‘Waking Up to A Nightmare’

Clarissa Cervantes is a travel researcher photographer. Clarissa also supplies freelance articles on a variety of topics for newspaper, blogs, websites, and magazines such as USA Today. Clarissa's photo gallery includes images from all over the world, where she finds inspiration to share her photographs with others through her creative lens, inviting the viewer to question the present, look closer, explore more the array of emotions, and follow the sunlight towards a brighter future.

Waking up to a Nightmare

Feb. 23, 2005, ended like most Wednesdays. After driving a Dirt Boys dump truck for 12 hours, Mark Lunsford—an uneducated, chain-smoking, long-haired biker living in Homosassa, Fla.—took a shower, threw on a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt and a pair of Levi’s, and got “Lost.” A few minutes into the hit TV show, his father, Archie, joined him, plopping down on his La-Z-Boy. Mark’s mother, Ruth, remained in their doublewide’s second living room, memorizing Psalms as if studying for an exam like her granddaughter, Jessica, who was scheduled to take the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) the following day.

About half an hour later, the Lunsfords heard family friend Sharon Armstrong bringing Jessie back from the weekly King’s Kids program at the nearby Faith Baptist Church. Sharon had been preparing Jessie for the FCAT, Florida’s high-stakes No Child Left Behind exam. She also taught her sign language. As she drove away, Jessie signaled, “I love you” to her tutor. Then the 9-year-old loped in through the back entrance, lobbed her brown sandals against the laundry room’s wall, and leapt onto her father’s lap, blocking Mark’s view of the wood-paneled television set.

Kissing her cheeks, Mark slid off the sofa to enable her to turn it into a trampoline. Slumping on the floor, his eyes darted from the TV to his airborne daughter. Jessie dove off the couch and dropped on the floor between the kitchen and the living room to perform a split. Mark and Archie hollered in approval. Jessie bowed and strutted into the bathroom to get ready for bed.

When she came out, her long brown hair clinging to her back like a wet mop, she pecked Mark’s face with goodnight kisses and said, “I love you, daddy.”

“I love you, too, sugar,” he said, hugging her and taking off to spend the night at his girlfriend’s trailer, a few miles away.

Mark avoided bringing women home. He felt it would have been unfair to Jessie because his relationships tended to dissolve within a few months. After two failed marriages, he scoffed at settling down. Although Carmen Howe complained about his commitment issues and threatened to turn him away when he showed up unannounced at her doorstep, she let him in with no complaints this time.

They had met a few months earlier at the Saloon down the road on karaoke night, when he noticed her swaying to Jessie’s rendition of Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” But he looked away after seeing that the Hispanic brunette hung out with two underage girls. Assuming she, too, was a high schooler, he lost interest.

He kept running into her during his weekly karaoke night-outs with Jessie but he paid her little attention until one evening, when he heard one of the girls say, “Mom, can I have a dollar?”

Mark and Carmen exchanged bashful glances. He needed a couple of weeks to muster the nerve to say something.

“Hey,” he muttered when Carmen strolled into his aisle at Winn-Dixie one day.

She wondered what took him so long. They made up for it by skipping over the dating stage. Nonetheless, he stopped short of committing. He considered his so-called phobia a survival instinct. The last time he was married, to Angela Bryant, whom he described as “hotter than a fox in a forest fire,” he got burned. She ran off with one of his friends, leaving him alone with Jessie.

Angie’s abandonment gave Archie and Ruth a chance to play an even greater role in their granddaughter’s upbringing. They had been taking care of Jessie in Homosassa during the summers and holidays breaks while Mark and Angie stayed in the Charlotte-neighboring city of Gastonia, N.C.

In 2004, Mark and Jessie moved in with them. Jessie viewed Ruth as more of a new mother than an old grandmother.

As he drove his parents’ old Chrysler Imperial to Carmen’s, Mark thanked God for giving him such helpful parents. They deserved a great deal of the credit for Jessie’s happy-go-lucky demeanor and excellent manners. Playful yet respectful, smart yet humble, Jessie attended two weekly church services, helped around the home, dressed up her Barbie and Bratz dolls with sewing scraps, did her homework with little prodding, and in the Southern tradition in which she’d been raised, listened to her elders.

Mark would soon wish she was less obedient.

***

On weeknights, Jessie rarely asked to stay up late. After Mark took off, she tidied up her room, picked out clothes for school, wrote in her diary, and declared, “Bring on the FCAT.” Ruthie tucked her in at 10 p.m.

A few minutes later, Ruthie said goodnight to Archie. He wanted to join her but knew that if he went to sleep too early, he’d wake up too early, so he forced himself to stay up an hour longer. Sitting outside Jessie’s door, which she insisted on keeping open, he watched muted TV.

At about 11:15 p.m., he shut it off the television. He closed Jessie’s door, dropped his dentures into a cup of water, and tried to catch some Zs, a challenge in his age.

At 4 a.m., he woke up and let out their Dachshund, Corky. He scrambled eggs, fried bacon, and poured glasses of grapefruit juice.

When Corky returned, Archie fed him, put him back in his living-room crib, and slipped back into bed.

Usually, Archie just rested during the two hours he had to wait before taking his heart medication. But that morning, he fell back asleep.

***

Beep ... beep … beep … The alarm clock sounded like a truck backing up. Mark heard it coming from Jessie’s room as he unlocked his parents’ back-entrance door at 5:30 a.m. The mechanical chirping mixed with the sound of rain hitting the trailer’s aluminum shell but seemed to have little effect on his daughter, who, a few months earlier, slept through a hurricane.

She often woke up early to watch “Winnie the Pooh” and other Disney Channel cartoons before getting ready for school. That morning, Mark reckoned, her dreams kept her entertained. So, he wiped the mud off his boots on the welcome mat and headed straight to their bathroom, which Jessie kept spick and span.

