Special Agent: My Life on the Front Lines as a Woman in the FBI
334
Special Agent: My Life on the Front Lines as a Woman in the FBI
334Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781667842561 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | BookBaby |
| Publication date: | 06/06/2022 |
| Pages: | 334 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The call came at four 'clock in the morning. It was Tom, my squadmate on the San Francisco Child Abduction Task Force, who had a hot tip from the Nevada FBI. "Candice," he told me, "a guy's passing through town with a kidnapped boy. Wanna get in on the bust?"
"Hell, yes," I said, instantly awake. It's rare to get a chance to thwart a kidnapping in progress and to recover the victim alive. In more than 90 percent of non-custody-related abductions, the child is molested and then quickly released. But each year, of the 200 to 300 children who go missing for more than twenty-four hours, fewer than 50 percent ever make it home.
This child, Joshua, was the eleven-year-old son of a single mother, who had let her friend Michael treat him to a week at the beach. Having raised my own son alone, I can certainly understand how welcome such an offer might sound. But it's not at all uncommon for pedophiles to befriend or even marry women just to get at their children. There's actually a special law enforcement term for it — the stepdaddy syndrome. Others may enter adult relationships as a cover for their true predilections. The notorious John Wayne Gacy, for example, a divorced father of two, married his second wife the same year he embarked on a rampage of abduction and torture that would claim the lives of thirty-three teenage boys. He buried most of them in the crawl space beneath the house where he lived with his wife, her children, and his mother-in-law, who would often complain of the odor of "dead rats."
Frighteningly, a full quarter of the annual tally of sex-related murders have victims under the age of seventeen. Indeed, according to the Department of Justice, children under seventeen suffer a shocking proportion — 78 percent — of the sexual assaults resulting in imprisonment. Over 85 percent of their abusers are people they know and trust — people like Michael, a family "friend" for several years, who had kidnapped Joshua.
On the day he was to come home, Joshua called his mother to ask permission to stay longer. She said no — and then her son disappeared. The local FBI office managed to determine that the abductor had bought two bus tickets to Oakland, California, across the Bay Bridge from me. I went to meet Tom and the rest of the team at the Oakland Greyhound station.
"No luck yet," I was told. It was possible that we had missed the abductor and child, for at least one bus had already come in that night. At 9 A.M., Ray Cummings, supervisor of the Oakland violent crime squad, suggested that we split up and also stake out the Amtrak station, in case they tried to catch the early-morning train. Its destination was San Diego, just ten miles from Mexico. Once they made it across the border, they would probably be lost to us forever.
The train left at 9:30, so we sped right over. Ray's direction proved right, for there on the platform, ready to board, was a man with a young boy who matched the description of the missing child. As soon as we approached, the guy tried to bolt, with the boy tight in his clutches. A chorus of shouts rang out: "Hold it right there!" "FBI!"
As the team grabbed him and tried to wrestle him into handcuffs, I reached through the jostling arms and pried the boy from his grasp. "You're okay, honey," I said soothingly. He was crying and shaking with terror.
Then, all of a sudden, the suspect pitched forward, gasping and gagging, and collapsed, croaking out, "I'm having a heart attack."
I'll just bet you are, I thought.
Leaving Joshua in the care of one of my squadmates, I pushed through the crowd that had started to ring the suspect. "Don't worry," I said, dropping down beside him. "I'm a nurse."
I checked his pupils and his breathing and slid my fingers to his throat to find his pulse. Like a mother examining a child for signs of fever, I laid my palm on his forehead and his cheeks. My suspicion was correct. "He's faking," I told the squad hovering over us.
They yanked him to his feet and cuffed his hands behind him. Sobbing out loud now, Joshua screamed, "Leave him alone! He's my friend!"
That didn't surprise me. The reaction was classic — the outrage of a child seduced by the promise of love. Unlike psychopaths, who get sexual or sadistic or vengeful thrills from their power over the weak, pedophiles have erotic feelings for children and try to woo them with gifts and affection. The lonely child of a mother run ragged by trying to care for her family and to make ends meet may be all too vulnerable to the lavish attentions of another adult. Then, when the adult who has so insidiously won his love awakens his sexuality, the child will be tom apart by confusion and guilt. The psychic damage pedophiles do children, with their seductions and betrayals, is profound.
