For nearly two decades now, Glendene Grant has had only memories of her daughter. That’s because Jessica Foster, at the age of 21, went missing in North Las Vegas in March 2006 after coming here for an extended stay.
For Grant, who still lives in British Columbia, Canada, where Foster grew up, the pain of not having had Foster around for the past 19 years is rivaled only by the pain of not knowing what happened to her.
“If you don’t find your way to cope with it, it will eat at you and it will eventually kill you,” Grant said.
In the Las Vegas Valley’s largest police jurisdiction, missing person reports have been on the rise in recent years.
A ‘hotbed’
Last year, close to 7,300 missing person reports were filed with the Metropolitan Police Department.
By comparison, the Cincinnati Police Department in Ohio worked just under 1,100 missing person cases in 2024, according to department statistics.
Even though Cincinnati’s population is roughly half the population of Las Vegas, Metro work nearly seven times as many missing person cases.
“Las Vegas is a hotbed for everything,” said Sgt. William Gethoefer, part of Metro’s seven-person Missing Persons Detail. “And that includes, yes, missing person cases. We get a lot of visitors that come here and get reported by their loved ones.”
From 2020 through 2023, the number of cases reported in Las Vegas increased marginally each year, but last year, the figure increased by 10 percent over 2023, according to Metro.
One explanation for the increase, police said, could be that the city has been growing. According to U.S. Census statistics, the Las Vegas population grew by 3 percent from 2020 to 2023, the most recent year where data is available.
As of mid-February, according to Metro officials, about 900 missing person reports had already been filed since the beginning of the year.
The good news is that more than 90 percent of those cases are solved rather quickly, Gethoefer said, but some are more complicated and some, similar to the Jessica Foster case in North Las Vegas, remain unsolved.
Metro has closed 7,054 of the 7,288 cases it received last year, which means the person reported missing was located.
“We deal with mostly elderly people, juveniles and people with diminished mental capacity,” Gethoefer said. “Sometimes, it’s a family court issue where a parent will circumvent a court order.”
Many times, the unit will be tasked with trying to track down a minor who decided to run away. Often, Gethoefer said, a parent or guardian will have already taken the minor’s cellphone away from them when they decide to stray, which makes the search harder.
Working with the coroner’s office
All reports are taken seriously — Metro doesn’t have a requirement for reporting a person missing — and one of the first calls a missing person detective often makes is to the Clark County coroner’s office, Gethoefer said.
The coroner’s office might also call Metro, asking if any recent cases involved someone with a specific tattoo or scar. Sometimes, matches can be made quickly, but some cases are more challenging than others.
In late January, searchers recovered the body of Michael Martin, a pilot who was reported missing after taking off in a small plane from the North Las Vegas Airport on Jan. 2.
Martin’s body was found amid the plane’s wreckage near Mount Jefferson in Nye County a few weeks later. His family became concerned and reported him missing Jan. 5, three days after he took off without telling anyone.
Gethoefer said normally Metro wouldn’t take a North Las Vegas case, but he believed it would be a challenge, so he wanted Metro involved.
“I don’t think we’ve had a plane case like that before,” he said. “If we have, it’s certainly been a long time. Compared to what we usually see, it was a very unique case. We were told, when he went off radar, he was near Tonopah. Where he ended up crashing, it was a very tough place to see from the air or the ground.”
Searchers including Nevada Search and Rescue, Nye County officials and other agencies were able to find the remote site, Gethoefer said, aided by some “very high-powered” binoculars.
Once Martin’s body was discovered, that meant the end of the job for Metro’s missing person detail. There’s no celebrating when a missing person is found dead, but it does mean the case is solved, Gethoefer said.
No matter what state a person might be in when they’re found, unit officers move on to the next case because that person is no longer missing, Gethoefer said.
A future forever paused
Lt. Monique Bulmer, a member of the missing person unit, said the work can be exhausting, but that contacting a loved one’s family to tell them there’s an answer to at least some of their questions is always satisfying.
“The toughest cases are probably the ones with kids involved,” Bulmer said. “As time goes on, you start to think about whether the situation could be really serious.”
Grant said her little girl — she still refers to her daughter as “Jessie” — was an adult when she went missing nearly two decades ago. She said she will always remember her daughter as a young woman who was robbed of a future that could have been so different.
Foster thought about going to law school, perhaps after she got some formal training and made a little money as a stylist, Grant said.
“She was always doing people’s hair and makeup; she was really good at it,” Grant said. “She had been injured by a car and she had some money from a settlement, so she knew she’d be able to pay for school straight away. She just never got the chance to do those things.”
After the disappearance, Grant became convinced that her daughter had become a victim of the brutal underworld of human trafficking. Foster had been spending time as a sex worker, Grant said. In September 2005, she was picked up for soliciting prostitution, according to Las Vegas Justice Court records.
Grant said she found out after Foster’s disappearance that hospital records showed she had her jaw broken.
To date, though, nobody has ever been charged in Foster’s case. A North Las Vegas Department spokesman said the case remains open.
“Jessie will always be with me,” Grant said. “Jessie was a stunningly beautiful young lady who was very popular at school and very popular with everyone. We got a law changed here in Canada because of Jessie’s case. There’s more awareness about human trafficking because of Jessie’s case.”
Grant holds out hope that answers can be found — she said she knows that justice can sometimes be “served cold” — but she knows a lot of time has passed.
98 percent solve rate
For Metro, there are over 150 cold missing person cases that have never been solved, according to Gethoefer. That said, there’s always some degree of hope in an active missing person case in which the person hasn’t been found.
At the end of the day, the unit solves about 98 percent of the cases it receives, Gethoefer said.
“It’s probably the highest solve rate in the entire police department,” Gethoefer said. “Almost all of our cases, the person is missing on purpose. They’re missing because they want to be missing.”
The others, well, they’re not going to give up on them, he said.
“Those cries that we get on the other end of the phone, when someone’s been found, that’s why we do this,” Gethoefer said. “Being able to tell a person’s loved ones what happened, that’s what this is all about.”
Contact Bryan Horwath at bhorwath@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0399. Follow @BryanHorwath on X.