Episode Details

EP 38 TINOCO-KOCHER

Wendy Corr:

Well, hey there folks, and welcome to the Roundup. I'm your host, Wendy Corr. And here at the Roundup, we focus on interesting people in the Cowboy State. But today we're kind of shifting to a little broader focus.

We're going to focus on a couple of very interesting people in the Cowboy State. One is a very interesting person from Cowboy State Daily, but we're also going to be focusing on a much larger issue, and a very topical issue, and that is, missing people in Wyoming.

And so I'm so grateful to have on the podcast today, Desiree Tinoco, who is in Casper, and she is the driving force behind "Missing People of Wyoming." It's a nonprofit. It started out as a Facebook page, but now it's a full nonprofit, and they're just doing amazing work.

But also on the podcast today is Jen Kocher, and Jen is a Cowboy State Daily features reporter, but missing people is her beat. At Cowboy State Daily, we have beats, you know, we've got Leo on the politics beat, and we've got Clair on crime and courts. Jen is our missing persons, and she does a phenomenal job in bringing these stories to life and bringing these stories to all of you, so that these people are not forgotten.

And Desiree, though, Desiree has been working on this really important issue for several years now. So I'm going to kind of toss it down here to Desiree and introduce you. And Desiree, you are, you're lived in Casper for 20 years now, but this is something - a family passion for you and your sister.

And so tell me a little bit about how this missing persons push, to find these people and to create a platform for searching for them. How did this get a hold of you?

Desiree Tinoco:

Yeah, thanks so much. So my older sister started a missing persons page for Missouri. There's several of them throughout the US, and it was always kind of in the back of my mind that I would start one in Wyoming.o

I'd never started a group. I'd never ran anything. I wasn't very tech savvy, and two cases came about where they weren't getting attention that I thought they deserved because of these gentlemen's lifestyle, you could say. One was on probation, the other one had drug issues.

And they both separately went missing, separate cases, and no one was talking about it. There were no stories on it. It it didn't seem like law enforcement was reaching out for the public's help, and they had both been gone for quite some time at this point.

So that's when I finally decided I would start a group for Wyoming. There wasn't one at that point on Facebook, and I started looking for resources and basically the stop drop and roll of missing persons. And there just really wasn't anything out there publicly.

When you have family turning to you as just a civilian, asking you for advice, you know, it got overwhelming, and I started to notice a big difference between my group and my sister's group. Obviously, we have a much lower population here in Wyoming, but the group was, you know, blowing up.

And it surpassed her group at one point with how many members, even though she'd had hers for, I don't know, probably four years before I started my group. So there's this joking about, you know, with siblings and one trying out do the other. And then it's like, no, there's something actually serious going on here.

And we realized soon that there wasn't anything provided by the government. So that's when we asked DCI to start their public database, which they were gracious enough to do. So wonderful people to work with over there. They really are, I mean that wholeheartedly, they've been they've been great.

And Jen came in shortly later, and she's been wonderful to work