On a Friday in January 2007, police walked into a small apartment in Kirkwood, Missouri, looking for one missing boy.
He was 13 and he had been gone for 4 days.
They found him alive.
And in that same apartment was a second boy.
Nobody had come there looking for him.
His family had been searching for him for more than four years.
His name was Sha Hornbeck.
For 4 years, 3 months, and 6 days, he had been living about 50 mi from the town he disappeared from with the man who took him.
The next day, the county sheriff opened his news conference with one sentence.
We have some good news and we have some probably unbelievable news.
This is how a missing boy lived in plain sight for more than 4 years.
And how a 15-year-old with a good memory brought him home.
By the end, you will hear the exact words that boy typed into his own parents’ website at 1:59 in the morning while they were still searching for him.
Somewhere in those years, a police officer stopped him on a dark street close to that apartment and asked his name.
I will tell you what he answered.
And about a month after he was taken, the man who took him drove him to an empty road in the woods with a plan.
I will tell you what that plan was and how an 11-year-old survived it.
Before we go on, tell me where you’re watching from tonight.
Richwoods is a small community in Washington County, Missouri, in the wooded hills southwest of St.
Lewis two-lane roads, gravel turnoffs, old logging tracks running into the trees.
In the autumn of 2002, Sha Hornbeck was 11 years old and lived there with his mother Pam Acres, his stepfather Craig Acres, and his sisters.
On Sunday, October the 6th, 2002, Shawn rode his bike toward a friend’s house.
Somewhere along the way, he turned down a gravel road.
He never arrived.
When he did not come home, his parents began calling around.
Then they began driving the roads slowly, looking into ditches and tree lines.
By nightfall, the sheriff’s department had been called.
Within days, more than a hundred rescue workers and volunteers were searching the countryside around Richwoods.
Dogs worked the fields and the woods.
His parents searched with them with dozens of volunteers for weeks.
They found nothing that told them where he had gone.
In November, four people arrested in southern Jefferson County, not far from Richwoods, were questioned about Shawn.
None of them could be linked to his disappearance.
Lead after lead was checked and lead after lead ended in the same place.
Nowhere.
Think about what those weeks looked like inside that house.
Every car on the road was a possibility.
Every ring of the phone could be the one.
The 6th of October became a date that would not move.
Pam and Craig put everything they had into finding him.
[clears throat] As the months passed, the reward for his safe return climbed to $75,000.
Craig Acres later explained where the money came from.
“We cashed in my 401k,” he said.
“Every penny that we had ever saved went into the search for Shawn.
They founded the Shaun Hornbeck Foundation and with it a volunteer search and rescue team trained to look for missing children.
The team joined the National Association for Search and Rescue and worked with search dog groups.
The foundation handed out kits so other parents could keep their own children’s fingerprints and photos on file ready for the first hour if the worst ever happened.
And the team went out to help other families search.
While the occurs’s own son stayed missing, they put up posters with his school photo.
They gave interview after interview.
They built a website about the search with a public forum where anyone could leave a message.
Remember that website?
It matters later.
A year passed, then two.
The family went on national television to the Montel Williams show, hoping a bigger audience might bring a tip.
On that show, a self-described psychic named Sylvia Brown told them Shawn was dead.
She said his body would be found near two large jagged rocks.
And she described the man who had taken him as a dark-skinned man with dreadlocks.
Every part of it would turn out to be wrong.
Shawn was alive, and the man who had him was white with short hair.
Craig Acres later said Brown offered to do a longer reading for them off camera for $700.
She denied that.
Years later, when her prediction was thrown back at her, her answer was that even the best psychics don’t get it right every time.
[clears throat] Craig Acres later called it one of the hardest things that we’ve ever had to hear.
Remember that moment?
Two parents on a television stage in front of millions of people being told by a stranger that the search was pointless.
Pam Acres would later say something that shows what those years did to her.
I do feel that I failed on the part of protecting him, she said, and keeping him safe and keeping him at home.
They did not stop searching because Shawn was not dead.
He was about 50 mi away in a busy suburb, far closer to people who could have recognized him than anyone in that studio could imagine.
