I see this comment (or more critical cooments on the same subject) in lots of cases involving missing persons, especially children. In the first few hours, days and weeeks of a case, parents and other family members actually do physical searches of their own property, their neighborhood, nearby parks and wooded areas, etc. At some point, LE takes the lead and may only want trained searchers. Families produce and distribute flyers, do media interviews, etc.
But if a child has been abducted and/or murdered and dumped somewhere, the family is actually looking for a body, which could be miles away, buried in the ground, or dumped in a body of water. In an abduction where the perpetrator intends to keep the child, he could have taken the child anywhere: Marc Klaas has said that the child can literally disappear at the speed of a mile per minute. So while I am not suggesting that parents should give up, what kind of search should families do, after 3 or 4 months with no results, especially if there is no particular pLace to look? How many families actually find a child themselves or solve the case by identifying the perpetrator?
The Holloway/Twitty family turned the island of Aruba upside down and did ocean searches--and no trace of a near-adult has ever been found. Until the killer decides to stop playing games, it's unlikely that Natalee Holloway will ever be found. For Kyron's family, the best hope is that either someone will come across Kyron by accident (we hope, a Kyron alive and in hiding) or that other evidence will eventually point to the perpetrator, who will reveal his whereabouts.
I guess what I'm saying is that family searches, after the first several weeks, are probably more useful to the family's emotional health (the NEED to search, to do something) and to keeping LE
on the case than they are to actually finding the missing person.
