There were other stories of children who’d gone missing before Etan Patz. Sometimes even sensational cases. But this one was different. He wasn’t a famous person’s son, like Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. He was just a kid doing what kids did back then. Roaming freely on his street. And unlike the nearly 30 children who disappeared and were murdered during the same period in Atlanta, Patz had a father who is a photographer. Overnight, New York City was plastered with images of his sweet-faced little boy under the chilling word “Missing.” Eventually that face became the first to appear on a milk carton.

Two years later, when 6-year-old Adam Walsh was abducted and murdered in Florida, it seemed that children were disappearing everywhere. And with them, childhood itself. Walsh’s father, John Walsh, went on to found the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center, which eventually paved the way for – and merged with — the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. And he became the host of a show on the fledgling Fox network, a show dedicated to tracking down fugitives and closing unsolved cases. “America’s Most Wanted” would go on to become the network’s longest-running series.

In the years since Etan Patz never made it to school, we’ve endured other nightmarish tales of abduction and murder, like that of Polly Klaas, Leiby Kletzky and most recently Sierra LaMar. And surprising recoveries, like those of Jaycee Dugard and Elizabeth Smart. And through it all, the “parents’ worst nightmare” story has proven itself a reliably sensational basis for the evening news or Nancy Grace’s entire career. The truth is that a stranger abducting a child, horrifying as it is to consider, is a very rare event. But it taps into our absolute most primal dread — the wolf at the door, coming not for you but for a vulnerable child. Your child.

I was 13 when Etan Patz disappeared, little more than a child myself. I’d been walking to school unaccompanied since second grade.  I played in the streets with my friends during afternoons and summertimes, with a total, mindless freedom I can’t give my own children. Not that I really think somebody’s going to snatch them up, but that fear is always there, lurking. It’s a possibility that never once crossed my mind as a child, nor, do I imagine, my mother’s.

Hernandez’ arrest seems to promise a closure to his story, even though Patz’s own family have long believed another man, Jose Antonio Ramos, actually killed him. There’s the hope of answers, of justice. But there’s no real closure when a child is murdered. There’s no closure when his body is never found.

As my children grow, their borders expand. I let them go, exploring their own limits, as healthy, self-reliant children must. But I think about the face on the milk carton. I don’t know any mother who doesn’t. I instinctively hold my breath a little in the moments before my children come through the door after school, and I hug them tightly when they come home, safe and sound. And on this National Missing Children’s Day, I remember the little boy who didn’t.

Chapman is just one of a growing number of wrongfully convicted inmates who have been cleared thanks to criminal justice reforms and new DNA testing laws put in place over the last decade. But oftentimes the hardship doesn’t end there.

In 2007, the New York Times interviewed 137 former prisoners exonerated by modern DNA testing methods and found that half were “struggling — drifting from job to job, dependent on others for housing or battling deep emotional scars. More than two dozen ended up back in prison or addicted to drugs or alcohol.”

According to a 2009 report by the Innocence Project, an organization devoted to exonerating the wrongfully convicted, an astounding 40 percent of people exonerated by DNA testing have received zero compensation, due in part to the 23 states around the country that do not offer assistance to the wrongfully convicted. That leaves exonerees like Alan Northrop, who lost 17 years behind bars in the state of Washington, with little to no help in rebuilding their lives.

Even in states that do offer compensation, the amount is often woefully inadequate in helping exonerees reestablish themselves, though compensation varies by state ranging from $20,000 in New Hampshire regardless of the years spent behind bars to $80,000 per year of wrongful imprisonment in Texas.

Most state compensation statutes, however, include conditions for eligibility. Last year, Texas refused to compensate Anthony Graves the $1.4 million he would have received for the 18 years he spent on death row because the judge did not include the words “actual innocence” on the document ordering his release. Texas reversed its decision only after nationwide media attention led to a massive public outcry.

In North Carolina, the exonerated are eligible to receive $50,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment capping out at $750,000 but only if they are granted a pardon of innocence by the governor who is not required to give a reason for her decision. Chapman filed a pardon request in 2009 but a decision has yet to be made. The office of North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue did not respond to a request for comment.

