Susan Redding -- Missing from Georgia Since 1981

Details from NamUs**: 

Susan left Washington and returned to Georgia in 1975. She was last seen by family at her mother's home and there is no information to indicate she went back to Washington State. She was last heard from when she called her mother and grandmother’s homes in the mid-1980s, prior to her father's death in 1987.

Missing Person: Susan Redding (no legal middle name)

Parents: Frank and Margaret Redding (according to a person I interviewed online that claimed to be the MP's sister)

Might go by: Curly, Sue (doesn't go by Randy according to Susan's sister; NAMUS says she did go by Randy, in contrast)
Last-seen: April 8th, 1975 (inconsistent as per sources; other source says 1981, sister says 1975)

Last-contact: there's a suggestion in the NamUs description that this person was known to be alive in the early 1980s because of a phone call
The area where the MP was last seen: Decatur, Georgia, but the missing person had links to Seattle, Washington
Link to government source: NamUS #MP20630

VITAL DETAILS

Ethnicity: Black, African American
Sex: Female
Age at time of disappearance: 16 years old
Birthdate: April 8th, 1959 in Griffin, Spaulding County, Georgia
Hair: Black, often wore a wig
Eyes: Brown
Scar: Above right eye
Height/weight: 5-foot-4 and 105 to 115 pounds
BMI*: Susan Redding was in the normal range for BMI.

• BMI is body mass index. It relates to an individual's height and weight. I include it believing it can help picture a missing person or describe one.

Tattoos: Susan Redding did not have any tattoos associated with her profiles. If you know this to be a mistake, then please contact this site.

Susan Redding's "last-seen" date is not clear. Some sources say she went missing on her birthday in 1975, however, her NamUs profile specifies the last contact of 1981. 

An individual who identified as Susan's sister contacted me on August 24th, 2021. She said that Susan was last seen on April 8th, 1975 in Decatur, Georgia. The sister of Susan said that Susan was going to the dry cleaners. She was in the company of an older white man. There was, according to Susan's sister, some kind of dispute between this man and one of Susan's brothers because of the age gap between Susan and the man. Susan may have been a prostitute at this point in her life, according to the sister. She had recently gone through some changes in terms of her personal style.

NAMUS says Susan may have been heard from in the mid-1980's via a phone call (but not after 1987). The date she was last seen and the date she was last heard from can certainly be different. However, this is a case where the details are not really ironed out. 

Susan's sister said that the phone call was placed to the grandmother's home shortly after the grandmother's death. The death of the grandmother occurred in October 1982 and the phone call would have been in the days afterward. The call was answered by a now-deceased aunt. According to the sister, Susan may have hung up the phone when she heard the mother's voice in the background. Susan appeared to be calling to discuss the death of her grandmother but Susan was estranged from her mother and that's a possible explanation as to the abrupt phone call ending. 

Nonetheless, that Susan learned of the grandmother's death suggests that she was in the verbal grapevine of a family member still as there wasn't social media back in the 1980s or even Internet. When someone died, you usually learned from a family member or the newspaper obituaries with the former being more likely, in my opinion. What this case sounds like, in my opinion, is a voluntary disappearance that has resulted in an unclear fate and there are family members who would like answers.

What stands out with this case, is the fact that she often wore a wig. If you are looking among the Jane Doe databases for this missing person, then any Jane Doe that was found with a wig can be cross-referenced against Susan's profile. That would involve looking at the date of death versus Susan's date of disappearance, her height, and other considerations.

The missing person did not have any articles or items associated with her missing person's reports, at least of the ones that I consulted. That probably has something to do with the fact that her missing-date details are not very clear at all.

I was not able to find a missing person journalist article at Newspapers.com. Websleuths looking at this missing person could do their own search to see if they can locate one. Furthermore, it would help to know this missing person's middle name as there are a lot of other people named Susan Redding, even with a similar birth year.

If you know where this person might be or have any information on this case, then please contact the authorities. In the USA, you can look for the NamUs profile. Conversely, you can post a remark to this article.

Author: @UncoolNegated on Twitter

All articles are subject to editing after the original posting.

@UncoolNegated on Twitter is not a Private Investigator, however, he is currently studying to be one as of March 2021.

Website hashtag: #MPCSL

*For BMI values, I use the UPPER or HIGHER ranges that are given for height and weight.
**Text might be paraphrased. If taken verbatim, then grammar or spelling errors are not necessarily corrected from original sources.
Disclaimer: Information posted is thought to be correct as of the time posting. If a missing person is found, then this article might stay posted until that is noticed. I try to stay on top of the news but it's not possible to follow all cases. Articles will be edited or deleted when credible news of the missing person is authenticated.

Joseph Slaughter -- Missing From Richmond Since 2005

Details from NamUs**: "He was last seen visiting family on Bland St in June 2005. Slaughter did not have a regular routine."

