Internet buffs help research missing
May 24, 2004
By: Jacob Bennett
jmbennett@jackson.gannett.com
The Clarion-Ledger
Internet buffs help research missing
Case information on 14 from Miss. collected on Doe Network site
Kenny Stricklin has been missing since 1992. With the help of the Doe Network, his son Michael Stricklin (from left), his mother Frances Stricklin and his sister Linda Luster are hoping for answers.
Michael Kenneth "Kenny" Stricklin's picture stares at Linda Robin in her Louisiana bedroom.
They've never met, but she knows a lot about the Yazoo City man. No one has seen him since Jan. 29, 1992.
"I've studied him," Robin said. "It's just amazing, it seems, how he could disappear and his truck could disappear. And nobody's ever found it."
Stricklin
Robin, the Mississippi area director for the Doe Network, knows Stricklin through information she found on a Web site, which she put into a file with 13 other missing Mississippians.
The network, which takes its name from the generic surname given to unidentified bodies, is a group of about 450 volunteers worldwide who scour the Internet to compare missing persons reports with descriptions of the nameless dead.
The Doe Network and similar groups hope to give grieving families closure that otherwise might never come.
Most of the cases are more than five years old; some date to the 1970s. The group finds some of its cases through Internet searches. Others are passed on by families or police. Possible matches are passed on to law enforcement agencies.
There are 425 Mississippians and 21 unidentified bodies registered missing with the National Crime Information Center, which tracks cases submitted by police agencies. There are only a handful of open cases in the metro area.
The three-year-old group has made 21 matches nationwide. None were Mississippians.
Group members use their own money during searches. Most require Internet research, although some searchers have traveled to places where bodies have been found.
Law enforcement officials generally welcome the extra hands.
"I think they're doing something that can actually help," Hinds County Sheriff Malcolm McMillin said.
One case the volunteers are following stems from the metro area. Daffany S. Tullos, an epileptic, vanished from Jackson in 1988 when she was seven years old. She didn't have her medication when she disappeared, according to the Doe Network Web site.
Her family couldn't be reached for comment.
Stricklin's family didn't know he was missing until two days after he was last seen.
Stricklin's estranged wife, who the family said now goes by Lisa Davis, called to tell them she couldn't find him. Davis couldn't be reached for comment.
Years later, the family saw a Doe Network representative on TV and asked him to create a missing persons Web site.
Stricklin's mother, Frances, said she believes someone killed him, wrapped him in a comforter she gave him for Christmas and carried him out.
Yazoo Police Department Assistant Chief Larry Echols said he believes Stricklin is dead but few leads ever materialized.
"That's all it is, is speculation," Echols said. "It's really a complete mystery."
Stricklin's younger sister, Linda Luster, was with Stricklin, then a 30-year-old car salesman and electrician, the night he disappeared.
Luster, Stricklin and a female friend played pool and downed some brews at a Yazoo City bar and rode around with friends.
The group later dropped off Stricklin at Manasco's Auto & Heavy Equipment Body Works, where some men were working on a truck one of them planned to race at a local track.
That was the last time Luster saw her brother.
Ellen Leach of Gulfport, a volunteer for the network, wishes more Mississippians would fill out the group's online application to participate. Only a couple of Mississippians are active in the network.
"There's so many missing in this state," said Leach, who has yet to make a confirmed match. "Somebody ought to care."
Authorities don't always put a lot of resources into cases such as Stricklin's, said Paul Martin of Greenville, the former Mississippi area director for the Doe Network.
"When you've got a vehicle that disappears like that, the gentleman might be living out in California under a new identity," Martin said.
But Martin knows there are other possible outcomes. He recalled a Mississippi town that drained a lake a couple of years ago and "found a lot more bodies and a lot more vehicles than they were expecting to find."
Frances Stricklin is angry authorities didn't spend more hours searching, and media didn't pay more attention to her son.
If someone could find her son, "it would mean all of the world," she said.
Divers have searched sections of the Yazoo River on three occasions, once even finding a toolbox the family said belongs to Stricklin. It contained a screwdriver with a broken handle that belonged to an uncle and electrical tools that Stricklin would have used on the job, his family said.
They believe he is in those waters, still in his truck.
"I know somebody knows something," Luster said. "He didn't just vanish into thin air."
For more information on the Doe Network, visit www.doenetwork.org.