Stories of the disappeared
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Read stories about people who have disappeared -- from their homes, their families, their workplaces. Who are the disappeared? Who is missing them? And what is being done to find them?Â
- Lori Pilger
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Early on Aug. 14, 1987, Jill Cutshall's stepmother saw the 9-year-old laying out her clothes -- jeans and a purple shirt -- in their Norfolk apartment.
It was the last time she would see her stepdaughter.
Three months later, a hunter would find those clothes, along with the girl's underwear, shoes and keys, in a wildlife area a dozen miles southeast of town, near Stanton.
And a Norfolk man, David Phelps, would be given a life sentence for kidnapping her nearly 30 years ago.
But his trial left so many questions.
“We've never determined exactly what happened to Jill,†Norfolk Police Chief Bill Mizner said.
He started as chief 11 days after Jill was reported missing and remembers walking into a nearly empty police department. Everyone, he learned, was in the basement: police officers, investigators, deputies, State Patrol troopers, FBI agents. A captain at the head of the table was going over assignments.
They paused briefly so someone could introduce him. Then they got back to work.
After, Mizner said, he went upstairs, shut the door to his new office and said out loud: “What have I got myself into?â€
Everyone wanted to find the 4-foot-6, 60-pound blonde, later described in court records as outgoing and athletic, happy, mature and intelligent.
The day she disappeared, the plan was for Jill to leave the McNeely Apartments, where she was staying that summer with her dad and stepmom, and walk to her babysitter’s house a few blocks away at around 8.
But when her stepmom got off work and went to the babysitter’s to pick Jill up, she learned the girl had never arrived.
After checking other places Jill might be, her father and stepmom went to the police department.
No one knew then she still would be missing 29 years later.
Witnesses reported spotting a girl matching her description at about 6:30 that morning on her babysitter's steps. But the babysitter’s live-in boyfriend didn’t see her before he left for work around 7:30.
Others reported seeing her near the McNeely Apartments, and in Fremont, West Point, even a Sioux City mall. None of the leads panned out.
Police asked hunters to watch for evidence related to her disappearance. And on Nov. 7, 1987, one at Wood Duck State Wildlife Refuge spotted her clothes.
But even that failed to turn up fingerprints, blood, semen, hairs or fibers -- anything -- that could help solve the mystery of what happened.
In early 1988, the lead police detective had come across Phelps while searching for a former tenant of the McNeely Apartments and would interview him several times.
But it was Roy Stephens, a private investigator hired by Jill’s mother, Joyce, who in January 1989 would drive him to Wood Duck, hand him a shovel and tell him to show him where Jill was buried.
Stephens, a felon who had lied about his criminal record to get his private investigator's license, told Phelps he could kill him right there and nobody would find him, and at one point Stephens fired his gun into the air, according to 1992 Nebraska Supreme Court records.
Phelps dug for about 20 minutes before finally saying he was ready to talk. With a tape recorder going, he said another man woke him that day, saying he had a child in his car and they were going to go for a ride. Phelps said they went out to the Wood Duck area, where he held Jill down while the other man raped her.
Phelps said he drove back to Norfolk, leaving the two behind.
After giving the recorded statement, Phelps went with Stephens to a Norfolk motel, where Phelps agreed to be interviewed by an Omaha TV crew. One of the reporters later would testify she didn’t believe everything Phelps said in the 30-minute interview; he seemed to be making it up as he went along.
But Phelps would make another statement that night to police, largely confirming what he had said on videotape, before he recanted, saying he had made up the entire story out of fear.
Joyce Cutshall ultimately would petition for a grand jury, which indicted Phelps, a man who admitted having a sexual interest in young girls.
In 1991, the case went to trial, a jury found Phelps guilty and a judge sentenced him to life.
Today, Phelps has an appeal pending. And the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children has a photo of what Jill might look like now -- she would be 38 -- on its website.
A couple of years after she disappeared, there was a service at her grandmother’s church and a tree was planted on the church grounds in memory of Jill.
Norfolk police consider it a suspended case.
Police Capt. Mike Bauer said they can go months, if not years, without new information, but occasionally developments turn up.
Like a diary that surfaced in 2012 purporting to tell, in graphic detail, of the abduction, rape and murder of four women at a farm near Chambers. One was said to be a girl named Jill.
But, Bauer said, the more they learned, the more it looked like a hoax.
Today, there are somewhere around 300 electronic reports on the case.
He and Chief Mizner said they don’t think any officer involved in a case like Jill's ever wants to give up. They want to be able to give the family answers.
“I don't know if she's alive or not, but if we get any information, we still will follow it up,†Mizner said.
He’s learned never to say never, though he knows that the passing years make it less likely they’ll ever learn more.
But it stands as the biggest missing persons case Norfolk has ever had and is on the short list of its highest profile cases, including killings.
The veteran chief is still as baffled by Jill's disappearance as he was on his first day.
Asked what he thinks happened, Mizner said: “We just don’t know."
- NICHOLAS BERGIN Lincoln Journal Star
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HASTINGS -- Marilyn Alexander disappeared on Sept. 20, 2001.
Her family believes she was the victim of domestic violence, her homicide unpunished.
Yet without proof, they wonder: Is she out there nearly 15 years later?
Is she being held against her will? Did she leave to start a new life without her husband and four children?
“There have been a lot of times when I’ve been driving somewhere, and I stopped and turned around, because I thought I saw someone that looked like her,†said Marilyn Alexander's oldest child, Elizabeth Morris, now 36.
Her younger sister, 26-year-old Emilea Sells, recently drove to the Rosebud Casino near Valentine with her husband, but spent the trip hoping she wouldn’t find her mom feeding coins into a slot machine.
“If she is still alive, that means she left everybody. I can’t see her doing that,†Sells said.
Marilyn Alexander was 39 when she disappeared. It was several years before the 2004 launch of Facebook, which families often turn to now to help find missing loved ones.
In the initial days and weeks, her disappearance got little attention. She had suffered from occasional depression, and she drank and gambled. She had gone off on her own before but had always made sure her children had a place to stay, either with her parents or sister.
Then workers at the gas station she managed found checks she wrote to the business but didn’t cash. Police got a warrant for her arrest on suspicion of theft.
“We’re not going to lie. She was an alcoholic, and she had a gambling problem,†said Cheryl Thiel, Alexander’s sister.
“Police treated her as a runaway, as a criminal that ran away from her crime,†Ed Thiel, her brother-in-law, added.
About a month after she disappeared, her car was found north of Red Cloud. In the car there were beer cans and a money bag with uncashed checks but no cash.
Her brother and ex-husband were members of the Red Cloud Fire Department and got fellow volunteers to help scour nearby fields.
Things didn’t add up to those who knew her. They say she wouldn’t have left without arranging for a place for her children to stay.
None of her belongings were missing, not even the pillow she had refused to sleep without for years. She once forced her ex-husband to drive hours to get that pillow after she forgot it at a hotel.
