But there was Shawn, on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” His hair had been cut, the rings were gone from his lip and ear and he looked “embarrassed,” Tony said, by all the hugging and carrying on over his rescue. When Winfrey asked Shawn whether he had friends while he was in captivity, and Shawn shyly said “yes,” a slight smile played across Tony’s face. When Winfrey asked Shawn’s parents, Pam and Craig Akers, if Shawn had been sexually abused during his captivity, and they nodded yes, Tony bit down on his fingertips. When Shawn’s aunt, Shari Frazier, lambasted the people who had noticed but done nothing about the fact that “Shawn Devlin” looked like the missing posters of Shawn Hornbeck, Tony winced and shrank back into the couch.
It was true, Tony admitted. Tony, his brother Larry, his sister-in-law Kelly and his mother, Rita, had seen those posters on park benches and on the local TV news. “We’d say stuff about it,” said Tony, claiming that he couldn’t recall exactly what they said. Kelly remembers one moment clearly. Shawn was over at the Douglas home, and everyone was in the living room watching TV. As the image of Shawn Hornbeck flashed across the screen, accompanied by a message reporting his disappearance, family members started exclaiming, “Wow, you kind of look like him,” and “That’s so weird.” But, Kelly says, Shawn just blew them off. “No, I don’t,” he replied. “Shut up. Whatever.”
Shawn never said a word about who he really was or hinted at what he might be going through, at least as far as the Douglas family could remember. Interviewed last week by platoons of reporters, Shawn’s neighbors in the working-class apartment building in Kirkwood, Mo., where he had lived for more than four years with a man named Michael Devlin, 41, were similarly stunned. The Gothic story that played out over the airwaves last week transfixed many Americans. How could a boy who surfed the Web, owned a cell phone and rode a bike so freely that he had, on at least four occasions, been stopped by police late at night not have called out for help?
With its twists and turns, near misses and surprise ending, Shawn’s story is as chilling as a creepy novel. The police were holding back on some of the details, awaiting a criminal trial, but it is possible to reconstruct the basic plotline, as well as some of the more disturbing details, of Shawn’s ordeal.
A spunky, likable kid who loved playing baseball and teasing girls, Shawn Hornbeck set off on his lime green bike to visit a friend in rural Richwoods, Mo., on Oct. 6, 2002. He didn’t come back. Authorities have said that Michael Devlin, his alleged kidnapper, used a gun. It is not hard to imagine what unfolded over the next few hours and days and months.
Cut off from his parents, shawn became completely dependent on a 6-foot-4, 300-pound strange man for food, sleep, warmth, attention and affection. According to the Associated Press, Shawn said that at times Devlin awakened him every 45 minutes. (Sleep deprivation is often used as torture by intelligence services.) Yet, at the same time, Devlin showered Shawn with goodies. The 11-year-old boy no longer had to go to school. He could watch TV and play videogames all day. He was given an iPod, a computer, an Xbox 360 and a bike. And he was almost surely threatened with gruesome consequences if he said a word about his abduction to anyone else. Child kidnappers “know how to create a paralyzing sense of fear so even when the captor is not present, the child feels he is omnipresent,” says Dr. Terri Weaver, psychology professor at Saint Louis University. “Their mental package is very coercive, very convincing, very mean. They don’t just say, ‘I’ll kill your family.’ They tell how they’ll do it in graphic detail and manner–how they’ll kill the child’s family and even pets.”
Harry Reichard lived upstairs from Devlin at the Kirkwood apartments. He says he often heard “weird sounds,” like whimpering, screaming and pleading. Once, says Reichard, “it was like Shawn was trying to get [Devlin] to stop doing something.” At another time, Reichard says, he heard Devlin yell, “What the f— did you do that for, you f—ing idiot?” The shouting was followed by what sounded like a blow. There was often loud banging and blaring music, including “horrorcore” bands like Insane Clown Posse and Twiztid. “It was like a maniacal workshop,” says Reichard, who thought Devlin and Shawn were having father-and-son disagreements.
There had been hints about Devlin’s private life. Some time before Shawn arrived to live with him, Laura Aguilar, another neighbor, happened to look through Devlin’s street-level bathroom window. She was disconcerted to see a variety of what appeared to be sexual toys. Other neighbors noticed Devlin had a temper. He was obsessive about his parking space, and once called the police in the middle of the night to report that someone had parked in his spot.
But Devlin was otherwise unremarkable. Adopted as a child, he was apparently a quiet, withdrawn, unathletic kid who grew up to be an edgy loner. He got a job at Imo’s Pizza during high school and never left. “Devo,” as he was called, was “never late, never sick, never missed work,” says the pizza parlor’s owner, Mike Prosperi. “That’s why I made him manager.” Aguilar remembers his moving into the Kirkwood apartments in 2001 or early 2002, arriving alone, accompanied by a black cat. In the fall of 2002, Aguilar noticed the arrival of a young boy, but assumed he was Devlin’s son. The two seemed normal enough. Another neighbor, Krista Jones, observed Devlin teaching the boy to drive his pickup truck, while others saw the two pitching a tent outside the apartment.