Mark washed his bony face and brushed his tobacco-stained teeth. When he turned off the faucet, he noticed Jessie’s alarm persisted. Beep ... beep ...

He poked his head into Jessie’s toy-filled room. He saw an empty bed. He spotted the neatly folded Bratz T-shirt and cheetah-fur-bottom jeans his fashion-conscious daughter laid out the previous night. Her white sneakers waited underneath the chair. He figured she crawled under the covers with his folks.

He opened the door to their room and whispered, “Jessie?”

His father snored; his mother squinted at him from above the sheets.

“Mom,” he said, “Where’s Jessie?”

“In her room,” she said.

“No, she’s not.”

“Look beside her bed,” his father said, his baritone Kentucky twang echoing. “Sometimes, she sleeps on the floor.”

Mark looked around and under her twin-size bed. He checked inside her closet. He found no sign or trace of her. Her toys, stuffed animals, notebooks, books, and bags rested, undisturbed, on top of her nightstand and dresser. Her karaoke machine sat quietly beneath her closed window.

The alarm’s beeping bounced off the trailer’s thin walls. Beep-eep ... Mark shut it off.

He exited to see his parents approaching. As they entered her room, Mark went into his, across the tiny hall. He looked under his bed and in his closet. Nothing. Panic seized his throat. His chest tightened as if to keep his rapidly beating heart from rupturing his ribcage. He knew something was terribly wrong. Jessie had never given him reason to worry. She followed her routine, showed up everywhere on time, and communicated constantly with her family. If Mark lost track of her for even a few minutes, he could always check with his parents.

His eyes welling, he scurried to see if any of the entrance doors were unlocked. He grabbed hold of the back porch’s sliding-door handle. It stood still, locked tight. He sprinted to the front door.

It was unlocked.

“Call the police,” Mark cried.

His mother dialed 911.

Mark ran outside, tears streaking down his face. “Jessie! Jessie!? Where are you?! Jessie!?!” he screamed, racing around the property, throwing open the flimsy doors to the half-dozen sheds scattered on the 2 acres, peering inside their four cars, and flashing a light under the trailer.

“Did she go for a walk?” he thought. “Is she hiding? Is she mad about something? She must be somewhere around here. She’d never run away.”

He covered Sonata Road, scuttling through puddles and kicking up pebbles. An eerie silence permeated the neighborhood. Even the neighborhood’s dogs, who inhabited nearly every yard and usually barked at the slightest sight or sound, kept quiet.

Mark jumped into the Chrysler to hit the area’s main drag, Cardinal Drive. He rolled down the window and yelled Jessie’s name into the darkness. He saw no one.

The sun peeked over the horizon. In the distance, he heard sirens wailing. At the edge of Cardinal, he parked by Emily’s Family Restaurant king lot to consider his next move. He failed to shift his mind out of first gear.

He made a U-turn to cruise up and down the streets. When his cellphone vibrated in his pocket, he immediately reached for it with shaky hands.

“The cops are here,” his mom said, crying.

He raced home. A Citrus County Sheriff’s Deputy greeted him at the back-entrance door and told him to remain calm.

“Sure,” Mark thought, “just as soon as we find Jessie.”

The deputy walked through the home, craning his neck underneath beds, and flinging open closet doors.

Corky incessantly barked at the deputy, who swept through the home a second time.

Holding up Jessie’s diary, the deputy asked, “Is this your daughter’s?”

He handed the diary to Mark, who would’ve never otherwise read it. Her words jumped off the page: “Dear diary, I have a boyfriend, his name is Jacob.”

The deputy sat in front of the family computer clicking desktop folders, photos, and files.

Soon, more than a dozen deputies invaded the trailer, spilling onto the front yard. One taped off Sonata a block from the home with yellow ribbon. Several went knocking on neighbors’ doors. A few examined the Lunsford residence’s objects, walls, and carpets. They took fingerprints and photographed every nook and cranny. They went through sheds and cars and confiscated the computer and clothes hamper.

Mark’s search for the most precious thing in his life soon took an unexpected detour as he learned of the deputies’ theory: The Lunsfords—at least one of them, anyhow—knew of Jessie’s whereabouts.

***

The question dumbfounded Mark. “Did you have anything to do with Jessie’s disappearance?” a detective asked.

“What?” Mark said.

“You heard me,” the detective said, sticking his thumbs between his belt and midsection.

“No, I did not,” Mark said. “If you ever ask me that again, I’ll punch you in the face. Just please find my daughter.”

“We’re going door to door, searching every room in every home in this neighborhood,” The detective said. “Wanna help find Jessie? Answer the damn questions.”

Mark and his parents sat at their dining room table and tried to fill in the blanks for the detectives. Did they know where Jessie was? “No.” Did they hear anything during the night? “Noting,” Archie and Ruth said. Did they see anything? “No.” Did they find even a trace of a struggle? “No.” How come Corky never barked? He slept under several blankets that muffled the sound around him, Ruth said. Did they lock all the doors? They thought they did, although it appears they accidentally left the front door open.

“Sometimes,” Mark said, “it looks like it’s locked when it’s not.”

Archie opened the door, twisted the little lock inside the knob, and closed the door. It looked shut. Uttering something about suction, he reached for the handle and opened the door without having to unlock it.

All the Lunsford wanted to do was to go search for Jessie. At the same time, they figured that, if they could help find her by racking their brains for bits of information, then that’s what they’d do. They went beyond answering the police’s questions honestly and fully—they volunteered everything and anything that popped into their minds, even if it seemed trivial, even if they feared it might get them in trouble.

The police took advantage of their naïve cooperation. Without letting them know they could’ve refused to go, the detective and a sergeant stuffed Mark and Archive into unmarked cars at 10 a.m. and hauled them into the police station in nearby Inverness.