Her dad, Laurence “Abie†Johnson, a former Hastings police detective, would have bailed her out of legal trouble, paid her debts and hired her an attorney; and Marilyn Alexander knew that, Cheryl Thiel said.
At the time, family wondered whether she had fled from her husband, Robert Alexander, and sought help at a women’s shelter. Morris, her oldest daughter, called them all.
“All they would say is, 'If she’s here, she is going to have to contact you herself,'" she said. “At that point, it kind of gave us a little bit of hope.â€
Amy Evans, executive director of Friendship Home, a Lincoln shelter, sympathized with the heartache Marilyn Alexander's family felt, but said the danger domestic violence victims face makes secrecy essential.
"I just can't imagine what that must have been like for her to so desperately be looking for her mother and not be able to get the answers that she needed," Evans said. "However, we as a domestic violence shelter can't know who the person calling actually is and whether the victim would want information disclosed to that person."
Evans said if the Friendship Home knows how to contact a person whose family is looking for them, staff will pass on a message and ask whether it's OK to give a message back to the person who called.
The month before Alexander disappeared, she had suffered a cut going through a glass door of a gun cabinet during a fight with Robert. He wouldn’t let her get it treated at a hospital.
“I told her at that point she needed to leave him and get away,†Morris said. “But she said she didn’t want to have another failed marriage.â€
The most dangerous time for a woman in an abusive relationship is when she's leaving, said Patsy Martin, communications coordinator for Voices of Hope, a Lincoln-based nonprofit that works with victims of abuse and sexual assault.
The Nebraska State Patrol recorded 22 domestic violence-related deaths involving 17 perpetrators from 2012 to 2013, the most recent dates for which figures are publicly available. All the deaths happened in a heterosexual relationship with a male abuser. In some cases, the person killed was a child or someone else close to the abuse victim.
Marilyn Alexander’s dad suspected his son-in-law of murder.
Adams County Sheriff Gregg Magee said area law enforcement respected Johnson, who died in 2007 without getting closure in the most personal case of his life.
Johnson brought his suspicions to investigators, Magee said, but officers were never able to prove Alexander died.
Robert Alexander took a lie detector test, which indicated he answered questions truthfully, according to documentation provided by Marilyn's family.
It wasn’t enough to convince Johnson, who hired a private detective and paid to have a cadaver dog search the septic tank of the Alexander home near Hastings.
The rest of the family looked to Johnson for guidance, and he told them to put their faith in law enforcement. Years later, they wonder whether evidence was lost during those first weeks, when police considered it a case of a woman running from the law.
The night before Alexander disappeared, she tucked her two youngest children into bed, like she did every night. Everything seemed normal, said Sells, 11 at the time. Her brother, David, was 9.
“She told us she loved us,†Sells said.
Their older siblings were grown and out of the house. Morris had her own family, and Tim Flesner was attending college in Lincoln, where he still lives.
Marilyn Alexander woke early Sept. 20, 2001, and left the house before her kids got up for school. She managed the Time Saver gas station and had to open.
Ed Thiel was the last member of the family to see her when he stopped at the station.
“She was not her normal giddy self,†he said. “She was kind of depressed, said she had to go back home and do something, then had to pay a bill.â€
What happened after that is a mystery.
A man claimed to have seen her at a Lincoln bar that day drinking beer and watching the Huskers play football, which police considered the last time she was seen alive. But her family thinks he was mistaken about the date she was there. She had been at the bar a week prior, before she went missing, watching a football game.
When the younger children got home from school that day, they found their stepdad shampooing the carpet. It was odd for him to be home that time of day, Sells said, and even more unusual for him to be doing housework.
That weekend, Robert Alexander moved the kids to their father’s house in Red Cloud. He filed for divorce about a month later.
Robert Alexander died in March 2003 when his truck crashed about 5 miles north of Harvard.
Marilyn Alexander remains on the Nebraska State Patrol’s Missing Persons Clearinghouse.
The Adams County Sheriff’s Office still has an active missing person case and criminal case, to make it easier to search national databases for mention of her. They also have samples of her hair and DNA.
She doesn’t have a headstone or memorial and never got an obituary.
Her children believe she’s dead, but they’ve been unable to properly mourn, Morris said.
“Even if we had a stone somewhere, there’s never going to be closure."
- Chris Dunker
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A small army of volunteers searched the square mile surrounding Ann Marie Kelley’s home a few days after she disappeared on April 15, 2008.
The rural Filley woman had taken off once before, leaving for a night before returning home in the morning, but this time she hadn't come back.
The last anyone heard from the 37-year-old was earlier that day, when she keyed in to her job at Southeast Community College in Beatrice, and later called her boss about an issue with one of her kids at school.
The final text message sent from her phone was a simple "What's up?" to her husband, William.
After that, Ann Marie and the dark gray 1991 Plymouth Voyager minivan with wood paneling she was last seen driving in Beatrice vanished.
Her family learned she was missing when Head Start called to say no one showed up to pick up the Kelleys' youngest child, or two others from St. Paul's Lutheran School.
That night, William called Ann Marie's sister, Rhonda Rickers, asking what he should do. William later called Beatrice police at 7:30 p.m. to report his wife missing, and the sheriff’s office responded.
“At first, it was just a missing persons case,†said Randy Ritnour, who was county attorney until 2011 and who spearheaded much of the early effort to find Ann Marie.
Law enforcement focused on finding the boxy minivan -- the kind that would stick out in 2008 -- and distributed Ann Marie’s driver’s license photo.
The hope was if someone spotted the vehicle Ann Marie wouldn’t be far away, said Sheriff Millard "Gus" Gustafson.
Neither turned up, despite a deluge of tips from all corners of the state and beyond, including one describing a woman resembling Ann Marie driving a van in Wyoming.
It was a coincidence, Ritnour said. Investigators traveled to Wyoming, where they met a woman named Anne Kelly driving an early 1990s minivan.
But it was not the Ann Marie Kelley they were looking for.
* * *
The investigation shifted back to the Kelley house.
A search of the property turned up drugs, Ritnour said, and an angry William Kelley sped home to confront law enforcement, more upset with the direction of the investigation than the fact his wife was missing.
Unbeknownst to William, he was becoming a suspect.
The summer before, according to former coworkers interviewed by deputies, William had talked about killing his wife and bragged that he knew several bodies of water in the area “deep enough that he could get a vehicle into it and that no one would be able to find.â€
But the coworkers had brushed aside his comments at the time. They knew him to be a hothead who often argued with his wife over money troubles.
With a new direction to search, Nebraska State Patrol divers waded into farm ponds, sand pits and limestone quarries dotting Gage County to look for vehicles. The sheriff’s office bought a sonar device to scan the muddy bottoms for a minivan.
Nothing tied to the case has been found.
