Missing Persons 101 with Detective David Hester | Part 1 of 2 | Tuesday November 16, 2021
Missing Persons 101 with Detective David Hester | Part 2 of 2 | Tuesday November 16, 2021
Someone’s gone missing.
Listen to these two episodes on The Murder Police Podcast and learn the inside scoop on what makes a missing person cases a case, and when and how they are investigated.
Retired Detective David Hester joins Wendy and David to talk specifically about the most stressful and challenging missing person cases out there: juveniles. David spent the last 4 years of his career investigating reports of juveniles that were reported missing or ran away from home, and how a detective always walks a razor’s edge between the routine and the nightmare.
Your host David will sprinkle in details about adult missing person investigations, comparing and contrasting the two.
Take a listen and learn about things like human and sex trafficking, Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) and when a Crimes Against Children detective picks up murder investigations.
Based on his experience, Detective Hester will offer some very real parenting advice as well.
This is a valuable series that will prepare our listeners for the episodes to come that will deliver missing person cases and unsolved murders.
As always, letter in True Crime with The Murder Police Podcast.
These episodes are sponsored by Hero Industries; designing and Manufacturing Uniquely branded products for First Responders, Government Agencies and Corporations Worldwide since 2000.
Show Transcripts
Part 1 of 2
David Hester:
… even when they’re running, on the run, disappearing and for multiple days they’re getting contact back to their family. They may not call mom and dad, but a lot of them would call a sibling or something, say, “Hey, tell mom and dad I still hate them, but I’m not dead.” They’re not that cruel to their parents. But any one of them could theoretically cross paths with the next Tommy Lynn Sells or the next railway killer or the next Sam Little or something like that. Someone just blowing through your town, the worst happens.
Wendy Lyons:
Warning: The podcast you’re a about to listen to may contain graphic descriptions of violent assaults, murder and adult language. Listener discretion is advised.
Wendy Lyons:
Welcome to the Murder Police Podcast: Missing Persons 101 with Detective David Hester, part one of two. Brought to you by Hero Industries, designing a manufacturing uniquely branded products for first responders, government agencies, and corporations worldwide since 2000.
Wendy Lyons:
Welcome back, true crime fans, to the Murder Police Podcast. I am Wendy.
David Lyons:
And I’m David.
Wendy Lyons:
Today, we are going to be hearing from Detective David Hester about missing persons. David, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about this?
David Lyons:
Next two episodes are going to be just a primer on missing person investigations to let the listeners know what it’s like to investigate these. Our, guest David Hester, is going to take us down the world of investigating missing juveniles and runaways, which is a complete type of investigation unlike any other.
David Lyons:
What I want the audience to think about is that four of our previous cases actually started out in some way as missing person cases, so they should go back and listen to those. They would be the murder of Haley McHone, the murder of Umi Southworth, the murder of Michael Turpin, and the murder of Alex Johnson. Each one had a different twist and turn and context. With that, let’s go ahead and join the interview with David Hester and learn about missing person cases.
Wendy Lyons:
All right. Welcome to the Murder Police Podcast. Today, we will be discussing missing persons with Detective David Hester, formerly with Lexington Police Department. David, how are you today?
David Hester:
I’m doing fine. Thank you for having me.
Wendy Lyons:
Thank you for coming to talk with us. Other David, how are you?
David Lyons:
Doing great. I love getting the opportunity to sit down with David because we worked together for many years back at the PD. And this is another one of those good educational podcast that we’re going to give because we’re going to start issuing out episodes on missing person and unsolved cases, which we haven’t done until now, and I wanted to give the audience an idea of what a missing person case is and how they’re investigated; what the real ins and outs of that is. And David is going to specialize because he worked a lot with the runaways and the missing juveniles at the police department, which is a whole different ball of wax than adults, so I’m looking forward to this.
Wendy Lyons:
Yes, me as well. Well David, why don’t you start with telling us a little bit about your career, what got you interested in law enforcement, and a little bit about working missing persons?
David Hester:
All right. Well, I started with Lexington Police Department in 1997. I spent about seven years on patrol, starting out as most police officers do in that area. I worked mostly on the north and the east side of Lexington. Then in 2004, I interviewed become a detective with what was then called the Family Abuse Section. It is now called the Special Victim Section in the Lexington Police Department to become a detective with the Crimes Against Children Unit. The Special Victim Section is divided in Lexington to two units, Crimes Against Children, which investigates crimes against… personal crimes against individuals under the age of 18. We would investigate anything from a simple assault all the way to homicide, but most of the cases in that unfortunately were either physical or sexual abuse type cases.
David Hester:
From 2004 to 2007, I was a general detective, which meant that I was catching any of those kinds of cases, again from simple assault all the way to homicide. And then in 2007, I became Lexington’s first internet Crimes Against Children detective. I was part of the Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce, at that time sworn as a special deputy US marshall under the authority of the FBI so that I could investigate and place charges in federal crimes as well as state crimes, mostly involving child pornography offenses, but also cases of internet luring, that kind of thing. I did do some of the undercover stings back in the day before Dateline pretty much ruined it for everyone with their stings all the time and made it much more difficult to catch fish, as it were, there. I did that from 2007 until 2010.
David Hester:
And then I transferred from the Crimes Against Children to the other unit in the special victim section, which is the Domestic Violence Sexual Assault Unit. That unit is charged with investigating, I said, obviously domestic violence, but also sexual assault cases involving adults. It also includes an elder abuse detective that follows up on crimes particularly against elderly victims, mostly financial in those type situations, but also abuse and nursing home issues, that kind of thing. I worked there in that unit from 2000 into 2014, when I transferred back to Crimes Against Children, again, as a general Crimes Against Children detective.
David Hester:
And then in 2015, I took over as the missing juvenile and runaway detective, which was the one of the two specialized positions within the of Crimes Against Children Unit. I’d already done the ICAC detective, so I did missing persons and finished out my career there. Retired in 2019.
David Lyons:
Let me ask you a quick… What got you interested in going into investigations? What drove you into there?