The worst day of their lives was about to get uglier.

They put them in different interrogation rooms, where they continued hammering them with the same questions. The sergeant wanted to know where Mark went the previous night? “To Carmen’s.” When did you last see Jessie? “Around 9 p.m.” Did anyone have a key to the Lunsford home? “No.” Why did you move to Homosassa?

“I needed help raising Jessie,” Mark said. “I work 12-hour days. My parents love her. They wanted to participate.”

“Are you sure you made the right decision?” the sergeant said.

“Yes.”

“Where’s Jessie’s mother?”

“Ohio.”

“When did you last see her?”

“We tried to see her last year.”

“Does she spend time with her daughter?”

“No.”

The sergeant raised his eyebrows.

He became annoyed when Mark answered his cellphone in the detective’s presence one too many times. But when his Big Sis Sue called from North Carolina, Mark had to talk to her.

“What happened to Jessie?” she asked.

“We don’t know,” Mark said. “We can’t find her.”

“What do you mean you can’t find her?”

“I came home this morning and she was gone.”

The detective listened intently. Besides irritation, his expression projected skepticism.

“Where did she go?” Sue said. She still didn’t get it.

“They don’t know, baby,” Mark said. “I’m at the police department. They’ve been looking for her. They tell me they’ve got bloodhounds looking for her, they’ve got choppers looking for her, and they can’t find her. What are we going to do?”

Sue burst out crying.

“I’m sorry, sis,” Mark said.

“It’s not your fault,” Sue said.

After Mark hung up, The detective asked him to turn off the cellphone and control his emotions.

“I can’t have you upset when you take tests,” he said.

He gave Mark a voice-stress test, a simpler version of the polygraph.

“Is your first name Mark?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you wearing a watch?”

“No.”

“Are you now wearing a hat?”

“No.”

“I want you to lie to this question—is the wall carpeted?”

“No.”

“Is today Thursday?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where Jessica is now?”

“No.”

Saying he was going to chart Mark’s responses, The detective left, saying, “I’ll be right back. Give you a chance to decompress.”

He returned a few minutes later. He asked the same set of questions again. “Is your name Mark?”

When Mark passed the test, the detectives shifted their full attention to 73-year-old Archie. Although he had stayed out of trouble for 50 years, he had a jaded past. In the early 1950s, he slept with an underage girl, drove his son across state lines without his ex-wife’s knowledge, and was accused of rape by a married woman.

The Citrus County detectives pressured Archie with a blind fervor to reveal what he has done with Jessie. When he got up to leave after several nerve-wrecking hours, they pinned his arms behind his back and ordered him to sit back down.

Meanwhile, Mark mostly sat by himself in another interrogation room. Although he yearned to spend that invaluable time searching for Jessie, he saw no way out of that police station.

At some point, he stuck his face in the “concealed” interrogation-room camera and said, “I’m going out for a smoke.”

An FBI agent accompanied him. He put a match to his filter-less Camel and outlined why he and the other detectives believed Archie had something, maybe everything, to do with Jessie’s disappearance.

“Oh, we’re not saying he did anything,” the FBI agent said. “We’re just saying it looks bad.”

He offered no specific theories, just broad allegations. Initially, Mark dismissed them. His dad was a great parent and grandfather. Mark modeled himself as a father after him. But as the detective and the sergeant fired round after round of allegations, suspicions, and statistics—noting, for instance, that most of these cases tend to be “inside jobs”—and as Mark increasingly felt drained and disorientated, he started to believe them.

It was Archie’s “abnormal” behavior that tipped off the investigators, they said. To them, he appeared aloof and calculated, refusing to fully cooperate, arguing, and withholding information. Halfway through the first day, they said they found Jessie’s blood on his underwear. Mark’s weak frame of mind precluded him from questioning how they drew such a conclusion so quickly. He became fully convinced of his father’s guilt.

The detective had him watch his dad being shaken down by the detective. Mark’s lips quivered as he witnessed their standoff through a small black-and-white monitor.

“Look,” The detective whispered in Mark’s ear, “Archie shows no remorse.”

“We all make mistakes,” the detective said to Archie. “I’m not here to judge you. I just want to find out why this mistake happened.”

“Lord,” Archie said, “I wouldn’t have touched that child for nothing.”

Suspecting his father greatly troubled Mark. Yet, in a strange way, it also provided some relief. He hoped he’d finally learn what happened to Jessie. He thought maybe he’d even see her that night.

So, when the detective suggested he confront Archie, Mark breathed deep and tried to summon the strength to shake the truth out of his father.

Mark always had a mutually respectful, caring relationship with his father. Sure, they sometimes fought, especially when Mark was younger. But they never had a major rift. They certainly never accused each other of anything criminal, much less something like this.

The sun was setting when Mark entered the interrogation room.

“They’re accusing me of doing it,” Archie said.

They talked about DNA evidence, which the detectives told them they had.

“I don’t understand DNA evidence,” Mark said. “Do you know where Jessie’s at?”

Archie clenched his jaws, shook his head, and cast his eyes.

“They’re going to ask me to take a lie detector,” Archie said, “and I won’t.”

“Do whatever they want, dad,” Mark said. “I just want to find Jessie.”

“That’s all both of us want,” he said.

“I’m supposed to ask you if you know where Jessie is,” Mark said, for the fourth time. “I’m sorry, dad.”

“I don’t hold that against you,” he said. “If I’d known, I’d tell.”

Mark pushed him to go back to working with the detectives. Archie reluctantly agreed.

As Mark left the room, he remained suspicious of his father.

Mark completely gave up on his dad a few hours later, when he found out that Archie failed his polygraph.

