Found Deceased IA - Elizabeth Collins, 8, & Lyric Cook, 10, Evansdale, 13 July 2012 - #37

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cindersoot said:
What peaks my interest is the time of day, the month and location, and bike trail for sure. Man, even the weather, cloudy rainy.
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I've thought about that to. Those clues to me have always pointed to a local.
 
dotr said:
Fwiw, The newspaper on the day of disappearance.
Wonder if perp prowled any of the events advertised in the paper?

FRIDAY JULY 13 2012
http://dailyiowan.lib.uiowa.edu/DI/2012/di2012-07-13.pdf
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That is the Daily Iowan, the newspaper published by the University of Iowa in Iowa City. It's a good 90 mile drive south of the Waterloo/Cedar Falls metro area (to the south edge); summer being road repair season, figure about 1 hour 45 minutes away from Evansdale. A Blackhawk county license plate would stick out in Iowa City on a normal day and a Johnson county plate would stick out even more in Evansdale.

So it seems unlikely to me. The perp might possibly have had time in the morning but we all know what his afternoon/early evening were taken up with.
 
I wish the Waterloo PD would release a artist sketch of the rape suspect.
 
Arod said:
I agree, what's the hold up? Unless they have their guy and collecting enough evidence to book him.
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http://www.kcrg.com/subject/news/pu...t-reported-at-george-wyth-state-park-20150728

SBM:
The victim was found unconscious in a wooded area near one of the trails by the campground in the park, according to Waterloo Public Safety Director Dan Trelka.

I have a feeling that because she was knocked unconscious she may not have been able to give a detailed enough description of the attacker for a sketch. If he knocked her out she may not remember those intricate details of his face...or if she was clawing/pushing her hands into his face to fight him off she also may not have seen detail.

They did report he would likely have scratches - so she put up a fight, and typically you'd go for the face/eyes/nose in at attempt to quickly thwart off an attacker - which leads me to believe she may not have recollection of those details. She reported he was young (20's) with blonde hair and less than 6 foot tall (that was found in another report I'd read)...those are fairly vague descriptions.

One would assume that if anyone at the campground saw someone in the area (fitting that description) before the attack they may be able to give more details as well...so maybe he just entered the park in a vehicle close by and was able to get out of there before anyone found her.
 
"We paid a friend who has his pilot's license to go up in the air to where a psychic said that they would be," Heather Collins said. "They weren't there. We've done that many times. And then all of a sudden we just came to the conclusion after maybe three months, we said, 'no more psychics, we're not listening to them.' "

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/st...llins-lyic-cook-morrissey-evansdale/30807291/

Even if the pilot was in the right area searching I don't think the girls would have been found. The place looks like a jungle, especially during the summer months, from the videos I have seen. It doesn't make sense to have to pay a friend either...

Why no massive searches at 7-Bridges old camp site in the beginning? I know it was out of the bounds of the immediate search area, but why not search sooner than later? Clearly there were tips about 7-Bridges and it had been used as a dumping ground previously...

It still blows my mind that Klunder was cleared...
 
cindersoot said:
What peaks my interest is the time of day, the month and location, and bike trail for sure. Man, even the weather, cloudy rainy.
Click to expand...

For sure the bike trail... Even the building that bikers stored their bikes at was a little sketchy to me.
 
Bootsctr said:
"We paid a friend who has his pilot's license to go up in the air to where a psychic said that they would be," Heather Collins said. "They weren't there. We've done that many times. And then all of a sudden we just came to the conclusion after maybe three months, we said, 'no more psychics, we're not listening to them.' "

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/st...llins-lyic-cook-morrissey-evansdale/30807291/

Even if the pilot was in the right area searching I don't think the girls would have been found. The place looks like a jungle, especially during the summer months, from the videos I have seen. It doesn't make sense to have to pay a friend either...

Why no massive searches at 7-Bridges old camp site in the beginning? I know it was out of the bounds of the immediate search area, but why not search sooner than later? Clearly there were tips about 7-Bridges and it had been used as a dumping ground previously...

