Whenever I return home to visit my parents, they present me with a box of artifacts to sift through. They are purging my childhood home in anticipation of their deaths, which are not particularly imminent. It is just the somewhat grim, pragmatic work of anti-nesting that comes with old age and a house bursting at the joints from accumulated memories of three children and many more grandchildren. Having lived much of my adult life in apartments, I am a shrewd executioner of keepsakes. I travel light, keeping only a single bin of cherished memories that represent the best of the best, most meaningful items that I might seriously mourn should they be lost to fire or flood—notebooks filled with writing through the years, my grade school and high school yearbooks, oddities like news clippings about the Detroit mafia boss who lived down the hall from my grandmother in her retirement home, the note my grandfather left my parents the night he died, which reads, “Josh was a very bad boy. He deserves to be punished.” (My grandfather spent his last night on earth babysitting me and my older sister while my parents were out. I was being a shit, so he scrawled that note—in crayon on construction paper—in front of me and I was, apparently, inconsolable. Later that night as he drove home he suffered a massive heart attack and died. When I awoke in the morning, I went downstairs and found my parents and sister at the kitchen table, crying. My dad kept the note, and I discovered it years later. It’s in the Bin.)

So I’m usually up for uncovering old trauma. 

During my most recent visit home to Toledo, Ohio, my mom handed me a box of junk, and I sifted through it, disappointed by the hodgepodge. It was a scattershot collection, including my baby book, various art projects from first through eighth grades, a class photo from my preschool, my baptismal gown and booties, medical receipts from when I was born (in 1974, delivering a child cost $370, all in), a First Communion workbook in which I wrote the prayer “Dear Lord, get me through my next soccer game,” and a stack of random documents. 

Among the documents was a tri-folded piece of cardstock from the Toledo Police Department dated September 24, 1983. On the outside of the card was my identifying information—name, nicknames, age, blood type, eye color, hair color, height, weight, complexion, medical/dental information, birthmarks, left- or right-handed. The bottom bore signatures from my mother and the officer who recorded the information. Inside were my black-inked hands and fingerprints. In bold letters across the top was “Child Fingerprint Program.” I remember the ink was stubborn, and the single-ply paper towel they handed me to wipe it off crumbled in my damp hands. I was eight years old. The officer gave the card to my mom and said, “Here you go, Mom, let’s hope we never see this again.” The card was to be held by my parents, and handed over to the police in the event I was abducted, murdered, dumped and needed to be identified. There were dozens of other kids getting fingerprinted that day.

If you grew up in the late seventies and early eighties, you knew about missing kids. They were everywhere, in that they were nowhere to be seen. Everyone was looking for them, no one could find them. You knew about child abductions as you did about AIDS and crack cocaine and Russia’s nuclear arsenal and Satan in rock music. All of these terrors were at our doorsteps each day, waiting to be let in. But the strangers—they were out there, trolling neighborhoods for unattended kids who were dumb enough to hop into their cars. 

In 1981, Senator Paul Simon from Illinois testified at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on H.R. 3781—the Missing Children Act. He claimed, “50,000 young people disappear each year, because of ‘stranger kidnappings.’” Further, he surmised that “about 4,000-8,000 of these children each year [are] found dead and probably a majority have experienced some type of sexual exploitation.” This wasn’t the most egregious claim on the nature of the “problem” of child kidnappings. In February of 1983, eight months before I was fingerprinted, John Walsh testified before a Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice, “This country is littered with mutilated, decapitated, raped, strangled children.” 

