who killed theresa?

Look, it’s budget season for me at work, so, super-busy. But I did want to write a “stream of conscious”, guerilla update.

10 years ago, Friday, March 15, 2002, I was in Lennoxville, Quebec. It was my first visit back in over 20 years.

This was the day that I went through all the records at the Surete du Quebec in Sherbrooke, and interviewed folks at Champlain College. It was the day I determined that my sister, Theresa did not die of a drug overdose, but had been murdered.  From that day, all hell broke loose. That weekend, I was joined by Patricia Pearson, a National Post journalist. She crafted the 3-part article that made everything public and the rests they say is history (history… there’s an echo in here).

My reflections looking back:

1.   Well, not much has changed. The case remains unsolved. As do the cases of Manon Dube and Louise Camirand; the other two young women who were discovered dead within a 14 month period of my sister.

2.   Feel good developments: In an effort to build bridges, my family and Champlain College established a scholarship in Theresa’s name. The first scholarship was awarded last spring. But don’t get all “feel goody” inside. The recipient couldn’t keep up her grades, so the award is still pending.

3.   I am on good relations with the Quebec police, but I barely have the time to give them a hard time anymore. Frankly, I’ve lost the energy and focus. I have other pressing issues. My daughters are almost all grown up. They need my attention more than the SQ (rotten buggers, they always know how to wear us down!  :)  )

4.   I am contemplating offering a reward for information leading to an arrest. A generous supporter has offered the funds; the police are against it (creates work for them, go figure?), I have mixed feelings. If the publicity could be focused around the area of Compton, Quebec, where she was found, I have hope that the effort would be productive.

That’s really all I have. I wish I could say to you, after 10 long years, that we are closer along to resolution. But we are not. Justice is blind… Fortune – the precursor of Justice – is also blind, and is represented with a wheel that is constantly turning. Indeed, Fortune is an excellent moral. The wheel turns, everyone gets a ride, your course rides up and down.

Beware the Ides of March!!!!

Be at peace,

J Allore

My two cents? A complete failure of the Quebec / Canadian public safety system:

Nurse heard confession in Julie Surprenant disappearance, hearing told

MONTREAL – The way Annick Prud’Homme tells it, a special room at Cité de la Santé Hospital in Laval serves as an unofficial confessional.

The auxiliary nurse was one of the people Richard Bouillon confessed to days before he died of cancer, on June 21, 2006, admitting he killed Julie Surprenant, a 16-year-old student who disappeared in November 1999.

The girl’s body has never been found and Quebec Coroner Catherine Rudel-Tessier is holding a public inquiry at the Laval courthouse to determine why Bouillon’s confession was only revealed in 2011. The coroner said one goal of the public inquiry is to find out why information about the confession was not passed on to police immediately.

Last year, after the confession came to light, the Ordre des infirmières et infirmiers du Québec said nurses can’t divulge such information because of rules that govern “professional secrets.”

Bouillon was never charged with Surprenant’s disappearance or her death, but Sûreté du Québec investigation into it produced sexual assault charges against him from two different women. In 2003, he received a 10-year sentence for those crimes and was stricken with cancer three years later. He was transferred from a penitentiary in Drummondville to Cité de la Santé Hospital in Laval eight days before he died. The SQ tried to get him to confess before he was transferred, but Bouillon told the investigators nothing.

At that point it was widely known that Bouillon had been at the centre of the investigation into Surprenant’s disappearance.

Prud’Homme testified Tuesday morning that Bouillon confessed to her three times during his eight-day stay at the hospital. She said he made the admissions to her while asking for a chance to talk to Claude Poirier, a well-known TVA journalist who is often contacted by criminals. Prud’Homme said she assumed Bouillon’s request to talk to Poirier would eventually put the two men in contact. She said she assumed Correctional Service Canada handled the request because the special room at the hospital is under their jurisdiction. She said the room in which Bouillon made the confessions is designed like a prison cell. It is used to treat up to two inmates from federal penitentiaries at any given time and a guard is always in the room when an inmate is present. Laval is home to three federal penitentiaries.

A lawyer for Correctional Service Canada, who is part of the inquiry, was asked by the coroner on Tuesday to see if personnel records about who guarded Bouillon at the hospital are still available.