Here is where we are.
An 11year-old turned down a gravel road and vanished.
Hundreds of hours of searching found nothing.
A psychic on national television said he was dead.
And the question that hung over that family was the simplest one there is.
Where is he?
In the St.
Louis suburb of Kirkwood, on a bench near a Shnook’s grocery store, there was a missing poster.
It showed Shawn at 11, and beside it, an artist’s drawing of what he might look like older.
That poster sat less than a mile from the apartment where Shawn was living.
Less than a mile.
In the same suburb where he rode his bike under another name where neighbors saw him come and go.
The face on the bench and the boy riding past it were the same person.
And for years, nobody made the connection.
A missing poster less than a mile from his door in the suburb where he was living.
Should someone have recognized him, or was that impossible once a boy had grown into a teenager?
Tell me what you think.
Now go forward to the second week of January 2007 and to another small Missouri town, Bowfort in Franklin County, about 40 miles from Richwoods.
Shawn had been missing for 4 years and 3 months.
William Oby, whom everyone called Ben, was 13.
On Monday, January the 8th, at about 3:30 in the afternoon, he got off his school bus in Bowfort and started for home.
He did not get there.
What happened in the next few seconds would decide everything for Ben and for a boy he had never met because this time somebody saw.
Mitchell Holtz was 15, a neighbor and schoolmate of Ben.
He saw a small white pickup truck speed away from near the stop.
He later put it in his own words.
I seen a white truck sideways on the road and it was flying.
Ben’s father, Donby, later remembered what Mitchell told him that afternoon.
He said there was this strange pickup and then it peeled out real fast.
I thought right away I need to call the sheriff.
When investigators sat down with Mitchell, he gave them more than a color.
Franklin County Sheriff Gary Tolki later recalled the description.
The word Nissan written across the tailgate in dark letters.
A camper top with a long window down the side.
A 2-in trailer hitch.
Rust or dirt over the fender.
The only thing Mitchell could not remember was the license plate.
That is worth sitting with.
A boy saw a truck for a few seconds at the end of an ordinary school day without knowing what he was looking at and kept almost all of it.
That memory would bring two boys home.
An Amber Alert with the description of the truck.
The Franklin County Sheriff’s Department led the search.
Prosecutors would later say what Ben was facing.
The man who took him had used a handgun to terrorize him into doing what he was told.
Ben’s parents, Dawn and Dorisby, began the waiting that the Acres family had already lived through for more than 4 years.
Two families 40 m apart who had never met.
One waiting 4 days, one waiting 4 years.
Across Missouri, the Amber Alert ran on television and radio.
Across Missouri, the Amber Alert ran on television and radio, and police were watching for a small white pickup.
Ben’s family could only wait and hope that one of them would not.
Keep the question in mind as we go.
A boy has been taken from a bus stop and a 15-year-old has described the truck.
Will it be enough and in time?
On Thursday evening, January the 11th, two Kirkwood police officers, Gary Wagster and Chris Nelson, went to an apartment complex on South Holmes Avenue.
They were there about something small.
A harassment complaint against a resident.
They could not find the person they were looking for.
As they turned to leave, they saw it.
A small white Nissan pickup with a camper shell.
It matched the truck in the alert.
According to the St.
Louis Post Dispatch, to a T down to the dirt and the rust.
Wagster turned to his partner.
Are you seeing what I’m seeing?
As they walked over to look, a resident came up and told them he had his own suspicions about that truck.
The owner, he said, lived on the first floor with his teenage son.
Then the owner walked out carrying his garbage to the dumpster and the officers knew him.
His name was Michael Develin.
He was the day manager of the Emo’s Pizza restaurant right around the corner from the Kirkwood Police Station.
The officers sometimes ordered pizza from him.
Chris Nelson had once arrested him for a traffic violation, and the previous March he had even been inside Develin’s apartment to talk to him about it.
So, I had kind of a rapport with him, Nelson said.
They started talking.
Develin was friendly.
Then they asked if they could search his apartment and everything changed.
It went from a casual conversation 180° from that.
Nelson said he did a 180.
Wagster saw the same thing.
He became too defensive.
