Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
Welcome to Porchlight International for the Missing & Unidentified. We hope you enjoy your visit.


You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free.


Join our community!


If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features:

Username:   Password:
Add Reply
Dreher,Barbara Jean August 12,1984; Washington D.C
Topic Started: Sep 5 2007, 12:48 AM (782 Views)
oldies4mari2004
Unregistered

Barbara Jean Dreher
Missing since August 12, 1984 from Washington D.C
Classification: Endangered Missing



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Vital Statistics

Age at Time of Disappearance: 39 years old
Height and Weight at Time of Disappearance: 5'2"; 130 lbs.
Distinguishing Characteristics: Black female. Brown eyes; black hair. Medium complexion.
Clothing: Green shirt and white slacks.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Circumstances of Disappearance
Barbara Dreher, a secretary with the D.C. public school system for 15 years, was last seen by her daughter on August 12. Dreher, a mother of five, drove to the home of her 19-year-old daughter about 5 p.m. on August 12. Dreher dropped off her 6- and 9-year-old sons at the daughter's home, saying she was going to pick up some money and would be back shortly. Dreher then drove away in a 1980 burgundy Oldsmobile Cutlass and has not been seen since.
Dreher was not reported missing until nine days later, as she sometimes stayed for long periods of time with her estranged husband in Hillcrest Heights.
Dreher's car was found abandoned outside a Southwest apartment building. Foul play is suspected.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Investigators
If you have any information concerning this case, please contact:

Detective James Trainum
Violent Crime Case Review Project
Violent Criminal Apprehension Program/ViCAP
202-727-5037

NCIC Number:
Please refer to this number when contacting any agency with information regarding this case.

Source Information:
ViCAP
Washington Post



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quote Post Goto Top
 
Ell
Member Avatar
Heart of Gold
[ *  *  * ]
http://z13.invisionfree.com/PorchlightUSA/...showtopic=15382
Ell

Only after the last tree has been
cut down;
Only after the last fish has been
caught;
Only after the last river has been
poisoned;
Only then will you realize
that money cannot be eaten.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Ell
Member Avatar
Heart of Gold
[ *  *  * ]
DC Site:
http://mpdc.dc.gov/mpdc/frames.asp?doc=/mp....pdf&group=1533
Ell

Only after the last tree has been
cut down;
Only after the last fish has been
caught;
Only after the last river has been
poisoned;
Only then will you realize
that money cannot be eaten.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
monkalup
Member Avatar
The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
[ *  *  * ]
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/local/cr...n-85571247.html

D.C. mom waved goodbye, was never seen again
By: Scott McCabe
Examiner Staff Writer
March 1, 2010
Barbara Jean Dreher (Courtesy photo)

The last time anybody saw Barbara Jean Dreher was Aug. 12, 1984, when the 39-year-old waved goodbye after dropping off two of her young sons at her adult daughter's home in Southeast Washington.

Twenty-five years later, the disappearance of the D.C. schools secretary and mother of five remains unsolved. Police are hoping someone comes forward with information to help with the investigation. Dreher's is one of the cases featured on the cold case playing cards handed to D.C. Jail inmates.

The day she disappeared, Dreher told her children she was going to get some money and would be back shortly. She never returned.

Dreher wasn't reported missing until nine days after she vanished because she had often stayed with her estranged husband in Hillcrest Heights, family members told police.

According to police investigating the disappearance, three weeks after she vanished, one of Dreher's children spotted a man driving her 1980 burgundy Oldsmobile Cutlass. Family members trailed the vehicle to a Southwest apartment building, where the man parked the car and got out.

The family quickly notified police. Officers responded and questioned the man. The man denied driving the car and claimed not to know Dreher. Officers found a ski mask, rope and gloves inside the car, but the man was not charged with a crime.

Eight months later, a man was charged with an alleged kidnapping and rape in the same building where Dreher's car had been parked.

Dreher was described by police as a black woman, 5 feet 2 inches tall, 130 pounds, with brown eyes, black hair and a medium complexion.

Anyone with information about this case is asked to call the Metropolitan Police Department's Command Information Center at 202-727-9099. Callers wishing to remain anonymous may call 888-919-CRIME.

