Cindy Lange-Kubick: 'Never give up,' says woman in search of Bos
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The woman from Missouri tried to make her small words have a big sound.
Dear America’s Most Wanted, Could you put this woman’s picture on your Web site?
Can you please tell her story? Her family needs answers. … Please? Could you, please?
Day after day Linda Stovall sat down at her computer in her old house in the country, a 47-year-old grandmother living with her husband and three little dogs in Craig County, home to 6,000 souls, halfway between St. Joe and Hamburg.
She didn’t care if the person opening her pleas thought she was a pest.
She just kept clicking send.
It took 20 e-mails, maybe more, before the day she opened the Web site devoted to finding America’s missing and found a smiling picture of a woman with dark hair and glasses.
Name: Regina Marie Bos
Current age: 47
Status: Missing
“I kept asking and asking,” Linda said Friday. “I was kind of begging, almost.”
The woman from Missouri had never met Regina Bos.
She’d never met her sister, Jannel Rap, a woman stubborn as she was, a woman who’d never quit searching for her Gina after she vanished Oct. 17, 2000, outside a Lincoln pub.
But Linda had a connection with Jannel. She’d once done her a favor, and she wanted to repay the kindness.
Jannel started GINA For Missing Persons as a way to keep her sister’s face in front of the public and to help families find sons and daughters and loved ones.
The songwriter from California started a concert tour, The Squeaky Wheel, and traveled the country singing songs and showing pictures of people who had vanished.
Linda didn’t have missing kin, but she’d been pulled into the world of the lost when a woman from Kansas City disappeared near her home almost two years ago.
The woman’s remains eventually were found in a highway culvert but Linda wanted to do more than leave a makeshift memorial on the roadside.
She can’t explain it, but she found herself drawn to help other families.
A young man missing from Skidmore, Mo., became her mission.
“I just like helping people,” she explains. “He’s my priority now.”
She built a Web site. She made herself a pest.
She e-mailed a woman in California, a songwriter who had a missing sister and a lot of heart, who put Branson Perry – missing since 2001 — on her site.
That’s when Linda began her presence in America’s Most Wanted inbox.
“I had gotten Branson on ‘America’s Most Wanted’ and I just thought, ‘I gotta get Gina up there, too, because Jannel does so much to help people.’”
It’s a sad place to visit, the Web site that keeps time with the disturbing news of our day. The unsolved murders, the criminals on the run, a running tally of heartbreak and horror and enough hope to keep people coming back.
Click on a state to see outlaws on the lam.
Click again to see the faces of the missing.
Click again to see the found.
Linda thinks it’s usually law enforcement officials who get faces and cases on the America’s Most Wanted Web site. And she thinks the pretty faces and compelling storylines have an easier time getting prime time.
But that didn’t mean she would take no for an answer in her quest to put Gina’s face in front of the tens of thousands of people who go to the Web site.
When Linda started e-mailing she had a goal: Get Gina’s story on the site before Oct. 17, the anniversary of her disappearance.
Dear America’s Most Wanted, These families need a voice. They need answers. Please, please, can you help me …
Day after day after day.
“It’s the way I was raised,” she says. “You want something done? You never give up.”
The woman from Missouri picked up the phone two weeks ago and called California. Gina’s story was finally up, out there for people to see.
How long is she going to be on there, Jannel asked.
“Forever. Or until she’s found,” Linda answered.
“Until there are answers.”
Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.
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