Adam Walsh Redrew the Boundary of Childhood

No, they never did.

But he won't do it again, right?

Don't ride farther than the Sweeneys' driveway.

Before the Internet. Before Nancy Grace made a career of crying over missing children she never knew. Before information dispersal became so efficient that unsolved mysteries became daily appearances in our inboxes. Have you seen? they ask. But we never have.

Before all that, for years and years it seemed, we had only Adam to think about. First he looked like a big brother, then a playmate. One day he appeared on television and he was suddenly just a baby. We'd grown up, he hadn't.

Later in the 1980s, another boy disappeared. Jacob Wetterling, 11, taken at gunpoint from a Minnesota park. Polly Klaas disappeared a few years after that, from her slumber party in California. Winona Ryder put up some money for her return.

Adam's severed head had been found just two weeks after his 1981 disappearance, but Polly's body lay undiscovered for two months, and Jacob was never found.

We remember adults talking hopefully immediately after each of those abductions, telling us reassuring things, saying that there was a good chance that Jacob and Polly were safe and sound and would be home soon.

We nodded. But underneath, by that point, we already knew all the bad things that could happen to children.