Monster Next Door?

"When the police came, they talked to Devlin and the son — who turned out not to be the son," says Emanuel, referring to the boy he now knows is Shawn Hornbeck. "They talked to the police. If the cops would have investigated across the board, they would have had him."

The parking-spot incident wasn't the first contact between Kirkwood police officers and Shawn Hornbeck. On August 15, 2003, Shawn contacted the department to report that his bike had been stolen. Introducing himself as "Shawn Devlin," the boy apparently gave officers no indication that he was in fact Shawn Hornbeck and had been abducted ten months earlier.

Shawn encountered police once again on September 29 of last year. This time a Glendale officer stopped the boy as he rode his bike just before midnight. According to the police report, Shawn again gave his name as "Shawn Devlin."

To the officers who encountered him and the neighbors who saw him daily, Shawn was merely the sullen son of a single dad. Shawn's friend Tony Douglas told Newsweek that Shawn had told him that his mother had died in a drunk-driving accident. Tony added that his friend began spending holidays with the Douglas family, explaining that he did not like his father's (Devlin's) family.

"Shawn never smiled," says neighbor Krista Jones. "When I'd walk by, he'd be in there playing Nintendo or whatever. He seemed normal, but when I'd smile just to be friendly, he'd just get a mean look on his face. He kind of kept to himself, like he didn't want anyone to talk to him. It makes me think that the guy [Michael Devlin] brainwashed him."

Speaking for the first time publicly on The Oprah Winfrey Show last week, Shawn told the talk-show host that he spent most of his days in captivity sleeping, watching television and playing video games. He said that when people asked if he was in school, he told them he was home-schooled.

"We just made a story and kept the story the same," he told Winfrey. "It was always 'home-schooled.'"

"You were home-schooled?" Winfrey asked.

"No," replied Shawn. "That was the story."

Shawn's grandmother, Anna Quinn of St. Louis, later told the Associated Press that Shawn told his family his captor would at times wake him every 45 minutes.

"Think to yourself when you don't get enough sleep," Quinn said. "He had to do something to get his cooperation."

During a segment of her show when she spoke with Shawn's parents, Craig and Pam Akers, without their son present, Winfrey said: "OK, I'm going to 'go there' and ask you what do you think happened: Do you think that he was sexually abused?"

Seated on a couch across from Winfrey, the Akerses both nodded yes.

"Do you think that he was tortured?" Winfrey continued.

"That I do not know yet," Pam Akers replied.

"There is more than one kind of torture. There's mental torture, there's physical torture," Craig Akers put in. "I have no doubt that mentally he's not the same boy he was."

Still, by all accounts, Shawn was afforded certain freedoms during his four years of alleged captivity. He was permitted to ride his bicycle around the neighborhood. Neighbors report that they saw him driving Devlin's truck on occasion. He had access to a cell phone, television, video games and the Internet.

He went so far as to post a message on the Web site his parents created to help find him. "How long are you going to look for your son?" he posted, signing his name "Shawn Devlin."

Neighbors say Shawn had a friend who slept over occasionally. In recent months they'd seen him holding hands with a girlfriend — a freshman at Visitation Academy, a Catholic high school for girls in west St. Louis County. On December 6, Shawn is said to have accompanied her to a school dance. (School officials say they're uncertain whether Shawn attended the dance.)

Still, Shawn told Winfrey he "prayed that one day my parents would find me and I'd be united."

Winfrey told viewers during the show that Shawn had told her off-camera that he had been too "terrified" to attempt an escape.

"There has to be something held over his head," Craig Akers told Winfrey. "There's no way in the world that if he was able to do whatever he wanted to do, and could've walked away at any moment — there's no doubt in my mind that he would have [come home]."

Experts have cited the so-called Stockholm Syndrome, in which a captive comes to identify with his captor, and hypothesized that Shawn was paralyzed by fear.

Washington County Sheriff Kevin Schroeder puts it in plainer terms:

"This is something that is so bizarre that the normal individual cannot grasp what this then-eleven-year-old boy went through," Schroeder says. "There is no way that anybody can project onto Shawn what he should have, could have or would have done. Nobody knows. Nobody was in that situation."