David Hester:
Well, I knew that as pretty young person that I wanted to be a police officer and I wanted to be a detective. I had a couple of incidences growing up, particularly in high school where a teacher of mine was sexually assaulted. That was probably my junior year of high school. And seeing how of that situation played out got me interested in becoming a personal crimes detective so I went to a college to study law enforcement, criminal justice, first in South Carolina at Charleston Southern University. But while going through the bookstore there, I realized that most of the textbooks were written by professors at EKU so after my freshman year, I transferred to Eastern Kentucky University and began pursuing my criminal justice degree there.
David Hester:
When I was in the middle of my junior year, people were telling me you have to apply multiple times to become police officer anywhere. So you’ve got to go through the testing process a whole bunch. I thought, well, I don’t need a job yet. I’ll test just to see what it’s like and get that under my belt. And instead, they offered me a job. At age 21, I was the youngest in my academy class, I started Lexington Police Academy in June of ’97. Then from there, I, like I said, did my time learning how to be a good basic police officer, which has to be done at the patrol level, and then began interviewing for a position and was eventually picked for the Crimes Against Children position.
David Lyons:
What a motivator. And not only just being an investigator, you had a path that you wanted to get into the personal crimes business. That’s interesting too. We record this in 2021. It’s ironic that they told you back then you had to take it to has several times. I think pretty much right now, if somebody has a pulse, they’ll take them. It’s become a whole different hiring event.
David Hester:
It is. Things in the last few years have made it very difficult to find good police candidates. Back in the late ’90s, when I was taken… took my test, we had over 1,000 people take the written test. I’m hang out with a lot of guys who do the background investigations for Lexington, and they’re having less than 200 take the test total over multiple testing dates and picking a class out of that. You just don’t have the numbers at anymore. And it’s a problem across the nation. You see it all over.
David Lyons:
It’s sad because it’s still… I know there’s a lot of turmoil, but it’s still a fantastic career. I how to tell anybody I enjoyed, even on the worst day, I enjoyed mine. That’s a pretty neat motivator to go into it. And that’s interesting too about being sworn in at the federal level, is to be able to have that dual certification or jurisdiction, would probably be a way to put it, too. I don’t think people are aware of how that works. I’m sorry that Dateline took away the cases on luring. I remember those shows, though. They were a little over the top. And that’s when you take something that’s serious and turn it into entertainment, tends to ruin it.
Wendy Lyons:
Well, David, why don’t you tell us what specifically makes a person missing? Whether it’s from an adult or a child, are those things the same that qualify them as missing? Or what is it that is the deciding factor that this child or this adult is in fact missing?
David Hester:
Well, with juveniles it’s very much… It’s much easier. Essentially, if a kid it is not somewhere where their legal guardian, parent usually in that situation, knows or intends for them to be, then technically they are missing. Whether it’s for just a few minutes or whether it’s for a few days or even longer, if your kid is not where you told them to be or where you expected them to be, they are theoretically missing, as far as what can be done as far as taking missing persons reports and following up on them.
David Hester:
For adults, the situation, of course, changes because adults do have a greater expectation of privacy and the ability to go and do as they please. While you can still report an adult missing with relatively little information other than you just don’t know where they are and they won’t contact you, they’re not going be followed up on, they’re not going to be investigated usually by law enforcement unless you have some reason to believe that that person is in some sort of danger or that there’s been some sort of crime involving that person that has taken them… What has caused them to be out of pocket to where no one can find them.
David Lyons:
And I think that’s what I wanted to talk about was how different that was. One on the juvenile side is that virtually everybody goes in quickly. And when I say go in, let’s go ahead and talk about that through the National Crime Information Center system, NCIC, where they go, which makes that information available to everybody. They go in quickly. But you’re right, with the adults I think that’s where it gets a little tricky and frustrating for some people, the entitlement to freedom and the fact that people do make choices to not show up or be known where they’re at sometimes, and that makes it difficult. Did it cause a lot of frustration with the families if they try to report and it doesn’t feel like the police are grasping that?
David Hester:
Oh, absolutely. It can be very frustrating, particularly when dealing with juveniles when it’s the first time that it’s happened. We discuss it, we can explain how a lot of juveniles we’re dealing with are multiple habitual runaways, frequent flyers, if you will. And they run away multiple times in a year, that kind of thing. And a big part of my job was getting parents of these kids that were troubled through the first couple of times to understand the limitations of what the justice system could do to correct the behavior and also what your kid is going through and how it was most likely going to resolve itself.
Wendy Lyons:
I know with adults, oftentimes when I watch some of the shows that I watch, I’m always saying to David how, “Oh my God, they’re missing.” And David often will say, “Well, sometimes they just don’t want to be found. They’re not missing, they’re just gone.” And they choose to be quote “missing,” but they’re not missing. Have you encountered many of that? That people maybe just don’t want to be involved in the life they’re in anymore and they start out as missing, but they’re really just living in Los Angeles because they don’t want to be bothered with the life they had here.
Wendy Lyons:
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David Hester:
That is something, of course, that happens. And again, it’s more of a phenomenon dealing with adults because adults have that freedom. My experience mostly, of course, is with children, people under the age of 18, who however mature any one individual child may be, legally they have no right to that kind of… to make that kind of decision and to live however they want to without interference the way an adult does. In my experience, it was as a Crimes Against Children missing a juvenile runaway detective is much simpler. Whatever the child’s reason for running away, going missing, is immaterial.
David Hester:
It’s a lot like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive; when he confronts Richard Kimble in the water pipe he tells he didn’t kill his wife. And he says, “I don’t care.” Well, that’s kind of how, as a juvenile detective, chasing runaways… Whatever their reason for running away, I don’t care; my first priority is to find them and make sure they’re safe. Now, in certain cases there would be perhaps criminal activity, perhaps abusive situations that they were running from, and we would find that out and investigate that after the fact, but the first priority had to be locating them and making sure that they were going to be someplace where they would be safe. That’s my experience and my take on it in dealing with juveniles.
