Part Two

I know—it’s been nine days since I promised to finish this blog. My apologies, as I really didn’t mean for this much time to elapse. Working to promote my book, my health issues and, my favorite pastime—volunteer work of my own—have taken priority. And now I’m behind on several other topics I must blog about, that pertain to upcoming events related to Sister of Silence.

However, this is too important a topic to leave you hanging. And since Oct. 7, when I wrote the first part, several more children, teens, and even babies, have gone missing (both here locally and around the country). Given that, you’ll want to know what else Ken Lanning (one of the most well-respected experts in this field) told me.

As a missing child search (like the one for Aliayah Lunsford) continues without results, the suspect pool naturally becomes smaller. “The family becomes more suspect as time and all other avenues are eliminated,” Lanning said.

Since the three-week search for the three-year-old missing Weston, W.Va., girl yielded little more than frustration, that’s probably why the media reported that authorities were looking into any connection Aliayah’s stepfather, Ralph Lunsford, might have to her disappearance.

Again, I need to remind you that Lanning and I spoke about missing child cases in general, so nothing he said can be applied specifically to this one case. But what he did say can help you to better understand such cases.

First of all, the people—professional and otherwise—who end up searching for children like Aliayah far outnumber those who search for, say, children who are like I once was. (That type of abuse is called “acquaintance molestation.” I discuss it in my book, and it’s what Lanning says is the norm in most cases that involve missing children or child sexual abuse.)

“If they appeared to be abducted and sexually abused by strangers, an army of people show up (to search),” Lanning said, including such groups as the FBI’s CARD (Child Abduction Rapid Deployment) team.

“It seems to tap into a primal fear that some stranger’s going to come kidnap your child,” Lanning said. These “long-term missing child cases,” create an unbelievable level of emotion that evolves and grows as the search continues, he added.

Conversely speaking, though, if a child is abused by a family member or close acquaintance, “we’re lucky is we get one person to investigate that case,” Lanning said.

But Lanning says the facts prove—and I agree, based on my own experience, as well as my own research—that missing child or child sexual abuse cases involve someone within the family, or someone the family knows and trusts.

Two other factors come into play with missing children. First, there’s what Lanning refers to as “shrinking the window of opportunity.” That’s what happens when a parent tells police they last saw their child at, say, 1:05 p.m. By 1:10 p.m., when they went to check on the child, it was gone.

“That’s a five-minute window,” Lanning said, “but what happens is they finally tell you (after many hours or even days) they didn’t realize the child was missing until four hours later.”

Did they lie? Are they trying to cover up a crime? Not usually. Lanning said most parents are too embarrassed to admit they left their child without oversight for that long—or else they truly believe that only five minutes DID elapse. “They’re not lying to you, but what they’re telling you is not accurate,” he said.

In the meantime, police and searchers were operating under the premise the child had only been gone for five minutes—when, in reality, a four-hour window allows much more time and distance to be covered by the child (if it left of its own accord), or the abductor who took the child.

Second, some people say police respond more favorably to cases involving white missing children. Lanning disagrees—and so do I. But based on his experience with missing child cases, two factors do come into play.

“The classic case involves a picture of a cute child with big eyes, that gets shown (on TV) over and over,” Lanning said. “The cuter the child, the more the media eats it up. They love visuals, and if you have moving visuals (like home video), that’s great.”

But some families don’t take pictures. Maybe they don’t have that luxury, or maybe their lives are just too chaotic. And chaos, according to Lanning, is a huge factor in convincing the authorities to investigate a missing child case.

These cases involve “poorer people who generally live a more chaotic lifestyle,” Lanning said.

What does that mean as far as a potential investigation or search, when such a family discovers its child is missing? Sadly, the chaos hampers police response and a subsequent search.

Lanning cited this hypothetic example, based on similar cases he investigated while with the FBI:

At 9 a.m. a distraught mother calls 911 to report her child is missing. When she is asked what time she last saw the child, the mother says “3 a.m.” This leads the dispatcher, or police officer (if one is dispatched to the scene), to ask why she didn’t report the child’s disappearance earlier.

Mother: Well, I thought my ex-husband came and got her in the middle of the night, while I was asleep.

Officer: What makes you think that?

Mother: Well, he’s done it four times before.

This, Lanning said, is not uncommon in families where chaos is the norm.

Or, police are told the parent didn’t report the disappearance sooner because he (or she) believed the child had gone to visit “Aunt Martha.” Such visits have, in the past, often turned into three, or four-day stays, so the parent didn’t even realize the child was missing.

Compounding the problem even further, Lanning says, is what happens when the police learn that “Aunt Martha” really isn’t a relative at all—but just a nearby neighbor the family calls by that name.

Such factors highlight the challenging nature of investigating any missing child cases. Nonetheless, people like me will continue to volunteer to look for these children, just as police will spend the resources to investigate these cases.

