The shadow man
Mike Manders was out of town when his 2 1⁄2-year-old daughter, Michelle, disappeared from her bedroom in the middle of the night in October 1981.
It wasn’t unusual for Mike to be away. His job installing and repairing electron microscopes required almost constant travel, and he rarely slept at his family’s Watertown duplex except on weekends.
As a result, Mike’s wife, Jan, was something of a single parent to Michelle and her siblings, who were both under 4 when she was born.
Raising three young children largely on her own wasn’t easy for Jan, who was just 19 when she and Mike married. Michelle’s free spirit, in particular, posed challenges.
Blue-eyed, blond and slightly bow-legged, Michelle sought adventure from the time she learned to crawl.
She feared almost nothing — except the dark. Sometimes, even though she had been put to sleep in her own room, Michelle would end up in Jan’s bed by the morning.
One night, Jan stayed awake to figure out how the toddler was escaping from her crib. As the young mother watched in the glow of a night light, her daughter wiggled some loose slats from the rail, worked them free and slid them out, careful to replace them afterward.
A bit of wood glue put a stop to that, and by her mother’s recollection, Michelle was not happy about it.
Once Michelle started walking, she romped around the backyard with her brother and sister and played in a fort they’d built not far from the railroad tracks behind their home. Sometimes she turned up
on a neighbor’s porch, her mother nowhere in sight.
One afternoon, Jan walked out of the kitchen for a minute while Michelle was eating lunch. When Jan returned, the back door was wide open and Michelle was gone.
Jan called the police, who quickly found the toddler at the end of the block with the family’s dog, Boomer, and their tiger-striped cat.
Her daughter couldn’t figure out why she was so upset, Jan recalled. Michelle simply wanted to know where the animals would go.
***
It took Jan longer than usual to get Michelle to sleep on the night of Oct. 13, 1981.
Perhaps the little girl was too excited about her new pink footie pajamas. Perhaps she was wound up from all the sugar in her chocolate shake, the one her mom bought her during a rare dinner at Burger King a few hours earlier.
Whatever the reason, Jan had to pry Michelle’s hug from around her neck before tucking the toddler into the big-girl bed in the room she shared with her sister.
The next morning, Michelle was gone.
***
When a child goes missing, hours — or even minutes — can be the difference between life and death.
The passage of time allows an abductor to get farther and farther away. Witnesses can forget small details or think up stories to cover for someone. A perpetrator can destroy evidence, or weather can degrade it.
Even if it isn’t a kidnapping, every passing moment holds new risks for accidents or encounters with unsavory characters.
To increase the odds of finding missing children alive, federal law now requires police to put information
about them into a national database within two hours.
That law wasn’t yet on the books when Michelle disappeared more than 35 years ago.
Back then, local departments could decide for themselves when and if they needed help finding missing kids.
***
For more than 24 hours, the Watertown police worked Michelle’s case on their own.
Despite launching a round-the-clock search, they found just one clue during that time.
An officer spotted Jan’s purse in an alley about a block from the family’s duplex, its contents strewn on the ground.
There was no wallet among them.
As it turned out, the wallet hadn’t been stolen. Jan told police she’d stashed it in a drawer, along with the rent she’d recently collected from the upstairs tenants and a wad of bills from cashing her nurse’s aide paycheck.
The first cop on the scene was kind of lost, according to Richard Reynolds, who was serving as Watertown police chief at the time.
“He didn’t have much to go on,” Reynolds recalled. “And the girl just seemed to disappear from the house and he just didn’t have any idea where to look.”
After a day had passed with no sign of Michelle, the Watertown police called the Wisconsin Department of Justice.
Another day went by before the state called the FBI.
***
As state and federal authorities swooped in to take over the investigation, Watertown officials stayed focused on the search.
Police and firefighters trekked across the uneven grassland behind the Manders’ duplex, around a railroad service building and over the sharp ballast stones to the tracks.
They paced up and down the rail line looking for clues.
Every day, they climbed into boats and scanned the shoreline of the Rock River, which wound through the city.
Three days after Michelle was last seen, bloodhounds tracking her scent led their handlers to a narrow stream that passed through a culvert and emptied into the river.
A skinny cop offered to squeeze through the tunnel, but his boss said no. If Michelle had crawled down there and floated into the river, the police chief figured, she had already drowned, and her body would turn up soon. It didn’t. Michelle’s family did their own searching, too.
Jan and one of her brothers crept into the burned out shell of a nearby skating rink, recently destroyed by fire. They were met with darkness and silence, everything inside turned to charcoal.
As they made their way through the rubble back toward the light of day, Jan could see squad cars, four of them.
One of the police officers approached.
“Get out of there,” he ordered. “Get out of there or you’re getting arrested.”
When Jan protested, the officer told her they had already searched the site, finding nothing.
After six days with no sign of Michelle, authorities told the public they were convinced she’d been kidnapped.
Around the same time, her 4-year-old sister, Jennifer, told their mother about the shadow man.
Jennifer couldn’t say whether Michelle stirred or made any noise when the man came into their room that night in October 1981.
She remembered waking up to a bright light. Before she could blink, the man turned the dimmer switch, dialing down the light to a level that shrouded him from view.
As darkness returned to the bedroom, Jennifer had only a fleeting thought: Her father must have come home early from his work trip out of town.
Then she drifted back to sleep.
Next Wednesday
How did Michelle get out of the house?