Photograph by Mark Gilliland
Early in his law career, John D. Rupp Jr. received a job offer he couldn’t turn down: Washington County needed an assistant prosecutor. “This countryside is gorgeous, with hills and pine trees, much of it in the Mark Twain National Forest,” he says. Small and rural, it reminded him of Pueblo, Colo., where he grew up. “What an easy job,” he thought. “What could happen in a place like this?”
He took the job and went to work in the century-old courthouse in Potosi, the county seat, in 1989. First appointed the prosecuting attorney in 1995 and reelected ever since, Rupp, now 43, has handled a grand total of eight homicides, a slew of parental kidnappings and one nonparental child abduction: the case that held the whole country spellbound.
Shawn Hornbeck disappeared from Richwoods, a town in northeastern Washington County, on Sunday, October 6, 2002. He was 11 years old.
Ironically, Rupp (pronounced “roop”) was the last in his office to know about the case that would consume years of his life. One of his secretaries asked him that Tuesday, October 8, “Are you aware there is a missing kid?”
He wasn’t. “That evening,” he says, “I watched the news and found out.”
The next afternoon, Rupp was called to the Richwoods Volunteer Fire House, told to come as soon as possible but given no details. He assumed that they had a homicide, because usually when law enforcement called him out, there was a body waiting. He took off in his Ford pickup and jumped out at the firehouse, straight into the viewfinders of TV cameras from St. Louis, 65 miles away. Reporters were yelling, “Give us this information, or we’ll leave.’”
To this day, Rupp has no idea how the reporters knew of Hornbeck’s disappearance before he did. The sheriff at the time never notified Rupp.
The former sheriff, a former process server, did not return calls requesting comment.
That day, Rupp made his way through the gantlet of reporters’ mics and into the firehouse. Rows of folding tables filled one bay, their tops covered with half-empty Styrofoam coffee cups. Cigarette smoke hung in the air. Maps of Washington County, divided into grids, were tacked to the walls. An FBI agent, a couple of Missouri Highway Patrol officers and sheriff’s deputies were working the phones. They stopped to brief Rupp: This wasn’t a murder investigation as he had assumed. It was a search-and-rescue mission, albeit one with no evidence. Shawn had left behind no bicycle-tire tracks, no jacket, no hat—nothing.
Their first lead came right away: A tipster named four suspects, high on meth, who’d been riding in a junker of a red car when, the tipster said, they struck a boy. As the story went, they’d picked him up, driven to a secluded spot, shot him and dumped the body down a well. Officers rushed out to investigate. Rupp began pacing.
Finally the officers rang back: They had found a damaged red car with blood and hair on it. The Highway Patrol and FBI swooped down on the car and took it to a lab, where experts took it apart. Rupp paced some more.
“The police located the four people, and they admitted hitting something.” As Rupp tells the story, he pauses for effect. “A dog. The lab report came back that the blood was that of a dog.” Nonetheless, the meth story morphed into a rural urban legend, with colorful variations, that persisted until this January.
Meanwhile, police were back to having no leads at all. Fire departments from all of the surrounding counties sent search-and-rescue squads to the newly minted mobile command center. Twelve commanders—FBI agents, Highway Patrol officers and local authorities—organized about 60 trained volunteer searchers, who then assigned about 1,000 untrained volunteers to teams. They all walked the maps’ grids, traipsing through woods and fields, checking out mine shafts and abandoned refrigerators and vehicles.
“We were working 24/7,” Rupp says. “We had plenty of resources and plenty of personnel, but still no physical evidence.”
County residents pulled together to boost the morale of the police and searchers, bringing homemade apple pies and fried chicken to the command center. Craig and Pam Akers, Shawn’s parents, went on TV, asking for batteries for the searchers’ flashlights, and the next day boxfuls of donated batteries filled a small room.
“Then everything came to a screeching halt,” Rupp says. “Near the intersection of Highways A, H and 47, blood and guts were found. Everybody panicked.
“It turned out a man had slaughtered his pig on his own property off the highway,” he continues. It was the second of about 75 leads that would go nowhere.
Anxiety mounted. Everybody working on this case knew the stats: Most abducted children who are not found in a short time have been killed.
By now, the command center was so thick with cigarette smoke that Rupp’s wife had him hang his clothes outside when he returned home.
Rupp hired Don Cooksey, a former Potosi police chief and former St. Louis police officer, as his full-time investigator on the case. Rupp, Cooksey, FBI agent Mike Singleton and two Missouri Highway Patrol sergeants, Mark Dochterman and David Bauer, kept working after the search-and-rescue site closed—and then after the command center closed. They were looking for similarities between Shawn’s disappearance and every missing-child case in a 100-mile radius. Painstakingly they compared their notes to those from the investigation into the disappearance of Charles “Arlin” Henderson in 1991 near Moscow Mills, in Lincoln County, at the age of 11. “That’s as far as I can go with that until the trial,” Rupp says.
“By Christmas of ’02, I thought Shawn was dead,” he continues. “I was haunted by the thought that someone had killed this boy and was still out there on the loose.”
New Year’s Day 2003 came without any sense of renewal. “We were spending thousands of hours, and we were no closer to finding Shawn than the first day at the firehouse,” Rupp says. “I was frustrated.
“Cooksey reinvestigated the whole thing, banging on doors trying to find someone who knew something. He established the correct timeline. Obviously Shawn left home about 1 that afternoon, and his parents got seriously concerned around 5:30 p.m. We were able to put together a timeline of where he was after 1 p.m. until 4:30 p.m., when we lost track of him. We were also able to establish where he disappeared. Initially the heaviest focus was to the northwest of town, where there were reports he might have been playing, riding his bike up to the stop sign and slapping the stop sign. But Cooksey’s work put him closer to Richwoods, very close to the school.
