One Woman is Tracking Thousands of Missing People | Digital Detectives

(somber piano music) - 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. (somber orchestra music) - 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. Thanks for watching. Please like and subscribe to our channel and for more stories like this, make sure to check out our other videos.

Channel: Freethink

Views: 289,366

Keywords: Crowdsourcing, Missing People, Missing Persons, Missing Persons Database, Cold Case, Cold Cases, true crime, missing persons cases, searching, autism, autistic, missing people documentaries, disappearances, charley project, hackers, hackers find missing people for fun, hackers find missing people, Freethink, Freethink coded, free think, documentary, freethink media, inspiring, innovation, science, future, amazing, ted talks, vice, coded, diy science, diy isp, documentaries, database, superpower

Id: m4yjI3dRAgQ

Length: 5min 16sec (316 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2019