11:27 Diana, let her know on 4 city talk-show by end of week. (Boston, Phil, Baltimore, Pittsburgh)
15:00 Bob Morton, would like to have Julie 6/17 on Tom Snyder “Tomorrow” tape from 6 to 7 pm, runs from 1 to 2 am, same night. Interview just Tom and Julie…. NBC 30 Rock Plaza, Studio 3K, 5:30 Be there!
—Patz logbook, June 1980
I know where thousands of missing kids are,” Stan Patz said, even if he didn’t know where his was. His voice had that characteristic trace of irony and sarcasm that put some people off, until they considered his circumstances, and then they usually found his manner perfectly reasonable. “They’re in schools. Many are enrolled in schools in other states. Maybe just one state away from where their families are.”
The reporter perched on their living room couch was taking notes on his yellow legal pad as fast as he could. Richard Rein was a freelance journalist, who wrote for People magazine and other general-interest magazines, and he had come by one day in September 1980 as the new school year was getting under way. Shira herself was in class; Ari had just turned four and was bouncing in and out of the room as the adults talked.
Rein had contacted the Patzes for an interview because he was thinking about writing a book, not about their case, but about the bigger phenomenon of missing children, a topic of growing national interest. He’d come to meet the most renowned example, to hear their story and their thoughts on what needed to be done. Stan and Julie were glad to hear that this wasn’t just about their sad plight. Yes, they wanted to use the coverage to look for their son, but they had learned so much more about what needed to be fixed, and they were eager to pass it on. “We have something to say,” Stan told Rein, “other than that we’re waiting for Etan to come back.”
As strange as it seemed, they knew they’d been lucky, at least compared with the parents of other missing children they were hearing from. Their local law enforcement had been the NYPD, not a small-town sheriff with few resources and little reach outside his county. Unlike local authorities in many other parts of the country, the New York police hadn’t been hamstrung by twenty-four- or forty-eight-hour waiting periods before beginning their search. Some police departments required seventy-two hours—three days and nights—to allow a child to return home on his own before getting involved. The Patz case had garnered phenomenal publicity, and as much as they hated cameras being thrust in their faces, Stan and Julie knew what a gift they’d been given. They felt that they needed to use their platform to advocate for the less visible and to make real change.
“Even if we can’t help ourselves,” Stan said, “maybe at least someone else won’t have to go through the ordeal we have. What we are trying to stress is the vulnerability of all children.”
Stan especially wanted Rein’s readers to understand just how large a role schools could play. As he talked he became less caustic and more earnest. The Patzes were particularly sensitive to the school angle and had given it a great deal of thought. They couldn’t ever lose sight of the fact that Etan had left home at eight in the morning and almost another eight full hours had passed before Julie had known there was a problem. Schools, stressed Stan and Julie, needed to let parents know when their kid didn’t show up. It could literally be a matter of life and death.
“It’s a question of poor inventory control,” Stan acidly told Rein. “Our children are our most precious possession, but any business has tighter inventory control than almost any school. Adults come to the schools, they take children out on a regular basis. Kids come in late, they don’t show up in the morning. It’s all very loose. People move from state to state, and take their kids with them. There’s no control.”
While the technology was fledgling, Stan’s own brother Jerry was a software programmer, and he had developed a program several years earlier to help the Boston school system keep attendance. “We have to look at this like we’re living in the ’80’s,” said Stan, “and use technology that private businesses have been using for years.”
But beyond such “inventory control,” there was so much more schools could do, Stan explained. The biggest problem facing parents of missing children like them was that there was no coordinated way to search outside their hometown. Like Steven Stayner, who’d attended several schools in his home state, Etan could even be alive and well, sitting in a classroom right now as close as New Jersey, and they might never know. And if he turned up dead, his body could sit in a local morgue unidentified until it was buried in an unmarked grave. There was virtually no way to match up the missing with the dead.
