Families of Missing Children May Get Help From Study

Jim and Joan Davies spent five tortuous years looking for their teen-age son, who disappeared from his bedroom on a cold November night.

They struggled alone through the loss of their photography business and home and the steady deterioration of the missing boy’s brother.

The police insisted that the couple’s shy son, a straight-A student, had run away. Psychiatrists admitted that they did not know how to help the family deal with the crisis.

The youth’s battered body was found in the fall of 1986 in a secluded wood. His abductor had stabbed him repeatedly and smashed his head with a boulder the same night he had lured the 15-year-old from his home.

The family’s wounds soon will be reopened, with the case against the suspected killer-kidnaper scheduled to go to court this month. It is expected to be lengthy, beginning with a jury’s determination of whether the man, who had been a close family friend, is sane enough to stand trial.

Dread Agony of Trial

“No, we are not over those terrible five years, and we dread the agony the trial will bring for us,” said Joan Davies of San Mateo, a vice principal at Milpitas High School.

“If only we could have gotten professional help. Emergency room doctors have special training and know how to save the patient. We had an emotional emergency, but there was no trauma team that knew how to get us through it.”

Such help may be on the way.

UC San Francisco received a $1.25-million federal grant earlier this month to conduct the largest study ever of the emotional impact on 400 families of missing children during and after their ordeal.

“This is the first comprehensive national effort to ascertain the effects of stranger and parental abductions on children, parents and siblings,” said Dr. Chris Hatcher, director of the study.

Although exact numbers remain unknown, an estimated 30,000 American children are abducted each year: 5,000 by strangers and 25,0000 by a parent. Fewer than 500 children taken by unknown abductors are returned.

“Few issues in recent years have generated as much legislative, media and public interest group activity as the problem of missing children,” said Hatcher, UCSF clinical professor of psychiatry and director of the Family Therapy Program at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute.

“Much of the change in public concern and public policy has proceeded without one essential component--a scientific base of knowledge about the problem. It is this task that must now be addressed.”

Researchers expect that the findings of the 3-year study will prove useful to mental health professionals as well as day-care workers, police, judges, juries, attorneys and lawmakers, said Dr. Jerri Smock, a Sacramento family therapist and lobbyist for missing children’s groups.

The scientists will focus on the psychological consequences of abduction on family and victim (if the child is returned); factors that may place a child at a high risk for sexual abuse; reasons why some families recover faster than others, and the most effective types of assistance.

“We were intelligent, articulate, knew whom to call,” said Davies, a member of the President’s National Advisory Board for Missing and Exploited Children.

“Yet, we were shocked, outraged and pained. Only a church marriage encounter session kept our Ozzie-and-Harriet family from breaking up. How much worse it must be for those who don’t speak English or have the resources we had.”

Davies said her husband and older son were too outraged at the lack of law enforcement action to deal sensibly with the situation.

“I realized no one would listen to a hysteric, so I kept my emotions inside and tried dealing with the situation in a rational manner,” she said. “But the pressure kept building, and I would fall apart at the craziest times.”

One such time was at a concert three years after their son John’s disappearance.

“It was the debut of a cello concerto. There were 50 cellos on stage,” she said. “I remembered how John had played the cello since third grade, and I lost it. I was in the front row, and I just got up and left.”

The study calls for extensive interviews with victims and families whose child is returned, found murdered or still missing and who seek help at centers in Illinois, Florida, California, Kansas and Missouri.

Knowing the sophisticated methods abductors use to control and persuade their victims could teach parents and professionals how to carefully draw the story out of the youthful victims, Hatcher said.

Police, judges and juries also could learn from the findings.

“When an officer finds a missing child, he feels like a hero and often is confused to be met with a flat, calm, quiet response,” Hatcher said. “What he may not realize is that the child often is preprogrammed to believe that what he tells the police will be a test--and he better pass it.”

Many judges and juries also question a child’s seeming allegiance to his abductor, he said, wondering why the victim failed to escape when left alone and not realizing that the abductor may have threatened the child’s family.

Said Hatcher: “The data of typical responses in 400 cases across the country would be persuasive in educating judges, juries and legislators to make more informed decisions about dealing with the missing-children problem.”

Davies said the study “will give practitioners the right kind of information they need to help families like ours. It was frustrating and lonely, especially knowing from the start that we needed help.”

Help was not forthcoming.

‘Police Did Not Believe Us’

“The real blow to us, who grew up in the Midwest with a firm belief in the infallibility of the system, was that the police did not believe or help us,” she said.

The couple stubbornly insisted that John in no way fit the profile of a runaway: He did well in school; he never used drugs; he got along with his parents; he had never been away from home alone overnight.

The police assured the family with equal zeal that the boy had gone off voluntarily and would return.

Davies, who as a teacher had encountered numerous troubled children, kept pointing to evidence that she was convinced contradicted the police theory: John had taken no jacket or shoes although it was cold; he had laid out his church clothes and set the alarm so he would not be late for services the next day.

“Does this sound like a kid who is planning to run away?” Davies said. “The police didn’t even make out a report for two weeks.”

The Davieses also were puzzled that the day after John’s disappearance they lost all contact with a family friend who had visited them daily. The police remained unimpressed.

The young man suspected of murder had met John’s oldest brother at church, and the two became inseparable until the brother joined the Navy.

Davies recalled how her heart had gone out to the troubled youth who had told her that he had been abused and beaten at home.

“After our oldest boy went in the Navy, I tried desperately to help this boy with a learning disability so he could get in the Navy too. We gave him unlimited access to our house. He practically lived with us,” she said.

She theorizes that the young man, who had become John’s friend after the older brother left home, enticed the teen-ager to come out of the house to listen to his new car stereo and then drove the youngster to his doom.

“He’s so unstable, I don’t think we will ever know what really happened,” Davies said.

Police did not consider him a suspect until he confessed the killing to a cellmate while serving time for burglary.

Davies has been able to deal with the ordeal mainly through her work with missing-children’s groups.

“I’ve been able to work out my frustrations by seeing others go through the same thing, by meeting truly dedicated people who are working for an important cause,” she said.

The most visibly hit by the ordeal was the middle son, at the time of his brother’s disappearance a promising 17-year-old student with dreams of becoming a veterinarian.

‘He Was So Angry’

As the months and years of hopelessness and outrage dragged on, the youth became abusive with his parents and peers, dropped out of college, developed an alcohol problem and wound up in juvenile hall.

“He was so angry that nothing was being done. He would race up and down the street without a muffler to get police attention,” his mother recalled. “When the police stopped him, he’d say, ‘Why do you bother people like me? Why don’t you look for my brother?’ ”

Davies in part blames herself for the middle son’s turmoil.

“We were so immersed in the search that for a time he felt he not only lost a brother but his parents too.”

Finally, a sister of another missing youngster helped push the youth onto the road to recovery. He joined the Navy and Alcoholics Anonymous and is currently attending school in Connecticut. The oldest son is a teacher in Pearl Harbor.

“If we had had proper help, perhaps our son wouldn’t have lost those years,” Davies said.

“What we really needed--and what I hope the study will provide for other families--was someone who could counsel us and tell us, ‘Yes, your family will be well again.’ ”