Investigators pried into phone records to look for clues to Ann Marie's disappearance. Court records show William reported finding a note, as well as Ann Marie’s cellphone, on a pillow in the couple’s bedroom at around 12:30 a.m. on April 16, 2008.
The search of the house, however, also led deputies to discover Kelley had been trading drugs and alcohol with a teenage girl for sex.
Deputies arrested William Kelley, charging him with child abuse, drug possession, providing false information on a handgun application and being a felon in possession of a firearm.
A little more than a year after his wife disappeared, William Kelley was sentenced to 16 years in the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution by Judge Daniel E. Bryan Jr.
He is scheduled for a parole hearing later this month, court records show.
At a post-sentencing hearing, Kelley requested Gage County return several items taken from his property: VCR tapes, a fishing boat and pictures.
Bryan asked Ritnour if there was any reason to deny the request.
“We believe she might be dead,†Ritnour told the court. “So we need to keep the evidence.â€
Bryan sided with Gage County, in whose hands the evidence remains, although Kelley has never been charged in Ann Marie’s disappearance.
His alibi: Kelley was with his employer from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Lincoln on April 15, 2008, and didn’t return to Gage County until around 5 p.m.
The last message from Ann Marie's phone was sent around 12:30 that afternoon.
The case remains an active homicide investigation, Gage County Attorney Roger Harris said, and the sheriff’s office as well as the State Patrol are still looking into leads and combing over old evidence.
“We’ll treat it as a homicide until they show it differently," Harris said.
Missing persons cases -- like homicides -- are treated carefully by law enforcement, although cases involving adults can often be tricky, particularly when time has passed, he said.
“We’re going to stay on top of it and continue to search for an answer,†the county attorney said. “Sometimes it comes from the dangdest places, but it’s difficult for the family when you start wanting to have closure.â€
* * *
The day William was arrested, Rickers went to bring three of Ann Marie's kids home to the house she shares with her husband, Dale.
“I was informed they were going to be at the house, they were going to put them into foster care, so I went to pick them up,†Rickers said. “We thought Ann would be coming home soon.â€
She never has. Nor has she withdrawn money from her bank account, nor made any attempt to contact her children, now teenagers growing up in the Rickers’ home.
The family has reached closure, in some sense, even as questions about Ann Marie persist.
The contents of the note left on Ann Marie’s pillow remain a mystery, as do other details about the house that night. Some cellphones tied to the case were also destroyed as the investigation widened beyond a missing persons case, Ritnour said.
Rickers asked deputies if Ann Marie’s glasses or contacts were left at the home. Ann Marie couldn’t see without them, she told investigators, and it would be unlikely she would leave them behind if she left on her own.
But answers -- there have been three lead investigators from Gage County on the case over the past eight years -- have been hard to come by.
The three younger Kelley kids living with Rickers still wonder about their mother.
The youngest for a time believed his mother was at the bottom of the ocean after being attacked by whales. The older kids voiced theories that Ann Marie fled to Mexico in that dark gray 1991 Plymouth Voyager minivan with wood paneling to escape the husband she feared.
Once, the kids wanted to retrieve old family videos from the rural Filley home, to remember what their mother’s voice sounded like and to see her in motion, but pornography had been recorded over all the tapes, Rickers said.
It’s never easy to talk about, and while the kids have moved on to make friends and make the honor roll, a missing mother and a father in prison are never far from their minds, Rickers said.
In those conversations, Rickers often finds a common refrain: “We’re not in control and we don’t know why this happened.â€
“Our faith, at least for me and my husband, and we’re trying to instill that into them, is the comfort we have,†she said. “We honestly believe she’s in God’s arms.â€
Through a supportive family and others, Rickers said, the family has been pushing through.
“Prayer, that’s the biggest thing. The power of prayer," she said.
Fliers showing Ann Marie and her minivan are still posted around Beatrice, and the sheriff’s department is still investigating leads as they come in.
A few years ago, Gustafson said, the department even asked a nationally known psychic to look into Ann Marie's disappearance. “It is what it is,†he said at the time. “We’re trying everything.â€
There is an active warrant for Ann Marie’s arrest tied to the drugs found in the home, although officers say it’s in hopes that if she does cross law enforcement’s path, she’ll become a blip on the radar once more.
If her remains are ever found, the DNA will be compared to samples taken from her children.
Rickers said she hopes someone who knows something about her sister’s disappearance will come forward, although she believes the one who knows most about it sits in a Nebraska prison.
Ritnour, the former prosecutor, said what he thinks happened to Ann Marie and what he can prove “are two different things.â€
“I think she was killed and we just don’t know where the body is,†he said.
“Just in Gage County alone, there’s a lot of woolly country out there, and there’s a lot of open space,†he added. “If something has happened to Ann Marie Kelley, unless somebody just happened to cross it, that might be the only way you find her out there.â€
- NICHOLE MANNA Lincoln Journal Star
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Anwesha Dey left a friend’s house near 23rd and S streets, walking through the rain on a Sunday evening more than a year ago.
She never made it home.
The 30-year-old fell into Antelope Creek on her way to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and was swept away -- a fact known only because it was caught on video.
Dey could be seen struggling in the fast-moving, 3-foot-deep water in an attempt to gain her footing and get out.
But the current flowed too fast. And she didn’t know how to swim, her family would later tell investigators.
The camera faced Union Plaza, capturing video for a nearby insurance company.
Before she left on her walk on May 3, 2015, Dey was praying with a group practicing Buddhism, something she became excited about after moving to Nebraska from India for school. She left with a friend to shop at Wal-Mart. The two women bought groceries and Dey picked up a pair of black ballet flats from Payless.
An hour after being dropped off at home, Dey realized she had accidentally taken a bag of her friend's groceries. Dey planned to walk to campus anyway, so she stopped by the house on S Street and dropped off the bag.
She wouldn't be seen again.
Dey had left the house wearing an orange hooded sweatshirt and blue jeans. A gray backpack was strapped to her shoulders. None of her clothing or belongings has been found.
Her parents, who live 8,000 miles away, told the Journal Star in July 2015 they didn't want to believe their daughter drowned, and they were praying for a miracle.
Dey was reported missing three days after she was swept away. The search didn’t turn to the creek until a week after that. Searchers went through the moving water all the way to the Platte River, and investigators searched the creek from a canoe. They looked through sinkholes and knee-deep mud; they used camera-equipped drones and cadaver dogs, but found no evidence of Dey.
From where Dey entered the water, Antelope Creek flows north for about a mile toward the Devaney Sports Center where it joins Salt Creek, which connects to the Platte River near Ashland. Eventually, it joins the Missouri River and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico.
Lincoln Police investigator Lacey Reha said officers are constantly watching the creek for signs of Dey.Â
- Cindy Lange-Kubick
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After nearly 16 years, the tips still come in.
Jailhouse informants. Psychics. Strangers from area codes across the country.
