Ghost Boat

Kelley spent the next two years caring for the baby. Jake realized his dream when his grandfather gave him $220,000 to buy and refurbish a 47-foot Buddy Davis yacht located in North Carolina. In late September 2006, while Jake began installing $30,000 of fishing equipment on the boat, Kelley went to St. Louis to visit her mother. She was pregnant again.

When the young woman arrived in St. Louis, she was severely dehydrated and had to be hospitalized briefly. She flew back to Miami in early October. A few days later, she called her mom. "Jake and I are getting married," she said. "We need to get insurance for the baby."

Kelley and Jake were wed on a beach somewhere in Miami — Leanne doesn't know the location — on October 14. Kelley borrowed a dress from a friend. They said their vows before a minister and a witness — no family, because Jake and Kelley feared Jeannette's reaction, Leanne says. (Attempts to interview Jeannette Branam for this story were unsuccessful.) Several days later, Jake called Leanne and asked if Kelley could stay with her in St. Louis for a month or two while he traveled to North Carolina to work on the yacht. He didn't think it was good for his pregnant wife and their baby to stay behind on Star Island.

Kelley spent only a month in St. Louis before returning to Miami in November. For much of that time, she was depressed and often fought with Jake on the phone. "I liked Jake as a person, and he was a great fishing boat captain," Leanne says. "But he really wasn't good husband material."

Still, the young family stuck together; Jake, Kelley and Taylor lived on Star Island as 2007 dawned. And on May 16 of that year, Kelley gave birth to a calm baby boy with sandy hair. They named him Morgan.

Another drama unfolded in early 2007, this one in Batesville, Arkansas. It was a little colder than usual the night of January 26. Around 9:30, Kirby Archer, the customer service manager at the local Wal-Mart, prepared to finish his evening shift. He asked a cashier ($92,000, investigators would later discover) to help collect money from the registers and put several bags of cash into a shopping cart. The 34-year-old Archer then did something odd, according to the cashier: He told her to clock out and go home. Usually she escorted Archer to a back room for safety.

As soon as she left, he took a new microwave oven to the back room and stuffed the money inside the box. Next he toted it through the store to a cash register, where a co-worker rang it up — including the employee discount. Archer paid in cash, and surveillance video of the parking lot showed him loading it into his Ford pickup. Then he drove to his aunt and uncle's house and put the box in a blue 1991 Dodge Caravan. Finally he sent a text message to his second wife, Michaele: "I really messed up," he wrote. "Remember, I love you!"

Around midnight, Archer was stopped for speeding in Bono, about 30 miles down the road from Batesville. An officer wrote him a citation and let him drive off, not realizing that police a few towns away were already searching for the thief.

After police issued a warrant for Archer's arrest, people in his hometown of Strawberry, Arkansas — a few miles from Batesville — began to whisper about his disappearance. In 1993, while living in Arizona, he had been convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a misdemeanor, for keeping the then-fifteen-year-old Michaele out after curfew. Later he seemed to clean his act up by enlisting in the army and serving as a military investigator at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He married a woman named Michelle in 1998. A year later, they had their first child, a boy, and in 2000, Michelle gave birth to a second son.

Three years later, Archer went AWOL from the army and was dishonorably discharged. The family moved to Arkansas, where the marriage dissolved. It was a sordid divorce, according to documents. She confessed to lesbian relationships, claimed Archer had a tryst with a high school boy, and added that he'd had sex with his own niece and fathered a child with her. (During a court hearing, Archer denied sex with his niece but admitted he was listed as the father on the baby's birth certificate.) Then there was the police investigation: Detectives in Arkansas were probing multiple child sex abuse allegations so serious that Archer was prohibited from seeing his own two children unsupervised. Indeed, those claims made it seem likely he would lose a fight for custody of the boys.

Around this time, he wed Michaele, the girl from Arizona.

After the theft at Wal-Mart, Archer's family, friends and new wife didn't know where he had gone. It was as if he had vanished. He eventually surfaced 1,100 miles away, in Hialeah, Florida, a mostly Hispanic Miami suburb. There he visited the Zarabozo family, whom he had met in the early '90s in Guantánamo. He was especially close to the youngest son, Guillermo, who was only eight when they bonded at the refugee camp. The pair had kept in touch; the boy had even visited Archer's home in Arkansas. After graduating from Hialeah Senior High School in 2006, the then-eighteen-year-old lived with his mother in a shabby pink condo and worked as a security guard.