Missing Person: Joseph Elsworth Slaughter
Last-contact date: June 1, 2005 (note, when NamUs uses the first of the month, sometimes it means at any point in the month; the last-seen date appears to be uncertain in this case as the "Details from NamUs" above suggest the entire time period is in play).
The area where the MP was last seen: Richmond, Virginia near Bland Street

Link to government source: NamUs #MP9961

Ethnicity: Black
Sex: Male
Age at time of disappearance: 66
Hair details: Black
Eye details: Brown
Scars: None known 
Height/weight: 5-foot-9 and 195 pounds
BMI*: The missing person was overweight by BMI at the time of the last contact. The picture above does not appear to depict an overweight individual. This could be due to many different factors, however, I think Websleuths or amateur investigators should keep an open mind when comparing this individual to John Does and pay more attention to Joseph's other characteristics.

Joseph Slaughter was primarily associated with the area around Richmond, Virginia. He was last heard from on June 1, 2005, when he was 66.

At the time of writing, he was missing for over 15 years. When people are missing for this length of time or longer some of their distinctive characteristics may no longer be relevant as identifiers.

What stands out with this case, is that there are not a lot of details. Nor was there much media coverage that I could find.

CharleyProject had the missing person's middle name as "Elsworth." Furthermore, at that site, he was described as homeless at the time of his disappearance.

Tags that I've associated with this blog post are below. It's interesting to see what can connect unrelated cases. Click one of the tags to go to an article that is related to this one in some way, shape, or form.

*For BMI values, I use the UPPER or HIGHER ranges that are given for height and weight.
Please, Google BMI if you aren't familiar with the phrase.

**Text might be paraphrased. Grammar or spelling errors are not necessarily corrected from original sources.

Patricia Lucille Jordan -- Missing Since January 2020 From Atlanta

Missing person: Patricia Lucille Jordan

Last-contact date: January 10th, 2020
Disappeared from: Atlanta, Georgia

Link to Government Source: NamUs #MP64770

Ethnicity/Race: Black
Sex: Female
Age at time of disappearance: 22 years old
Hair: Black
Eye color: Brown
Height and weight at the time of disappearance: 5'0" and 100 pounds
Clothing: Green tank top, black and white leggings, orange flip flops

Circumstances: "Patricia was last seen Jan. 10, 2020 near 900 block on Rice St. in Atlanta.

She was last seen wearing a green tank top, black and white leggings and orange flip flops.

She is known to frequent areas near her home in Fairburn."

This missing person was released from Fulton County Jail the same that she went missing. She has been described as "diminished capacity." She's said to suffer from "mania and paranoid depressive tendencies."

Source: WJCL News

If you are working on this case, then focus on Jane Does with similar clothing for starters. Also, note her diminutive size.

Author: Shane Lambert (Facebook profile)

Twitter: @UncoolNegated (Twitter)

Pinterest: Missing Person Board
Original Time of Writing: February 5th, 2021

All articles are subject to editing after the original posting.

I am not a Private Investigator, however, I am currently studying to be one as of February 2021.

Website hashtag: #MPCSL

Darian Michelle Hudson -- Missing Since October 2017

 

Missing person: Darian Michelle Hudson

Alias: D or DBaby

Last-contact date: October 26th, 2017 (Thursday)*
Disappeared from: northwest of Stillwater, Oklahoma at the intersection of Country Club and McElroy

*October 26th, 2017 is according to a Facebook post from her group.

Link to Government Source: NamUs #MP40719

Ethnicity/Race: Black
Sex: Female
Age at time of disappearance: 23 years old
Hair: Black
Eye color: Brown
Height and weight at the time of disappearance: 5'3" and 120 pounds

Tattoo: As pictured
Clothing: White t-shirt, jeans

Piercings: Nose and ear

Facebook group: Darian Hudson's Missing Person Facebook Group

Circumstances as per Kake.com:

"Stillwater Police have been searching for Darian Hudson since Oct. 22, 2017. She was suspected missing after not showing up for work.

Detectives in Stillwater...were able to track Darian’s movements through the evening of Thursday, Oct. 26, 2017. On that date, she was last seen sitting in a wooded area and walking toward an intersection northwest of Stillwater.

'A Human Recovery Dog and handler were brought into the area on Monday, December 4,' Stillwater Police shared online. 'For two days they searched a large portion of the wooded area south, east and west of the intersection. Some of her belongings were found abandoned in the area but Darian was not located. At this point police have no leads indicating what has happened to Darian or where she may have gone after being seen on the 26th.'

Darian was in the process of moving to Kansas. 

Family and friends told police that Darian does not have a vehicle. She may be suffering from a mental health crisis."

