Photo: Richard W. Rodriguez/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/MCT/Getty
Kidnappings split the lives of victims and their loved ones in two: one minute here and the next, gone.
“It’s the most devastating thing you can imagine,” the parent of one missing girltold PEOPLE in 2009. “Not knowing, not having a clue where she is — it keeps you up night after night after night.”
Thehistory of infamous kidnappings in Americais long and often wrenching, stretching back more than a century and including such names as Amber Hagerman, Patty Hearst, Charles Lindbergh Jr. and Adam Walsh.
In some cases, the missing were recovered alive. Other disappearances remain unresolved, even after decades. In still others, the captors faced justice while leaving mysteries behind.
What unites them all was the overwhelming absence each abduction created in the lives of those around them.
As Ernie Allen, then president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, said in 2009: “It creates a kind of suspended animation for these families. It hovers over everything they do; it’s part of their lives every minute.”
Below is a look at some of the most infamous kidnappings in American history.
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The 1976 Chowchilla school bus kidnapping
On July 15, 1976, three men in their 20s seeking $5 million in ransomhijacked a busload of 26 schoolkids in Chowchilla, California. They forced the driver and children, ages 5 to 14, to climb through a hole in the ground into a moving van buried in a rock quarry.
Driver Ed Ray, who died in 2012 at age 91, emerged as a hero, rallying the children and directing their escape.
The kidnappers —James Schoenfeld,Richard Schoenfeldand Frederick Woods — were caught, convicted and sentenced to life.
The victims, despite their anguish, have found comfort and healing in one another, they told PEOPLE in a 2012 article. Out of touch for many years, some reconnected through Facebook and at Ray’s funeral.
“It’s been healthy for us to share our feelings. We have this unspoken bond,” Jodi Heffington Medrano, who was 10 at the time during the kidnapping, told PEOPLE. “[At Ray’s funeral] someone said, ‘We are glad we are here today.’ We all laughed because we are all here and we are doing well.”
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John Paul Getty III
When billionaire J. Paul Getty’s 16-year-old grandson,John Paul Getty III, was snatched off the streets of Rome in the wee hours of July 10, 1973,the most shocking aspect of his ordealwas that the person with the power to rescue him refused to do so. Getty, then the world’s richest private citizen, wouldn’t budge, leaving Paulas the five-month hostage of Italian gangsterswho hoped to extort $17 million for his return.
Even when the boy’s captors sliced off one of his ears and mailed it to a Rome newspaper, the oil tycoon was unmoved.
In the end, what saved Paul was a tax loophole through which Getty found he could write off a portion of the $2.89 million bargained-down ransom he eventually paid. He designated the rest a loan to his son, John Paul Getty II, to be paid off at 4 percent interest.
The miserly patriarch “was a genius at business,” biographer Robert Lenzner once told PEOPLE, “but an illiterate with respect to intimacy and family.”
Getty’svast fortunemakes the tale of his grandson’s 1973 kidnapping all the more poignant. “The problem could have been solved instantly,” said screenwriter David Scarpa, who adapted the Getty kidnapping as All the Money in the World. “The money’s there, the entire problem exists in the head of one man.”
At 18, Paul wed his girlfriend, Gisela Martine Zacher, who was pregnant with their sonBalthazar.
At 25, he overdosed on drugs, causing a stroke that left him a quadriplegic and partially blind. He died in 2011.
Amber Hagerman
It may not entirely make up for that terrible loss, but some good did come from that still-unsolved killing.
Convinced that a more coordinated response to child abductions could save lives, media broadcasters and Dallas-Fort Worth police devised a rapid warning system,naming it “AMBER Alert"after the little girl.
“Finding Amber’s body is a sad moment I’ll never forget,” Tarrant County sheriff Dee Anderson, who played a key role in getting the system adopted around the country, told PEOPLE.
In the years since, at least hundreds of abducted children have been brought home in part thanks to Amber — including Tamara Brooks and Jacque Morris, then 16 and 17, who were taken on Aug. 1, 2002,but managed to survive their abductor.
“I’m so happy those two girls are home where they belong,” Amber’s mom, Donna, said to PEOPLE at the time. “My daughter is in heaven watching out for those girls. "
“It’s a shame my daughter had to be butchered and had to go through what she went through for us to have the AMBER Alert,” Donnatold Yahoo News in 2016, “but I know she would be proud of it.”
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Patty Hearst
She eventually was found in September 1975, about 19 months after her kidnapping, where she was arrested for bank robbery and other crimes. Hearst said she had been abused, threatened and brainwashed, but at the time there was no legal precedent for acquittal due to such manipulation.
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Charles Lindbergh Jr.
Within days, another ransom demand arrived for the family, this time for $70,000. Two days after that, a third arrived. More notes came in subsequent weeks and a ransom was eventually paid, though Charles Jr. was not returned.
On May 12, 1932, his body was found in a shallow grave a few miles from his home — a dreadful end to “the crime of the century.”
Kidnapping for ransom was rampant during the Depression, and, wrote A. Scott Berg in a 1998 biography, the Lindberghs' “fame and wealth cost them their firstborn child.” Although they went on to have five more children, “I know the loss was immeasurable and unspeakable,” daughter Reeve Lindbergh said in her memoir.