Although he liked to call himself a “knee-jerk liberal,” Stan Patz found himself advocating national fingerprinting programs for schoolchildren, which, with their shades of Big Brother, would have been abhorrent to him before Etan disappeared
“I now see this as just as inevitable as Social Security numbers,” he wrote in a letter published in the New York Times on December 7, 1980. “I know that groups like the A.C.L.U. strongly oppose fingerprinting, and I agree with its concern for privacy, but since tens of millions of people have already been fingerprinted, I believe these civil libertarians should concentrate on ways to prevent abuses of this system.
“The pros and cons of national fingerprinting should be openly discussed. A person’s right to privacy should be tempered by the fear of becoming an anonymous corpse.” It went against Stan’s long-standing convictions that he and Julie had given up their privacy, but they would have done so gladly before the fact instead of after.
The Patzes had already begun the painstaking effort to search the schools themselves, contacting school district superintendents throughout the country, asking that Etan’s poster be circulated to check it against new students. They had successfully tracked down contacts for all the public school districts, but had no easy way to contend with all the private schools. The postage alone was ultimately prohibitive. Months of their own fruitless efforts underscored the weakness in a national infrastructure to look for missing children. Apparently, there wasn’t one.
The closest thing was an FBI database—the National Crime Information Center—that kept a record of stolen cars, boats, and other crime statistics. It even tracked missing children, but a database is only as effective as the people who enter its data, and in this case, many in law enforcement didn’t know it existed. This was especially true when it came to kids who went missing. As of May 1981, there were almost twenty times more stolen license plates than missing children listed in the NCIC.
Even as Stan lobbied public opinion on the staid editorial pages of the Times, Julie was the one who more often stood in the limelight. She was willing to ride a train or take a flight to any media market, no matter how small, to do what the nonexistent national machinery should be doing—getting the word out to farmers and businessmen and housewives that her son and God only knew who else was missing.
There were no statistics, no clear definition of what “missing” even meant. Were runaways “missing”? That upped the numbers exponentially. Were children snatched by one angry parent from another in a custody dispute “missing”? Again, a whole different set of figures came into play.
So many wildly fluctuating figures were thrown around in the first years—from hundreds to thousands to an astounding 1.3 million missing children. There were no studies to cite, just anecdotal evidence and blind extrapolation. But one thing was clear. There needed to be a number—without it Julie or Stan or any missing children’s advocate got stuck on the first question. How can you talk about a problem that doesn’t exist?
In the early 1980s people began writing about the subject, and for the most part they simply quoted each other’s statistics. In early 1981 a journalist named Kristin Cole Brown wrote a lengthy feature on missing children for the New York Daily News Sunday Magazine, and cited another article in the American Bar Association Journal on parental abductions, saying that one hundred thousand custodial spouses snatched their children annually. She hoped it was a good figure.
Kitty, as her friends called her, was a mother of two young children herself, and she’d become profoundly interested in the subject, but as she’d researched the article she’d realized that the only real experts out there seemed to be the parents themselves. She was uncomfortable asking such sensitive questions, of compounding the grief of these mothers and fathers. She had called Julie Patz with her heart in her throat, cringing inwardly at the sense of intrusion. But Julie quickly put her at ease, giving her implicit permission to ask the most sensitive of questions.
By this point, Julie had had so much experience telling her story and appealing for help that she’d become resigned to the draining effort it took. If Etan had become the poster child for missing children overnight, Julie had gradually become the poster mother. Parents from every part of the country facing the same terror knew who to contact and learn from, as they too suffered the agonizing wait and pressed for help. The horrific Atlanta child murders were occurring over this period of time, twenty-nine black children and young adults killed over a two-year period, their families ultimately uniting to decry the lack of attention their cases received. When Atlanta mother Camille Bell began to speak out about her nine-year-old son Yusef’s death, the only other name she’d ever heard connected to missing children was Julie’s.
Julie was in touch with grassroots shoestring organizations around the country—from the Bergen County Missing Persons Bureau to California’s Stolen Child Information Exchange. From sea to shining sea there were parents of missing children who, in trying to find their children, found each other. And they all seemed to converge at Julie Patz’s door.