By Kansas, specifically, they meant Wichita, Kansas. If you are tweeting this case, then use Hashtags for that city.

Police were alerted to the "wooded area" mentioned above after they discovered someone that tried to use her debit card. This person, a male, stated "he found the card in a purse near the construction site of a church in Stillwater."

I'm sure the police would have had some questions for this person. For me, there is the question of how he planned to use the debit card without the PIN. It seems pretty futile to try and guess it.

This case detail, where someone was discovered trying to use a missing person's bank card, is similar to the missing person case of Emma Filipoff. That case is from Vancouver Island and involved a purchased debit card, the kind you get at the store with a balance on it. In Filipoff's case, the individual who used her card had found it after it had been discarded or lost.

The man that took her bank card said that he took it from a purse in October 2017. He tried to use it in December 2017. In my opinion, taking a card from someone's purse and then trying to use it involves Mens Rea. In contrast, the individual who found the debit card in Filipoff's case does not, in my view.

The best news source I found on this missing person's case is from NBC: Read More. All descriptions, in this case, suggest despondence and themes of depression involving the missing person. Those factors would make a reasonable person think that the potential for suicide is in play with Hudson but it's important not to be closed to other possibilities.

If you read the playing card below, there is a caption that reads "INMATE ACCESS #20." I'm taking that to mean that these are playing cards that are distributed to prisoners. The 5 of hearts in the deck is Darian Hudson.

Author: Shane Lambert (Facebook profile)

Twitter: @UncoolNegated (Twitter)

Pinterest: Missing Person Board
Original Time of Writing: 

All articles are subject to editing after the original posting.

I am not a Private Investigator, however, I am currently studying to be one as of February 2021.

Website hashtag: #MPCSL

Calandra Victoria Beverly -- Missing Since Early 2020

Update: I believe this individual has been found. I got the following poster from someone on Facebook.

Read ON BEING INDISTINGUISHABLE at LetterPile. A short story about the perils involved with picking up hitchhikers.

D'wan Sims and Azaria Chamberlain -- When the Mother is Not Believed

Author: Shane Lambert
Original Time of Writing: January 1st, 2021
All articles are subject to editing after the original posting.

Missing person: D'Wan Sims

Last-seen date: December 11th, 1994

Last-seen location: Livonia, Michigan at Wonderland Mall -- disputed

NamUs # and Link: #MP6656
Ethnicity/Race: Black

Sex: Male
Age at time of disappearance: 4 years old
Hair: black
Eye color: brown
Height and weight at the time of disappearance: 3'0" and 50 pounds

This is one of the most unique missing person's cases I've come across. What's known for sure is that D'Wan Sims is missing as of December 11th, 1994.

Coming up with a plausible explanation for what happened to Sims is difficult in this case. However, I decided to assume that the mother was honest in her rendition of events -- so long as honesty doesn't mean accurate. People can tell the truth as far as they know but it's only that they aren't perfect in ascertaining what exactly has happened around them. When that happens, a lot of confusion can result.

My basis for believing the mother in the case of D'Wan Sims is that she was the subject of police scrutiny for a long time before she died and they never arrested her nor charged her with anything that I could find. The mother, Dwanna Harris, claimed that her son went missing from Wonderland Mall. However, neither video footage inside the mall nor witness testimony can actually place the child in the mall in this strange case.

Accordingly, the focus, in this case, has been partly on Dwanna Harris. Now deceased, her claim that she last saw her son in Wonderland Mall has not been accepted by all. 

That does remind me of another famous missing person's case, where the mother's claim was not believed when she recounted to investigators what happened to her child. Australia's Azaria Chamberlain case may be food for thought when it comes to similar cases. This was a case where the mother's account of her missing child was not deemed credible.

The case was very different in terms of setting and events. Wonderland Mall in Michigan was not the Australian outback. Furthermore, the Australian case is resolved whereas the Sims case, at the original time of writing, was not.

Starting with the Aussie case, Azaria Chamberlain, according to the mother, was taken away by a dingo, a small carnivore of the Australian outback that might be 40 pounds for a large male. Due to its diminutive size, it doesn't generally pose as a mortal threat to humans.

The mother's claim that her child was taken by a dingo, for bizarre reasons, was considered to be incredulous by some. These people that considered it incredulous had enough clout and ability to obscure the facts to cause a false conviction. As events unfolded, suspicion grew towards the mother, her rendition of events was discounted, and she ended up being convicted of murdering her own child.

After spending a few years in prison, she was released after a nature enthusiast died in the same area that two-month-old Azaria Chamberlain went missing from. When his remains, the nature enthusiast's, were searched for the search included looking in the lairs of dingo's. It was during these efforts that they found the missing child's jacket in a dingo's lair and that was considered proof that the mother's claim was correct all along.