The kidnapper, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, was identified and arrested in September 1934, after a lengthy investigation. Convicted of first-degree murder, he was put to death in 1936. While prosecutors used circumstantial evidence to make their case, Hauptmann’s guilt has been the subjectof some continued debate. His widow, Anna Hauptmann, publicly argued he was innocent until her death in 1994.
Charley Ross
Two days after the abduction, the kidnappers sent Charley’s father the first of 23 notes demanding $20,000 for the child’s return. The father tried to pay, but the police protested that this would encourage further kidnappings.
Charley’s father, Christian Ross, wrote a book about his experiences in which he recounted, in part, the “varied expressions of horror” that came with realizing that a child’s kidnapping was even possible.
Five months after Charley disappeared, Joseph Douglas and William Mosher, a few smalltime burglars, were shot while robbing a house on Long Island. As Douglas lay dying, he told a witness: “It’s no use lying now. Mosher and I stole Charley Ross.”
Where was the boy? “Mosher knows,” replied Douglas. “Ask him.”
But Mosher was dead. “Then God help his poor wife and family,” said Douglas.
For the next 60 years or so, the hunt for Charley continued all over the country, while young boys, then mature men, then greying old folks — 5,000 people in all — turned up to claim the honor. But none of them proved it and Charley’s ultimate fate remains unknown.
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Frank Sinatra Jr.
Barry Keenan was in a haze then, flying to the moon on booze and Percodan, but he recalled indelibly the night of Dec. 8, 1963, when he went to a Lake Tahoe, Nev., hotel room and kidnappedFrank Sinatra Jr.
“I can see Junior looking at the bullets,” Keenanlater recalled to PEOPLEof how he waved a revolver in the face of the singer’s only son, then 20 and on tour singing in nightclubs.
To appreciate Keenan’s power trip, consider that to many Americans then,Frank Sinatrawas a vaguely sinister god in a fedora — the one star whose kid you wouldn’t dare nab. But Keenan, a school chum of Sinatra’s daughter Nancy, thought he had the angles figured. He would “borrow” Frank Jr., invest the ransom and repay Sinatra — with interest.
“In my demented state,” he said, “I saw it as a business deal.”
“I knew Frank Jr. had been in boarding school and wasn’t close to his father,” explained Keenan, who had never met this younger Sinatra. His drug-addled rationalization: “A kidnapping would draw them closer.”
Posing as a room-service waiter at Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe, where Frank Jr. was performing, Keenan and a friend entered room 417. Hustling Junior to their rented car, they drove to Los Angeles and phoned Frank Sr., who was waiting in Reno, Nev. “He was a nervous wreck,” recalled Jim Mahoney, Frank Sr.’s former publicist.
Frank Sr. paid the $240,000 ransom, which an FBI agent dropped off in L.A. between two parked school buses. But before Keenan picked up the loot, Irwin panicked and released Frank Jr.
At his trial, Keenan tried to portray the crime as a publicity stunt to boost Frank Jr.’s career. The jury didn’t buy it, but the lie lingered in public memory. “It is one of my biggest regrets,” said Keenan. “Junior has lived with the stigma the rest of his life.”
After Frank Jr.’s safe return, most of the ransom was recovered, and Keenan and his two accomplices got life sentences (a term later reduced for complex technical reasons to 12 years). But when he was paroled four years later — the others had already been released — Keenan went through an impressive transformation, morphing from a hapless con to a wealthy entrepreneur.
Sobering up, he made, lost and then remade millions as a real estate developer and consultant specializing in resorts and casinos, mostly in the Southwest. He also developed drug-and-alcohol rehab centers and spoke against substance abuse to youth groups.
Adam Walsh
Adam Walshwas 6 years old on July 27, 1981, when he was abducted while shopping with his mother, Reve Walsh, at a mall near their home in Hollywood, Fla.
Leaving him alone in the toy department, Reve returned 10 minutes later to discover Adam had vanished. Two weeks later, she and her husband, John Walsh, flew to New York City to plead onGood Morning Americafor Adam’s return. Later that day, the Walshes were in their hotel room when Hollywood police called with grim news: That morning, two fishermen had found a head bobbing in a canal in Vero Beach, Florida, 120 miles north of Hollywood. Dental records confirmed the remains were Adam’s.
While his wife wept, John, in a blind fury, trashed their room. Recalling the crime to PEOPLE in 1996, his eyes welled up, his voice choking. “[Losing him] broke my heart; it almost killed me,” he said. “Believe me, you never get over it.”
“It’s a wound that never heals,” John said in 1996, of Adam’s killing. “I don’t know what I’d do if I met his killer. But I truly believe that if he isn’t caught in this lifetime, he will be in the next. I’ll never give up hope.”
In 2008, nearly 30 years after Adam vanished, authorities in Florida said the convicted serial killer Ottis Toole was to blame.
“Who could take a 6-year-old and murder and decapitate him? Who?” John said then. “We needed to know. We needed to know. And today we know. The not knowing has been a torture, but that journey’s over.”
- With VICKIE BANE, ADAM CARLSON, BRUCE FRANKEL, BILL HEWITT, RICHARD JEROME, MICHAEL A. LIPTON, DIANA PEARL, JILL SMOLOWE, TIME STAFF, KARA WARNER and SUSAN YOUNG
source: people.com