***

The ts never told Archie which part of the lie-detector test he failed. He couldn’t imagine. When they asked him if he ever stole from an employer, he told them no, although Fearless Transportation in Dayton, Ohio, fired him after 20 years for allegedly stealing 55 lunch minutes. He swore he worked every minute he’d ever punched in. He paid a heavy price for that “free lunch.” He lost his home and retirement pension.

When the Citrus County deputies asked Archie if he ever hit Ruthie, he said, “I have never laid a hand over her.” Why in God’s name would he do something like that to the mother of his three children?

When the detective said, “I have all the answers, I just want to see how honest you’re going to be with me,” Archie should’ve realized that he had become a suspect—maybe even the suspect. It took him a few hours to catch on.

Delving into his distant past, to a time when he lived recklessly, he gave the detectives the full details about that 1950s kidnapping charge. His first wife won custody of their child, Drake, when they divorced. She had a difficult time raising him in the bad section of Dayton in which they resided. Archie lived in Indianapolis and drove a truck. One day, he made the 100-mile trip to Dayton to see Drake. He found his 18-month-old rolling in trash in front of his babysitter’s house.

Unattended children ran amok in and around the dilapidated, dirty dwelling. When his boy saw him, he smiled, cried, “Daddy!” and waved his chubby arms.

Archie picked him up, kissed him, and held him tight, soiling his shirt and getting a good whiff of his drooping diapers.

The babysitter emerged from the house holding another baby. “I haven’t seen his mom in two, three weeks,” she said. “You’re his dad, aren’t you? Why don’t you take him with you? He’d be much better off.”

Archie drove Drake to Indianapolis. He washed the little fellow, bought him new clothes, fed him and strummed the guitar for him. He was a brand-new boy by the time his mother showed up late that night with a police escort. They arrested Archie without bothering to hear his side.

Archie next saw Drake at his arraignment. In a policeman’s arms, in front of the judge, he ignored his mother and wailed, “Daddy! Daddy!”

“Let that man hold his son,” the judge said.

He ordered Archie and his ex-wife to settle their differences out of court, which they did, that day. They agreed to let Archie’s parents raise Drake on their Kentucky farm, and that was the end of it. That is, until Feb. 24, 2005, when the police again labeled Archie a kidnapper.

They also wanted to know everything about an attempted rape charge, also from the early 1950s. Problem was, Archie knew very little about that incident. He had no idea why a woman who stayed with her husband in the Cocoa Beach motel he had just started managing claimed he tried to rape her. His attorney said she was trying to extort money.

His father put up a $5,000 bond to release him from jail, where Archie sat for three days. The accuser never showed up at court, so the judge threw out the case. But this stranger ruined the new life Ruthie and Archie had started with their first baby, Sue, in the Sunshine State. They moved back to Ohio.

As Archie exposed his warts to the Citrus County detectives, he realized they’d already made up their minds. The detective stopped just short of saying “gotcha” when he brought that, in his late 20s, Archie had consensual sex with an underage girl, Linda Lively. He thought she was 17. The detective said she was “younger than that.” He didn’t give her age, and Archie didn’t ask. He said he received a suspended six-month sentence and a $500 fine.

Archie knew what he did was wrong. In the mid-1950s, he changed his ways and attended church services every Sunday. Seeing the detective drawing a direct line from Lively to Jessie, however, made him lose faith in the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office.

“We’re at a point in this investigation when we’re no longer wondering what happened,” the detective said. “We’re trying to figure out why it happened. There’s a reason why we brought you here.”

“I’m sure,” Archie said.

“Why would Jessie ask a neighbor to help her get out of the house because of you?”

“I have no idea,” Archie said. “I didn’t know she would even do such a thing.”

Frustrated, the detective switched to explaining the concept of DNA evidence. Then he spelled out the police’s thinking. “There’s no way what happened in that house was a stranger coming in,” he said. “There’s no way Jessie walked off with a stranger. Everything we’ve got is pointing at you.”

He asked if Archie felt “bad.”

“Bad?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know how you’re supposed to feel when somebody is leading you to believe that you’ve brought harm to your granddaughter,” Archie said. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to act or look or anything. But I wouldn’t harm that child. No child.”

“I think some things have been going on between you and Jess,” the detective said. “I think Jess goes through some things at school, starts to learn some things about good touches and bad touches and things start to escalate. Maybe she was going to tell somebody.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Archie said. “I’ve seen it on television, I’ve heard it. I don’t dislike you for it, I just don’t understand.”

The detective doubled down on his accusations, intensifying his attack with more baseless speculations. He told Archie that Jessie loved only her daddy and grandma, not him.

The detective said they already had enough evidence to wrap up the case.

“I hope you do,” Archie said. “But I can’t believe I can be guilty of doing something and not know it.”

“Well, you’re right,” he said. “You’ve done stuff and you know it. Maybe you’re embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed? I’m paralyzed.”

The detective proposed going over everything again. Archie saw no reason to do that.

“I’m not guilty of anything except loving a grandchild,” I said. “I’ve got nine of them. If you had to get an education to do this, you wasted your money.”

When Archie refused to continue, the detective brought in Mark.

Archie told Mark he knew nothing. But, unable to turn down his distraught son’s desperate plea, he agreed to again cooperate with the detectives.

After absorbing verbal hits for several more hours, he felt so exhausted, so emotionally and mentally drained, so shaken up, that he contemplated confessing. If Mark believes them, he reckoned, maybe they’re right. He must have committed a crime. His brain throbbed as he strained to remember what, exactly.

A law-enforcement official Archie had never met asked if he wanted to go get a sandwich. Mark later identified this man as the sheriff.

“I just want to go home,” Archie said.

“C’mon,” the sheriff said, “let’s go for a ride.”

