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BY David Krajicek
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8 Minutes in Texas
Amber Hagerman
More than 10 years later, Glenda Whitson recalls each second of the 8 minutes that changed her
family's life.
It began with a visit from her grandchildren, Amber Hagerman, 9, and brother Ricky, 5.
They stopped at Whitson's Arlington, Texas, home with their mother, Donna, at about 3 in the
afternoon on Saturday, Jan. 12, 1996.
Whitson's husband, Jimmie, was tinkering with a car out front.
He paused to say hello to Amber, an auburn-haired cutie who loved Burger King, Barbie dolls and
"America the Beautiful," for the line that mentioned her name: "Amber waves of grain."
Jimmie Whitson kept two bicycles at the house for the grandkids, and Amber and Ricky asked if they
could go for a quick ride on the sunny winter day.
"My husband and my daughter said, 'OK, but just go once around the block,'" Glenda Whitson told
Crime Library.
Glenda Whitson
They peddled around two corners to the parking lot of a Winn-Dixie grocery store that had been closed
for some time. Neighborhood kids enjoyed riding on a ramp there.
As the children went off, no adult gave it a second thought.
The Whitsons had lived there on Highland Drive, in Arlington's Highland Park addition, since 1975.
The children's mother had ridden her bicycle on the same streets when she was growing up.
Arlington had changed in those 21 years, of course.
Part of the vast Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, its population had nearly doubled since the Whitsons
moved in.
But the parking lot where Amber and Ricky headed was on busy E. Abram Street, just down the block
from a vast General Motors plant. The spot was far from isolated, and it was broad daylight.
"They rode over there and went down the ramp," Mrs. Whitson said. "Ricky told his sister, 'I'm going
back home because mama told us to just ride around the block.' So he rode back here, and my husband
asked him, 'Where's Sissy?' He said she stayed for one more ride on the ramp, so they sent him back
for her."
Ricky Hagerman left but returned a minute or two later and said, "I can't find Sissy."
Jimmie Whitson jumped in his truck and sped to the parking lot.
He spotted a police car there and pulled up to it. The officer told Whitson that a man who lived nearby
heard screaming and saw a man carry a young girl into a pickup truck. The witness called 911, and the
officer raced to the scene just moments later. But all he found was a bicycle.
Jimmie Whitson's heart sank.
He said, "That's my granddaughter's bike."
In recounting this series of events 10 1/2 years later, Jimmie Whitson's wife let out a long sigh.
"That was it," she said. "Eight minuteseight minutes from the time she rode away on her bicycle until
that man called 911. People have to know that this is how fast these things can happen."
Sad Tableau
Glanda Whitson
The abduction of Amber Hagerman in Arlington was followed by a sad tableau that has become
familiar in modern America: loved ones of the girl appeared on television to beg for her safe return.
"Please don't hurt my baby," the children's mother cried. "She's just an innocent child. Please, please
bring her home safe. Please."
The media interviewed the lone witness, Jim Kevil, who had phoned 911 after hearing Amber's
screams.
"I saw her riding up and down [the vacant lot]," he told reporters. "She was by herself. I saw this
pickup. He pulled up, jumped out and grabbed her...When she screamed, I figured the police ought to
know about it, so I called them. I wish I had known more. I done all I could do."
Kevil described the man as "not big, but very fast." He was white or Hispanic, and his truck was dark.
But he was too far to give much more detail.
Police theorized it was a stranger abduction.
In a typical year, 750,000 American children are reported missing, according to the National Center for
Missing & Exploited children. The vast majority are runaways or family abductions.
Impetuous Crime?
The truck driven by Amber Hagerman's abductor was seen outside a laundromat near the Winn-Dixie
plaza before the girl was snatched.
Police theorized it was an impetuous crime of opportunity since Amber had no established pattern of
riding her bicycle there at that time of day.
The man likely watched Amber and Ricky ride into the parking lot together. He pounced on the girl
just moments after her brother left to ride back to his grandparents' home.
Eyewitness Kevil said he watched the man drive west out of the parking lot and disappear.
