The Whole Truth (20 page)

When Kim first heard the name of the escaped convict in Florida, she only thought he must have some indirect connection to the disappearance of her brother. Her family had always thought of it as an abduction, but the truth was that they didn't know what had happened to Johnnie. One minute he was playing in the front yard, and the next minute he wasn't. It seemed impossible that he could have wandered off, fallen in a well, or entered an empty house somewhere and never been found. But they didn't know.

Amazingly, it didn't even occur to Kim that the man calling himself by that long-ago name might be her brother.

If there was any connection at all, she merely thought this might be the fiend who had wrecked their lives. Later, she realized the man they showed on the television was too young to be the kidnapper. But it still didn't penetrate into her heart or mind that it might be Johnnie himself, because the man looked far younger than the twenty-eight years of age that John would be by now.

"The truth," she admitted later, "was terribly hard for me to grasp. I don't know why, exactly. I just think maybe there was a part of my mind that refused to take in the possibility that the strange-looking man I saw, this awful person who had maybe murdered a little girl, that he could be my brother. No. I just. . . no."

It was not so difficult for her mother to comprehend.

"I knew," Katherine Kepler would say later. "It was my son." She knew it the minute she heard Kim say that name. "There wasn't any logic to it. I just knew. I felt the strangest surge of hope and at the same time this sickening dread, like I was going to throw up. It felt like going up on a roller coaster and coming down, all at once. I was overwhelmed. Actually, I did throw up, if you want to know. I was shaking and crying. But I knew!"

Kim literally ran to her mother's house, from where she called her siblings. She also called Jack Lawrence, a deputy now retired from the Johnson County Sheriffs Department. He had kept in touch with the Keplers all those years, never entirely giving up on finding Johnnie. The Keplers loved Jack, and knew his wife and kids, and they treated him like family.

Kim told the retired deputy what she had just heard on TV. He promised to get hold of the Bahia Beach P.D. immediately and find out everything he could, and then he'd get right back to them.

"How's your mother?" he asked Kim, and she could hear the excitement and concern mixed in his deep voice.

Kim told him that Katherine was, at that moment, a mess— throwing up in the bathroom and weeping when she came out of it—and that the only thing that would help her now was to get more information.

He promised he would do that immediately.

Unfortunately, that would prove to be impossible at that time, because he couldn't get anybody official in Florida to pay any attention to him.

How could the Keplers be sure?

In the two days that passed before anybody in Florida paid any attention to them, the family worked frantically on their own trying to find out if Raymond Raintree was their lost boy.

Kim Kepler had heard of a video-imaging laboratory at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Arlington, Virginia. The NCMEC, as it is known internationally, hadn't even existed when her brother disappeared. Eventually, the organization made it possible for anyone to search their database, at no charge, simply by logging on to the NCMEC Web site and entering descriptive information about a missing child or an abductor. Johnnie Kepler had been listed with NCMEC for many years. Now technicians there were using a poignant, powerful collaboration between technology and family photographs to age-progress pictures of missing children.

When Kim called there, they told her to put together full-frontal photographs of Johnnie, along with photos of family members at the same age Johnnie would be now if he were still alive.

"Do you have videotapes of him?" they asked her, gently.

"No," she had to tell them.

The very Christmas before Johnnie disappeared, their father had thought about giving their mother a video camera as a Christmas gift. He finally decided not to do it, because he was the one who really wanted it. It wouldn't be right, Fred Kepler had told the older children. It would be like their mother giving him the waffle iron that she wanted. Later, everybody in the family wished he had been as selfish as he usually was. But because Fred Kepler had an uncharacteristic burst of thoughtfulness that Christmas, there were no videotapes of Johnnie, no moving pictures of the little boy running, playing, eating, laughing, being held, taking a bath, sleeping. There were only still photos. One of them was a big, clear studio shot, an eight-by-ten picture in full color, showing Johnnie's little grin, his gray-blue eyes, his wild shock of brown hair.