So a few months later, Kitty Brown called Julie again, to ask her about appearing together on a Philadelphia talk show. By then, Kitty was doing volunteer work for an upstate New York group, Child Find. Founded by a woman whose ex-husband had gone into hiding with their daughter, Child Find focused on parental abductions, getting missing children’s photos distributed as widely as possible, and serving as a point of contact for runaways as well. If for whatever reason a child didn’t want his parents to know his whereabouts, Child Find could work as a third party to mediate or get messages through. Like other fledgling advocates, the group was feeling its way, but as the issue of missing children got more exposure, Kitty, the newly named information director, was being asked to make media appearances.
The Philadelphia show was Whitney & Co, hosted by local TV personality Jane Whitney. It would be a one-hour live telecast, and Kitty’s maiden voyage. Would Julie train down with her and add her expert input? Julie agreed. They caught the Amtrak together, and en route, Kitty confided her stage fright. She felt the burden of speaking for her organization as the panel’s “expert” without the chops to back it up. Every time she’d spoken to the show’s producers to prepare, she’d gotten a sense of vertigo that had almost knocked her off her feet. She told Julie she was petrified she’d open her mouth and choke.
“What if I sit there, struck dumb, on live television?” she worried.
“Oh, that used to happen to me,” Julie replied reassuringly. “It still does sometimes, but I’ve got a trick. When you can’t squeeze a word out, just put your hand up to your mouth and pretend you’re coughing.” She illustrated. “Works like a charm every time.”
Kitty tried it a few times, but she was skeptical. Her heart began to pound the minute she and Julie walked into the studio the next day, getting worse as she sat to be thoroughly powdered and primped. Julie, the veteran, disregarded the fuss, didn’t glance twice at a mirror, and spent the moments leading up to airtime reviewing her notes. She seemed oblivious to all the hoopla that stood out in Kitty’s first-timer consciousness.
“Aren’t you nervous?” Kitty asked her as they sat on the set and waited for the countdown to go live.
Julie smiled. “I’m not nervous,” she replied. “I’m excited, because this is another chance.” When the cameras rolled, Julie retold with quiet composure the story of the day Etan walked off for school alone, the terrible days that followed, and the uncertainty they still faced. She talked about their search and the futility of trying to reach every small town where her son might be, not knowing his family wanted him back.
“The police have been wonderful, but they’re limited,” she said. “There’s no way for them to get into every school in the country, where Etan might be at this very minute. If a child is taken, unless it’s a crime of passion, the chances are they’re taken elsewhere, to a different city, state, or country, but most importantly a different police jurisdiction.” And if he had been killed, there was the horrible possibility he was one of the thousands of unidentified bodies there was no system in place to identify.
“We don’t know that our son is dead,” she stated calmly, as she had so many other times. “We hope he’s alive, although we realize he could be dead. But mostly we need to know so we can put our lives back into order.”
Kitty knew from their conversations that Julie was a reluctant spokesperson, but you couldn’t tell that from her public persona. As the younger woman listened and took in Julie’s understated but SoHo chic wardrobe, the sleek chignon she often wore to keep her hair out of her eyes, and her dignified bearing, Kitty couldn’t help but be grateful that Julie was willing to tell her story over and over to help other families and other children. You couldn’t watch her face on a television screen and say, “That could never happen to me.”
When it was Kitty’s turn to speak, and her legs got numb, her mouth so dry she couldn’t swallow, she thought of Julie’s advice. She put her hand up to her mouth, coughed discreetly, and the words flowed, conveying her natural, unstilted passion.
“We envision a computer bank in every state,” she said, “tied into a nationwide database.” Perhaps a federal agency would oversee it, she continued, to collect and distribute the names and faces of the missing, along with descriptions, medical records, all the critical information that might bring a boy like Etan back.
“It may take a federal agency to make it happen,” Kitty said. “The odds are slim, but we will fight for it and it will happen because it is important.”
“See?” Julie said after the camera lights shut off. “You did fine!”
