The Fight Against Crime: Notes From the Front : Detective Busy Searching for L.A’s Missing

The Missing Persons Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department was called into action last week when a man, away from his family on business, panicked when he called home and no one answered.

A complicating factor: The caller was a Christian minister who did missionary work in the Middle East, where religious differences can lead to violence.

“There was a concern,” said Detective Alex Valadez, who is assigned to track down missing persons from five San Fernando Valley police divisions.

It turned out the case was not the Tom Clancy sequel that it sounded like, but an impulsive decision by the “missing” wife to go camping.

It was a false alarm, but in the missing persons business that’s a happy ending--much happier than starting a homicide investigation.

In between these extreme outcomes, there are about 4,000 cases a year for the city’s eight missing persons detectives and a million and one answers to the question: “They’re gone--what happened to them?”

“There are missing persons who don’t want their family to know where they are,” Valadez said. “In a lot of cultures, parents hold the traditional belief that adult children are their responsibility until they are married.”

When those people are contacted, they usually give the police an earful of remarks like, “Hey, I’m a big boy,” or “I want to be left alone,” or “Don’t give them my number,” Valadez said. In other instances, people are harming themselves, but police are powerless to intervene.

In one case, an elderly Louisiana man who came to live with relatives in California to quit his heavy drinking decided he wasn’t ready to sober up, after all. Valadez found him safe, sound and smashed at an automated teller machine on Skid Row.

Valadez said that for better or worse, Los Angeles is filled with “missing persons” who just don’t want to go home, people who find peace in the anonymity of the gritty streets, blending into the cityscape of the homeless and the transient.

But in addition to all those who do not want to be found or who are not really missing, there are those who have lost their way or fallen victim to predators and who may never be seen or heard from again.

Cecilia Newball, 31, and John Ward, both of Chatsworth, are two of those people, Valadez suspects.

Newball, 31, who was 8 1/2 months pregnant with her second child, disappeared Sept. 20 from her apartment with her 6-year-old son, leaving a goodby note to her husband in her car.

A week later, a letter arrived, ostensibly from Newball, telling her husband that she had run off to Honduras with a man.

Valadez suspects the worst.

“The Newball case is a puzzling one because everything that has happened is out of the ordinary,” Valadez explained. The handwriting on the note doesn’t look like hers, he said, and “there are things about it that don’t match her personality or habits, things that have been done that people say she would never do.”

“Everything that has happened so far seems like it’s someone trying to throw us off the track.”

And then there is John Ward, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, a nightmare come true for a missing persons detective.

Ward, 68, is an indefatigable hiker who can cover 25 miles a day according to his wife, Simone, who has scoured the Valley by helicopter and searched with a dog for her missing husband.

Since Ward left his home Aug. 31 over his wife’s objections, wearing his sturdy hiking boots, he has been seen at least twice.

But by the time Valadez heard of a sighting, Ward had hoofed it miles away. He was seen Sept. 25 outside a natural foods store in Canoga Park by a woman who knew him but did not realize at the time that he was lost.

As worried as Ward’s family is about his disappearance, Valadez considers the sightings a positive sign because it means the elderly man is still alive and strong. “If those reports are true, it means that he is still walking around out there somewhere,” Valadez said.

For a tracer of missing persons, that’s a hope and a challenge.