It still blows my mind that Klunder was cleared...
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As for paying a friend, it is likely the friend was renting the airplane. I can't speak for Heather and Drew Collins but I know that I could not ask a friend to spend hundreds of dollars on an airplane rental in addition to asking them to do a fairly gruesome task. Just wouldn't feel right and if I had the money, I would insist on paying for the rental.

I don't have a cite handy but as I recall, the Bremer County Sheriff's Department did check 7 Bridges and nothing looked disturbed. I do remember reports that if the hunters who found the bodies had gone 5 feet to the right or left of the first body they found, they would probably not have seen it, so searching 7 Bridges would take a lot of manpower. As for why no massive search, searches usually spiral outwards from the last place the victim(s) were seen. By the time you reach 7 Bridges, you're talking about searching a hair under 2000 square miles.

There were many other places to search before getting all the way out there.
 
Grainne Dhu said:
As for paying a friend, it is likely the friend was renting the airplane. I can't speak for Heather and Drew Collins but I know that I could not ask a friend to spend hundreds of dollars on an airplane rental in addition to asking them to do a fairly gruesome task. Just wouldn't feel right and if I had the money, I would insist on paying for the rental.

I don't have a cite handy but as I recall, the Bremer County Sheriff's Department did check 7 Bridges and nothing looked disturbed. I do remember reports that if the hunters who found the bodies had gone 5 feet to the right or left of the first body they found, they would probably not have seen it, so searching 7 Bridges would take a lot of manpower. As for why no massive search, searches usually spiral outwards from the last place the victim(s) were seen. By the time you reach 7 Bridges, you're talking about searching a hair under 2000 square miles.

There were many other places to search before getting all the way out there.
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True, plus LE was discouraging the public from searching. Misty's last public plea was for LE to search further north. Then of course the FBI stated they believed the girls were still alive and did a house search as late as September (?) and if people believed they were alive where would you begin that search if you're not Law Enforcement??

:sigh: Again, hindsight is 20/20, but I wish the case had been handled differently. I always felt that Misty got the short end of the stick with the way LE treated her.

I'm following Christina Morris' case from Plano, Texas. She's been missing almost a year now this August/September. Her mother and family and friends and strangers still search every weekend. Eqqusearch was brought in and they used drones... LE has been photographed several times searching. The searches for Christina and the searches for Lyric and Lizzy seem to be totally opposite. I only saw a few photographs of LE stopping cars in the search for Lyric and Lizzy. I think I was holding my breath for the longest time hoping they would be found alive, yet here I still sit now holding my breath for an arrest...
 
Arod said:
I agree, what's the hold up? Unless they have their guy and collecting enough evidence to book him.
Click to expand...

I can't recall a single time an artists sketch was released by the Waterloo PD for anything. I wonder if they even use one.
 
Bootsctr said:
True, plus LE was discouraging the public from searching. Misty's last public plea was for LE to search further north. Then of course the FBI stated they believed the girls were still alive and did a house search as late as September (?) and if people believed they were alive where would you begin that search if you're not Law Enforcement??

:sigh: Again, hindsight is 20/20, but I wish the case had been handled differently. I always felt that Misty got the short end of the stick with the way LE treated her.

I'm following Christina Morris' case from Plano, Texas. She's been missing almost a year now this August/September. Her mother and family and friends and strangers still search every weekend. Eqqusearch was brought in and they used drones... LE has been photographed several times searching. The searches for Christina and the searches for Lyric and Lizzy seem to be totally opposite. I only saw a few photographs of LE stopping cars in the search for Lyric and Lizzy. I think I was holding my breath for the longest time hoping they would be found alive, yet here I still sit now holding my breath for an arrest...
Click to expand...

As for the FBI stating they thought the girls were alive, I never believed it. That's pretty much standard operating BS; the reason LE agencies use it is that the public remains more engaged when there is a chance that the victims are alive than when it is believed the victims are dead. Unless there is a good reason articulated for believing the victim(s) are alive, well... the victim(s) are probably dead. It wasn't like there was any indication that Lyric and Elizabeth had run away, for instance.

The early stages investigation was evaluated by a national agency, the name of which I cannot recall right now darnit, found to be overall quite good and having made no major mistakes. Small town Iowa does not necessarily equate to incompetent.

