Missing persons: Jason Ronald Douglas and other curious vanishing — and reappearing acts
A YOUNG Brisbane man, who went missing 16 years ago and was found alive in England last week, is one of many cases where people simply vanish only to reappear many years later.
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Most people would give up looking for someone after they had been missing for more than 10 years. But the family of Jason Ronald Douglas from Brisbane, who never gave up looking for him after he vanished in England in 2000, were told last week of his whereabouts 16 years after he went missing.
Douglas became homeless after an uncle he was living with in England died, and without a phone or a home address his family found him impossible to track down. His disappearance may have a simple explanation but there have been many similar disappearances and reappearances in history, some with obvious explanations but others are more baffling.
The French poet Arthur Rimbaud had made a major impact on poetry from 1871 to 1874 writing his poems Illuminations and Season In Hell. In 1875 he left France, disappearing from the literary scene and the world he knew. His poems were published in the 1880s as the work of the late Arthur Rimbaud, while Rimbaud journeyed across Africa, Cyprus and the Middle East making a fortune trading coffee, guns and possibly slaves.
A report of his expedition to Ethiopia was published in the journal of France’s National Society of Geography in 1884 but fans of Rimbaud’s poetry seem to have been largely oblivious to what he was up to.
When he returned to France in 1891, for treatment of a knee ailment, people were amazed to find him alive. However, his return to life didn’t last long. He died shortly thereafter from cancer. Although his whereabouts had been known to many, a legend arose in literary circles that he had vanished and mysteriously reappeared.
More baffling, however, is the case of lawyer Jacques Verges. Born in Siam (now Thailand) in 1925, the son of a Vietnamese woman and a French diplomat, Verges had joined the Free French Forces in World War II under de Gaulle. After the war, he became a lawyer who took on challenging and controversial cases. A communist and active in agitating against colonial powers, he became an Algerian citizen in 1962 adopting a new name. But in 1970 he vanished, then mysteriously reappeared in 1979.
He refused to say what he had been doing in that time and later said: “It’s highly amusing that no one, in our modern police state, can figure out where I was for almost 10 years.
It has been conjectured that I spent the time with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, in Palestine, in China and in France. I enjoyed reading my obituaries. They were about a highly gifted young man who had left this world.” After a career defending the likes of war criminal Klaus Barbie and serial killer Charles Sobrahj, Verges died in 2013 without revealing his secret.
In 1970 single mother from Illinois Lula Hood had a fight with her sister Hazel, who had adopted Lula’s children. Due to mental health problems, Lula had been unable to properly care for her children, but during this fight Hazel told Lula to leave and she never came back.
Lula vanished and the family searched for her to no avail. In 1996 a skeleton was found in an abandoned brickyard, across the road from where Lula’s parents lived. Police thought it matched the description of the missing Lula, and the family was informed but the police kept the remains until DNA testing, then in its infancy, could be improved to make a positive identification.
A 2008 DNA test showed that it wasn’t Lula. Police reopened the case. In 2011 they finally tracked her down 2000km away in Florida. Lula was unable to recount how she came to be living in Florida and had only a partial recollection of her family.
Computer science student Petra Pazsitka was only 24 when she disappeared from the northern German city of Braunschweig in 1984. What seemed to seal her fate was when a man confessed to her murder in 1987. She was declared dead in 1989.
Police investigating a burglary at a flat in Dusseldorf in 2015 questioned a 55-year-old woman who revealed that she was living under a false name and she produced documents to prove she was actually Pazsitka. She had deliberately faked her disappearance, but not her death, and had been living without a bank account, driver’s licence or social security card since
she went missing, using cash for all transactions.
It seems that she had simply wanted a different life and vanished so that she could start again.
Originally published as Missing persons: Jason Ronald Douglas and other curious vanishing — and reappearing acts
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