Public Enemies: The Host of America's Most Wanted Targets the Nation's Most Notorious Criminals

Book by Walsh John Lerman Philip

Chapter One: Public Enemy Number One

I remember the first time I felt true fear.

It was just before dark on Monday, July 27, 1981, in the parking lot outside a shopping mall in Hollywood, Florida. It was the day my son Adam disappeared.

The fear did not come right away. I had spent all day in desperate but controlled activity, questioning police, demanding answers, rushing around, trying to find anyone who'd seen anything that day. The frantic activity of a father whose son has disappeared is fueled by adrenaline and panic; you do everything you can to try to will that little boy back into your arms. You are moving so fast and so furiously that you do not notice the hole in your stomach, the gaping hole growing larger and larger.

But just before dark, the lights began to be turned off at the mall, and they were locking up; most of the cars were gone, and suddenly there was nothing to do but leave this place, leave without Adam, go home without my little boy. And then, for the first time, I felt that hole, the gaping hole in my stomach, that felt like the wind was blowing through it, that my life was blowing through it, as though I were so much sand in the wind and only by force of will could I keep myself from disintegrating. It is an all-consuming fear: your child is gone, and, God forbid, is it possible that there is nothing you can do?

You push the fear down, and you move forward, resolutely: of course there are things you can do. You will find that child. Let's go. Let's get the flyers out, let's muster the troops, let's sound the call to battle. My child is somewhere and he needs me and by all that is holy I will do what my child needs and bring him back to me.

But late at night the fear creeps back as you lie silently in your bed, knowing that you will not sleep tonight, wondering if your wife is asleep and knowing she is not, feeling like you are falling, feeling consumed by an awful, nauseating, dizzying, overwhelming loneliness. As indescribably painful as it has been, all these years, to deal with the death of that lovely boy, those days when we did not know where in the universe he was, whether he was in the hands of some madman, suffering God-knows-what pain, those days of not knowing were the worst.

In those days I understood true, blinding, paralyzing fear.

It is now twenty years since I died the thousand deaths that a parent of a missing child suffers, and in those twenty years I have seen the look of that fear in the faces of so many other parents, ravenous for information, desperate to find their missing children.

I know it's not right, and I know it's not fair, but I will admit this to you now: there are some cases that affect me more than others. I don't know why that is -- something in a mother's plea as she holds your hand and tells you little things she remembers about her daughter: how she laughed, how she smelled, where she liked to Rollerblade. Something in a father's downturned eyes as he sits before you, afraid to look at you directly, afraid to start crying because he fears he'll never stop, feeling he has to be inhumanly strong for his child. Something in that first photo you see of a missing child, a photo hurriedly pulled from a family album or ripped from a frame on the mantel, a photo of a child who by all rights should be driving her parents crazy right now because she refuses to turn off the TV and go to sleep.

There are some cases that affect you more than others. At those moments, you freeze in your tracks and say, we have got to find this child. Now, here, this is where I draw the line. This time, the kidnapper is not going to get away with it. The son of a bitch will pay. This time, we will stop him. Enough is enough.

This was one of those cases.

Because this time, we would go to battle with evil itself.

The missing-child stories that reach the public's consciousness seem to come in waves. The summer and fall of 1993 was one of those times. It seemed every time you picked up the paper, another child had been abducted. In Northern California the abduction of eleven-year-old Polly Klaas -- a man had actually snuck into her home, into a slumber party she was having with her friends, and dragged her away while her mother slept down the hall -- sent a chill through every parent's heart everywhere. The fact that the case was trumpeted by a parade of celebrities, including Winona Rider and Robin Williams, kept it high in the public consciousness.

This was also the summer when twelve-year-old Sara Wood disappeared in upstate New York. She was last seen bike-riding home from vacation Bible school, and that afternoon police found her bike and papers strewn by the side of the road, another image that cast an indelible imprint. The proximity to New York meant that the parents had access to the morning talk shows, which picked up the case and ran with it. Being from upstate New York myself, I also knew some of the cops involved in the case, and I was drawn into it as well.

The summer had started with a case of an adorable six-year-old, whom I'll call Nancy. (We named her at the time she was missing, of course, but her parents have asked that we stop using her real name publicly, so I'll leave it out here.) Nancy and two friends were sitting in a driveway when a man approached and -- I swear to God -- offered them candy. He then grabbed Nancy and drove away with her. The cops, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and America's Most Wanted launched a massive search. We broadcast satellite alerts out to cover the region, blanketing the state with media coverage.

