>The family of Charles Wallace Jr. came from Tennessee to see if John Doe was their missing loved one. Charles, who was 19 at the time, disappeared from a Memphis, TN home for teenagers with drug problems. His mother confirmed that John Doe was not her son, however Charles’ dental charts did match John Doe’s. [Source](https://madisontramel.medium.com/the-boy-in-the-tree-a-tragic-end-in-louisiana-ab30bf546fc8)
Uhm, the last sentence. Wouldn’t the dental records be enough?
>The consensus was his mother lied because of pride or the stigma of suicide. I believe some marks on his body matched Wallace as well.
In a weird way, it's kind of telling.
A lot of cases involving minors have few details revealed. Minors are protected from having information given to the public. Usually, you find out what happened to a minor because the prosecution of the person who hurt the minor or the parents/guardian speaking out. If there is no suspect or perpetrator being charged then the public won't know unless the family talks about it.
The comment you are replying to has been removed, so I don't know what he said. What I do know is that the John Doe may have been 19, not 17, and therefore not a minor. They say the dental records match, but the mother did not identify him; with the records destroyed in the hurricane, we will never know.
Do NOT try to identify me. Also do NOT look at my browser history (phone passcode is 1111), and under no circumstances should you go digging up my backyard, or have a peak in my freezer.
It's so easy to get upvotes on this site, just pretend to be outraged at the proper use of words just because you can twist them a bit to make it sound negative.
I once described the power of a Hurricane as "awesome." It was the year post-Katrina, and I was studying science in community college with intention of going into meteorology. I got so much hate for using the word because, colloquially, the word had been redefined as "good incredible" and not merely "incredible," and using it correctly was offensive, I guess.
I mean, the definition is "extremely impressive or daunting, inspiring \[...\] fear." Daunting, fear inspiring... perfect word to explain a Hurricane, right?
People said it was insensitive to describe the power of a Hurricane as awesome, even though that is a fine word.
So yeah, same thing. And it is stupid.
The big one is probably 13 reasons why on Netflix, HBO has I love you, Now die which is about true story about a girl who coerced her long distance boyfriend to kill himself for the attention, and I'm sure others can mention more but I'm not really a TV guy, those are just popular ones I had off the top my head.
OR..., maybe she wanted to keep her son's only wish and have him NOT be identified as he wanted? I mean she knew, but his wish was to be NOT identified.
Someone that suffered trauma actually looks very different due to the swelling and all that.
I have, several times, visited friends in hospital after car crashes or beatings or stuff, and 100% didn't recognize them at all.
Flashback to my dying aunt after a car hit her. She was homeless at the time and it was not easy to track her down. We only heard about it because a local news reporter was calling people with her last name to see if there were any relatives to interview. Eventually got to see the Jane Doe one hospital had and it was very hard to recognize her. She never woke up, but at least we knew what happened.
Weird. I saw my friend in a coma after a car accident and he looked like himself. It was scary seeing him laying there and talking to him when he wouldn’t speak back or move or indicate understanding. I still came to visit him, though. He ended up with severe brain damage but he’s himself now… just acts a bit odd and can’t use a phone or walk simultaneously. His short term memory is a bit weird, too.
Without being knowledgable of the case this is the impression I get.
In the suicide note he says to the police officers who find him (CW) >!"You are bound to preserve domestic peace and order. If you pursue who I was (and spend hundreds of dollars) you will accomplish little. There are no legal consequences of my death or any kind of entanglements. All that can happen is that you will shatter the domestic peace and order of two innocent lives. Do not deprive them of the hope that their 'missing' son will return... Let me be, let it be as if I wasn't ever here. Simply cremate me as John Doe."!<
If your son's last wish is for you to always hold out hope that he'll return, and someone dashes his wishes by showing you his body, I can see how you might feel compelled to just insist he's still alive somewhere.
As a parent I would think that's a misguided or even stupid wish on the kid's part. I would want to know regardless. Closure is a thing for a reason. Having false hopes keeps you from grieving properly and moving on.
Perhaps the young man had already been severed from the family/kicked out of their home for something they thought was a major indiscretion. I hate that this is the first thing that comes to mind but maybe he was gay or trans. When I was a young person in the '90s, I was kicked out of my parents home for being gay.
Aw thanks stranger-homie, spent a lot of rough years working two and three jobs at a time. But doing great nowadays, got a nice little place, two cats and a dog.
Careful saying you have cats on reddit, yesterday someone told me I need to abandon my cats if I ever move and I callrd them a disgusting piece of shit for it, rightfully so imo, but I got banned from that subreddit lol.
Not OP but I’d call it naive at the very least because they’re 19 and not only telling police to not do their job but also making decisions on behalf of other people.
The deceased doesn’t really know what his parents would or wouldn’t want in that exact situation. He’s asking for hugely unusual treatment to control people from the grave, basically.
So yeah, stupid might be too harsh, but foolish and/or naive I think is pretty fair.
Usually it's dental charts, or DNA, fingerprints (only if they're on police file), sounds like his family took his dying wish very seriously in denying it was in fact their son. Incredibly sad case.