Prud’Homme said Bouillon added details the third and final time he confessed to killing Surprenant. He said he placed her body in a sports bag, added bricks to it and tossed it into the Mille Îles River in Terrebonne, behind a church. She also said it wasn’t until January 2011, after seeing Poirier host a show about Surprenant’s disappearance, that she “fully realized” Bouillon never talked to the journalist. She said she previously assumed Poirier and Bouillon had spoken and that is why she didn’t come forward until 2011.

Last year, police divers searched a section of the river they believe Bouillon was referring to but found nothing.

Prud’Homme said she shared the information with colleagues in 2006 and said that she “would be surprised” if the guards assigned to the room on one of the three occasions didn’t overhear Bouillon’s confessions.

She said Bouillon also told her he had raped “girls and boys” in a park in Laval’s Vimont district – crimes he was never charged with. She testified she never felt Bouillon’s confession was protected by a code of “professional secrets.”

She said that, in her opinion, only a patient’s medical information is confidential.

She also said she regrets not having done more in 2006.

“I didn’t even think of it,” when asked if she ever felt Bouillon’s confession was protected by an obligation on her part to respect “professional secrets” as her professional order claimed last year.

Prud’Homme also said inmates dying of a terminal illness often confess their past sins to nurses in the room. Lawyer Marc Bellemare, representing Julie’s father, Michel Surprenant, at the inquiry, asked Prud’Homme if the hospital has any protocol in place to deal with such information. Prud’Homme worked in the room from 2005 to 2008 and said she had never heard of such a protocol while she was assigned there and hasn’t heard of any since.

Johanne Dubois, a nurse’s assistant at Cité de la Santé, testified after Prud’Homme and said Bouillon also confessed to her about two days before he died.

“He looked me in the eyes and said, ‘It was me who killed her’,” Dubois said, adding all the nurses in the department knew Bouillon was a suspect in Surprenant’s disappearance.

“Why did you believe him,” Bellemare asked.

“Because of the way he looked at me,” Dubois said.

Trudel-Tessier asked Dubois if she would handle such a situation differently now. Dubois said she would, but her answer was less than convincing.

“I think it would be different. I’d call the police or do something. I don’t know,” Dubois said.

During a break at the inquiry, Pina Arcamone, head of the Missing Children’s Network, said that Prud’Homme’s testimony was difficult to listen to.

“I think it is really upsetting that there were no protocols in place and there still are no protocols in place, especially in cases involving unresolved crimes,” Arcamone said. “It’s unexplainable at this point.”

At the start of Tuesday’s hearing, SQ Sgt. Sebastien Rousseau testified Bouillon was a suspect in Julie’s disappearance from Day 1.

He lived in the same building as Surprenant’s family and had a criminal record for several sex offences involving minors.

Rousseau said Bouillon underwent a polygraph test and it indicated he was not telling the whole truth about the disappearance.

Traces of human blood were found on Bouillon’s boots and in his car but tests done on them did not establish a link to the missing girl, the investigator said.

Michel Surprenant is expected to testify for the inquiry on Wednesday. A member of the SQ who is an expert on a sex-offender registry accessible to police is also expected to testify.

Sex-offenders database inaccessible and confusing, Julie Surprenant inquiry told

MONTREAL – Like any good parent, Michel Surprenant put some effort into finding out what kind of neighbourhood he was moving to in 1997.

But like most people in Quebec, he had limited access to information that could have helped him learn he was moving into an apartment building housing a convicted sex offender, just above him, who would kill Surprenant’s daughter Julie two years later.

During an inquiry hearing Wednesday before provincial coroner Catherine Rudel-Tessier, Surprenant outlined the extra steps he took when choosing where to live in Terrebonne two years before Julie was killed. The man who lived above them, Richard Bouillon, admitted on his deathbed in 2006 that he abducted Julie, killed her, placed her body in a sports bag and dumped it into the Mille Îles River. Julie’s body has never been found.

The girl’s father testified he chose to live on the street on Île St. Jean, part of the town of Terrebonne, because it ended on a circle and only local traffic would use it. He told the coroner he also asked the landlord about the other residents in the building.

“I was told that Mr. Bouillon was a car salesman,” Surprenant said.

But by 1999, Bouillon already had been convicted of several sexual offences, including some involving minors.