D.C. police offer a reward of up to $25,000 to anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the person or people responsible for any homicide committed in the District of Columbia.

smccabe@washingtonexaminer.com

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/local/cr...l#ixzz0hhRa1hqD
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Begood
Member Avatar
Advanced Member
[ *  *  * ]
In 1984 she went missing. Could the skeletal remains found in a D.C. apartment crawl space in April belong to this mother?
By Peter Hermann
June 21 at 6:00 AM
Email the author

Gwendolyn Bell, 75, left, sister of Barbara Jean Dreher, a public school secretary who went missing from DC in the summer of 1984, and Anthony Blalock, 56, her nephew, who is Dreher's son, talk about Dreher at Bell's family home in Accokeek, MD, June 3, 2018. (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Post)
Anthony Blalock had not seen his mother in two weeks when he spotted her burgundy Oldsmobile. It was on a street in Southwest Washington. A man he didn’t know was driving it.

It was 1984 and Barbara Jean Dreher was missing. Blalock, then 23, followed the car as it pulled up to an apartment building and watched the man go inside. He asked a friend riding with him to stay behind as he rushed to a nearby home and called police.

The police found some disturbing clues: a ski mask, rope and gloves in the trunk of the Oldsmobile. They questioned the man but did not file charges. There was no sign of 39-year-old Dreher then, and there has been none since.

For more than three decades, the disappearance of the mother of five has left her family in a kind of emotional limbo. At first, hopeful she would come home, relatives celebrated Dreher’s birthdays with a family gathering and a cake, though they used no candles. Eventually some began to accept Dreher as dead, but to others that felt like giving up on their loved one.


Blalock, who became a father himself, then a grandfather, eventually became resigned to the idea he would never know his mother’s fate.

Then, this spring, a D.C. detective reached out after a construction crew discovered skeletal remains of a woman in an apartment building crawl space in Southeast. During a search, police found the remains of two more women in a shallow grave behind the building. At least two were AfricanAmerican. Two had been shot; the other beaten.


Remains found last week on a property along Wayne Place SE are seen on the phone of Adan Escobar on Monday April 30, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Courtesy Photo)
Authorities are now using DNA comparisons to try to determine the victims’ identities, and Dreher’s case is one they are looking at. The remains were found less than a mile from the apartment complex where Blalock had followed his mother’s car.

[Skeletal remains found in Southeast D.C. unnerve residents]

D.C. police investigate thousands of missing person cases each year, but most people return home or are soon found. Of the nearly 24,000 people reporting missing since 2012, 99 percent of the cases have been solved.

But some families endure years with no answers. The Cold Case squad, which takes on old, hard-to-solve cases, is investigating 18 missing person cases since 1983, among them the disappearance of Barbara Dreher.


Now, her son is waiting for an answer he’s not sure he wants to hear.

“I want closure, but I don’t want her body to be one of those bodies under that d*mn ground,” Blalock said. “I’m just saying, I don’t want her to have died like that, under some d*mn building.”

At first, nobody was alarmed
Dreher grew up with her sister and two brothers on Kenilworth Avenue, in the Parkside neighborhood of Northeast Washington. Their parents were estranged and they were largely raised by their grandparents. Early recollections were of neighborhood schools and apple and pear trees in the back yard.

“It was sort of like the country part of D.C.,” recalled Dreher’s sister, Gwendolyn Bell. “Some people had chickens. It was fun.”

[Police seek DNA to help identify remains]

Bell married, had children and went on to work dispatching emergency calls for D.C. police. Dreher worked for over a decade in a secretarial job at Moten Elementary School in Southeast.

The evening of August 12, 1984, Dreher dropped off her 6- and 9-year-old sons with her older daughter. She said she would return soon, but didn’t.


At first nobody was alarmed. Dreher was separated from her husband, but often visited him at his Hillcrest Heights home, sometimes staying for days.

After nine days without word, though, Blalock tried to track his mother down. He called her husband, who said she had not come to his house. Blalock reported his mother missing to police. Officers assigned the case number 84-411927.

A few weeks later, he saw her Oldsmobile.

Relatives believe police did not initially take the case seriously. In 1984, the drug of choice in the city was PCP and, while overall crime was down, homicides in the District were edging upward.

The family learned only later that the man in Dreher’s car had recently been released from prison, where he had served time in the killings of two people. While Blalock did not recognize the man, it is possible he knew the family. Police told Bell that the man had worked in maintenance for D.C. public schools. Dreher’s husband was a maintenance supervisor in the school system.

