Avery Bernard Johns went looking for the records of a six-year-old girl who disappeared in Washington, D.C., in 1961, and could not find them. Johns, a junior at Howard University, had started with the name Hattie Yvonne Jackson. What she found instead was how little of the official record survives: incomplete files and older police records that had been discarded.
So she built the record herself. Johns is the founder and principal investigator of Deadlining, a public case database and spatial research platform that documents 186 cases of missing and murdered Black women and girls in the District, from 1961 through 2025. Her first search of federal missing person records had turned up 37.
The distance between 37 and 186 is what the project is for. Johns works from historical housing maps, census data and neighbourhood data, which lets her see where the cases sit rather than only how many there are. The Metropolitan Police Department accepts Freedom of Information Act requests, but on cases this old, the answer often takes more research than a request returns.
The national picture is not thinner; it is just as hard to read. FBI figures for 2025 record approximately 96,000 missing person entries involving Black females, and nearly four in five of them involved girls under 18. Those are entries logged during the year. They are not necessarily unique people and not necessarily cases still open, which is one reason a count like this one has to be built case by case.
Deadlining is public, and it is built to be used by families, researchers and journalists. Johns is also a student affiliate of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. The database opens on a girl who disappeared sixty-five years ago and runs to last year, which means it holds the cases somebody is still looking for and the ones that were filed and then lost.
