I didnt want to muck up the missing bride thread with this question....
I was involved with one search many years ago, in fact the baby went missing the day after my 24th birthday
http://www.mupress.org/webpages/books/white1.html
Quote:
On July 3, 1992, seven-month-old Haley Hardwick was reported kidnapped. Her father Kenny Hardwick told police that he had stopped to assist two stranded motorists and, upon returning to his own vehicle, discovered his daughter missing. The case became a media sensation overnight. People in the metropolitan Atlanta area became obsessed with the mystery of the baby's disappearance. Huge searches by hundreds of volunteers produced no trace of the child. Although they spent hundreds of man-hours following up leads about the kidnapping, the police began to believe that the father was responsible and, with the media, began a campaign to pressure him into revealing the truth.
Numerous interviews with the lead investigators and the child's mother have provided in-depth insight into the case from two very different perspectives. While the police followed one lead after another, the child's mother was torn between believing a husband she loved and the authorities who kept telling her he was responsible for the baby's disappearance. As the investigation dragged on, Haley Hardwick became everybody's baby.
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It turned out that the father had killed her and buried her body in an area where lots of people, including me as a teenager, went "parking" known as the "duluth mud flats" (yes its the same Duluth as the wilbanks case)
Has anyone else here ever participated in a search (of any magnitude) for a missing person? If so why did you decide to participate? What was the experience like? How did you feel afterwards? What was the outcome?
I will answer my own questions...
Yes I have participated in a MAJOR search, the experience is one I will never ever forget. The media coverage on this was insane. The family lived right up the road from me and I had even driven accross the very bridge she was supposedly kidnapped from 4 times the night in question. The next day I was even stopped in a road block on the bridge and questioned by police as to if I had been in the area the night before. I cant tell you why I chose to help, other than I just felt I needed to help in some way.
The search itself was VERY difficult. It was July in Georgia, that equals HOT. The searchers were going into wooded areas and areas filled with kudzu, we were required to wear thick socks, heavy jeans, long sleeve shirts and boots. Thee would shuttle us from a near by school that was the staging area in SWAT vans to search an area then take us back to the school to rest and have food and drinks provided by local area places, then we'd go back out again. We searched pretty much from sunup to sundown. The media was every where, they followed the vans and interviewed the searchers. Kathy, the mother, wasnt allowed to leave the school...she sat in the gymnasium the entire time and it was horrible to look at her. She was SO helpless and they wouldnt even let her look, she had to wait for the teams to come back to find out anything. I wasnt a mother then so I had no clue what she was really feeling but you couldnt help but be enraged when you looked at her face because nobody was finding anything.
It was very frustrating to go home that night knowing that no one had found anything at all, and even more frustrating to find out later that my team had indeed searched the area she was found. The father had hidden it so well we didnt notice a thing. For the longest time that area was a shrine, its now been developed.
I honestly dont know that I would go thru that again for a stranger, but I have learned in my 36 years to never say never.