He said something didn’t feel right.
Develin would not budge.
And through a window, the officers could see a teenager inside.
He did not fit Ben’s description, so it was not the boy they were looking for.
It was Shawn Hornbeck.
The two officers left with what Wagster called an uneasy feeling.
For one of us to have that, that’s one thing, he said.
But for both of us to have it, as much as we’ve worked together, we knew that there was something wrong.
They called their supervisors and the Franklin County Task Force.
Investigators came that same night.
Develin would not let them in either, so they watched the apartment until morning.
Who was the man behind that door?
Develin was 41.
He had been adopted as a child into a large family and grew up in Webster Groves, a few miles away.
He managed an Emo’s Pizza restaurant in Kirkwood and worked part-time at a funeral home.
A coworker, Gus Nanos, said Devon had changed in recent years.
He went from being such a teaser to a much quieter person.
He said, “I felt like he had been humbled by all of his health problems.”
Develin had developed diabetes and in 2002, two of his toes were amputated.
2002, the same year, a boy disappeared from Richwoods.
His boss trusted him completely.
The owner of that IMOS, Mike Prosper, said Devon had worked for him for 25 years.
He was my manager.
Prosper said he counted my money and you just don’t do that with someone you don’t trust.
In all those years, he said there was never any mention of children.
But that week, Prosper started to wonder.
On Monday, the day Ben was taken, Develin had not been at work that afternoon, and Prosper had noticed red road dust on Devlin’s truck, the kind, he said, that you get from driving on a gravel road out in the country.
He passed his worry to a friend in the Kirkwood Police.
According to Prosperie, investigators were getting ready to look into it when the two officers spotted the truck themselves.
On Friday morning, January the 12th, officers arrested Michael Develin at work at the Emos around the corner from their own station.
In an interview room, FBI agent Lynn Willlet began questioning him.
Develin talked about the boy who lived with him, and he had an explanation for who that boy was.
Willlet noticed something as they talked.
Every time we would start to talk about Shawn, she later said, I could see his pulse increase on the kurateed on his neck.
The name Shawn meant nothing to the investigators at first.
They were there for Ben.
Then about an hour into the interview, Willlet said, “The hair on the back of my neck stood up and I realized he’s talking about Sha Hornbeck.”
She later described what Devlin told them.
Shaun’s not my godson.
Shawn is Sha Hornbeck.
At the apartment, investigators found Benby.
4 days after he was taken from a bus stop in Bowfort, he was alive.
According to the FBI, one of the first things he asked the officers was simple.
Are you going to take me home?
And there was the other boy.
15 now, nearly 6 ft tall.
Not the 11-year-old on the posters.
Agent Willlet told him he was safe.
We’re the police, she told him.
And you’re going to go home.
Shawn later described the moment he told her his real name.
When I told Lynn that my name was Sha Hornbeck, I could see the surprise in her face, too, he said.
And I just my world was going in circles.
I felt lightheaded.
It was such a rush, he said.
I felt like I didn’t have that monkey on my back anymore.
A retired detective who had worked on Shaun’s case, Don Cookie, heard the news that day.
I’m not going to lie to you, he said.
I sat down and cried like a baby.
Some of the best news I’ve ever heard.
Sheriff Tolki said investigators had been surprised to find him.
Officers had gone looking for one name and one face.
They came out with two, and the only reason anyone was at that door was a truck in a parking lot and a 15-year-old who had described it almost perfectly in Richwoods.
Craig Acres got a phone call from a prosecutor.
He said, “We’re 95% sure that we found Shawn and he’s alive.”
Craig remembered.
And I mean that was just instant tears.
Craig later described the moment he saw him.
There was that split second of shock.
He said once I saw the face I said, “Oh my god, that’s my son.”
Pam Acres remembered it like this.
He was sitting in the chair.
His head was down and he looked up.
And when he looked up, I knew.
She said they hugged for what felt like half an hour.
We must have hugged for 30 minutes without even letting each other go.
Shawn remembered the drive to that moment.
My heart was racing, he said.
So many thoughts were going through my head.
I didn’t know what was going to happen.
I wanted to see my parents so bad.