David Lyons:
Yeah, because with adults… And I think when I told Wendy that was when I had those cases, and this is what’s hard for family members to understand. Let me see if I can get this without sound offensive. Is that I know that people worry when adults don’t show up, but I’d be willing to bet that most of the adult missings that I had, by far almost all of them, were people who walked away from their life. It’s difficult because you’ll have a family say, “Well, he or she would never do this. They had four kids. He or she had four kids. They’d never walk away.” And inevitably, you get to the basis of it and they’ve moved on. And you locate them and they’re fine, they’re in good health and everything. And they’ll tell you, “I really don’t want anybody to know.”
David Lyons:
I think we talked to Greg Davis when we interviewed him on forensic pathology, talked about how maybe the media sexes this up and makes it more sexy. But he said that same thing with the death investigations, that people are very suspicious of those, but only that small handful turn into everything, which I think makes it difficult when you’re investigating these is you get into that whole thing of balancing where to look for where that actually is going to be a problem and advance it through.
David Lyons:
I was looking real quick, just to let people know too when we talked about NCIC, that the requirements for somebody to be entered are pretty simple. The person that is to be entered is an adult, has to have a proven physical or mental disability, they’re missing under circumstances indicating they may be in physical danger, they may be missing after a catastrophe. And I don’t think people really knew that NCIC does that. If you have, for example, a condominium collapse in Florida or a bombing is that one of the standard practices going on in the background is that they’re gathering a list of people to put an NCIC until they are located.
David Lyons:
The other things that they come into is a missing under circumstances indicated or disappearance may not have been voluntary; coerced, kidnapped, unlawful imprisonment type things like that or they file back into David where they’re under the age of 21 and don’t meet any other criteria. And then the last one is that they’re 21 and older, don’t meet any of the criteria better for whom there is a reasonable concern safety. That leaves a little wiggle room to get them into the system. Just wanted to cover that a little bit, too.
David Lyons:
But coming back to what Wendy said is that’s the balance that I think we have to find is that when they become the squeaky wheel, or when there’s a real threat. Some of the cases that we’ve covered on the podcast so far started out in some context as a missing person case. The murder of Haley McHone, the 13 year old girl was… And I’ll drop this back in your lap again, David, because I think that if I was doing the juvenile runaways and missings, that’s the case that turns into that.
David Hester:
Absolutely. I was with the police department, Lexington Police Department, when that happened in 1999. I worked the other side of town, so I did didn’t have any direct involvement myself in any aspect of that case, but I knew what was going on from being part of the department and what had happened and all of that. When I became the missing person or missing juvenile runaway detective, my one prayer was let me get through this to retirement without catching the next Haley McHone because it… That case is an absolute storm of just what could go wrong.
David Hester:
I mentioned before that we have… And to get into the numbers a little bit, the vast majority, 90%+ of the juveniles that are reported missing, are runaways. They’re not kidnapped, they’re not coerced into leaving, they leave of their own volition, knowingly of their own free will, make the decision themselves to go. And of that, most of them, the reports that are taken in a given year would be of multiple habitual runaways; kids that have runaway many times over the course of their childhood or over the course of a year.
David Hester:
And Haley was, in fact, one of those. She had away multiple times, and she always came back or… And when she was running away, she was running to her grandparents’ house. You talk about in the number of cases coming across your desk, when you see that one, it’s a kid who has done this before, who always comes back in a couple of days. And when she does run away, she’s running away to grands. How dangerous is that?
David Hester:
The problem is that she just happened to cross paths with Tommy Lynn Sells, the almost stereotypical drifter coming through. And in his telling of it she approached him to bomb a cigarette. We have his word for that at this point. But she basically got struck by lightning, is a way to look at it. She obviously was not planning to never come back again when she ran away, but because of the circumstances, because of whose path she just happened to cross, that’s what happened.
David Hester:
I would have these cases where I’d had kids who’d run away and be gone for many times not even a full day, just a few hours, 12, 16 hours, maybe. And they’re always coming back. They’re always off to grandma’s, maybe at their aunt’s, something like that. Even when they’re running, on the run, disappearing and for multiple days, they’re getting contact back to their family. They may not call mom and dad, but a lot of them would call a sibling or something say, “Hey, tell mom and dad I still hate them, but I’m not dead.” They’re not that cruel to their parents.
David Hester:
But any one of them could theoretically cross paths with the next Tommy Lynn Sells or the next railway killer or the next Sam Little or something like that. Someone just blowing through your town, the worst happens.You go from a situation where we have large numbers, 400,000 or more a year that are entered into NCIC as missing juveniles that have reports on. That’s a lot. You start looking at it, and most of… That’s not 400,000 or so individuals, it’s most of those, or at least half or so, are multiple reports they’re getting reported. If you broke it out, you might have half of that that are actual individuals; 200,000, not 400,000 kids every year going missing, but only 200,000 that are doing this, most of them multiple times.
David Hester:
You look at it further. In my experience, when I was the runaway detective, roughly 70% of the reports that were taken by Lexington police officers were resolved by the kid coming home themselves with no intervention by law enforcement, no… I didn’t have to go find them at all. The patrol officer responded and took the initial report, and a few hours later got a call to go back to the house and take another report to clear them out of NCIC, and we never had anything more to do with it.
David Hester:
You have this. Again, we’re shrinking the number even more. Most of the time, they’re going to come back on the own. From there, they show back up at school. Fayette County Public Schools Division of Law Enforcement would call and clear them out, again with no real intervention by law enforcement. And so that’s even more.
David Hester:
But then you would have potentially one that would turn into an actual tragedy so you had to walk that thin line between knowing that it’s probably going to be okay and concentrating on the cases that seemed the most potentially dangerous, I guess is one way to say it, versus the ones that you knew were probably going to come back in a day or so after you’ve been down this road multiple times with them, but you just don’t know. I managed to get through it.
Wendy Lyons:
What would make criteria for an Amber Alert? At what point do you call it that?
David Hester:
The criteria for Amber Alerts are very specific and they’re very limited, and that is by design. The Amber Alert system is, of course, meant to be used when we have an endangered child who is missing.
David Hester:
It originally started in mid ’90s in Texas. It expanded to every other state. Ultimately, states set the criteria for Amber Alert, but there are best practices and guidelines that most states, including Kentucky, follow before the issuance of an Amber Alert.