It sure would be nice if no more children disappeared or were abducted, but that’s just not the reality of our lives today, is it? The reality is though, that most of the time, the harm (inflicted by other people) that comes to children, comes to them through the adults who are supposed to love and protect them, as well as the adults we think we know and trust enough to let our children spend time with.

Posted by Daleen at 08:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Part One

Something’s been troubling me for the past week. As a journalist writing on assignment for a newspaper, magazine, or online journal, I would have spoken up a week ago. As a blogger, I would have done the same. But journalism ethics being what they are, I didn’t feel I could, at the time.

You see, I didn’t approach this story as either a journalist or a blogger—I went in just like most everyone else did: as a volunteer searching for a missing three-year-old.

Maybe that’s why, when I posted this blog last Friday, the first words that entered my brain and jumped onto the page had nothing to do with Aliayah Lunsford—but everything to do with me. Or maybe it’s because, once you reveal you could have killed your own children, as I do in my book, Sister of Silence, you have some nagging desire to reassure people that you really were a good mother. Or maybe it’s just because every mother I know has, at least once, lost her own child in a supermarket, a shopping mall or elsewhere.

But after actually taking part in the Weston, W.Va., search, I came to realize only one thing: Ken Lanning was right. I spoke with Lanning on Sept. 29, not long before I was called upon to join what turned out to be the last volunteer search that day. Lanning and I talk every now and then, whenever I’m curious to learn his thoughts about cases involving missing children or sexual abuse. (Lanning, an expert about such crimes whose training manuals are used by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, taught at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., for more than 20 years. Retired in 2000, he wrote the foreword for my book and now works as a consultant for crimes against children.)

I should note that nothing Lanning said specifically applies to this case, as our conversation was about the general nature of such searches.

We spoke for 30 minutes or so, and what Lanning said didn’t surprise me. Not because I already knew it, but because of human nature. In general, he said searching for missing children is an extremely challenging task, for it involves various levels of law enforcement, professional searchers, and volunteers who are eager to find the missing child. When these three groups converge, the potential exists for evidence to be missed or misunderstood, in part because of how such searches are conducted.

For instance, Lanning said his own former FBI Behavioral Science Unit “totally misconstrued the evidence” in similar cases. One such case he cited was the West Memphis 3 murders, which involved the 1993 mutilation of three eight-year-old boys. Authorities subsequently arrested three teen boys, ages 16, 17 and 18, who were convicted of the murders. (The trio was recently released from prison after such celebrities as Johnny Depp became convinced of their innocence.)

In that case, prosecutors claimed the mutilation was the act of Satanic cults. But as Lanning explained, and as was later found to be true, such violence had nothing to do with Satan worshipers. It was simply a case of people jumping to the wrong conclusions.

“Even professional people can make errors in judgment,” Lanning said. “The police and FBI can make errors.”

He’s seen this happen when searchers missed an area during their search—the same area where a child’s body later turned up. Searchers literally walked right over it, Lanning said.

Other times, Lanning said, search and rescue dogs have traced a victim’s scent to an area where the scent then disappeared, causing police to believe the missing child was kidnapped and taken in one direction. “But the child actually went in the opposite direction,” Lanning added.

Several hours later, as I drove the 60 miles home, wet, dirty and exhausted, I thought about the only volunteer search I’ve ever been a part of, and Lanning’s words came back to me. “People come from all around. They have a vigil, they say prayers . . . They get caught up in the emotion and . . . lose their objectivity,” I remembered him saying.

In addition, there is another problem with volunteer searches. “Sometimes you have searchers who aren’t searchers,” Lanning said. They’re highly motivated, they spend 12 to 16 hours a day helping to search, and they really feel a type of calling to take part. But, according to Lanning, the very thing that’s good about their involvement—their level of motivation—can became a bad thing: “It sometimes affects their judgment and objectivity.”

Like the majority of people helping to look for Lunsford, I wasn’t a professional searcher. I was a volunteer. I may be an investigative journalist, but I can now tell you for a certainty that while the two are similar, they are not alike. Searching for a small child while combing through all kinds of vegetation on uneven riverbank terrain is nothing like taking notes while interviewing people and digging through documents trying to track down, say, a money trail.

At least, it wasn’t in this case. In my group, a professional searcher some of the volunteers had nicknamed “Rambo” because he carried something that looked like a machete, which he used to cut through the thick underbrush, had us all line up about 10-feet apart. We still needed to be able to see the shoes of the person on our left and right, he said. As we walked straight ahead in a line, we were to look up and down (even in the trees), from side to side, and even behind us.

This is a grid search, and while Lanning said he isn’t an expert in this area, he does know what’s involved—and that searchers can “make mistakes and overlook things.”

From personal experience, with only a few hours “on the job,” I can attest to that. Intent upon searching every square inch, I was doing everything possible not to miss a piece of ground. But other searchers would call out for me to hurry up, since the entire line of people are supposed to stay together and not move too far ahead, or lag behind, as the group moves forward. Frustrated, I tried to cover ground faster, while not skipping any of it. But I know I did.