Chapman’s experience is consistent with statistics from the Innocence Project that show it takes an average of three years to secure compensation. Meanwhile, the wrongfully imprisoned face an uphill battle almost immediately upon release, starting with where they will sleep that night and how they will get their next meal. Only 10 states even offer the kinds of services — housing, transportation, education, healthcare, job placement, etc. — crucial to helping exonerees transition back into society as free citizens.

Chapman was not notified he was going to be released until the day he was freed. On April 2, 2008, a guard told him to “Pack up” and 10 minutes later he was out the door.  No one asked if he had a ride or a place to stay.

Luckily he had help from Pamela Laughon, a college professor and chairwoman of the psychology department at the University of North Carolina, who spent eight years working on Chapman’s appeal as a court-appointed investigator. The two immediately clicked when they met and have been inseparable since.

Laughon told Salon she was shocked her client was released with just 10 minutes’ notice and no ride or money. “Years ago they used to let them out with at least a bus ticket,” she says. Nevertheless, the two had already decided that if and when Chapman was released he would live with Laughon until he got on his feet.

That meant Chapman would have to move to Asheville, N.C., which worked out for the best because he did not want to return to Hickory. “When I go back to Hickory the hair on my neck stands up,” says Chapman. The town reminds him of the trauma from his trial when family members testified against him and the time he spent incarcerated instead of watching his two young sons grow up.

Laughon was happy to help. “I had lawyers calling me from all over the state asking me if I was nuts. I spent eight years trying to get this man released. There was no way I was going to drop him off at a homeless shelter or the projects where he grew up,” she told Salon.

With Laughon’s assistance, Chapman set up a checking account, got a driver’s license for the first time, found housing, learned how to use a cellphone and more.

She helped him manage his finances, which quickly dwindled given that he hadn’t received an income in 15 years. Over a decade in prison led him to mishandle the money he did have because, Chapman says, “I was so unused to having things that I wanted to buy everything. I went shopping crazy.” It was moments like this that having Laughon’s support was crucial to Chapman’s ability to readjust to society as a free man.

Laughon also went on job interviews with him to help explain his background to prospective employers. “I’m a college professor and chair of a department, so I have some cred,” she says. “He’s a black guy in the south. If he told an employer ‘by the way I was wrongfully convicted and spent the last 15 years on death row,’ people would look at him like he was crazy and laugh.”

With help from one of Laughon’s students, Chapman found a job at a hotel a few weeks after his release. Four years later, he still works there, which he says is the longest he’s ever held a job.

Still, life is a struggle. Laughon argues that Chapman needs the compensation because, “He’s stuck in minimum wage, being paid the lowest legal amounts you can pay a human being.”

The pardon of innocence pending before Gov. Perdue is important to Chapman not just for the compensation but also because it would be an official declaration of innocence. Laughon calls his current predicament “a no man’s land between not being guilty or innocent.”

Rev. Dr. T. Anthony Spearman, a pastor in Hickory and third vice president of the North Carolina NAACP, points out that without an official declaration of innocence, “His family is still at odds with him, not knowing whether he’s a criminal or not. The stigma of being a felon is still on him.”

Spearman went on to compare wrongful conviction to a crime in and of itself. “To be incarcerated, locked up for 15 years wrongfully, is to me a criminal act and the state needs to make up for that,” he told Salon. “The government needs to go head over heals to make sure these men receive apologies and make sure that they can get on with their lives meaning compensation, education, whatever they need to survive.”

Jean Parks, an active member of Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation (her sister was murdered) and People of Faith Against the Death Penalty in Asheville, agrees that Chapman needs be pardoned but feels that monetary compensation for the wrongfully convicted does not go far enough. “Money should be a part of it to help cover for lost wages and lost opportunities but the state’s response should go beyond that,” says Parks. “It should include an official apology and some social services to help the person get reacclimated to society, find a job, and reestablish oneself as a productive member of the community.”

Laughon argues that states should provide a “life coach” to do for the exonerated what she did for Chapman, which she describes as “somebody that’s going to navigate all the many day-to-day things like managing a bank account, how paychecks will be taxed, and the other kinds of life skills you and I do second nature.” She believes her experience with Chapman serves as a successful case study of the “life coach” approach.

