Goodnight Nobody: Abduction and Aftermath

CHAPTER I: CHILDHOOD’S END 1992

I let myself get emotional over the decision, so I ended up choosing a wooden club instead of a gun. Bill Gletkin had abducted my two-year-old daughter, and in so doing set off a chain of events that destroyed my marriage, ended my career, and fashioned the implacable and wholly unapologetic engine of Gletkin’s own destruction. And finally, after years of searching, I was so close I could smell his stink. I was about to kill Gletkin, and a quick shooting was just too painless. But as it turned out, I never got around to using the sawed-off baseball bat I had lovingly hollowed out and filled with lead. I crushed the life out of him with my own two hands. But even that wasn’t the end of it.

I suppose the end of it was what happened to me. And since people seem to be fascinated with monsters, the tale is worth telling. After it was over I had to burn everything—all the innumerable traces that might provide some clue to what I had done. And what I had become. While incinerating my personal effects, I came upon an old resume, from when I worked as a systems analyst for a telecommunications firm. Sprinkled with technological references now laughably dated, the resume depicts a timid guy grovelling to fit in somewhere, and using all the old cliches to do it. Phrases like strong work ethic and team player.

It would be quite a bit more interesting now. Occupation: murderer. Skills: arson, torture, demolition, surveillance. Hobbies: criminal psychology, mainframe hacking, avoiding incarceration.

Back when it all started, I had never wanted anything as badly as I wanted to find my daughter; finding her abductor was a secondary concern. No one knew what had happened to the baby, and there was no reason to believe we would ever find out. Perhaps our ignorance of her fate blinded us to the necessity of administering punishment for her kidnapping. I just wanted to know what happened to her, even though everyone said I was crazy to keep thinking about it. But the subject came to dominate my life. In time, the quest for knowledge of evil was entirely superseded by the necessity of destroying it.

By the time it was over, I had to admit I wanted to punish Gletkin more than I loved my wife, valued my career, or cared about returning to a normal life. I learned that in some cases compassion is a fatal weakness, and that death, far from being a cruel punishment, is just too damned good for some people.

Back up to 1988 … . Until Gletkin came along, we had a mercifully uneventful family life. It was jammed with work and bickering and scrambling to make mortgage payments, but we felt enlightened for having a California perspective that allowed us to realize we had it good, better than the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants. The harsh reality was that we were soft and complacent and never stopped to think how precarious our happiness was or about how easily it could be obliterated.

February 21, 1988. A three-block trip to the park changed everything, forever. My wife, June, came home early, just as the babysitter was taking Laura down to the park. June said she would catch up with the babysitter at the park, so the sitter could go home early. But an unexpected telephone call delayed my wife, and about twenty minutes later the babysitter saw somebody who looked—or was dressed like—my wife enter the park and wave. The babysitter let down her guard and started going through her purse, and Laura toddled past a long, low ornamental hedge, probably to get a glimpse of mommy walking across the playing field. A good ten minutes passed, and mommy came in the side entrance in a new change of clothes, jolting the babysitter out of her ruminations and precipitating a search of the shrubbery. All they discovered for certain was that the first person definitely wasn’t mommy. Laura was gone.

Then the police were called and I was contacted at my office in downtown Oakland. My initial reaction, fueled by denial, was annoyance and irritation. It seemed like these damned women were always getting worked up over something and bothering me at the office. But my boss insisted I go home, even though I expected him to feel the same aggravation I did. I drove home to our place in the Oakland hills, one of the good neighborhoods in Oakland, and a police cruiser was parked in the driveway when I got there. Once in the house, I found two patrol officers talking with my wife and the babysitter, and introductions were made by my wife.

Gentlemen, this is Rick Harsch, my husband. Honey, this is officers Ballantine and Cavalli.

The cops looked at me like something on a petri dish, and it wasn’t until later that I realized I was a suspect. Everybody was as far as the cops were concerned. By now the baby had been missing for over three hours, and the cops explained they were very much alarmed by the fact that the child was too young to have gotten very far by herself. At the same time, they weren’t assuming anything was actually amiss. The ugly truth started to sink in: Laura was really gone, and it wasn’t just some kind of misunderstanding. Suddenly my annoyance turned to rage and I snapped at all of them.

