ACT Policing is supporting National Missing Persons Week this week (1-7 August) by raising awareness of the impacts of long-term missing persons within the community.
Acting Superintendent for ACT Policing, Allison Hutcheson said nationally there were more than 2,600 long-term missing persons and the ACT had 14 long-term missing people, including two who were missing overseas.
Acting Superintendent Hutcheson said the community had an important role to play in long-term missing persons investigations.
“Each one of those individuals has a family and friends who care about them,” Acting Superintendent Hutcheson said.
“Police will always maintain hope that missing person cases could come to a resolution if someone were to come forward with more information,” she said.
“It might seem small to them, but that piece of information could just solve a case.”
Acting Superintendent Hutcheson said this year’s campaign message, Their faces might have changed, missing them hasn’t, acknowledged that appearances changed over time and asked the public to consider how missing people would look today.
She said that, as part of the campaign, AFP Forensic Artists had created an age-progressed image of long-term missing ACT woman Laura Haworth, to show what she might look like today.
“We believe there are people in the community who may hold crucial information about our long-term missing persons and we urge them to come forward and provide answers to the families and friends who are left with dealing with the unknown,” Acting Superintendent Hutcheson said.
She urged anyone with information that could assist police to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
The age-progressed image of Laura Haworth can be viewed in a video on ACT Policing’s Facebook page at this PS News link.
