Here are more updates and now it just gets weirder. If she was going to school in Washington and earned her CPA there would be record of her. The fact that they cannot verify anything the family says.... was she even ever in the USA? One thing I now find very curious is that every friend on her pages are from the Philippines.
According to family, Amery met a male in Manila, Philippines, while she was there for school, sometime mid-year 2014. Amery told family that she later flew to Washington State and married this male, in Spokane, in February 2015. Amery had told her family that this male was in his late 50's and lived in the Spokane area; they had never met this male. Amery reported to her family, at an unknown time, that her husband had passed away. Amery's family last had contact with her family in the Philippines via phone sometime in October 2016. Amery's mother reports that Amery had passed the CPA Exam in June 2016; she had been attending an unknown school in the Seattle area and was traveling to Spokane on her breaks. Amery's mother reports that Amery had gotten a job at an unknown company in Seattle in September 2016 and that they last heard from her in October 2016 when she told her mother that she would be able to send money back home after her first salary paycheck. Law enforcement has not been able to corroborate the information provided by the family.
Okay, I'm going to dip my toe into this one, mostly because I feel I have a less-traditional perspective. I want to be clear I have NO IDEA about this specific case though.
I have lived and worked much of my 25+ year career in Asia. My husband is Asian and he comes from a very poor part of the country where a lot of women migrate to the big city and a large number marry foreign men. He is not from the Philippines but I believe there are many similiarities to some of the attitudes, including
(a) all adult children will send money home for parents, grandparents, younger siblings etc. This continues throughout your life, no matter your other commitments.
(b) children who marry a foreigner are seen as having easy (or easier) access to larger amounts of money and there is a huge community and family expectation that they will support an even wider network of people back home ASAP once they migrate overseas
(c) the reality is that a lot of women move to the city and end up working in less salubrious jobs such as factories or as maids. Some end up in jobs that often bring them in close contact to that elusive "foreign spouse" - hospitality, non-sexual massage, sex work and a whole host in-between. Many women and men in the last category DO end up with foreign spouses.
(d) there is also a huge category of professionals who meet and marry foreigners in the course of their normal life, just as happens with the rest of us (ie: if you see a young Asian woman and an older Anglosaxon man, please do NOT automatically assume she was a mail-order bride or former prostitute. Seriously! This has happened to my husband and I multiple times, usually when we are in a western country. Frankly it is both a damning reflection on the person making the assumption and just plain old-fashioned rudeness.
So....my take
- LE are not stupid and I'm sure they did check that she actually entered the country before they raised an MP case.
- LE would also have access to her USA visa details (because she would not have been a citizen when she entered the US). Presumably they have also checked this out...so maybe there is spouse information/knowledge that they are holding back for a reason.
- I think she probably did meet a foreigner (or even have a foreign spouse) because Spokane/WA would be a weird place for a person in the Philippines to randomly pick as their fantasy of choice if they were going to lie. Yes most Filipinos would know Los Angeles or New York but I doubt most would even know WA. It wouldn't be a "prestige pick" if you were making up a fake case to impress the family back home
- The other alternative is that she met someone online or in person who was from Spokane and she was led into believing he would bring her to the US but that never happened and in fact something happened to her while she was elsewhere.
- Families in the Asian cultures I'm familiar with are not as interested in the specifics of who you marry, since marriage for love is not really the aim. The whole aim of a union is to be financially stable, to be able to care for your parents financially - love is a nice bonus if it happens. This is why you see so many great relationships amongst set-in-their-ways old foreign men and young Asian women; their aims are different but actually they are both having their needs met in a strange way. Just my opinion of course. My in-laws would have no idea where my husband (their eldest son) lives...they'd probably just say "Africa" but wouldn't know the country. If he went missing here, they probably wouldn't report it for years if at all *** (see my story at the bottom).
- The quote about being able to send money home once she got a job rings soooo true to me. I have heard so many migrants relay this to their families... my own mother-in-law had a similar expectation of my husband until he told her I was not an ATM machine!) BUT it is also exactly what a person who is a new migrant with poor language skills and no job prospects will say to their family. So many times I've seen miserable new migrants (with foreign spouses) stuck at home with minimal English and absolutely bereft because they have realised the dream of supporting their family back home is never going to come true, or is going to need a much longer time-frame. The feeling of failure when people are relying on them must be dreadful.
I don't really have thoughts about how/why she went missing but I could see why her Filipino family wouldn't know where she was or the timeframe for it happening.
*** Our story.... in the Asian tsunami my in-laws assumed my husband had died, because a few weeks after the event a "fortune teller" at their religious centre told them they had a vision of him riding a wave. The truth was that he worked in a city 400mi from the ocean and had lived/worked there for more than 15 years at the time of the tsunami. He sent money every month via a money transfer service and once a year he visited his parents during their annual harvest festival for a week. That was enough for his family; in his culture you don't share the nitty-gritty of your life so they had no idea what his job was, how he lived, WHERE he lived. He was fulfilling his duties as an adult child by sending money and that was all that was expected. He was too poor to own a mobile phone which were very expensive at that time. Some months after the tsunami hubby returned home for the harvest and people ran away from him screaming in terror when they saw him, as they believed he was a ghost. His parents had held a funeral for him (yes, even though the money kept arriving monthly they believed he was dead "because someone told us he was"). There is no police station in his village and they wouldn't have even known that stuff like DNA existed - and probably still don't. I know that this MP story is slightly more modern, with FB connections and the like, but my gut tells me that in many ways a Filipino village is probably full of far less knowledge and connection that we assume from our comfy western chair.