What the fuck are you doing standing around? You should be out looking for her!

Silence. Then one of the cops coughed, prompting the other to speak.

Sir, first we have to ascertain whether a crime has been committed. When we get a call like this, it usually turns out that a relative or neighbor has the kid. And the vast majority of kidnappings stem from custody disputes—

There is no custody dispute, God damn it, I barked. And we sure as hell don’t know anybody stupid enough to take off with her and not tell us! She’s two years old, so she’s probably not down at the local crack house either!

Please, sir—we understand your annoyance—

Annoyance? My daughter’s missing and you think I’m annoyed? I’m fucking pissed off beyond belief because you guys are sitting around on your asses.

June interjected: Please Rick, we’ve got to be rational about this.

That was it for me. I was out the door that instant, beating a path down the street toward the park. Our home was located in a hilly section of Oakland up behind the more prestigious neighborhood of Piedmont. Although the homes were fairly close together, there was a tremendous profusion of shrubbery and undergrowth, all getting dark and shadowy as the winter sun slid down under an opaque cloud cover. It was a perfect place for a kid to get lost—or kidnapped.

I peered over fences, looked in backyards, and rang doorbells—nobody had seen her. I kept looking until it got completely dark, then went back home for a flashlight. This time an unmarked car—except for a big radio antenna—was parked out front, and upon entering the house I met detective sergeant Matt Fleishacker, a rough-looking forty-year-old cop with a ruddy complexion and a gravelly voice. Sporting a rather flamboyant black and white checked sportcoat and elaborate wingtips, the man looked more like a used car salesman than a cop, but his sincerity won us over immediately. Fleishacker exuded a soothing bedside manner for cases like ours, an approach he had developed while heading up an Oakland P.D. ad hoc child abduction task force. He didn’t beat around the bush either, opting instead to give it to us straight.

I don’t mean to sound pessimistic, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m ruling out the possibility of a benign explanation for this. If she was twelve years and not two, there would be all sorts of alternative explanations, but two-year-olds don’t run away, at least not very far.

Believe me, I said, we never let her out of our sight.

The other thing is this mystery woman who waved at the babysitter. It could be some kind of weird coincidence, but I’d say that’s extremely unlikely.

I’m afraid your right, agreed June. She was dressed exactly like I was when I left for work—and came home. Somebody must have been watching us. It makes my skin crawl.

I don’t blame you, continued Fleishacker. I’m requesting a heavy squad car presence around here for the time being, but I doubt they’ll turn up anything. There’ll be a lot of cops around here the next few days, since canvassing is about the only way we have of getting any information. They did all the forensic work in the park while there was still light, but so far it looks like we don’t have much to work with.

How often does this happen, I asked.

Around the country, maybe five or six times a day. Around here, every month of two, discounting the divorce cases. Thousands of kids get kidnapped by pissed-off divorced parents, but that kind of thing is relatively easy to track. And as much as parents like to hurt each other, they usually don’t hurt the kids, at least physically—

I butted in. That brings up a question I don’t like to ask. Obviously, this is a different kind of situation. Why would somebody grab someone else’s baby?

It breaks down into a few basic categories. An obvious one is kidnap for ransom, but it’s not too common. People will do pretty evil things for money, but it usually takes more than greed to steal a baby. But there can be other financial angles. Sometimes corrupt adoption agencies serve as baby brokers, arranging the theft of babies for rich clients—it can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. That brings up another kind—desperate parents who steal a child when they can’t have one of their own. That kind usually gets caught—people notice when their neighbors magically come up with a baby—without nine months of pregnancy first.

Fleishacker looked at the floor and scratched at his two day’s growth of beard uncomfortably before he continued.

Then there are the really bad ones: molesters—and worse. Child molesters are bad enough, for obvious reasons. What’s worse is the ones who only get their kicks from killing their victims.

My wife turned pale; my stomach turned audibly.