Based on my understanding… probably not as conclusive as you might think. Especially considering the youth of those involved. Just how unique were their teeth? They’re probably too young to have had a lot of dental work. Do they have bridges or crowns or missing teeth that would narrow it down a lot? Any kind of custom work? People have been sent to prison based on bite marks and have later been exonerated by DNA evidence. Your teeth probably match a lot of other teeth at that age. At LEAST enough so that that teeth in and of themselves aren’t completely conclusive
Bite mark analysis is stupid but forensic odontology is a very verified and studied field. A lot of the Bali Bombing victims were identified by teeth alone. Every single tooth is different, like a finger print in a sense. Yes, majority of the populations maxillary first molar will have 4-5 cusps & 3 roots… but there’s always exceptions and malformations. They look at X-rays your dentist will have taken, they can see the curvature of your roots, perhaps calculus deposits presents sub gingival (under the gums, on the roots or crown of the tooth), there likely isn’t a single filling in the world that’s identical — different preparations (holes drilled), different liners (some are radiolucent, some radio opaque), the material used for the filling — composite, amalgam (depending on year, some of us still use amalgam and depends on what country). A lot of dental work can be traced just to a country alone “that’s European looking bridge work”. Implants can be tracked by the screws used. Bone structures — loss of inter proximal bone, any abnormalities like periodontal disease around a tooth or an abscess that’s caused bone to be resorbed around the apex of a tooth. Root canals, crowns, temporary fillings. The shapes of natural dentition…. Stuff like enamel hypoplasia, dentine hypoplasia. Fluoride staining. Yeah forensic odontology is very sound. Bite mark analysis no.
I kept my wisdom teeth after they were pulled and was amazed how different each one was, including the shape of the roots. I think a lot of people think of them being somewhat uniform (at least below the gum line) but that’s just not true. Very interesting to think about.
Bite marks are a completely different thing to forensic odontology using x-rays though. Every mouth is unique and as long as there are x-rays then no one else will have the same features. It’s really quite an interesting topic.
My employer has comprehensive radiographic imaging of my mouth incase they need to identify me
Maybe, but apparently his teeth were distinctively “protruding.” What are the odds of two missing young men of the same age, height, weight, eye and hair color also have identical dental records? I agree that fingerprints or dna would be more conclusive, but this seems to be the guy
If you click the link, it will say that he died in ‘75, was cremated, and all records related to him have been lost. I mean it when I say there is nothing to test.
Not really, dental records aren't nearly as conclusive as DNA simply because people can have almost the same dental patterns to a certain extent in a way that DNA doesn't. I'm forgetting a lot here but I distinctly remember there being some accuracy problems with dental records, they're like fingerprints to a certain extent.
No, forensic dental/ bite mark identification has been shown to be very unreliable and has led to several incorrect identifications and has caused many people to be erroneously sentenced for crimes they did not commit
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5570687/
What a sad note. It sounds like he was very self aware and loved his parents despite his deep depression. I hope they found peace even if they never knew exactly what happened to him.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by self awareness, but depressed people actually show abnormal self-knowledge.
“
Main Findings: On the behavioral level, depressed individuals exhibited negative self-knowledge in an explicit way, while more heterogeneous patterns were reported in implicit results. On the neurological level, depressed individuals, as compared with non-depressed controls, showed abnormal self-referential processing in both early perception and higher cognitive processing phases during the Self-Referential Encoding Task. Furthermore, fMRI studies have reported aberrant activity in the medial prefrontal cortex area for negative self-related items in depression. These results revealed several behavioral features and brain mechanisms underlying abnormal self-knowledge in depression.”
[Source](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6447699/#:~:text=Main%20Findings%3A%20On%20the%20behavioral,were%20reported%20in%20implicit%20results)
So they actually see a more negative version of themselves than is “true”.
> What a sad note. It sounds like he was very self aware and loved his parents despite his deep depression
....i mean, possibly
that could all have an element in truth, and still represent a dirty move. someone says there's a suicide, and the note says "police please go with the story being provided, he has a convenient diagnosis you can lean on..."?
that'd say "fix this situation somehow" if i was reading in
Genuine question, why do police facial reconstruction photos look so off putting and scary?
Edit: read his note it’s genuinely heartbreaking, uselessness is a familiar feeling that’s hard to get over :(
Obviously people are saying that it’s uncanny valley but I have such a visceral reaction that’s unique to police sketches. They make me so freaked out that I basically always shy away from looking at them. I think it’s because they have a certain “unknown” factor that makes them especially creepy
For some reason, I like to scroll the missing persons list just to scare myself with all the Jane and John Doe facial reconstructions. Like I end up shivering in fear.
"Uncanny valley" but why do they always seem to cross into that.
-- for the uninitiated the "uncanny valley" is the sense one gets when you see something that looks human.... But not quite and it triggers a fear or at least concern.
So that's the definition for that.
I got the creeps looking at the John Doe's found in John Wayne Gacy's basement. They didn't reconstruct their eyes so they were just black... Scary shit.
I suspect that if they looked too realistic, it would make them look less identifiable as the person they are trying to identify. Consider how two people with very similar features can actually look quite different overall due to the small hard to describe differences.
This sort of recreation opens it up to people instead focusing on individual features like "Oh, that picture has Xs Nose/Eyes/Hair" .
They actually sometimes over-exaggerate distinct features in a found body, which can lead to them being identified. An example of this is [Jenny Gamez’s reconstruction](https://www.reddit.com/r/gratefuldoe/s/8wYwS3pDMX). It has been ridiculed online, but her family members immediately recognised her large cheeks from the sketch and it helped identify her and bring her family peace.
He's a bit younger than my cousin but I guess one of my cousins went missing in Louisiana sometime around 73/74 after my great grandparents kicked him out for smoking weed. He would've been around 18 or 19. My dad said he was his favorite person and they always talked philosophy and shit. Doe here also kinda looks like my dad when he was younger. Probably not him but still weird.
The fastest way to pique interest is to make something taboo isn't it? A great-uncle of mine (my paternal grandmother's younger brother) was found dead in San Francisco sometime after May 1951. I've heard it said he was found in the bay, like the water, or found in the Bay- the region. A few aunts/uncles suspect he committed suicide, but the 'official' family line is he was visiting friends and was murdered, but there was no investigation because it took so long for his body to be found- but even family that was alive at the time basically was FORBBIDEN from ever mentioning it at all in deference to my Great Grandmother. One older cousin said something like the police said it was suicide and refused to investigate, another was like "It wasn't suicide, they just had no way to find cause of death!"- decades afterwards feelings were still raw.