"Bring it," Kim was told, for her plan was to go there.

Within less than a day, Kim was in Arlington, and she added to the photos as thorough a description of her brother as she could. She also took with her every other good picture of her brother she could find, as well as a studio picture of herself at twenty-eight and several snapshots of her older brother and even their parents at the same approximate age. In addition, she copied off the Internet some newspaper and magazine photographs of the suspect in Florida.

"I have to go myself," she explained to her siblings. "I can't put this precious material in a FedEx box and send it away. I have to keep my hands or my eyes on it, because if anything happened to it, it would kill Mom."

Over the years, many well-intentioned people had volunteered to get copies made of those precious photos, but Katherine Kepler would never give permission. She was too afraid that something would happen to damage or destroy them. She wouldn't take the chance. Except for a lock of hair from his first cut, and a baby tooth and his toys, they were all she had of her youngest child.

But she let her daughter hand carry them to Virginia.

Katherine Kepler didn't let Kim know at the time, that she burst into sobs the minute the pictures left her possession for the first time. Nor did Katherine admit to her other daughter and her son that she was in a lather of anxiety until Kim returned and placed them whole and undamaged in her hands again.

"If I had known that," Kim said, "I might not have had the heart or the courage to go away with them."

At the lab, the first time they tried the enhancement, Kim and the technician saw a man's face emerge. It looked a lot like her older brother, but not at all like Ray Raintree. This man in the enhancement was too full-faced, too healthy-looking, and he looked all of twenty-eight, which Ray didn't.

In a moment of tragic inspiration, Kim blurted to the technician at the keyboard, "What if nobody had loved him in all this time? What if he'd been neglected and underfed? Would he look any different than that?"

The technician tapped his keys again.

The photograph on the monitor began to melt and shift and change. The face became thinner and somehow smaller. The whole figure seemed to shrink. And there, suddenly, was a picture of a man who was the spitting image of "Raymond Raintree."

Kim cried on the plane, all the way back home, with old and new photographs in the padded envelope on her lap. She half-dreaded showing her mom.

Katherine's child was alive.

But her child was a monster.

Katherine Kepler was the exact same weight she had been on the day her son disappeared: 135 pounds on a small-boned five foot five inches. It was, on that day as it was to this, ten pounds more than she would like to have weighed. She also had the exact same hair style and color as she'd had back then in 1976: a streaked blond Dorothy Hamill "wedge" cut that was all the rage back then. Fortunately, it was a classic style that looked good anytime, but that's not why Katherine kept her hair fixed that way, or why she maintained her body weight at ten pounds over her personal limit.

"I wanted John to be able to recognize me," she explained. "If he had any memories of me, it would be when I was thirty-two years old, with this haircut." She touched the neat "do." "And with this body." She indicated the figure she kept looking youthful by exercising. With middle age had come the struggle to keep those extra ten pounds from becoming twenty. But with dieting and aerobic classes, she had managed to do it.

"And this face," she said.

At the relatively young age of fifty-four, Katherine had already had two partial face-lifts, which were her desperate attempt to keep the face her vanished child had known and loved. It was a good, open midwestern face with lips that naturally lifted up in a pleasant expression, and with a narrow nose and blue eyes, and dainty chin and ears and a wide brow. As a result of the surgeries, Katherine Kepler still looked remarkably like the younger woman in photographs with her youngest son.

If Johnnie Kepler, who would now be twenty-eight years old, ever saw her again, she hoped the sight would trigger memories of the first and most loving face he had ever seen.

"When he was born," Katherine remembered, "he had his eyes all squinched up and he was crying. Until they gave him to me. Instantly, like a miracle, he stopped crying. He popped open his eyes and I looked at him and he looked back at me. I was literally the very first person he ever saw on this earth."

Twenty-seven years later, his mother was determined also to be the last person her son would ever see, if that was how fate played itself out. He had come into this world seeing love in her eyes, and he would leave it, seeing the love that was still there for him.

