i'm surprised no one has brought this up yet:
she could have been killed at the detention center/youth home, and there could have been some kind of cover-up (maybe someone took her away & dumped or buried her, to save themselves). have all the employees from that time been investigated to see if there were any reports of abuse-- that is, if any records were kept?
sometimes things happen semi-accidently, from use of restraints, solitary confinement, or a person has an unseen heart condition that kills them during a struggle, and the employees don't get medical help for them in time... i wonder if this youth home still exists or what kind of place it was. if it was a sketchy place, there could have been all kinds of abuses going on.
another possibility- a sexual predator worked there... or she could have threatened to tell people about something going on there.. and she 'disappears'. just a thought.
i wonder if the family has checked morgue records in that area from that time frame to see what kind of anonymous people were buried or cremated.
in the old days, many asylums had their own graveyards (!!!!!!) you gotta wonder about that.. how many suspicious deaths occured. but probably by the 1970's, and for a juvenile detention home, that wouldn't be the case (at least,, legally).
probably, her running away from the place and getting mixed up with the wrong people is a more likely scenario. perhaps she hitched a ride with a trucker or someone else who was intent on murdering young girls.
i wonder if dalles from the cold cases thread (who wrote the book about his trucker father murdering several young people, still yet to be identified) has looked at her photo...?
i would think if she got out of that place alive, she would have either stayed with the friends or acquaintances of someone she knew closeby for a night or 2, and then they might hae hopped on a greyhound bus or hitchhiked straight to california, or maybe vegas... with promises of work and money. i hope any jane does along those routes (& in those areas) have been thoroughly checked.
what about this one:
http://www.doenetwork.us/cases/255ufok.html
it says some teeth are out of alignment (which mindy's appear to be, although we don't know if mindy had gotten extensive dental work done? maybe she did after she left the youth home, and someone else paid for it?) and she could have given herself some crude tattoos while in the youth home. the only thing is they say she is 18-25, and mindy would have been 14-15.
i wasn't clear (from her brother's website) if she ran away from HOME, or from the youth home in sept '79. but the remains were found in april 1980, so... well, anyway they've probably already seen her.
