[Black Lazerus]

fucking board


If you’re missing, it helps
to be young, white and female. Or the dog of one of them.
it's fucking sickening.

By Alex Johnson
Reporter
MSNBC
Updated: 5:21 p.m. ET July 23, 2004

Shelton Sanders called his father the night of June 19, 2001, to let him know he was driving home later than usual after helping out with planning for a bachelor party. It was the last his father, an influential county magistrate, ever heard from him.

advertisement
Sanders, 25, was on track to earn his degree from the University of South Carolina in December. Although school was out for the summer, he still made the 82-mile round trip each day from his parents’ home in Rembert to Columbia, where he was a systems manager at the USC medical school. But this night, he never made it home. He remains listed by the Sumter and Richland county sheriffs as a missing person, likely the victim of foul play.

Dail Dinwiddie, 23, was preparing to enter graduate school at USC when she vanished the morning of Sept. 24, 1992. The bouncer at a bar was probably the last person to talk to her, at about 1:30 a.m.; she was last seen walking home from one of Columbia’s popular club districts. She remains listed by the Columbia police as a missing person, likely the victim of foul play.

What is known about Shelton John Sanders must be reconstructed from police reports, interviews and articles in his hometown newspaper, The Sumter Item; no other newspaper has ever written about him, except for passing mentions and the occasional brief roundup note.

IMAGE: David Hazinski, University of Georgia journalism professor
University of Georgia
In a case like Laci Peterson’s, ‘people within the media ... have been embarrassed by how they’re covering this story so much,’ said David Hazinski, a University of Georgia journalism professor

Dail Dinwiddie had already been missing for nine years when Sanders disappeared in June 2001; her case was about as cold as cold cases get. But just since that day — never mind the previous nine years — at least six full-length articles examining her disappearance have appeared in South Carolina’s biggest newspapers, one of them 3,200 words long.

During those same three years, her decade-old story has also been retold by newspapers in Michigan, Minnesota, Georgia, Florida and Wisconsin. It was featured in U.S. News & World Report. CNBC and National Public Radio did pieces.

The attention to Dinwiddie “is kind of mind-boggling,” said Chip Chase, managing editor of the Item, which has regularly published updates on the Sanders investigation.

Two bright, ambitious students at the main state university disappear in the same town, under similar circumstances. One of them becomes “an inescapable name and face,” in the words of The Greenville News. The other is largely forgotten. No one can say why with absolute certainty.

But there is one unavoidable difference between the two cases:

Dail Dinwiddie is a white woman. Shelton Sanders is a black man.

Full story