Over the next eight hours, I would learn the harrowing details of Joshua's ongoing abuse and recent "vacation." At first he kept fidgeting and stonewalling me, reluctant to betray his "friend." Finally he admitted, "Michael said I should never tell the cops about anything. He said you would hurt us and take me away."
"You know, I have a son named Seth who looks just like you," I told him. "Do I seem like someone who would hurt you?"
He acknowledged that I didn't.
"Besides," I went on, "nobody's going to hurt you because you've done nothing wrong. Adults who like children in the wrong way will say things like that to fool them."
I kept using the words children and child to emphasize to Joshua that whatever had gone on, he wasn't responsible, even if — being eleven and so immature that he looked nine — he wanted to think he was a man. He had suffered enough emotional torment to overwhelm a grown man. I wanted to give him permission to feel victimized.
But Joshua insisted that Michael was his friend and wanted to show me his gifts to prove it. When he unzipped his duffel bag, I saw a crack pipe sticking out of a tangle of clothes. "What's that thing?" I asked.
He pulled it out and then let a little of the story leak. Fed only cookies and soda pop by his kidnapper — and plied with crack cocaine, presumably to numb him into submission — in a single week he had dropped from eighty to a haggard seventy pounds. Still, Joshua thought that getting to smoke crack was "cool." "And look what he bought me, Agent Candy," he said, digging out some CDs. "He loves me more than my mother — and I hate her."
This kind of brainwashing is typical too. Pedophiles try to boost their odds of success and reduce their risk of exposure by alienating their young victims from their families.
"That's what bad adults do," I told him. "They buy presents — they'll try anything to get what they want. They tell lies and make promises to make children think they love them. But your mother is the one who loves you more than anything. She's the one who called so we would rescue you. That's how much your mother loves you."
I reiterated, "And no matter what a bad adult might say, nothing bad that happens is ever the child's fault. The adult is the one — the only one — who is wrong."
Clearly, love had little to do with the abductor's plans. He had told Joshua that they were headed for Mexico, where he would "buy" a little girl and take the two of them to the Netherlands. They would make a video to send Joshua's mother, explaining that he was never coming back. That the Netherlands figured in the scheme suggested that they'd be making other videos too, for shooting child pornography films there is relatively easy. After that, I had no doubt, two children would be useless, disposable baggage to a man on the run.
I also felt certain that Joshua had been sexually abused. We had discovered that his abductor was wanted in Texas for parole violations following two prior child-molesting convictions. It appalled me that such scum had been allowed to ooze back onto the streets. Yet abusers all too commonly are. Child molesters rarely do serious time, even though they murder children's innocence.
But it is very hard for any eleven-year-old boy to talk about sex, never mind one who has been abused by a man. I tried to give Joshua neutral language to express what had been done to him. "Were you ever touched in the 'bathing suit area'?" I asked. "That's what some adults will do to children."
Little by little I chipped away at his resistance. When Joshua finally opened up, it was like a boil had been lanced, and what came out made me want to cry. In a rush, he described the acts he had been forced to perform, some of which Michael had captured on video. A search of Michael's duffel bag would turn up these homemade sex tapes. For over a year, Michael had been, in Joshua's words, "violating" him, just as he had done with his older brother in the past.
I kept reaffirming that the abuse wasn't his fault, that any wrongdoing was Michael's. "He's the one who could go to jail, not you," I stressed.
The idea of Michael behind bars seemed to comfort Joshua immensely. I still remember how his shoulders relaxed, as if he were shedding a burden, and how his face softened. I was watching a brittle young man ease up and become a sweet little boy again — the child he deserved to be. He clung to me for solace, and I just held him and let him cry. He then fell fast asleep, sitting in a chair.
Copyright © 2001 Candice DeLong and Elisa Petrini
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 1
Preface 3
Prologue 5
1 Dark Eyes 14
2 The Proving Ground 32
3 Rookie's Work 53
4 "The One In The Hat" 67
5 Over The Counter 85
6 The Wonderful World Police 107
7 Utopia 122
8 The Master Class 142
9 The Unsub 159
10 The Bad Guy 177
11 Cocaine Cowboys 194
12 Girl Talk 213
13 'A Little Dose of Cancer" 236
14 Shark Bait 252
15 The Beast 264
16 Blue Eyes 283
17 The Shark Fence 306
Sources 322
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