Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville)
October 25, 2009 Sunday
IS IT A DIFFERENT WORLD FOR OUR KIDS?
1974 Five girls, ages 6-12, disappear in Jacksonville in a three-month span;
2009 A 7-year-old Orange Park girl goes missing as she walks home from school
Once upon a time, parents didn't have to think twice about letting their kids walk home from school or bike to the playground.
But now? It's a different world.
That's what we keep saying while trying to make sense of the senseless, the fliers with smiling young faces, the string of children we never knew but now refer to by their first names.
Maddie, Caylee, Haleigh, Christopher and now Somer.
It's a different world. More dangerous, more evil.
How can you not feel that way after what happened last week? A first-grader disappeared on her walk home from school in Orange Park. A frenetic search ensued. And then, 48 hours after Somer Thompson was last seen, came the news that sent waves of emotions - sadness, anger, fear - throughout South Georgia and North Florida.
A body was found in a landfill in Folkston.
The news spread nearly instantly, not just locally but nationally. People near and far reacted, saying it was horribly sad. Saying it was sickening. Saying it was another sign of the times, of a world that is dramatically different from the one they grew up in.
But is it?
Or does the technology of today - the 24-hour news cycle, the Internet, the Amber Alerts and sexual predator maps - make it seem different?
If you go into The Times-Union library, to the shelves where stories written before the digital age are filed alphabetically by subject, you'll find a series of manila folders labeled "MISSING PERSONS." Pull out the one from 1974-75 and you will find 70 pages of yellowed newspaper clippings.
One starts with this sentence: "In 1974, some 3,093 Duval County residents were reported to police as missing."
The story says that eventually police found 2,913 of them. Many were runaways. Some were adults. But, it becomes clear by flipping through the pages, some were neither.
Thirty-five years ago, in October 1974, the big story in Jacksonville was the ongoing search for five girls, ages 6 to 12, who had disappeared in a three-month span.
There were front pages with pictures of children, some with gap-toothed smiles, each identified by single names. Jean, Annette, Mylette, Virginia, Ann.
There were descriptions of massive searches, shocked neighborhoods and worried parents.
There were quotes from people, wondering what had happened to the world they lived in.
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One mother said at least three-fourths of her neighbors are fearful of letting their children out to play or go to the store anymore alone (and) are taking them to and from school. "They're all afraid, and I don't blame them," she said. -- The Jacksonville Journal, Oct. 28, 1974.
On July 21, Jean Marie Schoen, a 9-year-old student at Love Grove Elementary, left her grandmother's house in Springfield and headed to Hanna's Food Store on the corner of Pearl and 17th streets, about two blocks away.
On Aug. 1, Annette Anderson, 11, and her sister, Mylette, 6, were left alone briefly at their Oceanway home. Their mother went to care for a sick relative shortly after 6 p.m. Their father, a commercial fisherman who was expected to get home by 6, got delayed by outboard motor problems. Sometime during a one-hour window, the two girls disappeared.
On Sept. 27, Virginia Helm, 12, disappeared after going to a convenience store one block from her home on the Southside. A story three days later said, "Police have received reports of young girls being approached by two or three persons in a car, then threatened and followed home when they didn't get in the vehicle."
On Oct. 12, Ann Greene, 12, missed the bus and stayed home with her mother. At 10:30 that morning, she went to a nearby grocery store to get some soft drinks. She bought the drinks, talked to the butcher, told him she'd see him later, then left by a side door.
By the fifth apparent abduction, the news was in the paper the next day with a large front-page headline:
Girl, 12, Missing Here; Fifth in Last 3 Months
There were massive searches involving horses, helicopters, four-wheel drive vehicles and volunteers. The City Council voted to offer a $5,000 reward for information leading to a resolution. In a sign that murder isn't a new concern, one council member questioned setting that precedent, pointing out that three people had been killed in his district in the last week.
More than two weeks later, a couple who had been looking for pine cones for Christmas decorations stumbled upon a body buried near a dirt road off Beach Boulevard. The police were called. Two of the homicide detectives who arrived on the scene were Lester Parmenter and Richard Pruett.
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"You'd hate to push a panic button and make a martial law type of situation in which children shouldn't be on the streets by themselves in daylight. People can't lock their children in the house and not let them out ... " Sgt. Jim Suber in an Oct. 28, 1974 story.
For Parmenter and Pruett, the news of police finding Somer's body in a Georgia landfill brought back memories of 1974 and, in particular, going into the wooded area off Beach Boulevard on a Sunday night.
"Of all the cases I worked, that particular time is still hard for me to deal with," Pruett said last week. "Those guys [who found Somer] are going to remember this forever, too."
Parmenter praised the Clay County detectives, noting that it wasn't new technology but old-fashioned legwork that led to the Georgia landfill.
"It's sad all the way through," he said. "It's sad for the families. It's hard on those officers. Some, if not all, probably have children of their own, maybe even children of that same age."
In 1974, Parmenter and Pruett did.
The body turned out to be Virginia Helm, the fourth girl who disappeared. She had been shot in the head.