The abduction was front-page news in Texas. Police were hopeful that other witnesses would step
forwardperhaps someone who had seen the feisty girl struggling with her abductor as he tried to drive.
Police and the FBI formed a special task force to investigate, and the girl's smiling image became
omnipresent in the Dallas Metroplex.
Coincidentally, a local TV station had been working on a story about Donna Hagerman's struggle to
get off welfare, and the station released videotape of the girl to other media outlets.
Her image became so widely known during the investigation that the local police chief would later call
Amber "Arlington's child."
But the investigation would have no happy ending.
No additional witnesses were found, and the pleas of Amber's loved ones went unheeded.
Four days after the abduction, a man walking his dog spotted Amber's naked body in a creek bed near
an apartment complex in north Arlington. The girl's throat had been slit.
Dead-End Probe
Three weeks after the abduction, authorities released a psychological profile, hoping to smoke out the
killer.
The profile suggested the man was at least 25 and lived or worked near the spot where he dumped the
body. Authorities revealed the girl was alive for two full days after she was abducted, which likely
meant there was a crime scene rife with physical evidence somewhere in the Dallas area.
Police theorized that something caused the killer to snapan argument with a loved one, a rancorous
domestic dispute, or the loss of a job. They said the killer's personality or appearance might have
changed as a result of the trauma.
As an Arlington police spokesman put it, "Our hope is...someone out there will hear this and will think,
'Gee, this sounds like someone I know.'"
Plenty of people had that reaction. Police pursued some 5,500 leads in the 18 months following the
murder.
Amber Alert
After the murder, a Dallas man asked a common-sense question: When a child is abducted and each
minute matters, why can't the police and the media get together to inform the public with the same
urgency of, say, a weather warning about a tornado or a hurricane?
Radio and television executives in the Metroplex adopted the idea, and the Dallas Amber Plan was
initiated in July 1997. Under the plan, police provide broadcasters with timely information about
abductionsincluding photos and descriptionsso word can be spread immediately to the public.
Sixteen months later, the Amber Plan proved its worth.
Sandra Fallis, a babysitter with a drug problem, disappeared with an 8-week-old child. An alert went
out, and Fallis was apprehended within 90 minutes when a driver who heard the alert spotted the
woman's truck. The child was safely returned.
Houston set up its own Amber Plan in 2000, and two years later Texas instituted a statewide Amber
Alert. That same year the U.S. Justice Department began coordinating the program for states and cities.
Today, all 50 states and hundreds of cities have Amber Alert plans.
Glenda Whitson says she is always stopped cold when she hears her granddaughter's first name on TV
or radio.
"My heart drops down to my shoes," she says, "because I know just what those people (the parents) are
going through."
She calls the Amber Alert system "the right legacy" for her granddaughter.
"It feels good when some child is brought home and our baby helped," says Mrs. Whitson. "You just
look up to heaven and say, 'You did it again, baby'...Of course I know sometimes it doesn't turn out
good, but the Amber Alert gives them something more to go on from the very start."
Katron Walker
In June 2006, two toddlers were taken from their grandparents by the children's father, Katron Walker.
An Amber Alert was issued because the man had threatened violence. A citizen who saw the alert on
television spotted the suspect's car near a lake and called police. Walker stabbed to death one of his
sons, but the other child was safely recovered.
Walker's children
Mary Winkler, accused of murdering her preacher husband in Tennessee in March 2006, was
apprehended two days after the shooting when a police officer in Orange Beach, Ala., identified her
van from an Amber Alert. The couple's three children were found unhurt in the van.
An Old Bugaboo
Amber Alerts have become a small industry, with an annual national convention (this year in
Albuquerque) for those who work on the systems, a new "Amber Alert Awareness" postage stamp and
a plethora of websites.
But the system is far from perfect.
Different local and state jurisdictions often make varying judgments as to whether an alert is
warranted. Some places, for example, have used Amber Alerts to help find Alzheimer's sufferers who
wandered off, while others reserve the system for missing children.
