Good Reads: Twilight of Innocence: The Disappearance of Beverly Potts

Being a self-confessed true crime junkie, it's no surprise that when I came across a website called The Charley Project a few years ago, I was hooked. It's a detailed catalog of people gone missing in the United States dating all the way back to 1910. There are almost 9,000 missing people profiled there: all of them tragic, some of them quite mysterious.

I've never found any of them to be quite so mysterious (or quite so haunting to me) as that of 10 year old Beverly Potts, who disappeared just yards from her home in a crowded park back in 1951. Beverly was a lovely, and by all accounts, extremely shy girl. She was minutes from home, having enjoyed a talent show in the park with thousands of her neighbors. There have been many hoaxes over the decades but no solid leads and no clear answer to what happened to her.

Recently I read Twilight of Innocence: The Disappearance of Beverly Potts by James Jessen Badal. A synopsis by Amazon reviewer MLPlayfair has this to say:

"Twilight of Innocence: The Disappearance of Beverly Potts" by James Jessen Badal is the spellbinding account of a community's search for a 10-year-old girl who vanished without a trace less than a block from her Cleveland home.

Born in 1941, Beverly Potts lived with her family in a quiet Cleveland suburb. On a summer evening in August 1951, she walked to a park just a few doors from home to see a local talent show with her best friend, Patsy. Her disappearance later that night led to what Badal calls "the largest manhunt in Cleveland history" and raised "the chilling possibility that she had been grabbed literally within sight of the family house."

Badal investigated the case by sifting through old newspapers and police files. He describes the dynamic interaction among the three vying newspapers in Cleveland -- an intriguing story in itself -- along with the city's political machinations. The author retraces the shy girl's activities just before she disappeared and provides an exacting timeline of events. He talks about the public's reaction to the crime: Many helped in the search while crowds gathered in front of the family home to get a glimpse of the "gloomy house where tragedy struck."

The authorities tracked down all known sex offenders, drained a pond, sent divers into Lake Erie, did flyovers in planes and led basement-to-attic searches. They followed up on cryptic messages and false leads and even took calls from psychics and extortionists. As Badal says, the hoaxes ranged "from the merely stupid to the heartlessly cruel."

Decades after the crime, police were still investigating, interviewing serial killers and molesters. Even today there are a lot more questions than answers. The ordeal was so horrendous for Beverly's mother that she "died, quite literally of grief, in 1956," says Badal.

We tend to think of the abduction of children as a modern phenomenon, forgetting that it's always been a terrifying fact of life. 

MLPlayfair has written an excellent synopsis and I highly recommend this book for true-crime mystery junkies. The only thing I didn't like about this book is certainly not the author's fault: it doesn't solve the crime. We are left hanging, as folks have been for nearly 60 years now, as to Beverly's fate. How tragic.