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- If you've been missing for over a year,
Meaghan Good probably knows your name.
- I added a whole bunch, a few details are available.
Case is yesterday out of California,
but there was a prostitute who had been murdered.
But she had astray motions.
But Hailey had stayed into drugs.
She ran away two years ago.
There's been no sign of her since.
- From her home, Meaghan is the caretaker
of The Charley Project, an online library of missing people.
Aside from the sensationalized examples
we see in the media, very few missing person cases
get the kind of the police attention we might expect.
There are simply too many people who go missing
and not enough resources.
So when people go missing,
it mainly falls on the shoulders
of their friends, families, and concerned volunteers
to find them.
Meaghan helps to gather and maintain data
that can help find these people and close their cases.
- I was born in rural Ohio
and I wouldn't say I had a happy childhood.
I was a very weird kid.
I was bullied a lot, to the point where I had
to drop out of school altogether when I was 13.
I got diagnosed with autism when I was 23,
and one of the symptoms is intense
special interest in a very narrow topic
and this is mine, the missing persons thing.
When I was in my teens, I stumbled across the website
for The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
and got hooked.
I mean, it grabbed me by the throat
and has not let go since.
I started communicating with a woman named Jennifer Marra,
who ran a missing persons database called
the Missing Persons Cold Case Network
and I was sending her articles
and information to put on there.
After a couple of years, she retired and she gave it to me.
I was 17 years old.
And then, I spent a year rebuilding it
and gave it a new name, The Charley Project,
and I've been running it this way ever since,
my entire adult life.
It is my magnum opus.
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- Meaghan does not solve cases.
She focuses purely on the facts and avoids speculation.
- For me, it's all like I'm a librarian
and I've got all this info and people can come in
and check out books and I can guide them to the right books.
Even when the stories are really sad,
it usually doesn't make me sad.
I don't think I process emotion the same way most people do.
- Meaghan's site is a clearinghouse
for information about missing people.
Amateur online detectives use The Charley Project
to find and share data about cases.
- If they have tattoos, for example,
I'll try to get photos of those,
or if they have a distinctive scar,
I'll get pictures of those
to put on their Charley Project case file.
- These little details can help close
unsolved cases in surprising ways.
For example, an online detective in Ireland
noticed that a missing person from Texas was wearing
the same necklace as an unidentified body in Arizona.
- She called it in and the family got him back.
It wasn't exactly a happy ending,
but they learned the truth about what had happened
and it wasn't as bad as it could've been.
He was hit by a truck.
He wasn't horribly murdered, he wasn't suffering,
and they finally learned his fate after wondering
all that time.
It's like The Charley Project is part of a chain
and one of the links in that chain of people
working together towards this common goal
of trying to find people.
It feels like a vocation to me.
This is something I was supposed to do
and it's very important to me that these people
be remembered, because
If you go to a cemetery and you look at a gravestone
and they've got the dates of the birth and death
and then, there's a line in between them
and that whole person's life is in that line
and I want to be able to tell the story of their lives
and what happened to them, as much as is known,
because these people should be remembered by somebody.
A lot of times, I'll get emails from relatives saying,
you know, before I saw your website,
I didn't think anybody cared anymore.
- The missing are more than statistics.
They're people.
They have names and stories and people who miss them
and God forbid should you ever find yourself among them,
Meaghan Good will work to keep your name and story safe.
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