As shawn grew older, he dyed his hair, painted his fingernails black, pierced his ear, eyebrow and lip, and otherwise behaved like an early adolescent. “He was real nice, real polite, a very sweet boy,” says Rita Lederle, Tony Douglas’s mother. Tony and Shawn became best friends.
Tony began spending nights over at Shawn’s, a messy one-bedroom apartment where Shawn slept on a futon in the living room. Dirty dishes were often piled high in the sink, and trash lay around on the floor. Devlin seemed quiet, almost monosyllabic to Tony. He liked Final Fantasy, a role-playing videogame. Devlin was never affectionate with Shawn, Tony later recalled to NEWSWEEK, though he remembered they would sometimes play-fight, punching each other jokingly. From time to time, Devlin blew up at Shawn, one time for somehow messing up his Final Fantasy game.
Shawn told Tony stories to conceal his true identity. He said his mother had been killed in a drunken-driving accident, claimed he was attending a private school to explain his absence from public school, and later said he was being home-schooled. He began spending holidays with Tony’s family, saying his father was away seeing relatives, whom, Shawn said, he did not care for. It was all a little peculiar, but “we learned early on that he was not comfortable talking about his family,” says Tony’s sister-in-law Kelly.
What was really going on in the boy’s mind? Shawn may have been suffering from some version of Stockholm syndrome, named after a 1970s bank heist in Sweden in which robbers seized numerous hostages–who ended up bonding with them. (The most notorious example, perhaps until now, is Patty Hearst, the heiress kidnapped by ’70s radicals who locked her in a closet and played with her mind until she was willing to join them in a bank robbery.)
On “Oprah,” the host asked Shawn, “How often did you think about your family?” Holding his stepfather’s hand, the boy replied, “Every day.” “Every day,” Winfrey repeated. “I prayed to God that one day I would be back with my family every night, and I crossed myself every night.” Winfrey: “You crossed yourself every night.” “Very Christian family,” said Shawn, smiling sweetly at his step-father. “Very Christian family,” repeated Winfrey. “Did you ever try to write or call them?” Shawn’s answer: “No.”
But he did reach out, ever so tentatively. His real family had created a foundation for missing children in Shawn Hornbeck’s name. At least twice, Shawn went to the Web site while he was surfing the Net. Once he posted a comment: “How long are you planing [ sic ] to look for your son?” Hours later, he wrote again, asking if he could write a poem for his family. On “Oprah,” Shawn explained, “I was hoping it would give some kind of hint.” His parents missed it. “You get so many weird, out-there messages,” said his stepfather, Craig Akers, his face twisting in regret.
There were a number of missed chances over the four years of Shawn’s captivity. Late one night he was stopped by police as he rode his bike home. Officers asked his name and he offered, “Shawn Devlin.” On three occasions, he was stopped with Tony Douglas. Each time, Shawn identified Devlin as his father. At least once, the cops gave the boys a ride home in the cruiser.
Devlin’s neighbor Monserrat Urias, 14, still wonders if she might have saved Shawn late last year. Sifting through the mail, she saw a flier showing a missing kid. “I know him, I’ve seen him,” she told her mother. Urias’s mother thought her daughter was being flippant about child snatching and scolded her, “This is serious.” Urias replied: “Never mind.”
When Shawn first vanished four years earlier, a total of 1,600 volunteers joined the search effort, combing the surrounding hills, valleys and rivers. One of them, Keith Hayes, who still sports a shawn hornbeck search and rescue cap, worked practically full time, gathering topographical maps and trudging, along with many others, through one grid after another. When they grew desperate they began consulting psychics, one of whom instructed them to inspect every boxcar on the railroad in the nearby town of De Soto; another directed them to a pile of rocks 20 miles away. “Obviously, we found nothing,” says Hayes.
Shawn’s parents were slowly, agonizingly, losing hope for their son. But they threw themselves into the Shawn Hornbeck Foundation, devoted to helping recover missing kids and promoting child safety. Though suffering from severe leg pain due to a vascular disease, Craig Akers joined the search for Bianca Piper, a Missouri girl who disappeared in 2005. (She’s still missing.) His leg turning blue from lack of circulation, he had to quit to go in the hospital. Three months later his lower left leg was amputated (he now uses a prosthesis).
The original prosecutor in the case, John Rupp, spent thousands of hours looking for a break. “It got really hard sometimes,” he recalls. “I’d throw my hands in the air and would say, ‘This will never be resolved’.” He was hard on his staff and hard on his family. “I was so haunted that someone had killed this boy and that person was still out there on the loose.”
