Beth Bentley - connecting the dots

Will the City of Woodstock, including its Police Department, genuinely take up the missing-person case of Beth Bentley? Or would it like to sweep the case under the rug and hope people just stop talking about how a 41-year-old woman, wife and mother can disappear from its city and not be found?

Even with the Police Department leading the investigation, if the public does not know what is happening, then after a while it starts to feel like nothing is happening. We know that our police department is characteristically silent about crime in Woodstock.

"Out of sight; out of mind." While that might work with vandalism and minor thefts, it does not work with a missing person case or major crime.

Remember when the Manriquez Jewelry store was robbed at gunpoint? Did we ever hear that the robbers were caught? I didn't. Were they?

And what about when the total of reported thefts in a month jumps astronomically? Was it because somebody's Porsche 911 was hot-wired? Or was there a rash of break-ins that created a total like $67,939 in October 2010 or $152,019 in February 2009 (against a 36-month average of $29,340 (even including those two high months)).

The Woodstock City Council was asked on June 7 to "get involved." Will it?

What can the public do? It can form an independent task force, go back to Square 1 and start developing its own information and investigation. Remember that the Woodstock Police Department has never called this anything else than a missing-person case.

When you begin connecting the dots, starting with phone records of May 21-24, the questions start coming fast and hard. The public needs to put its collective heads together and begin talking aloud about the questions, rumors, theories and the few facts in this case. Every trace of Beth since the baseball game on Thursday evening, May 20, 2010, should be put under a microscope.

The story of every friend, acquaintance, co-worker and family member of Beth Bentley should be investigated, analyzed and compared with every other story.

By now the assumption should be that this is NOT a missing-person case! In fact, that assumption should have changed months ago.