Shawn Hornbeck

Case background and investigation

Shawn Hornbeck was 11 years old when he disappeared on October 6, 2002, while riding his bicycle near his home in Richwoods, a rural community in Washington County, Missouri. According to an account published by the Alcatraz East Crime Museum, he was on his way to a friend's house when a man struck his bike with a pickup truck and took him. NBC News later reported that prosecutors said the boy had been taken at gunpoint.

For more than four years there was no public trace of him. According to the accounts given in court and summarized by NBC News, he was living in the St. Louis-area apartment of Michael J. Devlin, where he was repeatedly abused and threatened.

The case broke open because of a second abduction. On January 8, 2007, 13-year-old Ben Ownby was abducted in Franklin County. A schoolmate saw a white pickup truck leaving the area and described it to police. Investigators traced a truck matching that description to Devlin, and on January 12, 2007, officers found both Ben Ownby and Shawn Hornbeck alive in his apartment. Shawn was then 15.

Devlin was charged in several jurisdictions. A federal grand jury indicted him on March 1, 2007, on counts of producing child pornography and transporting a minor across state lines, according to Wikipedia's summary of the case. In October 2007 he resolved all of the cases with guilty pleas over three days. NBC News reported that he received a life sentence in Franklin County on October 8 for the Ownby kidnapping, three life sentences plus 60 years in Washington County on October 9 for the crimes against Shawn Hornbeck, and 18 consecutive life sentences in St. Louis County after pleading guilty to 71 counts, including two of kidnapping and 69 of forcible sodomy. He pleaded guilty to the six federal counts the following day and was later sentenced to an additional 170 years in federal court.

Published totals for the number of life terms differ from source to source, depending on how concurrent and consecutive sentences are counted, but every account agrees that Devlin has no realistic prospect of release. According to Wikipedia, he was moved to Crossroads Correctional Center in Cameron, Missouri, in January 2008, and survived a stabbing by another inmate there in April 2011.

Because Shawn Hornbeck was recovered alive and the person responsible admitted guilt in court, the case is considered resolved. It is often cited in discussions of long-term missing children because he was found so long after he vanished, and only because of a witness's description of a vehicle in an unrelated abduction.