After fifty-one hours, the kidnapper felt the heat and dropped Nancy off at a public phone booth.

She called her mom, and we joined that rare celebration, that wonderful moment when a stranger abduction ends in a tearful, loving homecoming.

A few days later, I sat down with Nancy for a little talk.

"What did the man say to you?" I asked her.

"He said, 'Do you want some candy?' " Nancy replied.

"And what did you say?"

"Yes." An embarrassed smile crossed her beautiful little face.

"Oooh," I said, trying not to sound mean. "Big mistake, huh?"

"Yeah!" she said with a nervous laugh.

"Then what happened?"

"I come with him, and he dragged me and tossed me into the car."

"Bet you were scared, huh. Then what happened?"

"I had to go down on the floor."

"And he drove away?"

"Uh-huh."

"What did you think was happening to you?"

Nancy fell silent. "Being kidnapped," she said, finally.

"He told you what?"

"Don't move a muscle."

"Don't move a muscle?"

"Not even one."

"Not even one," I repeated. "Bet you were scared. You know, other kids are going to be watching this. If you could say something to those kids about strangers who come up to you, what would you say to those kids?"

"Don't listen to them."

"And what if they want to give you candy?"

"Say no."

"And then what?"

"Go to the house what you're close to."

"Good advice. And what do you think should happen to the man?"

Her little face brightened. "I think he should go to jail for a hundred years!"

I thought, from your mouth to God's ear, little darling. From your mouth to God's ear.

It will haunt me to my dying day that, at the same moment I was sitting and talking with Nancy -- having the wonderful joy of knowing that we had helped bring a missing child home safely -- at that same moment, a thousand miles away, a woman named Sue North was walking over to a friend's home to get her daughter Jeanna and bring her home.

But Jeanna was not there.

And the nightmare was about to begin again.

She was a tiny baby, weighing just a little more than six pounds. The hair that would later turn to beautiful, fluffy waves of auburn started out jet black. That tiny head was peeking out of the yellow blanket they wrapped her in the day she came home from the hospital, and Sue North and her husband, John, had the same thought at the same time: she looks just like a little corn on the cob! Jeanna Dale North took on the nickname "Cobbie" that day, and in affectionate moments she was Cobbie to her mother ever after.

Almost from the time she could walk, Jeanna was running: a bundle of happy energy who never seemed to stop moving. "She just goes from dawn till dusk," Sue North told us later. "You have to lay her down on your lap and hold her head still for her to go to sleep."

Sue North's three daughters were very different from one another. Jessica, the oldest, was the brainy kid in the family: tested early on with an IQ at genius levels, she developed more into a right-brain teenager, loving her painting the most. Jennifer, the middle child, was the quiet and passive one: in the tumult of the household, Sue sometimes turned around, surprised to see Jennifer sitting there quietly, just watching the chaos unfold. And at the center of the chaos, usually, was Jeanna; "my little hyper-bug," Sue called her.

As they got older, Jeanna got on her sisters' nerves, as only hyper little sisters can. But with Dad and Mom both out working construction, they also had charge of Jeanna and were as protective of her as two little momma lions with a tiny cub. She knew how to annoy them, but they could not stay angry at Jeanna for very long: her bright, devilish eyes and coy smile would come bouncing at you, she would scrunch her little features into a funny face, and you were helpless to keep from grinning and going along with whatever little game she would think up next. She loved being the little clown of the house, as though the assignment given her by God was to keep her family laughing, to make sure they didn't take themselves too seriously, to fill every little moment with as much fun as she could. It seemed at times as though she was trying to pack an entire lifetime into every day; little girls do not have the philosophical bent to live each day as though it were your last, but the energy that abounded in Jeanna Dale North certainly made it seem as though she were doing just that.
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As though any given day could be her last day on earth.

By the time she turned eleven, Jeanna was still tiny -- just a few inches over four feet, she could get the scale over fifty pounds only by jumping up and down on it, which was not outside her realm of mischief. And if she "didn't like to mind so much," as Sue put it, she certainly had a way of getting you to forgive her. The trail of sneakers and socks and jacket and books and candy wrappers from the front door to her room told you that Jeanna had come home; the fact that her beloved Rollerblades were gone told you she was out again.

