I'm happy to see that Sheriff Gary Toelke of Franklin County, Missouri is one of the eight finalists for the yearly All Star award from "America's Most Wanted." His amazing 3 for 2 success record in retrieving abducted children rates whatever rewards are out there.
Voting is open and can be done once a day. I'm sure the families of Abby Woods, Ben Ownby, and Shawn Hornbeck have been adding to his tally. The on-the-ball Toelke has replaced the bumbling, incompetent Chief Moose as what springs to mind when I think of a local lawman in the national spotlight.
Also, check out the new look for Shawn's parents in this interview. It's amazing how nice you can look once you don't have to spend all your time and money searching for your missing kid anymore. That, and worry no longer gnawing on your guts like a weasel makes for a refreshed look.
Updates on the Ownby/Hornbeck case include a grand jury in Shawn's home county of Washington indicting his kidnapper Michael Devlin for charges in addition to previously-filed charges of kidnapping with a weapon. The additional crimes they found evidence for were sex crimes and attempted murder by suffocation. This means that after taking the boy to St. Louis after the kidnapping, he brought him back to the boy's home county, probably to the wooded property Devlin owns there. It's at that time that the attempted murder took place. By an account by a family friend on Facebook, the incident followed an escape attempt that concluded with Devlin suffocating the then 11-year-old boy into unconsciousness. The new indictments, combined with the indictments from Franklin and St. Louis Counties, and the Federal indictments, put Devlin's potential jail time now hovering somewhere around 2,000 years; to be followed-up, of course, by all eternity in Hell.
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