By the time the Patzes marked the second year of Etan’s disappearance, Julie was working not just to get the word out, but to turn words into action. She’d been employed part-time at an art gallery in the neighborhood, Gallery 345, run by artist and fiery political activist Karen DiGia. In advance of that anniversary the gallery mounted an exhibit called “Weeping in the Playtime of Others,” after a book of the same name by Ken Wooden, a journalist who had written extensively about missing and sexually abused children.
Over the next week there would be workshops on the sexual exploitation of children and child snatching by a noncustodial parent. Julie had helped Child Find put together information packets, which included tips and practical strategies for how to protect your own kids: Don’t write your children’s names on the outsides of their clothing or their bags; don’t inadvertently give strangers help in gaining your children’s trust. Teach your kids their phone numbers—with area codes. Come up with a family password that a stranger must know before your child will go with them willingly. When Julie Patz gave that advice, parents always took it more seriously.
The stark white walls of the airy East Village space were covered with framed articles on the subject and school photos of children known to have been missing or abused. The cheery portraits in the context of such a disturbing topic were difficult for some to take, but Julie urged people not to put their heads in the sand. Child abuse and molestation existed, and wishing it away did nothing to help fight it.
“Kids have become big business and big pleasure,” she told a reporter at the show’s opening, “and something has to be done about this.”
The opening-night reception was a strange affair, wine and cheese surrounded by the haunting faces of these lost children. Swedish actress Liv Ullmann provided star wattage, moving among the small collection of locals, parents, and Village art scenesters. The clinking glasses and hum of small talk provided a contrasting soundtrack to the show’s theme of missing and exploited children. A few of the art critiques were especially difficult for Julie to hear. One section of the display was devoted to pictures of Etan, those beautiful portraits taken by his father.
“What’s he doing up there,” she overheard one woman, referring to Etan’s picture, “when everyone knows he’s dead.”
In fact, a new development in the case suggested otherwise. Julie came alone to the event, her usually pale face flushed and animated. “Why isn’t Stan here?” Kitty asked.
“Can you believe it, we have a lead,” Julie replied. “He’s been talking to the police all day.”
Stan arrived sometime later, and hugged Julie.
“No apparent news,” he said with a grimace, although he filled her in later.
Stan had picked up the phone the evening before and spoken at length with a man who called himself “Marlowe” but who had immediately admitted the name was fictitious.
“I know this lady in New Jersey who has Etan,” Marlowe told Stan. “She did me a solid once, and now I want to return the favor. She goes back and forth about contacting you, and it’s taken her eighteen months to even go this far. I told her I’d act as a go-between to confirm your telephone number.”
Stan had learned not to say much to these kinds of callers, but he was taking copious notes. The man sounded young, but it wasn’t clear.
“Where are you now?” he asked. “Can we meet?” From the noises in the background, Stan presumed he was in a private residence. There was the sound of a televised ball game in the background, which at some point switched to pop music.
“No,” said Marlowe, he was wanted by New York cops. He explained that this woman couldn’t care for the child properly anymore. He said that the woman was older, and that she knew the Patzes. He hadn’t met the child himself, he said, but Marlowe had seen a picture of him, one processed by a well-known lab, over the weekend. It was dated two months earlier, March 1981.
“I just had a baby recently myself.” The man seemed to be trying to relate. “So I understand how you feel… I’ll try to talk to her, and now that I know I have the right number, I’ll call you back again soon.” Marlowe hung up.
The call had lasted eight minutes. Stan wasn’t sure if he should get excited or not. Both he and Julie had learned to steel themselves against cruel hoaxes and rip-offs. Still, “Marlowe” had had a lot to say.
The next day as Julie was busy getting ready for the gallery opening, Stan called Bill Butler and filled him in.
“Do not pick up the phone,” Butler admonished. “Let the machine get it.”
Less than two hours later, Marlowe called back. This time, the background noise suggested a bar or party, with both male and female voices blending together. The tape recorder spooled as he said he was waiting for the woman to call him. Etan was fine, he assured, and he’d been in private school for the last two years. Marlowe spoke with the smooth confidence that suggested he’d made a career out of such conversations. Initially dubious, Stan’s bullshit meter was going off the charts.