David Hester:
First thing to consider with Amber Alerts is there is one agency in each state that has the authority to issue an Amber Alert. In Kentucky, that’s the Kentucky State Police. So the Lexington Police Department cannot issue an Amber Alert. The Jessamine County Sheriff’s Office cannot issue an Amber Alert. They have to collect the criteria, submit it to KSP, then KSP decides whether to initiate the Amber Alert system. That’s the first thing to consider that many times parents don’t understand, and sometimes patrol officers themselves don’t understand, and they’re like, “Oh, sure, we’ll do this, we’ll do that.” You will do no such thing; KSP will. Now KSP, if it meets criteria, will of course issue the Amber Alert. They’re not trying to not issue Amber Alerts, they just have to meet criteria.
David Hester:
The first criteria that must be bet is that it must be an abduction. A runaway, a kid who left voluntarily of their own accord without coercion or anything like that, does not qualify for an Amber Alert. Period. It has to have been someone who is… a child who was abducted. And all of these criteria, as I go through them, they are all ands, it’s not ors. They have to meet all of these criteria to have an Amber Alert issued.
David Hester:
The second is that the child must be believed to be in serious danger of serious physical injury or death. We can have an abduction, and most abductions, from a legal standpoint involving juveniles, are actually parental abductions as opposed to stranger abductions; they’re familial abductions. Most of the time in that case, the parent is not planning to hurt the child, they are trying to take the child because they believe, perhaps wrongly, that they are acting in the best interest of the child. For whatever reason, they no longer have custodial rights to that child. Their rights may have been completely severed or they may have been modified. For whatever reason, when they don’t… when they take off with the kid, they are wrong legally, but they’re not trying to hurt the child. That situation would not call… Even though it’s an abduction, if we don’t believe that the abductor is going to hurt the child, that doesn’t qualify for an Amber Alert.
David Hester:
And now, if you’re dealing with a stranger abduction, obviously since you don’t know anything about that person and the circumstances as to why they have chosen that child, it’s much more easy to articulate that the child is in some physical danger. That’s just a given when you’re dealing with a stranger. But again, most abductions are not stranger abductions, they are family abductions.
David Hester:
The next criteria is that we have to have information to give the public to help them find the child. We may know the child may be abducted, we may know that it was abducted… the child was abducted by a stranger, but we don’t know anything about… We don’t have a description of that stranger; he was wearing masks and gloves, and we have nothing. We don’t even know their race or gender, we have no vehicle description or anything, so we have no concrete evidence, no direction of travel to give the public. An Amber Alert cannot be issued. We want there to be something for people to be looking for, and if we don’t know what that is, then we’re not going to do the alert.
David Hester:
The main thing with Amber Alerts… And I’ve been through trainings over the years and had said through presentations by some of the people who came up with it way back in the day, and they will say that their goal with the Amber Alert system is they did not want it to turn into a thunderstorm warning where you issue a thunderstorm warning, because they happen all the time people don’t pay attention. They want it to be more like a tornado warning. It’s rarer. They’re not issued until you’ve got more information such as a spotted of a tornado on the ground kind of thing. They’re more serious, so people will take those seriously and move to a shelter, that kind of thing.
David Hester:
It’s the same with an Amber Alert. We don’t want people to get where they just tune it out because it’s happening so often. If Amber Alert system is activated, we want people to have something to look for and to know where… that there might be a successful resolution of it. Otherwise, it won’t be. But the main criteria, and the one that many parents when their child has run away don’t understand is that it has to be an abduction. If your child has left on their own accord, it’s not an Amber situation. Period.
David Lyons:
I love the analogy of the thunderstorm warning because… And that’s it, is that if we were to start flooding this with people, is it would be a non-issue; people would glaze over it. I think there’s other things they can do like I’ve seen sheriff’s offices and police departments maybe pump it out on social media, which is short of that, which is a good idea, but that same effect will happen, is that people will scroll through. Well, that’s another 16 year old that ran away. That’s a frustrating thing for people to understand is that not everybody goes and there’s not a text message or a highway sign that goes off unless those are met.
Wendy Lyons:
Well, and I think also, not that Golden Alerts aren’t important, that’s going to be my next question to you as well, but I think when most people hear that a little child is missing via abduction or somebody left their car running in a gas station and it had child in the back of it, whatever the circumstance is, I think for the most part community people come together when they know there’s a child missing. And I would certainly hope that they do, but it just seems that when you see the Golden Alerts, I’m sure people still take heed to those as well because ultimately someone’s loved one’s missing, but I think when that Amber Alert started years ago, it just seems like everybody wants to pitch in and help find the missing child.
David Hester:
And when we talk about Amber Alerts and Golden Alerts, we are dealing with two separate systems. Amber Alert is a national system. If we are activating an Amber Alert, it’s not just Kentucky; the information is going out nationwide through partners in the media and all that. Golden Alerts is what we use in Kentucky – some states call it Silver Alerts – are generally for adults who may have some sort of medical condition or mental disability, something like that, perhaps age issues such as dementia that place them in personal danger to themselves. Those are state activations. And the entities that get notified in an Amber Alert versus a Golden Alert are very different. The Golden Alert is going to be pretty much confined to your state, your jurisdiction. If you’re in some place where you’ve got states coming together like northern Kentucky, it might be going to multiple states, but generally it is localized as opposed to nationalized.
David Hester:
The other thing about it is that any agency can request or issue a Golden or Silver Alert. It’s not restricted the way the Amber Alert is to just one entity the state polices here. Lexington can issue a Golden Alert for people in Fayette County. And it’s partnerships with local media that Golden or Silver Alerts are working with as opposed to the national push with the national media, the highway signs and all of that with an Amber Alert.
Wendy Lyons:
Well David, I know we’ve talked about the golden alert, the Amber Alert; why don’t you tell us about sex trafficking? I know that as of late, that’s something that’s come up and people talk about it more. Have you dealt with sex trafficking? Is that something that is inclusive of all ages? Or how does that work?