Bell said it was hard to go to work at police headquarters. The detectives, she said, “were not doing what they were supposed to be doing, and every time I would see them and tell them something, they would not check it out.”

The man in the car
In 2007, James L. Trainum, a 17-year veteran of the D.C. police homicide squad, tried to help the family. The now-retired detective had been assigned to organize a messy filing system. He pulled together case files of murders and missing persons, hoping to force new attention on forgotten cases.


A family photograph of Jean Dreher, a public school secretary who went missing from DC in the summer of 1984, taken shortly before her disappearance.(photo family courtesy) (Astrid Riecken)
Trainum spent hours trying to find the file on Dreher’s disappearance. He went to the 7th District station and plowed through records, looking for references to a rope and a ski mask. “Nobody entered the property into the books,” Trainum said. His search turned up nothing.


Dreher’s family believe that had police retained the evidence, it’s possible today’s advances in technology would provide a vital DNA link or other clues linking the disappearance to the man Blalock had chased down. They worry that any chances at criminal charges might have been squandered.

“How do you just throw away the mask, the rope?” said Bell. “How do you throw all that stuff away when someone is missing?”

A D.C. police spokesman confirmed the original file and missing persons report was lost but did not offer an explanation. Detectives have restarted the file and written a new report, reviving the 1984 tracking number. The spokesman, Dustin Sternbeck, said only: “No additional updates are available at this time.”

Trainum believes the evidence police had back in 1984 warranted an intense investigation of the man Blalock had found with his mother’s car, who also had her car keys with a blue canister of mace attached.

The man also had a violent record. When he was 18, he had pleaded guilty to killing a 23-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl in Southwest Washington, but was spared a lengthy prison sentence because he cooperated with prosecutors. Both were repeatedly stabbed by four men who took turns stabbing the victims. The girl was raped by three of the men before she was killed.

A year after Dreher vanished, police charged him with abducting a woman from a bus stop in Northeast and raping her in his apartment. Those charges were later dismissed.

“I don’t think they should have let him go so easily, especially with his record,” Trainer said. “Nobody connected the dots. Nobody said, ‘Here’s a guy with the missing woman’s car. Let’s check his background.’ It would be doing the bare minium.”

A final chance
Over time, the celebration held on Dreher’s birthday turned into an annual family cookout. Bell raised her sister’s children; two of whom died over the years.

Blalock, who works in the federal government, said his mother’s disappearance weighs on him but “as time goes on, you have to keep moving on.”

He remembers her as devoted to her children but a strict disciplinarian. Once, he recalled, she scolded him for his dirty clothes by cutting his pants into shorts, leaving him only one pair. The punishment was short lived. She promptly took him shopping.

Blalock said he knows his mother didn’t run off. “As much as she had done for us, there is no way she would have left us,” he said.

[Missing woman’s picture added to playing cards used by inmates]

He still can recite the license plate number of his mother’s Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. And he has never returned to the apartment building where he last saw the car.

Mementos, too, have been lost to the family. Police who initially investigated the disappearance also took Dreher’s personal items for evidence — her diary, letters and photos, the family said. Now they’re gone, apparently purged by the department clearing space for more pressing cases.

In 2009, the D.C. jail put Dreher’s photo story on the back of playing cards distributed to inmates, hoping to catch a break in the case. She was the King of Hearts. No tips came in.

Bell said she felt particularly close to Dreher because they were close in age. Two of their brothers have died; she is the only sibling left.

Without knowing for sure whether Dreher is dead or alive, Bell said, she cannot mourn her sister.

“What if she comes back?” said Bell, who is 75. “Having a funeral or any type of closure like that would not be appropriate.”

The bones may be the last chance for the family to learn what happened.

“Those bodies,” Bell said, her voice trailing off. “They make me think about her.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/in-1984-she-went-missing-could-the-skeletal-remains-found-in-a-dc-apartment-crawl-space-in-april-belong-to-this-mother/2018/06/20/37f3955c-68ea-11e8-9e38-24e693b38637_story.html?utm_term=.280457e26b24
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
ZetaBoards - Free Forum Hosting
Fully Featured & Customizable Free Forums
Learn More · Sign-up for Free
« Previous Topic · Missing Persons 1984 · Next Topic »
Add Reply