The Last Place You'd Look (13 page)

The most visible of these is an Atlanta woman who has admitted to operating an underground network that assists women who claim the fathers of their children present a danger to those kids—the most common being molestation. The underground network reportedly helps the women prepare to leave, assists them in establishing new identities for themselves and their kids, and then helps them relocate.

The woman from the underground network has told the press that she stopped relocating families in the United States and now helps them escape abroad, most often to countries where the inclination to enforce the Hague Convention is lax. She also has claimed in interviews that over the years she has received unofficial support from law enforcement officials, including the FBI and prosecutors. Whether certain officials give her a wink and a nod is not known, but the fact remains that she been very successful, even withstanding threat of both civil and criminal actions. And she is not alone: evidence suggests a large underground network dedicated to the same cause.

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In 2007, a man who went by the name of Clark Rockefeller was charged with kidnapping his seven-year-old daughter, Reigh, from her mother’s custody. Although he claimed to be a scion of the famous New York Rockefellers, he was exposed after his arrest as a German whose real name is Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter. He stayed on the run for six days until authorities apprehended him in Baltimore. Reigh was recovered and returned to her mother.

Extensive press coverage helped nail Gerhartsreiter and led to the little girl’s return, but even media coverage doesn’t always result in a quick and happy resolution.

In 1979, a Harvard Law School Legal Clinic supervisor took his two daughters—five-year-old Rachael and two-year-old Wendy—and fled with them to Florida. The girls would be raised under an alias. His former wife, Barbara Kurth, spent eighteen years looking for her children.

Arrested in 1998, Stephen Fagan, now known as Bill Martin, served no active time. He claimed in court and to the media that he ran with the children because his ex-wife was violent and a substance abuser—two unproven charges that Barbara and her family have denied. No concrete evidence supports his claim, but as far as anyone knows, the girls—both now grown—have failed to re-establish a relationship with their mother.

Although both matters were resolved, as in all instances of family abduction, no “happily ever after” exists. In Reigh’s case, her father was exposed as a fraud, and the story will follow her wherever she goes in life. In the Fagan abductions, the family was broken apart and the probability is that it will never heal.

While these cases may seem extraordinary, family abduction itself is not. NISMART’s figures indicate that in the United States alone enough children are abducted by family members on an average day to fill a school bus every other hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

The main symptom of a psychiatric case is that the person is perfectly unaware that he is a psychiatric case.—attributed to Oleg Shchepin, Russian health official

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om Zinza had not contacted his family or anyone else as far as they know for more than two years. They were mystified as to what could have happened to him, but what they did know was this: the Fairbanks, Alaska, resident and would-be writer climbed aboard a commercial airline flight on February 17, 2008, and landed in Cleveland. It was the first leg of a planned trip to Boston, but for some reason no one understands, Tom chose not to make the connection. Instead, he slept in a Cleveland hotel room that night. The next day he drove by rental car through a place called Wooster to Emlenton, Pennsylvania, where he checked into the Emlenton Motor Inn.

Two days later, the cleaning lady at the motor inn called the Pennsylvania State Police and told them that the man who rented Tom Zinza’s room never slept there. His rental car also sat unused, where he parked it when he first signed the motel’s guestbook.

Other circumstances flagged Tom’s disappearance as out of the ordinary. For one thing, Ohio law enforcement officers found Tom’s luggage, including his laptop and a collection of his writings, along a highway near the town of Wooster. And, prior to the former U.S. Marine’s departure from Fairbanks, he told his father and older brother, John, that he was sure someone was trying to kill him.

That someone might be out to kill Tom is a theory most would dismiss out of hand, but he had a long history of mental problems, and those claims were in sync with his illness. Tom suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder,
bipolar disorder, and psychosis. He also experienced constant pain due to re
peated right ankle fractures, chronic knee problems, and a herniated disk. But Tom had been doing well over the past few years, living independently on his disability checks in a cabin with his two cats, writing poetry and stories, and pursuing his dream of being published.

Tom was the type of nice guy that people remembered. With an extensive network of buddies from his hitch in the service, he had stayed in touch with many of his old friends, although in recent years he led a more secluded life. When he was on his medication, he did fine. When he went off his meds, the world tilted.

Although Tom experienced downward slides before, his brother John helped him overcome his demons time and time again. John says that the last big breakdown started in late 2003, but by spring, Tom was back on track. The experience brought the two brothers—one disabled and fighting for an identity, the other a successful civil engineer—much closer than they ever had been.

