Rachel Shore's Answers

2: I'm not a detective

Who took Willie? Why? Where is he now? Is he dead? Who else did they do this to? Did he actually run away? These questions and others plagued every spare thought I had. How can I move on if I don't even know what I'm moving on from?

I need to know what happened I need to answer those questions. How will I do it? I continued racking my brain for a solution. I am very thankful for these runs. How else could I possibly clear my head?

As I ran I came up with an idea. I would get a new phone line for people to reach me. They would tell me about the strange circumstances under which kids in their care ran away. I will claim that I just want to find out how and why kids run away so that I can help parents watch out for it. I hope that could also be an outcome but that is definitely not the goal. I created a profile or page or channel on every social media platform I could get ahold of. I basically ask for anyone who's had a child run away to share an image of the note they left. I know this will help me get answers. What I don't know is whether or not I will like those answers.

...

The responses came in so fast that I had a really hard time keeping up with them all. The first day I already had 40 messages and by the end of the week there were 130. I spent most of my free time shuffling through them. I looked for any notes that seemed similar to the ones I had already seen and made sure I could find that profile again.

After combing through what I had picked out I began to see some notes that were exactly the same except for a small phrase here and there. Some of the notes were different from the others. I can't explain it well but for example one note that I had briefly flagged said "I am sad and I wanna figure it out on my own" Whereas several notes had this sentence. "My grief is too strong and I need some time." I can't explain what I mean when I say they are two different age groups writing these but there is a difference. Not to mention word for word copies of the sentences in the notes.

As I began to reach out to the people that sent me these notes, I noticed a pattern. All the fake runaway notes are not from birth parents. There are foster parents and parents who adopted the victim. I also noticed that not a single victim was female. I then searched some runaway statistics and it is somewhat rare for a child to run away from his birth parents so this observation was a coincidence. The gender issue on the other hand is definitely a real thing. Girls run away somewhat frequently so whoever is doing this is targeting boys.

I decided to reach out to the individuals housing the victims to see if they were returned. It took some time to get the responses but I found that none of them were returned. This is crazy because most runaways are found after a while. What did they do with him?

The more I thought about what I had found the more I thought that maybe this information could be used by the authorities. I decided to pull together what I had found and organize it. I knew if I brought it to the police someone would believe me. Since it was late I decided to wait for morning.

I came to the police station with all my files and copies of all these notes. When I showed them to the police they chuckled.

"What evidence is there to back this up?"

"This is evidence" I argued.

"Maybe we will look into this but we have a lot of cases that actually matter. Have fun with your conspiracy's"

As I walked out the door I heard " That wasn't cool. I know she had some crazy theories but you can still be polite"

...

I sat on the edge of my bed discouraged. I knew that the police wouldn't fully believe me but I had hoped they would have at least looked into it. They didn't even take any of my files. I didn't expect to be shut down that harshly either. I'm really disappointed right now. I thought that since I found some evidence they might be willing to listen to me this time. Then again if I found some evidence maybe I can find more.