***

The only secret places in the suburbs were inside of homes that all looked alike. No hidden brooks or ponds or forbidden forests. Jake’s dad was a drunk and his mom was running around with the guy down the way. The Kowalskis were getting divorced, finally. We knew most of these secrets, despite our parents’ side glances and raised eyebrows. They spoke to one another as if we were deaf—we were forbidden to listen, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t hear. The divide between the front and back seats in cars was an illusion. We lived in neighborhoods that sounded magical—Barrington Woods, St. James Woods, Country Squire—though they were paved, side-walked, blocked, unmysterious. Decidedly not wooded. All we wanted was to find something undiscovered, no matter how small. A concrete culvert under a neighborhood road that, when dried out, you could walk through, hide in, scream to hear the echoes. A weeping willow over a small creek with a fork of branches large enough to hold three people as an imaginary hiding enclave. The poetry we were steeped in was Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein, and you could find a hardcover copy of the book in all our lookalike homes. The title poem, though, described the way in which we were surveyors and cartographers of the suburbs. “For the children, they mark, and the children, they know / The place where the sidewalk ends.” Another poem, by William Butler Yeats, from 1889 called “The Stolen Child” tells of faeries attempting to lure children to come away with them. The faeries beckon to children by describing a land we could have only imagined, “Where the wandering water gushes / From the hills above Glen-Car, / In pools among the rushes.”  

When we rode bikes, we had a range limited primarily by leg strength and elapsed, round-trip time. If we went out, could we return in time for our group’s earliest dinner or curfew? From our neighborhood, we rode south to Deline Ditch where a high schooler with a shovel and wheelbarrow carved out a righteous BMX track in a woodlot bordering a cornfield. It was trespassing, but the track had a table-top jump, a couple of doubles, a roller and a berm. The dude that carved it out did a great job, and the unspoken rules were that it belonged to him and his friends. If they weren’t there, we could ride it. If they were there, maybe they would let us watch them and we would hope that they might finish soon, though we wouldn’t ask. Just wait for our turn. The farmer used bird bombs to keep the crows out of the fields, and occasional explosions kept us sharp and sometimes messed us up on the jumps. If he found us back there, we’d be screwed, and if we ruined it for the high schoolers, we’d be really screwed. 

We also rode east to a metro park that had dirt trails and giant fallen oak trunks that crisscrossed creeks that fed into the Ottawa River. Bikes weren’t allowed on the trails at that time, so that was also trespassing. We rode north, up to Sylvania, where the big houses were. We rode west over an I-475 bridge to the neighborhoods of our childhood crushes, all of whom lived in this one little pocket of a neighborhood that required a posture of cool as we rode. We knew where the bullies lived, where their friends lived. We knew which McDonald’s or Wendy’s or (in a pinch) Burger Kings were safe.

We rode to department stores and record stores and toy stores and 7-11s to get slushies and Mountain Dews or to play arcade games. Sometimes we stole little things—candy bars, mostly. Sometimes we got kicked out. We were wary of strangers the way a surfer is wary of sharks. We saw them everywhere, even if they didn’t really exist. Single men in toy aisles. Single men in record stores. Single men driving with their windows down, looking at you at a stop sign. Single men asking for directions. Single men asking which action figure a ten-year-old might like. Single men smelling like beer who stand back and wait for you to finish the arcade game because they want to play. Single men who follow you out to your bikes, right on your heels the whole way. Always so close behind you. So close to catching you. 

Come away, O human child! / To the waters and the wild / With a faery, hand in hand, / For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Growing up, we understood little of the world’s weeping, except through television.

We were the first family in the neighborhood to own a VCR. It was a thick, top-loading machine that required some amount of strength to push down its oversized tape-recorder like buttons. The Toledo Public Library, which was close to where my dad worked, was one of the first places in which you could check out VHS movies—years before Blockbuster. He brought home a printed pamphlet of the library’s movie titles, and we would choose something from his refined list of “child-approved” titles. One of the earliest movies I remember watching on our VCR was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang—the Dick Van Dyke musical about a flying car. Perhaps the most underrated horrifying villain in all of cinema is the Child Catcher from the film. He’s dressed in black and has a long, prosthetic nose, and sniffs out the scent of children. He moves with a dancer’s ethereal grace, calling for the children to come out while holding a massive net in one hand and a sharpened metal hook in the other. Ultimately, he returns to the village and lures the children out with the promise of candy and ice cream, holding giant lollipops between his fingers and ringing a bell with the other hand. The children he’s seeking are hiding in a garden-level room, and there is a scene in which the Child Catcher peeks his head down into the window, upside-down, holding the candy and looking directly at the children. Simply recalling it right now is causing the hair on my neck to stand up. The children are flushed out with the promise of free candy and when they approach his carriage, which is dressed up as a happy-fun-time truck, he shoves them into the hold, the facades drop, and it is revealed that the kids are trapped in an iron-barred cage. I do not remember why the children needed to be caught. I only watched the movie once and will not tread upon it ever again. The nightmares it fueled spanned much of my childhood. 

