Jacksonville, FL: Still No Clues In Case Of A Woman Who Has Been Missing For Over 7 Months....
Slimpickins
Of 6,000 reported missing in city each year, more than 98 percent found
http://jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/101600/met_4344970.html
By Dana Treen
Times-Union staff writer
Elmer Rice sits at his kitchen table and fidgets with a cigarette as if he's
not sure whether to smoke it or not.
His wife, Linda, is having one. He finally slides one from the pack of
Salems they share and lights up.
"We're both out from our companies for stress and depression," he said.
"Everybody's on drugs."
Yesterday marked seven wrenching months for the couple and their families.
On March 15, their daughter, Tina Marie McQuaig, disappeared, vanishing from
her 4-year-old son, husband, job, T-ball games, family barbecues and the
myriad details of a young family's life.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
Tyler McQuaig, 5, hugs his father, Ottis McQuaig, on the front porch of
their Baldwin home. Tina McQuaig, Tyler's mom and Ottis' wife, turned up
missing after leaving her job about seven months ago.
-- Crista Jeremiason/Staff
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
It was then that the Rices, their son-in-law and the rest of 27-year-old
Tina's family met missing persons detective Steve Higginbotham and began a
difficult journey.
It wouldn't be long before the missing woman's file would become one of the
few true missing persons cases Jacksonville detectives face each year. Of
6,000 adults and children who are reported missing in the city annually,
more than 98 percent return home or are found.
"Less than 10 cases a year are true, bonafide foul play cases," said Sgt.
Scott McLeod, who heads the missing persons unit for the Jacksonville
Sheriff's Office.
They'll also be adults who have left for good or runaways who do not come
home, he said. "It cuts across the whole spectrum."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
Tina McQuaig.
-- Special
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
Each year, the unit deals with tales of addiction, adultery and abuse, of
runaways and the mentally unstable, of threatened suicide and fears of
violence. Of people abruptly gone.
"You never know the next worse case you are going to have," McLeod said.
For McLeod and the five detectives who track missing person cases, the
McQuaig case has been baffling. Here was a young mother whose car was found
at a Wal-Mart three days after she left her pharmacy job at Shands
Jacksonville and disappeared. The store on Normandy Boulevard isn't one
where the family normally shopped, but evidence technicians found nothing
out of place.
"She told her [sister-in-law] she was going to stop and get some cigarettes
and she would go home," Elmer Rice said.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
Sgt. Scott McLeod (right), who heads the missing persons unit for the
Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, and Detective James Royal, also with the
unit, have been investigating the Tina McQuaig case.
-- Bruce Lipsky/Staff
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
It was the last contact she would have with her family before her husband,
Ottis, reported her missing.
An 18-year veteran of homicide and missing persons investigations,
Higginbotham said the case was different.
"She hadn't done this before," he said. "They had some plans for the future.
She wouldn't have left."
By the time the car was found, police had begun gathering information from
friends, family and co-workers and tracing the paper trails that credit
cards and checking accounts leave.
Higginbotham has transferred out of the missing persons unit, and the case
has moved to the homicide division. Though he hasn't been involved in the
case for months and won't discuss evidence, he said some things were clear
early on.
"I think there was an abundance of evidence . . . that led to foul play," he
said.
Cases have similarities
Often, missing person cases can be categorized, pigeon-holed according to
the lifestyle of the victim. And although there are similarities in cases,
detectives work the dozens of missing person reports they get each week in
the same deliberate way. The only exception is runaways, which now are
handled, at least initially, by the patrol unit.
Seventy-five percent of those reported missing are between 13 and 17, McLeod
said.
"We have a core group of kids who are reported numerous, numerous times," he
said. "We get these cases all the time where a kid will take a bus to who
knows where."
Recently, one 17-year-old runaway was located in the Virgin Islands.
But initially, detectives don't know what they're facing.
"We get the same victims over and over," said Jim Royal, a 56-year-old
detective with 32 years on the force and nearly a decade dealing with sex
crime and child abuse cases before moving to missing persons cases this
year. "We investigate it the same way each time. This time it may be
different."
Royal said juvenile cases differ from adult ones.
With juveniles, one of the runaway's friends may know where they are and
another may not.
"A lot of times, they will go to school so they can hang out with friends,"
Royal said. "They won't go to class, but they'll be there."
Juveniles leave home for reasons ranging from peer pressure to abuse.
Sometimes, they will hide out with an adult or someone else's parent who
won't give them up.
"We've found many of them like that," Royal said.
Adults who run away are different, he said.
"They want to go away," he said. "It may be because they have gotten in so
much debt. They've fallen out of love. They just leave; they just can't take
it anymore."
Each missing persons detective gets two or three new cases each morning,
about 20 a week, Royal said.
"We're going to call that family within a couple of hours," he said.
The family call comes after the case detective has checked the jail,
hospitals and even made an attempt to discover whether the victim has
entered one of the city's strictly confidential drug or alcohol treatment
centers or an equally secretive abuse shelter.
Then come the interviews, the fliers, the first flush of evidence and leads.
Family and friends turn out to do what they can.
"We got really involved in the fliers," Linda Rice said.
"Everybody wants to do something, but you don't know what to tell them to
do," her husband said. "You want to go out and start looking, but what do
you do? It's the largest city in the United States."
