When using Perfect Tenses with/for the verb "to be", it seems necessary to give the period for which the state was known/appeared to exist. In this example, "had been dead (for how long? - missing)". I am not sure about this, thought, but that's what my mind is searching for when reading "have been so and so" or "had been so and so". Other examples of finished past time references are last year and in 2018, and these are not usually used with the present perfect. But it is fine to say We have been to California before , because "before" refers to a period of time lasting until the present moment (i.e., an unfinished past time). 3. The past perfect or pluperfect. The past perfect tense, or pluperfect, as in He had seen , is normally only used in English when one past event (either a specific action, or a contuous condition) has to be situated in a more distant past than another past event. In some situations, the progressive or continuous form is necessary. The past perfect continuous (progressive) tense describes an action that started in the past and continued into another time in the past. A past perfect progressive sentence is formed by using the auxiliary verbs had and been together with the main verb + -ing (e.g. walking). For example, 'I had been walking'. When you try to get information about an ordinary grammar structure, you may notice that the use of present, past and perfect is very common. One of the most preferred time modes in the use of Participles is the perfect time. When using this mode, we often use participles structures to specify individuals or objects and add detail to them. vlrnWP2.

by the time past perfect examples