Wednesday, May 07, 2008

'Wings of Protection' helps families of missing persons

By CYNTHIA HUBERT
BEE STAFF WRITER

last updated: November 02, 2007 12:23:22 PM

This story was published in The Modesto Bee on Feb. 18, 2003.

Nearly every day since Christmas, Laci Peterson's lovely face has smiled from the front sections of newspapers and appeared on the evening news, and Donna Raley cannot help but feel cheated.

"What about Dena?" she asks, her voice rising with emotion. "Everyone knows about Laci and Chandra and the women who went missing in Yosemite. But what about my daughter? No one knows about Dena!"

Like Laci and Chandra Levy and Carole Sund and Julie Sund and Silvina Pelosso, Dena Raley McCluskey is a woman with Modesto ties who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Unlike the other missing women, she never became a household name.

Dena Raley's name has appeared in The Bee 23 times since she disappeared. By comparison, Laci Peterson's name has appeared 116 times. And Raley insists police never gave the matter proper attention after Dena vanished in October 1999. Dena would turn 40 this year.

"What is it about these other people that makes them so much more valuable than my child?" Raley, 55, asks of the cases that have captured the public's attention.

Answers do not come easily.

For a while, Raley nearly drowned in her anger and pain. Then she channeled them into a mission. Last year, she and Chandra Levy's mother, Susan, formed Wings of Protection, a support group for people with missing loved ones.

"I realized that these families were hurting as much as I was," Raley says. "Of course I want to find my daughter. But I care about these families, too."

Raley, a nurse, runs the group out of her spacious home in a gated community in Modesto. Wings of Protection has 25 members who attend regular meetings and get practical advice, emotional support and grief counseling. The group also operates a Web site and holds vigils in an effort to educate people about missing men, women and children throughout the country.

According to federal authorities, about 200,000 people turn up missing every year. Most, like Dena Raley McCluskey, a green-eyed slip of a woman who weighed less than 100 pounds, disappear quietly and are quickly forgotten by all but those who loved them.

Dena, 36 years old and divorced, vanished on Oct. 10, 1999, after spending part of the weekend with a boyfriend with whom she had a volatile relationship.

Donna, who is Dena's stepmother but raised her as her own daughter, and her husband, Bill, Dena's father, both believe the boyfriend, Mark Keough, was involved in her disappearance. A Modesto police sergeant said that Keough, like Laci Peterson's husband, Scott, has neither been identified as a suspect nor ruled out.

Three days after Dena disappeared, police found her car on Oakdale Road in northeast Modesto, a few blocks from Keough's house. Police searched his car and home, and found some of Dena's jewelry, but have never been able to gather enough evidence to arrest anyone.

Keough, who has a history of domestic violence charges filed by Dena and other women, asserted his innocence and his love for Dena in a conversation taped by police after her disappearance. The Raleys have had no contact with him for more than two years, and he could not be reached for comment.

Bill and Donna Raley have lost hope that Dena is still alive, but they want her remains recovered and her case solved.

"That would end some of the mental torment," says Donna Raley. "Her case got dumped onto a table somewhere, put in a drawer or a cabinet and forgotten about. That's the most frustrating thing."

Police insist that they have investigated the case thoroughly and have no intention of giving up on it. But they say Dena's case is complicated, in part because she led a "risky" lifestyle in the months and years before her disappearance.

Those risks include heavy drinking, associating with people with criminal backgrounds, and filing and then recanting domestic violence charges, says Al Carter, the Modesto police sergeant who supervises the department's Crimes Against Persons unit.

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