Free Alligator Candy by David Kushner Page B

fear to exploit; every parent’s Ultimate Nightmare.
    I could see some of the ripple effects of all this reaching Tampa. The story appeared in the local papers and entered conversations among the neighborhood parents. Occasionally I would see them cast a long glance in my direction, perhaps careful not to upset me or maybe to see how I was responding. I gave them no indication of anything. I just went on playing electronic football or Atari, pretending as though I weren’t aware, hoping that the attention would go away.
    Now and then, though, I would reach out in my own passive-aggressive way. During one community class trip at IDS, we were taken to a local cemetery. While the teacher showed us the different kinds of headstones and crypts, I wandered off by myself and sat by a tree. In a way, it felt so transparent—such a maudlin bid for attention. I remember thinking how badly I wanted the teacher to come over and ask me if I was okay. But I felt too embarrassed and ashamed to ask for comfort myself. Instead, I just sat there for what seemed like forever, picking at blades of grass until the class moved on to another section of the cemetery, and I rejoined them.
    Despite the growing awareness of missing kids, we still seemed to have as much freedom as ever. If parents in our town were feeling more afraid, they weren’t changing their behavior yet. Kids still went off into the woods behind the 7-Eleven and disappeared on their bikes for hours on end. Even I was able to continue my explorations around the neighborhood. But my parents had limits.
    At the peak of the Atlanta murder mystery, IDS organized an Outward Bound trip, one of those adventure excursions that were supposed to teach us confidence through survival skills. After weeks of training, we would then pass the final test. Each kid would have to go off into the woods and spend the night alone. Everyone in my class was going, but the thought of me off in the wilderness by myself was too much for my parents. When my mother and father said they didn’t want me to go, I felt disappointed, but I was also relieved.
    On June 21, 1981, the Atlanta mystery finally came to an end when police arrested twenty-three-year-old Wayne Williams, who was found guilty of two of the twenty-nine murders and sentenced to life in prison (the murders stopped after he was apprehended). But the new fear didn’t end. The next month, six-year-old Adam Walsh was reported missing from a Sears department store in Hollywood, Florida, where he was playing video games while his mother shopped for a lamp a few aisles away.
    Coming on the heels of the Atlanta case, the Walsh murder became another nationwide saga, as police and locals searched in vain for the boy. His severed head was finally found in a canal a few weeks later, but the murderer remained at large. The boy’s father, John Walsh, would go on to become an outspoken advocate for missing children. He also founded a nonprofit to fight for improved legislation: the Adam Walsh Outreach Center for Missing Children, which later merged with a newer organization, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
    The two-year period between Patz’s disappearance and Walsh’s murder would prove to be a national tipping point. In 1982 Congress passed the Missing Children’s Act to fill the need for a coordinated center of information when a kid disappears. Such resources didn’t exist when Jon vanished. The Missing Children’s Act empowered the FBI to maintain a database on missing persons that parents and cops around the country could access.
    These developments were all beyond me at the time. And I suppose, like everyone else, I went back to my life and pursued my freedom with as much denial as I could muster—just as I had been living for years without truly knowing what had happened to Jon. It was still a mystery to me. A boy a few hours’ away in Florida had vanished and been