When I was thirteen, a man tried to abduct me. In a Hollywood screenplay this would be the scene the director uses to explain why I became a true crime journalist—my origin story, as it were. But my fascination with human predators actually began a couple years before this. By the time I was thirteen, I was already obsessing over Amy Mihaljevic: riding my bike to area shopping malls, looking for the face of her killer in the crowds. And before Amy, there was my grandfather, whom we’ll get to soon.
This thing that happened when I was thirteen I don’t talk about much. I give a dozen or so presentations about cold cases every year, mostly at local libraries. You’d think I’d use it as part of my shtick. But I don’t. It’s one of those stories that are hard to digest. People come to my talks to get scared. But a good storyteller knows that people need degrees of separation from true horror, and I think that separation is lost if I start talking about me and this thing that happened.
My parents divorced when I was four, and my father got custody of me. My mother picked me up for visitation every other weekend. In 1991, she was living in an apartment in Old Brooklyn, a suburb of Cleveland not far from the city zoo. Across the street was a section of the Metroparks, a part of the “Emerald Necklace” that wraps around Cuyahoga County. Nearby was the Memphis Kiddie Park, which had a carousel, baby rockets, and a short roller coaster called the Little Dipper. In between the park and the carnival was a railroad track.
I was thirteen and I liked to explore. I set off from my mother’s apartment one Saturday morning, crossed the street to the park, and made my way toward a creek that runs between cobblestone retaining walls. At the end of the parking lot was a concrete bathroom, and as I passed the men’s room doorway I noticed a tall man with dark hair standing just outside. He looked at me and fiddled with the crotch of his pants.
Kids, like adults, are quite capable of rationalizing dangerous behavior. He must have an itch, I thought. But then he began tugging and I knew something was off about this situation. Still, I kept walking. I started down a grassy path into the woods. I turned and saw that the man was walking after me.
I kept walking, willing myself not to panic. At a long, straight stretch of trail I turned again. The man was now about a hundred feet behind and walking briskly. I started to jog. I looked again. He was jogging now. And he looked angry. Angry that I was making him jog. For the first time I realized the danger I was in. There was nothing but more woods and the river this way. I couldn’t get back to my mom. This man was blocking my escape. I began to run.
When I was thirteen, I was skinny as a rail, 120 pounds. I spent long days riding my bike over the backcountry hills around my father’s house. And I was a runner. I was fast. But this guy was faster than me. Skinny, fit, he tore after me. All pretense was abandoned. I knew what he was now. And he knew that I knew. And that was that.
I saw the train tracks on my left. They led back to the apartments. It was a way out, maybe. I ran through the underbrush, tearing through skunk weed and berry bushes. In a moment I was on the tracks, running back toward the road, the white gravel between the ties kicking up behind my feet. The thin man was out of the woods now, too. He ran after me. It was clear that he would catch up to me long before I got to the road, before I got anywhere near the apartments. I looked for a way out. But the ground on either side had risen to sheer walls of rock, twenty feet high. A tight canyon.
There was one chance: to scale the wall. If I slipped, or if I was too slow, that was it, man. That was it.
I turned and dug my fingers into the rock and clay and pulled myself off the ground. I scrambled up as fast as I could. I didn’t slip. In ten seconds, I was all the way up. I looked down. The man stood on the tracks directly below me, looking up with eyes full of hate. I gave him the finger and then ran back to my mother.
She called the rangers, but by the time they got there, he was long gone. The rangers told me to not come back to the park alone. “Those bathrooms are where the queers hang out,” one of them said. This was long enough ago that Ohio cops still didn’t differentiate between homosexuals and pedophiles.
I think about this day a lot. What had that man planned to do with me? How had he planned to keep me from screaming? Was he just going to fondle me and be on his way or did he have murder in mind? Did he have a knife on his belt? How many times had he done this before? Who was he? Would I ever see him again?
The thing that scares me the most is the way he looked at me in the end. Those eyes said it all. He was so angry. He was furious that I had managed to get away. Where did that hate come from? When did it start?
I don’t think Maura Murray was abducted from the side of the road. I never did. Abductions are messy, like mine. Or they’re organized, like Amy Mihaljevic’s. And if they are organized, that means they were planned, meticulously.
Amy Mihaljevic was abducted across the street from the Bay Village police station, in broad daylight. Her abductor had groomed her for days, calling her at home, promising to take her shopping to get a gift for her mother if she’d just meet him at the plaza. She waited for her abductor and went willingly with him.
My attempted abduction had been messy because it wasn’t planned. I had run for several minutes and then escaped. Any number of people could have happened by to see me running away from that man.
The one thing I know for sure about Maura’s accident on Wild Ammonoosuc Road was that it wasn’t planned. No way was it staged—not the dangerous way it occurred; not in front of several homes, full of potential witnesses. The impact was hard enough to deploy the air bags and really could have injured her. It wasn’t planned. And if it wasn’t planned, an abduction from the scene could not have been organized. It would have been messy, like mine. But she disappeared, and no one saw it happen. There were no signs of a struggle.
No, this was no abduction.
I was beginning to form a theory to explain Maura’s vanishing act. There was another way it could have happened: She could have been traveling in tandem with another driver. The other driver would be ahead of her, leading the way east. After the accident, the second driver turned around and picked her up. If she knew the driver, it would have taken only a second for Maura to get in the vehicle and tell the driver to take off. That would explain why no one saw it happen—it was too quick. If someone forced Maura into a car, she would have screamed, alerting the neighbors. She would have fought back. She was not weak. She was a goddamn West Point cadet. A tandem driver explained everything. But if that’s what happened, who was driving the other car?