Charley Project Cold Case Missing Persons Scraper

Scrape cold-case missing-persons profiles from The Charley Project — the largest privately-maintained US cold-case database with approximately 15,000 narrative case profiles.

What does this actor do?

This actor crawls The Charley Project website and extracts structured data from each missing-persons case profile page. It discovers cases via the WordPress sitemap, then scrapes each case detail page for vital statistics and the narrative "Details of Disappearance" text.

For each case the actor outputs:

• Case name and profile URL
• Missing Since date and Missing From location (city, state)
• Classification (Endangered Missing, Non-Family Abduction, etc.)
• Date of Birth and Age at Disappearance
• Sex, Race, Height and Weight
• Distinguishing Characteristics (physical description, tattoos, etc.)
• Details of Disappearance — the full narrative write-up
• Investigating Agency name(s) and contact info
• Photo URL (primary case photo if available)

Why use this actor?

The Charley Project is a uniquely valuable resource for:

• True-crime researchers and podcasters — rich narrative "Details of Disappearance" write-ups that NamUs lacks
• OSINT / websleuth communities — cross-reference cold cases with other databases
• Genealogy and DNA identification volunteers — link unidentified remains to cold-case missing persons
• Journalists and academics — quantitative analysis of cold-case patterns

There is no other Apify actor for this dataset. It complements the NamUs scraper with deeper narrative content on cold cases specifically.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	Integer	10	Maximum number of case profiles to scrape. Set to 0 for all ~15,000 cases.

Output

Each item in the dataset represents one missing-persons case:

{
  "case_name": "Tara Leigh Calico",
  "case_url": "https://charleyproject.org/case/tara-leigh-calico",
  "missing_since": "09/20/1988",
  "missing_from": "Belen, New Mexico",
  "classification": "Endangered Missing",
  "date_of_birth": "02/28/1969",
  "age_at_disappearance": "19 years old",
  "sex": "Female",
  "race": "White",
  "height_weight": "5'7, 125 pounds",
  "distinguishing_characteristics": "White female. Brown hair, blue eyes...",
  "details_of_disappearance": "Calico was last seen riding her bicycle...",
  "investigating_agency": "Valencia County Sheriff's Office; 505-865-9611",
  "photo_url": "http://charleyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/..."
}

Notes

• All fields are optional — individual cases may omit any vital field not recorded by The Charley Project.
• The investigating_agency field may include multiple agencies separated by semicolons and may include phone numbers.
• Photo URLs use HTTP (not HTTPS) as served by the source site.
• A full scrape of all ~15,000 cases is a long-running operation. Use maxItems to limit scope for targeted research.
• This actor respects The Charley Project as a volunteer-run public-awareness resource — concurrency is deliberately kept low (5 concurrent requests).