Surprenant said he rarely saw Bouillon before Julie disappeared in November 1999, and their exchanges were limited to “Hello.”

“So you had no way of knowing about the danger that lived above you,” Christian Hacquin, a lawyer for the coroner’s office, asked Surprenant.

“No,” the father replied.

Surprenant said that even if he had suspicions about Bouillon, he probably wouldn’t have found Bouillon’s criminal record on Quebec’s antiquated court record system. The database, available in any courthouse in Quebec, hasn’t changed in at least two decades and is not user-friendly.

Surprenant said that when he learned Bouillon had been a suspect in his daughter’s disappearance from the start of the investigation, he tried to research his neighbour but couldn’t figure out the database. He said he tried again in 2011 at the Laval courthouse, and still could not navigate the database.

“When I asked (staff) for help, they said they were too busy,” Surprenant said.

The issue of what information on convicted sex offenders is available to the general public represented the bulk of the testimony heard by Rudel-Tessier on Wednesday morning.

Sûreté du Québec Sgt. Gaétan Ruest is one of only two police officers mandated in this province to access a federal sex-offender registry. The registry, created by the federal government in 2005, is not accessible to the public.

The situation is the opposite in the United States. As an example, Ruest said, someone in New York who wants to find out if a convicted sex-offender lives in a certain neighbourhood can do the research using an Internet search engine like Google.

Answering questions from Surprenant’s lawyer, Marc Bellemare, Ruest said no other police officer, except for his partner, can access the database in Quebec. Trudel-Tessier asked Ruest where his partner was at that very moment; Ruest pointed to the back of the courtroom, where his partner sat. This meant if a police officer wanted to request a search of the register in an emergency situation Wednesday morning, the only two people in the province who could do so were in a Laval courtroom, several kilometres from the SQ’s headquarters, where the database is located.

This prompted Rudel-Tessier to throw her arms in the air in apparent exasperation.

Ruest said 5,400 sex offenders are currently listed in the part of the registry run by Quebec. More than 4,000 of the offenders are not behind bars. Changes made to federal law in 2011 require judges in Canada to order that the name of a person convicted of certain sex-related offences be placed in the registry for a periods of 10 or 20 years. In the worst cases, an offender can be ordered to be on the registry for life.

Ruest described the database as a useful tool for investigations, and cited a recent crime committed at a hotel in St. Hyacinthe as an example. The SQ had no suspects, so Ruest simply entered the hotel’s postal code into the registry. That search alone produced a list of 27 sex offenders who live within five kilometres of the hotel.

Julie Surprenant: Inquiry into 16-year-old girl’s death opens

by Paul Cherry

MONTREAL – Quebec coroner Catherine Rudel-Tessier is expected to begin Tuesday an unusual, if not unprecedented, public inquiry into the death of Julie Surprenant, 16, who disappeared in 1999.

The coroner’s inquiry at the Laval courthouse is unusual because Surprenant’s body was never located despite what is believed to have been the deathbed confession of a man who was always considered a suspect in her disappearance.

Rudel-Tessier has set aside two days to hear from witnesses and will add a third if needed.

Richard Bouillon, a convicted sex offender with a long history of mental health problems, lived two doors away from Surprenant’s family home in Terrebonne when she went missing.

He died of cancer, at 52, in 2006.

Bouillon was investigated in the disappearance of Surprenant, who went missing after getting off a bus close to her home.

While looking into his past, a Sûreté du Québec investigator found a woman who alleged she had been raped by Bouillon when she was 16, in the early-1970s.

Another woman, who learned Bouillon was a suspect in Surprenant’s disappearance from a media report, came forward and alleged he sexually assaulted her several times when she was a child and again when she was a teenager.

In 2001, Bouillon was charged with sexually assaulting both victims and was convicted of several sex-related offences in 2003.

He was sentenced to a 10-year prison term and was declared a long-term offender but was never charged in Surprenant’s disappearance.

The Crown tried to have Bouillon declared a dangerous offender, which would have given him an indefinite sentence, but a Quebec Court judge opted for the less severe long-term offender designation.

In the process, disturbing details about Bouillon’s past came to light.

His criminal record by 2003 included several convictions dating back to 1970 when, at age 16, he molested a teenager at knifepoint and did the same thing to a 27-year-old woman 10 days later.

