Social media drive interest in missing-person cases

The disappearance of Mechanicsville teenager Theresa Marie Meadows languished in relative obscurity from the time she vanished in September 2004 -- until she was located alive last week in South Carolina.

On the flip side, the case of missing 20-year-old Virginia Tech student Morgan Dana Harrington has received intense state and national attention since she disappeared Oct. 17 after a Metallica concert in Charlottesville. A three-day search last weekend involved more than 500 volunteers.

The attention such cases generate can vary greatly, as thousands of people are reported missing every year in Virginia. They depend largely, authorities say, on the circumstances of the disappearance, a family's resources and willingness to become involved, the public's curiosity and interest by the news media, which tends to favor some cases over others.

But authorities point to another emerging factor they believe has played a significant role in the Harrington case: the public's use of social-networking media.

"Never before have you been able to get information out via Facebook pages and forums and blogs and Tweets, with the capabilities of the public to get more involved in a case by being able to post their thoughts, suggestions, opinions and insights," said Corinne Geller, public-relations manager for the state police, which is the lead investigative agency in the Harrington case.

Geller believes that interest in the Harrington case has been driven in large part by the public through social networking.

"Five years ago, people didn't have that medium to access," she said. "More people can learn about [a case] through the viral networking -- somebody sends a link, somebody sends an e-mail to five of their friends and those five send it to another five. People have so much more access to get involved in a case than say maybe [they did] three to five years ago."

Geller noted how some people responding to the Harrington case provided police with cell-phone videos of the concert she attended.

Contrary to appearances, state police have not dedicated any more investigative resources or attention to Harrington's disappearance "than we have any other case," Geller said.

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This year, state police alerted media outlets across the state about 48-year-old Halifax County resident Hattie Gertrude Brown, who disappeared May 16 after she was last seen at a service station just outside South Boston. Her burned 2003 Volkswagen Jetta turned up nearly two months later behind a barn near Virgilina.

State and local police in Virginia and North Carolina intensely followed leads and conducted ground and air searches for two weeks, but the case generated limited media attention and public interest waned. Recently, Brown's family members declined to talk about the case after a state police agent forwarded a request by a reporter.

In the Harrington case, "the family has made themselves very available to the media, and that's part of their passion and dedication," Geller noted. "The more they can keep [their daughter's disappearance] out there, the more interest the public will take in the case and hopefully continue to come forward with leads."

The family has even established a Web site that includes information updates, news releases, downloads, photos and television news clips about the case.

"Unfortunately, not everybody has those same resources," Geller said.

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State and local police take reports on thousands of missing children and adults each year.

Just in the metro area, more than 1,400 juveniles and adults were reported missing last year in Richmond and the counties of Chesterfield, Hanover and Henrico.

Statewide, thousands of missing young people under the age of 21 are added yearly to Virginia's Missing Children Clearinghouse, a list maintained by Virginia State Police under state law. Of the 493 people on the list last Friday, 405 were reported missing in 2009.

"They change daily," noted Lt. William J. Reed Jr., assistant commander of the Virginia State Police Criminal Justice Services Division. The majority of missing youngsters are soon located or turn up on their own, Reed said.

A total of 13,539 children were reported missing across the state in 2008; of those, 13,488 had been located as of Friday, Reed said. As a public service, state police on their Web site display separate lists of children and adults who have been missing long term, in some cases for decades. The two lists, which include case narratives and photos, currently show 67 missing children and 31 missing adults -- 11 from the Richmond area. Meadows had been on the list until she was found last week.

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Typically, when police confirm that a person is missing, that individual is immediately entered into the Virginia Criminal Information Network and the National Criminal Information Network, electronic data networks that provide computerized links to state and national law-enforcement systems.

"We want to make sure that they at least get into some automated system, so that if they're found or stopped or questioned [by police], they will come up as a missing person," said Chesterfield police Capt. Terry Patterson.

Most police agencies will also assign a detective to investigate each missing-person case.

In Richmond, each case is independently assessed and evaluated based on its unique circumstances, said police spokesman Gene Lepley. Richmond police took 672 reports of missing juveniles and 301 reports of missing adults in 2008. The department currently has 104 unresolved missing-person cases that cover multiple years, in addition to 52 juvenile "runaway" cases reported this year.

Chesterfield police took 166 reports of missing adults and 11 reports of missing juveniles last year, and all but two of those cases have been cleared.

The department maintains two lists of the missing -- one for "cold cases" that have been lingering for years and another for more recent cases. The cold-case list includes five women and one man who disappeared between 1977 and 1996. The more contemporary list includes six people, four of whom were added this year.

"Chesterfield is very liberal about our policy for taking reports about missing people," Patterson said. "There's a lot of restrictions that some departments will put on it before they will take a report. But we've never been that way."

The Hanover Sheriff's Office recorded 50 missing-person cases in 2008, but all have been cleared. The department keeps a single list of unsolved historical and contemporary missing-person cases; only one case, from 2003, is still unresolved.

Henrico police took 275 missing-person reports in 2008 and so far have cleared 107 of them. The department has received 235 missing-person reports this year and has cleared 146.

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Theresa Meadows' mother regrets that more wasn't done to locate her daughter in the beginning, but she's pleased with the efforts of Hanover Investigator Dave Klisz, who located Meadows Wednesday in South Carolina. Meadows, now 22, has been living under an assumed name.

"I give him all the respect in the world," Margaret Swann said. "He's been on this case ever since Day 1."

The state and national attention devoted to the Harrington case hasn't gone unnoticed by Swann, but she doesn't feel slighted. "It's just the way things work out," Swann said philosophically.

Swann says she feels sorry for the Harrington family.

"Because anytime I see a case like that, I know exactly how they feel," she said. "It just hurts knowing that somebody did something [to the woman] and they can't find them."

Contact Mark Bowes at (804) 649-6450 or .