Department of Justice program gathers experts to help families find their loved ones
It was 1969, and the Vietnam War in full swing. The special events coordinator for North Township and her family were living in Riverdale, Illinois, when Cantlon, who’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia, decided to head south to visit family, she said.
Since his diagnosis precluded him from following their brother, Doug, into the military, he felt defeated and wanted to at least clear his head, or maybe even start a new life, in Miami, Bridges said. After he boarded the bus to Florida, no one in his family has ever heard from him again. He was 26.
Bridges, who facilitated the inaugural Missing Persons Day on June 29 at the Wicker Park Clubhouse in Highland, said she’s imagined many different outcomes over the 50 years she’s been searching for him. Her most recent theory is that maybe he’d gotten kicked off the bus after having an episode and he either ended up in the company of people who did him harm and was eventually buried in a pauper’s grave somewhere between Illinois and Florida; or locked up in a mental health facility, never to be heard from again.
Whatever happened, Bridges doesn’t wish her pain on anyone.
“It’s been a really emotional day for me,” she said at the event. “I just don’t want another family to go through it.”
The event Bridges spearheaded for North Township — the first of its kind in the state, according to Melissa Gregory, regional program specialist for the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs — brought together various local and state law enforcement agencies to first learn the resources available to them and to families who have had members disappear, and second to help families who stopped in to ask for help. Only one family came to program Saturday, but that’s not unusual, Gregory said.
“(NamUs) has been around for 10 years, but the Missing Persons Day program for a little over five years, so it’s still relatively new,” Gregory said. “So far, we’ve done programs in California, Nevada, Michigan, New York and Texas, among others, but others are just starting out.”
People who come to Missing Persons events are able to do a couple things, Gregory said. Besides coming in to report a person missing — which they can do even though it’s recommended to first report the missing person to their local law enforcement agency — they’re able to leave a DNA sample by mouth swab to enter into the NamUs database if they choose.
The majority of NamUs entries are adults who’ve been missing for an extended time period, Gregory said, because children are reported missing more quickly, and therefore the chances of them being found are much higher. And adults aren’t necessarily tied to crimes, either, because it’s not a crime to “be missing.”
“Say you have someone with no criminal issue who disappears and resurfaces in Alaska. If police ask the person if they want to make contact and that person says, ‘No,’ it’s not like they’ve done anything wrong,” said Cook County Sheriff Detective Sgt. Jason Moran, who’d given a talk to law enforcement Friday regarding his work on serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s case and how that case fostered changes to federal law regarding missing persons. “In those cases, we always encourage people to make contact themselves for their loved ones’ peace of mind.”
Criteria for missing persons cases are as varied as the agencies who investigate them, Moran said. For some, cold cases are those that have been unsolved for at least a year; others consider a case cold when it’s been unsolved and all investigative leads have been exhausted.
Gregory said that leaving DNA samples may not help solve a case immediately; of some 4,400 bodies that are recovered but unidentified each year, around 1,000 remain unidentified she said. Nevertheless, more and more cases are getting solved through NamUs’s efforts.
“We had a case from the central part of the United States where the person had been missing for 60 years that was finally solved,” Gregory said.
And most importantly, NamUs is 100 percent federally funded and provides its services free-of-charge, Bridges said.
“The main purpose for me (when I pitched the program to North Township Trustee Frank J. Mrvan) was that people think you have to spend money to use these tools, and they don’t,” Bridges said. “Also, there are families reluctant to come to law enforcement, so this is a great opportunity.”
For more information on the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, visit
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