missing | person

April 13, 2003. Maria Cruz leaves her midtown Manhattan apartment, shops at a department store near West 16th Street, and vanishes without a trace. 

Detectives later discover she suffered from a condition called black tongue, a side effect of antibiotic therapy.  On the morning she disappeared, she had an appointment with a Dr. Faiello to treat the black tongue. 

Little did Maria know:  In 2002, Dr. Faiello was arrested for practicing medicine without a license and illegal possession of medical drugs.  He pleaded guilty and was released on bail.  Shortly thereafter, he opened a medical office in an apartment on West 16th Street in New York - the same street where Maria was last seen.

Around the same time Cruz disappeared, Dr. Faiello ordered several bags of cement delivered to his home.  He built a raised platform at his carriage house and fled the country.  By May 2004, nobody knew where he was.

In February that same year, police dug a body from inside the cement platform: a woman packed into a suitcase, baggage never meant to be claimed. 

Serial numbers on her breast implants revealed her identity: Maria Cruz.   

Detectives believe Dr. Faiello botched her treatment and killed her.  Instead of fessing up, he ran.

I read this, and I cannot help but think about the serial numbers, how those implants were more identifiable than her own skin and bones.  Reporters seemed to find it almost funny, that a woman could be identified by her fake breasts.  They repeated the detail over and over:  "You will not believe how detectives identified this woman." 

Her breasts had become more important than her violent death.  Or her life. 

The very things she had purchased to make her body more ideal - more the same, less distinct - had ended up identifying her in the end.  And even replacing her, in a strange sense, since that is all the media cared to report.

I also think of all the RFID chips retailers want to plant inside clothes, computers, soda cans, video rentals, library books, shoes, sweaters, cars, and every piece of plastic junk you can imagine.  Someday, we will be able to line up one hundred identical pop cans and tell them all apart with one zap of a radio signal. 

But a woman who disappears in Manhattan - finding her still relies on chance.  The off-chance that she implanted something with numbers that do not decay. 

I found myself reading the following case over and over.  The picture haunted me, and I kept staring into it, looking for new details, almost willing the woman to move, like I used to do at wakes when I was a kid. 

Mostly, though, I was fascinated by the idea of finding your own photograph under the heading possible victim.   I wondered what I would do, how I would respond.  If I would contact police.   

These questions and many others inspired a speculative essay.  Here, I want to share the initial notes and impressions I had.  This case is so incredibly horrifying - just the sheer violence of John Smith, and the way he treated his wife and her remains. 

I hope police do find this woman alive and well someday.  Or failing that, I simply hope she is alive and well, though I have my doubts.

image from the Doe Network/FBI

This woman may be a murder victim.  Or she might be alive out there, somewhere.  Investigators have no idea.   

They found her photograph mixed in with loose teeth, skull fragments, and other photos, all in the possession of a known - and now convicted -  killer.

The woman's fine hair, plaid button-down, and beaded necklace all feel so familiar to me - not in the sense that I actually recognize them, but in the sense of evoking a particular time and place.  She looks a lot like my mother in the 1970s & 80s, and a lot like the women I remember in my house, my neighborhood, local bowling allies, union parties, and school open houses.   

I wonder if she lives out there somewhere, unaware that police desperately hope to find her, confirm she is okay - that the loose teeth and skull fragments do not belong to her.  What would that feel like?  To find your own face featured as a hot case.  To be classified as a possible victim.  To have your identity lost in the possible.

I wonder what I would do if I found my face on a hot case listing.  Would I respond? 

The backstory:

Shortly before Thanksgiving 1974, a woman named Janice Hartman went missing.  She disappeared just a few days after divorcing her husband, John Smith. 

John explained her disappearance away, claiming she was placed in a witness relocation program. 

On Thanksgiving day, John's brother, Michael, witnessed him constructing a long plywood box for the storage of Janice's things.  The box looked more like a coffin than a storage crate. 

Five years later, Michael looked inside the box for the first time.  It had sat undisturbed - its lid nailed shut - inside an old gas station the family owned:

[Michael] said he took the box home, pried off the top, and discovered the circles he was seeing were the ends of cut-off leg bones and kneecaps.  At the other end of the box he said he used a stick to brush back a large amount of multi-colored hair - blond, brown, blue, green, and red - and recognized the face of Janice Hartman. (the-daily-record.com, from a report on the trial of John Smith, for Janice's murder)

But he did not turn his brother in.  Instead, he called his brother and tipped him off. John came, picked up the box, and disposed of it. 

In 1980, an unidentified woman's remains were discovered inside a coffin near Morocco, Indiana.  In 2000, those remains were identified as Janice Hartman.   

John was arrested, tried, and convicted for her murder. 

But that is not the whole story. 

Smith had a second wife - after Janice.  Her name was Fran Gladden-Smith, and she disappeared in 1991, never to be seen or heard from again.

I read this, and I feel sick.  What about the bone fragments and loose teeth?  The photos of unidentified women?   

If the woman in the above photo were not dead, surely John Smith would reveal her identity.  Surely he would want the police to find her - alive and well, not even possibly a victim.

___

These notes later evolved into a whole series of notes, followed by a speculative essay, which I may post here in the future, depending on how I feel about some revisions.