Manual Ordóñez: A Look at the Life

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Above all, Manuel José Ordóñez was a person with a large family until his disappearance on Nov. 6, 1982. Manuel had his parents in Milwaukee, a wife, and three daughters, but one thing was not right.

He also was one of the city’s drug dealers, the police reports allege.

“He was to come back home. He did not return,” Sal Ordóñez, Manuel’s brother says in the police reports. “On Sunday, Nov. 7, 1982, he was to pick up his ex-wife and children and take them to church, which he had done each Sunday for over a year. He did not show up. No one has seen him . He has never been arrested. Was laid off from his job.”

Manual Ordóñez.

Fast forward by 42 years. Manuel José Ordóñez is still missing. Ordóñez had a red 1976 Toyota pick-up truck and that vehicle’s whereabouts are unknown as well.  More than 40 years since, police have deemed the case “unsolvable.”

About 32,711 people have gone missing in the City of Milwaukee in the last 10 years, according to the Milwaukee Police Department. At any given time, about 500 people are actively missing in Milwaukee. Like Ordóñez, any are people of color, yet very few make the news. 

In 2024 through Oct. 15, 2,466 people were reported missing in the city. Each year in the past decade, between 2,500 and 3,300 people have been reported missing each year. Many are short-term missing cases where people are quickly found, highlighting a crisis of online grooming, group home runaways, and other issues. Stereotypical stranger abductions are exceptionally rare, and those are the ones that tend to be highlighted in the news. 

A team of 12 student journalists spent three months investigating 18 open missing people cases, most of them people of color in Milwaukee but several from smaller Wisconsin cities. The students spoke with family members and detectives and filed open records requests.  In the case of Ordóñez, Milwaukee police declined to answer specific questions on the case, but they did release the full police file to Media Milwaukee after an open records request.

In the 1980’s, there was a high amount of cocaine circulating around Milwaukee, and Manuel’s involvement in that epidemic was no exception in this time period. Media Milwaukee contacted a member of Ordóñez’s family but was not granted an interview, so the following information comes from the police file.

“Manuel was dealing cocaine and expressed a fear of meeting a Black male he was going to deliver approximately 5 ounces of cocaine to,” family members say in file. He was going to meet a male who was a MPS physical education teacher who Media Milwaukee is not naming because he has never been arrested or charge.

“(The teacher) was to direct him to two individuals who were going to purchase the cocaine. He hadn’t heard from him since,” the police file states.

Police tried to investigate the case despite family asking not to do so. Often times police at that time gave families discretion on whether to have police look for the missing, according to file.

On Nov. 22, 1982, Manuel’s sister told police she didn’t want them involved as she was afraid of reprisal by the teacher, according to the police file.

On Dec. 9, 1982, police went to the teacher’s house and spoke to him.

“(The man) admitted that he was involved with Manuel in selling cocaine.” The teacher stated that he was “probably the third best person in the city of Milwaukee to make rock cocaine from powder,” the file says of Ordóñez .

“He said that on the day Manuel disappeared he called (the teacher) and told him that he was dealing with some people that he didn’t know and he was a little afraid of. He requested (the teacher) accompany him and said (another man) would be there,” the file describes.

“Deal went down at Downer Ave house of (the teacher’s) girlfriend who was at a teacher convention,” file continued. “(The teacher’s) girlfriend who didn’t know (the teacher) was involved in cocaine.

Ordóñez’s connection to get cocaine was a person named Joe from California and Manuel owed him money, the teacher told police, according to the file.

Joe’s last name is unknown, so who is he? A dealer from California that would bring cocaine to Manuel? Who else knew him? All questions that remain a mystery.

This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into missing people’s cases in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available here.