Amber Alert overuse has been an issue from the beginning. Six alerts were issued in Dallas during a
single month in 1999, and both the media and law enforcers fretted that the public would become
numb by the frequent reports.
The federal government now recommends that alerts be limited to cases of children 17 and younger
who are believed to be in imminent danger as a result of an abduction. The guidelines also suggest that
alerts be issued only in cases where there is sufficient informationa suspect's description or a car's
make and model, for exampleto enable the public to help recover the child.
But the guidelines force police agencies to make judgments about which missing persons deserve
alertsan old law enforcement bugaboo.
Over the years, the loved ones of dozens of disappeared teenagers have been infuriated by law
enforcement's refusal to take a missing-person report before a waiting period of a day or two. The fury
becomes even more acute in cases where the child turns up dead or permanently missing.
Police say they cannot drop everything to search for each of the 2,200 Americans reported missing
each day. Most of cases are benignadults with drug or alcohol problems, runaway teenagers, custody
disputes or misunderstandings.
Yet Amber Alerts are fraught with inconsistency.
According to one newspaper investigation, one in five of the 233 Amber Alerts issued in 2004 was for
a child who was lost, had run away or was reported missing as a result of a hoax or a
misunderstanding.
Some states appear particularly quick to issue alerts that do not meet the federal criteria. Missouri, for
example, recently issued an Amber Alert after a man took his two sons from their maternal
grandmother's homeeven though the father had court-mandated access to the children.
Pressure on Police
A number of Amber Alerts have been issued by small police agencies that appeared unaware of the
federal guidelines. In other cases, parents of runaways or parties in custody disputes have pressured
both the police and the media to issue alerts.
And those are the cases that threaten to bring about what some call "Amber Alert fatigue."
The system was designed for confirmed abductionsa tiny fraction of missing-child casesnot as a tool to
help bring home every kid who goes missing.
"It has not ever been meant for missing children, lost children or child custody cases," Dee Anderson,
the Fort Worth-area sheriff who helped initiate the first Amber Plan, told that city's Star-Telegram.
"Almost at times the plan is a victim of its own success, because now everyone wants it used when a
child is missing."
Some experts also fear that overuse of alerts could cause crime hysteria in the country by giving the
impression that abductions are routine, even though they are rare.
But what parent wouldn't demand all the resources available to find a lost child? This visceral instinct
often leads to conflicts with law enforcers.
For example, no Amber Alert was issued when Brianna Maitland, 17, went missing in Vermont in
2004.
Brianna Maitland
The girl's father, Bruce, became increasingly critical of the slow-footed, close-mouthed response of
police.
Vermont State Police appeared to retaliate with a press conference at which a lieutenant cited Brianna's
"very questionable background involving drug use" and "some unhealthy lifestyle choices in her life
prior to her disappearance."
Bruce Maitland was stunned.
In an interview last year with Crime Library, he called the press conference "a dirty tactic...to trash
Brianna," which eased the pressure to solve the disappearance.
She is still missing.
"The police did not cause Brianna's disappearance," Bruce Maitland said, "but the police might be the
reason that she hasn't been found."
Cleveland Case
Parents like Maitland puzzle over the inconsistencies of Amber Alerts.
In the Cleveland area, police agencies have proven willing to issue alerts that are outside the federal
guidelines. From 2002 to 2004, more than half of the 17 alerts issued involved custodial abductions.
Yet when Gina DeJesus, 14, went missing in Cleveland in April 2004, police refused to issue an Amber
Alert because there was no witness to her abduction or disappearance.
Gina DeJesus
Later, two classmates revealed that they had seen the girl speaking with an older man earlier on the day
that she disappeared. And it came to light that another teenager, Amanda Berry, had disappeared the
previous spring just six blocks from where Gina DeJesus was last seen.
Amanda Berry
A year after the disappearance, authorities finally released a sketch of the man seen with DeJesus.
An FBI spokesman tried to explain the delay, but he was not convincing.
