On May 25, 1979, six-year-old Etan Patz walked by himself to his school bus stop in lower Manhattan for the first time. Tragically, it would also be his last as he disappeared before reaching his destination. It wasn’t until 2012 that charges were brought against Pedro Hernandez, who confessed to murdering the boy.
The disappearance of Etan Patz wasn’t an isolated incident, as a number of high-profile missing children cases rocked the United States during the 1980s. The ensuring media coverage led to changes in federal laws, the founding of various nonprofit organizations offering assistance, and pictures of missing children appearing on milk cartons and billboards throughout the United States.
In 1986, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Lois Lane of the Daily Planet became obsessed with the fate of missing children in the DC Comics Universe. Lane’s romantic relationship with Clark Kent – aka Superman – recently ended in tabloid fashion, while her journalistic credibility suffered from a lapse in judgement while reporting on the Middle East.
At the beginning of a two-issue miniseries, she abandons her date when she spots a trail of police cars headed to the Metropolis wharf, deciding that her professional career matters more than her personal. What the police retrieve from a watery grave, however, changes Lois Lane’s life in more ways than she thought possible.
“Once upon a time, it was a little girl who laughed and played and cried and loved,” she thinks to herself when she sees the body. “Now there is only a grotesque parody of a Cabbage Patch doll.”
Sensing her distress, police detective Bill Henderson offers Lane a momentary reprieve inside his squad car. “You tell me this thing happens a lot,” she says to Henderson. “Hell, I know it does. I’ve seen it on TV, read it in my own paper. Maybe I’m just feeling a little bit guilty, OK? It never touched me before, so it was somebody else’s problem. Well, now it is my problem, and I’m going to do something about it.”
Like Lois Lane, real-world film producer Linda Otto was driven to do something about the growing number of missing children in the factual United States. With the support of Alan Landsburg Productions in Los Angeles, she formed a nonprofit called Find the Children and held two benefit screenings of Jaws 3-D to raise $50,000 for the organization in 1983. Landsburg Productions also gave Otto the green-light to film a documentary that aired as a segment of the ABC news magazine 20/20.
Six-year-old Adam Walsh was abducted from a Sears department store in Florida on July 27, 1981. Two weeks later, his severed head was found in a drainage ditch. Linda Otto’s documentary crew followed Adam’s father John Walsh to Washington, D.C., where he lobbied for the passage of the Missing Children Act. The act – signed into law in October 1982 – enabled parents to enter the names of missing children into the FBI’s National Crime Information database.
“I thought I already knew a lot about missing children,” Linda Otto told the Los Angeles Times. “I didn’t.”
The same held true for Lois Lane in the DC Comics Universe. As part of her research, her first stop is Childsearch Inc., a private company that helps the parents of missing children. Administrator Kate Brinkley explains that two million youths go missing in the United States each year. The overwhelming majority are runaways, followed by children kidnapped by a divorced parent, leaving 50,000 a year abducted by strangers.
While there, Lois Lane meets the family of a child who had just been abducted. The next day she visits the middleclass mother of another child who went missing but was found alive nine months and seventeen days later, as well a wealthy father whose child had yet to be found. She likewise visits a halfway house for runaway teenagers, all to get a better grasp on a story that has become an obsession for her.
Filming a short documentary on Adam Walsh was just the beginning for Linda Otto as well. Her next project was a made-for-television movie about Adam’s kidnapping and murder, starring Daniel J. Travanti and JoBeth Williams. Simply named Adam, the film premiered on NBC in October 1983 and attracted 38 million viewers. At the end of the broadcast, the photographs of 55 missing children were shown, with thirteen of them found shortly afterwards as a result. The awareness that Adam raised likewise led to the Reagan Administration allocating $1.5 million to assist with the establishment of a National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
“It’s a sad commentary that people needed a prime-time television show – not a documentary, not a PBS show but an entertainment form – to form their priorities on what could happen to their children,” John Walsh told the Los Angeles Time on March 15, 1984. “It’s there in the newspapers every day, it’s often there on TV news programs – but all of a sudden they see a TV movie and decide that things aren’t right.”
Adam had a similar effect on Mindy Newell, the writer of the two-part Lois Lane miniseries published in 1986. She remembered hearing about the disappearance of Etan Patz in 1979 but admitted in the first issue of Lois Lane that “it wasn’t until a few years later, after my daughter was born, that I felt the loss of Mr. and Mrs. Patz. It wasn’t until a movie called Adam ran one night on NBC. It wasn’t until I saw JoBeth Williams turn pale and tremble in the shopping center in Florida. It wasn’t until I saw Daniel J. Travanti scream and kick and bite and tear a mattress to bits that I understood at last.”
On the opening page of the second issue of Lois Lane, Daily Planet city editor James McCullough tells features editor Janice Denton, “I was at the bank yesterday and there were missing kids posters up and the milk container this morning had photos. I don’t want to ignore this anymore.”
In May 1984, the Los Angeles Times reported that pictures of missing children were finding their way onto milk cartons, grocery bags, and billboards in the real world as well, while over 200 banks, restaurants, bus companies, and laundries had joined in the effort to find missing children. As a result, fourteen children in the Los Angeles area were found during a six-month period.
“(The pictures) are popping up all over the place,” the president of the California Grocers’ Association told the Los Angeles Times. “We hope to make it too hot for people to steal a kid anymore. People are going to think twice.”
While such efforts obviously helped, the growing number of nonprofits offering assistance had unintended negative consequences, including an exaggeration of statistics. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported that 1.5 million children went missing each year. One million were runaways, while anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 were abducted by parents caught in custody disputes. That left 4,000 to 20,000 children abducted by strangers.
Those numbers, however, were estimates, not factual statistics. The California Department of Justice reported 24,000 missing children in the state for 1984. All but 550 were found within thirty days, with only three having been abducted by strangers.
“We try to stress the point that stranger abductions are really a very, very small portion of the missing children reported – about one-quarter of 1%,” a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy said at the time. “It’s a point that should be stressed so that parents don’t become paranoid that their kids will be picked up off the street corners.”
In 1988, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children lowered their annual estimates of abducted children by eighty percent, aligning them with government and law enforcement agencies. Regardless of the actual numbers, Etan Patz and Adam Walsh – both of whom were only six years old – were abducted by strangers and murdered, something unimaginable for any parent. Raising awareness of abducted children increased the odds of them being safely found, while educating children to be wary of strangers no doubt saved the lives of many others.
“Prevention is the key,” Mindy Newell explained in the Lois Lane miniseries. “Education is the key… specifically the comic-book audience, whose age group, although spread out demographically, is a core of young people. They are the ones most affected. They are the ones who can be reported missing.” And they were the ones that Mindy Newell and Lois Lane most wanted to help and protect.
Anthony Letizia