"I had a little girl who at the time was about the same age, same size, same color hair - and so did my partner," Parmenter said. "We were out there at 1, 2 o'clock in the morning, digging that little girl up with our bare hands to keep from causing any other harm to her body. As we were digging, he was on one side and I was on the other. We'd look up at each other every once in a while and we both knew what the other one was thinking: It could be ours."
Four years later, on Feb. 8, 1978, it almost was Parmenter's daughter. Then 14, she left her middle school and prepared to walk home. It was raining so she called her mother, who sent an older brother to go get her.
When he drove up, a man was talking to her, claiming to be a firefighter. Something didn't feel right. So he didn't just get his sister and drive her home. He wrote down the license plate number of a nearby van.
The man turned out to be Ted Bundy.
The next day he killed 12-year-old Kimberly Leach in Lake City. She was his last victim. Bundy was apprehended and convicted, partly because of the help of Parmenter and his children.
"There's no doubt in my mind, learning what we found out later, that my daughter would have been one of his victims," Parmenter said.
So you ask the former homicide detective, the father of a girl who almost became one of Bundy's victims, if it is a different world.
He says he often wonders about that. He thinks some criminals have become more brazen. But is it truly different?
"Today you've got the sources to make everyone more aware of crime," he said. "And you've got a larger number of people. ... I don't know."
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The air-conditioned emergency command center ... maintained contact with more than 200 persons in the field with portable radios. Police said the radios were not powerful enough to relay signals through the regular radio net at the courthouse, several miles away." -- The Times-Union, Aug. 4, 1974.
It was a different world. No question.
You look at the newspaper clippings from 1974 and are reminded of that over and over. The yellowed newsprint alone is a reminder. Step back 35 years and the technology used today by the police, media and public feels like something from a sci-fi novel.
There wasn't Jacksonville.com, thesmokinggun.com or Twitter.
There weren't any Amber Alerts. (One story details changes being made in the reporting missing persons, saying that in some cases the paperwork took days.)
There were no maps of sexual predators. There wasn't even that term, although a headline on an Oct. 8, 1974, story said: "Sex Pervert Angle Is Probed in 4 Missing Girls Case."
There was no Nancy Grace or Greta Van Susteren, no CNN or Fox News.
There was local television. But, as former TV-12 news director Howard Kelley recalls, the stations didn't have the ability "to literally broadcast from the front yard." They shot film on the scene and went back to the station. They led the nightly newscasts with stories about the missing girls. But there wasn't the 24/7 news cycle of today's television and Internet.
"You didn't have the speed of technology, which heightens a lot of things," Kelley said.
It heightens and extends the ability of the police to get information out to the public. It also heightens and extends the sense of community. And the sense of fear.
It's not just that the speed or volume of coverage has changed. Crimes that once were local stories now become national news. If a young child disappears in Colorado, we might hear details of it in Florida. And vice versa.
In 1974, few people outside of Jacksonville followed the cases of the five missing girls.
The morning after the body of Virginia Helm was found, another massive search ensued. But no other bodies were found in that area.
Prosecutors eventually concluded that the two Anderson sisters had been abducted and killed by mass murderer Paul John Knowles, a 28-year-old Jacksonville resident who was killed in December 1974 while trying to escape from Georgia authorities.
Three years later, the remains of Rebecca Ann Greene were found near Heckscher Drive.
The bodies of the two Anderson sisters and Jean Marie Schoen never were found. Police believed the abductions, which all happened in different parts of town, were unrelated. The pain, however, was felt across the city.
When Maddie Clifton's body was found in 1998, Elizabeth Anderson told the Times-Union that they hadn't moved or changed their phone number since 1974 because her husband "always thought the babies were coming home."
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This is International Walk to School Month, an event that was highlighted by students at schools in more than 42 countries walking to school one day in October.
Once upon a time, there wasn't such a thing, because every day was walk to school day.
Forty years ago, 41 percent of children walked or biked to school. By 2001, only 13 percent did.
And last year, a 10-year-old boy in Mississippi made headlines when he told his mother that he wanted to walk to soccer practice, about a mile away. Several people saw him walking and called 911.
A police officer showed up, drove him the rest of the way and reprimanded his mother, telling her if that if anything had happened she could have been charged with child endangerment.
Some felt it was an appropriate reaction. Others pointed to it as a prime example of overreactions to a small number of high-profile incidents.
According to federal statistics, about 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year in the United States. More than 500 die in fires each year, more than 1,000 drown and more than 2,000 are killed in automobile accidents.
Of course, those statistics are of little consolation to anyone who has had a child among those 115. And when you open up the paper or turn on the television and hear about a missing child, there is a strong and natural reaction, one that is the same in 2009 as it was in 1974.
We hold our own children a little tighter.
We say it's a different world.
A retired detective isn't sure.
"I think it's always been the same," Pruett said. "Thirty-seven years on the job, it never changed. Information travels faster, but as far as human nature? There are people out there who are just plain bad. Always have been. Since Cain and Abel, there has been killing."
Murders and abductions aren't 21st century inventions. But the technology used to uncover them, cover them and react to them is.
Maybe that continues to change our world.
Or maybe, more than anything, it changes our perception of it.
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