'They kept trying to convince us maybe she'd gone off'
"Mama, Nancie's missing."
Each word was a lightning bolt through Willie Anderson's phone receiver.
(Keith Hale/Sun-Times)
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Have you seen them?
Tuesday: Missing kids.
Wednesday: People who can't be identified.
Thursday: Public policy and law enforcement.
Anderson, 76, was living in Meridian, Miss. Her 55-year-old daughter, Nancie Walker, lived in Chicago. But they talked on the phone two, sometimes three, times a day.
Nancie was Anderson's oldest. She was the one who bought Anderson a home down South to escape Chicago's cold; the one who declared at age 8 that she was going to become an entrepreneur -- and indeed ended up a successful businesswoman.
Now, one of Nancie's sisters was calling to say Nancie was missing. She hadn't been seen in days.
Anderson slumped into her chair. It was Jan. 31, 2003. The year was starting badly for her clan.
Even more heartache was to come for Anderson.
It's a sad fact that it's not that unusual for someone to vanish in Chicago. Chicago Police Department files are packed with missing-person cases -- kids, mostly, but also a growing number of adults.
Of the 20,000-plus people reported missing in Chicago last year, about 8,000 were 17 or older -- 40 percent of the total, up from 35 percent in 2000.
The figures are inching upward nationally, too. Last year, 169,447 adult missing-person cases were logged nationwide, up from 144,209 a decade ago.
Whether the actual number of missing adults is rising isn't clear. The increase might be due in part to better reporting and federal efforts that have spurred more police departments to take a report when anyone says a person they know is missing.
But when it comes to missing adults, law enforcement is severely lacking, critics say, with police opting to put their resources into the very young, very old, and those deemed "endangered."
There's logic to that thinking, the police figure: Adults have a right to disappear; most of the time when they're missing, it's of their own accord, and they almost always turn up fine. Indeed, 98 percent of such cases in Chicago end up "cleared" by police.
But often the authorities here are dismissive at first of what turn out to be legitimate cases of missing adults, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation found, potentially jeopardizing the safe return of victims and adding to the pain their families feel.
Nancie Walker's family says they had to beg the police to take her case seriously.
"They wouldn't take the report at first," recalled one of her five sisters. "They kept trying to convince us maybe she'd gone off. They kept asking, 'Does she drink? Does she do drugs?'
"The attitude was like they considered everyone on that end a drunk or a drug addict. We're like, 'Absolutely not!' Then, it was: 'Maybe she has a boyfriend. Maybe she went somewhere and didn't tell you.' Finally, we got irritated and demanded they take a report," her sister Vanessa Lankford said.
That's a common experience, according to the National Center for Missing Adults.
"There's an absolute lack of standardized procedures in first, whether police departments take the report, and second, how they respond to and investigate it," the center's Kym Pasqualini said.
In response to such complaints, Illinois lawmakers, with little notice, passed a bill this year -- which Gov. Blagojevich signed into law in August and which immediately went into effect -- that requires police to take a report on missing adults if anyone goes to a police station to notify them.
The new law also bars police from telling people: Come back later; we won't take a report until someone has been missing for 24 hours.
That's a huge step, advocates say, because the first 48 hours after someone goes missing are considered the most critical for their safe return.
On the day Nancie Walker went missing, the Morgan Park resident was supposed to have lunch with the sister to whom she was closest.
The pair talked on the phone around 10 a.m. that Tuesday as Nancie left her condo at 115th and Western and headed off to check on a 17-unit apartment building at 44th and Indiana -- one of the buildings her real estate company owned.
"We'd talked twice that morning, and she called me back, in one of her silly moods, just silly-happy that morning," Myrna Walker recalled. "I said, 'Girl, quit calling me!' She gave that laugh of hers.
"The last thing she said to me was, 'Girl, I just want to tell you what a difference a day makes.' "
She said her sister, a Buddhist, believed every day was an opportunity to create a new life.
At 2:30 p.m., Myrna ducked into a downtown Wendy's where the two always met. It was rainy, cold.
"I sat by the window, to watch for her," Myrna said. "I sat, and I waited and waited."
Nancie never showed up.
Myrna left phone messages that night, and Wednesday, too.
Then a friend told her that Nancie had missed rehearsal for the dance group she'd founded at Soka Gakai International. It was Nancie's way of sharing her lifelong passion for dance with kids. She'd never missed it before.
Something was really wrong, Myrna told Lankford.
On Thursday morning, three of Nancie's sisters went to her Bronzeville apartment building, where a longtime tenant relayed a strange story about seeing Nancie get into a black van that had tinted windows and two men inside. He said the driver honked, she got in, and it sped off.
"That didn't sound good," said Myrna.
At Area 1 headquarters, Nancie officially became a missing person at 11:10 a.m. on Jan. 30, 2003.
The next day -- after police initially were reluctant to take a report, her sisters said -- the family was contacted by Special Victims Unit detectives. Myrna called Anderson, who hurried to town.
When interviewed, Nancie's tenant told police that Nancie had mentioned she was going away. Her family didn't believe it. As the owner of six properties, a beauty salon and a cross-country trucking service, Nancie would never just leave without telling her close-knit family, they said.
Police also learned that she had recently cashed a check for $1,600. Her sisters said it was to be wired to a brother-in-law in Mississippi who worked for her company -- Nancie's Trucks.
Within days, police told the family their suspicion: They didn't think Nancie was a victim of foul play. They would tell reporters the same thing.
Local newspapers and TV had picked up on Nancie's story after the family turned to her friend, Delmarie Cobb, a publicist, for help.
"When they came to me that Friday, I said, 'We need to hold a press conference,' " Cobb recalled. "Myrna went and checked with the detective assigned to the case. He told her to give it till Monday. I told her, 'That's crazy. She's been missing since Tuesday.' We'd already lost too much time."
They held a news conference that Saturday.
Weeks passed. The family plastered the South Side with Nancie's picture, and tried but failed to interest the national media, which was consumed at the time with the case of Laci Peterson, a missing pregnant, white woman from Modesto, Calif.
"The Laci girl was getting all this national coverage, but we quickly learned it wasn't going to happen for Nancie," Myrna Walker said.
Cobb and her family suspect race played a role in the inattention, as she was black.
About five years later, however, another missing black woman got enormous attention -- pharmaceutical sales rep Nailah Franklin, whose body was found last month.
Regardless, a Sun-Times analysis of FBI data found that blacks account for a disproportionate number of the missing -- 32 percent last year, compared with a 12.8 percent representation in the U.S. population. A decade ago, they were at 24 percent, the newspaper's analysis shows.
On March 19, 2003, Lankford got a call. Her sister's body had been found by a road-cleaning crew at 108th and Stony Island -- dismembered and stuffed into two big plastic bags.
An autopsy found Nancie had been beaten, strangled and decapitated.
Only her head, arms and lower legs were found.
Despite her family's $50,000 reward, her murder remains unsolved -- a cold case, no suspects.
Nancie's mother wishes the police had reacted.
"They got stuck on: She walked away," she said.
Police won't comment on specifics of the case.
"Why someone would say they did not believe her a victim of foul play, I couldn't even comment on that," said Chicago Police Cmdr. Robert Hargesheimer. "But it's not unusual for families to say we want more done. And while we understand the frustrations of families, there's also 650 investigations going at one time on missing persons."
Anderson says that's not good enough.
"My Nancie was so timid. To think about how someone took her someplace and did that to her, sometimes I just can't sleep," her mother said.
"I just want police to stop saying an adult has the right to walk away. If the people who know them best -- a mother -- tells you something is just not right, you can believe them."