As of press, time there was still no good news concerning the math teacher from Billings, Mont., who went out for a jog but never returned home. Fourty-three-year-old Sherry Arnold was last seen at 6:30 a.m. Saturday, January 7. A large group of over 200 people initially turned out to look for Arnold, and discovered only a running shoe thought to be hers. On Sunday, nearly 1,000 searchers came out to help.
“It kind of makes you sick to your stomach that somebody was out jogging, minding their own business, and something or somebody or whoever had to do this to an innocent person,” said Bryan Prevost, who used his own plane to look from the air. “It’s just not right. And a small town like this – it just doesn’t happen. And so everybody’s really pulling together, and they’re trying to make the best of a bad situation.”
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It was 34 years ago when Ted Szal walked away from and out of his life in Glen Ellyn, Ill. He disappeared from all who knew him because of family issues, like the troubled marriage and a belief that his mother had assisted his wife in getting an abortion.
So for more than three decades, his family believed Szal was dead; in fact, their belief was that he was a victim of John Wayne Gacy, Chicago’s most notorious serial killer.
Then late last year, Szal’s family contacted the Cook County Sheriff’s Police after learning of efforts to put names with Gacy’s seven remaining unidentified victims. Investigators said the facts of the then 24-year-old Szal’s disappearance seemed to fit the Gacy pattern. But DNA samples taken from the missing man’s parents turned up negative.
Detective Jason Moran spoke with Szal’s father, Ted, now 87.
“He showed me a picture of his son that he keeps in his top breast pocket,” Moran said. “He’s kept it there for the last 34 years.”
Moran could have quit at that point, as his job was to ID skeletons that were dug up in the basement of Gacy’s house. So when Szal’s DNA came up negative, he could have, with a clear conscience, closed the case. But Moran didn’t quit; instead he ran the boy’s name and vitals through the Internet, using databases not in existence back in the 70's. He got a match in Portland, which is where he found Ted Szal, who was working as a carpenter.
Szal admitted he tried to vanish. “I didn’t have too much money. I didn’t have a job. So I drove to the airport, threw my keys down a sewer drain so I wouldn’t change my mind, and got on an airplane. That was 35 years ago.”
He eventually got remarried, but says that when the holidays roll around every year, he is haunted by the memories of his family.
“This holiday season will be different,” Szal says.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, who relaunched the Gacy investigation, says he was fully prepared for the possibility that his office would have to tell the Szal family that their worst fears had been realized – that their missing son was a John Gacy victim. “But we found him, alive,” Dart said. “It doesn’t get any better than that.”
This is the second such discovery. In late October, Harold Wayne Lovell was found alive after he didn’t return from a construction job 33 years ago.
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The Georgia Governor’s Office is reporting more than 400 girls a month are being sexually exploited in the state, and that the average age of the victims is between 12 and 14.
“Atlanta is one of many large cities in the United States that is the highest in terms of child prostitution and sexual exploitation,” said Brian Lamkin, special agent in charge, FBI Atlanta Field Office. “It’s a major transportation hub – not just domestically but internationally.”
The human flesh trade has become easier and more secretive through the power of the Internet. Combine that with the busiest airport in the world, Atlanta-Harshfield, and you have an epidemic.
“We don’t know for sure, but we have seen human traffickers utilize the airport to bring in victims,” says Brock Nicholson, special agent in charge ICE Atlanta. “We know that the same airports bring in conventioneers and other targets or employers that might be interested in these individuals as well.”
Elisabeth Marchant is the founder of Womenetics, a company that finds ways for female business professionals to educate employees about sex-slave warning signs and red flags.
“Who could imagine we would allow any of this to happen?” said Marchant. “It’s just incomprehensible to me that this is happening today. Young children in particular are being taken advantage of and being sold. It is just not acceptable.”