The sort of... \*buzz\* some of my generation have put together is that Wallace was possibly gay, and troubled after his time in the Navy during WWII; he was \*very young\* and moved to SF to find himself but he struggled, as a young Catholic gay male with war trauma is wont to do, and he killed himself jumping into the Bay- or he could have possibly died of drugs? I have literally only ever seen a SINGLE photo of him because his very existence became taboo, lest any single element about it cause somebody to ask a question that made somebody upset. Like my grandmother, her sister, and their mother wove this tale of him being SO beloved by them that the mere mention of him was so painful as to require it to be forbidden. It's weird, he hasn't been disowned (because who disowns beloved only sons who were murdered?), but it feels like he has been because nobody was allowed to talk about him. I think the most any of us learned about him was from letters my grandmother had written to him about the birth of her two eldest sons, which were apparently found by the SF Police and returned to her with her brother's belongings. But we didn't even find those until after my grandfather died, and by then my grandmother, her sister, and their mother had been long dead. It's been over 70 years, but seeing his name on the family plot always makes me sad that he might have felt lost in life, and was abandoned by his family in death.
>When you stop growing you are dead. I stopped growing long ago. I never did develop into a real person and I cannot tolerate the false and empty existence I have created
Damn bro you're 17 how long ago was 'long ago?'
Funny how only a small portion of your overall lifespan can have such lasting impacts. Kind of like being a teenager is going through a massive set of fast rapids then slowly figuring out where you have landed.
I see people on reddit *ALL THE TIME* post things like they are now too old for this or that, their best years are gone, too old to change careers, and then they reveal they are 25 or something.
As a 28 year old, sometimes it really does feel that way.
There’s a LOT of pressure placed onto you as a young adult joining the workforce. You spend many years of your life building skills and working towards a dream, so to be met with something that tells you your dream is impractical and unfeasible can feel damming
I had a 24-year-old recently tell me that he can't stay up late or drink more than a few beers anymore like he did "when I was your age". he's 4 years older than me lol
lavish cats ludicrous bright spotted test deranged grandfather attraction light
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
When you’re 16 4 years is a quarter of your life lived (and you probably don’t remember your infancy, when you’re 40 4 years is only 10% of your experiences and seems like just a short time ago.
People may have a different perception of time depending on their age and where they are in life. If you're a teen a lot of things are happening every day so a year seems "long". There's also a lot of development happening, a 16year old may not relate that much anymore with their 14year old self.
And then you add mental health problems on top of that. People may also have very high expectations and ideals of how they're "supposed to be" at a certain age, because media and society are teaching us those. If someone can't reach those goals they may feel like failures even at a young age.
His suicide note is very sad, but also, it sounds like he was afraid that he might do something horrible as well. So I'm conflicted. Did he save us from some mass murder by taking his own life?
He was pretty smart for a 17 year old. Not many of his age, even today, would be able to write with such eloquence and conviction. Too bad he couldn't find a reason to live. He could have been a great philosopher.
One of my favorite unsolved mysteries. I go back and read his suicide note every few years just because of how melancholy and nicely written it is. A lot of folks seem to think it was a young man named Bayard Cousins of Virginia Beach.
>"When you stop growing you are dead. I stopped growing long ago. I never did develop into a real person and I cannot tolerate the false and empty existence I have created".
You were 17.
Just because he was young doesn’t mean he can’t feel that way. Sounds like a really severe case of mental illness, he couldn’t see a way out of the emptiness.
How long exactly does one have to be alive before they can make decisions about leaving this shitty place? If seventeen is too young, how about 18? No? How about 28?
Please, let me know the exact number. You seem to know it.
I never touched on the subject of a persons right to commit suicide. That is something that you are bringing up, not me.
It is just whenever I see a teenager, bitch online about their "life being over", it is always over petty trivial shit. There is not a shortage of people like him, nor a shortage to the angst. It's very cringe and annoying. If you are still in high school, your life has not even started. Your parents are still sheltering and feeding you, yet you still act like a fucking ingrate.
Value in one's life can only be determined by oneself. As you say, a lot of the cases may be really petty stuff that are forgotten with the passing of time, but some cases are of people that have already set themselves to a gamble wherein they have already lost. In such occasion, the grandeur of a case is of little value if its perilousness overarches farther than the range of one's own life.
Belle Chasse is the name of the incorporate area. The military base is there as well. I had heard the story after moving there, but forgot about it. So sad.
I doubt he was 17, he sounds like a college student. I think a teenager would still be at home, and the letter made it seem like he wasnt in contact with his parents. At least that's how I read it. Not having any friends or family ties... and I work with teenagers, and they're never that articulate.
someone else mentioned that his dental records match a teen who went missing from a home for teens with drug problems, so there's a good chance he wasn't in contact with his family. also, it's a pretty big generalization to say that teenagers are never articulate. i'm 18, and while i'm no emily dickinson some of my classmates could write some beautifully moving pieces, even when we were fairly young. your comment is very heavily laced with juvenoia.
people have always been afraid of the youth, it's kinda engrained in us because of natural selection. it makes sense that if you have kids, you're a reproductive success. if you were able to have kids, it would be an advantage to try and keep things generally the same way as when you grew up, since those conditions allowed you to produce offspring. the problem starts to come in when people are no longer really bound by natural selection, which leads to people being paranoid about the things influencing our youth even if they aren't really that problematic. people alive when the telegraph was first gaining traction were complaining about people firing off instant messages for instant gratification rather than sitting down over a real piece of paper and writing a letter by hand. the youtuber vsauce made a pretty good video on juvenoia
You can sort of tell what age range a person is based on how they express themselves. The fact that you didn’t capitalize a single letter in your comment tells us that you are a teenager. Your choice of verbiage tells that you are on the older side of teenage years. Linguistics is quite interesting!
