If I Go Missing

Recently I’ve been obsessed with two murder cases.

The first showed up on my timeline when runners started sharing their morning routes and reposting this video in solidarity with a missing woman.

Eliza Fletcher, a 34-year-old mother of 2 was found dead last Monday after disappearing during a morning run. Around 4:30 am the Friday before, a man in an SUV pulled over and forced her inside.

Cleotha Abston has since been charged with her murder.

When the news of her death broke on Tuesday, social media became the usual shitstorm of blame. She was running too early. Her shorts were too revealing. Why hadn’t she shared her location? Rolling Stone reported one particularly harsh tweet that read: “Don’t dress like that exposing yourself, be a little bit more modest so as not to attract that kind of energy.”

Where to begin…

Very few comments, at least in the early moments, were centred around her assailant. The ones that were blamed her wealth as a reason she could have been kidnapped. Others thought her husband was looking for insurance cash.

The reality is much simpler: A man saw an opportunity and took it.

Cleotha Abston is supposed to be in prison. At the age of 16, he kidnapped a woman and was sentenced to 24 years behind bars. He was released in 2020 after serving 85% of his time. Today he is charged with a much more serious crime, though no one is shocked by his escalation.

Abston’s last victim wrote, “I was extremely lucky that I was able to escape from the custody of Cleotha Abston. ... It is quite likely that I would have been killed had I not escaped,”

Eliza Fletcher was not as lucky. Her ‘immodest’ shorts were found discarded near her body.

Since her death, female runners have shared the realities of running as vulnerable people. The serene routes are cloaked in paranoia, the highs are offset by catcalls, and the entire experience is marked with an asterisk that, maybe, I won’t make it home.

The second case on my mind proves that even when we do the “right things”, it can go wrong.

Lily Sullivan was 18 when she kissed Lewis Haines in a nightclub. They left together and walked toward an alleyway. At some point, Lily said “no” to further advances.

While many will harp on Lily for leaving with a stranger, she had an exit strategy. Friends watched her leave the bar, and her mom was waiting around the corner to pick her up. They spoke on the phone briefly just after 2:45 am, and Lily assured her she’d be there in a couple of minutes. The line went dead, and at 3 am, someone awoke to a scream.

Lily’s body was found topless in the pond nearby.

Lewis Haines immediately admitted to the murder. He ran home to his girlfriend (yes girlfriend) and told her he’d killed someone at the pond.

This is a good time to share that Haines is a father.

In the trial, it came out that Lily had threatened to accuse him of rape. He hadn’t taken her “no” for an answer, and she had the wherewithal to recognize that his actions were wrong. She stood up for herself against a much older, much larger man.

In pure self-preservation, he strangled her.

The judge told Haines: “She must have been terrified. An 18-year-old girl all alone in the dark with a powerful man. She was entirely at your mercy and you, Lewis Haines, showed her none.”

Lily’s case is depressingly reflective of what we already understand to be true: saying no can be just as dangerous as not saying anything at all.

One of the details I grapple with most is that Eliza and Lily were highly aware of the dangers women face. Lily Sullivan posted about the hypocrisy in Sarah Everard’s case. She cared that everyone felt safe walking home.

Eliza Fletcher listened to a popular true crime podcast, Crime Junkie, to which I also subscribe.

Crime Junkie has a saying that I love: Be weird. Be rude. Stay alive. The phrase means that your well-being comes ahead of manners. Women are raised to be unassuming and polite, and Crime Junkie urges us to abolish those norms in favour of safety. You don’t go along with something when your gut tells you not to. You don’t help strange men on the street. You drive past the hitchhiker. You ignore the guilt of being rude in order to mitigate risk.

Be weird. Be rude. Stay alive.

Crime Junkie also advocates for keeping If I Go Missing Folders with key details that could help an investigation in the worst-case scenario. It’s the next level up from having a plan and “texting when you get home.” In it, you’d share details like passwords, fingerprints, medical history, frequently visited places, typical commuting routes, close relationships, identifying marks, and photos.

It’s easy to think that nothing bad will happen to us. Statistically, we reason, it will be someone else.

Random abducting is rare. Women out for a run face much greater dangers from traffic than abduction; however, the fear is ever-present.

In our paranoia, we imagine how we’d get away from an attack. We like to think we’re smart enough, more alert, or faster than those who’ve been hurt before us. We would say “no” earlier, we wouldn’t run that early, or we would avoid the alley altogether.

When we come across sketchy interactions, we want to believe that we’re overreacting. All that pent-up stress is surely impairing our judgement.

The reality is that, when it does happen, it happens to regular women.

I remember moments on my way to early-morning barista shifts where I felt like it could be me on the news. I passed men lingering on the sidewalk, groups of drunk frat boys stumbling home in my path, and, in one incident that left me sobbing on the street, a van pulled up next to me and cruised beside me for a whole block.

As someone who writes about victim advocacy, you’d expect me to come out guns blazing - 911 already dialled, location sharing on, and fearless in the face of perceived danger.

What the news fails to recognize is the range of these moments women experience on a daily basis. At what point, precisely, does it go too far? Sometimes being weird and rude feels unwarranted. When are you willing to put yourself in potentially greater danger by causing a scene?

You might still end up like Lily Sullivan.

To understand what goes through a victim’s head is to understand that we live our whole lives as prey. Every running route, late-night hookup, or vow of silence is a calculated risk. Every time I quietly pass a catcaller or watch a man stare down women at the bar, I’m assessing what will happen if I did get involved. Whenever I leave my house, I’m thinking about what I need to do to come home again.

When your world is broken into degrees of safe and unsafe, you see these stories as more than what went wrong. You acknowledge all of the ways these women did try to protect themselves. Lily had given herself an exit plan. Eliza had established a secure routine.

The problem isn’t that these women failed to asses their surroundings accurately - I guarantee you they did - the problem is that they met men who also recognized them as prey.

So, if I go missing, don’t blame me.

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