cooksdelight April 29, 2015 Share April 29, 2015 When a daughter returns home from school to find her mother gone without explanation in 1981, the team must sift through clues that are now decades old, making this the oldest missing person's case the team has yet to face. 1 Link to comment
BookWitch May 2, 2015 Share May 2, 2015 Maybe paranoia was different in the 80's but it didn't occur to any of her relatives when this guy started isolating her? Kicking out her son? No phone? That other ex said he tried to do the same thing to her son! Christ people!! 3 Link to comment
cooksdelight May 2, 2015 Author Share May 2, 2015 Is this the first time Kelly mentioned her small-town mother needing a man, and marrying an asshole? 2 Link to comment
TribbleTrouble May 2, 2015 Share May 2, 2015 Maybe paranoia was different in the 80's but it didn't occur to any of her relatives when this guy started isolating her? Kicking out her son? No phone? That other ex said he tried to do the same thing to her son! Christ people!! I'm sure they did, but she was a grown woman. There are limits to what you can do if she appears to be doing those things of her own free will. They could have, and may have, expressed their concerns, but if she chose to stay with him there wouldn't have been much they could do. Probably the ex-husband would've been the only one to have any real leverage if he'd threatened to sue for custody of the daughter, but there was no mention of him having done anything along those lines. You can't force someone to leave a marriage even if you don't trust or like her choice of spouse. Any decision to leave would have to have been hers. Sadly, it looks like she didn't get out in time. 1 Link to comment
cooksdelight May 2, 2015 Author Share May 2, 2015 I have to admit, watching the guy get away on a power scooter had me laughing. 7 Link to comment
mbutterfly May 2, 2015 Share May 2, 2015 (edited) Is this the first time Kelly mentioned her small-town mother needing a man, and marrying an asshole? I don't remember hearing it earlier. I was a mite more curious than I should have been, I suppose. Edited May 2, 2015 by mbutterfly Link to comment
attica May 2, 2015 Share May 2, 2015 No phone? It was the time before the breakup of Ma Bell and the deregulation of phone companies. So having phone service in the first place was comparatively more expensive, due to the way it was priced: big monthly fee which covered local calls (which were usually just within your immediate service area, say a single city or county), and per- minute charges of long-distance calls (which were tiered depending on how far). Couple that with the much greater availability of public phones, even in rural areas. I knew more than one household who did without. I remember when my two roommates and I decided to get separate lines, my extended family thought I'd moved to Gomorrah! And sadly, the notion that isolation as a red flag of domestic abuse was not really/widely recognized back then. Boy, after showing those photos of Laverne, I gasped at seeing how much her daughter looked like her. Genes, man. Is this the first time Kelly mentioned her small-town mother needing a man, and marrying an asshole? It rang a small bell with me. Might she have mentioned it in passing in that John Walsh ep? Another case that gets solved but probably not prosecuted. I guess that's something, but... 1 Link to comment
cooksdelight May 2, 2015 Author Share May 2, 2015 We lived in a VERY rural area and got our first phone in 1972. Had to, with kids, my parents didn't want us home alone with no way to call them at work. It was a party line, however, which could get interesting. Especially when one of the neighbors went on vacation and left their phone off the hook....so none of us could send or receive calls. I think not having a phone was just one more way of Merl controlling her and keeping her out of touch with the outside world. 2 Link to comment
Calamity Jane May 2, 2015 Share May 2, 2015 It was the time before the breakup of Ma Bell and the deregulation of phone companies. So having phone service in the first place was comparatively more expensive, due to the way it was priced: big monthly fee which covered local calls (which were usually just within your immediate service area, say a single city or county), and per- minute charges of long-distance calls (which were tiered depending on how far). Couple that with the much greater availability of public phones, even in rural areas. I knew more than one household who did without. I remember when my two roommates and I decided to get separate lines, my extended family thought I'd moved to Gomorrah! And sadly, the notion that isolation as a red flag of domestic abuse was not really/widely recognized back then. Boy, after showing those photos of Laverne, I gasped at seeing how much her daughter looked like her. Genes, man. It rang a small bell with me. Might she have mentioned it in