After 33 years, someone has confessed to killing 6-year-old Etan Patz, and people immediately start speaking of “closure.” Patty Wetterling hates the word.
Since 1989, she and her husband have writhed in the same hell as Stan and Julie Patz. Whatever path they might have been on, it was irrevocably altered that October evening when a masked man walked away with their 11-year-old boy, Jacob.
“Once you’re a victim of a crime like this, your life takes a very different direction,” the St. Joseph, Minn., woman says. “It doesn’t really close anything because everything just became different from that point on. But it does provide answers.”
Thanks to the wonders of modern computer graphics, these parents can watch their children “age” — digitally, at least. But no one can write a program capable of generating the milestones — high school graduation, college, marriage, parenthood — that come along with growing up.
“Against all hope and reality, every now and then a child comes back alive,” says John Walsh, host of television’s “America’s Most Wanted” and whose 6-year-old son, Adam, was abducted from a Florida department store in July 1981 and murdered. “So that’s why these people keep their rooms and their phone numbers, because it’s part of the staying mentally sane. It’s part of the being able to cope with the worst possible thing that could ever happen to you — your beautiful, loving child disappears.”
A bedroom that never changes
With their other two children grown, the Misheloffs’ house in Dublin, Calif., is a bit too big for them. But they wouldn’t dream of moving while there is a chance that Ilene might return.
“She has to come back to her house,” Mike Misheloff says.
“This is her home,” says his wife, Maddi. “We have to be here for her.”
They have left their daughter’s room just as it was Jan. 30, 1989 — the day she vanished. Not as a shrine, Maddi Misheloff says, but simply because “it’s her room. And on the daily hope that we’re getting her back.”
Ilene was 13 when she disappeared on her way home from Wells Middle School to change into her figure-skating clothes. She had recently competed in her first regional meet, and her family had gotten permission for her to leave while everyone else was in last period.
After school, she usually had a snack while she waited for her coach to come pick her up. But she never got home that day.
The couple have been in contact with police off and on since Ilene’s disappearance.
“We want to know where our child is,” Maddi says. “Every day without her is torture, and we want her back.”
The last child
When Judy Moore of Jackson, Ky., heard that the Patzes second-guessed their decision to let Etan walk to the bus stop alone that day, she wept. “You’re reading my mind,” she says, the tears coming afresh. “It’s pitiful.”
Moore, 55, had lost one prematurely born baby at 5 weeks. A judge had given custody of her two older children to her parents because her epilepsy made it difficult for her to care for them, she says. Kelly, her baby, was all she had left.
On Feb. 12, 1982, she and 6-year-old Kelly were living with Moore’s boyfriend in a rented house in the eastern Kentucky mountains.
There was a dusting of snow on the ground. Kelly — a blue-eyed boy with a scar on his upper lip from an operation to repair a birth defect — had the day off from kindergarten and was begging to play outside. After about two hours, Moore says, she relented.
“He hugged me and said, ‘Mom, I love you,’ ” she says.
She watched him out the window. A couple of hours later, a neighbor yelled down to say that Moore’s sister was on the telephone. When she came back home from the call, she says, Kelly was gone.
“They keep trying to get me to confess to murder,” Moore says. “I understand that there’s mothers out there that do things like this. It makes me sick. I mean, how a mother can do something like that to their own flesh and blood? I’ll never understand it.”
Stopped on the way home
The outgoing message on the Wetterlings’ answering machine says it all. “Hope is an amazing force that we all need in our lives every day,” Patty Wetterling’s voice declares.
The evening of Oct. 22, 1989, Wetterling and her chiropractor husband, Jerry, were going out to visit with friends. They asked Jacob, 11, to baby-sit his two younger siblings — Trevor, 10, and Carmen, 8.
They called home to give Jacob the phone number where they were. Not long afterward, the children called to say that they were bored, and they asked permission to ride their bikes to the video store — about a mile away. After initially saying no, the parents acquiesced.
The brothers left their sister with a 13-year-old sitter and went with a friend to the store, where they chose their movie and bought some candy. They were about halfway home, the other two boys told authorities, when a masked gunman emerged from a driveway.
He ordered them to throw their bikes into a ditch and lie down. After asking each boy his age, he told Trevor and the friend to run toward the nearby woods and not look back.
But after a short distance, they did turn around — in time to see the man leading Jacob away by the elbow.
