Children's Safety Zone
Mikelle Biggs Story Index
MISSING CHILD: 'A FIRE THAT WON'T GO OUT'
PAIN OF LOSS DOESN'T STOP
PARENTS CAN'T
GIVE UP
January 11, 1999
Children's Safety Zone
Mikelle Biggs Story Index
Erma Prue pulls out the tattered cardboard box and thumbs through the dogeared photos, the faded news clippings, the unused fliers.
Twenty-four years have lapsed since her daughters, Cindy and Jackie Leslie, vanished without a trace. Twenty-four years of waiting and hoping and praying.
Twenty-four years, and still the tears pool.
"I'm still looking for them," the Apache Junction mother said. "Everywhere I go, I look. I've put up thousands of fliers. Everywhere I go.
"I haven't found their bodies, so I guess I'll always go looking."
Parents of Arizona's past and present missing children say that they cling to hope, as Prue has, until there's absolutely no other choice. They consult psychics, post thousands of "missing" fliers and pursue leads that sometimes take them across the country. They peer into the windows of passing cars and study every face they see.
Time goes by. Another child disappears.
Phil Bleyl's heart goes out to the parents of Arizona's latest missing child. Mikelle Biggs, 11, of Mesa, vanished Jan. 2 while waiting for the ice cream truck near her home.
More than a week after Mikelle's disappearance, there is still no trace of her, except the bicycle and two quarters left where she was waiting.
On Sunday, Mesa police received many calls of "sightings" of the transient they say lured another 11-year-old girl behind an apartment complex on Christmas Day and tried to force her to perform oral sex on him. The girl escaped. That incident took place less than a mile from Mikelle's home and just eight days before Mikelle vanished.
Most callers said they had spotted the man, whose composite sketch was released Saturday, in Mesa, but some said they saw him in other Valley cities.
"It probably won't be long before we get him," said Detective Jose Martinez, a Mesa police spokesman.
Mikelle's story generated about 20 tips after it was aired Saturday night on America's Most Wanted, but none immediately provided a break in the case, said Avery Mann, a spokesman for the show.
"I know what they have ahead of them," said Bleyl, whose son, Brian, 12, disappeared in 1981 while collecting for his newspaper route. "Every day, you think today's the day your child's going to come home, and I hope for them that it is."
Brian's body has never been found. A man who confessed to three witnesses that he killed the boy was tried and acquitted in 1990. Despite all indications that Brian is dead, Bleyl and his wife, Sharan, still like to think their son is alive.
"I don't think you ever give up hope," the Phoenix father said. "You just have to take it a day at a time. We always felt that he would be found, and he never was. We do wish we had an answer to the situation. We would like to know where he is and to make final arrangements for him."
Rodger Shawcroft of Chandler remembers jumping every time the phone rang, thinking this call would be from his missing daughter. He remembers the anticipation he felt with each new tip. After awhile, he learned not to get his hopes up.
"There is no way to totally describe what you go through," said Shawcroft, whose daughter, Diana, 19, disappeared with her roommate in 1996 while making a quick trip to a convenience store near their Glendale apartment. Their remains were found three months later.
"It's probably the worst thing any parent could go through," he said. "It's the most hopeless, helpless, empty feeling you could go through when it's your own child. You expect the worst and hope for the best."
Each year, about 4,600 children nationwide are abducted by strangers, authorities say. In Arizona, eight children younger than 18 still are missing and presumed to have been abducted by strangers, according to the Nation's Missing Children Organization. Their disappearances date to 1974. Five others, including Mikelle, are missing under unknown circumstances.
Rhonda and Mark Skidmore of Mesa are among a small group of parents whose abducted children returned home safely. Their daughter, Sarah, then 3, was abducted by a bearded stranger in 1986, then found alive three days later, wandering in the desert near Saguaro Lake.
All they could do for those days was deal with the police, the FBI, the hypnotist who tried to jar their memories and the endless phone calls. And they prayed.
"We felt she was alive and she was being protected by angels, and she would come home," Rhonda said. "That's what sustained us.
"But you think, 'What's happened to my daughter?' There's no control. There's nothing you can do. It's in somebody else's hands. And you're wondering, 'Is she fed? Is she cold? Has she been beaten or stabbed?' You don't know and you can't help wondering, but we didn't allow our minds to go too far. That incites the fear, and you've got to be able to deal with what's happened without going nuts."
Rhonda still remembers the flood of relief that washed over her after Sarah, now 16, was found. She prays that the Biggs family is equally blessed.
"I hope that they'll be OK," Rhonda said.
With every story like Mikelle's, Mamie Lee Traylor and others who have survived the same nightmare relive their anguish.
"The pain is just as bad today as it was the day he disappeared," said Traylor, whose great-nephew, Myron, 13, vanished in July 1988. "If you knew one way or another, it would be easier. You would know he's gone.
"If you know, at least you can say a prayer and put it to rest. It eats at you like cancer."
Myron disappeared while walking from his mother's house in south Phoenix to his grandmother's house half a mile away. Sandra Traylor, the boy's aunt, still prays for Myron several times a day, and family members in Phoenix often talk about him to buoy their hopes.
"It's like a burning fire in your stomach that won't go out," Sandra Traylor said. "You always try to keep your hope up, and sometimes your hopes go down."
Prue still carries "missing" fliers of her daughters in her motor home. She had the photos age-enhanced three years ago, and as recently as a year or so ago, she was still hanging them in store windows, on street corners and at truck stops. The phone book still lists her as "Erma Leslie," just in case.
Cindy would be 40 years old next month; Jackie, 38. But Prue can't picture them like that. The girls were 15 and 13 that July afternoon in 1974 when they disappeared from their east Mesa neighborhood after popping their heads into a friend's 18th birthday party.
"Until I see them dead, I will believe that they're still alive," Prue said.
"I just miss them. It's not part of the time. It's all of the time. I go to sleep at night saying a prayer for them, and I wake up thinking about them. It seems like it's in my head all day long. I still love them."
Prue has taken her fliers to every corner of the state and papered the coast of California after a psychic told her the girls were alive and close to the water. She tracked a wagon train to Yuma, believing her daughters were on it. And she journeyed to Kansas to find two girls working at a truck stop, but they weren't her daughters.
She scanned newspapers for photos that looked like her daughters, but the last time she saw one was in 1979. For a while, Cindy's and Jackie's pictures appeared on milk cartons in Colorado and Texas, but it's been two decades since there were any new tips.
Eventually, the fliers came down, and people stopped asking about the girls. Prue doesn't know what to do anymore, but she'll never give up.
"I just can't look like at it like they're dead. Could you?" Prue says. "When God takes me home, I'll quit hoping."
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Reproduced with permission from: The Arizona Republic Written by: By Judi Villa & Jim Walsh ©Copyright 1999 Arizona Republic |
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