"This didn't look like a good lead at the time," he said. "It came in shortly after she was abducted. We
didn't want people to lock into one person at that time. We had a lot of what we thought were really
good leads. We covered those. They were unsuccessful."
Like Bruce Maitland, the girl's mother was left puzzling over judgments by law enforcers and the
media when Gina DeJesus disappeared.
"We asked for an Amber Alert when we reported her missing that Friday night," Nancy Ruiz, 46, told
Crime Library. "They told us we didn't meet the criteria because there was no description of a car or
the person who abducted her."
Ruiz said she and Felix DeJesus, Gina's father, spent the next two days frantically looking for their
child while begging the Cleveland media and police to release a photo of the girl.
"We got bounced back and forth," she said. "The police said the media had to make the decision to air
her picture, and the media said they couldn't do it until the police gave the OK."
Playing Favorites?
Judy Martin, a victim's rights advocate in Cleveland, said Amber Alerts are "underused, too restrictive
and too subjective."
"Too many kids get left out and are lost because of arbitrary decisions by law enforcement," said
Martin, founder of two support and advocacy groups, Survivors/Victims of Tragedy and Black on
Black Crime. "It's unconscionable."
She cited the case of Shakira Johnson, 11, who disappeared from a dance in Cleveland in the fall of
2003. Police declined to issue an Amber Alert, even though witnesses saw the girl get into a red cara
basis for an alert, under the federal guidelines.
Shakira Johnson
The child's dismembered body was found in a vacant lot a month later.
Martin does not buy the "Amber Alert fatigue" argumentthat overuse of the system will lead to the
same yawning response that people eventually had to the faces of missing child on milk cartons.
"I think that's ridiculous," she said. "It's not like we're going to have 100 Amber Alerts each day in any
individual area. Maybe nationwide, but not in any given city or state."
Nancy Ruiz said inconsistent decisions about issuing Amber Alerts have left her with the impression
that law enforcers make value judgments about a particular child's worth.
"If Gina had been a police officer's daughter, I have no doubt that she would have gotten an Amber
Alert," Ruiz said.
That sort of insider influence has been cited as a factor in a number of questionable alerts.
This summer, the troubled granddaughter of Joe Bruno, a powerful Republican politician in New York
state, turned up missing. Without calling it an Amber Alert, the police and the media in New York gave
the case the full alert treatmenteven though the young woman was 20, had a history of flakiness and
had phoned home after her disappearance.
Joe Bruno
Her photo was omnipresent in the media for several days, and she was located in Times Square,
walking with a man she had met on the Internet. The state police superintendent twice held press
conferences about the young woman, and the media dedicated untold air time and column inches to the
case.
Such obvious special treatment for an influential figure confirmed for Ruiz that police are willing to
bend missing-person guidelines as needed.
"Bittersweet Thing"
Back in Texas, Glenda Whitson says she sides with those who see and hear too many Amber Alerts.
"I do think it's being overused," she said. "It was just supposed to be used for kids they knew were in
danger, in cases where they knew there had been an abduction. Now they use it for runaways all the
time, but there are thousands of runaways. You can't use an Amber Alert for a runaway."
Her opinion counts. Mrs. Whitson and her family have become seminal figures in national awareness
about missing children.
Donna Norris
Her daughter, Donna Norris, testified before Congress and stood near President Bush when he signed
federal Amber Alert legislation into law.
Amber's Tree
Jimmie Whitson, her grandfather, helped build a sturdy wrought-iron fence around it, and the family
decorates it with pink ribbons, Amber's favorite color.
The Whitsons pass the totem nearly every time they come or go from their home.
Glenda Whitson said she can't look at the tree without thinking of her granddaughter and that brief
bicycle trip.
"All the kids still ride bikes around here," she said. "I suppose most of them don't even know what
happened 10 years ago in this neighborhood. Maybe some of the parents don't either. Sometimes I see
little-bitty young ones go by. I stop and say to myself, 'I hope they're safe.'"
Resources
Crime Library interviews with Glenda Whitson, Bruce Maitland, Nancy Ruiz and Judy Martin
Web Links: