Deceased/Not Found MI - Coral Hall, 14, Flint, 22 Sept 1998 - *L. Janish guilty*

Coral Pearl Hall
Missing since September 22, 1998 from Flint, Michigan
Classification: Endangered Missing

Vital Statistics

Date Of Birth: September 21, 1984
Age at Time of Disappearance: 14 years old
Height and Weight at Time of Disappearance: 4'11" (150 cm); 85 lbs (39 kg)
Distinguishing Characteristics: White female. Blonde hair; blue eyes.
Marks, Scars: She has a scar on the lower part of her neck.

Circumstances of Disappearance

Coral Hall was last seen on September 22, 1998.
She may be in the company of an adult male in the Los Angeles, California area.

Investigators
If you have any information concerning this case, please contact:
Flint Police Department
810-766-7036

Source Information:
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
The Doe Network: Case File 1868DFMI

LINK:

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/1868dfmi.html

She was listed on NCMEC, then disappeared for several years -- I thought she'd been recovered. I guess not. She was relisted just recently. NCMEC is very weird sometimes, the way they keep pulling open cases, then putting them back up again.

I am a Flint (Mi.) Journal reporter trying to locate anyone with information about this case.
(810) 766-6317

Here is Mr. Fonger's article:

rfonger@flintjournal.com • 810.766.6317

http://www.mlive.com/news/flintjournal/index.ssf?/base/news-49/12054216114660.xml&coll=5

13 March 08

She was barely 14 when Coral P. Hall made a desperate call from the pay phone at Ann Arbor and West Court streets near the White Horse Tavern.

There was trouble at home, Hall told her friend Melissa Pierce, and she needed to get out of Flint.

Almost 10 years later, Pierce still remembers that unnerving late-night call to her home in Michigan's Thumb and how by the time her boyfriend and uncle made the long drive to Flint, Hall had vanished into the night.

"They couldn't find her," Pierce said. "They looked around, they drove down streets looking for her, and they couldn't find her."

Years after friends grew frustrated at the lack of progress in solving Hall's disappearance, Flint police are taking a fresh look at her case, assigning it to the city's Violent Crime Task Force.

much, much more at link (may need to enter a postal code to access)

http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/h/hall_coral.html

This girl could be anywhere in the country, or maybe even in Canada or Mexico. She could be a housewife, a prostitute, a college student, anybody.

Whatever became of her, I hope she's happy. I hope she will get in touch with her loved ones. I hope she's not dead.

I live in flint and the area she made the call from is not a good area at all. Knowing the area I do not believe she made it out of Flint.

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/337ufny.html

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/200ufut.html

Just saw Christines post about starting new threads about possible matches. I know Coral Hall has been mentioned a lot and wasn't ever on the Maricopa ME lists of people being investigated/ruled out as being MJD. Has she been submitted by anyone yet?

http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/h/hall_coral.html

http://www.missingkids.com/missingk...NCMC&seqNum=1&caseLang=en_US&searchLang=en_US

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/1868dfmi.html

and 2 articles from local paper in Flint MI- from March and April 08.
http://blog.mlive.com/flintjournal/newsnow/2008/03/flint_mich_police_take_fresh_l.html
http://blog.mlive.com/flintjournal/newsnow/2008/04/sightings_of_coral_hall_missin.html

I remember we found the name/phone number for the Michigan detective who was in charge of Coral Halls case, but can't remember if anyone contacted him or the Maricopa ME about her.

Personally I don't think she is MJD- she was only about 4'11" and 85 lbs when she disappeared in Sept 98, and it seems like she has a scar on her neck and also sort of prominent ears but I know other people did think she was a match so thought I would start a thread.

Age and height are way off Coral would have been 29 years old in 1999 MJD was between 13-17 in 1999 and she is also way too short to be MJD

Coral would not have been 29; her DOB is 09/21/1984. The year she went missing she was only 15 and that was in 1998.


I was born in 1980 and I'll be 28 this year.

Vask said:

Coral would not have been 29; her DOB is 09/21/1984. The year she went missing she was only 15 and that was in 1998.


I was born in 1980 and I'll be 28 this year.

Click to expand...

Opps You are correct about the age LOL The height is still too far off though.

LOL I read that and I looked like this -> :waitasec:

I dunno. The post-morgue pictures don't seem to match the photos of Coral. Then again, the one missing child I was most convinced was a match (Michaela Garecht) came up as being a non-match.

If anyone needs any help with the geography of the area, I have lived in Flint most of my life. At one point I lived so close to the White Horse that I could have spit and hit the parking lot.

I will agree with the other poster that says she probably never made it out of the area. If she did, she might have made it as far as Detroit. But I doubt she made it much father than that.

