Grace fought many battles in her career, both as a lawyer and as a detective. But her approach never varied when it came to rallying others to the cause at hand. Years earlier, while testifying before Congress on immigration, she said, “This grave question can not be boiled down to mere statistics … It is not a question of how much of this you will tolerate before you pass laws which will wipe out the evil. It is a question as to whether you will tolerate it at all.”
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the FBI investigated 466,949 cases of missing children in 2014. The NCMEC tip line on reported sexual exploitation of children and young adults received 1.1 million reports in 2014. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 100,000–300,000 children are at risk for entering the U.S. commercial sex trade. According to the U.S. State Department, 600,000–800,000 people are trafficked across international borders every year, of which 80 percent are female and half are children. I wanted to reprint all the people gone missing in the last year here, at the end, but it would not have been “cost effective,” they told me, even in the smallest type. So think of one name for me. Maybe it is someone you know. Or someone you saw on a show or a flier once. Or maybe it is your name, or a name you once had. Whoever it is, write that name here: ____________________________. If you don’t know anyone, put the name of someone you can’t imagine losing. They are the same name.
On May 6, 2013, as I was working on this book, I heard over the radio that three young women in Cleveland, where I live, had been miraculously found alive after being missing for over a decade. Michelle Knight, Gina DeJesus, and Amanda Berry escaped imprisonment in an ordinary-looking house through a combination of self-preservation, quick thinking, and the wild kindness of a stranger named Charles Ramsey, who refused to look the other way. All three women had been considered lost causes by local police and the FBI. All three are alive today.
As I finish this book, the latest name of a young woman that crosses my screen—unsearched, unbidden—is that of Tiffany Sayre, who went missing on May 11, 2015. The search for this mother of two toddlers lasted more than a month, until her body was found, wrapped in a sheet, in a wooded area on June 20. They found her on Father’s Day.
“Makes me mad, makes me hurt,” Thomas Kuhn, her father, told the local television station. “All I know is we are going to catch you, whoever you are.
“We are coming for you,” he said.
Author’s Note
I wonder if it won’t be the same with the children as it has been with us. No matter how long each one of them lives, won’t their lives feel to them unfinished like ours, only just beginning? I wonder how far they will go. And then their children will grow up and it will be the same with them. Unfinished lives. Oh, dearie, what children all of us are.
—Ernest Poole, His Family (1917)
On one appropriately hot Tuesday in July 1924, Oscar Zinn burned the collective crimes of New York City all the way down to ashes. During his tenure as the property clerk of the police department, Zinn had checked almost everything imaginable into the evidence lockers at Central. He had handled heavy guns, dirty money, and bloodied knives—so many knives—along with heroin, cocaine, costumes, and even axes and saws. One time, a few years earlier, he even checked in a bar of chocolate that had been turned in by a particularly honest member of the Junior Police Boys. Zinn had inspected all of these things and written them down in his ledger. He then placed them on their shelves to await trial or auction. When they were needed, Zinn would send them back up again and note it in his files. They usually came back. But sometimes things just disappeared. But when they were here, in the evidence room, he knew what was where. But for all the purse guns and stilettos, most of what he had was clothing. There were stacks and stacks of it, left over from crimes and investigations. Dark and brittle with blood, he handled them carefully.
Which made today, July 8, 1924, all the more satisfying. On this day, Oscar Zinn arrived at work early and looked at the tower of material in front of him. One by one, Zinn lifted each bundle and threw it into the central incinerator. Most of it would go up almost instantly. Some of it had been in storage for twenty years. Over the course of the day, Zinn oversaw the burning of twenty-five years of old criminal evidence. In total, five hundred bundles of clothing were consigned to the basement fire.
There was infamous material here. There were the clothes worn by Barnett Baff, the so-called Poultry King who was murdered on Thanksgiving Eve in 1914. There were the clothes of Harry Thaw’s victim, shot to death on the roof of Madison Square Garden. There were the terrible pillowcases that Hans Schmidt stuffed the body of Anna Aumuller into, which provided the evidence that sent him to the chair. There were the already-black clothes of Ruth Wheeler, who had been killed and placed in a fireplace by Albert Wolter when she answered his ad for a stenographer. And the little clothes of five-year-old Guiseppe Varota, who had been drowned by kidnappers. All of these real-life cases, all of these true-life people, had ended a long time ago.
And somewhere in the stacks of bound bundles that lifted light and burned fast were the bloodstained clothes found on Ruth Cruger’s body. Oscar Zinn tossed the clothes in. All that remained of the case were the records in a file, somewhere upstairs.
A few years later, a young woman looked at those very same files. There were handwritten notes, canvass reports, and even photographs. Her name was Isabel Stephen, and she wanted to be a writer since before you were born. Growing up in Dorchester, Massachusetts, she had a short story published in the Boston Post. After that, she began to think it might be possible. She didn’t want to be a nurse or teacher. Her story, “Caught by a Human Cat,” was a scary tale of mesmerism and a nighttime train ride. She saw her name in print and looked away before looking back again. Within ten years, Isabel was writing newspaper stories for all manner of papers up and down the East Coast. She specialized in women’s portraits: the popular small biographies of ladies of society, actresses, or general women of stature (or mischief).