passing in that John Walsh ep? Another case that gets solved but probably not prosecuted. I guess that's something, but... Attitudes were still pretty different in the eighties, although beginning to change. When I think back, I'm so happy to live in 2015! We lived in a VERY rural area and got our first phone in 1972. Had to, with kids, my parents didn't want us home alone with no way to call them at work. It was a party line, however, which could get interesting. Especially when one of the neighbors went on vacation and left their phone off the hook....so none of us could send or receive calls. I think not having a phone was just one more way of Merl controlling her and keeping her out of touch with the outside world. My grandparents had a party line into the seventies, yes, very "interesting." And if you couldn't get hold of someone, you could call the town operator, who could usually give you an idea where the person you were trying to reach had gone. Small towns. 2 Link to comment
Galloway Cave May 2, 2015 Share May 2, 2015 Another case that gets solved but probably not prosecuted. I guess that's something, but... I wonder if they are going to take some time to look for her remains "under the dock". But hopefully they will go forward with a prosecution, given all the different stories then the confession. I was a little confused about whether the original detectives had the information from the former girlfriends about how Merl would isolate them and try to manipulate their finances. That alone would have been a huge red flag, even back then. 1 Link to comment
attica May 3, 2015 Share May 3, 2015 I think most of those girlfriends came after Laverne (he'd been in jail before they met), so it's not something they could have had. One good thing about a cold case -- more bitter women in a bad guy's wake. 1 Link to comment
jairey May 4, 2015 Share May 4, 2015 It was the time before the breakup of Ma Bell and the deregulation of phone companies. So having phone service in the first place was comparatively more expensive, due to the way it was priced: big monthly fee which covered local calls (which were usually just within your immediate service area, say a single city or county), and per- minute charges of long-distance calls (which were tiered depending on how far). Couple that with the much greater availability of public phones, even in rural areas. I knew more than one household who did without. I remember when my two roommates and I decided to get separate lines, my extended family thought I'd moved to Gomorrah! And sadly, the notion that isolation as a red flag of domestic abuse was not really/widely recognized back then. Boy, after showing those photos of Laverne, I gasped at seeing how much her daughter looked like her. Genes, man. It rang a small bell with me. Might she have mentioned it in passing in that John Walsh ep? Another case that gets solved but probably not prosecuted. I guess that's something, but... Actually -- Local rates were very low. "Ma Bell" was required to make it financially possible for everyone to have a phone ("universal service") -- so while there were no bells and whistles and, as someone else commented, that might mean sharing a line with others, but you could get service for $5 a month. Now, long distance was extremely expensive and the extra funds were used to cover local service. Companies came along that could offer lower rates for long distance, but actually bought bulk access (cheaper) from "Ma Bell." As people began to go to the cheaper long distance servers, the funds to support cheap universal service went down. The following effort to change this resulted in the 1984 divestiture and then the later trivestiture etc. etc. That said, from where they were located, I would doubt there was a phone line run to the location. You did have to have a line run, and that was a whole other story. Some rural locations were beyond the reach of a physical line from the Switching Center working, and the "remote line carriers" like the SLC-96 were just being developed. That was up to the "local" phone company -- which might, at that time, still have been a mom and pop operation, not a big local one. So putting in a request might have had to come from the owner of the property, not from a renter (which I believe they were?). It would, IMHO, have been easy for him to convince her that they just couldn't "get" a phone. Speaking as a former Western Electric/AT&T/Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs employee :-) 1 Link to comment
KHenry14 November 3, 2015 Share November 3, 2015 Hey, look who just got indicted: http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/crime/husband-indicted-in-case-of-hernando-county-woman-who-went-missing-in-1981/2251876 1 Link to comment
cooksdelight November 3, 2015 Author Share November 3, 2015 What's he smiling about? Idiot.... 1 Link to comment
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