Two dozen still on Va. missing list

Morgan Harrington isn’t the only person reported missing in Virginia, just the most famous at the moment.

More than two dozen unsolved cases, the earliest dating from the late 1970s, are listed on the Virginia State Police’s missing persons Web site.

The missing are gone for a variety of reasons.

A case from the late 1970s includes a pair of girls who left to hitchhike from Roanoke to Florida and were never seen again.

Other cases involve men who have wandered away from car accidents never to be seen again, including Buckingham County resident Robert Lee Kelley, who went missing in July 2002.

Some had medical or mental problems.

One person left nothing more than smeared blood. Others, like Harrington, simply vanished, not taking any possessions or leaving any clues about where they were going.

About a fifth of Virginia’s missing person cases are from Norfolk or Portsmouth.

The only other missing person case from Charlottesville is Quinn Renard Woodfolk.

In summer 1998, 12-year-old Woodfolk went missing. He was the subject of a search and subsequent news coverage, but faded quickly from the scene.

He’s still listed on the Virginia State Police’s missing persons database.

His case isn’t a direct parallel for Harrington’s, though. At the time, police said they suspected he might have fallen in with a bad crowd, possibly drug dealers from New York. There’s no public theory yet on where Morgan went.

Harrington isn’t even the most recent of the six people who disappeared in 2009. William Paul Allen, an 83-year-old man, disappeared Monday in Accomack.

At a news conference earlier this week, state police Lt. Joe Rader defended the amount of effort that state police have put into the hunt for Harrington.

He said that resources aren’t spread evenly across every missing person case. Instead, they’re sent to where they’re likely to do the most good.

Aircraft, dogs and manpower have all been used in the search for Harrington. Even the FBI has gotten in on the act.

“This is the freshest missing person case in the Appomattox Field Office,” which includes Charlottesville, Rader said.

And then there’s the media response. In Virginia, media interest has been intense. Media outlets from a variety of cities, including Richmond and Roanoke, have come to the news conferences outside of the University of Virginia’s police headquarters.

The Beckley, W.Va., Register-Herald ran an article centering on the fact that Harrington’s father is a Beckley native.

National media outlets have picked up the story, too, and not just brief headline summaries. The mystery even got airtime on CNN’s “Nancy Grace” program, with Harrington’s mother talking about her daughter choosing an outfit for the concert.

In all, a Google News search turned up more than 1,400 articles on the missing girl, though of course many of those are different outlets republishing the same wire service copy.

That massive exposure is, at least in some part, the result of a deliberate effort on the part of the Harrington family to keep the case in the spotlight as much as possible.

Dan Harrington, Morgan’s father, said Thursday that the family feels the best way to help their missing daughter is to publicize her case in the hopes that a tip will lead to her whereabouts.

By this weekend, state police had received more than 150 tips from the Central Virginia area as well as the rest of the country.

Some of those tips involved potential sightings of Morgan, either charting her movements at the concert or potentially revealing where she’s been since. Others have been simply theories of what has happened.

“We just tried to be on the highest level of news that [the media] would allow us to get on,” Dan Harrington said Thursday.