robin Lee Reade, you find less than what Nash provides. On the other hand, if you Google for Anthony J. Pellicano, you discover that he went on to have an interesting but not entirely legal--or in fact legal at all-- career as a private investigator with a much more lucrative specialty. Which makes me wonder, how did he find Robin Lee Reade's grave in less than a month, five years after she disappeared? Nash has that infuriating photo of Pellicano explaining, but he doesn't say what the explanation was. Which is sort of emblematic of why this book frustrates me.



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