According to court documents, Bouillon’s parents had serious concerns about his sexual impulses in 1970 and had him committed to a hospital for three months.

When he was readmitted months later, after being convicted for the first time, he told doctors he was relieved because he could not control himself.

Four years later, he tried to rape a 6-year-old girl.

After undergoing an evaluation at the Philippe Pinel Institute, in 1975, a psychiatrist diagnosed Bouillon as “an individual with very severe personality disorders of a psychopathic nature” and “incapable of empathy.”

In 1990, Bouillon was convicted of sexually assaulting a patient who was at the same mental health clinic where he was being treated.

When Surprenant disappeared, on Nov. 16, 1999, Bouillon was on probation for having paid a minor for sexual services in 1996.

A pre-sentencing report prepared in that case described him as having a high risk of reoffending if he were in the presence of teenagers or young girls.

He was not required to undergo therapy in that case because he refused to admit he had a problem.

On his deathbed in 2006, Bouillon reportedly confessed to a caregiver that he killed Surprenant.

He told the caregiver he had placed Julie’s body in a sports bag and dumped it into the Mille Îles River.

The caregiver did not tell the police what Bouillon said until long after his death.

Police searched the river last year but were unable to locate the girl’s remains.

10-years-ago, I was preparing to travel to Quebec to investigate my sister’s death. I cannot believe that 10 years have passed. It’s been so much time that I am forgetting a lot of the details of this extraordinary story.  Here is a summary from Wikipedia that I wrote a number of years ago:

Theresa Allore was a 19-year-old Canadian college student who disappeared on Friday, November 3, 1978 from Champlain College Lennoxville in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Five months later on April 13, 1979 her body was discovered in a small body of water approximately one kilometer from her dormitory residence in Compton, Quebec. Upon her disappearance police initially suggested she was a runaway. When her body was discovered police then suggested she was a possible victim of a drug overdose, perhaps at the assistance of fellow college students. In the summer of 2002, the family of Theresa Allore enlisted the support of an investigative reporter and friend, Patricia Pearson who produced a series of articles for Canada’s National Post newspaper that gave compelling evidence that Theresa Allore was a victim of murder, and that her death was possibly linked to two other unsolved local cases; the death of 10-year-old Manon Dube in March 1978, and the murder of Louise Camirand in 1977.^[1] The theory was supported by geographic profiler and then FBI consultant, Kim Rossmo, who suggested a serial sexual predator may have been operating in the Quebec region in the late 1970s and advised police to investigate the three deaths as a series. Rossmo gained notoriety in 1998 when he suggested the creation of a serial killer task force to Vancouver police in the cases of missing women from the Vancouver’s downtown Eastside. Robert Pickton was eventually arrested and found guilty of six murders, though some presume he is responsible for as many as 26 murders of Vancouver missing women.

The deaths of Theresa Allore, Manon Dube, and Louise Camirand remain unsolved cold-cases.

Excerpt from Radley Balko’s excellent series on criminal justice myths. This one hits home. So who precisely does watch the watchmen?  Don’t look to law enforcement for ethical guideance:

Myth 5: Due to their position, law enforcement officials are held to a higher standard of conduct than regular citizens.

A strong argument can be made that they’re actually held to a lower standard. Unlike any other profession in America, prosecutors and judges are protected by the doctrine of absolute immunity, which completely shields them from civil liability for the decisions they make in the course of their jobs. The courts have ruled that prosecutors can’t be sued even if they intentionally manipulate or manufacture evidence that results in the conviction of an innocent person.

Police officers and most other government officials are protected by qualified immunity, which holds that even if they violate a citizen’s rights, they can only be held liable if a reasonable person would have known their actions were illegal. And unlike private sector workers, most government employees — including police officers — are not expected to have specialized knowledge of the laws governing their professions.

Many states have also passed a “police officer’s bill of rights,” a special set of protections for officers accused of serious misconduct, including acts that could result in criminal charges. In many jurisdictions, police officers get a “cooling off period” after a shooting or allegation of excessive force. During this period, which can range from 48 hours to 10 days, the officers under investigation cannot be asked any questions about the incident. In most states, police officers also can’t be questioned about misconduct without a union representative or attorney present. If any part of the police bill of rights protocol isn’t followed, even officers who commit egregious misconduct can find themselves back on the force, often with back pay.