Since then, a $5,000 reward has been offered for information in the
disappearance, and it was highlighted on the America's Most Wanted crime
show in May.
In the beginning, detectives started with the obvious.
"The first thing they did, they went to the hospital," Elmer Rice said.
Her friends were interviewed; her name was entered into the National Crime
Information Center database and a sister clearinghouse in Florida operated
by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Those sources can be used nationally to match everything from fingerprints
to tattoos to dental records with people or their remains. Florida, in fact,
requires that a dental record of people missing more than 30 days be
supplied to the state to help in forensic investigations.
No reason to leave
In Jacksonville, though, the work in the McQuaig case was still on the home
turf.
"Most of the real progress, the real productive stuff, is the real, old
police work," McLeod said. "For the most part, the best information you get
is talking to all the people associated with them. You start to build a
mosaic of their personality."
The day she disappeared, Tina McQuaig was in the midst of studying for an
additional certification for her job as a pharmacy technician. She and
Ottis, now 30, were planning to buy more than an acre around their
manufactured home outside Baldwin. The couple's son, Tyler, was starting his
first T-ball season. The family was planning to go out together to buy him
some cleats.
"She was talking about how she couldn't wait for me to come to his T-ball
game," Linda Rice said. "She said, 'He's so cute, he's the littlest one out
there.' "
A flush of family birthdays, including Tyler's fifth, was coming up, and
Ottis was taking an air-conditioning mechanics certification test the day
his wife disappeared.
"I think if she had up and left, she would have called by now," Ottis said
of the woman he married in 1995.
"She would have called this child," he said, gesturing toward his son, who
sat on a sofa, a new kindergartner proudly practicing writing his name. "Or
she would have come back."
On a back wall in the missing persons' office at the Sheriff's Office, a
score of faces belonging to people who never came back stare out into the
room. Dating from the 1980s, they are people like Larry Thigpen, a married
man whose car was found at the airport in late 1987; Angela Westbury, a
Jacksonville woman missing since late 1984 and last seen on a pleasure boat
that was later spotted in the Grand Cayman Islands; a man suspected of being
a chemist in an illegal drug lab; known prostitutes and drug users and
dealers.
"All of them had kind of an issue that led them in the way they were,"
McLeod said. "As people, we portray ourselves differently to different
groups. It's important to interview friends of the missing person in all of
the different social groups that they are associated with.
"You find out from that female friend at work what is really going on."
Since McQuaig's disappearance, it has been a waiting and watching game for
her family. Ottis McQuaig said he quit using the bank account he and his
wife shared, but continues to check it for activity. There's been none.
Likewise, there's been no activity in her Social Security file, no tickets
on her driver's license.
"Nothing came back" from a recent driver license check, Ottis said.
For family members, there is a pall over simple day-to-day life.
"It feels like there is something holding you back," Ottis said. "You can't
go forward. That's the first thing that pops into my mind in the morning.
'What's going to go on today with this?' "
The emotional weight
For the past seven months, the family has coped, in part, using prescribed
anti-depressants and counseling.
Occasionally, police will find a body.
"When these things come up, we go bananas," said Linda Rice.
A supervisor of customer service workers at Bank of America, Linda, 49,
worries she won't be able to go back to work.
"I'm a different person now," she said. "I feel if I try it, I will fail.
It's hard on me. I just don't need any more stress."
She said the couple's young son became somewhat withdrawn for a while.
"We're all changed from this," she said.
Her husband, Elmer, also 49, said he is just now considering going back to
work at BellSouth.
"I know you have to try to get back to normal sometime," he said.
At times, the family feels frustrated. Ottis, particularly, wonders if
police are telling all they know. He said he would just like something to
grab on to, so his own changing speculations would stop.
"Each month it could change," he said. "It'll flow into something else. A
month later it might go back to square one."
McLeod said that frustration is normal.
"The ones that you call bona fide are like the Tina McQuaig case," he said.
"The husband doesn't know where his wife is. They want you to do everything
and they want you to do it now. That's human nature, and we're not indicting
them for that."
Homicide detectives have taken over the McQuaig case. It's the way all
missing persons' cases are handled once the trail cools.
Royal, one of the current missing persons detectives, said even when a case
reaches the homicide division and detectives have concluded themselves that
foul play and a perpetrator are involved, it can be difficult to pin a case
down.
"We don't go to the state attorney unless we have a propensity, that we are
convinced that this person did it," he said. "You can only arrest them once
for it."
He said families understandably want a resolution, even if the evidence is
not there.
"Some of them want closure. I'm not going to make something up," he said.
"Why be the reason that someone gives up hope?"
For the Rices and Ottis McQuaig, there is an underlying understanding that
Tina is likely dead.
"I will never give up hope," Linda Rice said. "I feel like she's not with us
anymore. In the beginning, I really thought she was kidnapped. The longer it
gets, the harder it is to believe she is still alive."
Hester Mofet
>
>"I think there was an abundance of evidence . . . that led to foul play," he
>said.
I wonder what the evidence is besides the fact that she vanished.
>
>"She told her [sister-in-law] she was going to stop and get some cigarettes
>and she would go home," Elmer Rice said.
Since she didn't usually go to that Wal Mart,if someone kidnapped her, it's
likely it was either a stalker (who is more likely to have let people know he
was interested in her *before* just snatching her) or someone who found an
opportunity. Sad case.
Hester Mofet