I’m sorry to give it to you like this, but I’m not going to sugar coat it. It’s rare, but there are people who just like to kill children, sometimes for sexual gratification. It’s not a well-understood phenomenon, and fortunately there aren’t a lot of research subjects. But please don’t assume the worst. There’s no reason we can’t get her back safe and sound.

Before taking his leave around 9:00 p.m., he managed to calm us down to the point where we actually felt mildly hopeful about the situation. But we couldn’t think of much to say to each other about it, which is pretty much the ways things stayed in the following weeks.

And as those weeks passed and faded into months, we heard nothing about Laura. Her disappearance was marked at first by T.V. and newspaper pieces, then posters and flyers distributed around the Bay Area, and finally by her face on a milk carton. I had never imagined I’d live to see a sight like that. And Fleishacker was always cordial, always ready to take our calls, but he never had anything for us. With the proverbial patience of a saint, he listened to my outbursts of rage and my wife’s tears, and always had something comforting to say. But no new information.

I’m not sure when we first understood that we would never see our baby again, but it was probably after two or three months. I couldn’t sleep one night, so I got up and went into the little room that had been Laura’s, the room that housed her crib, clothes and stuffed animals. There was something inexplicably funereal about the pink striped wallpaper, the band of applique clowns and circus animals that circled the room at waist level. I realized that it wasn’t Laura’s room anymore. It was her monument, her tomb for all practical purposes.

I was just standing there like an idiot when June came in; she couldn’t sleep either. We took one look at one another, realizing that the toys, the furniture, it all had to go. It wasn’t the same as finding out that your child had been run over by a car or killed outright in some other way that forced you to confront the body. The realization that we would never see her again came slowly, horribly, held back by a rat’s nest of rationalizations and stillborn faith. And when it came, it was worse than death, at least for me. My problem was that I couldn’t get past it, couldn’t punch through the grief and get back to our old life. Loss counsellors, grief consultants, psychiatrists alike, they all said we had to have that realization that she was gone in order to get back to the business of living our life. But I just couldn’t make it through the realization. My wife did, but I was eternally frozen in that moment of understanding. Every minute of every day I was transfixed, paralyzed in that evil epiphany of raw, irreversible grief.

I kept a handle on it for a while. I held down my job as a telephone system developer with the phone company, but I had trouble concentrating and the work really didn’t interest me much anymore—maybe it never had. June and I were both depressed, but we tried to carry on. But as time passed my curiosity about what happened to our daughter became obsessive, and I started spending a lot of time hanging around school yards looking for suspicious types—by this time the criminal investigation revealed that she had last been seen with a man who had been described in completely different ways by several witnesses.

The forms of assistance intended to help the victims of this sort of crime increasingly got on my nerves. The worst was the group sessions, an exercise in anguish insisted upon by my wife. We sat around once every two weeks with a group of other survivors, couples and single parents, all of whom had a story to tell. At first it was just depressing. Some never saw their kids again or ever learned what happened to them, while others were called in to identify the bodies, sometimes years later. Still others got their kids back alive—physically mutilated, or maybe just psychologically traumatized, doomed to spend a lifetime looking constantly over their shoulders and peering under the bed before going to sleep. The parents of this last group were the ones I pitied the most. After years of telling their kids that life was good and decent and fair, urging them not to be afraid of the dark, these parents somehow had to explain that they had been wrong, that they had lied—maybe there was something under the bed or in the closet or in the yard, some relentless, evil presence worse than any storybook monster. Something society had no power to control or punish.

But once the discussion group digested the raw facts, the feelings came out, which was even worse, but not nearly as revolting as the rationalizations that followed. Anger was a common reaction, naturally, but that and everything else seemed to become subsumed by guilt in one form or another—guilt for not being there when the abduction happened, guilt for not being able to guide returned children back to a normal childhood, and worst of all, guilt over feeling angry and hostile towards the perpetrator. This last was the absolute worst:

I just feel like it only makes things worse to hate … The anger just makes things worse; it’s something I have to get over so I can pick up where I left off …