Wendy Lyons:
Hey, you know there’s more to the story so go download the next episode like the crime fan that you are.
David Lyons:
The Murder Police Podcast is hosted by Wendy and David Lyons, and was created to honor the lives of crime victims so their names are never forgotten. It is produced, recorded and edited by David Lyons. The Murder Police Podcast can be found on your favorite Apple or Android podcast platform, as well as at murderpolicepodcast.com where you will find show notes, transcripts, information about the presenters, and much, much more. We are also on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, which is closed captions for those that are hearing impaired. Just search for the Murder Police Podcast and you will find us.
David Lyons:
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Part 2 of 2
David Hester:
The types of homicides that we focused with, or crimes against children detective would be the lead investigator on as opposed to a robbery homicide detective would be the ones that were as a result of abuse situations, shaken impact syndrome in babies, that kind of thing.
Wendy Lyons:
Warning, the podcast you’re about to listen to may contain graphic descriptions of violent assaults, murder, and adult language. Listener discretion is advised.
Wendy Lyons:
Welcome to The Murder Police Podcast, Missing Persons 101 with Detective David Hester, Part 2 of 2. Brought to you by Hero Industries, designing and manufacturing uniquely branded products for first responders, government agencies, and corporations worldwide since 2000.
Wendy Lyons:
Well, David, I know we’ve talked about the Golden Alert, the Amber Alert, why don’t you tell us about sex trafficking? I know that as of late, that’s something that’s come up and people talk about it more. Have you dealt with sex trafficking? Is that something that is inclusive of all ages? Or how does that work?
David Hester:
It is something that happens, it is something that runaways are vulnerable to. It is often less a situation in my experience of a juvenile being taken advantage of or coerced by a stranger that they met while on the run, as it is a situation where they are put into by someone they know, particularly if they have an adult boyfriend, that kind of thing. One of the criteria I use when I’m trying to rate the cases that I get every, well, I would get every week, and just to back up a little bit and give you an idea of the numbers that we were dealing with in Fayette County when I was doing it, I would get between 60 and over 100 runaway reports or missing juvenile reports assigned of me per month.
David Hester:
Now, again, 70% of those are going to take care of themselves, the kid’s going to come back on their own, but that’s the level that it was coming in. Each one had to be reviewed. If the child had returned before I got to the office in the morning, then I didn’t really have to do anything with that one, but many times, even if the child was going to come back, they hadn’t quite made it back by 9:00 AM, so I got to call the parents, see what’s up, what information can they give me, all of that. As the long term ones where they were gone for more than 24 or 48 hours I have to decide which kids am I going to go out and physically drive around and search for today?
David Hester:
My criteria was age first, is what I considered. I’m going to look for your kids regardless of gender or any other type of demographic over older kids, and next I’m going to look for girls before boys, because girls are more vulnerable to sexual trafficking than boys are. It is just the nature of society. So that was something particularly as a girl might have stayed gone longer than 24, 48 hours, 72 window, where the vast majority of them are either coming back or turning up at school or something like that to being found. Those are the ones you had to be concerned. What are they getting into to make money to stay wherever they’re staying?
David Hester:
One of the things that turns up with runaways, particularly habitual runaways, and why kids don’t really stay gone that long, they can run, they can go to a friend’s house and their friend can go and say, “Hey, mom, Joey’s here and he’s going to stay here tonight. Is that okay?” And if mom doesn’t pay a whole lot of attention, she says, “Well, is it okay with his mom?” And the kids say, “Well, sure.” And so, “Okay, we’re fine.” Well, they’ll let him stay there at night, maybe two, but after a little while, they don’t want to feed another kid. So he’s either got to find someplace else to crash that they could run the same deal on, or he’s got to go home. And most of the time, it is easier to go home.
David Hester:
If they’re not turning up with friends or family, and we don’t know where are, then they are finding some way to stay that they’re having to come up with some way to pay for. And children don’t have a lot of skills that they can use to earn money. So it was always a concern with long term female juveniles that are gone, and maybe they are engaging in prostitution, something like that in order to have some way to keep this up, why they haven’t gone home, why they have it turned up at grandma’s house or something yet.
David Lyons:
Good description. I think when people hear about sex trafficking, exploitation and human trafficking, they think of like the movie Taken, where you’re abducted and taken overseas and left in a stall. Things like that happen, but I think for the most part, that’s why these things have to be hunted down so aggressively is like you said, maybe the longer they’re out, the more likelihood that is, and that’s why the sense of urgency comes in.
David Hester:
Well, and it becomes apparent then that they know someone that maybe the parents didn’t know about. There is some adult in their life, again, many times when we talk about runaways ending up being humanly trafficked, it is an adult boyfriend or other person that they knew, another male that they knew, not a stranger who let him crash at his apartment for a couple the days, but now something’s got to get done because he doesn’t want to just buy her groceries either. So it’s much more banal than taken, it’s not terrorist organizations and organized crime most often, again has happened, does happen, but mostly it’s the boyfriend or the older brother of the boyfriend or someone that was in their life that they knew that now has a way because they have run away and they don’t want to go home, they are vulnerable to now being exploited, often coerced physically, and otherwise to engage in sexual trafficking.
David Lyons:
How often is it that you see situations, where you said as though they have nowhere to go, so they stay, how often is it that you see these females since females mostly are sex trafficked in general, that you see that they have drug addictions and that person who has abducted them or is using them on behalf of sex trafficking is doing that to feed that Heroin habit or whatever and they’re keeping them victim, if you will, under their thumb, by feeding that habit in exchange for them turning these sex tricks?
David Hester:
I can’t really speak authoritatively towards that. In the relatively few, to be honest cases that I personally investigated, the drug use came later. They weren’t into drugs necessarily when they ran away and they weren’t when they first took up, perhaps with the older subject, whether it’s an older boyfriend or just another older male, they weren’t even necessarily on drugs when they first began being prostituted. That came as a result of, in order to deal with the other in my admittedly the limited experience that I dealt within the four years that I did it, I only had a handful of cases that did rise to that there was an actual prostitution, human trafficking component to it.