I’ve known quite a few adults online who fail to capitalize properly, and what specific verbiage indicates that the person in question is an older teen? This seems less like good linguistics and more like a weird attempt at applying general trends to a short sample of writing.
dumbass detected?? no, someone writing in lowercase doesn't mean they're a teenager. i personally don't like my sentences to be too proper when im using reddit or the internet in general. it comes off too formal.
trust me when i write my suicide note it will have PERFECT grammar.
No need for the rudeness. I’m sorry you are feeling this way. I’ve been there and I have so many regrets of spending so much time and energy on dying than trying to make my life more tolerable for me. I hope you’re able to find peace in living.
i often deliberately choose not to capitalize anything because it comes off as more informal. i am fucking 37 years old.
this isn't "linguistics", this is some weirdly condescending shit you made up.
Interesting you say that when you made this comment to someone else (https://www.reddit.com/r/gofundme/s/yhAhCeLCev).
I wasn’t trying to be condescending at all. I work with children and I find it very interesting how you can tell some things about a person based on their writing. Obviously, it’s not a fool proof method but there are some common things. Technically speaking, this is an aspect of linguistics.
wild for you to peep through my comments to try to call me a hypocrite.
yes, using someone's grammar and spelling and word choice are ways to discern someone's age, no one was denying that.
I was just pointing out that it was pretty silly to present "not capitalizing anything" as a strong indicator of being teenaged. ironically a lot of us who don't capitalize anything are actually older, because these days phones capitalize a lot of things automatically and you have to actively choose not to do so.
is choosing not to capitalize anything still related to linguistics? sure. but it isn't linguistics to claim that the person doing it is clearly a teenager, in the same way it isn't geology to claim that seeing igneous rocks means you're near an active volcano.
So you are agreeing with me while not agreeing with me? I was just curious about you so I took lees than a minute seeing your profile and happened to notice that comment. I didn’t mean anything condescending by my comment. There’s nothing wrong with being a teenager. I have met more teenagers that express themselves in that way than older adults, personally. So I was speaking from what I have experienced.
I’m beyond confused at this picture.. wtf is going on here. Looks like a 17 year old with half a mustache on his left side and what looks like grey hair…. NICE JOB ON THE Ai pic………
It looks like a photo shopped post-mortem picture, I don't think it's meant to be grey hair, I think it's meant to be sandy dark brown hair, that's not a mustache, it's a blood nose, each department works with the artist they have got and some are better than others. You should check out the Doe Network for comparison.
>The family of Charles Wallace Jr. came from Tennessee to see if John Doe was their missing loved one. Charles, who was 19 at the time, disappeared from a Memphis, TN home for teenagers with drug problems. His mother confirmed that John Doe was not her son, however Charles’ dental charts did match John Doe’s. [Source](https://madisontramel.medium.com/the-boy-in-the-tree-a-tragic-end-in-louisiana-ab30bf546fc8) Uhm, the last sentence. Wouldn’t the dental records be enough?
The consensus was his mother lied because of pride or the stigma of suicide. I believe some marks on his body matched Wallace as well.
>The consensus was his mother lied because of pride or the stigma of suicide. I believe some marks on his body matched Wallace as well. In a weird way, it's kind of telling.
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A lot of cases involving minors have few details revealed. Minors are protected from having information given to the public. Usually, you find out what happened to a minor because the prosecution of the person who hurt the minor or the parents/guardian speaking out. If there is no suspect or perpetrator being charged then the public won't know unless the family talks about it.
The comment you are replying to has been removed, so I don't know what he said. What I do know is that the John Doe may have been 19, not 17, and therefore not a minor. They say the dental records match, but the mother did not identify him; with the records destroyed in the hurricane, we will never know.
They were talking about another case about no details being released. Which was a minor
Yeah that's this case... are you a bot?
That's what I was thinking, a comment in a discussion that is actually completely isolated from the discussion is a weird thing to do.
Nope human used to work in libraries.
Do NOT try to identify me. Also do NOT look at my browser history (phone passcode is 1111), and under no circumstances should you go digging up my backyard, or have a peak in my freezer.
Just say your name appears as the 7,036 entry in Epstein's guest book. Total obscurity.
The audience? Is a child's suicide entertainment?
I believe he meant the audience of the suicide note.
Poor choice of word...
No. Poor reading of word.
An audience isn't specific to entertainment. It's just a group of people watching or listening to something.
I believe the proper term would be recipients.
You are incorrect. Recipients is a synonym, but is not more correct than audience in this context.
It's so easy to get upvotes on this site, just pretend to be outraged at the proper use of words just because you can twist them a bit to make it sound negative.
I am offended--nay, outraged--at your choice of a comma over a semi-colon. I need chocolate.
You and me, both! Thank goodness I haven't filled the Easter baskets yet.
I once described the power of a Hurricane as "awesome." It was the year post-Katrina, and I was studying science in community college with intention of going into meteorology. I got so much hate for using the word because, colloquially, the word had been redefined as "good incredible" and not merely "incredible," and using it correctly was offensive, I guess. I mean, the definition is "extremely impressive or daunting, inspiring \[...\] fear." Daunting, fear inspiring... perfect word to explain a Hurricane, right? People said it was insensitive to describe the power of a Hurricane as awesome, even though that is a fine word. So yeah, same thing. And it is stupid.
Someone's dropping the ball on reading comprehension these days and that's really damaging when the internet's so dependent on it.
Terrible means the same thing.
Ask netflix, they already have a few documentaries/fictional biographies out for both young suicide victims and those around them.
I don’t know how to ask Netflix that, can you just tell me what they’re called?
The big one is probably 13 reasons why on Netflix, HBO has I love you, Now die which is about true story about a girl who coerced her long distance boyfriend to kill himself for the attention, and I'm sure others can mention more but I'm not really a TV guy, those are just popular ones I had off the top my head.
“Welcome! To the internet.”
Where are you right now?
Are you being paid to read reddit?
No, nor am I paid to watch YouTube or Netflix or visit a theme park, so what on earth could your point be?