The book upon which the film is based was written by Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond spy novels. And the Child Catcher wasn’t a character in the book. He was written in by the film’s director and Roald Dahl, who helped to pen the script for the movie. The creation of this character is itself a diabolical act. The performance of the character, however, was nothing short of mind-bendingly sinister. It is said that the actor who portrayed the Child Catcher was soft and kind and funny with the kids on the set, and often protected them from the curse-laden tirades of its apparently abusive director.

***

My dad began recording TV movies with fervor, and in a very short time, we amassed a library of movies and shows that he meticulously labeled on the sleeves of the VHS tapes, were stacked on the shelves of our room divider. The tapes squeezed out my parents’ books, which were relegated to the basement bookshelves. 

One day, my said to us, “I want you and your sister to watch a movie. It’s very important.”

My mom stood next to him, her arms crossed, her lips pursed as if she were swallowing a secret. 

“What is it?” my older sister asked. 

“It’s called Adam,” my dad said.

“I heard about that movie in school, I don’t want to watch it,” my sister said, her eyes welling up. 

“I am not asking you, I am telling you. You have to watch it. End of discussion,” my dad said. End of discussion signaled that there existed no sliver of possibility of escape. 

“Could we have popcorn?” I asked.

Adam was a TV movie that premiered in 1983 about the abduction of Adam Walsh, a kid in Florida who was my same age. You’ve seen Adam Walsh before. You’ve seen the picture. We can’t forget it. A toothless child in a red foam and mesh baseball cap with a white “C” on it; a Louisville Slugger over his shoulder, his hands choked up so high on the grip; a red sweatband on his right wrist like the pros wear; cheeks padded with baby fat, spotted with freckles. He was every suburban kid in the eighties. He was me, my friends. A kid who went with his mom (played by JoBeth Williams in the movie) to a Sears one day on an errand, a kid who asked to play with the video games on display while his mother went to do her business. A kid who, when the mother returned to the video game display, was gone. Vanished. A kid whose tearful, panicked mother had him paged in the store over and over again to no avail. A kid who you never saw in the movie again, but whose father (John “This country is littered with mutilated, decapitated, raped, strangled children” Walsh) became a desperate, single-minded machine, searching tirelessly for him. 

Until one day. 

The phone rings and Adam’s dad (portrayed by the actor Daniel J. Travanti—you’ve seen him before) answers and it is the police informing him that the head found in a drainage ditch someplace belongs, in fact, to Adam, and John Walsh loses his ever-loving shit in a made-for-television PG-curse-laden tirade. (A lot of “damns” and “damn-it-alls.”)

What I remember of this movie that I saw once and would never tread upon again, though my father kept on VHS with “ADAM” printed meticulously on the label, is that they never caught the guy who took Adam. The guy who took Adam in the movie was never even seen. He was the Child Catcher, but a shadow phantom one who moved about Sears aisles, taking children without a single noise, without witness. The Child Catcher took Adam someplace for some amount of time, and then decapitated him, perhaps with his sharpened hook. 

After the movie ended, my dad stopped the tape and turned on the lights. My sister was in tears.

“This is what could happen if you get into a stranger’s car,” my dad said. “It’s important you never talk to strangers.”

“We don’t know Adam talked to a stranger, though,” I said.  

“He did, or else he wouldn’t have been taken,” my dad said.

“Yeah, but we don’t see it,” I said, deeply troubled then (as now) about the film’s narrative-directorial choices.

“I don’t care,” my dad said, raising his voice. “You don’t talk to strangers. End of discussion.”