John kept in constant contact with Tom, following up with Tom’s mental health clinic, making sure he was taking his medications, putting out the little fires before they became bigger ones. Both John and his father sensed something was afoot about ten days before Tom boarded that plane. John says Tom made some financial changes, was preparing to deal with his debts, and placed at least one phone call to a number in Mt. Pocono, Pennsylvania.

Then Tom told his brother he was going to leave Alaska as soon as possible to visit Tom’s former wife, her three daughters, and some friends from his Marine Corps years. The next day, February 15, Tom dumped his medications in the trash and asked his mental health provider to prescribe some new ones. Tom boarded a plane the day after that and vanished somewhere along I-80 in Pennsylvania.

John Zinza grows so emotional when he talks about his gentle younger brother that he chokes out the words. John knew that because Tom was diagnosed with a mental illness some agencies would not give his disappearance the weight it deserved. Tom could have been anywhere, without the ability to contact his family or to do something as simple as telling someone his own name.

After Tom disappeared, John retrieved his brother’s car from the airport and visited his Fairbanks home. The cabin looked as if Tom had just walked out the door for a moment. There were no signs he planned to be away for any length of time. John found Tom’s cats and took them to a shelter, cleaned up the garbage Tom left behind, and read through the stack of unopened mail for clues as to what might have happened to his brother. The bank would later foreclose on the simple cabin.

Then John started bumping heads with the system. Tom flew out of Fairbanks, landed in Ohio, and drove to Pennsylvania. John dealt with both state police and local law enforcement in all three states. Alaska said from their viewpoint, Tom was not missing because he left the state of his own volition. Ohio pointed to the fact that Tom landed in Ohio but checked into a Pennsylvania motel. Pennsylvania referred John back to Alaska.

In early 2010 John said, “I don’t think he’s in good law enforcement hands. I don’t know if Ohio followed up on any of the leads on his case. Alaska says Pennsylvania is the lead agency. Pennsylvania says the same thing about Alaska.”

In fairness, Pennsylvania authorities did search the wooded areas near the motor inn where Tom was last seen, but the searches were not for Tom—they were for his corpse. That was in the summer following his winter disappearance. In the spring of 2009, John managed to spark another search using trained cadaver dogs and multiple search-and-rescue groups as well as law enforcement agencies.

With his voice breaking, John said afterward, “I think they will find bones in the area five, ten, or maybe even twenty years from now. I cry every day for my brother.”

But Tom was not the only brother for whom John shed tears. In a family of five boys, two have vanished without a trace. James Zinza, one of John and Tom’s two older brothers, has not been seen nor heard from since February 28, 1992, when he disappeared from his Mesa, Arizona, home.

John says his older brother, whom he called Jimmy, was not diagnosed with mental illness, but there were signs all was not right with him prior to his disappearance. Jimmy is intelligent and spiritual, according to John, who says Jimmy attended community college, rode his bike everywhere, loved cats and pizza, and led a quiet but fulfilling life. Still, in retrospect, John says he sees many of the same characteristics in Jimmy that Tom later exhibited.

Jimmy moved around a lot, traveling across the country before settling in Mesa. “That is where we started seeing the cracks,” says John.

The very last time John saw Jimmy—a thirty-year-old with an easy smile and receding hairline—was right before he went missing. John and his wife were moving and had a pile of magazines they thought Jimmy would like, so they drove over to his place to drop them off. Their last meeting was awkward for reasons John didn’t understand at the time. Jimmy told him he didn’t want the magazines, didn’t invite them to sit down, and seemed anxious for them to leave.

“He didn’t want anything to do with me,” John says.

Then Jimmy was gone. By the time the Zinza family discovered he had vanished, no one had seen Jimmy for days. The oldest Zinza brother (John is the middle child of the five boys) hired a private investigator to look for Jimmy, but he failed to turn up any clues pointing to Jimmy’s fate.

It was as if Jimmy Zinza never existed.

“If he’s dead, he’s not been found. Is he in a landfill underneath some vegetation, or in some sheriff’s office, cremated, or maybe in an unmarked grave somewhere?” John asks. His voice quavers when he talks about Jimmy.

For years, the four remaining Zinza brothers and their parents looked for Jimmy, trying to break through the limbo of not knowing where their loved one is or what happened to him. Then, almost fifteen years later, Tom followed Jimmy into the void. It is almost more than one family can handle.