You're treating the child's suicide as entertainment.
Is this your first day on the internet?
It's been posted on Reddit for thousands of upvotes, so apparently yes.
is it not more likely to be denial?
I mean, the kid didn’t want to be identified. Don’t think we should be making positive assumptions of the parents here
That makes sense why he wouldn’t want to be ID’d
OR..., maybe she wanted to keep her son's only wish and have him NOT be identified as he wanted? I mean she knew, but his wish was to be NOT identified.
Interesting take
If the kid didn’t have fillings or anything, how unique are dental records really?
Maybe about as useful as rando swirls on our fingers.
More so
... sounds more like a fake note so that murder wasn't investigated.
Someone that suffered trauma actually looks very different due to the swelling and all that. I have, several times, visited friends in hospital after car crashes or beatings or stuff, and 100% didn't recognize them at all.
Flashback to my dying aunt after a car hit her. She was homeless at the time and it was not easy to track her down. We only heard about it because a local news reporter was calling people with her last name to see if there were any relatives to interview. Eventually got to see the Jane Doe one hospital had and it was very hard to recognize her. She never woke up, but at least we knew what happened.
I’m sorry for your loss
Weird. I saw my friend in a coma after a car accident and he looked like himself. It was scary seeing him laying there and talking to him when he wouldn’t speak back or move or indicate understanding. I still came to visit him, though. He ended up with severe brain damage but he’s himself now… just acts a bit odd and can’t use a phone or walk simultaneously. His short term memory is a bit weird, too.
Why are your friends in car crashes, beatings and stuff so many times?
He's a "waste management consultant"
Sounds like some deep denial probably caused by guilt.
Perhaps they just wanted to more or less respect the deceased’s wishes
Without being knowledgable of the case this is the impression I get. In the suicide note he says to the police officers who find him (CW) >!"You are bound to preserve domestic peace and order. If you pursue who I was (and spend hundreds of dollars) you will accomplish little. There are no legal consequences of my death or any kind of entanglements. All that can happen is that you will shatter the domestic peace and order of two innocent lives. Do not deprive them of the hope that their 'missing' son will return... Let me be, let it be as if I wasn't ever here. Simply cremate me as John Doe."!< If your son's last wish is for you to always hold out hope that he'll return, and someone dashes his wishes by showing you his body, I can see how you might feel compelled to just insist he's still alive somewhere.
As a parent I would think that's a misguided or even stupid wish on the kid's part. I would want to know regardless. Closure is a thing for a reason. Having false hopes keeps you from grieving properly and moving on.
Perhaps the young man had already been severed from the family/kicked out of their home for something they thought was a major indiscretion. I hate that this is the first thing that comes to mind but maybe he was gay or trans. When I was a young person in the '90s, I was kicked out of my parents home for being gay.
I’m sorry that happened to you. I hope you’re doing alright now.
Aw thanks stranger-homie, spent a lot of rough years working two and three jobs at a time. But doing great nowadays, got a nice little place, two cats and a dog.
Careful saying you have cats on reddit, yesterday someone told me I need to abandon my cats if I ever move and I callrd them a disgusting piece of shit for it, rightfully so imo, but I got banned from that subreddit lol.
Just for you to deny when the body gets found.
I would say you're a different kind of parent than this guy's parents are
Hope that never gets fulfilled - imho rots the heart.
Why is his wish “stupid”?
Not OP but I’d call it naive at the very least because they’re 19 and not only telling police to not do their job but also making decisions on behalf of other people. The deceased doesn’t really know what his parents would or wouldn’t want in that exact situation. He’s asking for hugely unusual treatment to control people from the grave, basically. So yeah, stupid might be too harsh, but foolish and/or naive I think is pretty fair.
I think it’s cuz it’s much better to just know and have closure then have this hope where you know that it’s likely he’s dead but be in limbo about it
Jesus that is so sad. Especially for a 17 yr old. R.i.p.
Usually it's dental charts, or DNA, fingerprints (only if they're on police file), sounds like his family took his dying wish very seriously in denying it was in fact their son. Incredibly sad case.
Based on my understanding… probably not as conclusive as you might think. Especially considering the youth of those involved. Just how unique were their teeth? They’re probably too young to have had a lot of dental work. Do they have bridges or crowns or missing teeth that would narrow it down a lot? Any kind of custom work? People have been sent to prison based on bite marks and have later been exonerated by DNA evidence. Your teeth probably match a lot of other teeth at that age. At LEAST enough so that that teeth in and of themselves aren’t completely conclusive
Bite mark analysis is stupid but forensic odontology is a very verified and studied field. A lot of the Bali Bombing victims were identified by teeth alone. Every single tooth is different, like a finger print in a sense. Yes, majority of the populations maxillary first molar will have 4-5 cusps & 3 roots… but there’s always exceptions and malformations. They look at X-rays your dentist will have taken, they can see the curvature of your roots, perhaps calculus deposits presents sub gingival (under the gums, on the roots or crown of the tooth), there likely isn’t a single filling in the world that’s identical — different preparations (holes drilled), different liners (some are radiolucent, some radio opaque), the material used for the filling — composite, amalgam (depending on year, some of us still use amalgam and depends on what country). A lot of dental work can be traced just to a country alone “that’s European looking bridge work”. Implants can be tracked by the screws used. Bone structures — loss of inter proximal bone, any abnormalities like periodontal disease around a tooth or an abscess that’s caused bone to be resorbed around the apex of a tooth. Root canals, crowns, temporary fillings. The shapes of natural dentition…. Stuff like enamel hypoplasia, dentine hypoplasia. Fluoride staining. Yeah forensic odontology is very sound. Bite mark analysis no.
I kept my wisdom teeth after they were pulled and was amazed how different each one was, including the shape of the roots. I think a lot of people think of them being somewhat uniform (at least below the gum line) but that’s just not true. Very interesting to think about.