***

A series of PSAs played in heavy rotation during after-school Cartoon Hours. One of them featured McGruff the Crime Dog—a tough-talking, trenchcoated cartoon dog. He was the brainchild of the Crime Prevention Coalition and The Ad Council. When he talked, he sounded like a cop right out of Hill Street Blues (a popular eighties cop show starring Daniel J. Travanti, the actor who portrayed Adam Walsh’s father in the movie Adam—you’ve seen him before). In one PSA, McGruff introduces us to “Jenny,” a little girl in red overalls and pigtails be-bopping down the sidewalk when a Dodge Omni approaches and the passenger’s side door opens. The driver is obscured—The Child Catcher. The scene freezes and McGruff tells us that “if she gets into that car, you may be looking at Jenny for the last time.” McGruff then takes us to a playground filled with kids, and tells us, “Every day in this country, sixty kids disappear.” When he says “disappear,” every kid on the playground disappears—empty bikes fall over, shot basketballs go un-rebounded, swings empty mid-arc, and a bat, softball and glove fall to the ground. It was a reasonably dramatic special effect for the eighties. 

“Some run away, but a lot are kidnapped by strangers or even by people they know,” McGruff says. 

Another PSA from the early eighties from the American Medical Association made the bold choice of showing us the Child Catcher. Another young girl is be-bopping down another sidewalk when she is approached by a man in a car. He rolls down the window and greets her warmly, “Hi therrrrre, you live around here?” His eyes are shifty, he has a cleft chin. He is a nondescript, average-looking white dude—the face of danger incarnate in that he doesn’t look dangerous at all. At one point, the actor portraying the stranger makes a Strasberg-grade acting decision and he quickly, briefly licks his lips while he’s enticing the girl to get into the car. It oozes predatory creep. He offers her a ride to school. A voiceover says, “last year 50,000 children disappeared—many of them from nice, safe neighborhoods.” 

In fifth grade, our teacher Ms. Lawecki read us a book called Prisoners at the Kitchen Table by Barbara Holland. It was about a boy and a girl our same age who were abducted and held for ransom by a couple—Bill and Verna. The two kids are walking home from fishing when Bill and Verna pull up in a car and convince the two that they are the girl’s aunt and uncle from Minnesota. Once the children realize they’ve been kidnapped, they suffer through all of the sadness and fear and horror that I imagined Adam Walsh suffered. The realization that they weren’t going home to their toys and bedroom, weren’t going to see their parents and families again, imagining the worry their parents felt, the anger, the loneliness. This was a Scholastic Book. A book for grade schoolers. I found the book, years later, under the paperback title Run for Your Life! The hardcover version was Prisoners at the Kitchen Table. I’m not sure which title is worse. The second-biggest thing I remember most is the kids plan and execute a daring escape from Bill and Verna’s house. They make it to another farmhouse where an old guy with a pet bird takes them in and calls the police. The police pick up the kids and reunite them with their families. In the end, the detectives who visit the boy to get more information on Bill and Verna inform him that they had fled the house before the police got there. The book ends and the two kidnappers are still at large. 

The boy’s name in the book is Josh. I later purchased the book as proof that it really existed. I held it in my hands and read through it and remembered the sheer terror I felt listening to Ms. Lawecki read it. 

***

Some of my fondest memories of childhood boredom are accompanying my mom on errands. On any given day, we would drive to the grocery store, a department store, the butcher’s, a drug store, the fish market, and doctors’ offices. I wandered freely about each location while my mom conducted her business. I stared at whatever might be interesting to a child. I cannot recall why, but my mom frequented a stationery store, which smelled like petrochemicals and was brightly lit and made me feel queasy. I stared at a wall of colored pens, arranged by Pantone number. In the department stores, I found the toy aisles, and stared at the toys I wanted. I found record aisles and stared at album covers. I found the Iron Maiden, Ozzy Osbourne, Def Leppard, Quiet Riot albums. I stared at the bloody, cryptic artwork. I searched the covers for odd symbols I didn’t understand, as if they were Highlights Magazine hidden object puzzles. One cover—Iron Maiden’s 1981 album Killers—featured an illustration of their demonic mascot Eddie (a human stripped of flesh, except for fibrous sinew) holding a bloody hatchet, the hands of his victim on the ground before him out of frame from the album cover reach up and pull at Eddie’s shirt, as if pleading for mercy. I would have nightmares for days. 