In most places these extra rights only pertain to internal, administrative investigations, not criminal investigations — but the internal investigations usually take place first. That means bad cops can use those protections to gain advantages not afforded to those who don’t happen to work in law enforcement.

Unlike other professions, police officers and other public officials also can’t be fired from their jobs or disciplined for invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

… and that’s the end of that sad chapter. I have blog pretty extensively about Andrew Dalzell, and where our lives intersect. I’m not going to tell the whole disturbing story again. You can read it here.

I DO like that when you Google his name, this blog is the first thing that gets tossed up. Otherwise he and his transgressions would die in obscurity. Thanks to Beth Velliquette of the Herald-Sun for keeping this story alive.

CARRBORO – A murder confession made by a Carrboro murder suspect came back to bite him during a sentencing hearing for a completely different case in federal court.

The man who made the confession, which was later suppressed in state court, was Andrew Douglas Dalzell, who grew up in and around the Carrboro area. He is serving about 26 years in a federal prison in South Carolina for attempting to lure an 11-year-old girl into a sexual relationship in Asheville.

But Dalzell was once in the news in Orange County when he was arrested in the killing of Deborah Leigh Key in Carrboro.

Key, 35, disappeared after leaving a Main Street bar in 1997, and witnesses told police they saw Dalzell talking with Key at the bar that night. One witness told police that when he left the bar after it closed, he saw Key and Dalzell in the nearby Bank of America parking lot.

Key was never seen again, and her remains have never been discovered. For seven years, police suspected Dalzell killed her, but investigators couldn’t get enough evidence to charge him.

Then in 2004, using a series of tricks, that included showing Dalzell a warrant and a letter indicating he was being charged with first-degree murder and could be sentenced to death, when in fact he was being arrested for stealing some figurines from a store where he previously worked, Dalzell confessed to Carrboro officers that he had killed Key and driven her body to Wilmington, where he dumped her body in a large trash receptacle.

According to documents filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, Dalzell told Carrboro police that he and Key were talking in the parking lot. When he tried to hug her, she spun around and slapped him. Dalzell said he grabbed her neck and couldn’t let go. She collapsed and he scooped her into the back seat of the car and drove east to Wilmington where he put her body in a Dumpster behind a strip mall.

When the case came to court, Dalzell’s attorneys argued his confession should be thrown out because the officers did not read him his Miranda rights before questioning him. Superior Court Judge Wade Barber agreed and wrote a long order, citing multiple violations of standard police procedures and law that Carrboro officers violated, and he suppressed the confession. Without the confession, police didn’t have enough evidence to hold Dalzell on the murder charge and he was released

Seven years later, that murder confession was used against Dalzell in federal court after Dalzell pleaded guilty to the federal charge of coercion and enticement for attempting to entice an 11-year-old girl to pose for child pornography.

According to law enforcement officials, Dalzell began communicating over the Internet with someone who he believed to be an 11-year-old girl named Megan. He initiated sexually explicit chats and solicited Megan to meet him for the purpose of taking sexually explicit photographs of her performing oral sex on a man.

Dalzell also sent “Megan” a modeling contract that would make her the property of the agency. If she stayed with him as his “pretty little slavegirl model,” he would pay her $300. He sent her a pornographic photo of a girl performing oral sex so she would get the idea of what kind of photographs he wanted to take, according to the federal documents.

“Megan,” however, was actually a detective with the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office in Asheville posing as an 11-year-old girl, and when Dalzell showed up in the mobile home park where she supposedly lived, he was arrested.

That led him to federal court in the Western District last year where he pleaded guilty to the charge, which carried a minimum of 10 years and a maximum of life in prison.

Based on his criminal history, Dalzell was categorized as a Level II offender, and federal sentencing guidelines called for him to be sentenced to 253 to 293 months or about 21 years to 24½ years in prison.

However, during the sentencing hearing, federal prosecutors asked that he be sentenced at a higher level because of his “extreme conduct,” in which he stated during his Internet chats with “Megan” that he wished to turn her into his slave.

During the chats, he spoke of his willingness to torture and bind his slaves and described in graphic sexual detail the way he would murder a slave who was noncompliant, according to the prosecutor’s response to Dalzell’s appeal.

The judge denied that request.

