0:00

You're

0:02

listening to Radio Diaries and this is Nellie Gillis

0:04

with producers Alisa Escarce and Micah

0:06

Hazel. Hey! This is our producer

0:08

takeover. Sorry, Jo. Sorry, Jo. Before

0:11

we start today's show, we wanted to let you know that right

0:14

now is Radiotopia's annual fundraiser. And

0:16

for the occasion, our team wanted to come and tell

0:19

you a few of the favorite things that we've heard from

0:21

the network recently. Micah, you go first. So

0:24

I recently listened to the Stoop episode,

0:26

Don't Call Me Auntie, which is basically

0:29

breaking down the word auntie. I use

0:31

it all the

0:31

time. A lot of people of color use it all the

0:33

time. It's like a very endearing

0:35

term. And this

0:38

episode really just kind of broke

0:40

down the ways in which it's actually

0:42

pretty problematic.

0:45

I think something this show just really does well is

0:47

it takes these just everyday things in

0:49

my life or everyday things in black culture and

0:51

it kind of like flips them on the head a little bit

0:54

while also just feeling like a very casual

0:57

conversation between friends. Awesome.

0:59

How many people in your life do you call auntie? Oh my

1:02

God. Like pretty

1:04

much anyone who's nice to me. How

1:08

about you, Alisa? So I recently

1:10

loved this episode. It was a collaboration

1:12

between two of my favorite Radiotopia shows,

1:14

Articles of Interest and Wait For It. They

1:17

did this story about plus size clothes

1:19

that was the perfect combo of personal

1:21

stories and really fascinating fashion history that

1:23

I had never thought about. I'll

1:25

never be able to look at those shoulder cutouts on T-shirts

1:27

the same way. I heard that

1:29

episode too and I definitely have shoulder cutout

1:31

shirts that I don't know whether I'll ever wear again. So

1:35

I just listened to this Ear Hustle episode about the largest women's prison

1:37

in the world. And

1:39

they interview like five women and one of them talks

1:41

about how before she was incarcerated she hopped

1:44

freight trains for years. But

1:46

then there's this beautiful moment where she

1:48

almost like longs for the sound of trains and

1:51

there's this freight train outside the prison

1:53

and she says she can still hear like the

1:55

engines from like a mile away. And I

1:57

just thought it was like one of those rare interviews that you want

1:59

to take.

1:59

tell everyone about. So

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if you want to support work like this from passionate creators

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visit radiotopia.fm slash

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donate to give today. Our goal

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is to reach 1,000 donors and if

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you donate you'll get a link to a special Radiotopia

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mixtape.

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I've heard it it's really good. That's

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radiotopia.fm slash donate.

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Thanks for supporting our stories.

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This episode of Radio Diaries is brought to you by

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3:06

Radiotopia. From PRX.

3:15

From Radio Diaries I'm Joe Richman and

3:17

this is the final episode of the Unmarked

3:20

Graveyard. A series about people

3:22

buried in America's largest public cemetery.

3:25

The lives they lived and the people they left

3:27

behind.

3:29

There

3:33

were thousands of questions. Where's

3:35

his family? Where's

3:37

his people? Neil Harris was last

3:40

seen in Inwood, New

3:40

York on December 12, 2014. The playwright, novelist

3:45

and author of Happy Island, Miss Dawn

3:47

Powell. And that found you, she

3:49

found us and we're here. And

3:51

now we know you are.

3:55

Back in 1995 Lamont Dotton was 21 years

3:59

old and a freshman. at Queens College when

4:01

one evening he didn't come home.

4:04

Within 48 hours his mother was at

4:06

a local police precinct trying to report him

4:08

missing. His name was added to

4:10

a pile of almost 20,000 cases

4:13

that the NYPD's missing person squad

4:15

was supposed to be investigating and the

4:18

Montz case fell through the cracks. This

4:21

is a story about the New York City Police Department

4:24

and a woman searched to find out what happened to her

4:26

son.

4:28

It took me 30 days to

4:30

get him officially reported

4:32

missing. My

4:34

name is Dr. Anita Fowler and

4:37

Lamont Dutton was my son who went missing

4:40

in 1995. I

4:42

remember walking in to the

4:44

precinct there

4:46

were four room of people scurvy

4:48

around while I was talking to a man who's

4:51

being very nonchalant with me. Now

4:54

here I'm a mother trying to report my

4:56

one and only child missing

4:59

and no matter what I said he says no

5:01

take my word for it, be home soon you know.

5:04

He was considered an adult.

