by Carole Moore
Ed Smart, father of Elizabeth Smart, who was abducted as a child from the bedroom of her Utah home while she slept, is the keynote speaker. He leads the crowd through a step-by-step description of his family’s experiences during the harrowing minutes, days, and months that transpired between his daughter’s abduction and her miraculous recovery. The main conference room is cavernous and a bit noisy when the heating unit kicks in, but the crowd sits transfixed as this father talks with raw emotion and honesty about his child and her ordeal.
In the audience are a number of families who understand better than anyone how hard it is to not know where a loved one may be. They are the families whose children or parents or siblings are missing. They are the real reason for this annual conference, which looks for ways to bring the disparate segments of this community together for a common goal.
And there is a common goal: they all want to bring home the missing. But investigating a missing persons case isn’t like investigating any other case. Barbara Nelson, the conference coordinator, says, “Although adults have the right to disappear without notifying anyone, the substantial issues surrounding adult disappearances are often sensitive and recovery resources are limited. In order to make a determination that an individual is ‘at risk,’ law enforcement agencies must focus on a number of serious social issues that contribute to disappearances, like domestic violence, Alzheimer’s disease, substance abuse, prostitution, human trafficking, mental illness, suspicious circumstances, and foul play.”
Nelson says the three-day conference, which is held each February, helps provide leadership in changing attitudes, policies, and practices. And most important, it opens a platform for those who search for the missing to talk to others who are doing the same thing, often in a different way or from a different perspective.
In the end, it is this exchange of ideas that helps police understand the human equation involved in these cases, and that is the most important lesson they can learn.
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On June 8, 2010, one day after the arrest in Peru of a man believed to be involved in the disappearance of her daughter, Beth Holloway presided at the opening of a new resource center for the families of missing persons.
The Natalee Holloway Resource Center at Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of Crime and Punishment will offer better access to materials and the press for families of missing persons. Natalee disappeared while on a group high school graduation trip to Aruba in 2005.
Beth told reporters at the opening that she hoped the center would “act as a point of light for the missing.”
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Happy Endings:
These Loved Ones Came Home
We hope that our story focuses attention on all of the children still missing and on their need to be found. We must keep looking for them. As Jaycee shows, miracles can happen.—Terry Probyn, mother of Jaycee Dugard
Jaycee Lee Dugard was eleven years old when she was abducted from the street near her family’s home in South Tahoe, California. Her stepfather, Carl Probyn, saw a gray sedan occupied by two people pull up to Jaycee, open the car door, and yank her into the vehicle before speeding away. He chased the car on his bicycle but was unable to keep up, and the car, with Jaycee inside, vanished. The date was June 10, 1991, and the little girl was in fifth grade.
Police and other law enforcement organizations were brought into the case. Days became months; months turned into years. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children continued to update Jaycee’s photograph, progressively aging her image to enhance her chances of being found. But privately, given the time and circumstances, many believed that Jaycee was already beyond help.
Terry Probyn, Jaycee’s mother, put her time to good use. Like many of the families of the missing, she advocated not only for Jaycee, but also for other missing children.
Then in August 2009, police investigated a report that a convicted sex offender named Phillip Garrido—on parole and forbidden to have contact with children—had two little girls and their young mother living with him and his wife, Nancy. They found Jaycee Dugard and her two young daughters in the backyard of the Garridos’ Antioch, California, home. Jaycee told detectives that Garrido fathered both of her children.
Jaycee reunited with her family and became reacquainted with her younger sister, who was a baby at the time of Jaycee’s abduction. The police, who had received multiple tips concerning the odd living arrangements at the Garridos’ home and had done little about them, came under severe criticism. They apologized to the Dugard family at a press conference, and the California state legislature voted to award Jaycee $20 million in victim’s compensation funds.
As of this writing, the Garridos await trial in connection with Jaycee’s abduction and captivity. She and her daughters are reported to be adjusting well to their new lives.
Stories with endings like Jaycee Dugard’s are rare, but they do happen. In 2007, police found Shawn Hornbeck alive. The eleven-year-old victim of stranger abduction had been missing since October 6, 2002. The break that led the police to Shawn came while they were investigating the disappearance of another Missouri youth, Ben Ownby. Authorities followed a tip from an observant teenager and discovered a man named Michael Devlin was holding both boys captive. Tried and convicted of kidnapping and imprisonment in addition to other charges, Devlin was sentenced to life in prison.
Spending four years, or in the case of Jaycee Dugard, eighteen years, in captivity makes it hard to qualify a case as a “happy ending.” Jayee’s family lost almost two decades with their child and the circumstances in which she lived were both abnormal and difficult. But for a parent whose child has been abducted by a stranger, finding the child alive and well is an amazing outcome.
