The QAnon mass delusion adds to KC man’s anguish over his missing sister
His sister’s disappearance in 2005 broke Zakk Hoyt’s heart. The nutty QAnon conspiracy theories have only reopened the Kansas Citian’s wounds.
The lesson: Be careful what you read and pass on in social media. It can easily hurt others deeply.
Hoyt’s sister Emillie, then 23, fell off everyone’s radar just before Christmas 2005 and never reappeared. She went missing in Highland Beach, Florida — most likely just by coincidence, not far from Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion in Palm Beach. There’s nothing else linking her case to the notorious sexual predator.
Hoyt spent years searching for her, pressing Florida police to care, and immersing himself in the vast but lonesome missing persons community.
Though Hoyt has since stepped away from the hunt, sadly accepting that Emillie is probably dead. But he feels that he and others in the missing persons movement have been done a grave disservice by the QAnon craziness.
The serpentine QAnon conspiracy theory holds that there’s an international ring of pedophiles led by prominent Democrats, and President Donald Trump is secretly working to expose the cabal and arrest the guilty en masse. The delusions of its credulous followers get even loonier, but we’ll spare you the details.
The suggestion that there’s a federal effort to save the missing and the exploited from predatory big-name Democrats cruelly gives a false sense of hope to their loved ones.
“It distracts from the real work that needs to be done and hasn’t been done — the real advocacy for missing children and missing persons,” Hoyt says.
“The public wants to share memes with inaccurate information and graphics that don’t portray human trafficking victims accurately,” says Kansas City’s Maureen Reintjes, executive director of communications for the nonprofit Missouri Missing. “They need to stop. If they, the public, care that much then we beg them to turn to the correct sources to join the fight to stop human trafficking and not to an anonymous person.”
Some of those legitimate sources include local anti-trafficking organizations Veronica’s Voice, named for Veronica Neverdusky, a victim of commercial sexual exploitation murdered in 1993; Rended Heart, which helps with housing and medical, dental and counseling needs for victims of trafficking and sexual exploitation; and The Stop Trafficking Project, which fights domestic sex trafficking of minors.
The Big Search KC, an annual distribution of information on missing Kansas Citians brought to town by Veronica’s Voice, has been rebranded as Search KC — and will be staged in social media next month, instead of in person, because of COVID-19.
Nationally, Hoyt says, the search for missing people is led by several government agencies and intrepid nonprofits — he cites the NamUs.gov database and The Charley Project, which maintains profiles of cold-case missing persons accounts.
There are a lot of feverishly well-meaning survivors and supporters trying to help with scattershot social media and web pages of their own, but Reintjes laments that many of them lack proper training. Hoyt says even big government agencies’ databases aren’t adequately integrated, a problem Congress has yet to solve.
The lack of a comprehensive, coordinated and concentrated effort to find missing people like Emillie Hoyt is a quiet scandal.
Too quiet, considering that there are some 100,000 missing Americans. Their disappearance is a real problem made considerably worse by baseless conspiracy theories.
This story was originally published September 16, 2020 at 5:00 AM.