Stan immediately called the cops back. We’re working on a plan, they told him. Just keep recording the calls and we’ll get back to you. Over the next hours Marlowe called repeatedly, obviously hoping to get Stan himself on the phone. Finally on Wednesday, Marlowe left the instructions on the tape. Stan must take the Long Island Railroad to the West Hempstead stop. Next to the train station, he should check into the Hotel Hempstead Motor Inn. Bring $2,500.
The man was firm. “This is not a ransom. It’s a loan. She’s going to pay you back.” He promised to call Stan in the hotel at 2 p.m.
Butler and the other detectives went into action. Stan would go along with the instructions, surrounded by undercover officers and wired for sound. He was waiting outside his apartment when an oversized yellow Checker cab pulled up. The back door flew open.
“Get in,” said the driver. Stan did, and realized there was a man sitting on the floor in the back, concealing himself. They might be under observation, the man indicated, better not to take chances. The cab drove to Sixth Avenue, and when it turned north toward Penn Station, the man sat up to wire Stan.
“Pull up your shirt.” When Stan did, the cop was dismayed to see he had nothing on underneath the long-sleeved pullover.
“You should have worn a T-shirt,” the detective complained.
“No one told me. It’s summertime.” The detective had no choice but to wire Stan without it, plastering the microphone with heavy electrician’s tape to his bare chest. Stan recognized the absurdity of speeding uptown, half naked and half lying on the backseat as a man worked over him. Is this whole thing really necessary? he asked himself. He didn’t dare ask the cop.
“Now, don’t worry. Our guys are going to be all around you, watching and ready to move, but you won’t know who they are.” The man left him at the entrance to the train station.
Stan rode the train, easily picking out his team. When he checked into the hotel, another undercover duo posing as man and wife came up to the desk next to him. This place probably has never seen this much action, he thought. Up in the room, Stan opened the door to a sharp knock and was given an envelope, the handoff, with the $2,500. But when he looked inside, it was filled with torn newspaper.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said. “You couldn’t come up with the real $2,500? This is not big business here, this is retail.” For the first time this didn’t seem like a game. “I would have coughed up the money myself somehow, if I’d known I was going to be stuck in a hotel room with a criminal, handing him this.” He had no interest in getting roughed up for a wad of newspaper.
After the detective left, Stan walked to the window and drew the curtains. Directly below him a man stood in the parking lot and Stan made a few nervous remarks into his chest about sending out for pizza for everyone, thinking the man looking up at him might hear. He later learned that no one had heard—the mikes had died almost immediately after being taped to Stan’s bare skin.
But the cops did catch their perp—in the very same parking lot. He was calling it off anyway, he told police, because he’d mistaken the husband-and-wife team in the lobby for the Patzes themselves and was angry that Stan had disobeyed him by bringing Julie. Marlowe turned out to be a thirty-two-year-old con artist named James Slaughter, whose previous criminal career involved stealing people’s pets and holding them for ransom. He was charged with attempted grand larceny and aggravated harassment. And as much as Stan Patz had grumbled about how silly the whole exercise had seemed, using him as bait, he wouldn’t have begrudged the cops any request, no matter how outlandish or inconvenient. For their part, the task force detectives had long since overcome their own initial suspicions of Stan and his cool, even sarcastic façade.
“Stan was instrumental in making the extortionist’s arrest,” one detective later told a reporter. “The Patzes have been terrific. They’ll do anything you ask.”
A month after the gallery exhibit, Kitty Brown brought her children to the city to meet Shira and Ari and accompany them to a neighborhood fair. “There’s a big street festival a few blocks away. It’s my kids’ favorite,” Julie had told her. “You can stay over.”