So en route home later that night, I kept wondering, “What if I missed an area—under a fallen tree branch or a pile of wet leaves—where Aliayah was hiding, or hidden?”

The other nagging thought I’ve had since last week is this: by the time we ended our search, darkness had descended at least 15 minutes earlier. When the volunteers gathered that afternoon and discussed the search, I thought I heard someone say we wouldn’t be searching during the darkness—only the professionals would be. So I didn’t expect to be waving around a small, dimly-lit flashlight as we continued searching, hoping to find a swatch of fabric or a sign that earth had been moved—clues that might tell us anything about Aliayah.

(To be continued . . . )

Posted by Daleen at 06:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday, as my feet sunk in marshy mud and found myself tramping through briar brambles taller than I am, looking for Aliayah Lunsford, I realized it was only the third time I've searched for a person who was truly missing.

The first time was in 1986 or 87, when my son was still in diapers and not quite two-years-old. As a mother, I know exactly how it feels to discover a child--and not just any child, but YOUR child--is missing. That's because I am the person who made that discovery.

We were living in my childhood home at the time, which sat about three feet from a creek that rose and ran fast and swift in places during the springtime. Just on the other side of the creek were three sets of railroad tracks, which then carried several trains by each day, rumbling the windows in our house as they did so.

As a mother, I cannot think of anything that terrified me more than the thought that my child would turn up missing. My first experience, a few years earlier, came inside a J.C. Penny's store, where I spent about 10 frantic minutes searching for my second daughter--who turned up holding the hand of a neighbor girl who had gone along with us that evening. That daughter was not, however, truly missing.

Aliayah is, and she is just three-years-old. My son was younger than that, and as soon as I realized he had disappeared, I ran throughout our large brick home, yelling and looking and searching frantically. Hoping and praying he was just being an ornery child, hiding under the bed, or behind a door. By the time I realized he wasn't, I found myself at the creek, screaming--by then--at the top of my lungs.

My screams brought the neighbors running, and they immediately joined my search. Not seeing him anywhere in the neighbors' yards, or at the water's edge, I ran toward the bridge over the creek, and couldn't help but envision him being swept away in the water below. But he was nowhere to be seen. Thank God. It was probably mere seconds, but it seemed like many minutes, that it took my feet to cross the three sets of railroad tracks, and run the length that would allow me to see up and down the tracks, in both directions. No diaper-clad baby boy could be seen.

From there, I broke into a run: up a narrow road to a wider intersection that, while not busy, did carry speeding vehicles past the only official building--the post office--and through our tiny town. I continued praying, and screaming. I can't remember if Jim Engle, the postmaster, heard my screams, or if I ran inside asking if he had seen my child. All I do remember is the two of us half-walking, half-running, down the road and back toward the tracks, the creek, and the neighbors.

"We should call the police," he urged.

"I don't want to bother them just yet. What if he's not really gone, but is just hiding?" I asked, the fear and my rapid movements simultaneously stealing the breath from my chest.

We had all converged in the backyard seconds later, trying to come up with a plan of attack, and leaning more toward calling the police, when we heard a sound.

A dog's bark. Coming from the creek. We all ran toward the direction of the barking, which was increasing in intensity. I led the way, running as fast as my legs would carry me. By the time I had stepped into the cold liquid, balancing carefully so as to not fall on the slippery rocks turned tangerine from the coal mines, I could see our family pet.

Then I saw him: a small, nearly nude figure. It was a tow-headed, blue-eyed toddler, slowly moving just as gingerly among the rocks as his mother. Unlike me, he was smiling. Unlike the woman who now had, not tears of terror threatening to fall from her eyes, but a trail of teardrops running down both cheeks. Tears of gratitude and happiness that my child was safe and sound, being led back to us by--of all things--a dog.

The last time I joined a search crew was more than 20 years ago, and we were on rubber rafts at Bull's Run, searching for three missing Preston County men. I was working that day, covering the ongoing story of those local adults who had, one at a time, gone missing.

Yesterday was the first time I joined a search as a volunteer. It's different when you do it as a parent, as a mother, and the missing child is yours. It's also quite different when you do it as part of your profession. I'd always suspected this--ever since May 1, 1994, when I lived not too far from the mountains where Victor Dwight Shoemaker Jr., another little boy disappeared. It seems like the mountains swallowed up "JR," for--like those three missing men--he was never found, either.

Unlike my son. Thank God!

But unlike Aliayah? That was our prayer, yesterday, that we would find her--our little group of a dozen volunteers that was, not unexpectedly, composed of many mothers. I am sure it remains the prayer of all the volunteers who continue their search for Aliayah today.

Editor's note: If you are a parent or an educator, or just want to know what all the fuss is about, you can read a few pages of my memoir, which was banned last week at a California high school, online at Amazon. Sister of Silence, which is being used by at least one Bay Area therapist, to help her patients work on healing from abuse, is available in paperback or as an e-book. You can buy it here: Nellie Bly Books

Posted by Daleen at 07:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)