David Lyons:
Yeah. I think the likelihood would increase with older age, getting out of the juvenile realm because I did see that a little bit where if somebody already had an addiction on board, that’s another risk factor that you’d have to look at because the term is called, keeping them dope sick usually, but a lot of times it would be a preexisting thing if it happened, but it wasn’t real frequent either.
David Hester:
Right. And at the point that I was dealing with it with them as juvenile runaways, they just simply had not been alive long enough to have developed those problems, those addictions.
Wendy Lyons:
I know that sometimes there’s some sites on Facebook that I’m on or that I keep track of that talks about people that had been missing or unidentified persons. And they may post a picture of that person most often times, they’re deceased asking, “Do you know this person, does anyone recognize this person? This person was found in Oklahoma,” or wherever they were. They may have some identifiers on there such as tattoos, if those are visible and still able to be seen, if there’s no, I guess, decomposition or anything or jewelry, Have you ever had to deal with a case where you have a body and no name to go with it?
David Hester:
The way that the workload was distributed in Lexington, an unidentified remains case would’ve gone to robbery homicide, the adult person crimes unit, as opposed to crimes against children, even if it was someone we suspected was a child, normally those types of homicides went to robbery homicide because their expertise in dealing with that far exceeded what crimes against children detectives normally dealt with in Lexington. The types of homicides that we focused with, or crimes against children detective would be the lead investigator on as opposed to a robbery homicide detective would be the ones that were as a result of abuse situations, shaken impact syndrome in babies, that kind of thing.
David Hester:
That was by design. And when we had a juvenile homicide victim, we did work together on those cases, but depending on the circumstance of the case would decide which unit was going to be the lead and which unit was going to be the secondary. So like I said, an infant that gets shaken to death by a caregiver, a parent, or a guardian, the lead investigator on that would be crimes against children because we are used to dealing with all the other types of physical abuse that don’t necessarily result in death of the child. We’re used to navigating the social services aspect of it that has to come on board by statute when we’re talking about juveniles.
David Hester:
If we have, for lack of a better term, regular homicide victim, a 16-year-old gets shot on the street, that would be investigated by robbery homicide. We would go then as secondary on that case a lot of times to help because we could help with navigating perhaps the schools or something, again, things that we dealt with more than a robbery homicide detective in their day to day caseload. So I can’t speak authoritatively to discovered remains in Fayette County because any of those cases automatically went to robbery homicide. Now, what I did get as the missing juvenile runway detective, when a missing persons report is filled out and entered into NCIC, the report includes the victim’s name, identifiers, a photo if available.
David Hester:
But in addition to just the basic stuff such as height, weight, gender, race, that kind of thing, it also has for marks or tattoos, or scars, or things of that nature or prosthetics, that kind of thing. So some juvenile reports have those things, scars and even tattoos, that kind of thing that would get entered. Any investigator across the country who came across a body would sometimes enter what they knew about that body, and it might just butterfly tattoos or scar to right cheek, something like that. The more information you were able to put in, the better your results, but if you didn’t have much information and you only put in a little bit, you’re going to get a lot of results.
David Hester:
So I would get notifications occasionally from people across the country who had come across a body asking, could this be your missing juvenile? And in every case that I had, it wasn’t one of my runaways. It was they just happened to also have a butterfly tattoo or whatever. I was lucky in that respect that I didn’t have that actually occur on my watch, but that’s how that would work. And we would get those kind of notifications to just say, “No, this is not my kid. And this is why, because you’re in Texas and I actually talked to one of his friends who actually saw him at the skate park yesterday. so that’s obviously not your body.” That kind of thing.
Wendy Lyons:
I know that was the case as we mentioned with Haley McHone, our former missing child who turned, as you said, murder with Tommy Lynn Sells, which if our listeners have not listened, that is probably one of my favorite ones that we had done because I really learned from David, that was just such an interesting thing we talked about when we first met was that particular case. And we went by where she resided, where she was found, and then subsequently, I’ve looked on YouTube videos of Tommy Lynn Sells. There was a book written about him and it was just a horrific case, but I know David, you had told me that Haley went out and well, two other, David.
Wendy Lyons:
Hailey went out as a missing child, and David, I recall when we talked about that with Chris Schoonover, it was suspicion that was her when she was found, but it hadn’t yet been confirmed. So I guess in that sense you had still trying to identify is this missing child that missing child that we’re missing?
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David Lyons:
In her case, though, it was more of a formality that had to be completed. There was literal and no doubt that was Haley, but there’s a difference between running with the investigation and then the formality of it, but it was just a few 100 yards from her house. And because she was abducted with just a couple 100 feet from her house actually is where he walked off with her. But I liked what David talked about because when I had the adult missing persons, it was the same thing. And it’s a neat thing that I think people don’t see in the background is that the person is entered into NCIC. And then there’s the second side of NCIC, which is the unidentified bodies and parts that are in there too, which is not uncommon at all.
David Lyons:
According to NamUs, roughly a little over 4,000 unidentified dead people that are found or located, parts of them are entered into the system every year. What the system does that’s unique is that within a certain set of parameters, like David said, it could be something as simple as a butterfly tattoo description, ages, heights, weights, and everything. As an investigator almost daily, you would start to get NCIC transactions sent to you. And what it was, was like, “Hey, take a look at this, just to see.” It’s another thing that’s going on in the background with a lot of good data management from the FBI to try to help resolve these cases because it’s a huge thing.
David Lyons:
I think that as of 2020, I think I read it from the NCIC stats that there’s roughly about 90,000 close to 90,000 unidentified people, which is frightening that we have a large group of unidentified people and haven’t been able to match them up. But you find people in different states, for example, the Ohio River, which is up by Louisville, it’s not an uncommon thing is they’ll find a sneaker with toe bones in it. And people see that on the news and they’re like, wow, but most people will tell you that’s not an uncommon thing, drowning victims and things like that.
