Unread Book Challenge: Paulides, Missing 411: Western US & Canada

[truepenny]

Missing 411: Western United States and Canada by David Paulides

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

[library]

Compilation of missing persons cases, with Paulides' commentary and portentous hints of what he won't say he thinks is going on. I have questions and observations.

1. What does "dying of exposure" entail? I'm sure it depends on the location (hypothermia vs. heat stroke, for example), but what exactly is presumed to be going on? (That's not a question aimed at Paulides; I just realized that I don't actually know. ETA: I got an excellent answer from a reader over on my patreon; death from exposure is what happens when the human body becomes unable to maintain its core temperature, either due to cold or heat.)

2. These books badly need a control study: something with which to compare the disappearances Paulides claims are highly unusual.

3. He makes a big deal out of the times missing persons are found, dead or alive, in areas searchers have been over multiple times. But I know from reading about the Green River murders that that does happen, even with searchers who are very careful and very thoroughg. So again, how unusual is this really?

4. Human beings are incredibly bad at estimating time, which Paulides never acknowledges. So when someone says it was only a "few minutes" between the time they last checked on their child and the time they looked up and found the child missing . . . that could mean almost anything. (Which is not a slam against the parents: human beings are just not as good as we think we are at estimating the passage of time.) And that makes a difference in just how long the child was gone before the search started and thus in how surprising/unusual it is that the child was not found.

5. He uses the word "coincidence" when what he means is "alleged coincidence that I think is a correlation," and he has NO sense of when a correlation is significant and when it isn't. Partly this is because he's trying for the "even the most insignificant detail may be of critical importance" routine," but partly it's just that he can't tell. E.g., two women disappeared from the vicinity of Lander, Montana, one in 1997 and one in 2005: "Ann and Amy's disappearances had the common elements that they were both alone, both disappeared on Loop Road, both disappeared in the Shoshone National Forest, both of their names started with A, and their first names only had three letters" (252). Now, there may be no important correlations between the disappearances of Amy Bechtel and Ann Wagner, but Paulides seems completely unaware of his own reductio ad absurdam.

6. Logical fallacies. One example, also from Amy Bechtel's case: "If Amy's watch was in the riverbed, Amy must have been in the riverbed" (251). That's just patently untrue.

7. Dude cannot put a narrative together, and with as much practice as he's giving himself, that says maybe more than just practice is involved in learning to tell stories.

8. "I've always stated that I believe people are more careful traveling alone than traveling in pairs" (157). Saying you believe something to be true is not the same as proving that it is true.

9. He has this conspiracy theory about the National Park Service. I would very much like to hear the NPS' side of Paulides' FOIA requests. Because, "Maybe the answer to this complex equation is that the NPS does not want the public to know how dangerous it is trekking alone in the backcountry of our national parks" (161) , when the NPS goes to a great deal of trouble to try to persuade the public that it is dangerous (Srsly, ppl, BEARS. How hard is this to understand?), is not a terribly plausible theory.

10. "Understand that I didn't set out to locate stories that supported a hypothesis; the hypothesis was developed after I finished investigating the cases. I also didn't search for stories that mimicked each other. There was already an overwhelming amount of data that seemed to be cut from the same mold. Stories were not selected basked on their location; instead, they were chosen because they fit my criteria" (xviii)

A. He says repeatedly that he doesn't have a hypothesis, but I guess we can call that as a lie.

B. "Having a hypothesis" and "having criteria" are the same thing.

C. There's a term for this, and that term is CONFIRMATION BIAS.

11. "They were in clusters, meaning their disappearances could be loosely grouped together by location, time and type of occurrence [. . .] Understand that clusters can also include people who went missing hundreds of miles apart if the facts of the disappearances are similar" (x). Translation: "cluster" means whatever I want it to mean.

12. He's so focused on his hypothesis that he won't admit he has that he routinely fails to consider more mundane explanations.

13. He repeatedly insists that small children could not possibly have traveled the distance at which they were found in the time in which they were gone, but he also includes this detail in the case of Lorraine Smith, who disappeared at the age of 2 in 1950 from Lake Edith in Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada: "After several days searchers did something quite intelligent: they brought Lorraine's twin brother into the forest to see how quickly and efficiently he could move on the ground. The article stated that they were surprised how easily he made his way through the forest" (305). But Paulides doesn't seem to recognize there might be a wider application of this demonstration.

Lorraine Smith, like Amy Bechtel, was never found.



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Comments

[redbird]

Point 5 caught my eye in part because he doesn't seem to realize that he may be counting the same thing twice: "on Loop Road" and "in Shoshone National Forest" is likely to be "they both disappeared on this same n-mile length of road that happens to be in Shoshone National Forest." Then again, someone who apparently is hypothesizing a killer who starts by identifying women with three-letter names starting in A either has no idea what "logic" means, or has a hypothesis that calls for a lot more investigation, like, Would the killer have found his victims by looking in the same area's phone book, or in unrelated high school yearbooks, or what? and Is Paulides sure there are no otherwise-relevant disappearances from that area of women named Sue or Alison, or men named Art, that he is eliminating because they don't fit all of {name starting in A, three-letter name, and female}?