Meaghan Good: The Most Dedicated Missing Persons Tracker
How do you measure the impact of The Charley Project?
I know it’s one of the main sources of information for missing people on the internet. I got an email once from a lady who was writing about a very old missing person’s case and the guy that’s missing had an FBI file about his disappearance.
When she asked for it under the Freedom of Information Act, they sent the documents to her and it included a printout of his Charley Project page. I hear occasionally about cases that have been solved as a direct result of what I have done and that makes me really happy.
Do you have any recent examples?
Back in the fall, I heard from a woman who was a flight attendant and she explained to me that there had been a man on her flight who was acting weird. She and the other attendants were very concerned in that it didn’t seem like he could take care of himself. They talked to him throughout the whole flight and tried to learn things about him and when they landed, she left him with another flight attendant to supervise him because there was something wrong with him.
She decided to Google his name and see if she could find anything more about him and his Charley Project page popped up. He had been missing for five years. Anyway, he wound up going to the police station in the area where he had landed and identified himself. I don’t know what happened to him after that, but I’m hoping he was able to get in touch with some resources where he could be taken care of. He had run away from an institution.
Was there any other coverage on this person?
No, they usually don’t cover cases like that. I mean, grown men who disappear don’t get a lot of media attention. Especially when it was obvious he had left because he wanted to. There was also a case not too long ago where a man was able to be identified recently because I had put up a photo of his tattoo. I was the only resource that had an actual picture of it. I had gone through his social media and taken the photos that showed his tattoos and cropped them.
Do you think you have a little more freedom in what you can do because you’re your own boss?
Yeah, definitely. Like NamUs (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System), the federal database, it’s got all these rules about what they can and can’t put up and they’ve been through various incarnations. It seems every time they reboot the site, they take information away instead of adding it. The first NamUs that they did, they had dates of birth, and then they went and removed that. Then they removed all the medical stuff if the person had a medical condition. They also removed dental information because that was considered medical even though it’s a major body identifier. I understand you’ve got the medical privacy laws and everything and they’re doing whatever they feel is correct.
I’m just glad I don’t have to work under those rules. I can make my own decisions and that’s one of the main reasons why after all this time I’m still working alone.
How did you develop your meticulous research skills?
I’m autistic and one of the main characteristics of it is you tend to have an obscure special interest that you just obsessively learn about and study it practically to death. Missing persons is one of my special interests.
How would you describe The Charley Project?
It’s more defined almost by what it isn’t as opposed to what it is. People get the impression that this is this big organization of people working to investigate cases and help solve them when it’s not those things. The organization consists of one person, me. And I don’t investigate cases, I’m not trying to solve them myself. People send me tips all the time. I’m like, “Look, you really need to send this to the police. I can’t do anything with this.” What I do is I publicize cases. I tell the story as to make it an investigative tool for other people to use.
Have you ever officially assisted with a search?
No. But I know that various other organizations, including NamUs and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, use my website as a resource. One time, when I had a subscription to Ancestry, I was looking through high school yearbooks to find photos of people who had gone missing. So, I added this photo and then the very next day I got an email from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children saying, “Is that in fact a photo of so and so? And where did you get it?” I’m like, “Well, of course, it’s a photo of her. I wouldn’t have put it up otherwise.” I explained the yearbooks and they thought it was a great idea.
I heard that The Charley Project is one of the largest databases of missing people.
Yeah, it’s the largest privately run database in terms of actual numbers of cases. The only one that’s bigger is NamUs, and that’s run by the federal government.
Have you experienced someone missing from your family?
No, I’m very fortunate that that’s never happened to me.
How did it all start for you?
I was 12. I like to write short stories about kids, fiction stories, and I wanted to find photos of people that looked like the kids in my imagination. I wound up on the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children website because they have all these photos on the posters, and I was looking at these posters and just got kind of sucked in. That was over 20 years ago, and the rest is history.
How has it affected you?
A lot of people would wind up getting too depressed to deal with it after a while or just get bored of it, but I never have.
Why do you think that is?