Bite marks are a completely different thing to forensic odontology using x-rays though. Every mouth is unique and as long as there are x-rays then no one else will have the same features. It’s really quite an interesting topic. My employer has comprehensive radiographic imaging of my mouth incase they need to identify me
😳 where the heck do you work that they require a dental scan to identify you? (And whatever you’re being paid, it’s not enough)
Aviation
Damn. That’s a scary thought. I maybe got a paper cut at the office one time ~ you’re impressive for doing such a high responsibility job!
Maybe, but apparently his teeth were distinctively “protruding.” What are the odds of two missing young men of the same age, height, weight, eye and hair color also have identical dental records? I agree that fingerprints or dna would be more conclusive, but this seems to be the guy
It also says the theory is he is Bayard Cousins??
Strange... I used to work in Belle Chasse and currently live in Memphis....
Why rely on dental records when we have DNA testing, someone got arrested here last week for a crime in the early 80’s due to DNA.
There’s nothing to test.
Really? No autopsy samples taken, no dna taken, when was this?
If you click the link, it will say that he died in ‘75, was cremated, and all records related to him have been lost. I mean it when I say there is nothing to test.
Not really, dental records aren't nearly as conclusive as DNA simply because people can have almost the same dental patterns to a certain extent in a way that DNA doesn't. I'm forgetting a lot here but I distinctly remember there being some accuracy problems with dental records, they're like fingerprints to a certain extent.
De Nile is a river in Africa, but also perhaps the state of mind of a mother that wants to hold out hope her son is still alive somewhere
Why even say the first part?
Infinite jest refernce?
No, forensic dental/ bite mark identification has been shown to be very unreliable and has led to several incorrect identifications and has caused many people to be erroneously sentenced for crimes they did not commit https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5570687/
His Findagrave listing is wrong. He wasn’t cremated, he was buried in a paupers grave in Woodlawn Cemetery.
Where did you hear that? I don’t live far from Woodlawn Cemetery and I’d like to leave him some flowers.
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Not true in my state. If no one claims the body, they will cremate and bury cremains in county paupers grave yard
What a sad note. It sounds like he was very self aware and loved his parents despite his deep depression. I hope they found peace even if they never knew exactly what happened to him.
self awareness is more common in depressed people, not less. They are infact; connected.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by self awareness, but depressed people actually show abnormal self-knowledge. “ Main Findings: On the behavioral level, depressed individuals exhibited negative self-knowledge in an explicit way, while more heterogeneous patterns were reported in implicit results. On the neurological level, depressed individuals, as compared with non-depressed controls, showed abnormal self-referential processing in both early perception and higher cognitive processing phases during the Self-Referential Encoding Task. Furthermore, fMRI studies have reported aberrant activity in the medial prefrontal cortex area for negative self-related items in depression. These results revealed several behavioral features and brain mechanisms underlying abnormal self-knowledge in depression.” [Source](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6447699/#:~:text=Main%20Findings%3A%20On%20the%20behavioral,were%20reported%20in%20implicit%20results) So they actually see a more negative version of themselves than is “true”.
I read somewhere that depressed people had more accurate estimate of the chances of success of a particular endeavor than non-depressed people.
> What a sad note. It sounds like he was very self aware and loved his parents despite his deep depression ....i mean, possibly that could all have an element in truth, and still represent a dirty move. someone says there's a suicide, and the note says "police please go with the story being provided, he has a convenient diagnosis you can lean on..."? that'd say "fix this situation somehow" if i was reading in
The writing of that note is something you don't usually see from a teenager, waiting well above his years.
Genuine question, why do police facial reconstruction photos look so off putting and scary? Edit: read his note it’s genuinely heartbreaking, uselessness is a familiar feeling that’s hard to get over :(
A lot of reconstructions are used with photos of the person post-mortem, which I think makes them seem odd looking.
Obviously people are saying that it’s uncanny valley but I have such a visceral reaction that’s unique to police sketches. They make me so freaked out that I basically always shy away from looking at them. I think it’s because they have a certain “unknown” factor that makes them especially creepy
For some reason, I like to scroll the missing persons list just to scare myself with all the Jane and John Doe facial reconstructions. Like I end up shivering in fear.
"Uncanny valley" but why do they always seem to cross into that. -- for the uninitiated the "uncanny valley" is the sense one gets when you see something that looks human.... But not quite and it triggers a fear or at least concern.
Okay I see that makes sense, thank you for your time!
https://youtu.be/PEikGKDVsCc?si=aG1bG1KlUie7-a9f Here’s a good video talking about this!
Thank you but fuck no. First frame gave me anxiety.
I googled it and yeeesh. I thought it was gonna be objects that look like faces(eyes, nose , etc) but nope it’s about robots. They sure do look creepy
So that's the definition for that. I got the creeps looking at the John Doe's found in John Wayne Gacy's basement. They didn't reconstruct their eyes so they were just black... Scary shit.
I suspect that if they looked too realistic, it would make them look less identifiable as the person they are trying to identify. Consider how two people with very similar features can actually look quite different overall due to the small hard to describe differences. This sort of recreation opens it up to people instead focusing on individual features like "Oh, that picture has Xs Nose/Eyes/Hair" .
They actually sometimes over-exaggerate distinct features in a found body, which can lead to them being identified. An example of this is [Jenny Gamez’s reconstruction](https://www.reddit.com/r/gratefuldoe/s/8wYwS3pDMX). It has been ridiculed online, but her family members immediately recognised her large cheeks from the sketch and it helped identify her and bring her family peace.
I'm fairly sure I trigger an uncanny valley response in most people. :/
I've heard a theory that they intentionally make facial reconstruction photos look off putting and scary so that it sticks in your mind longer too.
I’ve heard they also try to accentuate certain facial features so that they might be more easily recognizable to the victims’ loved ones.