It was the annual festival of the Feast of St. Anthony. Kitty’s children were in wonderland—they had never seen anything like it, with the lights, the noise of the music and the throngs of people, and all those rides. They’d been to their local county fair, but this was so compressed, souvenir booths and homemade stands displaying icons of the saints, all sandwiched between the city buildings. Kitty held the kids’ hands and they navigated the crowded streets. She strained to hear Julie say something over her shoulder about the last time they’d been to this fair, just after Etan disappeared. The four-year-olds wanted to stop and play all the games; Ari loved the tommy gun that shot BB pellets at a target. Everyone rode the Tilt-a-Whirl, which threatened stomachs full of fried dough and cotton candy.
This is overwhelming, Kitty thought, of the chaos and the din. She spent her days talking about missing children and knew how easy it was for a child to suddenly vanish in a sea of faces. Other parents can let their children run around here, how can I do that? Kitty was acutely aware of her anxiety—even, she’d admit, her paranoia. If she was so disconcerted, she wondered how Julie could deal with this scene. But she noticed the way Julie kept an eye on her children without seeming to smother them. It was subtle, just a sense that she didn’t stop to look at every exhibit or spend twenty minutes trying on earrings. Instead she would intermittently skim the crowd, noting where Shira and Ari were and what they were doing. Kitty found herself modeling her behavior after the older woman’s as the fair surged around them.
When her kids pleaded to go on the Ferris wheel, and Kitty just couldn’t shake off her fear of heights, Julie laughed and held out her hand.
“I’ll take them all,” she said. Kitty stayed safely on the ground, tracking Julie and the four children riding to the top for a view of Greenwich Village and the festival spread out below them. She smiled as she watched her kids shriek with rapture, arms thrown up in the air, and she remembered one of Julie’s remarks that had stuck with her from the Philadelphia morning talk show where they’d met.
“I die a thousand deaths every day before they come home,” she’d said in response to a question about her two other children. “But you have to draw the line between letting them grow up and gain independence and not letting them be taken away.”
Later that summer, Karen DiGia, the owner of Gallery 345, brought Julie for a picnic near Kitty’s home north of the city. They talked about the recent release of Still Missing, a novel by the mother of one of Julie’s former preschoolers, about a six-year-old boy who goes missing and what his family endures. The author, Beth Gutcheon, had spent a lot of time with Julie in the months following Etan’s disappearance. She was one of the few to whom Julie had allowed herself the luxury of unloading her anguish, and although Beth had told Julie that the topic of her book was missing children, Julie hadn’t expected it to mirror so closely her own family’s circumstances. Now the book was all over the press, and an ad in the New York Times heralded a movie in the offing. It was the talk of the neighborhood, and the talk of the women’s picnic. The Patzes had a mixed reaction to the book; on the one hand it might indeed raise the profile of the missing children issue. But on the other, it felt invasive to Julie, who also worried that readers would confuse the novel’s fictional details—the disintegrating marriage of the boy’s bereft parents, for example—with the real-life story of her family. She found that out firsthand when a local paper called asking for pictures of Etan to accompany the review of the “Etan Patz” book.
“You mean it’s fiction?” the caller asked. “We all thought it was about Etan!”
Reiterating that it wasn’t, Julie had refused the photo request, asking to speak personally to the reviewer, to beg him to emphasize that unlike the invented Alex Selky, Etan was still missing. At the picnic she was still circumspect about her feelings, but Kitty couldn’t contain her outrage.
“I had a fit on the phone with Beth,” Kitty admitted to the other women. “I told her I thought not only was it a cheap way out, but people are going to think Etan’s been found, and they’ll stop looking. I know she thinks it’s going to help. I think I really shook her up.”
The following month, in early August, life showed just how much uglier it often is than fiction. Julie got a call from Kitty one Saturday to say she’d be in the city on Monday meeting with a Florida couple whose son had disappeared two weeks earlier from a shopping mall and hadn’t been seen since. Adam Walsh was six and a half, just like Etan. He’d gone with his mother to the local Sears, and while she went to look at lamps, he’d stayed in the nearby toy section to watch some older boys play with a new toy, called a video game. When his mother came back minutes later, all the kids were gone. One of the employees had kicked out the others for being too rowdy, and no one knew if Adam had been swept up with the group.
