Robbing the Innocents

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

The little girl didn't like garbage, which is why her mother doesn't believe the story of her death. Andrea Parsons of Port Salerno, Florida, disappeared last July on her way home from the corner store with some candy. Claude Davis, a roadworker living across the street from the Parsons home, claimed that he saw her being forced into a car by four Hispanic men. Then last month he changed his story: Andrea had been helping him look for aluminum cans in a Dumpster. She fell, hit her head and died, he said. Yet no body has turned up, and Andrea's mother Linda doesn't believe Davis: "Andrea would rather be grounded than take out the trash." Linda and the local authorities think somebody made away with her daughter -- and with her life's joy. "It's like we're stuck in a vacuum, with no beginning and no ending," she says.

If that state of limbo seems grimly familiar, it is because as winter falls, the country seems seized by a spate of child abductions. The FBI is investigating nine cases of kidnapping in which homicide is known or suspected. A stalker haunting the Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys raped a girl and fondled about 20 other schoolchildren. In St. Louis, Missouri, two young girls fell prey to a kidnapper-killer, and police have just arrested a suspect in the would-be abduction of a third. The second girl, Cassidy Senter, 10, was the object of a massive helicopter-and-roadblock search. Her body was found in an alley, her head beaten, several fingers missing, her pants pulled down.

The public reaction has been outrage. In St. Louis callers swamped radio talk shows demanding the death penalty and, in one case, disembowelment for the killer. At the Adam Walsh Center, a missing-children organization in West Palm Beach, Florida, calls for advice are up 50%. Its director, Nancy McBride, echoes a popular sentiment: "Don't let your children go anywhere alone. Our society is breaking down, and you can't expect kids to watch themselves anymore."

Social scientists, however, advise against hysteria. "While this kind of incident is every parent's worst nightmare, like most nightmares it's not likely to happen," says Steven Nagler of the Yale Child Studies Center. Adds Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC): "There are going to be outrageous acts that even the most cautious of families will not be able to prevent." The specialists stress two things: there is little protection against kidnapper-murderers, but fortunately there are few of them. The vast majority (several hundred thousand a year) of child snatchings are perpetrated by family members in custody disputes. According to the well-respected 1990 Justice Department report National Incidence Studies on Missing, Abducted and Thrown-Away Children in America, far fewer -- 3,200 to 4,600 minors a year -- are seized by strangers. Most victims are teenagers; contrary to media coverage, a disproportionate number are black or Hispanic. Only 300 of the abductions are classic kidnappings involving overnight captivity, transport of more than 50 miles, and ransom or murder. The number of kidnap-murders has fluctuated between 50 and 150 a year for at least 17 years. Allen estimates that 1993 will be on the low end.

Allen's group, founded in the early '80s, culls data from 30 federal agencies, 44 state-level missing-children clearinghouses and more than 60 private organizations. When a minor is confirmed missing, NCMEC transmits a photo and a biography to 17,000 law-enforcement groups. "The reality is that most missing kids are going to be recovered," says Allen.

FBI experts hope to complete a psychological profile of the typical snatch- and-slay perpetrator next year. In the one recent case where the murderer was caught, however -- the killing of 12-year-old Polly Klaas of Petaluma, California, by Richard Allen Davis, 39 -- there was less interest in Davis' psyche than in his rap sheet. First booked at age 12 for stealing checks, he escaped charges in the shotgun death of a girlfriend seven years later but served a total of eight years for a burglary and two assaults on other women, one involving kidnapping. Free again in 1985, he abducted a female acquaintance and forced her at knifepoint to withdraw $6,000 from the bank. He got 16 years for that, but thanks to California's rules mandating early release for good behavior, Davis served only half; emerging just in time, if his confession is to be believed, to relax at a bucolic, vine-decorated "transitional living" facility in San Mateo County before arriving in Polly Klaas' bedroom with his knife.

The details of his second parole, which became widely known after Davis was charged with Klaas' murder two weeks ago, have helped fuel the petition campaign for a measure titled "Three Strikes and You're Out." The California initiative, whose language is similar to a bill recently adopted in Washington State, triples the sentence of a violent felon convicted for the third time, effectively jailing him for a minimum of 25 years. Says its coordinator, Chuck Cavalier: "We had tremendous support before the Klaas case, but ((since Davis was captured)) our 800 number has got so many calls we blew out the voice-mail systems." (Not everybody is signing up, however. State assemblyman John Burton notes, "I don't think it's a good idea to load up the wagon with criminals that are felons . . . but who are not grave threats to individual safety.")

Kenneth Lanning, special supervisory agent at the FBI Academy's Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia, stresses that parents should not obsess on murder-kidnappers. Concentrating too hard on "stranger-danger," he says, "is like putting a lightning rod on your home and canceling your homeowner's insurance. You're prepared for one terrible but highly unlikely event and unprepared for a host of things that are far more likely." Although Lanning understands the horror that a Klaas case generates, he points out that family violence exacts a much higher toll. "In the two months that you put all this energy and these resources into one child who's been abducted," he says, "200 kids are murdered by their mother or father."

Neither Allen nor Lanning is hinting that parents should abandon the common- sense rules of parental vigilance. For the especially worried, New York State clearinghouse on missing children manager James Stanco suggests knowing exactly, rather than approximately, what your children are wearing in the event you must describe them, and introducing a family password to prevent their walking away with a bogus relative. But, cautions James Fox, dean of Northeastern University's College of Criminal Justice, "we should not make them panicky and make them lose their childhood. You don't want them to think that everyone they meet is a potential serial killer."

With reporting by Greg Aunapu/Miami, Sharon E. Epperson/New York, Staci D. Kramer/St.Louis, Elaine Lafferty/Petaluma and Kristen Lippert-Martin/Washington