David Lyons:
It’s interesting too, when you’re talking about finding deceased, because the day we’re recording this, literally in a neighboring county, in Wayne County, Kentucky, they just found some human remains. That’s all they know right now. And it now becomes a guessing game and you have to wonder about if you have a family members missing somebody, their imagination, it reasonably starts to load in, but there’s just not enough information yet. Sometimes they’ll find those and we don’t know how long they’ve been there, every now and then you’ll expose a grave from the 19th century or the 20th century. That’s not uncommon or somebody that just wandered off and died. It just leaves a lot of questions.
David Lyons:
But I like talking about what it’s like to have it in report on file, trying to make a decision on where the energy goes and so much of that is intuitive. I know for me, some of it was based out of like David, you talked about, straight up fear is that you just can’t leave these things sit and make assumptions, you know logically where they’re going to go and making that decision, and then a different information that comes in on that. Now, speaking of information, of course we don’t want anybody to ever have anybody go missing or anything, but when people make that report, would you agree that being very detailed about that person and everything that are going on in their life, does that mean a lot to the investigator going forward?
David Hester:
Absolutely. And one of the great frustrations in dealing with juvenile runaways is realizing how often a lot of parents don’t really know their kids. They don’t their friends, they don’t know their friends’ parents, they don’t know where their kid really hangs out or what they’re into. They have some vague idea. One of the things I used to say is I could tell when a parent didn’t know anything about their kid. On the back of their port, there’s a block or line for hangouts, places a kid might go. And if all it said was Fayette Mall, this is the big mall in Lexington, Kentucky, then that was a clue that parent had no idea what their kid was really into because frankly, kids don’t hang out at the mall the way that they did 20 years or so ago.
David Hester:
When I was a young person and everything, I would get those reports and I would, “Okay, I’ll go check the malls.” Or twice a week or so, I would go and walk the mall and visit the Great American Cookie Company and all of that. But the only child I caught at the mall in the four years that I did it, was a juvenile who had been on the run for a while, and one of her adult cousins thought she really needs to go home and worked with us to bring her to the mall and we caught her in the parking lot to take her home. But so many times I get these reports and they don’t know what else to say, what did I do when I was a kid, I went to the mall, so we’re going to say the mall.
David Hester:
The big thing is friends and family. I talked earlier a little bit about how they go to a friend’s house and they just tell that mom, “Hey, can I stay there?” Or, “Can he spend the night if it’s okay with his mom?” And the parent just says, okay. And they do that for a couple of nights until they get run off from there. Well, what I needed to know was who are those friends and who are those parents? Because while I wasn’t catching kids at Fayette Mall, where I was catching them, it’s where they were sleeping. And it’s another thing about Fayette Mall, they’re not sleeping at the mall overnight.
David Hester:
And the most success I had in actually picking up habitual runaways was figuring out who they were crashing with and then going there at 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning, which was still early to a teenager and catching them literally while they were asleep. But even if I didn’t catch them there, they happened not to be there at that time, I could tell the adult, “Hey, the kid is missing. So when he shows up here, don’t let him stay because you don’t want to be harboring a runaway.” So if the kid did come back, that’s when they would say, “Nah, you can’t stay here.” So I needed to know those friends and their parents so that I could tell them, “The kid is missing, don’t let him crash here.”
David Hester:
That closes the number of places available to the kid so that he would then go home because he didn’t have anywhere else to go if he’d want to stay outside. So that’s the biggest thing that I could say to parents is you’ve got to have the relationship with your child where you actually know, and as they get older, those friends are going to become more important, particularly through the teenage years than family is. So you’ve got to have established the relationship beforehand so that they are comfortable and you know who they actually are friends with. And who they were friends with in fifth grade is probably not who they’re friends with in ninth grade.
David Hester:
That’s the one thing that I would advise parents to do is get involved with your children early and really know who they, who they’re hanging out with and the family situations of the parents of those friends.
David Lyons:
Yeah. Because a little bit of pro tip stuff from over my career, it’ll run right along with what you’re saying is that I’d meet parents that were struggling with that and they’d talk about how they used to be straight A student and then they went to D’s and F’s, and I’d say their friends changed, you need to get in close to what… because that was the problem. I can tell you on the adult side, it’s mission critical too, is that if you report a loved one missing, you have to be very straight with the investigators and the police from day one, I’d say the reporting officer, because you’re going to probably have to share things that normally you wouldn’t that might worry you.
David Lyons:
For example, if the missing person dabbles in drug trafficking or any kind of criminal activity. People struggle with that, and I understand that, but the reality of it is that the police generally won’t shift from a missing to a criminal investigation, unless you happen to say that they’re a serial killer, that might be the only one that would shift at that fast. But those details will dictate where that investigation goes in the next few hours. Because I did see where I met people in my career that were brutally honest about that and it helped get a resolution quicker, but then you saw people that held that back and then wondered why later nothing was getting done.
David Lyons:
And then later when you’d have the epiphany, you’d be like, “I really needed to know that like in that first 24 hours.” So being direct about that information is mission critical, for sure. Well, David, we talked a little bit about the frustration on a family side that makes a report, and sometimes in a case of an adult tries to make a report and the qualifiers aren’t there and they get frustrated because really worried and everything is… In the end I think most people that are in that boat get extremely emotional and frustrated because of that dark place that they’re in, that you and I never want to be in.
David Lyons:
What could you talk to somebody that’s going through that because we have people who have people that in their lives that are missing for years and it doesn’t feel like much is happening, but what would you say to them to try to get them to understand, or maybe at least start to alleviate some of that fear? And then secondly, I’m going to throw a second one on you. If you’re an investigator, knowing that that’s coming, what advice would you give an investigator knowing that they’re going to deal with very hurt people?
David Hester:
I alluded to it earlier, a big part of my job was managing the expectations of family members, particularly the first couple of times that their kid ran away. One of the things that I had to understand and appreciate is that even though I’ve seen this 1,000 times, and I guess I’m speaking more to the investigators at this point, and this goes for any interaction with the police from missing persons reports to homicide, to traffic tickets and all the other things that are routine to you, it’s the only time this year that it’s going to happen to them, the family member or the person that you’re writing a ticket to.