And then he was in the room with them.
All three of us hugged at the same time.
He said there wasn’t any first, you know.
And then he said the tears came and would not stop.
It was like a water mane broke.
He said it simply.
There’s nothing like a mother’s and father’s love.
It’s something I didn’t feel in a long time.
So it just knocked me off my feet.
40 mi away.
Doris Alby had her son back.
I grabbed him and just held on to him.
She said for a long time.
She finally let go for one reason.
I got to let you and let your daddy have you for a little bit.
Ben’s father knew exactly who to thank.
If it wasn’t for what Mitchell saw, Donby said, “I don’t know if we’d be sitting here talking to you right now.”
The next day at a school in Richwoods, the town he had vanished from, Shawn stood with his parents in front of the cameras.
He did not speak.
His mother did.
Shawn is a miracle here.
Pamacres said, “We’re glad to have him home.”
Then she said the line that summed up 4 and 1/2 years.
I still feel like I’m in a dream.
Only this time it’s a good dream and not the nightmare I’ve had 4 and 1/2 years.
Back in the house, something was waiting for him that his parents had protected all that time.
His bedroom kept virtually the way it was on the day he disappeared.
He was just tickled pink that everything was just the way it was left.
Craig said in a drawer of clothes bought for an 11-year-old, there was one t-shirt that still fit the boy who was now nearly 6 ft tall.
Believe it or not, there was one t-shirt in that drawer that did fit him, Craig said.
And he kept and he was able to wear.
His parents knew the hardest part was still ahead.
Pam Acres said Shawn wanted to go back to school, but would first have to be evaluated because he had missed all of it.
He can go to any movie he wants to go see, she said.
But we’re going to be right there with him.
Craig, trying to keep it light, told time the two of them were going to have to get used to going on a lot of double dates for a while.
And Craig made a decision about the questions the world wanted answered.
It’s not worth putting Shawn through any more guilt so that I can satisfy my curiosity, he said.
And you can satisfy your curiosity.
Newspapers called it the Missouri miracle.
And almost immediately the whole country asked the same question.
How how does a boy vanish from a country road and then live for more than 4 years in a suburb 50 m away?
Riding a bike seen by neighbors without anyone finding him.
The answer came out slowly in charging documents in court and later in Sha’s own words.
And it begins with what happened on that gravel road in October 2002.
According to the probable cause statement filed in Washington County, Develin took Shawn by force and showed him a handgun to make him comply.
From day one, he had the gun.
He had the power.
Shawn said years later, I was powerless.
There’s nothing I could physically do.
He remembered one thing Develin told him.
You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Develin drove him to the apartment in Kirkwood.
Prosecutors said that for the first weeks whenever Devlin was at work or away, Shawn was tied to a futon with duct tape over his mouth so no one could hear him.
Develin later admitted he sexually abused him.
That is the record and that is as far as this story will go into it.
And now the plan I promised you at the start.
About a month after the kidnapping, according to the prosecutor, Develin put Shawn back in the truck and drove him toward Richwoods to a deserted logging road in the woods.
When Develin pleaded guilty, the court heard what happened there and prosecutors described it.
Shawn at that point became uneasy and asked what was going on, he said.
And the defendant stopped the truck, got out of the truck, got Shawn out of the truck.
Then the prosecution said the defendant then attempted to strangle Shawn with the intent of killing him.
An 11year-old on an empty road in the woods, and he did the only thing he could.
Shawn began pleading for his life, the prosecutor said, and told the defendant he would do whatever he wanted him to do as long as he didn’t kill him.
And in court, Devlin said it himself in one sentence.
I attempted to kill Shawn and he talked me out of it.
That is how Shawn Hornbeck survived.
But it came with terms.
He could never try to contact anyone, never try to run, the prosecutor said, and that if he did, he would be killed.
The prosecutor, John Rup, called it a deal with the devil.
Hold on to that because everything people later found strange about those four years.
The bike, the phone, the friends, the name happened under that deal.
Here is what we know now.
A boy was taken at gunpoint, tied up for weeks, and nearly killed on a logging road.
He talked his way out of dying on the condition that he would never run and never tell.
