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Caison talked the store clerk into giving her surveillance-camera footage taken during the group's visit and turned it over to the police. She engaged a pilot to do a flyover in search of the getaway car -- a white minivan with chrome bumpers -- and designed posters with pictures of the mother and kids as well as a description of their vehicle. A volunteer named Angela Hinckley took a few to hang up around town.Hinckley, a 32-year-old church secretary, was heading to a CUE board meeting that evening when she stopped for gas at a different store. Inside, a customer who smelled of beer gave her a friendly "Hello, ma'am." When Hinckley got back to her car, she nearly fainted -- there, at the pump, was the white van. Inside were the two children and their mother, who seemed to be waiting for the boozy man to return. Hinckley quickly called Caison, who confirmed the license plate number and patched her through to 911. The dispatcher asked Hinckley to follow the van and stay on the line. For 30 miles, through the busy streets of Wilmington and along I-40, Hinckley trailed the van, keeping a discreet distance and relaying her location so that police could set up a roadblock. "I'm thinking, I have children at home," Hinckley recalls. "What am I doing?" Finally, sirens wailed, and a phalanx of squad cars forced the van onto the shoulder. Sheriff's deputies arrested the man and handed the kids teddy bears that CUE distributes to law enforcement for such occasions.
Caison called the children's father, who was driving to North Carolina to meet with her. "He pulled over to the side of the road,"she says, "and he was just bawling."
In other instances, the pursuit is considerably more difficult. While conducting searches, Caison has had poisonous cottonmouth snakes lunge at her. She's been lacerated by thorns and threatened by the shotgun-wielding father of a kidnapping suspect. Sometimes finding a missing person can be a searingly painful emotional experience as well.
In January 2000, a nine-year-old boy named C.J. Wilkerson didn't come home after school one day in Wake Forest, North Carolina. His stepfather, Derrick Glover, was the last person known to have seen him, but Glover -- who'd been alone in the house with C.J. that morning -- was missing too. So was a car belonging to C.J.'s mother, Tracey. She had been married to Glover for just three months and had recently discovered that he was still married to someone else. The day before her son's disappearance, she had ordered Glover to move out. Perhaps, she thought, he had abducted C.J. to spite her.
Because Glover was C.J.'s legal guardian and had no history of violence, the police treated the matter as a domestic dispute. Six days later, Glover called Tracey from a gas station, saying he'd taken C.J. in order to hurt her as badly as he had been hurt. Investigators traced the call, and the next night they found Glover in a parking lot, near death from hypothermia and an overdose of sleeping pills. He was arrested on kidnapping charges but refused to discuss C.J.'s whereabouts. Over the next three weeks, as Glover held his silence, the police carried out massive searches, while C.J.'s relatives -- led by the boy's father, construction worker Clarence Wilkerson, Jr., who'd remained part of his life long after breaking up with Tracey -- conducted smaller ones of their own. Relations between the two sides deteriorated, each accusing the other of being uncooperative. Finally, social workers called in Caison.
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