As they walked to his car, Archie complained about the detectives’ abusive behavior.

“If I gave you these keys,” the sheriff said, holding them up, “would you drive me to where you think Jessie is?”

“I can’t tell you where Jessie is,” Archie said. “I don’t know.”

***

As time ran out of that endless day, the detectives released Mark on one condition: that he stay away from his parents’ home that night.

He went straight there.

His friend Penny drove him. Turning onto Cardinal, they spotted several antennas rising from TV vans that dotted the trailer park. She dropped him off at his parents’ front yard, where the Sheriff’s Office set up its mobile command center, breaking police protocol and curtailing the scent trails.

Detective Gary Atchison approached Mark, saying Archie gave him the wrong storage key.

“Dude, you take me over there,” Mark said, “I’ll cut the lock off.”

Two deputies waited at the storage facility. Mark used a bolt cutter to let them in.

They looked through his clutter of furniture and nick knacks.

“It’s not like they’ll find Jessie in there,” Mark thought.

“Whose stuff is this?” Atchison said, pointing at Mark’s dresser drawers and little wooden boxes.

“It’s my stuff,” Mark said, “from North Carolina.”

They uncovered only one object that interested them—a bong.

“Do you smoke marijuana?” Atchison said.

“Yeah,” Mark said.

They returned home just as Dawsy dropped off Archie.

“Why did the sheriff drive you?” Mark asked.

“That was the sheriff?” Archie said.

The distrust that Archie spotted in his son’s eyes deepened his pain and confusion.

The agents and deputies started eyeing Mark. They knew he’d agreed to stay away that night. So, he asked Archie to take him to Carmen’s. They drove in silence. Two FBI trucks—one black, one white—followed them.

The trucks parked overnight outside Carmen’s trailer.

Mark and Carmen put on a boring show for them. She held him, turned out the lights, and said, “Get some sleep, baby.”

Lying on his back, Mark stared at the wobbly ceiling fan for hours, tears wetting his pillow like a drip.

***

At around 1 a.m. on Feb. 24, John Evander Couey—a slight, bald 46-year-old with Swiss-cheese facial skin and glassy, vacant eyes—gazed at Jessie’s bedroom from his window. Coming off a crack-cocaine high, he watched for signs of Mark returning home for the night.

The previous three nights, he remembered, Mark slept at home. So Couey waited patiently to turn his vile fantasy into a terrifying reality. He had planned it for weeks. Working as a mason’s helper at Homosassa Elementary and living 150 yards from her home, he stalked Jessie without raising any suspicion.

During that period, he also eluded his probation officer, Mary Doyle, who had overseen him for nearly two years. She knew he spent 59 days in jail in 2004 for violating his probation by driving under the influence of marijuana. She realized he failed to check in with her upon his release or return her mailed notices. But she had no idea he was a convicted sex offender with a long rap sheet.

At the age of 8, while living with his aunt, he tried to rape his 10-year-old niece. In the mid-1970s, when he was a teenager, his father kicked him out of their home in the East Florida town of Bunnell for luring a 5-year-old into the woods and making her take down her pants. In the 1980s, his wife, Karen, left him after discovering that he molested her 6-year-old daughter. And in the early 1990s, the state locked him up for two years at the Madison Correctional Institute in London, Ohio, for masturbating in front of a 5-year-old.

The police arrested Couey 22 other times for offenses ranging from burglaries to drunk driving to drug possession.

In November 2004, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) sent Dawsy a letter asking him round up 58 sex offenders, including Couey. A month later, sheriff’s officials issued a warrant to arrest Couey for violating his probation but neglected to track him down.

In January 2005, Couey moved in with his half-sister, Dorothy Marie Dixon, across the street from the Lunsfords.

Aware of the problems he faced and posed, Dorothy considered shutting him out. She had an easy excuse. Four other people already crowded her trailer—her boyfriend Matt Dittrich, her daughter Madie Secord, her son-in-law Gene Secord, and the Secords’ 2-year-old son, Josh. But realizing she served as Couey’s last line of defense, Dorothy let him stay. She gave him his own bedroom, cash, and crack cocaine.

Dorothy’s hospitality to a convicted sex-offender gravely upset Madie, who struggled with the lingering trauma of Uncle Johnny molesting her when she was 7. Knowing he also raped her younger sister when she was 6, Madie feared for Josh and fought with her mom over Couey’s stay, to no avail.

Madie pounced at a chance to remove their danger from her home on Feb. 10, when deputies showed up at her doorstep to question her crackaholic family about a drug dealer. She told them they should arrest her uncle for breaking his probation.

Although they showed more understanding than her mother, the deputies ignored her plea and left without even questioning Couey.

At 3 a.m. two weeks later, Couey climbed down a ladder perched against his window and crossed Sonata. Walking through the Lunsfords’ open gate, he hesitated for a moment, thinking, What if Mark suddenly returned?

Mark intimidated him, what with his biker tattoos, quiet confidence, long hair, and roaring Harley. But Couey had become obsessed with Jessie. He moved methodically, like a feral cat on a hunt. He tore through the Lunsfords’ back porch screen with kitchen knife, unlocked their metal door, and nudged the glass door. He failed to slide it open.

Couey checked the back-entrance door, a few yards away. It was locked. He hopped down the wooden steps and headed home, bypassing the Lunsfords’ front door.

Front doors gave him the heebie-jeebies. So he kept walking.

When he reached the Lunsfords’ gate, he stopped, surveyed the scene, and stared at Jessie’s window, his breathing escalating, his mind filling with tempting images. He approached the front door. He put his shaking hands on the handle. It was unlocked.

Guided by several nightlights throughout the home, he made his way into Jessie’s room. He stood over her. He tapped her on her shoulder. Her eyes popped open.

