Living With Evil

When Shawn first vanished four years earlier, a total of 1,600 volunteers joined the search effort, combing the surrounding hills, valleys and rivers. One of them, Keith Hayes, who still sports a shawn hornbeck search and rescue cap, worked practically full time, gathering topographical maps and trudging, along with many others, through one grid after another. When they grew desperate they began consulting psychics, one of whom instructed them to inspect every boxcar on the railroad in the nearby town of De Soto; another directed them to a pile of rocks 20 miles away. "Obviously, we found nothing," says Hayes.

Shawn's parents were slowly, agonizingly, losing hope for their son. But they threw themselves into the Shawn Hornbeck Foundation, devoted to helping recover missing kids and promoting child safety. Though suffering from severe leg pain due to a vascular disease, Craig Akers joined the search for Bianca Piper, a Missouri girl who disappeared in 2005. (She's still missing.) His leg turning blue from lack of circulation, he had to quit to go in the hospital. Three months later his lower left leg was amputated (he now uses a prosthesis).

The original prosecutor in the case, John Rupp, spent thousands of hours looking for a break. "It got really hard sometimes," he recalls. "I'd throw my hands in the air and would say, 'This will never be resolved'." He was hard on his staff and hard on his family. "I was so haunted that someone had killed this boy and that person was still out there on the loose."

Rupp feared that he was chasing the worst kind of predator. Of the roughly 800,000 children reported missing every year, about 100 are kidnapped by strangers intending to harm them. If children seized by these monsters are not rescued in the first 24 hours, terrible things happen. About four in 10 wind up dead. Of those returned to their families, a third have been injured and half have been sexually abused. The kidnappers are usually acting out some sick fantasy. (Devlin was charged last week with felony kidnapping and felony armed criminal action in connection with Hornbeck's abduction. He has not yet pleaded.) Ransom is generally not the motive. "These people are not doing it for the money," says Melissa Sickmund, a senior researcher at the National Center for Juvenile Justice.

Devlin might still be on the loose if he had not, as police charge, decided to kidnap another boy. It is hard to say exactly why Devlin may have decided to add a captive at the Kirkwood apartments, but an earlier case could offer a hint as to how a kidnapper might think. In 1972, a boy named Steven Stayner was snatched at the age of 7 off the street in Merced, Calif. His abductor told him that his parents didn't want him anymore. Sexually abused, living in constant fear, he nonetheless went to school and made friends. Then, on Valentine's Day 1980, his kidnapper brought home a fresh captive--a 5-year-old boy named Timmy White--and began taunting Stayner that he was growing too old. Stayner took the little boy and made a run for it--hitchhiking 40 miles and going to a police station in Ukiah, Calif. "I couldn't see Timmy suffer," he said to NEWSWEEK in 1984. "It was my do-or-die chance."

By the fall of 2006, Shawn Hornbeck, too, was growing older. He began seeing a girl he had met through an online chat room, holding hands with her at the mall. On Dec. 9, he reportedly went to a dance at her private all-girls school. It may or may not be a coincidence that less than a month later, Devlin allegedly snatched a sweet-faced 13-year-old boy named Ben Ownby and brought him home. (In a separate proceeding, in a different Missouri county, Devlin pleaded not guilty last week to kidnapping Ben. Though the investigations are ongoing, Devlin was not charged with sexually assaulting either of the alleged abductees.)