And Ken Koziol checks them all, hoping one will finally lead to Regina Bos, the musical mother of three who left Duggan’s Pub at the end of open mic night on Oct. 17, 2000, put her guitar in her trunk and then disappeared.
More than 100 tips have been investigated, the sergeant with the Lincoln Police Department said.
Greg Sorensen, the first LPD detective on the Bos case, has retired; the second has moved to another unit.
“We really want to find out what happened to Gina,†Koziol said. “It’s on so many officers’ minds.â€
The high-profile case has an electronic file thousands of pages long, among the largest Koziol can remember in his 38 years on the force.
The cold case is classified as a missing persons case, although it’s highly unlikely Bos, 40 when she disappeared, is alive.
Koziol declined to detail the leads the department has chased, citing the open investigation.
“There are so many jailhouse rumors that go around, but it’s the same thing over and over.â€
And nothing has led to Bos, a middle child in a large, close-knit family who was waiting for a Habitat for Humanity house and had begun a new job when she vanished.
Koziol remains in contact with Bos’ sister, Jannel Rap, who became the family’s spokeswoman early in the search.
The California musician flew to Lincoln to help paper the city with fliers featuring her sister’s photo in the days after she vanished.
She started the Squeaky Wheel Tour, traveling the country performing and bringing attention to Gina and others who are missing in the cities she visited.
She started 411 GINA, a website with a hotline for tips about her sister’s whereabouts.
In the beginning, every lead brought hope, Rap said.
Over time, the family tempered its expectations. “Eventually, we learned for our own emotional health not to believe or count on anything until we knew there was some validity to it.â€
But even seemingly solid tips never panned out.
Earlier this year, Rap canceled the 800 number associated with the 411 GINA website, saving money by switching to a cellphone. She was surprised by the feelings that accompanied her decision.
“It’s a phone number, for goodness sake,†she wrote on Facebook. “But it’s not just any number. It’s a phone number that takes me back to that unimaginable moment when I heard those words ‘Gina is missing.’
“We had high hopes for that number and for this cause. We couldn’t find Gina, but perhaps there is hope for someone else’s ‘Gina.’â€
The case will remain open until Bos is found, Koziol said.
“Someone knows what happened to her. Hopefully one day they will finally find it in their soul to come forward.â€
- Riley Johnson
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For more than two years, Antonio E. Turner's been missing on paper.
In reality, he's believed to be alive and well and living in California.
But Lincoln Police Sgt. Luke Wilke said Turner will likely remain a "missing person" until his path crosses with a cop.
Turner's case remains active because of police protocol that a missing person must be verified as OK by a law enforcement officer.
An ex-girlfriend of Turner's reported him missing Aug. 22, 2014. She wanted to serve him with a protection order just a few days before he was reported missing.
Court documents show sheriff's deputies looked for him at all the addresses they knew were connected to Turner in Lincoln to give him the order.
But they came up empty.
And then Wilke was put on the case.
Wilke got in touch with Turner's sister, who said he left Lincoln and is living in California, he said.
Turner is still entered in the National Crime Information Center's missing person database, so if he comes into contact with police, they should clear it out, Wilke said.
Wilke can't clear Turner's name from the database because he hasn't contacted Turner, and the department doesn't have the money to send an officer to California to look for him.
The 45-year-old, who had worked at a north Lincoln bar before he left, knows the investigator is looking for him.
Attempts by the Journal Star to contact Turner or his sister were unsuccessful.
Because Turner appears to be OK, Wilke said, his case doesn't have the urgency of cases in which foul play is suspected.
And cases like Turner's are fairly common, the 24-year department veteran said.
"Some people don’t know we are looking for them," he said. "Some people know they are being sought but don’t want to be contacted."
And some people don't cooperate with police because they're afraid officers will share their location with family members.
In those cases, investigators don't divulge the person's location if he or she doesn't want police to, he said.Â
But in all cases, Wilke said, he leaves the National Crime Information Center entry active until the person is contacted by law enforcement.
"We tend to (err) on the side of safety."
- Peter Salter
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He's been missing nearly two decades, longer than almost anybody from Lincoln.
And you've likely never heard his name.
Michael Watkins would be 67 now, but had just entered his 50s when he left Lincoln in early November 1998, headed to California to spend Thanksgiving with his daughter in Bakersfield.
He wasn't missing then. And he wasn't missing when police pulled him over in Signal Hill, near Los Angeles, on Nov. 16, 1998. Or when cops stopped him again a week later in nearby Cypress.
He never did make it to Bakersfield, but he did end up behind bars in Tijuana, Mexico, in December 1998. He was released two days before Christmas, the last time anyone saw him alive.
Now he was missing, but not officially, at least not yet. It wasn’t until four years later, in 2002, that his wife in Lincoln made the call and the formal report to police.
Technically, Michael Watkins could be California's responsibility, or Mexico's. But either through a sense of personal duty or professional obligation, the Lincoln Police Department has devoted its resources to finding a man who was alive and well when he left the city limits.
They've generated at least 50 reports in their search for Watkins. They've communicated with his daughter. They've searched databases that contain descriptions and dental records of unidentified bodies from around the country.
And they've kept his file active all of these years, even though he didn't have the social media force behind his search, like in the case of Craig Baxter, or a determined family, like in the case of Regina Bos, who vanished from outside of Duggan's Pub two years after Watkins left Lincoln.
“I don’t know if anyone living locally even knows who Watkins was,†said Lincoln Police Sgt. Luke Wilke. “Everybody knows who Gina Bos is.â€
Still, they want to close this case, to take Michael Watkins -- a man you've likely never heard of, a man who hasn't been seen alive for nearly 20 years, a man who might not have ever made it out of Mexico -- off their list of missing persons.
- Kevin Abourezk
- Updated
Little is known about a 42-year-old man who has been missing since October 2009 -- like whether Leonel Lopez is even his real name.
Cited nine times between July 2003 and September 2006 for various traffic violations, the man never produced a valid driver’s license for Lincoln police.
So police can’t be sure he's 42. Or whether the name he gave police -- Leonel Lopez -- is real.
“That’s the name that he used,†said Lincoln Police Sgt. Luke Wilke. “I would be surprised if that was his correct name.â€
What police know is that in June 2010, his girlfriend reported him missing, saying she had last heard from him the previous November. She told police she thought he might have left for a job in Kansas in October 2009.
Despite a lack of leads about the man's whereabouts, police have continued searching for him. Wilke said he can’t find any recent information about Lopez using the identity he provided to police.
Lopez said he was born Sept. 5, 1973, and gave two apartment addresses, one at 18th and M streets and one at 23rd and Lynn streets.
Wilke said he has assigned various investigators to the case.
“A fresh set of eyes tends to benefit things,†he said. “We have very little to go on.â€
He said he does have a fingerprint Lopez gave for a traffic ticket, and he's plugged that into law enforcement databases to try to find Lopez.