And then for 4 years, he lived in the open.
For those years, he was Shaun Develin.
Develin presented him as his son or as his godson, depending on who asked.
The landlord, Bill Ror, said Develin had listed Shawn on the lease as a second occupant, his son.
Ror later wondered what he could have done differently.
“If I had run a background check on Devlin,” he said, I would have gotten a traffic violation come up.
“A neighbor, Rick Butler, told the Associated Press he never noticed anything strange.
I just figured them for father and son.”
Mike Prospery, the boss who had trusted him for years, put it in one line.
I just can’t understand how all that time nobody knew.
Shawn did not go to school.
His parents later said that he was never enrolled anywhere in those years.
About 7 months into his captivity, he was allowed to make a friend, a 13-year-old neighbor named Tony Douglas.
Tony was my first friend, Shawn said.
And we were friends for a long time.
According to reports, Develin let him have a cell phone.
A neighbor once found it lying outside, called a number on it, and the teenager came over to collect it.
Shawn’s grandmother, Anna Quinn, told reporters what the family had learned about the nights.
That Devlin would wake Shawn every 45 minutes inside the apartment.
Time stopped meaning much.
There was times that I thought it was July and it was snowing outside.
Shawn said, “I I didn’t keep track of time or day.
It was just another day.”
He slept a lot.
When you sleep, it seems like time goes by fast, he said.
And it’s just an escape.
What kept him going was the people searching for him.
That’s just what held me on is because our family’s so close.
He said there were some times when it wasn’t looking so bright, but then I just knew that they were still out there, so I should just hold on.
He said he doubted himself more than them.
I had more doubts in myself than I did them.
[snorts] He did not hide how dark it got.
I’m not going to lie, he said.
There was times when it seemed like I was better off dead than living through that.
And they were still out there.
By late November 2002 alone, investigators from the State Highway Patrol, the FBI, and the sheriff’s department had spent 2,290 hours on his case and followed 319 leads.
More than 100 people had been interviewed and nearly a dozen had taken polygraph tests.
All of it pointed back at the countryside around Richwoods, while the boy they were looking for was living in a suburb an hour away.
Now, the promise from the beginning, the message.
On December the 1st, 2005, at 1:59 in the morning, someone using the name Shawn Develin posted a single question on the forum of the Shaun Hornbeck Foundation website, the site his parents had built to find him.
Here it is as it was typed, misspelling and all.
How long are you planning to look for your son?
At the time, it was one message among many from a name nobody recognized.
After Shawn came home, it was found again.
Craig Akres said, “Never in my wildest dreams would have I have imagined it was my son who had done that.
It was not the only time.”
According to CBS News, Shawn wrote to his parents’ website twice in those years.
He later confirmed it.
I was hoping it might give some kind of hint.
He said, “Think about it with everything you now know.
A 14-year-old living under a promise that he would be killed if he ever reached out.
Writing in the middle of the night to the people looking for him, using the name the man had given him.
Not a cry for help, a question.
How long are you going to look for me?
They were going to look until they found him.
And one more moment in those years could have ended it early.
On September the 29th, 2006, at about 11:20 at night, a police officer in Glendale, the suburb next to Kirkwood, saw a teenager riding a bike in the dark.
The boy wore dark clothes and his bike had no reflectors.
The officer stopped him and asked where he was going.
He said he was riding to the apartment after visiting a friend’s home.
The officer asked his name.
He said his name was Sha Develin.
Glendale police later described that stop and Sergeant Bob Catlet told the St.
Louis Post Dispatch what the officer had been told.
At first, Shawn did not answer the officer’s questions, so the officer asked him to get off his bike.
There was no alert for anyone named Shawn Develin.
When the report was dug out after the rescue, the officer did not even remember the stop at first.
Glendale Sergeant Bob Catlet said he said he was Shawn Develin and we had no reason to doubt him.
The officer sent him on his way.
He was about a mile from Devlin’s apartment.
That is the name I promised you at the start.
Not Shawn Hornbeck, Shawn Develin.
A missing child face tof face with a police officer gave the name he had been given and rode home into the night.