David Hester:
It may be the only time in their life that they have to have this interaction with law enforcement. And so you have to always remember that while you’re not excited about it because you know that 70% of the kids who run away come back on their own with no intervention from you or any other law for enforcement within 48 hours or less, they don’t know that, they’ve not experienced it yet. And so you have to make sure that you recognize that to them, they are focused on the worst case scenario that even if intellectually they may know that their kid probably is going to come back and he’s probably down at the skate park and probably are hanging out with his best friend whose name you don’t know for sure, but you think it’s this one, emotionally, they’re still afraid that the ghost of Tommy Lynn Sells or whoever has risen and snatched him.
David Hester:
That is a very, very rare phenomenon, it’s equivalent to being struck by lightning, but they don’t know that. And you have to be able to empathize with them and understand that that is what is in their head at this time, and focus them in on the things that are known, not the things that are unknown. So information that they can give you about where the kid might be, that you then corroborate because you found a friend who said, “Yeah, I did see him at the skate park,” that’s a big relief to them when you’re able to tell them, “Okay, we haven’t got him to bring him back home yet, but he has been seen.”
David Hester:
To the parents and to the family members, do your best before any of this happens to have the information available to the law enforcement if it does. Establish the relationships with your kids early, and we’re talking years before they get to the age of where they’re running away, which is generally speaking, we’re talking 13 and older, so that when they do face problems in their life, they will hopefully come to you instead of trying to run away from that. Know who their friends are, know where they hang out, who their friend’s parents are, phone numbers and contacts for them so that you can give that information quickly to the person taking the report, the patrol officer taking the report.
David Hester:
Have pictures of your kids, particularly real pictures of your kids, not just pictures on your phone, but something that you will be able to physically give the officer to take with him and attach to the report physically, because what the detective will have to work on. A lot of times I got reports and they didn’t have a picture or the only picture they had was when the kid was eight years old and he’s now 16. That’s not helpful to be quite honest. So prepare beforehand, you need to do your best to keep perspective on what is probably going to happen, which is that your kid will either come home on his own, he’ll turn back up at school because that’s where his friends are. So eventually a lot of times they just go back to school because they don’t have anything else to do.
David Hester:
When you’re the only kid on the run during the day, you go back to where your friends are and also where you can get lunch. They’re probably not going to be, and I know that it would be hard to not focus on the worst case scenario. That is not really likely to happen. And when you get information, when someone notifies, you get a call from your sister that said, “Hey, he just called to let me know that he’s okay. He doesn’t want to come home, but he’s okay.” Make sure you pass that on to law enforcement in a timely manner so that they can contact the sister and perhaps get a little more information out of her, “Well, did he say anything about where he was calling from or where he’d been?” That kind of thing.
David Hester:
If you start to have information to believe that the child really has left the jurisdiction, is going to go to California and live on the beach for real, or that he has met somebody from another part of the country and maybe trying to head that way, make sure that information is passed on to law enforcement. And it go back to what you were saying about embarrassing information or something that a lot of times victims’ families don’t want to share, that can be the difference. So it may not be a relationship or something that you approve of, but we need to know about it so that we can run that lead down.
David Lyons:
I think so much of that falls on the adult side too. And I think that the summarizing and closing with it is that, and I’ve always believed this and you’ll agree, I think too, that if you take on this job and investigations that you did, and you had a focus that came in, is you have to be prepared for this stuff. And that a lot of the anxiety, a lot of the frustration, not all of it, but a lot of it with these family members and whatever, really pitches on who’s investigating the case and whether they’re practical with the advice they’re giving or how transparent they are or how detailed they are. So I think that’s an important part out there is that people in these situations need good straight advice and they need it.
David Hester:
And that is to go back to what investigators should do is, the worst thing you want to do is over promise and under deliver. You owe it to victims and to the victim families in my experience, and this is again, investigating all types of crimes or situations that the police are involved in, to tell them the truth, to tell them what you can do, why you can’t do something that they think you should be doing like we talked about with the Amber Alerts and that kind of thing perhaps, but you do not want to give them false hope that ends up being crushed later, because that will be much worse than for you telling them, “Okay, here’s this seriousness of the situation that we faced, here are the practical things that we are going to be able to do to resolve this situation, to locate your lost loved one, whatever, or to solve your offense. And here’s the things that we can’t do, and here’s why.”
David Hester:
You do not want for them to think that you’re going to accomplish something that you simply have no right to claim that you could, that ends up being worse when it goes sideways on you.
David Lyons:
Amen. Wendy, do you have anything as we start to wrap up around the corner?
Wendy Lyons:
No. I just in recovering what you said about knowing who your child’s friends are, and I know a lot of parents feel like they’re being intrusive of their child if they ask to see their phone or they ask questions, and I get it, when I was a teenager, I didn’t want to be asked questions either, but you have to know that stuff. And at the end of the day, they are still minors than they’re in your house, so it is my right to know, and it’s every parent’s right to know, no matter how mad the teenager gets. And I think I’d rather play it on the safe side and know what’s going on than one day to look back and think, “I wish that I had asked more questions because now I don’t have a clue who the friends are or where he probably hangs out.”
Wendy Lyons:
So with that, David, thank you so much for coming and sharing with us about missing persons and your certainly extensive background in crimes against children and missing children and everything that you’ve done. We thank you for coming on here, sharing your story and your certainly your knowledge with us.
David Hester:
Thank you again for having me and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Wendy Lyons:
Yeah. If you get a chance, we’ve got some other topics that we might try to bring you back in that I think that people would find fascinating too, but thanks a bunch. And thanks for the strong emphasis on juvenile missings, because they’re difficult, they’re frustrating, and it happens way more than I think we’d like to see. So thank you very much.
Wendy Lyons:
The Murder Police Podcast is hosted by Wendy and David Lyons and was created to honor the lives of crime victims so their names are never forgotten. It is produced, recorded and edited by David Lyons. The Murder Police Podcast can be found on your favorite Apple or Android podcast platform, as well as at murderpolicepodcast.com, where you will find show notes, transcripts, information about the presenters and much, much more. We are also on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, which is closed captions for those that are hearing impaired. Just search for The Murder Police Podcast and you will find us.
Wendy Lyons:
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