“Don’t yell or nothing,” he whispered. “I’m taking you to see your daddy.”

Wearing a pink silk nightgown and white shorts and clutching her dolphin, Jessie followed Couey. He stood only a few inches taller than her, but he was a grown-up, and she thought she had to listen to him, even if she’d never met him.

He led her to his back yard and pointed at the ladder. She tried to steady her bare feet on the bottom rungs. He pushed her up into his filthy bedroom, followed her in, knocked down the ladder, and shut the shudders behind them.

Couey molested her and made her lie by his side.

A couple of hours later, they heard Mark yelling Jessie’s name through the light rain.

His voice revived her spirit.

As the sirens wailed, Couey shoved Jessie inside his closet and told her to stay put and keep quiet. She heard helicopters hovering overhead. She clasped her dolphin.

At 9 a.m.—when her classmates were taking the FCAT—Jessie heard the police questioning Madie outside the trailer.

The deputies asked Madie if they could look around the trailer’s perimeter. They circled the home, found nothing suspicious, and continued canvassing the rest of the neighborhood. Had they asked to search inside the home, she later said, she would’ve let them. She insisted she had no idea Jessie was in her uncle’s closet.

At 8 p.m. that first day, the police returned to Couey’s trailer. They knocked on the door. Gene opened it. “Have you seen a 9-year-old girl?” deputy Scott Briggs said. “Brown hair, 4-foot-10, 70 pounds.”

“No,” Gene said. “I heard she’s missing.”

Deputy Lee Entrekin asked Gene for the names of the trailer’s residents. Knowing his mother-in-law wanted to protect her half-brother, he mentioned everyone except Couey.

Gene gave Briggs and Entrekin permission to look around in the back yard. They noticed nothing noteworthy and returned to the command center, 70 yards away. There, Dawsy spoke with them and a few other deputies and detectives.

“I got my man,” the sheriff said.

They nodded, knowing whom he had in mind.

It wasn’t Couey.

***

The next morning at 5 in Carmen’s bed, Mark gave up trying to fall asleep. He kissed her on her forehead and tiptoed outside into the predawn blackness. He knocked on the white FBI truck to wake up the agent, who slumbered on the steering wheel.

“Hey,” Mark said, “can you give me a ride?”

The agent orientated himself, switched on his headlights and rolled down the window, saying, “Hold on a minute.”

Anxious to get home, Mark started walking toward US-19, Homosassa’s commercial spine. The agent picked him up. Neither spoke.

Two deputies guarding Sonata raised the yellow tape to let them through. The FBI agent dropped Mark off right there, made a U-turn, and took off.

Mark walked to the RV command center. It stood empty. He headed to his trailer. He pictured Jessie sleeping peacefully, a cut-and-glued apology note from the kidnapper by her side.

The sight of her empty room shredded his vision.

It looked exactly the same, yet totally different.

Tears, which had been trickling from his eyes on and off for 24 hours, poured out with a flurry, blurring his vision. He nearly missed the edge of the bed when he sat down. He steadied himself with both hands, wiped his face with his T-shirt, swallowed hard, and took a Halloween photo of Jessie out of his wallet. He recalled how dressing her up as a cat and drawing whiskers on her face.

It was at that moment—when he sat there, hopeless, helpless, looking at her photo through a fog—that, in his mind, he started to hear Jessie cry. He believed he wasn’t hallucinating or even imagining. He heard her. The sound of her breath jolted him, instilling renewed hope. He knew she was alive.

“We’ll bring you home soon,” He whispered.

When he heard someone coming in, he put away the picture, remembering that the detective said he’d pick him up first thing in the morning.

Even though he expected to spend another wasteful, humiliating day at the station, he trusted the police. He trusted that they knew their jobs. He trusted that they were conducting a door-to-door, room-by-room search of every home in the neighborhood. And he trusted that their often-puzzling questions would help lead to Jessie. What if he had information that could aid their efforts, let’s say, about his father?

As he followed the detective to his unmarked car, reporters approached them.

“Don’t talk to them,” the detective muttered under his breath.

Mark gazed at the ground.

He thought he knew what to expect when he arrived at the police station, but the detectives threw him off by putting him in a larger, nicer room and bringing up something he immediately admitted doing—something that, by the end of the day, he feared would land him in serious legal trouble.

Porn.

The detectives asked if he visited adult websites. He said yes. They inserted a disc containing links taken off the Lunsfords’ computer and rotated the laptop toward him.

“Did you look at these?” the detective said, as provocative pictures popped up.

“Yeah, I probably did,” Mark said. “I don’t remember all of them, but it’s a good possibility.”

The detective moved the laptop closer to him and uttered, “She don’t look 18. Have you been looking at child porn?”

“No,” Mark said. “I’ve never seen this photo.”

He showed him several more unfamiliar images. The women all appeared to be older than 18.

The detective said someone looked at them on the computer the previous day at 9 a.m.

“Well,” Mark said, “it wasn’t me.”

“What about your dad?” the detective said.

“He doesn’t know how to use a computer,” Mark said. “I remember seeing one of y’all at the computer at that time.”

Nonetheless, his pornography confession preoccupied the detectives, who spent the day going over it, over and over. Mark thought they might charge him with some sort of a crime—not for viewing child porn, which he never had, but for engaging in what he’d always considered to be a legal activity: looking at naked women. Convinced he faced a court date, he started devising a defense.

“I have a little girl,” Mark told the detective, “I can’t have magazines lying around the house.”

When the detective noted that Jessie used the computer, Mark said he always closed every website he viewed.

Although the detectives never named Mark as an official suspect, they treated him like one. They reacted to his answers like lied-to parents. After they gave him a polygraph in the afternoon, they said it came out “inconclusive.” Mark wondered what they were talking about.

