Suffer the parents

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.