One morning in 1979 a six-year-old American boy, Etan Patz, set off on foot to catch the bus to school — the first time he had been allowed to walk to the bus stop by himself.
One morning in 1979 a six-year-old American boy, Etan Patz, set off on foot to catch the bus to school — the first time he had been allowed to walk to the bus stop by himself. He did not arrive; he vanished without a trace and was never found. In 2001, still missing, he was declared dead.
Etan’s was the case that changed the way America looked for its lost children: his search was given huge — unprecedented — media coverage, and his photograph was the first of many to be used in the ‘milk carton’ campaigns of the 1980s. Coverage of child abduction was altered for ever, and similar cases in this country still feel the influence of that disappearance.
In 1981 Still Missing was published, the story loosely based on that of Patz. A six-year-old boy, Alex Selky, sets off for school on foot. At the corner of the street he waves goodbye to his mother, Susan, as he does every day. But in the afternoon he doesn’t come home. Susan telephones her friend Jocelyn to find out if Alex and her daughter are playing together at her house, and it transpires that Alex never turned up to school. Susan calls the police and her — every parent’s — nightmare begins.
What follows is not a detective story but an examination of the effects of Alex’s disappearance on his parents and their relationships with friends, family, neighbours and the wider public — those strangers who watch Susan on television and then approach her, in the street or the supermarket, with their opinions. The story is told primarily from Susan’s perspective and it attempts to depict what most people would call ‘unimaginable’: what it feels like to be the mother appealing — pleading — on television for the safe return of her child.
Today’s media would have a field-day with Susan: she is an attractive, intelligent and articulate woman whose composure they cannot fracture. Given that she and her husband (both teachers) smoke the occasional joint and seem to share an elastic view of fidelity, today’s tabloid press would no doubt characterise them both (but only condemn her, being a woman) as negligent, licentious, liberal intellectuals who deserve to have their child abducted.
In 1981 they are received with relative mildness, but Gutcheon is still able to emphasise a process which is familiar to the presiding detective, Menetti, and will be familiar to a contemporary reader: the need for the public to separate the parent, in this case Susan, from normal practice. Searching for differences between ourselves and the victims is, Gutcheon notes, a forlorn attempt to deny the possibility of a similar fate: ‘It could not happen to my child because I am unlike that mother’. Much is made of the parent’s behaviour (how could she let her six-year-old walk to school?) and then her character (an absence of on-camera tears signifies collusion in the crime), because to accept the randomness of such an incident is to accept that it could come at any time.
As much as the public wants the child to be found it wants, perhaps to an even greater degree, to find a reason why the kidnapping happened to that particular child. Of the two searches, it is this one which proves inexhaustible.
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