St. Louis – First came the shock that two missing boys had been found, one after he had been gone more than four years.
Then, the overwhelming joy and celebration.
And then, the questions, chief among them: Why didn’t Shawn Hornbeck escape his captor? Why didn’t he tell someone or call someone? Wasn’t there something, anything, he could have done to slip away?
“The big question is, ‘Why didn’t he run?”‘ said Robert Butterworth, a Los Angeles psychologist who specializes in trauma.
For now, days after the 15-year-old Richwoods, Mo., boy was found in a Kirkwood apartment along with William “Ben” Ownby, a 13-year-old Beaufort boy abducted Jan. 8, the answer is known perhaps only to Shawn and his alleged captor, Michael Devlin.
Devlin was being held Sunday in the Franklin County jail in lieu of $1 million bail and is charged with first-degree kidnapping. It was unclear Sunday whether he had a lawyer.
As investigators piece together the details of Shawn’s captivity and Ben’s abduction, they are trying to discover how the boys could have been kept captive in an apartment where neighbors often heard banging, shouting and arguing.
Internet profiles posted up to nearly three years ago that were created using pictures resembling Shawn emerged over the weekend when a blog mentioned them. A Kirkwood detective said Sunday he had heard about the profiles but didn’t know what role they might play in the investigation.
A Yahoo user homepage belonging to “xxdevildevlinxx” was created in April 2004 and shows a partial picture of a boy, strongly resembling photos of Shawn, with an eyebrow piercing. On Saturday, the boy had a lip ring and three ear piercings.
Another Yahoo profile using the same picture is registered to an “mdevlin” in Kirkwood.
Another profile was taken out under the name Shawn Devlin in November 2005, according to the Yahoo page. It contains a full picture of a young boy similar to pictures of Shawn; the page says the user lives in Kirkwood. A website called the True Crime Blog mentioned the pages over the weekend.
Details yet to emerge
Residents of Richwoods were shocked that the boy could have so much contact with the outside world but remain at his captor’s side – refusing to flee even as Devlin worked two jobs that forced him to leave Shawn and, later, Ben alone.
But experts say previous incidents of kidnappings and hostage-takings shed light on what may have been playing out these past few years.
When trying to understand what did and didn’t happen, it’s important to realize that the rest of us don’t know what sort of psychological techniques may have been used to control Shawn, Butterworth said.
In the case of Elizabeth Smart, the Utah girl taken from her bedroom in 2002 and found nine months later, she was warned that her family would be at risk if she didn’t do what she was told, Butterworth said. Abductors sometimes tell their captives that if they try to escape, others dear to them – family or even pets – will be hurt, he said.
“They use psychological chains, which can be just as bad as physical,” Butterworth said.
Also to consider is what has been dubbed “Stockholm syndrome,” a situation in which a victim may come to identify with, support or somehow care for his or her captor, even to the point of defending that person.
“You almost become connected,” Butterworth said. “And you start thinking your bridges are burned, or your parents don’t love you anymore.”
Terri Weaver, an associate professor of psychology at St. Louis University who specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder, said the amount of control a captor can wield psychologically over a victim is immense – even if the abducted person eventually is allowed to mix with other people, as a neighbor said was the case with Shawn.
“And if you think about this child being around other people and no one is helping him when he’s in broad daylight, that information also can be experienced by the child as, ‘There’s nothing I can do,”‘ said Weaver, adding it’s possible Shawn did try to communicate but that those efforts failed.
An abducted child likely has to live his or her life by rules set by the captor, Weaver said.
“And conducting yourself that way is really designed for you to survive on a day-to-day basis,” Weaver said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