CBS News later reported another time police stopped Shawn and his friend Tony for riding after curfew and took them back to the apartment complex.
Shawn said nothing to the officers then either.
Time magazine wrote about the case under a headline calling it a missed opportunity.
Remember the deal on the logging road?
Never contact anyone.
Never run.
Then in January 2007, Ben Alby was brought into that apartment.
Shawn later explained what went through his mind in words that are hard to hear.
The days got slimmer, he said.
Cuz it’s a replacement.
When you get a new car, what do you do with the old one?
You usually get rid of it, right?
4 days later, the police came through the door.
I knew when they came in the door, it was either something very good or very bad.
Shawn said, “I got lucky and it was something very good.
Here is what we know now.”
A boy lived for 4 years under a threat of death.
Sent one quiet question to his parents, gave police a false name more than once, and feared that a new boy in the apartment meant his own time was running out.
And on the outside, people were about to start asking why he never ran.
When Shawn’s story became public, not everyone met it with sympathy.
Shawn and his parents went on Oprah Winfreyy’s show.
Within days of the rescue, Oprah told the audience she would not ask him on camera why he hadn’t tried to escape.
Off camera, when she asked him why he had never called his parents, he said he was terrified.
On television, the commentator Bill O’Reilly questioned why the boy had not run.
He said it was hard to believe a normal kid would stay in a horrible situation when escape was easy.
Craig Acres answered him in Time magazine.
Can you really be that simple-minded?
He said, “Our son was 11 when he was abducted.
A child that age can be mentally manipulated in a very short time.”
On television, he put it more simply.
You can be bound mentally as well as physically.
A psychologist at St.
Louis University, Terry Weaver, said it plainly, “I think it’s a real mistake to judge this child.”
“Whatever he did to this point to stay alive is to his credit,” Shawn answered for himself later in his own interview.
“Nobody has the right to judge anybody,” he said.
“And people see it in their power to judge me.
They don’t know what I went through.
They weren’t there.
They didn’t have to suffer mine or my parents’ pain.
And he was clear about who was to blame.
I can’t look at my parents and tell them that it’s their fault.
He said to me, it was Devlin’s fault.
On that same Oprah show, he spoke about the boy whose kidnapping brought him home.
I’m thankful that he held in there for those few days, he said of Ben.
And he said something about himself.
I told myself a long time ago I never wanted any kid to go through what I went through.
Once Michael Develin was in custody, the case against him came from four directions.
Franklin County charged him with kidnapping Ben and [clears throat] with armed criminal action.
Washington County charged him with kidnapping Shawn and added attempted murder.
St.
Lewis County Prosecutor Robert McCullik filed 71 more felony counts covering both boys.
Federal prosecutors charged him with producing child pornography and with taking a minor across state lines.
More than 80 charges in all, each one carrying the possibility of life in prison.
He was held on a bail of $1 million cash only.
His lawyer, Michael Key, said in those first days, “The only thing I have is an allegation.”
Prosecutors said Develin had already confessed.
At first, he pleaded not guilty for months.
Months it looked as if both boys might have to testify.
Then, in October 2007, prosecutors announced that Devlin would plead guilty to everything, everywhere.
On October the 8th in Franklin County, he pleaded guilty to kidnapping Benby and was sentenced to life in prison.
The next day in Washington County, he stood in court and admitted taking Shawn, abusing him, and trying to kill him on that logging road.
That was where he said, “I attempted to kill Shawn, and he talked me out of it.”
Washington County Prosecutor John Rup spoke after the hearing.
“You heard it from his own mouth,” he said.
“You’ve heard what kind of a monster he is.”
Robert McCullik had his own view of why Develin chose to plead.
“He pleaded guilty because he does not want the world to know the full extent of what he did,” he said.
One account of the sentencing said Develin showed no emotion and offered no explanation and no apology.
Pam Acres wept in her husband’s arms.
She said she did not want to give Develin the satisfaction of seeing how badly he had hurt them.
Craig Akres said that after hearing it all, they finally understood.
We know now the details that made him not run away.
He said, “Remember Bill O’Reilly’s question?
Why didn’t he run?”
In that courtroom, the man who took him answered it.