In the meantime, Chapman has an interview with the clemency office on May 30, a signal that Gov. Perdue will likely come to a decision soon. He is determined to stay positive no matter what the outcome and insists he has no bitterness toward the people who put him on death row. “I can forgive. That doesn’t mean I have to forget,” says Chapman.

He upholds that principle by traveling across the state when he can to speak about his exoneration and bring awareness to the flaws in the criminal justice system. He admits he was not aware of the death penalty before his conviction but “now that I do know, I’m going to do everything I can to put an end to it.”

Since his exoneration, Chapman has written a book called “Life After Death Row.” His next book, “Within These Walls,” will be released later this year and includes his diary entries from death row. He says, “It’s going to be a tear-jerker.” Chapman will also be featured in an upcoming episode of B.E.T.’s “Vindicated,” a documentary-style television show that tells the stories of exonerated prisoners.

If he receives compensation, Chapman hopes to open a bed and breakfast. He also dreams of one day opening a shelter for at-risk women.

Chapman acknowledges that none of this would be possible without someone like Laughon in his life. “When I first met Pam it was like meeting an old friend for the first time. To this day, she’s like my big sister,” he says. “She’s been there for me from start to finish. I don’t think I would have made it without her.”

One thing made a difference: The actions of Lucie’s father, Tim Blackman, who arrived in Tokyo to join his other daughter, Sophie, in publicizing the search and prodding the police. Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for the Times of London, covered the case as it unfolded, first over the course of several months while Lucie’s whereabouts and abductor remained unknown, and finally for the six years it took to try the man accused of killing her, Joji Obara. The book Parry wrote about the case, “People Who Eat Darkness,” is an exceptionally perceptive and nuanced look at a terrible crime, one that put nations, institutions and family members at odds, and often into bitter and toxic conflict.

Unlike Truman Capote, author of “In Cold Blood,” the most celebrated true crime narrative of all, Parry is in essence a reporter; this is no “nonfiction novel.” But like Capote, he’s less interested in dishing the eerie or lurid details than he is in exploring the penumbra of the crime, the complex factors that fed into it and the unpredictable effects it had on an ever-spreading network of people. The true crime genre has a (mostly well-earned) reputation for trashiness, but it fascinates for legitimate reasons, as well. Transgression, justice and punishment speak to the very heart of what a society is, how it holds its people together and how they decide who lies beyond the pale.

Because Lucie Blackman was a foreigner, and one employed in an industry that the Japanese view as disreputable, the Tokyo police were inclined to dismiss her disappearance. Bar hostesses get paid to talk to and flirt with customers, and they are expected to go on (paid) dinner dates with them outside the clubs where they work, but it’s an arrangement that usually stops short of actual sex. Nevertheless, the Japanese think of most foreign hostesses as irresponsible, drug-loving backpackers who might well run off without telling anyone or get mixed up with dangerous people. Whether or not a Westerner would call what bar hostesses do a part of the sex industry, for the Japanese, these women belong to that category of “bad” girl who can expect little help or concern from authorities should she get into serious trouble.

Crime is not what it was in Capote’s day. In addition to finding and building a case against the perpetrator — jobs for law enforcement authorities — there’s handling the media, a task usually left to the victim and his or her relatives. Lucie’s father proved, initially at least, to be a master at this. Tim could detach himself emotionally from the horror of his situation and strategize. He was able to capitalize on a G-8 summit meeting being held in Japan around the same time Lucie vanished and parlay it into the intervention of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair publicly asked Japan’s prime minister to front-burner the investigation, and met with Tim and his younger daughter Sophie while he was in Tokyo.

The police, who had been dragging their heels on Lucie’s disappearance, found this development (which made perfect sense in the political context of Britain) flabbergasting. Still, it worked: Lucie, who might have been written off as one of those “disposable” women of dubious virtue, was conclusively cast as an innocent girl, “naive perhaps, out of her depth,” but an adventurous daughter rather than a reckless slut. Tim was driving the narrative, as an electoral campaign manager might put it, and he was good at it. He liked talking to the press, even the tabloid press, and they liked him.

But if Tim was good at telling Lucie’s story, he was less successful at telling his own. Some of the most penetrating passages in “People Who Eat Darkness” concern what Parry refers to as the “script” expected from bereaved parents. Years later, Parry covered a press conference given by the father of another murdered girl and recognized in him “everything the world expected of a man in his situation: broken, helpless, turned inside out by loss.”

