If you want a primer on sick celebrity obsession, the case of Nancy Guthrie is a good place to start.
The media fixation on the missing mother of NBC-TV darling Savannah Guthrie leaves heartbroken the relatives of thousands of missing people across the country.
Just in Maine alone, generations of Maine residents cry themselves to sleep over dozens of their relatives who have been missing for decades and more.
The heartache of not knowing, not having a body to bury, strains the bounds of survivors’ lifelong pain.
A national database of missing persons shows 154 open cases in Maine, though a State Police classification system shows the tally at 36.
Either way, it’s too many.
Nationally, 100,000 persons are missing at any one time, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
“The abduction of Nancy Guthrie is putting a spotlight on the excruciating uncertainty endured by thousands of families whose loved ones go missing each year,” reports New England Public Media.
Just citing one 50-year-old cold case in Maine is more than enough to illustrate the reality beyond just Nancy Guthrie.
Pauline Rourke of Fairfield disappeared in 1976 and to this day has never been seen again.
Rourke, 32, lived in a mobile home with a man named Albert Cochran.
Rourke was last seen by her daughter, who reported overhearing her mother and Cochran arguing the night before she disappeared.
Pauline was scheduled to be interviewed by Maine State Police about the murder of Janet Baxter as a possible witness against Cochran.
Cochran, convicted 22 years later of Baxter’s murder, denied any knowledge of Rourke’s disappearance, police said.
He died nine years ago at Maine State prison, where he had served 18 years of a life term, at age 79.
At the time of Rourke’s disappearance, he was on parole after having served 11 years in an Illinois prison for murdering his wife in 1964.
He also confessed to stabbing their three small children to death in the same incident, but those murder charges were dropped on a technicality.
Pauline Rourke, a young mother, just one of Maine’s missing persons, many of them believed to have been murdered, while we fixate to their exclusion on Savannah Guthrie’s family.