One of my friends is an Aikido instructor. I was telling him how mad I was, and he said the ultimate martial art was one that taught the attacker how to love instead of just hurting him … Every night I pray for the soul of the man who killed my daughter, because he needs God’s forgiveness more than anyone else …

This last sentiment was the ultimate in degeneracy, and every time I heard it, which was at least once each session from somebody, I had to jam my hands in my pockets and stare at the floor to keep from getting up and slapping some sense into the speaker. I never said anything myself, and one chirpy blond discussion leader told me I was taking the abduction too personally. Enough time had passed for some of these people that the perpetrator had been caught, tried, and returned to their communities and lived nearby, and here were these pathetic fucks talking about forgiveness. What made these people so weak? Like a lot of people in general, and especially people in Oakland, where even the good neighborhoods were only a few miles from the almost daily drug shootings, I had spent much of my life trying not to dwell on violent crime, the kind that happened to someone else. Now I was doing a lot of thinking about the death penalty. It had never seemed so right.

I began spending a lot of time at the library, reading up on criminal behavior. I also started spending less time with my wife, who was alarmed by my steady diet of criminology treatises and true crime books. She wanted to forget, I wanted to know everything; at the same time I began to actively hate the man who took my baby. At first I wanted to learn as much as I could about what motivated child abductors, since I hoped to piece together some sort of profile of the animal who took my child. But the more I read, it seemed that the more heinous the criminal, the less actually went on in their heads. More and more case studies revealed an absence of empathy and compassion, the qualities that tempered most people’s behavior, but the perpetrators themselves seemed to have little idea why they did what they did. They really didn’t care much one way or the other.

Of course, psychologists and criminologists had plenty of theories, but they didn’t seem successful at much more than securing tenure for their creators. Moreover, the researchers themselves openly admitted that the traits found in career criminals—impulsiveness, a feeling of being above the law, the need for extreme forms of stimulation, enjoyment of intruding on other people’s lives—could be found in many people who succeeded in roles accorded respect by our society—million dollar athletes, politicians, corporate financiers. And cops. That was the funny thing—there was something decidedly pathological about many people who tangled with law and order, regardless of which side they happened to be on. Theories were a dime a dozen and they didn’t give me anything I could use to track down my daughter—or the person who took her.

Oddly enough, though, child abductors—the killers—weren’t exactly career criminals. They were more likely to be psychopaths, individuals who often balanced their sporadic forays into evil with an iron clad self-control that allowed them to lead outwardly normal lives. These weren’t the impulsive ones, the kind who committed crimes every day—hot wiring a Camaro because he liked the custom wheels or robbing a 7-11 because it was there. The garden variety psychopath didn’t rat himself up with garish tattoos or make a big show of confronting authority in public. It might be the guy next door, the chuckling father of four who worked for IBM. Then it hit me, the big hole in all the theories. No matter how hard researchers worked on the available information on child abductors, the conclusions only applied to the psychopaths who had gotten caught. And many of these guys actually wanted to get nailed. The ones who got away, the ones who were never caught, those were the ones we needed to know about, and by definition it wasn’t possible to construct a profile of the ones that remained a mystery. There was a complete lack of living research specimens.

The unlikelihood of gleaning anything from book learning rankled, and I became increasingly depressed and jumpy. Hearing the phone ring literally made me jump, especially at home. Every time I reached the mouthpiece, I had to quell the rising feeling in my gut—the call could be anything. News that Laura had been found. A request to identify her body at the morgue. A tardy demand for ransom. Or anonymous taunting from the abductor. But it was never any of these. Instead, it was wrong number or a friend or an asshole selling insurance. A lot of acquaintances didn’t like the sound of disappointment they heard on my end of the line, and most of them stopped calling altogether after a while.