Tim, however, was composed, which aroused a formless popular suspicion regarding his sincerity. In similar cases, this uneasiness frequently takes the form of outside observers suddenly deciding that the parents might be implicated in their child’s disappearance or death. Tim, halfway around the world when Lucie vanished, was immune to that, but when he quarreled with the rich businessman funding the private search for his daughter, accusations of self-interest and even exploitation surfaced.

Lucie’s mother, Jane, on the other hand, behaved exactly as a grief-stricken mother is supposed to. In some respects, the truth about her parents’ failed marriage is as unknowable as the events of Lucie’s final hours. Unamicably divorced, Tim and Jane avoided even being in the same room together throughout the crisis. Was Jane, who seems to fall for every kind of supernatural hokum that crosses her path, pathologically vindictive, or was Tim as big a shit as she claimed? Just when you think you’ve made up your mind on that question, a new development comes along to knock you into the other camp.

As for the perpetrator himself, he remains something of a cipher to Parry, who was never able to interview him. Obsessively camera shy, Obara deftly avoided being properly photographed even after his arrest. He was clearly demented, as a long, self-justifying self-published book (disguised as the work of concerned supporters) amply demonstrates. Resolutely confident and unrepentant, Obara was also utterly unlike the vast majority of Japanese criminal defendants. (Parry explains that the justice system there depends almost completely on the ability of police investigators to shame suspects into confessing.) They simply didn’t know what to do with him. The Japanese blamed Obara’s recalcitrant behavior on his Korean ethnicity.

The Blackmans and Obara, Western-style players, descended on a criminal justice system unprepared to cope with them. “The inadequacy of its police force is one of the mysterious taboos of Japanese society,” Parry writes, “a subject that the media and politicians strain to avoid confronting, or even acknowledging.” The blunders of the police were many, but they could also be dogged investigators. Their real problem, according to Parry, is that they are good at dealing with “conventional Japanese criminals,” but when faced with the unexpected, they’re “sclerotic, unimaginative, prejudiced and procedure-bound.”

Obara behaved like a British or American criminal — taking charge of his defense, actively contesting the prosecutors, formulating a counternarrative to account for Lucie’s death. Watching how Japanese institutions responded to him, as well as to the Blackmans’ efforts to influence the investigation, proves fascinating. Since true crime, at its best, serves as a window on what a society cares about — how it constitutes not only what’s right and wrong but what’s sympathetic, reasonable, acceptable and important — the Obara trial was a most illuminating culture clash.

Parry doesn’t, however, forget what lies at the root of this drama: the death of a young woman who, whatever her doubts or flaws, had every reason to hope for a wonderful life. As the investigation would eventually reveal, this tragedy was eminently preventable. The people who tried to tip off the police about Obara were dismissed as not worth listening to. Let’s hope they’re not the only ones to learn from that mistake.

In 2006, Pearce told an interviewer on a video that emerged last year that he also considered Ready to be a “true patriot, to the real purpose, the limited purpose, to the Republican platform that we have.”

According to news reports, Wednesday’s victims included Ready’s apparent girlfriend, two others adults and a child, along with Ready’s apparent suicide, and was most likely connected to a domestic dispute.

While Ready, a neo-Nazi activist, might have made more headlines for his “U.S. Border Guard” and defiantly white supremacist tirades against immigrants from Mexico, his shadowy connections to Pearce and others in Arizona’s extremist political circles remain troubling.  Earlier this spring, Ready had announced his intention to run for sheriff of Pinal County, on the outskirts of Phoenix.

Ready possessed an undeniable showmanship and proclivity for attracting media attention to Arizona’s immigration crisis.  He had been court-martialed twice from the military, yet still managed to invoke the veteran tag until he was stripped of his role as master of ceremonies for a Veteran’s Day parade in Mesa. That didn’t stop Ready from making a failed bid for the Mesa City Council, or gaining a spot as a precinct committeeman for the Republican Party in 2008.

