by Carole Moore
Schmidt says that Colton O’Neal’s mother and his stepmother, frustrated by the inability of local police to track the missing child, approached the feds for assistance. The women claimed they got the brush-off, so they launched their own initiative, establishing a Web site, giving interviews critical of law enforcement, and snagging Schmidt’s attention.
In one month, Schmidt was able to find the boy and bring him home. The child had been missing for a year and a half before being reunited with his family.
The California private operative has a long list of cases of children he has located who were taken by noncustodial parents. He found little Everett and Celestia Langille (who were ages one and two, respectively, when they were abducted) in Los Angeles after their father, Michael, was discovered working there—far from their kids’ home in Pennsylvania. The children were reunited with their mother, Nicole, after evaporating for five months—a long, agonizing time for the young mother who, as Schmidt remarked when he found them, was robbed of seeing her young son take his first step.
“The first thing I tell any client is to have reasonable expectations about what can be done, and don’t base [those expectations] on movies and television,” Schmidt says, adding, “Most people don’t have reasonable expectations.”
Family abductions are the most common type of child abduction, and child abductions are more common than most realize: according to the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Thrownaway Children (NISMART-2), which was released in 2002, more than 200,000 children are reported as abducted by family members each year. Another 58,000 kids are taken each year by nonfamily members, and about 115 of what are referred to as “stereotypical” kidnappings occur in which ransom demands are made, the kidnapper plans to keep the child permanently, or the victim is killed.
The NISMART report broke down the statistics on family-abducted children even further: of a total of 203,900 abductions classified as family abductions for the purposes of the report, 117,200 are classified as “caretaker missing,” a subcategory that the report’s authors defined as “the caretaker did not know where the child was, became alarmed for at least an hour, and looked for the child.” In 56,500 of the family abductions studied, the child was reported as missing to authorities.
That’s another number that bears closer scrutiny: not all children who are abducted by a parent are reported missing. In fact, the majority are not reported because many times the custodial parent is aware of the child’s whereabouts. One example of this takes place when a child is on a visitation with the other parent and is not returned at the appropriate time.
Family abduction ranks second to running away as the most common reason a child goes missing. Of family-abducted children, the fathers took 53 percent, while mothers are responsible for 25 percent. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other family members abducted the remainder of those children.
The good news is that 46 percent are returned within a week; 21 percent are returned within a month of their abductions. The majority of kids taken by a family member are recovered in a short amount of time, but other custodial parents, like Stephen Watkins and David Goldman, must launch complicated and expensive searches for their children.
In the excellent government resource, Family Abduction Prevention, author Patricia M. Hoff outlines the following steps a parent should take when searching for a child:
• File a missing persons report with the appropriate law enforcement agency.
• Request that the agency enter your child into National Crime Information Center Missing Person File with a child abduction flag.
• Request the issuance of an Amber Alert.
• Contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
• Search for information under any aliases the abductor may be using (think maiden, middle, and former names, and so forth).
• Keep a record of every person and agency with whom you come in contact, and stay in touch with them.
• When your child is located, follow up with the agencies and individuals who assisted you with your search.
In addition to the above suggestions, it also helps to network with missing persons organizations, including the clearinghouses in each state (a full list of these clearinghouses can be found in Family Abduction Prevention or at www
.klaaskids.org). Another exceptional resource can be the organizations that belong to the Association of Missing and Exploited Children’s Organizations (AMECO), whose member organizations offer various levels of support and advice for families whose children are missing. One of those sites belongs to Kelly Jolkowski, founder of Project Jason (www.projectjason.org).
Many of the people Kelly helps through her Web site and work have children who were the targets of parental abductions. But there are others who advocate for children kidnapped by a parent for a very different reason. They are members of an underground network that helps women who claim to be fleeing abusive partners for the sake of the children.
The most visible of these is an Atlanta woman who has admitted to operating an underground network that assists women who claim the fathers of their children present a danger to those kids—the most common being molestation. The underground network reportedly helps the women prepare to leave, assists them in establishing new identities for themselves and their kids, and then helps them relocate.
The woman from the underground network has told the press that she stopped relocating families in the United States and now helps them escape abroad, most often to countries where the inclination to enforce the Hague Convention is lax. She also has claimed in interviews that over the years she has received unofficial support from law enforcement officials, including the FBI and prosecutors. Whether certain officials give her a wink and a nod is not known, but the fact remains that she been very successful, even withstanding threat of both civil and criminal actions. And she is not alone: evidence suggests a large underground network dedicated to the same cause.
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In 2007, a man who went by the name of Clark Rockefeller was charged with kidnapping his seven-year-old daughter, Reigh, from her mother’s custody. Although he claimed to be a scion of the famous New York Rockefellers, he was exposed after his arrest as a German whose real name is Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter. He stayed on the run for six days until authorities apprehended him in Baltimore. Reigh was recovered and returned to her mother.
