I'm catching up on old episodes of The Vanished podcast and just came across James's story. I feel so terrible for his poor sister, and that his mom passed away never knowing what happened to her son.
The rumor about James having been killed because of dating some woman didn't ring true to me at all. He was such a recluse, lived with his family and worked with his brother, then spent all of his time isolated in his room with his video games, I think his family would have noticed if he suddenly had a girlfriend he was talking to on the phone and going out on dates with. I would personally discount that rumor completely.
But the call that came in to the Dollar General looking for his sister Kelcie and claiming to be James, leaving the number for the Northlake Behavioral Health hospital in Mandeville, Louisiana, I feel has to have been a real attempt from James to reach his family. His case got almost no media attention whatsoever, so if it were just a prankster, I can't imagine they would know that Kelcie had been working at the Dollar General when James went missing. Nor would a random prankster 17 years later think it likely that they would have any luck getting a message to her by calling a different dollar store 14 miles away because the one where she worked had closed down. Thank goodness for small towns since one of her friends was working there and got the message to her, otherwise they would have just chalked it up to a wrong number and the family would never have known anything about it.
It's unfortunate that the behavioral health hospital couldn't give out any information because of HIPAA regulations, but I would bet money that he was there in that hospital and it was him calling. All they could say was that there was no patient there by the name James Wiggins, but if he really did have schizophrenia, I think there's a distinct possibility he might not even know his name. Or he may have started calling himself something else in the 17 years that had passed since he vanished. He has likely been living among the homeless for most of that time, I would imagine.
I'm going to see if I can access any news articles or police blotter information for the area in the time immediately preceding that phone call. He might have been involuntarily committed again after having some kind of crisis in public or something else that caused the police to be called. I'll also see if there are any organizations in the area that do homeless outreach and see if they can take a look at his missing poster and maybe even share it around. It would be nice if there were an age progression photo, though. He looks like a little boy in his missing photo and he's sure to have changed quite a lot over the years.
Really hopeful James can be reunited with his family if he wants to be. It's a rare cold case that makes me think the missing person is still alive out there somewhere, but I really do think James is still with us.
