The case that fell through the cracks

A brother and a niece of a Trumbull County woman missing since 1989 are determined to bring closure to the case.

By ED RUNYAN

VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER

An Arizona woman and a Niles

man have made it their mission to locate Janet Dolgae Henderson, who disappeared from Trumbull County in October 1989.

Annette Madson of Arizona, Janet’s niece, and Jim Henderson of Niles, Janet’s brother, say they are frustrated that no Trumbull County police agency accepted the responsibility to fully investigate the disappearance.

But thanks to help the Warren Police Department provided in March 2008 and more recently, it’s possible that they might know in a few months what happened to her.

Janet, originally from Warren, was 28 and divorced when she left Jim’s home in Weathersfield Township to go to work as a hostess at Alberini’s Restaurant in Niles in October 1989, Madson and Henderson say. She’d be 48 now.

The rule of thumb is that the police department responsible for handling a missing-person report is the one where the person was last seen alive, according to various law-enforcement officials.

But Joe Consiglio, Weathersfield police chief, said Janet’s disappearance was never his department’s case. It was the Warren Police Department’s case, he said, because Janet was last seen leaving the Trumbull County jail, where she had been incarcerated.

Jim Henderson says he believes Janet was in the Warren city jail in 1988 for fighting — not in the Trumbull County jail and not in 1989.

Lt. Gary Vingle of the Warren Police Department said his department never knew about the case until 2008, when Jim Henderson came to the department asking if his sister could be entered into the FBI’s missing-persons database.

The department made out a report and has helped get the woman listed on the database “as a courtesy,” even though the case has technically never been in Warren’s jurisdiction, Vingle said.

As far as anyone knows, the only missing-person report ever made out when Janet disappeared was in January 1990, Jim Henderson said. At the time, Jim talked to a friend, Lt. Norm Olson of the Trumbull County Sheriff’s Department, and Olson said he would make out a report and get Janet listed as a missing person.

Capt. Thomas Stewart of the Trumbull County Sheriff’s Department says he never found any indication that Olson entered Janet into any database as a missing person. If Olson ever made out a paper report, it probably would be impossible to find, Stewart said, because two floods occurred at a storage facility on Panther Drive in Warren in the 1990s that destroyed most of the records kept there.

As for Janet’s having been last seen alive leaving the Trumbull County jail, Stewart said he can find no proof of that nor any evidence that she was ever in the jail.

Regardless of whose case it is, Stewart said, he is working on it with the Warren Police Department. The sheriff’s department regularly works on homicide investigations in which the agency with jurisdiction doesn’t have the manpower to do it on its own, Stewart noted.

Janet’s case, however, seems like it fell through the cracks, family members say.

“It’s almost like I’ve been stonewalled by all these [police] departments,” Jim Henderson said.

“Nobody’s done their job,” Madson agreed. “Warren did it as a courtesy.”

Jim Henderson said he doesn’t know why, but “in the last two years, it [Janet’s disappearance] has really been on my mind.” That’s when he started asking police officials for help. “I want to know where she’s at.”

Madson, originally from Niles, has been helping Jim. Madson is Janet’s niece even though she is only four years younger than Janet. She says Janet was her “best friend.”

Madson and Henderson discovered a while back that an unidentified woman’s body was found in Fulton County, Ga., and a reconstruction expert provided a photograph showing what the woman may have looked like.

The person looked a lot like Janet, Madson and Henderson say.

To have Fulton County officials check to see whether the body might be Janet’s, the family needed for Janet to be declared missing by a police department.

Once the Warren Police Department did that, the next step was for the Warren Police Department to secure DNA from a close female relative of Janet’s that could be used to conduct a mitochondrial DNA test.

By using mitochondrial DNA, authorities in Georgia will be able to determine whether the body is Janet’s, Vingle said.

The reason this works is that all mothers have the same mitochondrial DNA as their offspring because the mitochondria of each new embryo comes from the mother’s egg cell, according to the Web site www.genomics.energy.gov.

Vingle said the DNA sample collected here will be sent to the FBI in Quantico, Va., and in about three months, the results will be sent to Georgia to determine whether it is a match.

Madson said it’s frustrating that the Henderson family has had to push all sorts of buttons to get authorities to help find Janet.

“Why have we as a family had to do all this work when law enforcement should be doing it? They’ve given up on her, but we haven’t given up on her. She’s family,” Madson said.

Even if the body in Georgia is not Janet’s, Madson hopes the publicity of the family’s search might prompt someone to tell police what they know about Janet’s disappearance.

“Maybe it will flip a switch,” she said. “Maybe someone will remember something.”

runyan@vindy.com