***

In the morning, when the FBI asked Ruth to spend the second day of Jessie’s disappearance with them at the police station, she immediately got up to get ready. Archie had warned her about that place, but she wanted to see it for herself.

Archie, however, saw no benefit in Ruth’s Inverness field trip. When she came out of the bedroom holding her purse, he was arguing with the agents.

“Please don’t take her,” he said. “She’s weak, she’s down, she’s hurt.”

“It’s all right,” Ruth said, putting her hand on Archie’s.

“She can’t tell you anything,” Archie said.

“I’ll tell you what I can,” she told the agents.

Archie threw up his hands.

As the agents opened the back door for Ruth, Archie said, “Wait.” All three of them turned around. “Please don’t do her like you did me and Mark.”

At the station, the agents started by questioning Ruth about Mark. They inquired about his lifestyle. She told them to ask him. They brought up his “pornography habit.” She said, “Ask Mark, not me.” This went on a while.

Ruth continued along the same vein when the detectives asked her about Archie. They wanted to know her husband’s vices, criminal background, and relationships with women.

“Why don’t you ask him?” Although she knew the answers—at the very least, she had her opinions—she stood her ground.

When they asked Ruth about Archie’s relationship with Jessie, she threw the agents a curve ball. She said they loved teasing each other. She gave them an example: One day, as Archie baked a cherry pie, Jessie walked into the kitchen just as he yelled, “Ruthie, look what you made me do.”

She saw him fanning singed crust. “It’s not Grandma’s fault you burned the pie,” Jessie said, throwing down her head in an exclamation point and marched to her room.

Archie laughed so hard, he forgot to save the pie, which burned.

That’s how they got along, Ruth said. They entertained each other and anyone else who happened to be around.

The agents, however, were not amused. They continued quizzing Ruth about Archie. She reverted to her sealed-lips approach. So they changed topics. They started out logically, with questions about the night Jessie vanished.

“Help us to understand something: your dog, Corky, barks a lot,” they said. “Do you mean to tell us that he was quiet the whole night?”

“He barks, all right,” Ruth said. “But when he’s in bed with all those big blankets that he has, there’s no way he’ll hear you unless you ring that doorbell.”

“There’s no way whoever took Jessie rang the doorbell, we’ll give you that,” they said. “But you have to admit, that dog barks nonstop.”

“He only started doing that, and a few other strange things, since Jessie disappeared,” Ruth said. “He has a whole new temperament. He’ll go toward you then back up. And he won’t go into his bed.”

Ruth put on her canine voice, saying, “Somebody came in here and took Jessie, and I didn’t hear them and didn’t see them, so I’m never going to get in my bed ever again.”

Although her animated explanation failed to erase the detectives’ cynicism, it did prompt them to move on.

“Did you ever lie to your grandpa?” they asked.

“Lie to my grandpa?” Ruth said. They nodded. “I’m in my 70s and you’re asking me if I ever lied to my grandpa and he’s been dead since the 1950s?”

They were serious.

“I don’t think I ever lied to my grandpa.”

“You’re not telling us the truth.”

“Look,” Ruth said, “we knew better than to lie to grandpa.”

Just as Archie predicted, they made her take a polygraph.

She failed.

She had no idea how or why. All she knew was that the detectives said she put up “red flags.”

She sat up straight and said, “Tell me how I can help you.”

“Tell us—what did you lie to your grandfather about?”

She wanted to say, “Why don’t you ask him?”

Instead, she said, “Nothing.”

***

In the evening, when the detectives let Mark go, he felt relieved for a moment, until he realized that a second day had gone by without a sign of his daughter.

“Did y’all find any physical evidence?” he asked the detective as he drove me home.

“What do you think this is, CSI?” the detective said.

“It’s your job to find evidence,” Mark said. “Isn’t it?”

“We will.”

The detective had other things on his mind.

“Tell me about your girlfriends,” he said.

“What about them?” Mark said, wanting to strangle him.

“How many do you have?”

“Two or three.”

“Do they suck your dick?”

“Excuse me?” Mark said.

“You heard me,” he said.

“Yeah, dude.”

“What kind of sex do you have with them?”

“What kind?”

“That’s right.”

“Normal, dude. Very normal.”

“Ever hit them?”

“Hit them? Why would I do that?”

“Ever get freaky?”

What Mark really wanted to say was, “You’re freaking me out,” but he played along. He dismissed his growing doubts about the police.

“No, no,” Mark answered as he exited the police car, “just good, all-American sex.”

The sight of the fridge reminded him that he’d eaten nothing since Jessie disappeared. He toasted a slice of Wonder Bread, sprayed it with I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Butter, and took a bite. It lodged in his throat.

He gulped a glass of whole milk and tossed the toast.

He spent the night on his father’s La-Z-Boy, waiting for Jessie. He recalled her stealing raisins from his cereal and driving a bulldozer from his lap.

“Is God punishing me for my sins?” he thought. The mistakes of his younger days swirled through his mind.

He took out Jessie’s Halloween photo. He heard her cry.

***

When the sun pried open his eyelids, Mark saw his father standing in the kitchen, his arms dangling by his side like a teddy bear’s.

“Dad,” Mark said, “just tell me what you did with Jessie.”

Archie looked away.

“You listening to me?” Mark said.

He shook his head. Mark had no idea if he was indicating yes, no or something else altogether. He started screaming. “Damn, dad, just tell me! Tell me!”

Archie left the kitchen, his head bowed, his feet dragging.

Mark scurried outside. He kicked Archie’s Chevy Impala. “Let’s see if you ignore me now!”

Archie stayed away, even from the windows. The deputies, however, reacted like curious coyotes. As they started toward Mark, he ran to Cardinal. They followed him, their black batons and holstered pistols swinging.