Well, I think it’s partly the autism. I think I process emotion differently than most people. I actually do have severe clinical depression anyway and this actually helps it. I find myself kind of distracting myself with doing the website and it keeps my mind off of my moods.
How many hours a day do you spend on it?
On an average day, I’ll spend three or four hours. I’m almost always doing something with it when I’m online, even if I’m also doing something else at the same time. But there have been days where I’ve spent 12 hours a day just doing this work. Eventually, I wound up having to go to the doctor and get steroids injected into my back because the muscles had just frozen, so I had to stop.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in a little tiny town in Ohio with less than 200 people in it. You sneeze and you miss it basically. Now I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
What was it like growing up there?
I didn’t have the greatest childhood. I got bullied a lot. I didn’t have any friends and I wound up actually having to leave school when I was 13. My parents pulled me out altogether because I was being bullied so bad and I was severely depressed and flunking all my classes.
Are there any cases that you will never forget?
The ones that involve child abuse are very upsetting to me. In Hawaii in the 90s, there was a little boy named Peter who disappeared and was supposed to be under the supervision by Child Protective Services. But they weren’t monitoring his situation closely enough and it turned out his parents had killed him. Anyway, I think 10 years after that happened, they brought in a new director who admitted they messed up the case and were transparent about their mistakes to try and prevent it from happening again. They released the normally confidential file with all the details, and it was downloadable on PDF.
It just made me so incredibly angry to think about what that poor child went through. So, I summarized it all and I put it on the Charley Project, all the tortures that he had endured before he went missing. Basically, I wanted everybody to know.
How much of you publicizing it do you think contributed to his parents getting charged?
I don’t know if what I wrote about him had anything to do with it. But here’s the thing, that file that they released to the public is no longer available online as far as I can tell. The only place where you can read what happened to him with all the details, is now on the Charley Project.
Has anyone ever reached out to you and asked you to take cases down?
Yeah, that actually happens on a fairly regular basis for different reasons. For example, if a person is found I’ll generally move to the resolved section. A lot of times I’ll hear from people who will be like, “Yeah, I’m trying to get a job and I kind of don’t want people to know I ran away when I was 14 years old.” Of course, I perfectly understand that. There are also instances of families who just kind of want to heal and move on from whatever it was that happened and so they just politely ask me to remove it. Of course, I’m willing to work with them on that. I have no idea what they’re feeling. I can’t even really imagine it, so I do the best I can to help them and do what they ask.
Has anyone ever offered you a job?
No, they’ve offered to volunteer for me though.
Is there anything else you’re working on lately?
Well, I’ve come to learn a great deal about the Holocaust. That’s my other main special interest. I’ve read over 700 books on it. And I haven’t really done anything with that but I could probably teach a class or something on it, but I don’t have any formal credentials you see.
What interests you about the Holocaust?
Well, you see the extremes of morality with humans. You see ordinary people that get turned into monsters and ordinary people that turn into angels. You also see a lot of morally ambiguous situations where there was really no right or wrong answer. I mean in Poland, for example, it was a very serious crime to try to help Jewish people in any way during that period. If you were caught, it was not just you but your entire family and possibly your entire village that would get put up against the wall and shot.
Imagine if you want to save a Jewish person but at the same time, you’ve got your family to think about. And so, if you’re putting them in danger just if you even try to help them, you’re putting them in mortal danger, so it was a very tricky situation where there are all these things you have to think about or all these shades of gray. In the books I read, I saw a lot of instances where the rescuers were not angels and they were doing it for selfish reasons or whatever.
It’s just interesting to think about what you might have been if you had been there in that situation. I don’t think anybody can answer that question until it happens to them.
Has learning about the Holocaust taught you anything about the cases you come across?
Well, I think about the people who lost relatives, who literally lost them in both modern-day disappearances and in the Holocaust. There are a lot of people who just really have no idea what happened to their loved one and having to go on with their lives. In both situations, there are a lot of wounds that just will never close.
I mean when a person dies, there’s ways that we know how to deal with it. There are certain rituals you go through like a funeral and so on and so forth. But when a person is missing, and you don’t know what happened to them, maybe you can kind of assume they’re dead but you don’t know for sure and you don’t know how or when. It’s something that you never really get over.