The good news about stranger or nonfamily abductions is that despite what news accounts lead us to believe, they are not that common. According to Stacy Daniels and M. A. Brennan (Department of Family, Youth and Community Science, Florida Cooperative Extension Service, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville), who conducted a study of missing children:
Nonfamily abductions are rare. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that in 1999, 33,000 children (a rate of .47 per 1,000) were victims of nonfamily abduction. The perpetrator is often a stranger, is more likely to be male, and more often victimizes females. Teenagers are at higher risk for this form of abduction, mostly because these attacks take place when the child is alone and in some type of public area. Most victims of nonfamily abductions are between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, but twelve- to fourteen-year-olds are more likely to be victims of stereotypical kidnappings. Sometimes the perpetrator, or perpetrators, asks for a ransom, but more often the motive in these attacks is sexual. Just less than half of all victims of nonfamily abduction are sexually assaulted. In a very few cases the victims die. A 1997 study by the State of Washington’s Office of the Attorney General calls the murder of an abducted child “a rare event.” They concluded that about 100 such incidents occur each year in America. This is less than one-half of one percent of the total number of murders committed each year. However, they warn that 74% of abducted children who are murdered are dead within three hours of the abduction.
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In 2002, two teenage girls made conscious decisions not to join that .5 percent of murdered children. They fought back when abducted by a stranger who took them from a lover’s lane area. After tying up the girls’ boyfriends, thirty-seven-year-old Ron Ratliff, a two-time loser and rape suspect already on the run from authorities, forced the girls into his car. Seventeen-year-old Jacqueline Marris and sixteen-year-old Tamara Brooks, of Lancaster, California, would emerge as the test case for the state’s new Amber Alert system, which both worked and failed simultaneously.
Named for nine-year-old Amber Hagerman, an Arlington, Texas, girl who in 1996 was abducted and slain, the Amber Alert (which sometimes goes by a different name, depending on the state) is an electronic system used to notify the
media and public when a child has been abducted.
The Amber Alert itself grew out of a model program conceived by Bruce Seybert, a volunteer who had joined the tragic search for Amber, and Marc Klaas, father of Polly Klaas and the force behind the Klaas Foundation, which promotes child safety. Seybert mentioned their concept in an address during a media symposium. When word of Klaas and Seybert’s idea filtered to the Dallas police chief, the Amber Alert system, which initially used local radio stations to impart crucial information, was created. Soon, other states followed Texas’s lead and implemented their own systems.
In 2002, five-year-old Stanton, California, resident Samantha Runnion was snatched from her own front yard. Samantha had been playing outside when a man named Alejandro Avila approached and told her he was looking for his lost dog. Her body was later found in the mountainous areas near Riverside, California. She had been raped and strangled. Avila went to trial and in 2005 received the death penalty. On July 24, 2002, California reacted to the senseless abduction and slaying of the curly-haired little girl by instituting the statewide Amber Alert system.
In October of that same year, a federal effort was launched to encourage states to adopt the Amber Alert system. Included in the legislation was a national alert coordinator, as well as funding for the effort. But California’s system was only a few days old and the national system nonexistent when Jacqueline and Tamara, the two California teens, were kidnapped by Ron Ratliff.
The girls later told police that they waited for a vulnerable moment, then fought back against their attacker, cutting him with a knife and hitting him in the face with a whiskey bottle. Communicating with one another by holding hands and tracing words in one another’s palms, the girls were prepared to go down fighting. They almost did: only when Ratliff, their captor, confronted them with a gun, did they give up their effort to escape.
In the meantime, as Ratliff drove the young women in his Ford Bronco about one hundred miles north to Kern County, an Amber Alert went out across the state. After freeing themselves, the boys had called authorities and provided a thorough description of both Ratliff and his vehicle.
That first California Amber Alert almost didn’t work: there were expensive delays getting the information out to the media. But in the end, when seconds were precious currency, that alert helped save the girls’ lives. A Kern County animal control officer who heard it and paid attention spotted the Bronco and reported it. When deputies responded to the call, they found Ratliff aiming a gun at them. They shot and killed him. Jacqueline and Tamara, who had been forced to crouch down on the floorboards of the Bronco by Ratliff in order to avoid detection, suffered minor injuries in the incident. Both girls have been candid about the fact that Ratliff raped them. Their unique courage has been credited not only with dispelling much of the stigma associated with rape, but also with encouraging other victims to fight back and speak up.
Rescue for Jacqueline and Tamara came not a moment too soon. Deputies say they believe Ratliff planned to kill them within the next few minutes.
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Not every person who goes missing and is found alive and well is recovered as a result of random good luck. Some are located because the person searching for them is determined not to fail. Oklahoma resident Cathy Wilson is one of those seekers who wouldn’t give up.
When Cathy’s son, Matthew, disappeared on December 17, 2007, she knew from the beginning that something was wrong. Matthew was on a full scholarship to Rice University in Texas. When Cathy tried to contact Matthew prior to his holiday visit, she instead reached his roommate, who told her that her son had disappeared. Although at first she believed something had happened to Matthew, a closer look convinced her he had walked away.