In her heart of hearts, she knew that he might stare at her then as he had first gazed at her when he was born: as a stranger who looked nice, and somehow familiar.

When Kim showed her mother the age-progression of Johnnie's picture, Katherine Kepler didn't hesitate for one moment. She took one look, and pressed it to her breast. "This is my beloved son, and I would give my life for him."

Kim's brother said sarcastically, where their mother couldn't hear, that they probably wouldn't have to give their lives, just nearly everything else they owned, if they had to pay his legal fees. "I want to see more evidence than this photo," he told his sisters. "DNA. Fingerprints."

Hearing that, Kim thought that even with all that, Johnnie might never know them, never recognize them, or call them his own. And even if he did, did they really want him back now? For her mother the answer to that was easy, a natural yes. But for his angry brother, who didn't want to have to claim a killer, and for his confused sisters, the answers weren't easy at all.

Once they had the photo confirmation, Katherine Kepler told herself and warned her children that Johnnie probably wouldn't remember her, or any of them. He had been so young and it had been so long ago and so many terrible things must have happened to him in the intervening years. Or else, why would he have turned out this way?

She told them this to protect them, and herself.

There exists scientific research that suggests physiological support for the validity of Katherine's ideas. Both long-and short-term memory are associated with twin organs in the brain called hypocampi. The normal human brain has a left hypocampus and a right hypocampus. Certain studies have shown a dramatic shrinkage of the hypocampi in Vietnam veterans suffering from the syndrome known as post-traumatic stress. In those vets, the shrinkage has been demonstrated to be as much as twenty-six percent of the total volume of the hypocampi, resulting in long-term amnesia and difficulty with short-term memory. Shrinkage has also been observed in victims of severe child abuse. It is suggested this phenomenon might account for the fact that many victims of child abuse cannot seem to recall large chunks of their childhood. Those blocks of memories are just gone, the victims claim; and now science is saying that might be literally true, that years might be lost in the shrinkage of a sensitive and important organ of the brain. It appears that severe stress of any sort can affect memory.

If those studies are accurate, there could be a real, physiological reason why the escaped murderer in Florida might not ever be able to recall a former identity. Ray Rain tree truly might not remember being Johnnie Kepler. Katherine fully expected to be proven to be correct; her son, if this was her son, might never remember or acknowledge her. That's what her brain said. Her heart spoke a different language, and it said, "Remember me."

But even if "Raymond Raintree" claimed to recall an identity as Johnnie Kepler, how were they to prove whether or not he was?

"Thank God for modern science," Jack Lawrence commented to the grown Kepler children. "And for sentimental mothers who save their children's baby teeth, and locks of their babies' hair."

Thank God, in other words, for DNA typing.

The shortest path to the point of establishing a person's identity through so-called DNA typing, or profiling, is to take DNA from his mother and DNA from his father, and compare them to his DNA. If there are certain similarities between his DNA and theirs, then he is probably the child of those two people. (There is no such thing as a perfect "match" in DNA profiling, there are only statistical probabilities. It is not like fingerprinting, where prints can be exactly matched. There is not, in fact, a standard definition of what is a "match" in DNA typing. As the O. J. Simpson case suggested, it is not yet the precise science many people think it is, and much depends on the reliability of the lab and the technicians performing the work.) In this case, obtaining DNA from the mother would be easy, but nobody knew if Johnnie's dad was even still alive, much less where he was.

It would probably be enough, however, to find out if the man named Ray Raintree was linked to Katherine Kepler through DNA. In addition, Katherine had saved a lock of John's hair from his first trim, when he accompanied his father to a barbershop when he was only eleven months old. She also had one of his baby teeth, so there was, at least in theory, plenty of biological material available for DNA testing. If Ray Raintree carried her DNA and if his own DNA "matched" that of the teeth and the hair, then he would certainly be identified as Johnnie Kepler.