It was January 13th, 1996 in Arlington, Texas. Nine-year-old Amber Hagerman and her five-year-old brother Ricky were spending some time at their grandparents’ house on a Sunday afternoon when they decided to take a bike ride around the neighborhood. They set out at about three p.m., heading for the parking lot of an abandoned Winn-Dixie grocery store, where some local kids had set up a wooden bike ramp.
Amber and Ricky did a few jumps on their bikes, and then Ricky decided he was ready to head back home. Amber wanted to stay a little longer, so she told him to go ahead home without her. Their grandparents’ house was only a couple of blocks away.
Minutes after Ricky left the parking lot, Jim Kevil, a seventy-eight-year-old retiree who lived nearby, saw Amber riding her bike up and down in the parking lot while he was working in his backyard. Then, quite suddenly, he saw a dark blue or black American-made pickup truck pull up alongside the child. The man in the truck jumped out, pulled Amber off her bike, and stuffed her into the cab of the vehicle before peeling out. Amber screamed briefly and kicked at her attacker, but she was no match for him.
Jim Kevil immediately phoned the police, describing the truck as well as the kidnapper, who he said was a white or Hispanic male between the ages of twenty-five and forty, with a medium build and standing less than six feet tall.
Authorities arrived on the scene immediately, even before Amber’s grandparents were aware that she had been taken. When her grandfather Jimmie Whitson got to the parking lot, having become worried when Ricky had come home without his sister, he was met with swarms of police cars and officers. A search fanned out from there.
It turned out that no one other than Jim Kevil had seen the girl being abducted, or at least were not willing to come forward and claim they had. There was a busy laundromat in the same parking lot as the former grocery store, but many of the customers were suspected to be in the United States illegally, and were perhaps reluctant to come forward and expose themselves to law enforcement. One witness did say they had seen a dark-colored pickup parked in front of the laundromat that afternoon, but other than this one nebulous lead, investigators were left with nothing at all to go on.
Amber’s distraught parents, Donna and Richard, took to the media to beg the kidnapper to return their little girl unharmed, but all of their pleas seemingly fell on deaf ears. And sadly, four days after she went missing, Amber Hagerman would be found dead.
On January 17th, a man out walking his dog near the Forest Hill apartment complex, less than five miles away from the parking lot from which Amber was abducted, saw the child’s body lying in a creek bed. She was nude except for one sock, and her throat had been slashed.
After an autopsy was performed, the coroner determined that Amber had been held for two days prior to her murder. She had been sexually assaulted multiple times while in captivity. But because her remains were found in a creek, any further potential evidence had been washed away by the water.
Though police investigated thousands of leads and attempted to track down the man in the dark pickup truck who had taken the girl, no suspect was ever identified, and the case is still unsolved, more than a quarter century later.
One positive development did emerge from the horrific crime shortly afterward, however. Only a few days following the funeral of Amber Hagerman, a woman named Diana Simone, who was a mother herself but did not know the Hagerman family personally, called a radio station in Dallas and asked them why the public was immediately alerted when dangerous weather was approaching, but not when a child was abducted. She pointed out that had locals in the surrounding area been informed of Amber’s kidnapping and told the type of vehicle and perpetrator to look for, then perhaps someone could have intervened before Amber was killed.
The idea quickly spread through the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and eventually went national, then international; at this writing, more than twenty countries besides the United States also utilize this child abduction alert system, called the AMBER Alert in Amber Hagerman’s honor. The system sends immediate notifications to the cell phones of all individuals in the area of the kidnapping, along with a description of the child, the perpetrator if known, and the vehicle. The same alert is also posted on electronic billboards on all nearby highways. To date, the AMBER Alert system is estimated to have recovered nearly nine-hundred abducted or endangered children.
Crime Immemorial 