Prosecutors also wanted the murder confession, which had been thrown out in state court, to be considered as part of his criminal history in federal court. They argued that Dalzell made the statement voluntarily and that the police tactics were not enough to overcome his will.

The court ruled that despite Judge Barber’s order suppressing his confession, it was still admissible for purposes of sentencing, and he granted the addition of three points to his criminal history, moving him from a Level II offender to a Level III offender, which calls for a longer prison sentence.

In the end, the judge sentenced Dalzell to about 26 1/2 years in prison.

Although when he pleaded guilty to the charge, Dalzell assured the judge that he knew he could not appeal his sentence, he appealed anyway.

He appealed the ruling that the murder confession could be used to increase the number of points in his criminal history.

The Court of Appeals considered first whether Dalzell had the right to appeal and found that his right to appeal was foreclosed by his appeal waiver that he made when he pleaded guilty to the charge in federal court.

It also ruled that there was no evidence that his defense counsel was ineffective and it declined to address the merits of that claim.

His attorney gave notice that the decision might be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Je vous connais tous; et veux bien pour un temps favoriser les caprices déréglés de votre oisiveté.

En cela je continuerai à imiter le soleil qui permet quelquefois aux nuages impurs et contagieux de dérober sa beauté à l’univers,

afin que lorsqu’il lui plaira de redevenir lui-même, le monde, après en avoir été privé,

le voie avec plus d’admiration reparaître tout à coup à travers les noires et hideuses vapeurs qui avaient paru le suffoquer.

Si l’année entière se passait en jours de congé, les jeux seraient bientôt aussi ennuyeux que le travail.

Mais quand ils ne viennent que de temps à autre, ils reviennent toujours désirés; rien ne plaît que ce qui n’arrive pas communément.

Ainsi quand je rejetterai ces habitudes déréglées, et que je payerai la dette que je n’ai jamais reconnue,

autant mes promesses auront été au-dessous de ma conduite, autant je tromperai l’attente des hommes;

et telle qu’un métal brillant sur un fond obscur, ma réforme, dont l’éclat sera rehaussé par mes fautes,

paraîtra plus méritoire, et attirera plus de regards que le mérite qu’aucune tache ne fait ressortir.

Ainsi je veux faillir de manière à me servir habilement de mes fautes,

lorsque ensuite je regagnerai le temps perdu au moment où on y comptera le moins.

HENRI IV, PARTIE I, I, ii

West Stewartstown, United States (NTN24) – A community in New Hampshire mourns after the body of 11-year-old Celina Cass, who had been missing for a week, is found in a river near the Canadian border.

Divers pulled the body of a missing 11-year-old girl, Celina Cass, from the Connecticut River on Monday (August 1) not far from her New Hampshire home. Authorities called her death “suspicious.”

A dive team from the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department found her body near a hydropower station in West Stewartstown, a New Hampshire town of about 1,000 residents near the Canadian border.

“Until we determine the cause and manner of her death, we are just going forward as a suspicious death, but we are treating it as a criminal investigation based on what we know at this juncture,” said Jane Young, a New Hampshire senior assistant attorney general.

Young declined to give details about the cause of death, citing the need for an autopsy.

People in the small New Hampshire community gathered together for a candlelight prayer vigil on Monday. Some held balloons with personal messages written on them.

Cass was last seen at home at about 9 p.m. local time on July 25. The 5-foot 5-inch tall Cass, who has long brown hair and hazel eyes, was wearing a pink shirt, pink pullover, and blue shorts before she disappeared, authorities said.

Over the weekend, the Federal Bureau of Investigation offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the girl and the arrest of anyone responsible for her disappearance. In addition, a private citizen offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to her whereabouts.

Brianna Maitland

DANBY, Vt. — Vermont State Police say it could be some time before investigators are able to determine the identity of the woman’s skull found by the side of the road in Danby.

Detectives and others scoured the area along Danby Hill Road on Wednesday where the skull was found on Sunday by a passer-by, but they found no additional clues.

The medical examiner’s office says the skull appears to be that of a young adult Caucasian female who could have been the victim of a crime.

Police are checking records to see if the skull could be from any open missing persons cases.

Police noted two particular cases: the 1991 disappearance of Heidi Wilbur from Middletown Springs and the 2004 disappearance from Montgomery of Brianna Maitland.