Our son
"A while after my son had went missing, I got a call from a dozen different states saying they had found him. And they had."
It all started about a month after our son had gone missing when the first call had come in.
As the owners of a large muti million dollar corporation, one of our greatest fears is that our son would get kidnapped and held for ransom. These fears eventually subsided as he grew up and joined the family business.
But then one day he was gone without a trace. No words, he was just gone. We were frantic, none of his friends or even his fiancee had seen or heard from him.
So we contacted the local authorities who in turn contacted the FBI. We submitted pictures, his finger prints, and his DNA map. "We each had our prints taken and our DNA mapped for just such event"
So as I said a month later came the first call.
We live in Wisconsin and the first call was from Ohio. It was from the Zanesville PD. They notified us that they had found the body of a young man that matched the description of our son, and he had his ID on him. Needless to say, we were devastated. Our only son was dead.
Three days later the prints and DNA confirmed it was our son. The next week was the hardest time in our lives making the arrangements to bury him and trying to get through the whole process.
Our son had a lot of friends, so the funeral was large. They were all in shock and disbelief that he had gone so young. "He was only 23!" His poor fiancée was inconsolable. But we made it through the whole ordeal as best we could. Throughout the next week we struggled to get back to some semblance of normalcy.
But then came the 2nd call.
This time it was the Essex County Sheriffs department in Vermont, informing us that they had found the body of a young man they believed to be our son. In shock and disbelief, I told them there had to be a mistake, our son had already been found and we had just buried hin. They were insistent that they were correct with the identity of the young man, the prints matched, the DNA matched and they had found his ID in his pocket. They went on to give me the details of the young man they had found. He was found wearing red and white Nike Air Jordan's, Calvin Klein jeans, and a Lawrence University tee shirt. Also the cause of death was not able to be determined. I almost dropped the phone, these were all things our son owned. What our son was wearing when he was found and the same mysterious unknown cause of death.
How could this be is this some sort of cruel joke someone is playing? If this is our son than who did we bury last week, had that been our son? The FBI assured us that it was, but the fact that the circumstances of this young mans death were identical to the young man we just buried was to say the least very creepy. Even with that, the FBI once again verified the identity of the body. With no one else to claim the body, we agreed to make the arrangements to bring him back and bury him. This time it was a very small service consisting of mainly family and a few close friends who were trying to be supportive, but like us didn’t understand what was going on. The FBI was still trying to sort out this whole mess and had rerun their testing numerous times on both boys, and they kept coming up with the same conclusion they were both the same person. This was very stressful on the whole family, we wanted answers, but no one had them.
However when we thought it couldn't get any worse, the 3rd call came in this time it was from the Richmond Virginia PD telling us that they had found what they believed was the body of our son. Just like before the results were verified by the FBI, and like before the body was found wearing the same clothes as the others and had the same ID. The same unknown cause of death. As before we had agreed to take the body, but this time there was no funeral we just had the body cremated and placed in a simple urn.
This was just too much. We couldn't take anymore. We hired an answering service to take all are calls. The local authorities and the FBI created a task force to try to get to the bottom of this nightmare. But it seemed like it would never end, like clock work. The phone would ring and it would be another city with another body just like before. This went on for six months for a total of twelve cities in twelve different states.
Ohio, Vermont. Virginia, Georgia, Arkansas,
New Mexico, California, Washington State,
Wyoming, Colorado, South Dakota and finally Iowa.
The task force along with the funeral home I had contracted to cremate the bodies handled everything. We were numb. We just couldn't do it anymore. My wife was nearly catatonic and stayed in her room all day, I could barely function myself. We had to hire help just to take care of our day to day needs. I had to turn over the operations of the company to my vice president.
Finally the most shocking thing of all happened. Our son came home. How could this be? Is this really our son? Is he even real? Were we hallucinating? Through it all, he was real. At least he claimed to be. We didn't interrupt him, his first little rant to us. First thing he said to us when he stepped through that door was,
"I'm sorry to have taken off like that without letting you know. I'm sure you were worried sick, but I just had to get way for a while, I haven't told you but. . . I've been struggling for quite some time with some stuff. I had to get away and try to find myself and work it all out, so I traveled. I went to a different city and state, each place I chose a different demon in my head to battle with until I had defeated them all. Each time I won, I felt like I shed I piece of my soul."
