Living With Evil

He thought they were best friends. For the past three years, Tony Douglas had palled around with a boy whose name, he believed, was Shawn Devlin. The two 15-year-olds had ridden bikes together, gone skateboarding, hung around the mall and played videogames like Dragon Ball Z and Gears of War. But last week, as he sat with his mother, watching TV in the living room of their modest apartment in suburban St. Louis, Tony was having a hard time believing that Shawn, whose real last name was Hornbeck, had been abducted as an 11-year-old and held hostage, or something worse. All that time, Shawn had been, as Tony put it to a visiting NEWSWEEK reporter, "like a brother to me."

But there was Shawn, on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." His hair had been cut, the rings were gone from his lip and ear and he looked "embarrassed," Tony said, by all the hugging and carrying on over his rescue. When Winfrey asked Shawn whether he had friends while he was in captivity, and Shawn shyly said "yes," a slight smile played across Tony's face. When Winfrey asked Shawn's parents, Pam and Craig Akers, if Shawn had been sexually abused during his captivity, and they nodded yes, Tony bit down on his fingertips. When Shawn's aunt, Shari Frazier, lambasted the people who had noticed but done nothing about the fact that "Shawn Devlin" looked like the missing posters of Shawn Hornbeck, Tony winced and shrank back into the couch.

It was true, Tony admitted. Tony, his brother Larry, his sister-in-law Kelly and his mother, Rita, had seen those posters on park benches and on the local TV news. "We'd say stuff about it," said Tony, claiming that he couldn't recall exactly what they said. Kelly remembers one moment clearly. Shawn was over at the Douglas home, and everyone was in the living room watching TV. As the image of Shawn Hornbeck flashed across the screen, accompanied by a message reporting his disappearance, family members started exclaiming, "Wow, you kind of look like him," and "That's so weird." But, Kelly says, Shawn just blew them off. "No, I don't," he replied. "Shut up. Whatever."

Shawn never said a word about who he really was or hinted at what he might be going through, at least as far as the Douglas family could remember. Interviewed last week by platoons of reporters, Shawn's neighbors in the working-class apartment building in Kirkwood, Mo., where he had lived for more than four years with a man named Michael Devlin, 41, were similarly stunned. The Gothic story that played out over the airwaves last week transfixed many Americans. How could a boy who surfed the Web, owned a cell phone and rode a bike so freely that he had, on at least four occasions, been stopped by police late at night not have called out for help?

With its twists and turns, near misses and surprise ending, Shawn's story is as chilling as a creepy novel. The police were holding back on some of the details, awaiting a criminal trial, but it is possible to reconstruct the basic plotline, as well as some of the more disturbing details, of Shawn's ordeal.

A spunky, likable kid who loved playing baseball and teasing girls, Shawn Hornbeck set off on his lime green bike to visit a friend in rural Richwoods, Mo., on Oct. 6, 2002. He didn't come back. Authorities have said that Michael Devlin, his alleged kidnapper, used a gun. It is not hard to imagine what unfolded over the next few hours and days and months.