I agree with you about Misty. I think she's gotten the short end of the stick all around and that she's yet another victim of our insane war on drugs (what will it take for us to realise it is a losing war that is sucking billions of dollars out of our economy every year in terms of LE, human potential, etc?). In the first two weeks the girls were gone, there were a lot of car searches. After that, it started to become a question of civil rights and rightfully so. If you're innocent, just how many searches do you have to put up with simply because you happen to live near a missing child? After the first five, I think it would become very old very quick.

What I find most hopeful was the news that they still have an investigator working the case full time. That says to me that the case has not yet gone cold, that they are still getting leads worth chasing down. And maybe they are going back through the early leads to re-evaluate them; that's my hope, anyway, because I think that's where the most likely clues are.

Although as time goes on, I wonder more and more about a travelling predator like Joseph Duncan III. While the use of 7 Bridges seems to indicate local knowledge, Duncan committed plenty of crimes on a travelling through basis and had no apparent problems in finding places that were remote and little used. I wonder if anyone has checked on other remote areas in Blackhawk and Bremer counties to see if anyone remembers seeing any vehicles in them in the month before the girls were abducted?
 
Ommmm said:
I can't recall a single time an artists sketch was released by the Waterloo PD for anything. I wonder if they even use one.
Click to expand...

I can remember cases in the past where they've used a sketch artist from the Iowa DOI. We've already seen that Evansdale and Blackhawk county LE don't hesitate to consult with the DOI, so it's not due to a lack of coordination.

My assumption for the reason they haven't released one in the case this summer is that the victim probably doesn't have enough memory for a sketch. I've been knocked unconscious more times than is good for me (traumatic encelopathy, anyone?) and each time I have lost some memory from immediately before being knocked out. The longer the victim stays unconscious, the higher the risk they will lose memories from before the concussion.

In Lyric and Lizzie's case, I have taken the lack of sketches to mean that no one has come forward with the description of someone unknown that was significant enough to warrant a sketch.
 
Grainne Dhu said:
I can remember cases in the past where they've used a sketch artist from the Iowa DOI. We've already seen that Evansdale and Blackhawk county LE don't hesitate to consult with the DOI, so it's not due to a lack of coordination.

My assumption for the reason they haven't released one in the case this summer is that the victim probably doesn't have enough memory for a sketch. I've been knocked unconscious more times than is good for me (traumatic encelopathy, anyone?) and each time I have lost some memory from immediately before being knocked out. The longer the victim stays unconscious, the higher the risk they will lose memories from before the concussion.

In Lyric and Lizzie's case, I have taken the lack of sketches to mean that no one has come forward with the description of someone unknown that was significant enough to warrant a sketch.
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I agree. And another thing also might be that even if the victim remembers its probably all blurry. I've been attacked before. There is so much adrenaline, fear, fighting, screaming, that everything turns into a blurr and only small things stick out and the things you remember are so random. Its like tunnle vision all most. I was sitting on my couch a year after I was attacked when things that I didn't even know had happend popped into my mind. Maybe with time she will remember something that can help. I sure hope so besides the fact he needs to just be caught I think it could be linked.
 
http://phys.org/news/2011-05-police-dont.html

"Why police sketches sometimes don't work
May 11, 2011 By Tom Avril

When they were investigating the series of attacks on women in Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood, police stopped dozens of black or Latino men who were thought to resemble a face in a forensic sketch. The image of a guy in a hoodie, drawn by a trained artist who interviewed one of the victims, was a high-profile use of an investigative technique that dates back more than a century.

But ultimately, police arrested a suspect, Antonio Rodriguez, by using a tool of more recent vintage: DNA analysis.

So, does he look anything like the guy in the sketch?

In an informal survey of a dozen neighborhood residents, most said no, whereas police who worked the case were divided.

Manuel Enrique Sanchez, one of the men police stopped during their investigation, saw no resemblance, nor did he think his own face was similar to either the suspect's or the sketch. Except that all three were men of color wearing a hoodie - not an unusual sight in Kensington.