John and Revé Walsh were to appear on ABC’s Good Morning America with David Hartman, and Kitty was going to try to meet with them. John Walsh was already championing the need for a better way to track these cases, calling the current void a national disgrace. Kitty wanted to tell him more about their own efforts and discuss joining forces. But it was, of course, a delicate thing. The parents were frantic; Revé especially was a wreck. Would Julie be around if she needed her? This was the kind of encounter that always unnerved Kitty. Again, she doubted her fledgling expertise, but people like the Walshes were turning to Child Find for help. If anything, Kitty knew more about divorced parents who abducted their own children, and she knew that Julie would be much more effective offering her shoulder. Of course, Julie assured her. Call me when you need me.
The Walshes arrived in New York on Monday, for an early Tuesday morning appearance on Good Morning America. At 5:30 a.m. John received a call in the room from his best friend in Florida. The man needed to get his hands on Adam’s dental records. He told John that a head had been found in a canal one hundred miles north of their home, and while investigators doubted it was Adam’s, they wanted to eliminate the possibility. On air a few hours later, John Walsh hinted at the possible break in the case.
“What happened last night?” David Hartman asked. “Can you tell us that?”
“They had found the remains of a young person,” John said, “and at this time they are trying to identify them.”
Afterwards Julie got a call from Kitty.
“It’s so awful. They may have found Adam’s remains in Florida,” Kitty said anxiously. “Can you come to the Plaza? Revé and I are having something to eat, and I need your help.” Julie could see as soon as she walked into the hotel restaurant that Revé Walsh was in bad shape, wan and fragile. The woman looked shell-shocked and had already skipped several meals. Julie and Kitty tried to talk her into eating. Between them, they convinced her to order breakfast.
The talk stayed on a light, superficial level. John’s best friend had been so supportive and Revé wanted to buy him a new kind of gadget he couldn’t yet find in stores back home. Julie and Kitty were trying to help her figure out where to get a “Walkman,” when Revé was paged. The next minutes were complete chaos. Julie remembers a Plaza staffer bringing a phone to the table and he happened to place it in front of her. Revé, sitting next to Julie, turned even paler than she already was as Julie handed her the receiver. Revé listened, gave a cry, and dropped the phone. It was clearly bad news, and she needed to get back to the hotel, now.
Julie watched helplessly as Revé collapsed, sobbing and gasping for air. Julie and Kitty half walked, half carried her down the street to the Walshes’ hotel room at the St. Moritz. Someone called the EMTs to administer first aid. Julie and Kitty sat waiting in the lobby, unsure what to do next, each numbly lost in her own thoughts. Before the Walshes left for the airport, to return to Florida, John Walsh came to say goodbye to the two women.
They hugged him, murmuring words of regret.
“This isn’t over,” John said fiercely. “We have to change things.”
A little over two months later, Julie Patz and Kitty Brown were on an American Airlines flight to Chicago. It was a real nail-biter, the plane dipping and bucking all the way, and the two women finally indulged in a drink to steady their nerves. But they were also celebrating, in a sense, because the following day, along with the Walshes, Camille Bell, and an Oklahoma couple, John and Norma Pallett, whose daughter Cinda had been missing a month, they were scheduled to tape The Phil Donahue show.
It was a reunion of sorts, because just two weeks earlier John Walsh, Julie, and Camille Bell had sat at a rectangular table in a Dirksen Senate hearing room, testifying on behalf of S 1701, a bill introduced the day before. The bill joined a similar effort in the House by Congressman Paul Simon that would require missing children to be entered into the NCIC database and create a national tracking system for unidentified bodies. Paula Hawkins, an enthusiastic and passionate freshman senator from John Walsh’s home state of Florida, had authored the Senate’s draft and called for the hearing. Together in a public forum for the first time, the three parents told their stories, and a cumulative grief filled the room. Some in the audience were moved to tears as they heard about the urban child missing from a close-knit New York artists’ enclave; an African American nine-year-old from the Atlanta projects found strangled in an abandoned school; and the son of a marketing executive who had vanished from a suburban Florida mall. It didn’t matter who you were, the message was clear: It can happen anywhere, to anyone.