“He doesn’t have anything in there, and that’s unusual,†he said. “It would be nice to get it resolved.â€
More like this...
- Lori Pilger
Early on Aug. 14, 1987, Jill Cutshall's stepmother saw the 9-year-old laying out her clothes -- jeans and a purple shirt -- in their Norfolk apartment.
It was the last time she would see her stepdaughter.
Three months later, a hunter would find those clothes, along with the girl's underwear, shoes and keys, in a wildlife area a dozen miles southeast of town, near Stanton.
And a Norfolk man, David Phelps, would be given a life sentence for kidnapping her nearly 30 years ago.
But his trial left so many questions.
“We've never determined exactly what happened to Jill,†Norfolk Police Chief Bill Mizner said.
He started as chief 11 days after Jill was reported missing and remembers walking into a nearly empty police department. Everyone, he learned, was in the basement: police officers, investigators, deputies, State Patrol troopers, FBI agents. A captain at the head of the table was going over assignments.
They paused briefly so someone could introduce him. Then they got back to work.
After, Mizner said, he went upstairs, shut the door to his new office and said out loud: “What have I got myself into?â€
Everyone wanted to find the 4-foot-6, 60-pound blonde, later described in court records as outgoing and athletic, happy, mature and intelligent.
The day she disappeared, the plan was for Jill to leave the McNeely Apartments, where she was staying that summer with her dad and stepmom, and walk to her babysitter’s house a few blocks away at around 8.
But when her stepmom got off work and went to the babysitter’s to pick Jill up, she learned the girl had never arrived.
After checking other places Jill might be, her father and stepmom went to the police department.
No one knew then she still would be missing 29 years later.
Witnesses reported spotting a girl matching her description at about 6:30 that morning on her babysitter's steps. But the babysitter’s live-in boyfriend didn’t see her before he left for work around 7:30.
Others reported seeing her near the McNeely Apartments, and in Fremont, West Point, even a Sioux City mall. None of the leads panned out.
Police asked hunters to watch for evidence related to her disappearance. And on Nov. 7, 1987, one at Wood Duck State Wildlife Refuge spotted her clothes.
But even that failed to turn up fingerprints, blood, semen, hairs or fibers -- anything -- that could help solve the mystery of what happened.
In early 1988, the lead police detective had come across Phelps while searching for a former tenant of the McNeely Apartments and would interview him several times.
But it was Roy Stephens, a private investigator hired by Jill’s mother, Joyce, who in January 1989 would drive him to Wood Duck, hand him a shovel and tell him to show him where Jill was buried.
Stephens, a felon who had lied about his criminal record to get his private investigator's license, told Phelps he could kill him right there and nobody would find him, and at one point Stephens fired his gun into the air, according to 1992 Nebraska Supreme Court records.
Phelps dug for about 20 minutes before finally saying he was ready to talk. With a tape recorder going, he said another man woke him that day, saying he had a child in his car and they were going to go for a ride. Phelps said they went out to the Wood Duck area, where he held Jill down while the other man raped her.
Phelps said he drove back to Norfolk, leaving the two behind.
After giving the recorded statement, Phelps went with Stephens to a Norfolk motel, where Phelps agreed to be interviewed by an Omaha TV crew. One of the reporters later would testify she didn’t believe everything Phelps said in the 30-minute interview; he seemed to be making it up as he went along.
But Phelps would make another statement that night to police, largely confirming what he had said on videotape, before he recanted, saying he had made up the entire story out of fear.
Joyce Cutshall ultimately would petition for a grand jury, which indicted Phelps, a man who admitted having a sexual interest in young girls.
In 1991, the case went to trial, a jury found Phelps guilty and a judge sentenced him to life.
Today, Phelps has an appeal pending. And the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children has a photo of what Jill might look like now -- she would be 38 -- on its website.
A couple of years after she disappeared, there was a service at her grandmother’s church and a tree was planted on the church grounds in memory of Jill.
Norfolk police consider it a suspended case.
Police Capt. Mike Bauer said they can go months, if not years, without new information, but occasionally developments turn up.
Like a diary that surfaced in 2012 purporting to tell, in graphic detail, of the abduction, rape and murder of four women at a farm near Chambers. One was said to be a girl named Jill.
But, Bauer said, the more they learned, the more it looked like a hoax.
Today, there are somewhere around 300 electronic reports on the case.
He and Chief Mizner said they don’t think any officer involved in a case like Jill's ever wants to give up. They want to be able to give the family answers.
“I don't know if she's alive or not, but if we get any information, we still will follow it up,†Mizner said.
He’s learned never to say never, though he knows that the passing years make it less likely they’ll ever learn more.
But it stands as the biggest missing persons case Norfolk has ever had and is on the short list of its highest profile cases, including killings.
The veteran chief is still as baffled by Jill's disappearance as he was on his first day.
Asked what he thinks happened, Mizner said: “We just don’t know."
- NICHOLAS BERGIN Lincoln Journal Star
HASTINGS -- Marilyn Alexander disappeared on Sept. 20, 2001.
Her family believes she was the victim of domestic violence, her homicide unpunished.
Yet without proof, they wonder: Is she out there nearly 15 years later?
Is she being held against her will? Did she leave to start a new life without her husband and four children?
“There have been a lot of times when I’ve been driving somewhere, and I stopped and turned around, because I thought I saw someone that looked like her,†said Marilyn Alexander's oldest child, Elizabeth Morris, now 36.
Her younger sister, 26-year-old Emilea Sells, recently drove to the Rosebud Casino near Valentine with her husband, but spent the trip hoping she wouldn’t find her mom feeding coins into a slot machine.
“If she is still alive, that means she left everybody. I can’t see her doing that,†Sells said.
Marilyn Alexander was 39 when she disappeared. It was several years before the 2004 launch of Facebook, which families often turn to now to help find missing loved ones.
In the initial days and weeks, her disappearance got little attention. She had suffered from occasional depression, and she drank and gambled. She had gone off on her own before but had always made sure her children had a place to stay, either with her parents or sister.
Then workers at the gas station she managed found checks she wrote to the business but didn’t cash. Police got a warrant for her arrest on suspicion of theft.
“We’re not going to lie. She was an alcoholic, and she had a gambling problem,†said Cheryl Thiel, Alexander’s sister.
“Police treated her as a runaway, as a criminal that ran away from her crime,†Ed Thiel, her brother-in-law, added.
About a month after she disappeared, her car was found north of Red Cloud. In the car there were beer cans and a money bag with uncashed checks but no cash.
Her brother and ex-husband were members of the Red Cloud Fire Department and got fellow volunteers to help scour nearby fields.
Things didn’t add up to those who knew her. They say she wouldn’t have left without arranging for a place for her children to stay.
None of her belongings were missing, not even the pillow she had refused to sleep without for years. She once forced her ex-husband to drive hours to get that pillow after she forgot it at a hotel.