Mon, Feb 10, 1986 – Page 4 · The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) · Newspapers.com

The connection between the Sims case and the Chamberlain case is that they both feature a mother who was not believed when she recounted the events that surrounded her child's disappearance. In the Chamberlain case, disbelief was certainly due to inept professionals in the Australian legal apparatus. 

Yet, there were also professionals that believed Chamberlain's mother all along, including a coroner. The coroner in Australia, Mr. Barritt in the snip below, agreed that the child had been taken away by a dingo. The snipped section of an article below contains a reference to limitations on what he could say because he was part of the judicial system.

Mon, Feb 10, 1986 – Page 4 · The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) · Newspapers.com

It would be interesting to know whether D'Wan Sims' mother has allies in the American judicial system whose point of view may have been filtered out somehow. If you don't think that this filtering can happen, the definitive answer to that is that it's what happened in the Chamberlain case. It's true that America and Australia are different countries but everyone involved is equally human.

Dwanna Harris's account of the disappearance of her child is that the child went missing from a mall. If the mother's account is to be taken as honest, then the assumption has to reconcile the fact that she claimed her child went missing from the mall yet no video footage exists that places the child inside of the mall. There's also a lack of witnesses making claims that support her rendition of events.

One explanation would be that the child walked in video-blind spots and that witnesses aren't too important because a woman walking with a child in a mall just isn't memorable. The latter point, regarding the witnesses, isn't difficult to accept: it's known that witnesses error or don't remember the banal. 

However, the lack of video footage is tougher to accept. A child walking in blind spots both before and after a mall abduction doesn't seem too plausible.

Yet, what we can start with, if we accept the mother's rendition of events, is one firm premise: she wasn't paying close attention to her child. She's that parent -- the one that goes to a public place with her kid and then doesn't pay attention to him. The best explanation, if we accept the mother's rendition, is that she was being honest about what happened but simply errored in her interpretation of events.

This scenario could see abduction occurring, for example, in the parking lot. Then Harris, the mother, walking into the mall believing that her son D'Wan Sims was nearby the whole time. Perhaps she believed she saw the child with the corner of her eye but really saw things that were not the child.

Along these lines, the toughest part to accept is the entry into the mall. She entered a Target store. This store had an entrance from the parking lot and the store also had an exit into the mall corridors.

The following Youtube video contains footage of the mall where the child is said to be missing from. I don't recommend the entire video but appreciate the footage of the possible abduction scene. Watch from the 30-second mark of the video until about the 53-second mark of the video.

 

For the entrance to Target (a still is just above), I picture heavy doors that are designed to close automatically when opened unless someone keeps them open -- the kind of doors that four-year-olds might not be able to handle themselves. Thus, upon entry into the mall, you would think the mother would have held the door for her child and noticed him at this point -- almost certainly. 

Therefore, I think the doorway footage if it exists, is the critical footage in this case. It's pervasiveness, clarity, and blindspots are of the utmost importance.

Related to that matter, the police have maintained that the child cannot be placed in the mall. Yet, that simply doesn't mean that the child was not there. I question the logical-reasoning abilities of anyone who thinks that a lack of evidence of something happening conclusively means it did not happen. Things happen that are outside of the scope of tracing all the time -- including what happened to Azaria Chamberlain, at least for long enough for a wrongful conviction to develop.

In the news I've read from the journalism near the time of Sims' disappearance, a lot of the comments were like this: "We find no evidence that D'Wan Sims was at Wonderland Mall nor has anyone come forward to place D'Wan at the mall. The evidence leads us to believe that D'Wan Sims was not at Wonderland Mall" (Pete Kunst qtd. in December 21st, 1994's The Herald-Palladium).

The phrase "leads up to believe" does not reflect confidence. What's needed is this: "The evidence shows that Harris walked into the mall alone." I think the police would say that if they could but that they won't say anything irresponsible and so their passive statements result, statements that therefore hint at insufficient mall footage.

This is important enough to repeat: there is fallacious reasoning on the part of one who takes Kunst's comments or similar ones on this case to mean D'Wan wasn't at the mall. I think it is this mistake that people have run amok with. However, I believe that anyone working on this case should presume that the mother was honest. At the time of the child's disappearance, she had divided attention.

It all makes me think that Harris's entry into the mall wasn't clear in the footage. After this entrance, the mother was flustered enough to lose focus on where her child was. Then, D'Wan simply disappeared into the arms of the type of guy that lurks in malls looking for a chance to abduct. My best guess is that an abduction took place in the parking lot or in the Target store and I'm more partial to the latter than the former. 

Wed, Dec 14, 1994 – Page 6 · Detroit Free Press (Detroit, Michigan) · Newspapers.com

D'wan Sims Wed, Dec 21, 1994 – 28 · The Herald-Palladium (Saint Joseph, Michigan) · Newspapers.com