Matthew is a good kid—smart, hardworking, and close to his family. His father died when Matthew was two, but he is close to his mom and three sisters. Cathy knew he was under self-induced pressure at college and refused to entertain the possibility she might not see her son again. Instead of waiting and hoping the police would locate him, the preschool teacher dedicated herself to finding Matthew.
Although Cathy wasn’t well versed in the ways of the media, over the next few months she would make herself an expert, both at tracking her son and at attracting media coverage. She worked with university police at Rice and the police agencies she encountered in her search for Matthew. She also hired two private investigators during her crusade.
“I could never give up; I took time off from my job and lived my life searching for Matthew,” Cathy says.
Six months after Matthew disappeared, his car was found on a street in Berkeley, California, prompting Cathy to fly there. She had already crossed the country in her search, raised a reward, put up thousands of posters, given dozens of interviews, and kept Matthew’s name in front of the public. She would not rest until she found her son—and find him she would—eight months to the day he first went missing.
Matthew was in Berkeley. Under enormous pressure at school, tired, and feeling alone in the world, he fled and made his way to the University of California’s Berkeley campus, where his mother discovered him. Cathy, who is working on a book about her efforts to find Matthew, says he came back to Oklahoma, where he continues to put his life back together with the support of his family.
“It was hard. I remember being jealous when friends would say their kids were home from college and I would think, ‘I don’t know where mine is,’” Cathy says about the time Matthew was missing. “But if I had [the search] to do all over again, I would.”
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In October 2008, two Goldsboro, North Carolina, men traveled across the country to renew a relationship with someone they had neither seen nor heard from in thirty-eight years—their father. The reunion was made possible by persistence and smart sleuthing.
William Schafer met his wife and the future mother of the two men in Long Beach, California. The former sailor and his new spouse relocated to Durham, North Carolina, but when their sons, John and Robert, were ages three and eighteen months, the couple separated. Custody went to their father, but John told a newspaper reporter that, unknown to their father, their mother took them from a day care center one day and moved with them to Lillington, North Carolina, where her family lived.
She changed the boys’ last name to that of her first husband, with whom she had other children. The two Schafer boys spent a decade believing they were Hewitts by birth.
John said he learned about his real father from his mother’s former boyfriend. Although he continued to ask his mother about his birth father, she refused to discuss him. Later, he would learn his father had never stopped searching for his boys, even hiring a private investigator to look for them.
John’s wife, Kerri, knew that her husband had many unanswered questions that could only be resolved by finding his father. William Schafer had been forty-two when John was born. Kerri knew there was a chance he might not be alive. Still, she persisted in her efforts to locate him, using her instincts and amateur sleuthing skills. Kerri’s efforts produced a lead.
Their dad was eighty-three years old when John and Robert saw him for the first time since their abduction. Almost four decades had passed since their mom had taken them from the day care center. William Schafer had neither remarried nor had any other children. The family reunited in Long Beach, California, and spent many hours discussing the intervening years. They vowed to make the most of each moment they still have together.
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The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s age-progression technology has resulted in more than one child being reunited with his or her family. Thanks to a dedicated investigator and the NCMEC’s finesse for nailing age progressions, another long-overdue reunion took place in 2003.
Special Agent Colleen Maher of the U.S. Department of Education was investigating a possible fraud case involving student loans. A man later identified as Brent Austin took out thousands in federally financed student loans using the Social Security nu
mber assigned to his son, Michael David Johnson Jr. Austin, who was going by the name of Michael David Johnson Sr., admitted to the fraud, and Maher discovered an age-progressed photograph that looked a lot like his son.
The boy, Michael David Johnson Jr., turned out to be Aric Austin, who was abducted from his mother’s care during an ugly custody dispute in 1981, when the child was six weeks old. Although infants are difficult to age progress, the NCMEC staff did such an expert job of it that Maher had no trouble recognizing Aric, who was at last reunited with his mother, Pennygale Gusman.
In Florida, an eleven-year-old girl with Asperger syndrome disappeared in a swamp infested with alligators near her Winter Springs home. Searchers blanketed the area, but after four days even the most optimistic among them discounted the chances of finding Nadia Bloom alive and unharmed.
Sometimes things do go right: a volunteer who attends church with the Bloom family spotted the little girl on a dry patch of land in the swamp. Nadia was dehydrated and covered in bug bites but otherwise fine. It was the happy ending for which her family had prayed.
Three years earlier the prayers of another family were answered when rescuers discovered a starving and fragile Ora Doris Anderson just days shy of the memorial service scheduled on behalf of the missing seventy-six-year-old woman. Ora vanished in the wilderness of the Wallowa Mountains in Oregon in what rescuers described as “extremely rough terrain.” She had spent thirteen days without food or water in thick brush. Although she sustained a hip injury, medical authorities said Ora was in good shape for someone who had spent the better part of two weeks unable to move.
Ora and her husband, Harold, were on an elk-hunting trip when their truck became stuck in the mud. The couple started to walk for help, but Ora became fatigued and turned back to wait in the truck. She lost her way and ended up stranded, spending evenings in temperatures that plunged into the thirties.