Extensive press coverage helped nail Gerhartsreiter and led to the little girl’s return, but even media coverage doesn’t always result in a quick and happy resolution.
In 1979, a Harvard Law School Legal Clinic supervisor took his two daughters—five-year-old Rachael and two-year-old Wendy—and fled with them to Florida. The girls would be raised under an alias. His former wife, Barbara Kurth, spent eighteen years looking for her children.
Arrested in 1998, Stephen Fagan, now known as Bill Martin, served no active time. He claimed in court and to the media that he ran with the children because his ex-wife was violent and a substance abuser—two unproven charges that Barbara and her family have denied. No concrete evidence supports his claim, but as far as anyone knows, the girls—both now grown—have failed to re-establish a relationship with their mother.
Although both matters were resolved, as in all instances of family abduction, no “happily ever after” exists. In Reigh’s case, her father was exposed as a fraud, and the story will follow her wherever she goes in life. In the Fagan abductions, the family was broken apart and the probability is that it will never heal.
While these cases may seem extraordinary, family abduction itself is not. NISMART’s figures indicate that in the United States alone enough children are abducted by family members on an average day to fill a school bus every other hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
• 7 •
The Mentally Ill and Substance Abuse:
The Forgotten Missing
The main symptom of a psychiatric case is that
the person is perfectly unaware that he is a psychiatric case.—attributed to Oleg Shchepin, Russian health official
Tom Zinza had not contacted his family or anyone else as far as they know for more than two years. They were mystified as to what could have happened to him, but what they did know was this: the Fairbanks, Alaska, resident and would-be writer climbed aboard a commercial airline flight on February 17, 2008, and landed in Cleveland. It was the first leg of a planned trip to Boston, but for some reason no one understands, Tom chose not to make the connection. Instead, he slept in a Cleveland hotel room that night. The next day he drove by rental car through a place called Wooster to Emlenton, Pennsylvania, where he checked into the Emlenton Motor Inn.
Two days later, the cleaning lady at the motor inn called the Pennsylvania State Police and told them that the man who rented Tom Zinza’s room never slept there. His rental car also sat unused, where he parked it when he first signed the motel’s guestbook.
Other circumstances flagged Tom’s disappearance as out of the ordinary. For one thing, Ohio law enforcement officers found Tom’s luggage, including his laptop and a collection of his writings, along a highway near the town of Wooster. And, prior to the former U.S. Marine’s departure from Fairbanks, he told his father and older brother, John, that he was sure someone was trying to kill him.
That someone might be out to kill Tom is a theory most would dismiss out of hand, but he had a long history of mental problems, and those claims were in sync with his illness. Tom suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, and psychosis. He also experienced constant pain due to repeated right ankle fractures, chronic knee problems, and a herniated disk. But Tom had been doing well over the past few years, living independently on his disability checks in a cabin with his two cats, writing poetry and stories, and pursuing his dream of being published.
Tom was the type of nice guy that people remembered. With an extensive network of buddies from his hitch in the service, he had stayed in touch with many of his old friends, although in recent years he led a more secluded life. When he was on his medication, he did fine. When he went off his meds, the world tilted.
Although Tom experienced downward slides before, his brother John helped him overcome his demons time and time again. John says that the last big breakdown started in late 2003, but by spring, Tom was back on track. The experience brought the two brothers—one disabled and fighting for an identity, the other a successful civil engineer—much closer than they ever had been.
John kept in constant contact with Tom, following up with Tom’s mental health clinic, making sure he was taking his medications, putting out the little fires before they became bigger ones. Both John and his father sensed something was afoot about ten days before Tom boarded that plane. John says Tom made some financial changes, was preparing to deal with his debts, and placed at least one phone call to a number in Mt. Pocono, Pennsylvania.
Then Tom told his brother he was going to leave Alaska as soon as possible to visit Tom’s former wife, her three daughters, and some friends from his Marine Corps years. The next day, February 15, Tom dumped his medications in the trash and asked his mental health provider to prescribe some new ones. Tom boarded a plane the day after that and vanished somewhere along I-80 in Pennsylvania.
John Zinza grows so emotional when he talks about his gentle younger brother that he chokes out the words. John knew that because Tom was diagnosed with a mental illness some agencies would not give his disappearance the weight it deserved. Tom could have been anywhere, without the ability to contact his family or to do something as simple as telling someone his own name.
After Tom disappeared, John retrieved his brother’s car from the airport and visited his Fairbanks home. The cabin looked as if Tom had just walked out the door for a moment. There were no signs he planned to be away for any length of time. John found Tom’s cats and took them to a shelter, cleaned up the garbage Tom left behind, and read through the stack of unopened mail for clues as to what might have happened to his brother. The bank would later foreclose on the simple cabin.