Thanks to Phoenix New Times’ Stephen Lemons’ indefatigable muckraking over several years, we know how Ready involved himself with the National Socialist Movement and nativist border groups while maintaining a relationship with Pearce. In fact, Pearce had taken part in Ready’s baptism in the Mormon Church and ordained him as an elder in the Melchizedek priesthood.

Despite the mounting evidence, Pearce denied association with Ready and emailed Lemons in response to the “true patriot” video in the winter of 2011: “No one could have known or guessed he would later become involved with radical hate groups.”

However, the Anti-Defamation League in Phoenix had already warned Pearce about Ready’s Nazi activities in 2006. A year later, local media began to report on Ready’s white supremacist affiliations after a legislative hearing. At an anti-immigrant rally in Phoenix in the summer of 2007, Pearce had watched admiringly as Ready wooed the crowd.

In the end, it was Ready who felt betrayed by Pearce’s political maneuvers.  “He’s supposed to be a lawman,” Ready charged in a taped interview with Phoenix videographer Dennis Gilman, after Pearce closed the door on their relationship due to all of the media attention, “but he has a pattern of criminality.”

“He is the worst kind of racist,” Ready referred to Pearce in a New Times interview in the fall of 2010. “One who will do anything to achieve power, then trample on our rights like a tyrant when he gets that power.

Ready added, “I christen him Grand Wizard of the AZ Senate!”

Ready’s connections are not just limited to Pearce. State legislator Sylvia Allen introduced a bill this spring for Arizona to fund and arm its own border militia, which was arguably modeled on Ready’s controversial militia antics that won national media-coverage.

As national debate raged over SB 1070 in the summer of 2010, Ready announced his militia initiative on his “white supremacist New Saxon site, inviting participants to “bring plenty of firearms and ammo.” Ready admonished: “Camouflage or earth tone clothing [is] preferred…Bandanas, balaclavas, or other identity concealing items are permissible and encouraged.” He declared: “This is the Minuteman Project on steroids! THE INVASION STOPS HERE!”

Two weeks ago, armed apparent militia activists in camouflage ambushed and killed two undocumented migrants in an incident that remains unsolved.

Regardless of any connection he may have had to that attack, Ready has brought another bitter chapter of death to the border state’s headlines.

Update: Russell Pearce has released a statement regarding his relationship with Ready. “I knew JT Ready, I did, as did many of us who have been involved in Mesa politics for a long time. When we first met JT he was fresh out of the Marine Corp and seemed like a decent person,” it reads, in part. “ At some point in time darkness took his life over, his heart changed, and he began to associate with the more despicable groups in society. They were intolerant and hateful and like so many who knew him from before, I was upset and disappointed at the choices he was making. I worked with others to have him removed from his local position within our Republican Party because there has never been and will never be any room in our Party or our lives for those preaching hatred.”

According to U.S. code, domestic terrorism occurs when the act is “dangerous to human life” and is “a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State” and “appear[s] to be intended … to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.” When discussing Grady in a press release, FBI Special Agent in Charge Teresa Carson’s comments suggest Grady’s alleged actions were indeed terrorism: “The FBI will always investigate and bring to justice anyone who resorts to violence as a means to harm, intimidate or prevent the public’s right to access reproductive health services.” The key word there is “intimidate,” which is one of the core characteristics of any terrorist act. Yet Grady has only been charged with arson and “intentionally damaging the property of a facility that provides reproductive health services.”

Erin Miller, project manager of the Global Terrorism Database, tells Salon that Grady’s attempted arson of the Planned Parenthood, especially in light of his comments to the investigating FBI agent, was clearly an act of domestic terrorism. According to the criminal complaint issued by the FBI, Grady told the agent he “lit up the clinic,” while making clear “he is pro-life, believes in God and disapproves of the activities taking place at the clinic.”

Assistant United States Attorney William Roach, whose office is prosecuting the case, says Grady’s alleged attack did not rise to the level of domestic terrorism, primarily because Grady torched an unoccupied room in an empty building. Also, he says it’s not his responsibility to determine Grady’s motivation for the alleged attack, which he says will come out in front of the jury. “Domestic terrorism is a term of art,” he explains. And regardless of whether you consider Grady’s alleged actions domestic terrorism, according to Roach, he is facing serious charges that could lead to five to 20 years behind bars.