"Everyone fits that description," Sanchez said.

In repeated studies, psychologists have found that people are not very good at recalling a face after just one encounter. And accuracy is even worse if the witness has to describe a face so someone else can draw a picture - whether with a pencil or with one of various available computer programs."
 
Grainne Dhu said:
As for the FBI stating they thought the girls were alive, I never believed it. That's pretty much standard operating BS; the reason LE agencies use it is that the public remains more engaged when there is a chance that the victims are alive than when it is believed the victims are dead. Unless there is a good reason articulated for believing the victim(s) are alive, well... the victim(s) are probably dead. It wasn't like there was any indication that Lyric and Elizabeth had run away, for instance.

The early stages investigation was evaluated by a national agency, the name of which I cannot recall right now darnit, found to be overall quite good and having made no major mistakes. Small town Iowa does not necessarily equate to incompetent.

I agree with you about Misty. I think she's gotten the short end of the stick all around and that she's yet another victim of our insane war on drugs (what will it take for us to realise it is a losing war that is sucking billions of dollars out of our economy every year in terms of LE, human potential, etc?). In the first two weeks the girls were gone, there were a lot of car searches. After that, it started to become a question of civil rights and rightfully so. If you're innocent, just how many searches do you have to put up with simply because you happen to live near a missing child? After the first five, I think it would become very old very quick.

What I find most hopeful was the news that they still have an investigator working the case full time. That says to me that the case has not yet gone cold, that they are still getting leads worth chasing down. And maybe they are going back through the early leads to re-evaluate them; that's my hope, anyway, because I think that's where the most likely clues are.

Although as time goes on, I wonder more and more about a travelling predator like Joseph Duncan III. While the use of 7 Bridges seems to indicate local knowledge, Duncan committed plenty of crimes on a travelling through basis and had no apparent problems in finding places that were remote and little used. I wonder if anyone has checked on other remote areas in Blackhawk and Bremer counties to see if anyone remembers seeing any vehicles in them in the month before the girls were abducted?
Click to expand...

Just jumping off your post regarding the comments of "we have reason to believe the girls are still alive" comments by the FBI:

IMHO I think (at that point) their strongest (and possibly their only) "lead" was the fact that Dan and Misty both had questionable pasts that were heavily entwined in the drug world. Not to mention Dan's court hearing and all the hoopla around him backing out on testifying immediately prior to them disappearing, etc.

If they had ANY reason to suspect the girls could have been taken (or even a fake attempt of staging a "kidnapping" to create a diversion) I think they would play out a plea to the public in an attempt to get someone to speak up.

I know this may not be the majority opinion here, but I feel that although they followed the protocol of what to do in the case of a missing child, I didn't get the feeling (initially anyway) LE thought it was just a random kidnapping.

I really felt at the beginning that while they were trying to keep everything close to the vest, their real focus was a narrow scope. From the taking of Dan and Misty's cell phone, to the beating down of the hotel door in the middle of the night - flat out accusing Dan of knowing what happened to the girls, to the subpoena of Misty's interview with KWWL, to the requests of multiple lie detector tests, to the tightening up of Dan's supervision, to the flat out lying to the public that "all RSO's have been cleared" within 48 hrs (later finding out they were still interviewing them a week later), to denying knowledge of witnesses (TG), to the ambush of the house a block from where Wylma lived, etc...the list goes on.

Do I think they were keeping open the "possibility" that a random perp had taken the girls? Absolutely. And publicly they were doing all the "right" things that LE should do in the case of a missing child. But do I think that they really thought they were going to find the girls stuffed in the trunk of someone's vehicle at a checkpoint? Not for one second.

In my opinion, I think they had their faces sniffing down the "obvious" rabbit hole - and truly, honestly felt that is where the strongest lead was - that the girls were not really "missing" but rather "conveniently missing". I have ZERO facts to back this up, this is just what MY impression was early on.

I feel that over time that focus shifted...after months of waiting and searching through all of these thousands of "leads" they reportedly receive. The focus then shifted to the white SUV, the paddleboat rider, the location of Seven Bridges, etc...slowly shifting the focus to a much broader scope.