For Shawn, the guilty p meant something simple.
“That was a big thing off my shoulders,” he said.
“I really didn’t want to get up there and testify.”
In Washington County, Devlin was sentenced to three life terms plus 60 years.
In St.
Lewis County.
He received 18 consecutive life terms.
Prosecutor John Rub said Develin would have to live past 100 to have any chance of parole.
Then came the federal sentence on top.
Altogether, Michael Develin received more than 70 life sentences, plus hundreds of years more.
He was sent to the Crossroads Correctional Center in Cameron, Missouri.
In 2011, another inmate stabbed him several times there.
He survived and he remains in prison.
After his arrest, investigators from several counties, the FBI, and the state highway patrol formed a task force to look at whether Devlin could be tied to other disappearances of children in Missouri.
One case stood out.
On July the 25th, 1991, an 11-year-old named Charles Arland Henderson rode his bike in the small town of Moscow Mills in Lincoln County, Missouri, and never came home.
3 months later, his bike was found in a bean field about 5 mi from his house.
Investigators found fingerprints on its frame that they hoped to identify.
The parallels were hard to ignore.
Another 11-year-old boy, another bike.
Arlland’s uncle said the boy had told his mother that a tall, thin man had been taking pictures of him before he vanished.
When Develin was arrested, a Lincoln County detective said the description matched the description enough that we have to pursue him as the most viable lead.
But a lead is not proof.
Years earlier, a 13-year-old boy had confessed to Arlland’s abduction and killing, then admitted he had made it up, and none of it had solved the case.
In 2010, the FBI showed Arlland’s bike to the public again, still hoping someone would come forward.
Michael Develin has never been charged in Arlon Henderson’s disappearance.
It remains open, and Arlin has never been found.
Chris Nelson said the case only hit him when his 11-year-old daughter Britney told him, “Dad, you’re a hero.”
Ben Alby went back to school that spring with counseling to help him years later when Ben earned the rank of Eagle Scout.
One of the people at the ceremony was Lynn Willlet.
The FBI agent who had sat across from Michael Develin and watched his pulse jump at the name Shawn.
Asked about coming back to ordinary life, he described it the way a 13-year-old would.
I just have to figure out how to get around.
He said, “It’s a maze.”
Shawn had 4 years to come back from.
His family went through counseling together.
He went back to school and caught up faster than anyone expected.
It was different getting back into the swing of school, he said.
But I caught on to it quick.
2 years after he came home, his parents described a more confident young man who had taken up motocross.
I’ve lived two lives, Shawn said.
I had to start over again from when I was kidnapped cuz it was a different life.
That life is gone.
So, I’m picking up this life again.
And I’ve got what I wanted most in life was to be back with my family.
He did not pretend it was over.
It’s always going to be with me, he said.
That’s something I’ve come to cope with.
And then he said something that sounds like sounds like the boy who held on through all of it.
At every end of a dark tunnel, there’s always a bright light.
You know, his mother found her own words for it.
I do believe miracles happen, Pam Acres said.
And I do believe that it was a miracle that brought Shawn home.
The search team his parents built went on to work more than 40 missing persons cases.
40 other families, each starting with the same phone call the actresses made in October 2002.
So, go back to where this began.
A boy on a bike near Richwoods turning down a gravel road on a Sunday in October.
A search across fields and woods.
Two parents who cashed in every penny they had.
A psychic on national television telling them he was dead.
And all that time he was alive.
He was taken at gunpoint tied up for weeks and driven to a logging road where he talked a man out of killing him.
He lived as that man’s son about 50 mi from home, less than a mile from a poster of his own face.
He typed one question to his parents’ website in the middle of the night.
He gave a police officer the wrong name on a dark street.
And in the end, what brought him home was another family’s worst week and a 15-year-old who saw a white truck for a few seconds and remembered the word Nissan on the tailgate.
Police went looking for one missing boy that January.
They found two.
What would you have done in his parents’ place?
His name is Sha Hornbeck.
He was 11 when he rode away from home in Richwoods and 15 when he came back.
If this one stayed with you, the case on your screen right now is the one that should never have