The choice not to charge Grady as a terrorist, however, shows a clear double-standard, according to critics — one that suggests terrorist crimes only occur when they are the product of alien ideologies that make mainstream Americans uncomfortable. This in turn provides public support, or at least indifference, for using controversial counterterrorism techniques — such as agent provocateurs, limitless surveillance without a criminal predicate, and harsh sentences — to launch fishing expeditions and to win lengthy prison sentences for individuals who never harmed or killed anyone and never intended too.

“Ultimately the facts will emerge in the court of public law, not public opinion,” says Alejandro Beutel, government and policy analyst for the Muslim Public Affairs Council. “Nevertheless, as a community that is frequently under the public microscope and subject to broad-brushed surveillance over national security issues, we continue to be closely monitoring this incident and how it is treated by public officials and reporting outlets.”

Journalist Will Potter, the author of “Green Is the New Red,” which explores how the war on terrorism has been used to stifle dissent and label nonviolent civil disobedience as terrorism, says the perfect illustration of this double standard is the case of Eric McDavid. McDavid was labeled an “eco-terrorist” by the FBI and sentenced to nearly 20 years in federal prison in May 2008 after the judge applied a terrorism enhancement to his sentence. McDavid was convicted of conspiring to destroy the Nimbus Dam and other targets with two co-conspirators. His defense attorney, however, argues he was entrapped by an FBI informant that he had developed a crush on.

During the trial, jurors were told that “Anna,” the ringleader of the group McDavid belonged to, was not a government agent, thereby precluding them from considering entrapment a legitimate defense for McDavid. After the trial, two jurors wrote letters to the judge expressing outrage when they learned Anna was indeed a government agent.

“My opinion of the case is that the FBI agents were an ‘embarrassment’ by their lack of knowledge of FBI procedures and the way they handled the investigation, specifically by allowing this case to develop the way it did using Anna and providing all of the essential tools for the group; the cabin, the money, the idea, the books, everything, and by letting Anna ‘string Eric along’ when she should have terminated the relationship clearly with him; that the main witness ‘Anna’ was not a credible witness at all,” wrote juror Diane Bennett. Later on in the same letter, Bennett added, “we would have found that he was entrapped” if the jurors knew Anna was a government agent.

Mike German, a former undercover FBI agent and now senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, notes that there is no way the FBI would use such aggressive tactics to catch antiabortion extremists, even though they present a violent domestic terrorism threat. Usually, tactics such as these are used almost exclusively against Muslim-Americans. “[The ACLU has] evidence that the FBI has sent informants with criminal records into Muslim religious communities, not with a specific focus on particular suspects but rather to spy broadly on the community,” German explains. “If the government was doing the same thing in Christian churches, I think there would be a broader concern about that tactic.” (German was clear to note that this doesn’t mean such FBI tactics need to be used against right-wing groups and antiabortion groups out of some misplaced sense of fairness. Rather, these counterterrorism techniques need to be used selectively and only when the FBI has a specific target and a reasonable basis for suspicion.)

Outside of a notion of equal protection under the law, there are legitimate public safety concerns raised by misdiagnosing where the real domestic terrorism threat lies, says German. Often times, the FBI categorizes instances of vandalism, such as activists breaking windows and spray-painting “Animal Liberation Front” or “Earth Liberation Front” on things, as terrorist acts when more violent instances of right-wing or antiabortion terrorism do not get reflected in the official statistics.

“Within the last 10 years, the FBI has repeatedly said that the environmental terrorism is the No. 1 domestic threat,” he says.  “If you look at the numbers they count, it excludes similar conduct that wasn’t charged to terrorism on the right-wing side.”

German also notes that the FBI has been criticized in the past by its own inspector general for not keeping accurate terrorism-related statistics. “Congress and the Department management also use terrorism-related statistics to make operational and funding decisions for Department counterterrorism activities, and to support the Department’s annual budget requests,” the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General stated in a February 2007 report. “For these and other reasons, it is essential that the Department report accurate terrorism-related statistics.”

That, however, isn’t happening. And by misrepresenting where the true terrorist threat resides in the United States, warns German, the FBI is putting its thumb on the scale and raising legitimate questions as to whether the FBI invests its counterterrorism resources properly. The Grady case only amplifies these concerns.