Missing Persons

He is a short guy in a purple sweater in an office about the size of your average bathroom, only better-decorated. He has a phone stuck in one ear, and in a soft Texas twang, he's telling someone "the McDonald's was a pretty good lead. "But she's probably with her pimp now." Pat Rutherford, 68, spends most days at Worldwide Tracers like this, packed into his tiny office in San Clemente, tracking down missing persons.

Larry Myers seems an unlikely crusader. The soft-spoken Illinois native puts in six days a week at a supermarket warehouse--as he has for 29 years--hefting crates to provide for his family. He wears a ball cap most of the time and enjoys the sports page and a good joke. He calls himself "a regular guy." But, since September, Myers is more than that: The 55-year-old is now a publisher and a man-hunter.

He has seen his share of bullet-riddled bodies, tracked down the killers of mothers and fathers and children. But in all of William Howell's years as a crime investigator, he never had a case cause bad dreams and doubt--until he began trying to solve the curious disappearance of Michael Negrete. Sixteen months ago Negrete was a freshman at UCLA, an unassuming teenager, a talented musician with good grades and good friends, living in one of the biggest dorms on campus.

Birdie Tiemeyer believes that somewhere between the Canadian border and Los Angeles, her 65-year-old husband is steadfastly pedaling a bicycle--unaware that he is lost, knowing only that his home is to the south. Hank Tiemeyer, who 10 years ago began suffering the first symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, disappeared six weeks ago while visiting his son, Gordon, in the rural northern Washington town of Lynden.

A high school jewelry instructor who also allegedly handled investments is being sought by police here both as a missing person and for questioning about complaints that he bilked investors of $60,000, Sgt. Andy Gonis said Wednesday. Police began looking for Stanley Gordon, 54, on Friday after his wife filed a missing person report. Gonis said that before Gordon's disappearance police had received four separate complaints about him from unhappy investors.

For mountain rescue teams, all the training and exhausting work--the slogging through blizzards and hauling motorists' bodies out of canyons--paid off Friday with the crackling of a sheriff's radio. "We've got tracks!" came the voice of a rescuer, who was deep in the Angeles National Forest looking for a missing mountain biker named Jeremy Galton.

A convicted rapist who fled before police arrived to arrest him on new rape charges was arrested Saturday in his neighborhood after police found six decomposing bodies at his home. Police spokesman Lt. Thomas Stacho said that Anthony Sowell was walking down the street on the east side of Cleveland when authorities spotted him and took him into custody. Sowell initially denied that he was the man authorities were looking for, but admitted his identity as officers began fingerprinting him, Stacho said.

For air traffic controller Robin Lee Wascher, the Feb. 1 disaster on Los Angeles International Airport Runway 24-Left--her runway--was "especially tragic" because her parents had died in an aviation accident nearly 14 years ago, friends and co-workers said. Norman K. and Beverly Jean Wascher vanished June 19, 1977, while flying to Oxnard in their single-engine plane after attending another daughter's college graduation in Eureka, Calif. The plane has never been found.

In what they called a major break in the disappearance of two college students, including an Irvine woman, San Luis Obispo police said Friday they had found human remains in a remote canyon near the home of a paroled sex offender they term their leading suspect. Rex Allan Krebs, a local lumberyard worker, has not been charged in the case but remains in custody on an unrelated parole violation, police said in a late-afternoon news conference.

Lance Cpl. Jayson J. Rother was one tough Marine, but the stark, chocolate-brown mountains and the furnace-hot desert of San Bernardino County where he was lost proved to be tougher. Left stranded by his outfit last summer, Rother, 19, disappeared somewhere out on the firing ranges of the 932-square-mile Marine Air-Ground Combat Center north of here.