Here's what I know about the area:
1. It is very close to downtown Flint...even in the late 90's, not a good area. Not somewhere you want to hang around after dark.
2. Very close to several dark secluded places including bridge overpasses and close to the Flint River, which was giving up about a body a week there for a while.
3. The White Horse is also very close to Hurley Medical Center, which might have helped her if she had made it there. I know in the late 90's, you could hang out there forever, nap in the waiting room, eat from the vending machines and basically live there without being asked a lot of questions. You could also get a ride to almost anywhere in the county and maybe even the state. Hurley was the only Level I trauma center close by for quite a while and might still be. At the time, they brought in injured from all over the state, if you had a good enough story, you could get a ride out to almost anywhere.
4. Unfortunately, the area is also very close to a large Community Mental Helath Center, and a large psychiatric center, as well as the bus station. the bus station has been cleaned up a lot now, but at the time, no, you didn't want to hang out there unless you were a drug dealer, hooker, or crazy enough that no one would mess with you.
5. Very close to large freeways. If she managed to make it to the freeway and not get picked up by a crazy, she might have made it out. But she might not have headed to the closest freeways because it means walking very near the police station and that might have scared her off in the other direction.

There's more, but this is turning into a book already.

I was wondering if anyone, maybe the reporter that was here, might know if the grounds of the School for the Deaf were searched for her? Seems like a good bet as a place to run since she was so close (within a quarter mile) and I think some of the smaller buildings on the campus were abandoned in 1998. I'm not certain about that, but I think so.

I don't know which areas of the city may have been searched by police for Coral Hall.

The stories I've written are the first time we have written about her case so we don't have a good account of what happened immediately after she turned up missing.

The current detective assigned to the case says there were several leads followed initially, including a trip to Pontiac to check a sighting of Coral. The woman turned out not to be her.

Here is a follow-up story on some other leads in the case, none of which bore fruit.

http://www.mlive.com/flintjournal/index.ssf/2008/04/sightings_of_coral_hall_missin.html

It's too bad that the police didn't get there in time to check out the motel girl sighting. It seems very possible that the two (motel plus the store ten miles away) were her.

If it would help anyone feel closer to the case, or to Coral, I can go take pictures of the area she was last seen. Let me know if it would help.

Maybe it would help if I clarified.
I know that it has been quite some time since Coral disappeared, but the area that she disappeared from has not changed in major ways. If she had disappeared from downtown proper, that would be a different story. But, she disappeared very close to the Mason St. area. Mason St. is our historical district. (They try to say Mason St is a piece of it, but with GM gone, that is it.) The school for the deaf (not being insensitive, that's the name) has not changed a bit. There may have been a couple small demolitions and some more of the buildings abandoned, but they are the same buildings in the same area. Swartz Creek has not moved, a bridge still runs over it only a matter of feet from where Coral disappeared. There is still an area a couple blocks away that can only be described as terrifying. It has a freeway overpass and a large area of open land, no houses, no businesses, no one around, right off the river. One side is now abandoned totally except for utility workers and the other part of that area is city owned and used to dump our yard waste, essentially a compost heap. It wasn't much better at the time. The distance to the nearest freeways to hitch out are the same, the houses she would have passed are the same, some may be boarded up now, but there are no new builds on the main routes she could have been expected to take. The same party store and White Horse Tavern where she disappeared. To see it in pictures is to understand why I don't think she made it out.
For people who don't live here, have never lived here, it's hard to understand Flint. People think that our crime rate and our unemployment rate, the highest in the state, in a state among the highest in the country, are due to GM pulling out. And they are part right, it has gotten worse, but it was almost inevitable that it would anyway. There are 2 running jokes about Flint. One is to remember if you're the last one to leave turn off the lights and cancel the paper. The other is when someone tells they are leaving Flint, laugh at them, they're jinxed. This city is literally a black hole. People leave and those lucky enough to make it out, usually don't come back, not for funerals, weddings or court dates. Most spend their whole life talking about getting out, but never quite making it. A relative gets sick, they get a job offer that lasts just long enough for them to run out of moving money, they get pregnant, so on and so forth. And I know it happens everywhere, but if you've lived here, you understand. This city has been seething with desperation for years. It's part of the atmosphere, thousands of people since the creation of Flint, desperate to leave this place and essentially trapped. In small towns, it's a different type of vibe, it makes it almost homey, not in a city of 100,000+ people.
I don't believe Coral made it out. She is still here somewhere, in my belief, and I want to know where.
I'm going to take those pictures, and I'm going to post them. And I'm sorry about the book, but I am determined to drum up some interest in this child.

not_my_kids said:

Maybe it would help if I clarified.
I know that it has been quite some time since Coral disappeared, but the area that she disappeared from has not changed in major ways....

I don't believe Coral made it out. She is still here somewhere, in my belief, and I want to know where.
I'm going to take those pictures, and I'm going to post them. And I'm sorry about the book, but I am determined to drum up some interest in this child.

Click to expand...

Thank you for your interest in Coral Pearl Hall and for your determination to assist her case. I think that seeing photos of the area where she disappeared and hearing about that time and area in Flint can be of great help to investigators.

What you say about Flint is certainly depressing. I guess that I am one of the few people you refer to who "got out" of Flint, although I never really considered it that way. I lived there for a year and a half, attending Junior High School, and then went back ten years later to do some Student Teaching.

I am not familiar with the area you describe. Seeing photos and maps would help to visualize the scene.