Just read this thread for the first time. How sad - my gut feeling is certainly that if the father's not talking the kids are unlikely to be alive.
I fed Princeton, MI into the Topozone site and it came back with Marquette County - can anybody tell me if that's right? If the father was telling the truth and if he wanted to hide bodies somewhere, the whole area is absolutely riddled with mines. It would be almost impossible to find someone down there. Also a river and a convenient lake, as well as a pit and presumably a few quarries. Can't see any farms obviously marked. I shall switch to the Terraserver to see what the photos look like. USGS will also tell what sort of waterbodies are there - eg whether they're "bottomless", "seasonal" etc but the choices he'd have had if that was what he was after look almost endless. It seems to me that he's thinking "no bodies, no proof". But you can bring murder charges without a body, can't you? I'm sure it's been done before.
[ETA - A blow-up of the area on Terraserver clearly shows plenty of cultivated land but very little apparent habitation. Shouldn't be too difficult to find the "friend's" family's farm if she's finally telling the truth. Finding anything hidden on that land is going to be an entirely different problem, IMHO. Wetlands shows two huge ballast pits with excavated bottoms and a couple of forested areas with waterbodies in the middle, as well as many smaller areas of water, some with "unconsolidated bottoms" (eg cobble/gravel/sand/mud, presumably as a result of mining/quarrying). Looks like a nightmarish area to have to search to me. Anybody able to get a fix on where exactly this farm might be - can the "friend's" family name be found and linked to an address in the area?]
I fed Princeton, MI into the Topozone site and it came back with Marquette County - can anybody tell me if that's right? If the father was telling the truth and if he wanted to hide bodies somewhere, the whole area is absolutely riddled with mines. It would be almost impossible to find someone down there. Also a river and a convenient lake, as well as a pit and presumably a few quarries. Can't see any farms obviously marked. I shall switch to the Terraserver to see what the photos look like. USGS will also tell what sort of waterbodies are there - eg whether they're "bottomless", "seasonal" etc but the choices he'd have had if that was what he was after look almost endless. It seems to me that he's thinking "no bodies, no proof". But you can bring murder charges without a body, can't you? I'm sure it's been done before.
[ETA - A blow-up of the area on Terraserver clearly shows plenty of cultivated land but very little apparent habitation. Shouldn't be too difficult to find the "friend's" family's farm if she's finally telling the truth. Finding anything hidden on that land is going to be an entirely different problem, IMHO. Wetlands shows two huge ballast pits with excavated bottoms and a couple of forested areas with waterbodies in the middle, as well as many smaller areas of water, some with "unconsolidated bottoms" (eg cobble/gravel/sand/mud, presumably as a result of mining/quarrying). Looks like a nightmarish area to have to search to me. Anybody able to get a fix on where exactly this farm might be - can the "friend's" family name be found and linked to an address in the area?]
