Back from unintended hiatus

The location of the McStays' remains

Soon after starting this blog, I returned to grad school. It wound up being very time consuming and, unfortunately, this blog fell by the wayside. I still monitored google alerts on all the cases featured here, but I never seemed to dredge up energy to write on them.

This Friday, though, I noticed a flurry of google alerts about the McStays. I was stunned to find that they had been located. Of all the cases on here, this was one of the ones I deemed least likely to be solved. And yet here we were. This discovery has galvanized me, and I will post about recent news on the McStays and other cases featured on Disappeared.

I am currently writing up a reflection piece on the McStay case, and it should be posted soon.

My sincere condolences to the McStays' family members. 

Recap of the Mcstay family disappearance, and a book review

Is this the McStay family?

My first google alert was about the McStay family just now.

I'm not terribly surprised about this. This disappearance is one I will talk about with anyone who will listen, have lost sleep over, have googled late into the night. I'm not sure what I think I'll find by googling, but this case is memorable for being baffling to an almost ludicrous degree. When one person goes missing without a trace- as so many people on this show have done- that's terrible enough. When an entire family goes missing, it seems to bend all the laws of likelihood and possibility. Seems fitting my first post should involve this case.

Anyway, my alert was to this post by Sean Munger.

It provides a good recap of the case thus far, as well as the leading theories. There's also a review of No Goodbyes, Rick Baker's book on the subject. Munger comes away with a negative impression of the book, and I'm not surprised. From what I've heard, No Goodbyes is ... not especially kind to Summer McStay. Everything about her is spun in the most negative light possible. And at least some readers have posted that the book takes a porn related spam email as evidence in McStay's inbox that she was involved in shady dealings. In that case, 90% of people with an email inbox are secretly sketchy!

I want this disappearance solved, but I'm a little wary of the tone surrounding this case sometimes. This isn't a story where there's piles of circumstantial evidence leading to to a likely culprit (such as in the case of Hatice Corbacioglu.) In this one there are many possibilities. And, well, if you pore over the minute details of anyone's life, most people will begin to look suspicious.

There's a difference between presenting information, and trying to steer an interpretation of information, and Summer McStay isn't here to defend herself.