Public Enemies by John Walsh

Author:John Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC035000
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2002-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

5

THE FUGITIVE WHO CAME TO DINNER

I shouldn’t be surprised by anything at America’s Most Wanted anymore. After fourteen years, just about every bizarre thing that could happen, has.

Case in point: a few years back, a husband and wife from a small Florida town were on their way to visit Washington, D.C. They managed to get our publicity director, Avery Mann, on the phone and told him they were huge fans of the show, that they were seniors, and that their greatest wish would be to come tour America’s Most Wanted. Something they said must have hit home with Avery, because he decided to give them the rare chance to visit the hotline in our Crime Center on a Saturday night while tips were coming in.

The couple were in their sixties, but they looked like a couple of kids at Disneyland as they came into the studio. The show was on, and the place was abuzz with activity, but the couple managed to corral one of the cops working a case—to ask him who he was chasing that night.

By sheer coincidence, the cop was from the same small town in Florida as the vacationing couple. Neither could believe it, and they spent a few minutes playing who-do-you-know-back-home.

Finally, the cop got around to telling them about the case he was working on—an urgent case we had just inserted in the show a few days earlier. A child had been abducted, and he had an artist’s sketch of the kidnapper; there was good indication we could bring the child home safe and sound if we could find the abductor that evening.

The woman stared at the sketch. Something about it seemed familiar.

Very familiar.

And then it hit her.

It was her brother.

It turns out that the woman’s brother, to whom she hadn’t spoken in years, had a history of mental problems. Her identification of the sketch as being her brother turned out, indeed, to solve the case: her brother was, in fact, the kidnapper, and if it weren’t for that one-in-ten-million encounter at our hotline between a vacationing couple from a small town and a cop on a missing child case, we might never have solved it.

That was, by far, the strangest coincidence I’d ever encountered in all my years at America’s Most Wanted.

That is, until the case of Asgar Ali.

• • •

IN FEBRUARY OF 2000, Fox tried a little experiment: for publicity, they did a crossover between a reality show and a fiction show—X-Files and COPS. It was kind of cute, but it got us to thinking: why not team up the two shows that really could work together? Why not have America’s Most Wanted and COPS team up to clean up one town? Someone pitched the idea to the network: first John Walsh rides with the cops on COPS as they take down whatever bad guys they can find, and then America’s Most Wanted goes on remote from the same town to hunt down the fugitives they missed. It was a simple idea, and a fun one—but also one that could do some good—and the network said, go for it.

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