Missing Persons Group Is Target of State Inquiry

The state attorney general’s office is investigating possibly illegal fund raising by a Santa Clarita organization founded to locate missing persons, but an attorney for the group’s founder said any violations were accidental and unintentional.

The founder of Missing Persons International, June Littlefield, thought the group had been incorporated as a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization when she began soliciting donations this year, said attorney G. Marshall Hann.

She made an “absolutely innocent and inadvertent” mistake, he said, because clerical errors have delayed the processing of the incorporation papers by the state.

Hann said he did not know how much money Littlefield, who is also known as June Ramsay, had raised for the group.

A spokesman for the attorney general’s office confirmed Friday that the agency’s charitable trust section is investigating Missing Persons International but would not elaborate.

In an unrelated case, Littlefield is scheduled to appear Monday in Newhall Municipal Court for a preliminary hearing on three counts of grand theft and two counts of forgery.

Littlefield, a bookkeeper, is accused of taking a total of $2,395 from her former employer--M.D. Painting in Santa Clarita--by altering two checks and making out a third one to herself, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Susan Mills.

Checks for $26.90 and $11.48 were doctored so Littlefield could receive $926.90 and $911.48, Mills said.

Littlefield declined to comment Friday, but Hann said the criminal charges were the result of a squabble between Littlefield and her former boss at M.D. Painting, Michael Fink.

Hann said Fink was trying to silence Littlefield because she uncovered illegal bookkeeping practices at the company. Fink denies the charges. “I wasn’t trying to silence her,” he said. “That’s baloney.”

The criminal case is not related to the investigation into fund raising at Missing Persons International, said Jim Cordi, head of the charitable trust section of the attorney general’s office in Los Angeles.

Littlefield said she founded her organization in 1960 to track down runaways, children abducted by estranged parents, children given up for adoption and other missing persons. Until this year, she ran the organization using her own funds and volunteer labor, Hann said. She is a frequent guest lecturer for community groups and social service organizations in the Santa Clarita Valley.