Her dad, Laurence “Abie†Johnson, a former Hastings police detective, would have bailed her out of legal trouble, paid her debts and hired her an attorney; and Marilyn Alexander knew that, Cheryl Thiel said.
At the time, family wondered whether she had fled from her husband, Robert Alexander, and sought help at a women’s shelter. Morris, her oldest daughter, called them all.
“All they would say is, 'If she’s here, she is going to have to contact you herself,'" she said. “At that point, it kind of gave us a little bit of hope.â€
Amy Evans, executive director of Friendship Home, a Lincoln shelter, sympathized with the heartache Marilyn Alexander's family felt, but said the danger domestic violence victims face makes secrecy essential.
"I just can't imagine what that must have been like for her to so desperately be looking for her mother and not be able to get the answers that she needed," Evans said. "However, we as a domestic violence shelter can't know who the person calling actually is and whether the victim would want information disclosed to that person."
Evans said if the Friendship Home knows how to contact a person whose family is looking for them, staff will pass on a message and ask whether it's OK to give a message back to the person who called.
The month before Alexander disappeared, she had suffered a cut going through a glass door of a gun cabinet during a fight with Robert. He wouldn’t let her get it treated at a hospital.
“I told her at that point she needed to leave him and get away,†Morris said. “But she said she didn’t want to have another failed marriage.â€
The most dangerous time for a woman in an abusive relationship is when she's leaving, said Patsy Martin, communications coordinator for Voices of Hope, a Lincoln-based nonprofit that works with victims of abuse and sexual assault.
The Nebraska State Patrol recorded 22 domestic violence-related deaths involving 17 perpetrators from 2012 to 2013, the most recent dates for which figures are publicly available. All the deaths happened in a heterosexual relationship with a male abuser. In some cases, the person killed was a child or someone else close to the abuse victim.
Marilyn Alexander’s dad suspected his son-in-law of murder.
Adams County Sheriff Gregg Magee said area law enforcement respected Johnson, who died in 2007 without getting closure in the most personal case of his life.
Johnson brought his suspicions to investigators, Magee said, but officers were never able to prove Alexander died.
Robert Alexander took a lie detector test, which indicated he answered questions truthfully, according to documentation provided by Marilyn's family.
It wasn’t enough to convince Johnson, who hired a private detective and paid to have a cadaver dog search the septic tank of the Alexander home near Hastings.
The rest of the family looked to Johnson for guidance, and he told them to put their faith in law enforcement. Years later, they wonder whether evidence was lost during those first weeks, when police considered it a case of a woman running from the law.
The night before Alexander disappeared, she tucked her two youngest children into bed, like she did every night. Everything seemed normal, said Sells, 11 at the time. Her brother, David, was 9.
“She told us she loved us,†Sells said.
Their older siblings were grown and out of the house. Morris had her own family, and Tim Flesner was attending college in Lincoln, where he still lives.
Marilyn Alexander woke early Sept. 20, 2001, and left the house before her kids got up for school. She managed the Time Saver gas station and had to open.
Ed Thiel was the last member of the family to see her when he stopped at the station.
“She was not her normal giddy self,†he said. “She was kind of depressed, said she had to go back home and do something, then had to pay a bill.â€
What happened after that is a mystery.
A man claimed to have seen her at a Lincoln bar that day drinking beer and watching the Huskers play football, which police considered the last time she was seen alive. But her family thinks he was mistaken about the date she was there. She had been at the bar a week prior, before she went missing, watching a football game.
When the younger children got home from school that day, they found their stepdad shampooing the carpet. It was odd for him to be home that time of day, Sells said, and even more unusual for him to be doing housework.
That weekend, Robert Alexander moved the kids to their father’s house in Red Cloud. He filed for divorce about a month later.
Robert Alexander died in March 2003 when his truck crashed about 5 miles north of Harvard.
Marilyn Alexander remains on the Nebraska State Patrol’s Missing Persons Clearinghouse.
The Adams County Sheriff’s Office still has an active missing person case and criminal case, to make it easier to search national databases for mention of her. They also have samples of her hair and DNA.
She doesn’t have a headstone or memorial and never got an obituary.
Her children believe she’s dead, but they’ve been unable to properly mourn, Morris said.
“Even if we had a stone somewhere, there’s never going to be closure."
- Chris Dunker
A small army of volunteers searched the square mile surrounding Ann Marie Kelley’s home a few days after she disappeared on April 15, 2008.
The rural Filley woman had taken off once before, leaving for a night before returning home in the morning, but this time she hadn't come back.
The last anyone heard from the 37-year-old was earlier that day, when she keyed in to her job at Southeast Community College in Beatrice, and later called her boss about an issue with one of her kids at school.
The final text message sent from her phone was a simple "What's up?" to her husband, William.
After that, Ann Marie and the dark gray 1991 Plymouth Voyager minivan with wood paneling she was last seen driving in Beatrice vanished.
Her family learned she was missing when Head Start called to say no one showed up to pick up the Kelleys' youngest child, or two others from St. Paul's Lutheran School.
That night, William called Ann Marie's sister, Rhonda Rickers, asking what he should do. William later called Beatrice police at 7:30 p.m. to report his wife missing, and the sheriff’s office responded.
“At first, it was just a missing persons case,†said Randy Ritnour, who was county attorney until 2011 and who spearheaded much of the early effort to find Ann Marie.
Law enforcement focused on finding the boxy minivan -- the kind that would stick out in 2008 -- and distributed Ann Marie’s driver’s license photo.
The hope was if someone spotted the vehicle Ann Marie wouldn’t be far away, said Sheriff Millard "Gus" Gustafson.
Neither turned up, despite a deluge of tips from all corners of the state and beyond, including one describing a woman resembling Ann Marie driving a van in Wyoming.
It was a coincidence, Ritnour said. Investigators traveled to Wyoming, where they met a woman named Anne Kelly driving an early 1990s minivan.
But it was not the Ann Marie Kelley they were looking for.
* * *
The investigation shifted back to the Kelley house.
A search of the property turned up drugs, Ritnour said, and an angry William Kelley sped home to confront law enforcement, more upset with the direction of the investigation than the fact his wife was missing.
Unbeknownst to William, he was becoming a suspect.
The summer before, according to former coworkers interviewed by deputies, William had talked about killing his wife and bragged that he knew several bodies of water in the area “deep enough that he could get a vehicle into it and that no one would be able to find.â€
But the coworkers had brushed aside his comments at the time. They knew him to be a hothead who often argued with his wife over money troubles.
With a new direction to search, Nebraska State Patrol divers waded into farm ponds, sand pits and limestone quarries dotting Gage County to look for vehicles. The sheriff’s office bought a sonar device to scan the muddy bottoms for a minivan.
Nothing tied to the case has been found.
Investigators pried into phone records to look for clues to Ann Marie's disappearance. Court records show William reported finding a note, as well as Ann Marie’s cellphone, on a pillow in the couple’s bedroom at around 12:30 a.m. on April 16, 2008.
