Search in Miss. gets local support Bangor volunteers analyzing photos

Local volunteers continued to analyze photos throughout the weekend in an attempt to find a missing Mississippi woman.

Virginia Ratliff, 82, of Brookhaven, Miss., has been missing for more than three weeks, and state police and local authorities there recently requested the high-tech assistance of a Bangor-based organization to aid in their search.

Gary Soucy, a volunteer with the Down East Emergency Medicine Institute of Bangor, traveled to the Magnolia State last Wednesday and took more than 1,500 high-resolution photos while flying in a helicopter over the search area.

He returned Friday and volunteers have been busy ever since poring over the photos for any signs of Ratliff or the 1999 Mercury Grand Marquis she was believed to be driving.

Even if the woman has died, her body or the car still would appear in an image, Bowie said.

“We’re just waiting to see what we get for results,” Soucy said Sunday evening. “It was quite the challenge because it was five times larger of a search area than we normally do.”

Analysts scouring the photos had found no signs Ratliff as of Sunday afternoon, but had ruled out several locations where there was potential for locating the missing woman.

“We have got thousands of square miles of woodlands that we have cleared,” institute director Richard Bowie said Sunday. “Searching is not necessarily finding someone; many times it’s eliminating areas that they may be in.”

Analysts in Maine conduct what’s called a “hasty search,” while analysts at Volunteer Imagery Analysts for Search and Rescue in Ohio take a more detailed look at the images.

“The first analyst goes through in a little more rapid fashion than he’d like,” Bowie explained.

Volunteer Imagery Analysts for Search and Rescue is a nonprofit affiliate of the Down East institute that’s dedicated to providing advanced imagery analysis services to search-and-rescue organizations across the country. The Ohio-based organization has a business office in Blue Hill, Maine, and was founded by Chris Rowley.

Rowley is the cousin of Harrison Damon, the 17-year-old Orland boy who was killed in a fall from the Penobscot Narrows Bridge in March 2007. Rowley founded Volunteer Imagery Analysts in memory of Damon, and the technology was used in the search for his cousin.

The technology has been used successfully in numerous searches in Maine, including for a 3-year-old girl who apparently drowned last April in the Aroostook River; for missing Bangor man Matt Lacrosse, whose body was recovered from the Penobscot River earlier this month; and for a fisherman who was missing off Little Deer Isle.

In Mississippi, they’re hopeful that the technology will help them locate Ratliff, who is believed to have gone off the road into a ditch or swamp area, Bowie said.

Now searchers think the woman might have driven farther than originally expected.

She had enough gas in the car to have gone about 275 miles, which could have taken her as far as Memphis, Tenn., or Birmingham, Ala., Bowie said.

“This could turn into a multistate search,” he said.

Ratliff’s husband, Charles Ratliff, suffered a medical problem the night before his wife went missing and had been transferred from one medical facility to another.

Virginia Ratliff, who suffers from dementia, hadn’t driven for at least a year but went home to gather some of her husband’s belongings and is believed to have been on her way to see him at the VA hospital in Jackson, Miss.

There’s evidence that Ratliff made it home and picked up some of her husband’s personal items, including his slippers and an L.L. Bean jacket.

“Easily, a person with dementia can continue driving out of panic,” Bowie said.

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