Occasionally, said Bolks, the kids are fleeing abusive homes. But mostly, she said, they simply don’t want to abide by house rules, and their disappearance is relatively brief—no more than a day or two. “I mean, we have regulars that take off every Thursday or Friday, and then they’re gone for the long weekend,” she said. “A lot of times, it’s just that the kids are incorrigible.”
Not so with Christopher, however. “What you need to know is, he’s always been a very great kid,” Jim told me. He was a National Merit Scholar semifinalist; he was invited to join the National Honor Society; and, even as a gangly teen, he’d made the high school swim team. Though never a top-tier competitor, he twice made the regionals. Watching Christopher swim the medley—breaststroke, crawl, backstroke, and fly—is one of Jim’s fondest memories. “He gets an ovation when he’s done,” he said. “His time stunk, but who cares? He actually did it.”
Christopher loved to camp. Loved to ski. He was adept at playing with the software of a computer—an original Macintosh—back when such an activity was still relatively esoteric. A friend’s dad owned a warehouse, and they’d play laser tag. He played cello in grade school, clarinet in junior high and high school. “He was a smart kid, a good sense of humor,” Jim said.
When Bolks inherited the case, in 1994, Christopher had been gone four years. The local investigation had reached a dead end. Nothing was found of the boy’s clothing, his glasses or the gun, and the police department had received only “a handful” of tips. But there was reason to hope that all this might change, as Christopher’s case had recently gotten a great deal of publicity.
THE ATTENTION CAME IN THE FORM OF A MUSIC VIDEO for a song called “Runaway Train” by the alternative rock band Soul Asylum, who, in 1993, were at the height of their success. The group had just released their sixth—and most popular—album, Grave Dancers Union, which ended up going triple platinum. “Runaway Train”—which would remain on the Billboard charts for more than 40 weeks, and which the band would play at Bill Clinton’s inaugural ball—was one of its singles.
The idea for the song’s video had begun with a milk carton—and, by extension, another missing kid.
Etan Patz, abducted in SoHo in May 1979, may be the most famous missing American child of the last half century, and the case’s fame rests, in part, on Patz’s face being displayed on the side of a milk carton. Depending on whom you ask, his was either the first or among the first. And that lit the spark for the video, its director, Tony Kaye, has said: “I was being driven home one night and I saw a poster—I think it was a milk poster . . . where it was missing kids on the carton.”
“Runaway Train” is a power ballad about depression. But Kaye decided the music video ought to be about something else: missing children. Over the course of four and a half minutes, the video toggles between footage of the band singing—the stuff of traditional music videos—and kids making a break for it; at the end, it depicts an abduction. Dotted throughout are photos and names of real missing children along with the date on which each disappeared.
Securing photos of those children required the help of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and its founder, Ernie Allen. In a recent conversation with me, Allen recalled the power and efficacy of the milk carton campaign. “Photos of missing children work,” he said, with the fervor of a man who has been making that argument for a long time. If enough people are armed with the best possible images and information, he reasoned, there’s a much better chance of locating and recovering a missing child. (The milk carton campaign, the origins of which are murky, fell by the wayside after Dr. Benjamin Spock and others suggested it needlessly scared children.)
When Kaye approached him, Allen was enthusiastic. He felt, and Kaye agreed, it was best to focus on “endangered runaways,” which the US Department of Justice would eventually define as children who had been “physically or sexually abused at home” or were “substance dependent” or “in the company of someone known to be abusing drugs.”
Further requisites: The children had to have been missing for at least a couple of years; their absence must have been reported to the police and entered into the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s national crime database; and, finally, it was imperative that parents grant permission to disseminate their child’s photo.
At the time, according to Allen, there were 1.6 million runaways a year. While many return home after a short time, Allen knew it was the kids who had been gone awhile that were at greater risk for harm. The reality, to which “Runaway Train” alludes in its closing minute, is that sometimes what looks like a runaway is actually an abduction. “You don’t ever really know, in most missing persons cases, what the circumstances are,” Allen noted.
In any case, he said, the video was “an opportunity to provide massive exposure to a huge segment of the population that may not routinely see missing child photos, and making whoever sees these photos think, I might be able to do something. I might have actually seen this person.” So Allen agreed to help Kaye and the band. But first, he extracted a promise from Kaye: If any child were recovered, his or her photo must be immediately removed from circulation and replaced with the photo of another missing child. What this meant, in practice, was that if things went according to plan, Kaye would have to repeatedly recut the video.
When the video debuted in May 1993, 13 children were featured. Sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Wiles was the first to come home.
“I LIKED A GUY WHO WAS OLDER THAN ME AND MY PARENTS told me no,” said Liz Vatovec, née Wiles. She’s now 39, and lives with her husband outside of Nashville, where she is a real estate broker and a licensed contractor. It was oddly jarring to realize that the blond kid from the decades-old photo of her reunion with her mother was my senior.
I contacted a few of the children—that is, the lucky ones who lived to no longer be children—from “Runaway Train.” Of the ones I reached out to, only Vatovec agreed to be interviewed.
Wiles, then 13, left her family’s home in Lamar, Arkansas. She and her boyfriend, Ron, hitchhiked to California, where she and her family had lived before moving to Arkansas. He worked odd jobs until they could afford a place of their own. They told anyone who inquired that she was 17. “People didn’t seem to be overly concerned about a 17-year-old having a dysfunctional family and leaving home, and people kind of sympathized with me a little bit and just looked the other way,” she said.
They stayed for two and a half years.
In May 1993, Elizabeth and Ron were at a friend’s house in San Diego. The television was on, and they weren’t paying much attention to it. But then Wiles saw her own face on MTV. Her biological father, Duane, had—without consulting Elizabeth’s mother, Debra, from whom he was divorced—given her photo to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. The video had begun airing that month.
“I just kind of freaked out,” she said.
A week later—she’d hesitated, at first—Elizabeth called her mother, who had not heard from the girl, not even a postcard, since she’d left home. As they wept, Elizabeth apologized and said she wanted to come home. There were no recriminations; Debra was just happy to have her back.