Drew has made it clear via his interviews that he feels this is a sex offender, period. Heather? Not so much. She maintains her belief that it was, indeed, tied somehow to drugs and Misty and Dan's connection to that world.

But I think straight out the shoot...the most obvious, the most likely, the BEST possible outcome, would have been that it WAS tied to drugs (aka Dan and Misty) and their disappearance was no more than an attempt to maintain freedom (per Dan's words of "I'm not ready to go to jail").

And that is why I personally think they commented that they had reason to believe the girls were still alive. I know others may not agree...that is just how I felt at the beginning. I think differently now, but at the time of that comment I really felt they thought they were getting close to finding out this was all a big sham and the girls weren't in danger.
 
From this article, it does seem as though the girls may have been abducted by a stranger, imo.
Wondering if the perp might have been a stranger to the girls, but they were not strangers to him?
imo.

Rbbm.

http://www.parents.com/kids/safety/stranger-safety/child-abduction-facts/

"Acquaintance kidnapping involves a comparatively high percentage of juvenile perpetrators, has the largest percentage of female and teenage victims, is more often associated with other crimes (especially sexual and physical assault), occurs at homes and residences, and has the highest percentage of injured victims.
Stranger kidnapping victimizes more females than males, occurs primarily at outdoor locations, victimizes both teenagers and school-age children, is associated with sexual assaults in the case of girl victims and robberies in the case of boy victims (although not exclusively so), and is the type of kidnapping most likely to involve the use of a firearm.
Only about one child out of each 10,000 missing children reported to the local police is not found alive. However, about 20 percent of the children reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in nonfamily abductions are not found alive.
In 80 percent of abductions by strangers, the first contact between the child and the abductor occurs within a quarter mile of the child's home.
Most potential abductors grab their victims on the street or try to lure them into their vehicles"
 
I know that trauma has away of scattering thoughts and making things difficult to recall. Fortunately or unfortunately God has blessed me with a strong sense of recall at least in terms of human facial recognition.
A little OT comment. I worked for a major electronic retailer for almost 30 years as a salesman and manager. In sales an important sales tool is to observe as much information or detail about a person in your brief encounter and introduction. Observing and listening could be a key to additional sales opportunities. One day a gentleman came into the store. He wore an expensive suit and expensive shoes. He had a purchase order "from the state to purchase a police scanner and some additional small items. I saw the gentleman maybe 3 or 4 minutes because the Store Manager was the person who was actually handling the sale. I was busy helping our other customers being that this was a Saturday afternoon and usually a busy time for us. The customer finished with his purchase and left the store. About 6-8 weeks later we had a police detective come to the store and he wanted us to idea a potential suspect. The detective showed their lineup and I was the one to identify the prep not my Manager who had spent considerable amounts of time with him. This gentleman had been very busy. He had used fraudulent PO#'s to secure about 500 K dollars worth of stuff from all over the area. There are people who do have the ability to recall faces and events pretty accurately the question becomes when trauma sets in or is a part of the equation. The human emotional experience usually doesn't like to dwell on negative things and painful or fearful events even less so.

There are so many of these cases like Lyric and Lizzy and Celina Cass and Hailey Dunn and so many other cases were there is some comfort for the families knowing that their loved one is not suffering and they have been returned to them. But justice has not been served because nobody has been arrested and or convicted for taking these innocent young girls lives.

As difficult as it is for us as a curious and well meaning group advocating justice for these victims and their families the wheels of justice just go so exceedingly slow. But even the smallest of clues can make a difference. Another little sidebar. I had a cousin who had not been seen or heard from since 1999. He was on the Unidentified boards on WS. It was determined that he had died in Oct of 1999 and his human remains were setting in storage in a medical examiners office in Pinellas County Florida. An old school friend had save a letter that my cousin Fletcher had written him about 19 years earlier. The friend who happened to be a writer for the Tampa Bay Hearld opened his letters from the end. So the ME office was able to extract DNA from the saliva that Fletcher used when he sealed the letter in the middle. Who would have thought that something so insignificant in the order of the universe would help us to unlock the mystery of my cousin after all these years.
 
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