5:07

There was a Hispanic lady listening

5:10

and she came over she said I'll

5:12

take your report I'm not sure how

5:14

far I can get it and

5:17

then I called at least twice

5:19

a week at night because that's when they would

5:21

work the shift from missing persons.

5:24

One day turned into two days and two days

5:26

turned into three days and unbelievably months.

5:29

I

5:31

definitely remember his mom

5:33

being very persistent.

5:35

My name is Cameron Brown. I was a detective

5:38

in the missing persons apartment from 1997 to 2002.

5:40

She would constantly

5:44

call the missing persons if you want to know

5:46

what was going on today what was happening.

5:49

But they refused to meet

5:51

with me and just

5:52

said there's no update or we have a new detective

5:55

on it.

5:56

The case kept opening the closings and

5:59

And one time I showed up and his picture wasn't even

6:02

on the board.

6:03

So I said, how are you searching for my son if his

6:06

picture's not here?

6:08

The missing person's squad at that

6:11

time was in a

6:13

state of disrepair.

6:15

There was no work being done

6:17

on cases. Record keeping

6:20

wasn't good. I'm

6:22

Philip Mahoney. I was the

6:24

commanding officer of the missing person squad

6:27

in the New York City Police Department from 1998 to 2000.

6:32

The amount of case law that each

6:34

individual detective had there was amazing.

6:38

This was 10, 11 detectives

6:40

with between 20 and 40 cases apiece.

6:44

And there was not a lot of investigation. They

6:46

didn't have vehicles for us to actually

6:48

go out and do the interviews. It was

6:51

just mostly phone calls at that point.

6:54

You know, hi, this is Detective Brown. You

6:56

made a report on someone's own missing. Did they come home?

6:59

Okay, thank you.

7:01

I remember looking at this spreadsheet

7:03

of open missing person cases. It

7:06

just went on for like 100 pages. Someone

7:09

with an adult missing son, that

7:12

would be low on the totem pole.

7:18

This article is from the Daily News, November

7:21

21st, 1995. Carlos

7:25

resident, Arnita Fowler, hadn't had time

7:28

to prepare for Thanksgiving. She's

7:30

been to busy checking city hospitals,

7:32

the morgue and jails, and a desperate search for

7:34

her 21-year-old son. I

7:38

was known as a one-woman search party.

7:41

I created my own press conferences.

7:44

I learned how to write press releases on the fly.

7:47

I would look in every

7:49

homeless person's face as

7:52

I walked the streets.

7:55

I go, weren't that

7:55

crazy? But

7:58

I know that I could not live the rest of my life.

7:59

life not knowing

8:02

if he was out there.

8:07

I was 17 when I had

8:08

my son and everything I

8:11

did evolved around him.

8:13

He was a

8:15

very loving, very loving son.

8:18

He had that spirit of happiness

8:20

with them, you know what I mean? Like carefree.

8:23

We were always together.

8:25

And I know he was saying, my mom's going to find

8:27

me.

8:30

I became lieutenant and commanding officer

8:32

of the missing person squad in 1998. Then

8:35

I immediately tried to organize the missing

8:38

person squad. And so we appointed a couple

8:40

of people to go through that list, the

8:43

hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of active

8:45

cases that had accumulated

8:48

over the years, page by page,

8:50

name by name, and find out what happened to

8:52

these people that the missing person squad

8:54

never followed up on.

8:56

It felt good. I was actually

8:58

out doing investigations. And we

9:01

had two or three cases from the 50s. And

9:04

when you really go back and still speak to parents, that

9:07

same pain of their child being missing was still

9:10

there.

9:11

They would start with very basic checks, fingerprint

9:13

checks and so on. We did find

9:15

a lot of people through routine checks.

9:19

I spent four years

9:21

looking for my son. And

9:24

then this one particular night, I was so

9:26

frustrated that

9:29

I picked up the phone in frustration

9:31

and

9:33

called. And the same man who

9:36

had been telling me no, it was the same guy. He

9:39

said, sure, we'll meet you.

9:42

And when it came, my

9:44

house was full. And it

9:46

was a lady officer.

9:48

She said

9:49

they had discovered that they hadn't dotted every I

9:51

across every T. Okay.

9:53

So I'm reading from a missing

9:56

person's report. The report says that

9:58

the missing person was found. And

10:00

the FBI matched it with an arrest that

10:02

was made.

10:23

He was arrested for a stolen

10:25

car when he was in high school.

10:28

The NYPD never followed up

10:30

for results of that identification

10:34

until 1994 years later.

10:37

On this date, the deceased was identified as

10:39

a mud dot through fingerprints. In

10:43

view of the facts stated above, the undersigned recommends

10:45

that this case be marked closed.