She was a whiz on the Rollerblades, as though they were the one mechanism for chaneling all that abundant energy in a single direction. Once, at the local roller arena, she got going so fast that the crowd spontaneously cleared the rink for her, and she flew, around and around, again and again, smiling child-wide, in her favorite place -- the center of the spotlight. As she flew by she caught her mom's eye, saw her mother beaming with approval and pride, and Jeanna's smile grew just that much wider.

Little accomplishments mean a lot to a kid who doesn't do all that well in school; Sue North instinctively knew this and encouraged Jeanna as best she could. The first time she came home with a 100 on a spelling test, Sue framed it and put it on the wall.

"She wasn't a straight-A student," said her dad, John, "but she was easy to love, and she gave a lot of love away."

At eleven, Jeanna was still her daddy and mommy's little girl. The only time she stopped moving was to climb in her dad's lap and cuddle in his arms, and she still slept in her parents' bed whenever she was allowed. But now she was becoming more adventurous: one day she decided to climb to the top of the water tower, just to see if she could do it.

Sue had to punish her for that, and had to punish her again on the afternoon of June 27, 1993, when Jeanna came home from summer school. It was a bad moment to have to chastise her daughter: Jeanna, uncharacteristically, had been a little sad and sullen the last few days. But as she burst through the door, she announced, "I don't know nothin' about it" -- Sue had no idea what she was talking about but understood it to be a preemptive strike against the inevitable. Sue, of course, soon had the story out of her daughter: some silliness about someone taking someone's colored pencil had gotten a little out of hand, the way things can with hyperactive eleven-year-olds. She sternly told Jeanna exactly what she thought of her bad behavior.

Later that afternoon, a sad-faced Jeanna came up to her mom in the kitchen.

"Are you mad at me?" she asked her mom.

"Oh," she told her daughter, cuddling her in her arms, "I guess I'll keep you around for a while."

Sue was at work the next evening, around 10:30 p.m., when Jeanna and her friend Clarice were out Rollerblading around town. The town of Fargo, North Dakota, where Jeanna grew up, is still the kind of place where people watch out for one another, so when they stopped at a local Dairy Queen around 10:30 p.m. for a snack, then left, a police officer noticed. "A little late for those two to be out alone," he said to the clerk at the store. "I hope they're headed home."

They headed directly to Clarice's house, where Jeanna planned to spend the night. Although she was eleven, Jeanna had only just started having sleepovers -- she preferred the security of home. When she got to Clarice's, she chickened out, and decided to go back and sleep in her own bed instead.

Clarice watched Jeanna skate down the street, toward her home, a block away. Then Clarice turned and went inside.

But Jeanna was still being watched... by a predator.

A second set of eyes, charming and sinister, followed her as she skated up the street.

In the darkness, they moved toward her.

The man approached, and she stopped.

She knew this man; he lived right across the street. So she had, she believed, no reason to fear.

Had she known the secrets that lurked in Kyle Bell's dark past, she would have understood: this man was as fearsome and dangerous as the panther tattooed on his left arm, as deadly as the Grim Reaper tattooed on his right.

From the time Kyle Bell was three years old, there was something strange about him. Once, while his mother was neglecting him, he gnawed through the wooden bars of his crib. Soon after, Kyle and his father went to live with Kyle's grandparents, hardworking farmers outside Aberdeen, South Dakota. The Bells had lots of family around -- Kyle's Uncle Tom and Aunt Kim lived nearby with their children, and Grandma Bell ran an old-fashioned household ("three banquets a day, complete with homemade pies," remembered Kim Bell).

But into this big, loving extended family, Kyle Bell came like a virus, disrupting the peace and respect of the household with his bizarre behavior. Grandma and Grandpa Bell didn't know what to do with a three-year-old who put his cousin's Barbie dolls in sexual positions -- this was a household in which you didn't even joke about sex -- but the doctors they sought out said there was nothing wrong with Kyle, that he would grow out of the weird behavior.

Instead, he grew into it.

In the fifth grade, a puppy followed him home from school. For some reason, this enraged young Kyle.

So he killed the puppy by impaling it on a sharp stick.

A few years later, Grandma saw something strange on the side of the house. When she investigated,...