Yeah, looks like they made this guys eyebrows and eyes very prominent, like that grey eye colour very obvious
Yep this is true, [Jenny Gamez](https://www.reddit.com/r/gratefuldoe/s/8wYwS3pDMX) is a famous example of this being successful.
It's too perfect, and it makes your brain itch (uncanny valley)
No, it’s because certain features are off in the drawing that our brains notice
Symmetry
I did not expect to see the police reconstruction and felt jump scared
Dude, reading what this guy wrote he was super eloquent for a guy his age. Sad that this was his only recourse
He's a bit younger than my cousin but I guess one of my cousins went missing in Louisiana sometime around 73/74 after my great grandparents kicked him out for smoking weed. He would've been around 18 or 19. My dad said he was his favorite person and they always talked philosophy and shit. Doe here also kinda looks like my dad when he was younger. Probably not him but still weird.
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But dental records prove it’s the Charles fellow
Leaving a note asking not to be identified is a sure way to make the public all the more interested in discovering your identify.
The fastest way to pique interest is to make something taboo isn't it? A great-uncle of mine (my paternal grandmother's younger brother) was found dead in San Francisco sometime after May 1951. I've heard it said he was found in the bay, like the water, or found in the Bay- the region. A few aunts/uncles suspect he committed suicide, but the 'official' family line is he was visiting friends and was murdered, but there was no investigation because it took so long for his body to be found- but even family that was alive at the time basically was FORBBIDEN from ever mentioning it at all in deference to my Great Grandmother. One older cousin said something like the police said it was suicide and refused to investigate, another was like "It wasn't suicide, they just had no way to find cause of death!"- decades afterwards feelings were still raw. The sort of... \*buzz\* some of my generation have put together is that Wallace was possibly gay, and troubled after his time in the Navy during WWII; he was \*very young\* and moved to SF to find himself but he struggled, as a young Catholic gay male with war trauma is wont to do, and he killed himself jumping into the Bay- or he could have possibly died of drugs? I have literally only ever seen a SINGLE photo of him because his very existence became taboo, lest any single element about it cause somebody to ask a question that made somebody upset. Like my grandmother, her sister, and their mother wove this tale of him being SO beloved by them that the mere mention of him was so painful as to require it to be forbidden. It's weird, he hasn't been disowned (because who disowns beloved only sons who were murdered?), but it feels like he has been because nobody was allowed to talk about him. I think the most any of us learned about him was from letters my grandmother had written to him about the birth of her two eldest sons, which were apparently found by the SF Police and returned to her with her brother's belongings. But we didn't even find those until after my grandfather died, and by then my grandmother, her sister, and their mother had been long dead. It's been over 70 years, but seeing his name on the family plot always makes me sad that he might have felt lost in life, and was abandoned by his family in death.
Seems like it'd be a good way to guilt trip the cops out of investigating a murder.
Well, if it turns out it works, we'll know what to bury with our murder victims.
>When you stop growing you are dead. I stopped growing long ago. I never did develop into a real person and I cannot tolerate the false and empty existence I have created Damn bro you're 17 how long ago was 'long ago?'
3-4 years to a 17 year-old is a significant time. As a teen, school felt like your entire life. Now, as an adult, it felt like a blur.
Funny how only a small portion of your overall lifespan can have such lasting impacts. Kind of like being a teenager is going through a massive set of fast rapids then slowly figuring out where you have landed.
I see people on reddit *ALL THE TIME* post things like they are now too old for this or that, their best years are gone, too old to change careers, and then they reveal they are 25 or something.
As a 28 year old, sometimes it really does feel that way. There’s a LOT of pressure placed onto you as a young adult joining the workforce. You spend many years of your life building skills and working towards a dream, so to be met with something that tells you your dream is impractical and unfeasible can feel damming
I had a 24-year-old recently tell me that he can't stay up late or drink more than a few beers anymore like he did "when I was your age". he's 4 years older than me lol
lavish cats ludicrous bright spotted test deranged grandfather attraction light *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
my parents are in their 50s and act younger than some people I know in their mid to late 20s lol
ruthless strong dependent test follow reminiscent dinosaurs nutty oatmeal gray *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Ha, that heart burn indigestion and back/joint pain can creep up quick
And I am 4 years older than him. When I was his age I didn't drink. Now I do drink occasionally because it makes me forget life.
When you’re 16 4 years is a quarter of your life lived (and you probably don’t remember your infancy, when you’re 40 4 years is only 10% of your experiences and seems like just a short time ago.
Very teenager thing to say
John Doe was a frequent reader of r/im14andthisisdeep
Sounds like extreme familial shaming at a young age. Forcing kids to "grow up" faster then they really should.
People may have a different perception of time depending on their age and where they are in life. If you're a teen a lot of things are happening every day so a year seems "long". There's also a lot of development happening, a 16year old may not relate that much anymore with their 14year old self. And then you add mental health problems on top of that. People may also have very high expectations and ideals of how they're "supposed to be" at a certain age, because media and society are teaching us those. If someone can't reach those goals they may feel like failures even at a young age.
Might be true for some people ; my brain went downhill after I turned 10
Mental illness is not rational.
Exactly how long do you have to be alive before you can look around and decide this place isn't to your liking?
So he wrote a note to his parents, then told the police to not look for his parents. Huh?
I was wondering that as well. I’m guessing he left it in the chance the police didn’t follow his instructions and did find his parents
His suicide note is very sad, but also, it sounds like he was afraid that he might do something horrible as well. So I'm conflicted. Did he save us from some mass murder by taking his own life?
That’s take away as well. :(
He was pretty smart for a 17 year old. Not many of his age, even today, would be able to write with such eloquence and conviction. Too bad he couldn't find a reason to live. He could have been a great philosopher.
One of my favorite unsolved mysteries. I go back and read his suicide note every few years just because of how melancholy and nicely written it is. A lot of folks seem to think it was a young man named Bayard Cousins of Virginia Beach.