The search of the house, however, also led deputies to discover Kelley had been trading drugs and alcohol with a teenage girl for sex.
Deputies arrested William Kelley, charging him with child abuse, drug possession, providing false information on a handgun application and being a felon in possession of a firearm.
A little more than a year after his wife disappeared, William Kelley was sentenced to 16 years in the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution by Judge Daniel E. Bryan Jr.
He is scheduled for a parole hearing later this month, court records show.
At a post-sentencing hearing, Kelley requested Gage County return several items taken from his property: VCR tapes, a fishing boat and pictures.
Bryan asked Ritnour if there was any reason to deny the request.
“We believe she might be dead,†Ritnour told the court. “So we need to keep the evidence.â€
Bryan sided with Gage County, in whose hands the evidence remains, although Kelley has never been charged in Ann Marie’s disappearance.
His alibi: Kelley was with his employer from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Lincoln on April 15, 2008, and didn’t return to Gage County until around 5 p.m.
The last message from Ann Marie's phone was sent around 12:30 that afternoon.
The case remains an active homicide investigation, Gage County Attorney Roger Harris said, and the sheriff’s office as well as the State Patrol are still looking into leads and combing over old evidence.
“We’ll treat it as a homicide until they show it differently," Harris said.
Missing persons cases -- like homicides -- are treated carefully by law enforcement, although cases involving adults can often be tricky, particularly when time has passed, he said.
“We’re going to stay on top of it and continue to search for an answer,†the county attorney said. “Sometimes it comes from the dangdest places, but it’s difficult for the family when you start wanting to have closure.â€
* * *
The day William was arrested, Rickers went to bring three of Ann Marie's kids home to the house she shares with her husband, Dale.
“I was informed they were going to be at the house, they were going to put them into foster care, so I went to pick them up,†Rickers said. “We thought Ann would be coming home soon.â€
She never has. Nor has she withdrawn money from her bank account, nor made any attempt to contact her children, now teenagers growing up in the Rickers’ home.
The family has reached closure, in some sense, even as questions about Ann Marie persist.
The contents of the note left on Ann Marie’s pillow remain a mystery, as do other details about the house that night. Some cellphones tied to the case were also destroyed as the investigation widened beyond a missing persons case, Ritnour said.
Rickers asked deputies if Ann Marie’s glasses or contacts were left at the home. Ann Marie couldn’t see without them, she told investigators, and it would be unlikely she would leave them behind if she left on her own.
But answers -- there have been three lead investigators from Gage County on the case over the past eight years -- have been hard to come by.
The three younger Kelley kids living with Rickers still wonder about their mother.
The youngest for a time believed his mother was at the bottom of the ocean after being attacked by whales. The older kids voiced theories that Ann Marie fled to Mexico in that dark gray 1991 Plymouth Voyager minivan with wood paneling to escape the husband she feared.
Once, the kids wanted to retrieve old family videos from the rural Filley home, to remember what their mother’s voice sounded like and to see her in motion, but pornography had been recorded over all the tapes, Rickers said.
It’s never easy to talk about, and while the kids have moved on to make friends and make the honor roll, a missing mother and a father in prison are never far from their minds, Rickers said.
In those conversations, Rickers often finds a common refrain: “We’re not in control and we don’t know why this happened.â€
“Our faith, at least for me and my husband, and we’re trying to instill that into them, is the comfort we have,†she said. “We honestly believe she’s in God’s arms.â€
Through a supportive family and others, Rickers said, the family has been pushing through.
“Prayer, that’s the biggest thing. The power of prayer," she said.
Fliers showing Ann Marie and her minivan are still posted around Beatrice, and the sheriff’s department is still investigating leads as they come in.
A few years ago, Gustafson said, the department even asked a nationally known psychic to look into Ann Marie's disappearance. “It is what it is,†he said at the time. “We’re trying everything.â€
There is an active warrant for Ann Marie’s arrest tied to the drugs found in the home, although officers say it’s in hopes that if she does cross law enforcement’s path, she’ll become a blip on the radar once more.
If her remains are ever found, the DNA will be compared to samples taken from her children.
Rickers said she hopes someone who knows something about her sister’s disappearance will come forward, although she believes the one who knows most about it sits in a Nebraska prison.
Ritnour, the former prosecutor, said what he thinks happened to Ann Marie and what he can prove “are two different things.â€
“I think she was killed and we just don’t know where the body is,†he said.
“Just in Gage County alone, there’s a lot of woolly country out there, and there’s a lot of open space,†he added. “If something has happened to Ann Marie Kelley, unless somebody just happened to cross it, that might be the only way you find her out there.â€
- NICHOLE MANNA Lincoln Journal Star
Anwesha Dey left a friend’s house near 23rd and S streets, walking through the rain on a Sunday evening more than a year ago.
She never made it home.
The 30-year-old fell into Antelope Creek on her way to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and was swept away -- a fact known only because it was caught on video.
Dey could be seen struggling in the fast-moving, 3-foot-deep water in an attempt to gain her footing and get out.
But the current flowed too fast. And she didn’t know how to swim, her family would later tell investigators.
The camera faced Union Plaza, capturing video for a nearby insurance company.
Before she left on her walk on May 3, 2015, Dey was praying with a group practicing Buddhism, something she became excited about after moving to Nebraska from India for school. She left with a friend to shop at Wal-Mart. The two women bought groceries and Dey picked up a pair of black ballet flats from Payless.
An hour after being dropped off at home, Dey realized she had accidentally taken a bag of her friend's groceries. Dey planned to walk to campus anyway, so she stopped by the house on S Street and dropped off the bag.
She wouldn't be seen again.
Dey had left the house wearing an orange hooded sweatshirt and blue jeans. A gray backpack was strapped to her shoulders. None of her clothing or belongings has been found.
Her parents, who live 8,000 miles away, told the Journal Star in July 2015 they didn't want to believe their daughter drowned, and they were praying for a miracle.
Dey was reported missing three days after she was swept away. The search didn’t turn to the creek until a week after that. Searchers went through the moving water all the way to the Platte River, and investigators searched the creek from a canoe. They looked through sinkholes and knee-deep mud; they used camera-equipped drones and cadaver dogs, but found no evidence of Dey.
From where Dey entered the water, Antelope Creek flows north for about a mile toward the Devaney Sports Center where it joins Salt Creek, which connects to the Platte River near Ashland. Eventually, it joins the Missouri River and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico.
Lincoln Police investigator Lacey Reha said officers are constantly watching the creek for signs of Dey.Â
- Cindy Lange-Kubick
After nearly 16 years, the tips still come in.
Jailhouse informants. Psychics. Strangers from area codes across the country.