Hawkins and cosponsor Senator Ted Kennedy had listened with appropriate expressions of shock and horror to the three parents telling their stories. Yet the testimony didn’t get the public’s attention as the three had hoped. That night on the evening news there was no mention of the hearing or the bill. Every newscast was consumed with the day’s bigger story—the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
But someone at the Donahue show had noticed. In 1981 The Phil Donahue Show was the hottest, most watched national talk show on television. Donahue was substantive, it was topical, it was the dream of any nonprofit or cause to land even a segment, and the show wanted to devote the whole hour to missing children. More than eight million viewers would hear the stories of Etan, Yusef, and Adam and their parents, and with bills pending in the House and Senate, they would be urged to take specific action.
The group stayed up late in the hotel coffee shop the night before, strategizing and assigning different points each one should be sure to hit the next day. A current of anticipation hummed through the air, with the idea that they would be able to accomplish something important. Someone might be watching who would get a child back home. Parents would learn how to keep their children safe. And new law might be made. These were the moments that in some infinitesimal way countered Julie Patz’s grief.
Standing on the talk show’s set was like being onstage in an actual theater. The crew was extremely professional, expertly pinning on the lapel mikes as soon as the guests sat down. For all the local broadcasts, the AM Detroits and the Midday Lives, Donahue was as big as it got, and the broadcast did everything Julie and the other guests had hoped for. They showed pictures not just of Etan and Cinda Pallett, but of several other missing children. Etan sightings were coming in while they were still on the air, although Donahue cautioned about all the false leads Julie had already endured. Together, the parents and other advocates lobbied for a national clearinghouse and broadcast Child Find’s 800 number several times. They personalized the bureaucratic words of the legislation, not just with their own accounts but other stories as well. One family in Texas had spent their entire life savings, $40,000, on private investigators to find their missing daughter, only to learn later that her body had sat in a nearby morgue for eighty-seven days.
“It could be your child, or anyone else’s child, next,” Camille Bell pleaded. “If nothing else, please write your congressmen and senators and get this bill passed.”
At the end of the broadcast, Donahue paid tribute to the families sitting on the set in front of him, who were able to channel their own grief for a greater good.
“They hope, as do all of us, that their children will be found. We can’t really say much that’s going to make you feel any better, other than you make us feel good about human beings, just the fact that you are on your feet. You are a testimony to the human spirit.”
It was a heady moment. For days the Child Find phones, which at the time consisted of two or three lines manned by a handful of volunteers, were overwhelmed with sightings and tips. Congressional offices, especially in the home states of the Donahue panelists, were flooded with phone calls, letters, and petitions calling for support of the Missing Children’s Act. At House hearings the following month, Florida representative Clay Shaw credited the power of the media.
“I have in my office received literally thousands of names on petitions and letters,” he said, “perhaps more than on any other issue than I have seen…. Much of this was caused by the good work of Phil Donahue on his nationally broadcast show.”
The November hearings led to revisions on the House’s draft legislation to bring it in line with the pending Senate bill, and in early December a comprehensive summit of politicians, academics, law enforcement, child advocates, and the parents of missing children themselves met in Louisville to create an agenda for the next push. It would take another full year before the legislation was finally signed into law, and two years after that for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to be created, but by the end of 1981, dozens of disparate, far-flung organizations were coalescing into a movement and a national dialogue had begun. Americans were now aware that the problem existed.
For Julie Patz, who knew all too well about the problem firsthand, the gains were gratifying. But her own child’s case—which had gotten the attention so many others had not—wouldn’t benefit from that attention. The sightings called in during the Donahue show had, like all the others before, led nowhere. She and Stan still had no idea what had happened to their own son. All the lobbying and new laws wouldn’t change the fact that there wasn’t a single clue to grasp on to and follow to its conclusion.