We stared at anything in front of us—cereal boxes, milk cartons, magazines, a lazy susan filled with seasonings, toys in a toy aisle, catalogs, a wall of colored pens in a foul-smelling stationery store, demonic album covers. The school milk cartons featured safety tips like “never take shortcuts home” and “don’t play in vacant lots or deserted buildings.” The bigger milk cartons featured the faces of missing kids our age staring back at us. Etan Patz, Johnny Gosch, Kevin Collins. Dr. Benjamin Spock—America’s pediatrician in the eighties, and in many cases the first consult before seeing our actual pediatricians—thought displaying missing children on milk cartons might frighten children at the kitchen table. How else would we learn of the world’s weeping, though? 

Johnny Gosch was from Des Moines, Iowa. One Sunday in September 1982, Johnny Gosch loaded his wagon with newspapers and started on his route to deliver them. He never returned home. His parents began receiving phone calls from neighbors asking where their newspapers were, and they went out and found Johnny’s wagon, but never found Johnny. Gone. Vanished. 

Kevin Collins stared at us for months in our family room. The March 1984 Newsweek bore the headline “Stolen Children.” The cover image was a “MISSING!” bulletin with the picture of Kevin Collins. His Newsweek picture was different, though. They used a picture of him in which he wasn’t looking into the camera and smiling. He is looking back over his shoulder, past the camera, as if he were caught in the act of doing something wrong. He looked terrified. Underneath his picture on the bulletin was a reward and his identifying information and the line “This child could be yours,” which didn’t make sense to me. He wasn’t ours. He was someone else’s. Unless it meant that this could be me. The title of the cover story was “What Can Be Done about Child Abduction?” 

In December 1948, the Saturday Evening Post ran a cover story by David Wittels called “What Can We Do about Sex Crimes?” Except in the case of the Saturday Evening Post, the cover was a Rockwellian illustration of a young redheaded boy—Kevin Collins’ age—in a barber’s chair getting a manicure from a woman while the gray-haired, male barber shows him the line of his neck in a mirror. The woman doing the boy’s manicure is the 1940’s image of a blonde hottie, but it’s her eyes that catch you. She’s side-glancing seductively at someone past the boy—someplace past him, or behind him. Maybe at another customer who is waiting. Maybe at the boy’s dad. The gray-haired barber is himself unsettling. He’s leaning in close toward the boy’s right ear while holding up the mirror so the boy can see his neckline. The barber is also not looking where he should. The boy is checking the line in the mirror presumably straight in front of him, but the barber is staring up to the left. Maybe it’s all just a moment in time captured from a photo or a memory. Maybe it’s all just as routine and innocent as a normal haircut in a 1948 barber shop. Except the headline in the top right corner of the magazine “What Can We Do about Sex Crimes?” while the boy in the illustration is being meticulously groomed.

***

In April of 1984, the Director of the Child Stealing Research Center, Dr. Michael Agopian, testified before a House Subcommittee on the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act that “We are all aware of the Adam Walsh case, but please recognize that there are tens of thousands of additional Adams that are not so prominently reported by the media. Today the problem with missing children is a serious and pervasive national tragedy. Approximately 75,000 children are abducted each year by a noncustodial parent.”

The term “latchkey kids” originated with children who grew up during World War II, whose fathers were overseas fighting and whose mothers had to go to work while the husbands were away. They were also coined “eight-hour orphans.” This tear in the fabric of the nuclear family prompted the creation of what we now call daycare centers. Gen X, however, is widely regarded as the definitive generation of latchkey kids, especially those raised in the suburbs with working parents. Freedom had its perks. 