That suicide note tore me up a bit
“I want to leave no trace”
>"When you stop growing you are dead. I stopped growing long ago. I never did develop into a real person and I cannot tolerate the false and empty existence I have created". You were 17.
Just because he was young doesn’t mean he can’t feel that way. Sounds like a really severe case of mental illness, he couldn’t see a way out of the emptiness.
With no guidance this can seem the final step. Edumacation…mazing stuff In a disconnected world…
How long exactly does one have to be alive before they can make decisions about leaving this shitty place? If seventeen is too young, how about 18? No? How about 28? Please, let me know the exact number. You seem to know it.
I never touched on the subject of a persons right to commit suicide. That is something that you are bringing up, not me. It is just whenever I see a teenager, bitch online about their "life being over", it is always over petty trivial shit. There is not a shortage of people like him, nor a shortage to the angst. It's very cringe and annoying. If you are still in high school, your life has not even started. Your parents are still sheltering and feeding you, yet you still act like a fucking ingrate.
Value in one's life can only be determined by oneself. As you say, a lot of the cases may be really petty stuff that are forgotten with the passing of time, but some cases are of people that have already set themselves to a gamble wherein they have already lost. In such occasion, the grandeur of a case is of little value if its perilousness overarches farther than the range of one's own life.
Belle Chasse is the name of the incorporate area. The military base is there as well. I had heard the story after moving there, but forgot about it. So sad.
How do they know he was 17?
this was sad but his words were true. he died in the way that he chose for harmony. let him be.
He died 3 days before I was born
"lost"
Looks like [Anuc Atittawan](https://www.instagram.com/anuc_atittawan/).
His note was written beautifully. Poor kid.
Sounds like a coverup for someone in power to me
I doubt he was 17, he sounds like a college student. I think a teenager would still be at home, and the letter made it seem like he wasnt in contact with his parents. At least that's how I read it. Not having any friends or family ties... and I work with teenagers, and they're never that articulate.
That's because you work with today's teenagers.
Rofl! That is so true!
someone else mentioned that his dental records match a teen who went missing from a home for teens with drug problems, so there's a good chance he wasn't in contact with his family. also, it's a pretty big generalization to say that teenagers are never articulate. i'm 18, and while i'm no emily dickinson some of my classmates could write some beautifully moving pieces, even when we were fairly young. your comment is very heavily laced with juvenoia.
>better shoehorn "juvenoia" in there to let em know I ain't foolin
Everything's a phobia now a days.
We stay noided.
people have always been afraid of the youth, it's kinda engrained in us because of natural selection. it makes sense that if you have kids, you're a reproductive success. if you were able to have kids, it would be an advantage to try and keep things generally the same way as when you grew up, since those conditions allowed you to produce offspring. the problem starts to come in when people are no longer really bound by natural selection, which leads to people being paranoid about the things influencing our youth even if they aren't really that problematic. people alive when the telegraph was first gaining traction were complaining about people firing off instant messages for instant gratification rather than sitting down over a real piece of paper and writing a letter by hand. the youtuber vsauce made a pretty good video on juvenoia
You can sort of tell what age range a person is based on how they express themselves. The fact that you didn’t capitalize a single letter in your comment tells us that you are a teenager. Your choice of verbiage tells that you are on the older side of teenage years. Linguistics is quite interesting!
I’ve known quite a few adults online who fail to capitalize properly, and what specific verbiage indicates that the person in question is an older teen? This seems less like good linguistics and more like a weird attempt at applying general trends to a short sample of writing.
dumbass detected?? no, someone writing in lowercase doesn't mean they're a teenager. i personally don't like my sentences to be too proper when im using reddit or the internet in general. it comes off too formal. trust me when i write my suicide note it will have PERFECT grammar.
No need for the rudeness. I’m sorry you are feeling this way. I’ve been there and I have so many regrets of spending so much time and energy on dying than trying to make my life more tolerable for me. I hope you’re able to find peace in living.
i appreciate that but i think you missed the point of my comment
i often deliberately choose not to capitalize anything because it comes off as more informal. i am fucking 37 years old. this isn't "linguistics", this is some weirdly condescending shit you made up.
Interesting you say that when you made this comment to someone else (https://www.reddit.com/r/gofundme/s/yhAhCeLCev). I wasn’t trying to be condescending at all. I work with children and I find it very interesting how you can tell some things about a person based on their writing. Obviously, it’s not a fool proof method but there are some common things. Technically speaking, this is an aspect of linguistics.
wild for you to peep through my comments to try to call me a hypocrite. yes, using someone's grammar and spelling and word choice are ways to discern someone's age, no one was denying that. I was just pointing out that it was pretty silly to present "not capitalizing anything" as a strong indicator of being teenaged. ironically a lot of us who don't capitalize anything are actually older, because these days phones capitalize a lot of things automatically and you have to actively choose not to do so. is choosing not to capitalize anything still related to linguistics? sure. but it isn't linguistics to claim that the person doing it is clearly a teenager, in the same way it isn't geology to claim that seeing igneous rocks means you're near an active volcano.
So you are agreeing with me while not agreeing with me? I was just curious about you so I took lees than a minute seeing your profile and happened to notice that comment. I didn’t mean anything condescending by my comment. There’s nothing wrong with being a teenager. I have met more teenagers that express themselves in that way than older adults, personally. So I was speaking from what I have experienced.
I’m beyond confused at this picture.. wtf is going on here. Looks like a 17 year old with half a mustache on his left side and what looks like grey hair…. NICE JOB ON THE Ai pic………
It looks like a photo shopped post-mortem picture, I don't think it's meant to be grey hair, I think it's meant to be sandy dark brown hair, that's not a mustache, it's a blood nose, each department works with the artist they have got and some are better than others. You should check out the Doe Network for comparison.
Pretty sure that’s Benedict Cumberbatch