“There were too many people out at Richwoods the day Shawn disappeared,” Rupp adds, “so we knew that the abduction must have taken place quickly and without a struggle. We suspected it was sexual in nature and then his assailant disposed of the body.”
Three or four leads suggested that Shawn had been murdered. A psychic claimed that “druggies” had buried Shawn beneath a silo. A note was found in a men’s room at a Tennessee rest stop, saying that Shawn’s body was buried in Texas. “This case has been all over the country,” Rupp says, “Tennessee, Texas, Florida, Washington state and more.”
In poured the so-called prison confessions, tales concocted by jailhouse snitches to bargain for reduced sentences. Even one of Rupp’s University of Missouri–Kansas City law-school classmates called to say that a client knew who killed Shawn but wanted a deal.
“They were all absolute garbage,” Rupp says, “but Cooksey had to check them out.”
All that searching did turn up something: a number of meth labs. “Richwoods is a suspect-rich environment,” the prosecutor says wryly. “A lot of people are there because it’s a great place to disappear.” True or not, he wishes that he hadn’t made the observation to a reporter during the search: “It only perpetuated the rural legend that druggies did in Shawn.”
Rupp and his team were now looking at a blank wall: “I’d throw my hands up in the air at times and say, ‘This will never be resolved.’ Cooksey would stay cool and say, ‘This case is not going to beat us.’ I’d have my emotional temper tantrum, then sit right back down and get right back on it.”
The case took its toll. “I’d go home and isolate myself,” he admits, regret in his voice. “I’d go mess on my computer or sit in front of the TV and watch the History Channel like a junkie. I didn’t want to talk to my wife. I didn’t want to play with our two kids.”
Rupp and his small team focused on several suspects, narrowing in on “one promising guy who happened to own a white pickup truck with a camper shell.” The truck was similar to the one driven by Michael Devlin, who was eventually charged with kidnapping Shawn. “When I heard about that white truck on the news, I picked up the phone and offered the Franklin County prosecutor my investigator for as long as he needed him,” says Rupp.
As for the original suspect with the white truck, “we interviewed him many, many times, searched his truck, got search warrants on his home and property, but never found a thing linking him to Shawn except that he had Shawn’s picture in his Bible,” Rupp says. “It probably came from one of the fliers.”
Early on the afternoon of Friday, January 12, 2007, Rupp was working at his dark-oak desk when Dochterman called. “We think we’ve found Shawn alive,” he said.
“What do you mean, you think?”
“I’ll have to get back to you on that one,” Dochterman said.
Rupp began his pacing. It seemed five hours passed before his phone rang again, although his clock told him that it had been only 10 minutes.
“We’re sure we’ve found Shawn,” Dochterman said.
“What do you mean you’re sure?” asked Rupp, ever the trial lawyer.
“Can’t say, but I’ll have someone else call.” A minute later, Rupp’s phone rang again. It was Franklin County Sheriff Gary Toelke.
“You’d better get ahold of the parents now,” the sheriff told Rupp. “He’s identified himself as Shawn Hornbeck.”
Hanging up, Rupp asked loudly whether the office had the Akerses’ phone number, grabbed one of the nine binders for the case and began flipping through the pages. “Cooksey, being the cool and calm fellow he is, sat down and dialed directory assistance,” Rupp says with a laugh.
After landing twice in Pam Akers’ voice mail, Rupp called Craig Akers’ cellphone. He got Craig’s voice mail and left a message. He tried Pam at work again, then sat staring at the phone, frantically trying to think of how else to reach them. Then his phone rang. Craig had gotten his message.
“Where are you headed?” Rupp asked.
“Driving home,” Craig said.
“Where’s your wife?”
“Right here beside me.”
“Pull your car over now,” Rupp said. Once they did, he added, “I’m 95 percent sure we’ve found Shawn, and he’s alive.” Be careful, Rupp told himself. Leave some room in case law enforcement is wrong.
Craig was silent for a long minute. Then the words came in a rush.
“How do you know he’s alive? Where is he now?”
“Go to the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department immediately,” Rupp said, guessing that Shawn was there because it was Toelke who had called him. By now Rupp was suspecting a connection to the kidnapping of William “Ben” Ownby from Franklin County.
Rupp and Cooksey ran to the nearest TV. “We were screaming and jumping up and down,” Rupp says. “When we saw Shawn being escorted from the police cruiser into the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department, Cooksey and I had a good handshake. We all went off to the Elks Club for some beers.”
Rupp is the only law-enforcement officer who has worked the Hornbeck case from start to finish. The FBI didn’t even bring in a profiler for the first two years. “I don’t know if that one would have helped earlier,” Rupp says. “If the suspect’s not on the radar screen, not in any database, and you have nothing to link him to the crime ...”
What won the day wasn’t profiling; it was a witness, and Rupp calls it “nothing short of a miracle.”
“Mitchell Hults [the classmate who made note of the white pickup truck at the time of Ownby’s kidnapping] gave us the only physical lead in the case,” he continues. “It’s important that the public know it was they who solved this case, not law enforcement.”
The morning after Hornbeck and Ownby were found, Rupp awoke full of questions. “What was Devlin planning to do with Shawn? We have to investigate all this. The case is not completely solved and is extremely complicated. I also have to ensure that Devlin’s civil rights are protected and he receives a fair trial. Devlin is now only accused and not yet found guilty. My work has just begun.”
He pauses. “We were really focused on homicide; we were really focused on bodies. Although we had several supposed sightings of Shawn alive, none were close to being accurate. Honestly, I was convinced that the boy was dead. Just absolutely convinced. This case has changed me. I will never make that kind of assumption again.”