The school bus dropped us off at our stop and left before we could even step off from the curb. We walked through the wake of diesel fumes to our house. I realized I’d forgotten the key. We went around the back of the house to the kitchen window, which was over the sink so it was higher up. I easily pulled out the screen, and then I pushed against the outside of the window and raised it up a little. Then I boosted my younger sister up to push it up all the way so she could climb into the kitchen sink. Then I went around front, and she opened the door. The extra keys were where my mom had left them for me in the morning, and I instructed my little sister not to tell. I threatened her not to tell anyone, especially our parents. 

“This is our secret,” I said to her.

Today, when I meet my seven-year-old stepdaughter at the bus stop after school, the bus driver makes eye contact with me and waves in acknowledgement that she sees me. The very first time I met her at the bus stop without her mother, the bus driver reached her arm out as she was about to step off the bus and held her back. She asked her, “Do you know this man? Who is he?” And there was this moment of stepfather panic in which I wondered if she might denounce me. If I might be a stranger. I wore a hoodie and jeans and ratty sneakers that were likely slipped on and untied. But she screamed, “That’s Josh!” and then be-bopped down the steep stairs off the bus. I fixed her a snack and let her do her iPad for a half-hour.

***

“Can I say hello to him?” my stepdaughter asks me, be-bopping down the sidewalk a few paces ahead of me. A man and a dog are approaching us from the other direction.   

“You may not,” I say.

“Why not?”

“He’s a stranger. You cannot talk to strangers,” I say.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not safe.”

“Can I ask to pet his dog?”

“Very much no,” I say.

“Is his dog a stranger?”

“Yes. Just, as a rule, don’t talk to people you don’t know and definitely do not pet dogs that you don’t know.” 

“What if I get to know them?”

I feel my father’s voice bubbling up. Don’t talk to strangers. End of discussion. 

***

In the late nineties, after graduating from college, I moved to Chicago. A college friend who had moved to the city before me was kind enough to print out a packet of apartment listings and schedule some appointments with landlords. All I had to do was retrieve the packet from her office on LaSalle Street. It was a weekday morning, and the Loop was a hive of corporate folks walking with intent and bike messengers and cabs and honking and massive skyscrapers that blocked out the sun and smells of human feces and concrete. It was a chaos to which I would never quite adjust nor feel fully at home. I parked my car in front of her building, turned on my hazard lights, and ran into the building to the elevators and up to her floor. I grabbed the packet, hugged her, promised dinner or drinks, went down to the lobby, exited the building and my car was gone. Vanished. I had been inside for less than five minutes. I panicked. A long, blue 1988 Lincoln Town Car pulled up, and the driver rolled down the passenger window. 

“You the red two-door with the Wisconsin plates?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“They just took it. I can still see them. Get in, and we’ll run it down,” he said. 

My judgment was clouded with adrenaline and panic and the terrifying thought of losing everything before anything even started. Everything about this city felt out of my league. I couldn’t really afford to move to Chicago, I couldn’t really afford an apartment, I couldn’t really afford a new car (or a used car, for that matter). Then it struck me that my wallet with my credit cards and cash and driver’s license were in the glove compartment of my car. 

I opened the stranger’s door and got in. I remember making sure to buckle the seatbelt. 

“You can’t do that here anymore,” he said. “Even with your flashers on. They just wait in the alley and watch. Second you went inside, they towed it.”

“Who took it?” I asked.

“Chicago Police towed it. Parking patrol. The bastards.” 

What the hell had I just done? This was a terrible choice in any decade. It was lunch hour in the Loop, and traffic was heavy enough that we weren’t really moving. If he wanted to abscond with me, it would prove a slow and arduous crawl. I couldn’t see the tow truck or my car. I grew desperate to get out but remained polite and grateful. I didn’t see any weapons.

“Do you know where they are towing it?”

“Lower Wacker and Randolph, up three blocks that way, then down,” he said, pointing the way.

“Thank you so much,” I said. “I think I’ll just get out here and go wait for them.” 

“Okay, man. Sorry we couldn’t run them down. They may have let you just take it back.”

