Background
Lindbergh Baby, 1932
The first missing child to capture public attention was Charles Lindbergh Jr. He was only 20 months old when kidnapped from his nursery in New Jersey in 1932. He was found dead two months later, and his alleged killer/kidnapper, Bruno Hauptmann, was executed.
Kidnapping was made a federal crime after this high-profile crime. |
Click to enlarge
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"[Aviation hero Charles] Lindbergh, [...] and his wife Anne discovered a ransom note [shown on the left] in their 20-month-old child's empty room on March 1. The kidnapper had used a ladder to climb up to the open second-floor window and had left muddy footprints in the room. The ransom note demanded $50,000 in barely literate English." |
Pre 1984
In the early 1980s, if a child went missing, law enforcement agencies did not formally share information and responses varied from town-to-town. Whether or not the child was found depended on where he or she lived. Because no central clearinghouse existed, few realized how pervasive the problem was. Additionally, police did not always take missing children reports seriously. Often, they did not respond quickly, nor did they distribute information to other agencies: local, state, or national. The lack of communication was the biggest issue surrounding missing children at that time.
Personal interview with John E. Bischoff III
Executive Director, Missing Children Division National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
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" Twenty years ago it was easier to find a stolen car than a stolen child. There was [...] no national response system in place and no central resource system in place and no central resource to help families like mine." |
Personal interview with Barbara HuggettDirector of Research and Development for the National Child Safety Council, on possible aid available to families of missing children before 1984.
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Newspaper article about Johnny's case, 1982. Click to enlarge.
Noreen GoschMother of Johnny Gosch, the first boy featured on a Milk Carton, discussing the delay and misunderstanding of law enforcement in handling her son's case.
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"I called the police. It took them 45 minutes to respond and we only lived 10 blocks from the police station. I called the District Manager of the newspaper and she gave me the names of everyone who would have picked up papers at that corner. By the time the cop arrived, I had all the information. I gave it to the police officer [...]. He basically was not going to look for Johnny. [...] The police chief kept screaming "runaway" despite the fact we had 5 witness's to the kidnapping. I called the FBI myself, they came to the house and said 'we will not be entering the case because the POLICE CHIEF DOES NOT WANT OUR HELP'. Kidnapping is a federal crime and they were refusing to investigate." |
Historically, police lacked the appropriate training and understanding of the problem of missing children cases, and this often made it possible for kidnappers to succeed. Law enforcement required parents to wait from 24 to 72 hours before they could file a missing person's report. This was significant because, according to the Washington State Office of the Attorney General, "In 76 percent of the missing children homicide cases studied, the child was dead within three hours of the abduction–and in 88.5 percent of the cases the child was dead within 24 hours". The delay in starting a case prevented officials from bringing more children home.
" In the early 80s the United States was a nation of fifty states that often acted like fifty separate countries when it came to handling missing children cases. We had 18,000 law-enforcement agencies that didn't always communicate with each other" |
"In the late 1970s and early 1980s three incidents occurred shocking the country and creating a nationwide focus on the subject of missing and exploited children. Those events were the murders of 29 boys and young men in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1979 to 1981; the abduction of 7-year-old Etan Patz from a New York City neighborhood in May of 1979; and the July 1981 abduction and murder of 6-year-old Adam Walsh in Hollywood, Florida."
- U.S. Department of Justice
Obviously, these were not the only children who went missing but, for various reasons, these were the children who caught the nation's attention.