Free Deviant by Harold Schechter

evening. But on this night, there was no word from her. Shortly before nine, Richard Hartley picked up the phone and tried reaching his daughter. She didn’t answer. Worried, Hartley quickly drove the mile and a half to the Rasmussen home and knocked on the door. Again, no answer. Peering through a picture window, he caught sight of his daughter’s eyeglasses and one of her canvas loafers lying in the middle of the living-room floor.
    By now his concern had flared into alarm. He searched for a way in, but the doors and first-floor windows were all locked. Then he spotted an open basement window. He also spotted something else: footprints underneath the window. And bloodstains leading away from the house.
    Hartley crawled through the window and discovered his daughter’s other shoe lying on the basement floor. Upstairs in the living room, the rugs were disarranged, as though they had been disturbed during a scuffle. Hartley quickly notified the police.
    During the search that followed, police and sheriff’s officers discovered more blood on the lawn, as well as several bloody patches, including a palm print, on the house of a neighbor. Bloodhounds were brought in to follow the trail that led away from the basement window, but the dogs were stopped cold at a spot about two blocks away. Apparently, the girl had been forced into a car at that point.
    From the slim evidence they could gather, the police theorized that Evelyn had heard a noise in the basement and went to the top of the stairs to investigate. When she saw the intruder coming up the stairs, she turned and tried to flee. There were indications that she had even managed to reach the front door when she was overtaken. Neighbors reported hearing a single scream at around seven-fifteen, but at the time they had thought nothing of it, assuming it was the sound of children playing.
    As in the Weckler case, no word was heard from the abductor. Police Chief George Long told reporters that night that he assumed the girl had been kidnapped. “But not,” he added ominously, “for ransom.”
    Over the next few days, a massive search was conducted—“the most intensive combing” of the region that had ever taken place, according to Chief Long. At least a thousand volunteers—farmers, members of veterans’ organizations, Boy Scouts, church groups, students and faculty from Wisconsin State College—joined law-enforcement officers in a fifty-mile hunt that extended into Minnesota. River patrols dredged the waterways, an Air Force helicopter searched the bluffs and woodlands, and every swamp, ravine, culvert, and cave was explored.
    By Tuesday, Evelyn’s whereabouts remained a mystery, though the searchers had located several pieces of evidence that seemed to confirm the police chief’s suspicions. Two blood-smeared items of girls’ underclothing—a white pair of panties and a brassiere, identical to the kind worn by the victim—were discovered just off Highway 14, about two miles southeast of La Crosse. And about four miles farther south, near a place called the Sportsview Inn, police found a bloodstained pair of men’s trousers.
    On Tuesday night, Mr. Hartley issued an emotional appeal for the return of his daughter. His wife, tight-lipped and tearful, refused to speak to any more reporters. “I’ve answered all the questions I can,” she told them. “I don’t want to think about it anymore. It’s terrible. It’s almost beyond bearing.” Meanwhile, searchers began using long poles to explore the mounds of soft earth in the fields around the Rasmussen home. By that time, as the Milwaukee Journal reported, “every indication was that the search was directed toward finding a corpse.”
    But the body was never found.
    Three more people vanished during this period. And whereas the Weckler and Hartley abductions were committed more than a hundred miles apart from each other, these other disappearances occurred in the same vicinity.
    All of them happened around