The little girl didn't like garbage, which is why her mother doesn't believe the story of her death. Andrea Parsons of Port Salerno, Florida, disappeared last July on her way home from the corner store with some candy. Claude Davis, a roadworker living across the street from the Parsons home, claimed that he saw her being forced into a car by four Hispanic men. Then last month he changed his story: Andrea had been helping him look for aluminum cans in a Dumpster. She fell, hit her head and died, he said. Yet no body has turned up, and Andrea's mother Linda doesn't believe Davis: "Andrea would rather be grounded than take out the trash." Linda and the local authorities think somebody made away with her daughter -- and with her life's joy. "It's like we're stuck in a vacuum, with no beginning and no ending," she says.
If that state of limbo seems grimly familiar, it is because as winter falls, the country seems seized by a spate of child abductions. The FBI is investigating nine cases of kidnapping in which homicide is known or suspected. A stalker haunting the Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys raped a girl and fondled about 20 other schoolchildren. In St. Louis, Missouri, two young girls fell prey to a kidnapper-killer, and police have just arrested a suspect in the would-be abduction of a third. The second girl, Cassidy Senter, 10, was the object of a massive helicopter-and-roadblock search. Her body was found in an alley, her head beaten, several fingers missing, her pants pulled down.
The public reaction has been outrage. In St. Louis callers swamped radio talk shows demanding the death penalty and, in one case, disembowelment for the killer. At the Adam Walsh Center, a missing-children organization in West Palm Beach, Florida, calls for advice are up 50%. Its director, Nancy McBride, echoes a popular sentiment: "Don't let your children go anywhere alone. Our society is breaking down, and you can't expect kids to watch themselves anymore."
Social scientists, however, advise against hysteria. "While this kind of incident is every parent's worst nightmare, like most nightmares it's not likely to happen," says Steven Nagler of the Yale Child Studies Center. Adds Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC): "There are going to be outrageous acts that even the most cautious of families will not be able to prevent." The specialists stress two things: there is little protection against kidnapper-murderers, but fortunately there are few of them. The vast majority (several hundred thousand a year) of child snatchings are perpetrated by family members in custody disputes. According to the well-respected 1990 Justice Department report National Incidence Studies on Missing, Abducted and Thrown-Away Children in America, far fewer -- 3,200 to 4,600 minors a year -- are seized by strangers. Most victims are teenagers; contrary to media coverage, a disproportionate number are black or Hispanic. Only 300 of the abductions are classic kidnappings involving overnight captivity, transport of more than 50 miles, and ransom or murder. The number of kidnap-murders has fluctuated between 50 and 150 a year for at least 17 years. Allen estimates that 1993 will be on the low end.