And Ken Koziol checks them all, hoping one will finally lead to Regina Bos, the musical mother of three who left Duggan’s Pub at the end of open mic night on Oct. 17, 2000, put her guitar in her trunk and then disappeared.
More than 100 tips have been investigated, the sergeant with the Lincoln Police Department said.
Greg Sorensen, the first LPD detective on the Bos case, has retired; the second has moved to another unit.
“We really want to find out what happened to Gina,†Koziol said. “It’s on so many officers’ minds.â€
The high-profile case has an electronic file thousands of pages long, among the largest Koziol can remember in his 38 years on the force.
The cold case is classified as a missing persons case, although it’s highly unlikely Bos, 40 when she disappeared, is alive.
Koziol declined to detail the leads the department has chased, citing the open investigation.
“There are so many jailhouse rumors that go around, but it’s the same thing over and over.â€
And nothing has led to Bos, a middle child in a large, close-knit family who was waiting for a Habitat for Humanity house and had begun a new job when she vanished.
Koziol remains in contact with Bos’ sister, Jannel Rap, who became the family’s spokeswoman early in the search.
The California musician flew to Lincoln to help paper the city with fliers featuring her sister’s photo in the days after she vanished.
She started the Squeaky Wheel Tour, traveling the country performing and bringing attention to Gina and others who are missing in the cities she visited.
She started 411 GINA, a website with a hotline for tips about her sister’s whereabouts.
In the beginning, every lead brought hope, Rap said.
Over time, the family tempered its expectations. “Eventually, we learned for our own emotional health not to believe or count on anything until we knew there was some validity to it.â€
But even seemingly solid tips never panned out.
Earlier this year, Rap canceled the 800 number associated with the 411 GINA website, saving money by switching to a cellphone. She was surprised by the feelings that accompanied her decision.
“It’s a phone number, for goodness sake,†she wrote on Facebook. “But it’s not just any number. It’s a phone number that takes me back to that unimaginable moment when I heard those words ‘Gina is missing.’
“We had high hopes for that number and for this cause. We couldn’t find Gina, but perhaps there is hope for someone else’s ‘Gina.’â€
The case will remain open until Bos is found, Koziol said.
“Someone knows what happened to her. Hopefully one day they will finally find it in their soul to come forward.â€
- Riley Johnson
For more than two years, Antonio E. Turner's been missing on paper.
In reality, he's believed to be alive and well and living in California.
But Lincoln Police Sgt. Luke Wilke said Turner will likely remain a "missing person" until his path crosses with a cop.
Turner's case remains active because of police protocol that a missing person must be verified as OK by a law enforcement officer.
An ex-girlfriend of Turner's reported him missing Aug. 22, 2014. She wanted to serve him with a protection order just a few days before he was reported missing.
Court documents show sheriff's deputies looked for him at all the addresses they knew were connected to Turner in Lincoln to give him the order.
But they came up empty.
And then Wilke was put on the case.
Wilke got in touch with Turner's sister, who said he left Lincoln and is living in California, he said.
Turner is still entered in the National Crime Information Center's missing person database, so if he comes into contact with police, they should clear it out, Wilke said.
Wilke can't clear Turner's name from the database because he hasn't contacted Turner, and the department doesn't have the money to send an officer to California to look for him.
The 45-year-old, who had worked at a north Lincoln bar before he left, knows the investigator is looking for him.
Attempts by the Journal Star to contact Turner or his sister were unsuccessful.
Because Turner appears to be OK, Wilke said, his case doesn't have the urgency of cases in which foul play is suspected.
And cases like Turner's are fairly common, the 24-year department veteran said.
"Some people don’t know we are looking for them," he said. "Some people know they are being sought but don’t want to be contacted."
And some people don't cooperate with police because they're afraid officers will share their location with family members.
In those cases, investigators don't divulge the person's location if he or she doesn't want police to, he said.Â
But in all cases, Wilke said, he leaves the National Crime Information Center entry active until the person is contacted by law enforcement.
"We tend to (err) on the side of safety."
- Peter Salter
He's been missing nearly two decades, longer than almost anybody from Lincoln.
And you've likely never heard his name.
Michael Watkins would be 67 now, but had just entered his 50s when he left Lincoln in early November 1998, headed to California to spend Thanksgiving with his daughter in Bakersfield.
He wasn't missing then. And he wasn't missing when police pulled him over in Signal Hill, near Los Angeles, on Nov. 16, 1998. Or when cops stopped him again a week later in nearby Cypress.
He never did make it to Bakersfield, but he did end up behind bars in Tijuana, Mexico, in December 1998. He was released two days before Christmas, the last time anyone saw him alive.
Now he was missing, but not officially, at least not yet. It wasn’t until four years later, in 2002, that his wife in Lincoln made the call and the formal report to police.
Technically, Michael Watkins could be California's responsibility, or Mexico's. But either through a sense of personal duty or professional obligation, the Lincoln Police Department has devoted its resources to finding a man who was alive and well when he left the city limits.
They've generated at least 50 reports in their search for Watkins. They've communicated with his daughter. They've searched databases that contain descriptions and dental records of unidentified bodies from around the country.
And they've kept his file active all of these years, even though he didn't have the social media force behind his search, like in the case of Craig Baxter, or a determined family, like in the case of Regina Bos, who vanished from outside of Duggan's Pub two years after Watkins left Lincoln.
“I don’t know if anyone living locally even knows who Watkins was,†said Lincoln Police Sgt. Luke Wilke. “Everybody knows who Gina Bos is.â€
Still, they want to close this case, to take Michael Watkins -- a man you've likely never heard of, a man who hasn't been seen alive for nearly 20 years, a man who might not have ever made it out of Mexico -- off their list of missing persons.
- Kevin Abourezk
Little is known about a 42-year-old man who has been missing since October 2009 -- like whether Leonel Lopez is even his real name.
Cited nine times between July 2003 and September 2006 for various traffic violations, the man never produced a valid driver’s license for Lincoln police.
So police can’t be sure he's 42. Or whether the name he gave police -- Leonel Lopez -- is real.
“That’s the name that he used,†said Lincoln Police Sgt. Luke Wilke. “I would be surprised if that was his correct name.â€
What police know is that in June 2010, his girlfriend reported him missing, saying she had last heard from him the previous November. She told police she thought he might have left for a job in Kansas in October 2009.
Despite a lack of leads about the man's whereabouts, police have continued searching for him. Wilke said he can’t find any recent information about Lopez using the identity he provided to police.
Lopez said he was born Sept. 5, 1973, and gave two apartment addresses, one at 18th and M streets and one at 23rd and Lynn streets.
Wilke said he has assigned various investigators to the case.
“A fresh set of eyes tends to benefit things,†he said. “We have very little to go on.â€
He said he does have a fingerprint Lopez gave for a traffic ticket, and he's plugged that into law enforcement databases to try to find Lopez.
“He doesn’t have anything in there, and that’s unusual,†he said. “It would be nice to get it resolved.â€
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