Rupp feared that he was chasing the worst kind of predator. Of the roughly 800,000 children reported missing every year, about 100 are kidnapped by strangers intending to harm them. If children seized by these monsters are not rescued in the first 24 hours, terrible things happen. About four in 10 wind up dead. Of those returned to their families, a third have been injured and half have been sexually abused. The kidnappers are usually acting out some sick fantasy. (Devlin was charged last week with felony kidnapping and felony armed criminal action in connection with Hornbeck’s abduction. He has not yet pleaded.) Ransom is generally not the motive. “These people are not doing it for the money,” says Melissa Sickmund, a senior researcher at the National Center for Juvenile Justice.
Devlin might still be on the loose if he had not, as police charge, decided to kidnap another boy. It is hard to say exactly why Devlin may have decided to add a captive at the Kirkwood apartments, but an earlier case could offer a hint as to how a kidnapper might think. In 1972, a boy named Steven Stayner was snatched at the age of 7 off the street in Merced, Calif. His abductor told him that his parents didn’t want him anymore. Sexually abused, living in constant fear, he nonetheless went to school and made friends. Then, on Valentine’s Day 1980, his kidnapper brought home a fresh captive–a 5-year-old boy named Timmy White–and began taunting Stayner that he was growing too old. Stayner took the little boy and made a run for it–hitchhiking 40 miles and going to a police station in Ukiah, Calif. “I couldn’t see Timmy suffer,” he said to NEWSWEEK in 1984. “It was my do-or-die chance.”
By the fall of 2006, Shawn Hornbeck, too, was growing older. He began seeing a girl he had met through an online chat room, holding hands with her at the mall. On Dec. 9, he reportedly went to a dance at her private all-girls school. It may or may not be a coincidence that less than a month later, Devlin allegedly snatched a sweet-faced 13-year-old boy named Ben Ownby and brought him home. (In a separate proceeding, in a different Missouri county, Devlin pleaded not guilty last week to kidnapping Ben. Though the investigations are ongoing, Devlin was not charged with sexually assaulting either of the alleged abductees.)
The first few days in the squalid little apartment must have been horrendous. On “Oprah,” Shawn gave a guarded version that contained an eerie echo of what Steven Stayner said about little Timmy White two decades earlier. “I’m thankful that he [Ben] held in there for those couple of days,” said Shawn. “And I’m sorry for what he went through, ‘cause I told myself, a long time ago, I never want any other kid to go through what I went through, ‘cause I know what it’s like.”
Fortunately, rescue was not far away. A student had seen a white pickup with a camper shell leaving the area in Beaufort, Mo., where Ben Ownby disappeared after getting off the bus. An all-points police bulletin went out. The airwaves filled with bulletins about a suspicious white pickup. At Imo’s Pizza, owner Prosperi began to wonder and connect the dots. Devlin’s truck matched the one described on the news. Devlin, uncharacteristically, had missed work on Monday, Jan. 8, the day of the abduction and the day after. That Tuesday afternoon, Prosperi drove by Devlin’s apartment to look at the truck. He thought that the Nissan lettering didn’t quite match the coloring described on the news, but he did notice something strange: fresh road dust on the fender. The boy had been abducted on a dirt road. Two days later, Thursday, he went to the Kirkwood police. Independently, the police were already closing in. A pair of alert cops serving a warrant noticed a truck fitting the description at the Kirkwood apartments. They questioned the owner, who turned shifty. The FBI was called in, and by the next day it was over–both boys saved, Devlin under arrest.
Rupp, the prosecutor, got the Akerses by cell phone as they drove home from work that Friday evening. “Pull your car over now,” he told Craig. He told the couple their son was alive. “I looked up straight to the sky,” Pam recalls, “and said, ‘Thank you, God’.”
For both boys, it will take time and kindness to heal, as well as good counseling. Interviewed by NEWSWEEK, Steven Stayner’s sister, Cory, recalled that her brother tried to use humor to deflect his hurt, but that he suffered, taunted by other schoolkids for being molested by a man. (Steven Stayner died in 1989 in a motorcycle accident.)
“It can’t ever be the same after this,” says Craig Akers. Still, he hopes to restore some “normalcy” to Shawn’s life. But what, exactly, is normal? Last week Shawn’s best friend, Tony Douglas, told NEWSWEEK, “I still think he’s mine. I don’t know what he thinks.” Meanwhile, some 50 miles away, Shawn was out in the yard of his old/new home throwing a baseball around with his old–or is it new?–best friend from before 2002, Patrick. The Akerses sent two people out to watch their son. They, too, kept glancing out the window, as if they could not quite believe he was there, alive and safe.
