lost comes in many forms and usually in unexpected ways it can be devastating leaving you facing an uphill struggle to go on with life without someone you thought would always be there but life does go on and even in the deepest despair we c hope welcome to grief really with your hosts doctors gloria and heidi horsley brought to you by the open the whole foundation helping people find hope  topic and we know that there are people who are method in their children are having a difficult time right now and we hope will be able to give you some good information on that while missing children is a really difficult topic i want to tell you th these experiences heidi and i have met some heroes and angels in the world and we want to tell you that we have two of those people on our show today one is todd matthews and i want to get right todd matthews is with the national missing and  then we're going to have michael j dave a fine michael j davis is a singer songwriter and a wonderful person and he's going to talk a little bit about the son he's going to be doing worth on the show but i want to tell you again there are angels and heroes in the world and we've got to come on today we really do want and you know these men that we're going to interview today are so passionate about what they do and they are doing so much to change the world to change the laws and to find missing children and to reunite them with their families some of these kids of are dead and some of these kids are are alive and one of these amazing then is marc klass and marc is the father of polly klaas polly was an american murder victim whose case gained national attention in one thousand nine hundred and three at the age of twelve she was kidnapped at knife point during a slumber party in petaluma california marc is the founder of klaas kids foundation and his mission is t stop crimes against children that's great and we'll be showing a little role in about the class kids foundation to be telling you more about it you want to talk a little bit about michael and what you think i would love to i would love to michael davis is or songwriter and he w buffet and by the way you can find him michael j davis dot com and you can hear some of the music there he will be singing something about love and this song is about finding the audience quickly about the fact that you got into the work you had two children two siblings who died very early and you're a person who's lived six generations in the same area right and you had your cemetery where you could visit six generations of family easily and and you came across a missing persons years ago and wanted to unite them with your family and got into this work but let's catch up with you today because tell us about what you're doing today well today i'm actually the director of communications for name a start up again the national missing on it in a person system we were very close with the national center for missing exploited children for instance they actually use our database to minister child cases but on the other end of the the adult cases which are often even more complex so name us dot and just to revisit what my mom just said the reason that this is so important for you is that early on in your life your baby brother and your baby sister died yes in different ways and and fast forward now you just feel like it's so important to remind people with missing people that are missing missing and they cause you ladies there  great work with grief really been missing is worse than they had actually you know i've dealt with many parents of it and other siblings of missing persons and deceased they've been murdered it's easier to have a place to go and be over with and to live the rest your lap trying to find the answer and it never really knew that and i knew that i had it least massive wings were in a spot record and it was over it's not all the way i've ever known and was names on  stone these people don't even have that i thought i had nothing with two stone but really i have more than i have so i think it's important to try to at least give them that much and i realized i had a whole lot more than i thought i had you know i had a little bit of resolution and a way to do healing go forward in this is part of it and now there are what forty thousand missing there are forty thousand an unidentified remains throughout the united states as an estimate from our early that there was a study group people out there that are they don't know where their children and their siblings and their loved ones are it must just be absolutely heartbreaking it is it is and sometimes it's amazing to see somebody grateful to literally have bones to reenter and i know how important that is because that's the one thing i would want to do i would want to take the bones of my deceased loved one and put him with the rest of them the so it's a very symbolically important to humans to be able to have that in their hand and put people back really belong i think well and one of the things i love which i've gotten to know about you before the show is that once you make these calls and let these families know that you've identified the remains you also develop relationships with these families which i think is wonderful but yes yes some of them some stick out more than others and they and the ones that really develop long term relationships are the ones that want to continue i've had people they take their loved one and you never hear from them again and then there's others that come back i want to spare others this pain and tell me how i can in their journey how can i make it move faster and we can use those people to serve as examples we can also use them to pair with people that are new you know when you just newly had  they ask what's next and you know we have a whole network of people that compare people with and allat i'll let this lady explain to you what's going to happen next for her own experience l k so now i'm listening to the show and i'm thinking wow my cousin disappeared years ago and nobody's done anything is it too late no absolutely not i mean we've recently it's become routine to have resolution after four decades so that's good in the internet that a lot of it due to this and you know the social media that the rapid us of sharing data we no longer have to wait thirty years for enough information to come together to college now information to be shared instantly and i think that's important you know if you're missing loved one today doesn't mean we need to be comparing it with bodies tomorrow necessarily but you need to be preparing for that possibility it could go into a long term case what you do here now is the most important thing prepare for the worst and hope for the best we need dental records d n a information thing or print as much as you can possibly get but even though it's twenty years ago even even twenty years ago it's never too late to go back and trap because i've seen it happen i've had family members that i've talked to about a missing person and i realized i never met a local report there was never a missing person's report or law enforcement tell them to go home wait for him to come back and then make a report if they don't they never went back so if anybody in your in your audience has a missing loved one in their family or a missing piece of them were it is important they reach out to their local authorities and if not they can go kidnapped and murdered it was a senseless tragedy and why i started the class kids foundation to ensure that no other child would suffer polysorbate we've made a lot of progress since then but we need your help because there is still much more that needs to be done runaways kidnapping and child prostitution occur every day in america we can stand for that we need your help and support now please visit us at class kids dot org we should never forget the most vulnerable among us our kids  oh mark what a story you have and i know there are some many people who are wondering you know who have that story in their mind i'm sure you run into a lot of people who remember nothing about paul and how your experience you know how you've lived through it and all that and here you are and doing amazing things well i've always said that we want to make meaning out of paul these death with our foundation and we want to create a legacy in her name that will be protective of children for generations to come i think twenty years is an accepted lifespan for a generation and here we are twenty years later we're still doing things