Painful Uncertainty Clouds Lives of the Abducted Children’s Parents

They live with a double agony: loss and uncertainty.

Parents of abducted children share the painful anxiety that comes with not knowing if or when they will ever see their sons and daughters again.

Here are three families who have endured the worst, but hope for the best:

Mike and Maddie Misheloff recently marked the saddest milestone of their lives: the first anniversary of their daughter’s disappearance.

Ilene Misheloff, 13, vanished in midafternoon on Jan. 30, 1989, walking home from school in Dublin, Calif.

“We try to keep on going, keep the publicity going, to not get too up or down about anything,” Mike Misheloff said. “We have not given up hope. We refuse to give in to despair.”

On the anniversary of Ilene’s disappearance, the Misheloffs led more than 500 people in a candlelight vigil, walking along the route their daughter is believed to have taken that day in the community 45 miles southeast of San Francisco.

The Misheloffs and their two sons, one of whom is Ilene’s twin, have struggled with a jumble of emotions during the last year.

“Frustrated, yes, that we haven’t found her,” Mike Misheloff said. “Very scared what she has gone through and what she is undergoing. Angry? No. I don’t know who to be angry at. I can’t get angry at the world. I can’t be cynical at the world because of the actions of one crazy person or maybe a few crazy people.”

Though the family is “coping as best as possible,” Mike Misheloff said Ilene’s twin didn’t want to celebrate his 14th birthday, and he and his wife can’t bear to visit the ice rink where their daughter practiced competitive skating.

When a TV program showed a tape of her skating, he said: “I could hardly keep control of myself.”

Mike Misheloff, a microchip engineer, says he has put his career on hold because “Ilene is our No. 1 priority.” The couple won’t go anywhere they can’t be reached by phone or leave town for a vacation.

“I can’t conceive of this lasting for another year,” he said.

David Collins devotes his days to helping parents of missing children. It’s a gut-wrenching ordeal he knows about firsthand.

His son, Kevin, disappeared Feb. 10, 1984, in San Francisco. The coach who was supposed to give the 10-year-old a ride home with other children didn’t notice that he was missing. He was last seen at a bus stop.

His father formed the Kevin Collins Foundation for Missing Children, which has worked with more than 100 families of abducted children. He travels to their homes, helps get flyers distributed and, he said: “I listen a lot.”

Collins said he has gone through different stages since 1984.

“The first six months, you’re looking at every bus, every car, you’re really paranoid about the whole thing,” he said. “Your nerves are shot. . . . I was working 16, 17 hours a day (searching).

“After the second year, things die down, the public becomes a little less interested . . . the leads stopped coming,” he said.

Collins said he no longer thinks of Kevin every day, but vividly remembers his last week at home and how his son, who suffered from dyslexia and was taunted at school, was “just coming into his own.”

“He had gotten his first ‘A’ on a test,” Collins recalled. “He came running in, he showed it to me, he gave me a kiss. He’d been through a lot . . . and he was at his peak.”

A picture of Kevin, the sixth youngest of nine Collins siblings, appeared on a cover of Newsweek magazine for a story on missing children.

The family attends church on Kevin’s birthday and, every Christmas, puts his stocking out.

“The ache is always there,” Collins said quietly. “It never goes away.”

Noreen Gosch last saw her son, Johnny, as a freckle-faced boy of 12 heading off on his paper route. If he is still alive, he’s a man.

“I have a real difficult time even comprehending what this boy of 20 might be like,” she said. “To me, he’s still 12. All those years have been robbed from us. The clock stopped.”

Since Johnny disappeared from West Des Moines, Iowa, on Sept. 5, 1982, his family has raised tens of thousands of dollars to hire investigators, made hundreds of speeches and pushed for laws to require immediate police searches when children are reported missing.

They have been victimized too: One man tried to swindle them, and phone solicitors falsely claimed that they were collecting money on Johnny’s behalf.

Gosch said it took almost five years before family life returned to normal. Her heart and stomach pains have subsided. But her memories of Johnny haven’t dimmed.

“You might hear a song on the radio that might be your child’s favorite or pick up something your child gave you or you gave them,” she said. “The minute you see it, touch it, feel it or hear it, it just floods back like the child is here.”

When she recently posed for a photograph for a story on Johnny, she was asked to hold one of his belongings. “The minute I touched his jacket, I could picture the night we bought it at the store. I could hear him say, ‘Oh, mom, I really love it.’ It was like reliving the experience.”

The Gosches, who have two other grown children, remain hopeful.

“We know that someday this case is going to be solved,” she said. “I want to know if he’s alive, of course. If his life has been taken, we can deal with it, but we want to know. . . . I really thought we would have some answer by now.”