Visiting friends or going out for dinner or a movie started to make me uncomfortable. June needed all the help she could get to distract herself, but I soon reached the point where I didn’t like to leave the house. Part of it was just a general jumpiness. I couldn’t stand to sit still, especially for two hours in a movie theater. More than that, seeing and hearing families—and especially children—put me on edge. On the intellectual level, I had come to accept the hard reality that Laura was dead, buried in a shallow grave or thrown in a storm sewer to rot. But hearing kids her age tweaked my emotions, and sometimes my senses played tricks with me and I’d see little girls who looked precisely like her. To make matters worse, I somehow developed an extreme self-consciousness in public places, high school all over again. The sound of laughing made my skin crawl; I was sure they were laughing at me. What was it? The way I looked, the way I walked? Hearing people laugh behind me usually made me want to turn around and start beating their heads against the nearest wall. June noticed my mood changes, and she didn’t like them. Who could blame her?

As I became more detached from my mundane responsibilities, my work habits deteriorated, and after a couple of months people at work began to worry. I was often agitated and spent a lot of time pacing or taking walks outside the office. I also started craving all sorts of junk food—not all the time, but on a random basis I found myself gorging on crap that I hadn’t even thought about since I was a kid—Hostess pies and sno-balls, Snickers, Mars bars, Bit-O-Honey, Reeses, beef jerky, chewing gum, you name it. There are worse to things to develop a jones for, but the infusion of sugar and lard didn’t do much for my weight; the sugar highs worsened my moodiness.

Too much sugar and caffeine during the day screwed up my appetite later in the evenings; at the same time, my sleep patterns had become as random as the need for candy. Some nights I’d sleep straight through eight hours, only to awaken exhausted; other times I’d have insomnia much of the night or sleep and snap awake dozens of times in one night. Then the nightmares started, and I didn’t want to sleep at all. It wasn’t just any kind of nightmares; I had them once before, when I first lived by myself just after I got out of college. Although nothing out of the ordinary was weighing on my mind back then, I started dreaming that someone had gotten into my apartment and was skulking around in my room. Thanks to the frequency of violent crime and robbery in Oakland, my building was virtually impregnable: bars on the windows, three locked gates and doors at the entrance. Any intruder would have to use dynamite or an arc welder to get in, so there was little likelihood of breaking and entering. But that didn’t do me much good the three or four times a night I woke from a dream that some dark figure was approaching the bed. The scary part was that I couldn’t tell when the dream was over, or even whether I was dreaming or not, since the scene in the dream was identical to my room. It was very frightening; I knew in my guts that shadowy motherfucker was coming right for me. The dreams stopped after about six months, and I never knew why they came—or went. Now, ten years later, it was starting all over again.

After a night of little or no sleep, I was usually happy to get out of bed and on to work, where the lack of sleep somehow resulted in a strangely alert, almost hyperactive state. Most of my lunch hours were spent hanging around an elementary school a few blocks away, where a lot of people were probably starting to think I was some kind of nut myself. Little Rock Elementary School was a public institution located on the Lake Merritt side of downtown, occupying a full city block. The three story concrete building dated from the fifties, but it looked good in its recent coat of light blue paint. Though the surrounding sidewalks were punctuated by trees, the grounds were solid concrete, including the playground. The children filed in and out of a single entrance in the front. Around the beginning of the school year, I started sneaking out of the office for a while around 3:00 p.m., when school let out and people came to pick up their kids. Most of the students returned home on school buses, and I tried to memorize the rest—who went home with whom, in what kind of car.

Then, late in December, just before school let out for vacation, an improbable combination of events changed my life almost as drastically as my daughter’s abduction had. I showed up outside the elementary school one afternoon and fifteen minutes later, much to my amazement and disbelief, witnessed a typical abduction ploy: a guy drives up next to a child, reaches across and opens the passenger door and tells the kid, Your mommy sent me, she’s going to be late. At first I had no way of knowing whether I was right, but as I drifted closer, I could see the kid, a little black boy, was really scared. The driver grabbed the boy and started dragging him into the car, a big, ugly late-model American sedan.

I hadn’t really expected to witness anything like this. I knew I wasn’t acting rationally by hanging around playgrounds, and I had never really thought about what I was doing there. I wanted to find the guy who took my daughter, but I had no idea what he looked like. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to protect other kids, or if I was just expiating my guilt over not being there when a madman stole my daughter and killed my soul. I had never really thought about what I would do if I actually saw someone try to kidnap a child. For the first time in my life, I