and polly's name and we continue to make meaning out of her death that is amazing i think is that polly is doing as much in her death as she in her life because you are really changing the world and and and helping so many people through this tragedy while listen before we came along the body was really doing anything in this field so we adopted a pretty broad mission of stopping crimes against children and then address that in a variety of ways we have search and rescue operation that has helped approximately nine hundred families over the course of the last twenty years we have a child i d program in  a community outreach program that is fingerprinted and photographed more than a one million kids without ever charging for the service or database in any information we work on legislation we get out there in the media and we try to have a consistent message all the time that it's really about the kids and author of grey well how have you done that i mean how did you get through that i'm sitting out there thinking about you if you know that story i mean here you are you're up moving around and i am thinking i'm not going to get through it how do how do you do it well st of all let me just say that twenty years on i've found happiness in my life i mean we don't live in pain we don't live in agony by any means and really what we did is get up and when i say we i mean my wife and i really violet is a huge part of our operation we would get up every morning and try to do something to push our agenda forward we felt that we had a ninety day window of opportunity after polly was was reported after polly was found dead and then people would move on to the next cause does you're the next victim does your so we've always worked with a real sense of urgency to try to get things done and lo and behold twenty years later we're still we're still dealing  said what is one thing i can do to push my agenda forward and it's always forward that's really really important right it's always about moving forward because once you start looking back and once you start looking back a lot you you you can remember the regret you can remember the  pain you can remember the agony and you can relive that so it's really about it's really about always moving forward with your life with your purpose and with your agenda so what what's your plan going on do you have something that's going on right now you want to comment on what you're i mean right now like i said we've we've worked on nine hundred dollars missing person cases we have more cases coming in than ever so we're expanding our search team from the east coast to the west coast will have both coast covered with a regional team we're also looking towards a future of technology but frankly i think that as todd is explained with the work that he does that's very technologically savvy and we to believe that whether it's social networking whether it's smartphone apps whether it's browsers themselves whether it's g p s technologies the future of the missing kid issue and protecting missing kids is most likely in technology at this point missing how quickly amber alerts are coming on you get if something on your i phone saying this in you know with technology just get that information like you said quickly very quickly twenty years ago and polly kidnapped you know we didn't have amber alerts  they put out the all points bulletin on polly's disappearance and they said this information was not for press release so in so many ways we've evolved income so much farther that there are children that are being found now i think two good examples are the young girl in georgia just last week and hannah anderson from san diego i think that was just last month i think without things like the amber alert without the kind of awareness that we have now that those children would have had a chance and it must be agony  eleven then you would call other jurisdictional law enforcement agencies call the state police and call the f b i then you might want to contact media assignment desks and let them know that there's a child missing and that there's a parent willing to talk about it and then get busy on social media make a facebook page i mean for so long the missing child issue has been about the static picture of a child on a poster but now with social media you can do a well rounded well rounded profile of that child you can have videos you can have multiple pictures testimonials links to news stories etc etc so that people can look at it and get really invested in your child and then be in a position hopefully to help you recover that child that  just wanted to ask you about your anniversary coming up well october st is the th anniversary of polly's kidnapping and my wife and i have decided that we have to address  obviously because for us it means a lot so what we've done is we've invited people like susan whitmore our good friend to come and join us at a gathering in san francisco on that day and we've gotten a very good response well over  hundred people are going to show up and these would be people that worked on the case either as petaluma police officers or f b i agents some media folks that really helped us and people that have impacted our lives in impacted our cause over the course of the last twenty years so we're surrounding ourselves with people that we love and people that we adore that's great and i think doing rituals and those kinds of things are an important thing and we grieve in community and getting community together well i want to talk to you two together for a minute and i wanted to ask you what do you think's going to happen with the government and the individual and everything is it all going to come together in some way that has day it has to and i think i personally am committed to that and then our government's committed to that they want to see these two forces work together the public and the if it did community and we want to make sure that the resources are going into the right direction i think everybody wants the wrath thing to happen it's not a thing and after all i mean what is more fundamental function of government it's going to get bigger because it's still evolving it's still evolving is a system of use facebook i mean you can see changes almost every week in there are changes that make you more and more connected either with people that you know or with communities that you're involved in and there's it continues to grow around the world and more people have access there's just going to be more and more of those communities and i think it's it's again it's just an evolutionary type of situation it's kind of interesting because i know todd and i were talking about that the government doesn't do volunteer  well they can't be responsible for for individual volunteers it's kind of hard that's why it's important work with the daughter works the nonprofit so that where dot com i'm talking about where you know people that are committed to volunteer and it's really utilize volunteers for instance there's a girl that's missing in the bay area named sierra lamar she's been missing for well over a year now and we've helped organize a search for her and pulled in many thousands of people many thousands of many hundreds of organizations and businesses to assist in the recovery of that child and what it does is it gives people a personal sense of accomplishment knowing that they can go on a saturday morning and do something viable to help this family recover their missing person so now volunteers are deserves peace everybody deserves to be found everybody deserves to be buried or cremated or dealt with in a way that a family wants to do that in a family does not need to have those lingering doubts as we were saying before the show once you know that your brother your sister your child is no longer with us we also know that they're no longer being harmed and it gives a step peace of mind as well and i understand this agony having gone through sixty five days of it and it still enrages me that terrible people will do horrible things to innocent little kids and just leave these families out there steve they're helpless and hopeless in many instances so yeah i do take it very  to hear your ideas about other shows if you'd like to have fun and now we're going to have michael sing for us and you said something earlier about what he's going to sing do you remember what it was i declare yeah i don't have it  aybe we can finally see it from another point of view some then  and he looks like me and it's something about