Had I refrained from jumping into the stranger’s car, I wouldn’t have known where to look for my car. I made it to Lower Wacker’s impound lot just as the tow truck with my car entered the gates. I paid $150 in cash and made it to my first apartment showing. 

***

The text reads: Your Lyft driver, Oscar, is here! Look for the Blue Lincoln Aviator.

***

In 1984, the Missing Children’s Assistance Act mandated periodic updates on data about missing children. The problem was that neither categories of missing children nor uniform, precinct-by-precinct data was available or shared. So, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), a division of the U.S. Justice Department, created the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART) research program. The goal of the NISMART program was “to periodically conduct national incidence studies to determine, for a given year, the actual number of children who are reported missing, abducted by strangers, or kidnapped by a parent as well as the number of children who are recovered.” To date, there have been four iterations of NISMART, the most recent of which was a technical report published in 2022, which outlines updated methodology in collecting the data. We live in a golden age of data collection, and even so, this is difficult data to collect. The earliest NISMART results were as unreliable as its methodology, which used a combination of random household surveys of parents and any available police data (of which, you can imagine, was both scant and, if available, disparate from community to community). Subsequent NISMART iterations refine the methodology of collecting data, and the categories of missing children. Today, according to NISMART definition, there exist the following episodes of missing children: Family abduction; non-family abduction; stereotypical kidnapping (a subtype of non-family abduction); runaway or thrownaway; missing involuntarily, lost stranded or injured; missing, benign explanation. The Adam Walsh variety, so seemingly pervasive in eighties, is the Stereotypical Kidnapping category, which is defined as “A nonfamily abduction in which a slight acquaintance or stranger moves a child (age 0–17) at least 20 feet or holds the child at least 1 hour, and in which one or more of the following circumstances occurs: The child is detained overnight, transported at least 50 miles, held for ransom, abducted with intent to keep the child permanently, or killed.” 

Like Josh in Run For Your Life!

It turns out that, despite all the magazine covers and TV movies and milk cartons and PSAs during Cartoon Hours and child fingerprint programs, stereotypical kidnappings happen about as frequently as lightning striking a person. The NISMART-2, for example, collected data for 1997-99 and found that out of 58,200 non-family abductions, only 115 of them were considered “stereotypical abductions.”

It turns out that the people you know are statistically more dangerous than strangers. 

***

I hold the card stock copy of my fingerprints, and recount with my mom having them taken. We have a laugh. She shrugs and says, “We didn’t know what we were doing,” which is something she says frequently about raising us. I don’t blame her, though, for doing what she thought at the time was right. Having us fingerprinted, showing us movies, telling us not to talk to strangers. Moral panics tend not to age well, yet they are notoriously stubborn to shake. McGruff the Crime Dog is still around. Currently, he’s peddling “Safe Kits,” which include a similar fingerprint and identification card as I had, and a DNA kit. The Child Catcher takes on so many forms now, or so we tell our kids as they explore a world that is too accessible to them and invisible to us. My own refrain as a parent in this modern world is often, “If only that were our biggest worry right now.” I take the dog on walks while my stepdaughter rides her bike. 

“Can I go ahead of you?” she asks, drawn toward the desire for speed. For freedom.

“Yes,” I say, “but only go up to the end of the sidewalk, then you have to stop and wait for us.”

She’s not as free as we were. Sometimes it saddens me. I can’t help it, though. I still see child catchers everywhere. None of them got us, but you never know. For all of our free-range, come-home-before-nightfall exploration, the world today feels less safe. It feels some days like the demons on the Iron Maiden record covers have finally come to life and are seeking to pull us all down with them. Perhaps it’s just my age, or my propensity to read too many headlines. Still, the faeries in Yeats’ poem do eventually lure the child away. “For he comes, the human child, / To the waters and the wild / With a faery, hand in hand, / For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.”  

I go into the basement and open the Bin. I fold up the card stock with my fingerprints on it, and I tuck it into the middle of my paperback copy of Run for Your Life! and place it gently atop the pile and close the bin for now.