10:49

I couldn't imagine that

10:52

this was the outcome

10:54

after four years. I

10:58

don't know how

10:59

he died. I

11:01

do not believe it was suicide

11:04

and there was no book for Strahm,

11:07

nothing indicating foul play.

11:12

This is a paper that

11:14

shows where my son was buried

11:16

at in Hartzelland. There's

11:19

no name, it just says Mel.

11:23

To bury my son in a place

11:26

as though he had no one,

11:28

as though he had no one, and I'm

11:30

in your face, but

11:33

he was somebody's child. And

11:36

it shows a date of death

11:38

and the day he was exhumed four

11:41

years later.

11:43

I remember opening the paper and seeing

11:45

the picture of the body and the horse drawing carrots

11:47

going around. Queens. I

11:50

was like, wow, we had that case, look. And

11:53

we're all looking at it. I

11:56

just can't imagine any of my children

11:58

not coming home. home. We're

12:01

not knowing what happened to him.

12:04

This is the Daily News September 21st, 1999. Student

12:10

laid to rest. Four years

12:13

after being buried in a papa's grave, a missing

12:15

Queens student was finally given a proper

12:17

burial yesterday. And

12:21

it was a perfect funeral.

12:23

He was drawn by two

12:26

horses and a

12:27

carriage.

12:29

And Casketed stuff is

12:31

all right,

12:32

like the horses.

12:34

It is what I believe

12:36

that he deserved nothing but the best. I

12:40

needed memories to be something

12:42

that you could reflect on who

12:44

he was, the

12:46

prince that he was to me. President

12:52

Lamont is now buried at the Calverton

12:55

National Cemetery. I just

12:57

went there yesterday and put flowers. I just took pictures

12:59

there.

13:02

There are seasons of my

13:03

feelings that shift. One

13:07

major shift was when I realized he's

13:09

been gone longer than he's been with me.

13:12

But I can, as a mother, still

13:15

smell what he smelled like, still hear what he

13:17

laughed like. And I'm looking at his picture. I

13:19

can imagine what he's actually sounding

13:21

like. So it's just really

13:25

people just don't disappear.

13:32

Following years of advocacy by Fowler,

13:34

New York State passed a law in 2016

13:37

requiring the police to expedite searches

13:39

for missing adults. It's called Lamont

13:41

Dutton's law. In recent

13:43

years, advances in fingerprinting and DNA

13:46

technology have improved the identification

13:48

of unnamed bodies in New York City. This

13:54

is the last episode in our series, The Unmarked

13:56

Graveyard, stories from Heart Island. When

14:00

working on this series, Heart Island has been mostly

14:02

off limits, as it has been for 150

14:04

years. But

14:06

today, we are able to report that Heart Island

14:09

is officially opening to the general public.

14:11

Tours begin this week.

14:14

When we first started thinking about this project, I kind

14:16

of imagined it as a series of audio obituaries

14:19

for people who never got one. But

14:22

each story became more than that. More

14:24

complicated, more mysterious, more

14:26

surprising. In the end,

14:28

this series isn't just about individuals

14:31

buried on Heart Island. It's about the

14:33

people who went looking for them, and the people

14:35

who remember them. Because

14:37

once the body is gone, all that's left

14:39

are the stories. Our

14:45

story about Lamont Daughton was produced by Elisa

14:48

Scarse. The producers behind

14:50

our series, the Unmarked Graveyard, are

14:52

Nellie Gillis, Micah Hazel, Elisa Scarse,

14:55

and myself. All the stories were edited

14:57

by Ben Shapiro and Deborah George. Our NPR

15:00

editor was Matt Ozug. Sound mixing

15:02

by Ben Shapiro and Mitra Kiboli. Marketing

15:04

and development by Lena Engelstein. Theme

15:07

music is by Matthias Bossi and Stellwagen

15:09

Symphonette. Thanks to Melinda

15:11

Hunt and the Heart Island Project. And thanks

15:13

to our broadcast partner NPR's All Things

15:15

Considered. We're proud members of

15:18

Radiotopia from PRX, a network

15:20

of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported

15:22

podcasts. You can hear them all at

15:24

radiotopia.fm. Radiodeyeres

15:27

has support from the National Endowment for the Humanities,

15:30

the Lilly Auchincloss Foundation, New

15:32

York City's Department of Cultural Affairs, and

15:34

for listeners like you. I'm

15:37

Joe Richmond of Radiodeyeres. Thanks

15:39

for listening.

15:59

you