John says there is a distinct difference in how his two brothers’ cases were handled. He believes everything possible was done to locate Jimmy, while help came too little and too late for Tom. He thinks both men disappeared as the result of mental disorders but at one point he didn’t know whether either—or both—ended up as part of the homeless population or dead. Time is the enemy in these cases, and the law makes it hard for families to exercise any control over their situations.

“I’m burnt out mentally on all of this stuff. I cry. This is the last three years of my life,” says John.

But he never gave up on Tom, and he hasn’t abandoned his decade-and-a-half search for Jimmy, either. “I don’t want to go through the rest of my life feeling like I didn’t do everything I can do to find them,” John says. And so he plugged on, talking to law enforcement, putting up flyers, chasing down each and every lead, no matter how vague or pointless it seemed. But each night, when John climbed into his bed, he did so with a little less hope, a little less determination, a little less spirit than he had when he first arose.

“You can’t begin to imagine what it’s like,” he says.

On October 3, 2010, the skeletonized remains of Tom Zinza were found in the woods not far from the Pennsylvania motel where he had been staying. An autopsy concluded no foul play was involved in his death.

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They huddle on the sidewalks, holding cups and begging coins. They push grocery carts loaded with items fished from trash bins and picked up from the side of the road. They crowd shelters when they can find them, curl up in cardboard boxes when they can’t. Many times they end up frozen and dead in some morgue, as nameless and anonymous in death as they were in the last days of their lives. They are the chronically homeless—people who remain on the streets, not the ones who find themselves without a place to live for a day or two—and many are mentally ill.

Sherrill Britton believes her missing son, Adam Kellner, once joined the homeless ranks that haunt nearby Los Angeles. Britton and her other son have combed the area’s homeless district, known as Skid Row, looking for Adam, putting up flyers, talking to everyone they meet, with no success. The widow and former Miami resident knows Adam is out there somewhere, but he remains out of reach.

Adam, who at the time of this writing was thirty-seven, couldn’t make it through the day without his pack and half of cigarettes and the hat he always wore to cover his bald spot; yet a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving 2007, he walked out the door of the beautiful upscale home he shared with his mother and stepfather thirty miles north of Los Angeles and left his pack of Benson and Hedges behind. Adam took with him no clothes and no money, not even his ever-present hat. The one item Britton couldn’t find was the note pad Adam used to write down the names of his imaginary girlfriends.

Adam has schizophrenia. He hears voices, but he’s a kind, sweet man who cared for his ailing stepfather and preferred the insulation of his mother’s home to the uncertainty of the outside world. Adam didn’t drive—his license was revoked following his diagnosis—instead he took buses. When he disappeared, Britton talked to the bus drivers with routes through Stevenson Ranch, where she and Adam lived. None had seen him.

Adam Kellner with his late stepfather and his mother, Leonard and Sherrill Britton. Courtesy of Sherrill Britton.

Adam’s medication played a key role in keeping him on keel. Britton put his meds into one of those plastic Sunday through Saturday containers—one for day and one for night—and Adam knew how to administer his medications without assistance. On the date he vanished, it appeared Adam had taken his daytime pills.

Britton was on a brief overnight business trip, the first one she’d taken in years. Her husband, Adam’s stepfather, was recovering from surgery and Adam had taken an active role in his care.

From Miami before moving to California, Adam was a standout athlete and a good student who showed no signs of mental issues until he started college. That’s when things began to slide downhill. When his illness began to affect his birth father’s new marriage, Adam moved to California to live with his mother and her new husband, establishing himself in a happy, though somewhat isolated, life.

When Adam first vanished, Britton and her family went into overdrive. They filed a missing persons report with local authorities, made and distributed flyers, searched the surrounding area, and even had a spot on a local news program. Based on a tip that came in, Britton believes Adam may have ended up on L.A.’s Skid Row.

Skid Row, which extends several square blocks in Central City East, is home to an estimated eight thousand “residents.” No one knows the exact population of Skid Row, and no one ever will because it changes daily as the pool of homeless circulate in and out of the district. It’s a tough area, and a hard place to look for someone since a lot the residents don’t want to be found.

Britton discovered how difficult that natural resistance could be when she started looking for Adam there. A security guard she encountered told her that he had given her son a pair of shoes—but the size was wrong. Others swore they had seen him and were convincing enough that Britton felt a small spark of hope from their stories. But her search yielded nothing, not a single substantial lead.

“Even the missions down there tell you. ‘We can’t tell you if he’s down here or not,’” she says. In the eyes of the law, Adam has certain rights, even though his mother says he isn’t competent to make life-altering decisions.