The Mystery of the Downward Spiral...(S_S's 2000th post)

[PhantomSam]

Heh, yeah I figured this was an old topic for you guys, but it was new to me! Just popped into my head yesterday and then I found this site.

[jay-ell]

Welcome aboard, Sam. 

I missed this whole thread the first time around...interesting to see it re-open now. 

[Golfhaus]

I remember this thread the first time around, and being moderately creeped out by the photo sequence. The fact that there's more information out there now than when the journey began is impressive, but creepier. It's one thing when they're just pictures, but when the story starts to come together, and the humanity in the situation starts to be revealed... sad. Makes me want to make sure to give an extra hug or two to my daughters.

[jaydub]

I think that was Side Show's intent - to take us beyond the icon and help us remember the real person the pictures represent.  Giving her back her identity restores some shred of dignity that the tragedy of her life took away.

[side_show]

I think this one might be solved from some additional information I found today while searching.  I'll search the other names in this story and follow up.

Pulled from a comment from http://identifythisgirl.blogspot.com/2005/09/downward-spiral-identify-mug-shots.html:

The Sunday Telegraph (Sydney, Australia)
March 12, 2000, Sunday
Descent into hell of a girl on heroin
BYLINE: SARAH CHALMERS
SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 52
LENGTH: 484 words


AT 22, Maria Ramos should have had her whole life to look forward to.

Slim, with a mane of lustrous dark hair, a perfect complexion, bright eyes and sweet smile, she could have been a model.

Instead she chose heroin -- and as this startling sequence of pictures shows, the drug robbed her of her looks and her self-respect. Finally, it took her life.

In the 14 years after the first photograph was taken Maria stopped smiling.

She became sullen and withdrawn, losing all interest in her appearance, with little energy or desire to fight the devastating effects heroin wrought on her body.

First to go was her flawless complexion, then her sparkling gaze, her healthy hair and her slim figure.

By the time the last photograph was taken, when she was 36, she looked more like a bloated hag than a woman in her prime.

Weeks later she was dead.

Now the New York Police Department has compiled the 12 mugshots of Maria into a horrifying montage which starkly illustrates the effects of heroin abuse.

On a visit to the department, Judith Gillespie, head of the Royal Ulster Constabulary drugs squad, was so struck by the montage that she took a copy back to Northern Ireland to use in a hard-hitting anti drugs campaign.

"I brought it home just to remind myself and show others what effect drugs can have," Detective Superintendent Gillespie said. "From a smiling bright-eyed beautiful girl right through the 12 stages to her death, it is a grim reminder of just what can happen if you take drugs."

Maria Ramos came to police attention in April 1983 when she was arrested for soliciting in a notorious drug area of Manhattan. It is not known if she was already a drug user.

NYPD spokesman Walter Burns said: "She may have got involved in prostitution to fund her way through college."

Two years later, in 1985, as the deterioration in her physical appearance shows, she was abusing drugs.

Over the next 12 years her appearance was further ravaged as she was arrested again and again -- almost always for prostitution, occasionally for drugs possession -- and even served a short prison sentence.

Maria fell into a deadly cycle of prostitution to feed her drug habit.

Detective Burns said: "She was heavily into narcotics."

Prolonged hard drug abuse diminishes appetite and encourages apathy which in turn leads victims to neglect personal hygiene and appearance.

Paula Woodward, of the Institute for Studies of Drug Dependency, said: "With chronic frequent use, euphoria is replaced by restlessness, hyper-excitability, nausea, vomiting and weight loss. With continued use this may develop into a state of mind similar to paranoid psychosis."

A clampdown on drug crime has been a major feature of Rudolph Giuliani's time as New York mayor.

Two years ago police identified 7000 drug dealing points on the city's streets. Now they say there are virtually none.

[side_show]

Verified via multiple hits: Judith Gillespie as head of the Royal Ulster Constabulary drugs squad

Verified via multiple hits: NYPD spokesman Walter Burns

Also posted to the site was this story that could be tied to the same woman based on age:  http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19920924&slug=1514699

Couple Jolted From Odd Love Nest -- Train Halts Session On Subway Tracks

By Ellis Henican

Newsday

NEW YORK - Oh, the things we do for love.

Here were Maria Ramos and Darryl Washington, ages 30 and 32, respectively, down on the track bed of the Bowery subway station in lower Manhattan, sprawled half-naked across an old foam mattress, in romantic embrace.

Yes, down on the track bed. Yes, doing the nasty. And yes, with a Queens-bound J train coming right at them.

Now, the Bowery subway station may not be everyone's idea of the perfect amorous hideaway. But who can ever explain the tug of love? All those trains running through all those tunnels, romance in the air. For these two subway lovebirds at least, the Bowery station would just have to do.

"We came down from the park, me and my wife, and we went toward the back of the station," Washington said yesterday from his bed at Bellevue Hospital, where he is recuperating.

"I started kissing her," he said. "I closed my eyes, and the next thing I knew, something went `BANG!' It was a very big bang."

Big, you know, like 300 tons of rolling steel, barreling down the track. Did the earth move, honey? Or was that the train?

"Something pulled her under, and I guess she pulled me," Washington said. "I could see the train coming on top of us. . . . I don't remember anything else."

A horde of transit workers responded to the "man under" call, but could barely believe what they had stumbled upon.

"The woman was mostly naked, and the man was partly naked," said road-car inspector James Horan. "Apparently, they were having sexual activity on the mattress down there.

"I have people all over Transit asking me, `What were they doing down there?' I try to put it as delicately and discreetly as I can, if there's a woman in the room. But the women are the ones who laugh the hardest.

"Now I'm just calling it, `Love on the wrong side of the tracks.' "

They were taken to Bellevue. It is really quite remarkable that either one of them is alive.

She was bruised and cut up a bit, but her injures were no more severe than that.

Washington suffered a broken thigh bone, a small spinal fracture and cuts on the back of the head. Plus, the train severed the toes from his left foot.

"Usually no trains run on that track," a shaken Maria Ramos told the detective who spoke to her at Bellevue.

Washington said he was just happy to be alive.

"That's what I told Maria," he said from his hospital bed. And he said he told her something else.

"If it would have turned out worse than it did, at least I was holding you last."

Copyright (c) 1992 Seattle Times Company, All Rights Reserved.

[side_show]

Another version of the train track sex story in a Ann Landers column:  http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=932&dat=19940417&id=aaYNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=s1UDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6818,2833383

[side_show]

If you visit the Identify This Girl it seems (with the lack of response) that the story has not yet been verified.  Seems odd in this day and age that no archive of the original story seems to exist.  I wonder where the story that was pasted into this blog came from?  I did a little further digging and there is a reporter named Sarah Chalmers writting today for the UK Daily Mail, and I wonder if she's the same person.  I'm going to try find for her and possibly see if I can track down the archives department for the paper to see where that leads.