What are some of the legal issues that pop in long-term missing person cases?
The problem with people whose relatives are missing is that they’re not legally victims and, in most instances, missing persons aren’t even classified as a crime. Their relatives aren’t eligible for the kind of services that someone who was a victim of an assault would get for example.
Let’s say you’re married, and your husband disappears and suddenly you’re no longer getting his income. And so, you’ve got this mortgage to pay, or a lot of rent and you can’t get out of that. And maybe the house is just in his name and so you can’t even sell it. People get ruined financially because of it.
They’re sort of stuck in this gray area where technically a missing person isn’t a crime, they’re just missing. You need to have actual evidence of a crime usually before they’ll properly investigate and so on. But the thing if they don’t properly investigate then a lot of times they’re not going to find the evidence of a crime.
I have heard of people getting convicted for murder without the body, which is very rare.
Yeah, I’ve got a special section on my site just for that. It’s called corpus delicti.
What does that mean?
It’s a Latin term. It’s part of what you need to be able to prosecute someone. A lot of people think that it means the actual corpse of a murder victim, but it actually means the body of evidence to prove that the crime happened.
How many cases do you currently have in the database?
14,493 including one that’s a draft.
Have you ever had any other job besides The Charley Project?
I did work at Walmart for three years. It was pretty terrible. I mean I was night shift unloading boxes and putting them on shelves. I went to college. I went to college in Arkansas and I studied for a history degree and it was a wonderful place and I had a great time there but I was always at the same time dealing with then undiagnosed, untreated depression and things. So, it could’ve been a lot better than it was.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
Read and watch true crime TV and history TV. I like reading true crime books and back in December I read a really interesting book about Jonestown, the massacre.
Do you think a lot about the motivation and psyche behind the crimes you read about?
Yeah, I do because I don’t think people are born that way. On the Charley Project, I’m very careful not to speculate as to what might have happened because it’s not my place to put opinions. On my blog, I do some speculation and just talk about how I feel about certain cases. I mean like with the Susan Powell case after Josh Powell murdered his kids and then suicided, I was just extremely angry and I actually wrote on my blog about that, talking about how angry I was that he had done this out of pure spite.
I try very hard not to make any accusations unless there’s evidence.
Has anyone ever tried to sue you?
No, they threaten a lot, but they never do. It’s especially apparent with the family abduction cases I put where the child was taken by their noncustodial parent and that’s kidnapping. Maybe you don’t think of it that way, but it is kidnapping. Then I sometimes hear from the noncustodial parent say if it’s some other country or their lawyer saying, “Stop calling that person a kidnapper or we’re going to sue you.” I’m like, “Yeah, go right ahead.” And they never do.
Why do you think people are so interested in true crime these days?
A lot of it is escapism. Plus everybody likes a train wreck. It’s kind of the same reason that reality TV is so popular. Plus, I think there’s a lot of feeling that they watch this and then, of course, they always think this isn’t going to happen to me; that person made this mistake and that mistake, that was how they wound up getting killed and I would never do those things. But you actually don’t know what’s going to happen to you.
Have you ever thought of monetizing from your website traffic?
People have asked me if they could put ads on my website in exchange for payment. But the thing is, I don’t like the idea of profiting off of grief.
Has your trust in humanity wavered?
Not really. I generally will take people at their word. Even after all the stuff that I’ve read, unless I find actual evidence to the contrary, I’ll believe or at least try to believe that what I see and hear is true.
If you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing?
Probably I’d be in academia probably doing some historian-type things, researching, and perhaps teaching. I don’t know. I am in a research position right now, it’s just missing people.
It’s extraordinary that you’ve gotten really good at something that’s incredibly helpful to a lot of families.
I mean think how unlikely it is that you exist. If you think about all of the number of ancestors that had to come together at the exact right time to help predict this chain of people that led to you, if you’re lucky enough to get born, you ought to try to leave the world at least a little bit better than it was before you arrived. I just see it as kind of a duty. Do what you can with what you’ve got, where you are, and this is what I can do.
