Awareness=Answers

Shane Fair

 A 19-year-old Canadian student and reservist soldier is missing.  Shane Fair was last seen at a dinner at the Atlantis Pavilion in Toronto on May 16 (the photo on the left was taken at the dinner.) His friends realized he was missing when he didn’t show up to board a bus to return to his residence at Calumet College in York.

“This week has been pretty difficult. It’s a mother’s worst nightmare to have her son go missing and not have any news,” says his mother, Lisa Malo.

Shane’s friends say that he had been drinking at the dinner and was talking and having fun. At the end of the dinner, friends say Shane was quieter than normal and was sitting at the bar alone.

Friends say Shane liked to go hiking and enjoyed long walks. They think he may  have decided to walk back to campus. There is a report that he was seen walking about six blocks east of the Pavilion.

Police say that foul play is not suspected. Searchers are now focusing on a lake. Police are using an underwater robot to look along the lakefront.  While police officers are not actively organzing block by block search parties, Shane’s family and friends are.   

“It’s difficult,” said Fair’s mother, Lisa Malo. “You always hate to imagine the worst. But here we are, with the worst in front of me.”

Click here to read more about the disappearance of Shane Fair.

Click here to read an earlier post about missing men in Canada.

Kristi Piehl In the Press, Uncategorized

Matthew Grendel

A Wilkes-Barre, PA newspaper article reveals that smiley face graffiti may have been found near the location where Matthew Grendel was recovered in 2007. 

I didn’t know much about Matthew’s case until the newspaper reporter emailed me. After some digging, it appears that his story certainly mirrors the others. He was at a house party celebrating St. Patrick’s Day and  got separated from his friends.  Matthew made a strange cell call (the cell phone has never been found) and vanished.  The last time anyone heard from Matthew was in the afternoon of 3/10/07.  To get to the water’s edge, he would have had to walk some busy streets in the broad daylight. There were no sightings of him between the campus area and the water. 

The newspaper reporter, Jerry Lynott, asked if he could interview me for the story. I agreed and asked for the phone number for Matthew’s mom. Patty Grendel is an amazing woman with inspiring faith who says if her son was killed, she will forgive the perpetrator. Despite a thorough police investigation, many things about Matthew’s disappearance don’t add up.  Her family, like so many others, is left searching for answers.  

So about that graffiti… I know you are wondering what it looked like and where it was found. I asked the newspaper reporter and he told me that retired NYPD Kevin Gannon says he found it and it matched other graffiti. He refused to disclose a photo or specify the location. 

Thanks to Jerry Lynott, the reporter at The Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, PA. Here’s is a link to the article.

Kristi Piehl In the Press, Uncategorized

Patrick McNeill

Larry King on CNN featured the case of Patrick McNeill and new evidence that a famed pathologist says proves Patrick was murdered in 1997.  Click here to watch the Larry King interview. This is the first time that former FBI Profiler, Candice DeLong and Dr. Wecht have commented on the case. I want to highlight the new information they shared, but I encourage you to watch the segment that also interviewed Patrick’s parents, former detectives Kevin Gannon and Anthony Duarte and Prof. Lee Gilbertson. 

During the segment, Dr. Wecht said that fly eggs found on McNeill prove the Fordham College student was dead before he went into the water. 

WECHT: I’m saying that the fly larvae have been laid in the groin area. It’s an indoor fly, could not have been an outdoor fly. It was an indoor fly. And the larvae were there, did not move ahead into the later stage. So we have a body that was already dead before it was placed in the water. 

KING: I got you. You’re saying he was murdered? 

WECHT: I would call it a homicide, yes. 

KING: Were you impressed with what Dr. Wecht had to say? 

CANDICE DELONG, FORMER FBI PROFILER: Yes, regarding that particular case in New York, that certainly does sound like it was a homicide. I, however, fail to see the connection between the New York case and these other midwestern cases. Perhaps we could learn. 

A couple of other interesting things DeLong and Dr. Wecht said on the show:

DELONG: Well, the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit looked extensively at this, in addition to using their violent criminal apprehension program, which is a computerized tracking system. And they don’t see any links. I don’t know if the two New York detectives have met with the profiling unit or not. And unfortunately, it’s sad but true.  Now notwithstanding the Patrick McNeil (sic) case, sadly, a lot of young people do die of accidental deaths, many times drowning, on our college campuses throughout the nation. 

WECHT: Larry, first of all, if I may say from a forensic, epidemiological stand point, as you pointed out in your introduction, the statistics are so stacked against this number of men, young men, Caucasian males, found in bodies of water in that cluster of states, within that period of time. Of course, there are statistical aberrations, I realize. I just wanted to point out that to the epidemiologist, it would be a weird case. 

WECHT: From the forensic pathology standpoint, with regard to Patrick McNeil (sic), we have a young man who is found — he has a blood alcohol level of 0.16. Probably a third of that is postmortem putrefaction, a quarter to a third of that. So we have a relatively low level of alcohol. There’s no way in the world that this man then accidentally is going to fall into a body of water, because he as a 0.1 or a 0.12 level of alcohol. 

Click here to read more about the increase of BAC after death.

Click here to read more about drinking and drowning statistics. 

Kristi Piehl In the Press