They were closing in when Mark bumped into an unfamiliar-yet-friendly face. Stepping out of her front yard, a plump, middle-aged woman he had never seen before opened her arms to embrace him. “Be strong,” she whispered in his ear. The police hung back.

Mark darted into the woods, calling out Jessie’s name. He finally felt useful. He was out looking for Jessie. All he found, though, were broken beer bottles, corroded vehicle shells, and assorted pieces of trash.

When he came out, the detectives picked him up.

“What were you doing in there?” they asked.

“Looking for my daughter.”

Later, he saw them combing the woods for whatever “evidence” they thought he tried to dump.

***

When Mark returned home, he wanted everyone to leave him alone, so when his cellphone rang, he used it as a shield.

“Mark Lunsford? This is John Walsh.”

After Mark described the scene for Walsh, the “America’s Most Wanted” host advised him to start talking to the media.

When Mark let the newspaper and TV reporters know he was ready to speak, they indicated they wanted to interview his parents at the same time.

During the press conference, Mark shook, sobbed, and stuttered as he struggled to spit out semi-coherent answers. “I really need as much help as I can get right now,” he said. “I need my daughter home.”

He figured after that miserable performance, the media would just interview the sheriff, FBI agents, and their spokespersons, instead. But CNN’s Nancy the detective called and asked Mark to appear on her show that night.

Under different circumstances, Mark would’ve been nervous. He had no experience with public speaking, much less live television. But his eagerness to spread the word about Jessie chased away the butterflies. He held up his daughter’s photo and begged viewers to phone in tips. He instinctively realized he needed to deliver soundbites—and somehow, they started coming out of his mouth.

Next thing he knew, Larry King, Geraldo Rivera, Bill O’Reilly and others started asking him to appear on their shows.

***

The following day, after the police again knocked at his door but never checked his closet, Couey raped Jessie. Afterwards, he ordered them pizza.

That night, he tied Jessie’s hands with stereo wire and told her to get into a garbage bag so he could take her back home.

Once she got into the bag, he took her to the back yard, placed her in a hole he had dug in the ground, and sealed her fate with a shovel.

Jessie suffocated to death.

***

Three weeks after Jessie’s disappearance, the official search ended. To keep it going, Mark summoned volunteers through the media.

Mark only stopped suspecting his father when deputies shared what he viewed as their “ridiculous” theory: His parents gave Jessie to friends because of his “partying lifestyle.”

On March 17, 2005, the police apprehend Couey in Georgia for breaking his probation. He shocked them by confessing to raping and murdering Jessie. Two days later, Mark watched deputies dig his daughter’s corpse out of the covered hole in Couey’s back yard.

Mark embarked on a campaign to boost child-protection throughout the country. He addressed the Florida Legislature, which passed the Jessica Marie Lunsford Act. Among other provisions, it required schools run background checks on prospective employees. Mark then lobbied lawmakers in other states to wise up and crack down on sex offenders. It proved more challenging than he’d imagined.

He traveled to state capitals and Capitol Hill and appeared regularly on national TV shows to try to change the way Americans think about sex offenders and victimized children. He quit his truck-driving job to focus on his activism.

He put it on hold to sit through Couey’s trial in Miami. The jury convicted Couey on all four counts and recommended the death penalty.

After the trial, Mark started speaking publicly about the police’s mistakes, including muddling the bloodhounds’ scent trails by setting up the command center at the crime scene. He met with the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies, urging them to study the Jessica Lunsford case and change the way they search for missing children.

Mark joined the Surviving Parents Coalition as a founding member. As he geared up to join them on Capitol Hill, his 18-year-old son, Josh Lunsford, got arrested for fondling a 14-year-old girl. He was charged under Ohio’s just-enacted Jessica’s Law.

Radio talk show hosts and bloggers attacked Mark. They accused him of mismanaging the nonprofit he started. They said his drive to mandate minimum sentencing for sex offenders would shackle judges and prosecutors and turn the justice system into a one-size-fits-all mess.

Josh took a plea bargain for a lesser charge. But he still had to register as a sex offender and spend 10 days in jail.

Ohio had joined a growing number of states to pass Jessica’s Law. But Mark grew increasingly weary of his public status. He felt paranoid and anxious.

After convincing 46 states to pass Jessica’s Law, Mark got cancer and withdrew from public life. Going through chemotherapy, he lost his long hair and strength. But he never lost his yearning to find Jessie.

Boaz Dvir, award-winning filmmaker, tells the stories of ordinary people who transform into trailblazers. They include an average schoolteacher who emerges as a disruptive innovator and a national model (Class of Her Own); a World War II flight engineer who transforms into the leader of a secret operation to prevent a second Holocaust (A Wing and a Prayer); an uneducated truck driver who becomes a highly effective child-protection activist (Jessie’s Dad); and a French business consultant who sets out to kill former Nazi officer Klaus Barbie and ends up playing a pivotal role in one of history’s most daring hostage-rescue operations (Cojot).

Dvir’s critically acclaimed nonfiction book, “Saving Israel” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), follows the World War II aviators who risked their lives and freedom in 1947-49 to prevent what they viewed as a second Holocaust. The Washington Times book reviewer Joshua Sinai described this nonfiction book as a “fascinating and dramatic account filled with lots of new information about a crucially formative period.”

Dvir, a Penn State University associate professor of journalism, has written for many publications, including New York’s Newsday, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, The Miami Herald, the Tampa Bay Times, TIME magazine, the Las Vegas Sun, the Jerusalem Post, The Satirist, Scripps Howard’s Treasure Coast Newspapers, and the Times of Israel. He wrote a chapter for “Homegrown in Florida” (University Press of Florida, 2012), an anthology edited by William McKeen that includes childhood stories by Michael Connelly, Carl Hiaasen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Tom Petty.