Then John started bumping heads with the system. Tom flew out of Fairbanks, landed in Ohio, and drove to Pennsylvania. John dealt with both state police and local law enforcement in all three states. Alaska said from their viewpoint, Tom was not missing because he left the state of his own volition. Ohio pointed to the fact that Tom landed in Ohio but checked into a Pennsylvania motel. Pennsylvania referred John back to Alaska.
In early 2010 John said, “I don’t think he’s in good law enforcement hands. I don’t know if Ohio followed up on any of the leads on his case. Alaska says Pennsylvania is the lead agency. Pennsylvania says the same thing about Alaska.”
In fairness, Pennsylvania authorities did search the wooded areas near the motor inn where Tom was last seen, but the searches were not for Tom—they were for his corpse. That was in the summer following his winter disappearance. In the spring of 2009, John managed to spark another search using trained cadaver dogs and multiple search-and-rescue groups as well as law enforcement agencies.
With his voice breaking, John said afterward, “I think they will find bones in the area five, ten, or maybe even twenty years from now. I cry every day for my brother.”
But Tom was not the only brother for whom John shed tears. In a family of five boys, two have vanished without a trace. James Zinza, one of John and Tom’s two older brothers, has not been seen nor heard from since February 28, 1992, when he disappeared from his Mesa, Arizona, home.
John says his older brother, whom he called Jimmy, was not diagnosed with mental illness, but there were signs all was not right with him prior to his disappearance. Jimmy is intelligent and spiritual, according to John, who says Jimmy attended community college, rode his bike everywhere, loved cats and pizza, and led a quiet but fulfilling life. Still, in retrospect, John says he sees many of the same characteristics in Jimmy that Tom later exhibited.
Jimmy moved around a lot, traveling across the country before settling in Mesa. “That is where we started seeing the cracks,” says John.
The very last time John saw Jimmy—a thirty-year-old with an easy smile and receding hairline—was right before he went missing. John and his wife were moving and had a pile of magazines they thought Jimmy would like, so they drove over to his place to drop them off. Their last meeting was awkward for reasons John didn’t understand at the time. Jimmy told him he didn’t want the magazines, didn’t invite them to sit down, and seemed anxious for them to leave.
“He didn’t want anything to do with me,” John says.
Then Jimmy was gone. By the time the Zinza family discovered he had vanished, no one had seen Jimmy for days. The oldest Zinza brother (John is the middle child of the five boys) hired a private investigator to look for Jimmy, but he failed to turn up any clues pointing to Jimmy’s fate.
It was as if Jimmy Zinza never existed.
“If he’s dead, he’s not been found. Is he in a landfill underneath some vegetation, or in some sheriff’s office, cremated, or maybe in an unmarked grave somewhere?” John asks. His voice quavers when he talks about Jimmy.
For years, the four remaining Zinza brothers and their parents looked for Jimmy, trying to break through the limbo of not knowing where their loved one is or what happened to him. Then, almost fifteen years later, Tom followed Jimmy into the void. It is almost more than one family can handle.
John says there is a distinct difference in how his two brothers’ cases were handled. He believes everything possible was done to locate Jimmy, while help came too little and too late for Tom. He thinks both men disappeared as the result of mental disorders but at one point he didn’t know whether either—or both—ended up as part of the homeless population or dead. Time is the enemy in these cases, and the law makes it hard for families to exercise any control over their situations.
“I’m burnt out mentally on all of this stuff. I cry. This is the last three years of my life,” says John
.
But he never gave up on Tom, and he hasn’t abandoned his decade-and-a-half search for Jimmy, either. “I don’t want to go through the rest of my life feeling like I didn’t do everything I can do to find them,” John says. And so he plugged on, talking to law enforcement, putting up flyers, chasing down each and every lead, no matter how vague or pointless it seemed. But each night, when John climbed into his bed, he did so with a little less hope, a little less determination, a little less spirit than he had when he first arose.
“You can’t begin to imagine what it’s like,” he says.
On October 3, 2010, the skeletonized remains of Tom Zinza were found in the woods not far from the Pennsylvania motel where he had been staying. An autopsy concluded no foul play was involved in his death.
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They huddle on the sidewalks, holding cups and begging coins. They push grocery carts loaded with items fished from trash bins and picked up from the side of the road. They crowd shelters when they can find them, curl up in cardboard boxes when they can’t. Many times they end up frozen and dead in some morgue, as nameless and anonymous in death as they were in the last days of their lives. They are the chronically homeless—people who remain on the streets, not the ones who find themselves without a place to live for a day or two—and many are mentally ill.
Sherrill Britton believes her missing son, Adam Kellner, once joined the homeless ranks that haunt nearby Los Angeles. Britton and her other son have combed the area’s homeless district, known as Skid Row, looking for Adam, putting up flyers, talking to everyone they meet, with no success. The widow and former Miami resident knows Adam is out there somewhere, but he remains out of reach.