The Kansas City Star
By Tanyanika Samuels
March 30, 2004

Every Sunday morning, Karen Stratton plies away at her computer looking for clues to help her unravel one singular agonizing question: Where is my daughter?

She still remembers the last time she heard Jody's voice. It was a Thursday night, May 23, 1985. The 14-year old Kansas City girl had argued with her boyfriend and walked over to a friend's house to call her mother for a ride home. Stratton however, did not have a car then.

“That's OK, Mom,” Jody said. “I'll find a ride.”

The petite blond girl, with the big round glasses, never made it home.

“In my heart, my hope is that she is alive,” Stratton said in a soft plaintive twang.

Recently, while searching the Web for her daughter's name, she found another reason to hope. Jody's story had been added to DoeNetwork.org. The self-funded Web site is staffed by 200-plus volunteer cyber-sleuths who scour the Internet trying to help law enforcement solve missing and unidentified persons cold cases.

“If people look at it,” Stratton said, “someone might recognize her. Anything helps.”

The DoeNetwork group, many of whom met in an online chat room about missing persons, coalesced into a formal organization in October 1999. The members are mostly “everyday people” — housewives and stay-at-home moms — who have been touched by their own loss or a missing person's story, said Todd Matthews, a group spokesman. Other members include law enforcement agents, forensic artists, medical examiners and missing-person caseworkers.

“Networkers” pluck cases from law enforcement Web sites worldwide and post the details on the Internet to encourage tips. Members also comb the Web for clues and newly posted articles.

“We will not accept that these things are going unanswered and unaccounted for,” Matthews said recently from his Livingston, Tenn., home.

The group is credited with helping solve 17 + cold cases. Authorities across the country are investigating several other potential matches.

The work is painstaking. Networkers continuously share tips and hash out what-if scenarios in a private online chat room. Specially trained area directors contact police if they think they have found a match to a cold case.

Kansas City police Detective Jana Rogge, who investigates missing person cases, hears from the group occasionally. None of the group's tips has led to a positive identification in the metropolitan area, but she appreciates the group's efforts.

“Any publicity about any unidentified person can't hurt,” said Rogge, who is also the police contact for Jody's case.

Considering the statistics, the group's task is daunting. The FBI's National Crime Information Center maintains nearly 100,000 active files on missing persons across the United States.

More than 16,200 people are listed as missing from Missouri, and 865 are considered missing from Kansas.

The DoeNetwork Web site lists more than 700 unidentified victims and more than 2,300 unexplained disappearances from North America, Europe and Australia. Most of the cold cases date to 2001 or earlier. A newly added section called “Hot Cases” features more recent profiles.

Networkers don't expect to solve all the cases. But that does not mean they won't try, said Shelley Denman, an assistant area director in Overland Park.

“It's almost like an addiction,” she said. “You're always thinking, ‘What if the next page I turn or the next Web site I see is a match?' That's what keeps us going.”

Cases are cataloged in chronological and geographical directories. The site features a listing of forensic artists who donate their services, as well as a separate section for cases local police resolved.

Those searching for loved ones may fill out a case submission form. Those with tips may contact the police department listed for each case file or contact the DoeNetwork to act as a go-between.

Those willing to help investigate cases must come with a passion that will not allow them to quit, Matthews said.

For him, that passion was ignited in 1987 with the story of “Tent Girl.” Twenty years earlier, his father-in-law had stumbled onto the body of a Jane Doe wrapped in tarp near a rural Kentucky creek. Matthews became fascinated with the case and the failed attempts to identify her.

In 1995, he started a Web site dedicated to the “Tent Girl” but none of the e-mails he received yielded substantial clues. Then in January 1998, while poring over missing person Web sites, he found a woman who was searching for her lost sister. Matthews contacted the woman and discovered startling parallels to his Jane Doe case: similar physical characteristics; similar disappearance date; similar location.

Matthews discovery persuaded authorities to exhume the “Tent Girl” for DNA testing. The tests revealed that the Jane Doe was the woman's sister.

“After I got so far into the ‘Tent Girl' case, I realized there're thousands of others out there. We just can't stop,” Matthews said. “So long as there's technology out there that can help and there's people that have the passion, anything's possible.”

Karen Stratton is just as optimistic.

In the years since Jody's disappearance, tips have trickled in and dried up. Kansas City police dragged the Missouri River near Riverfront Park in 1997 looking for the girl's body after two inmates said they had information in the case. That search came up empty, but police did reclassify Jody's case as a homicide.

Stratton refuses to accept that Jody, who carries her father's last name of Ledkins, is dead. Instead, she searches the Web and, every six months or so, makes a trip from her home in Arkansas to Kansas City to look for her daughter.

Earlier this month, she was back in the metropolitan area, cruising the streets of her old East Bottoms neighborhood. She visited the home where Jody stopped to call her the night she disappeared. She stuffed neighborhood mail boxes with fliers bearing Jody's picture. She stopped to talk to anyone who would listen.

Carla Williamson and her son, Robert Witmer, were sitting on their porch when Stratton approached. Witmer said he knew some of Jody's old friends but he didn't remember the girl. Neither did Williamson.

“No, I don't know this girl, but I'll sure ask around for you, honey,” Williamson said.

Stratton thanked the two, then set off again.

She has talked with former neighbors and Jody's old friends before. But perhaps, she said, this time someone might remember something or take pity and reveal any secrets.

“In my heart, unless there is a body found, she is still alive,” Stratton said. “I will always look for her.”