One of the largest police investigations...

[Gil T.Azell]

.in Canadian history

I remember hearing at one time they thought he was spotted on the East coast of the US, but nothing came of it.

 

[Starkers]

There are quite a few of these horrible stories around the globe. Here in the UK there's Medeline McCann and Ben Needham.

Of course sometimes even years, decades later a missing child is found, Natascha Kampusch for example, or the examples they use in the article.

Cliched I know, but it must be the not knowing what's happened to them that the worst thing

 

[Miss Chicken]

I can't think anything more heartbreaking than having to cope with the disappearance of a child.

The most famous disappearance in Australian history is that of the Beaumont children - two sisters, Jane (aged 9) and Arnna (7) and their brother, Grant (4) disappeared from an Adelaide beach in 1966. No trace of them have ever been found.

Seven years later Joanne Ratcliffe (11) and Kirsty Gordon (4) disappeared while at an Adelaide football game. The description of a man seen with them is similar to a man who was seen at the beach the day the Beaumont children went missing. There has been no trace of Joanne or Kirsty.

 

[cultcross]

Cliched I know, but it must be the not knowing what's happened to them that the worst thing

I agree with this - how can you grieve for a child, i.e. give up on a child, who may still be alive? Could the McCanns just give up on their daughter and get on with their lives, when there remains the possibility, however slight, that she could turn up tomorrow? A very, very hard situation to imagine.

I read Kate McCann's book, Madeleine, initially out of professional interest, but I would recommend it wholeheartedly for more general readers - it is a brutally honest account of living with a tragedy like this.

 

[Starkers]

It must be horrible, and on some level you must almost want your child to be found to have died soon after they went missing, because in many ways that might be preferable to some of the potential alternatives.

I used to work in the NHS and our child protection officer once told us that the special units who look at child pornography can often see a child grow up over the course of many vidoes/photos. It's a really shitty world sometimes.