Moms of the Missing, page 15
Missing: Christopher Meyer
Date of Birth: 01/05/1985
Missing From: Aroma Park, Illinois
Missing Since: 08/07/1995 (10 years old)
Classification: Endangered Missing
Interview: Mika Moulton, mother of Christopher
Christopher loved butterflies. He spent that morning drawing a butterfly on a piece of paper. When he was done the ten-year-old boy asked his mother, Mika, to give the drawing to one of her coworkers. It was the colleague’s birthday, and Christopher wanted to surprise her.
The caring behaviour was not unusual for Christopher. The boy with the cute dimples and warm smile loved making other people happy. So later that day when he looked at his mother with begging blue eyes asking her permission to go fishing at a nearby river, Mika could not resist her son’s charm.
“Christopher was quite a character,” Mika recalls. “He was just one of those jokesters that always knew how to get you on his side.” She laughs as she recalls her son’s ability to tease a “yes” from his mother.
Christopher was not only a charming and caring kid, he was also a great admirer of animals. Mika remembers how her son would always catch and release fish no matter how big they were.
“And even if he saw a dead raccoon he would stop to see if he could help it,” Mika remembers.
Mika also knew she could always trust her son. If she gave him an order he would comply and live up to his words. Still, she reminded him when he left the house in Aroma Park to go play with friends at the boat launch that afternoon, that he had to be home at five o’clock for dinner. Mika therefore grew nervous when she looked at the clock on her stove: 5:22 p.m. And no sign of Christopher.
“I expected him to return any minute, but the later it got the more I started to worry. At the same time I could not help thinking that he was gonna be in trouble when he got home, because I was always very strict with house rules,” Mika admits.
And Christopher knew how strict his mother could be. One week earlier, he had been out playing with friends and had lost track of time, which was unusual for Christopher. When he came home, Mika wanted to teach him the importance of keeping to the terms of an agreement. She asked her son to sit down with a piece of paper and write all the explanations he could come up with for why his mother insisted on him being home on time.
“I have never told this before, but his answer shocked me. He wrote on the paper that it was important because if he was not home on time, I might worry that someone had taken him. It was almost like he knew what was going to happen. Like he read the future and foresaw his own fate,” Mika says.
Christopher was still missing by the time darkness set in, and Mika decided to go to the boat launch. Her flashlight lit her way. A police officer approached her to ask what she was doing on her own in the dark. When she explained her son was missing the officer immediately called for backup. A river and ground search was launched.
“At first people thought he drowned. I knew that could not be. The water was low and Christopher was an amazing swimmer,” Mika recalls.
In the following days fire fighters, police officers, and local neighbours searched for Christopher. Everyone came out to help because Aroma Park, located seventy miles south of Chicago, was a tiny and tight-knit village. So when the news became widely known that a little boy had gone missing it concerned everyone. And Mika had no doubt that it was only a matter of time before her son would be found.
When the mother was not out looking for Christopher herself she would sit by the window in her living room, expecting him to pull into the driveway on his bike any minute.
“I could not help thinking about how embarrassed I was going to be when they found him alive and I would have to apologise to all of them for having worried about my son. On the other hand fear would also at times come creeping in on me. But then I tried to hold it down by telling myself that horrible crimes just don’t happen in a small town like Aroma Park,” Mika remembers.
Therefore, she also reacted promptly when Christopher’s dad came to town from California with his cousin. The local police department had already asked Mika and her former husband to come down to the station to provide DNA samples. The samples would be used to help identify Christopher’s body…if law enforcement ever had to. When Mika called her ex-husband’s hotel room to tell him about the police department’s request, the cousin picked up the phone.
“When I asked to talk to Christopher’s father,” Mike remembers, “the cousin just asked: ‘Why, did they find his body?’ Right away I just started screaming that there would be no body,” Mika says.
Today, Mika says that even though she was still expecting to see Christopher coming up the driveway any time, by then most people in Aroma Park had probably realised that was not going to happen.
A few days into the search reality slowly started to sink in. Investigators asked Mika to come down to the fire station. When she arrived officers opened the door to a cargo van. Inside was Christopher’s bike. It had been found in a thicket close to the river.
“But I kept saying to myself that this did not mean he was not okay,” Mika concedes. “They had just found his bike—and not him. I forced myself to keep hoping he would still come home.”
However, Mika’s hopes were soon extinguished. Officers also showed her a shoe they had found in the river. The shoe belonged to Christopher. This discovery put Mika in a very dark spot…a place where she started to imagine the worst possible scenarios. For a while she lost her sanity, as she describes it.
“I could not hold my thoughts together,” she says.
With the discovery of the bike, the shoe, a piece of Christopher’s T-shirt, and a pair of Ninja Turtle underwear that was hanging in a bush near the river, people started to speculate what had happened. Mika was deeply hurt when some people suggested that she might have killed Christopher herself. They based their cruel accusation only on the fact that Mika was gay.
Mika had been married to Christopher’s father, James, for seven years and had three children by him when she met a woman called Patti. The two women fell in love and were living together in the small town in the American Midwest at the time of Christopher’s death. The local community was not very accepting of homosexuality, according to Mika.
“I was very hurt by [the fact] that some people could suggest we had killed Christopher just because we were gay,” Mika recalls.
EYES OF EVIL
People’s prejudices and the uncertainty of Christopher’s whereabouts took its toll on Mika. She did not sleep for days, and she started to feel both physically and mentally stressed out. The more in despair she felt the more she also started to realise what the result of the search for her missing son might be.
“There is something in your head that does not allow you to swallow all details at once. It is too much to cope [with]. But slowly I realised what could have happened, and I promised myself that no matter what I was gonna accept the outcome,” Mika says.
Eight days after Christopher disappeared Mika had to live by her promise. At three o’clock in the morning officer Jo Lynn knocked on Mika’s door. For the next several hours the two women held hands as they both broke down and cried together.
Two rookie deputies had parked their squad cars early that morning and walked off into the dark. While searching for Christopher in the woods they saw a piece of plywood lying across the ground. When they lifted the wood they found a boy’s corpus hidden in a shallow grave. The boy had been stabbed to death.
When the officer, Jo Lynn, conveyed the information about the discovery of the boy’s body to Mika she said that investigators were not one hundred percent certain the dead boy was Christopher; but as soon as the officer conveyed this, Mika replied: “But there [are] no other children missing.”
The moment Jo Lynn, according to Mika, answered “No, there isn’t”, the mother knew her life had changed forever, and that she was never going to awaken from the nightmare, as she describes the ordeal.
After it had been determined that the boy found by the two rookie deputies was Christopher, hundreds of people came for a candlelight vigil held outside a Methodist church in Aroma Park. Mika brought them to tears when she spoke to the crowd; according to the Associated Press, she said:
“God loaned me ten and a half years of twinkling blue eyes, dimples, and joy. It is time now to lift up Chris and ask God to use this child as our special angel.”
The disappearance and death of Christopher brought back bad memories to the local community. In spite of the common belief that Kankakee County was a safe place, the community had now experienced two child murders separated by only fourteen years and five miles.
In 1981 a five-year-old girl with chubby cheeks and sandy-blond hair went missing on her way to visit friends. The other children lived just a couple of blocks down the street from the girl’s home. It was a community where no one locked their doors and everybody knew each other from the barbecue parties the community frequently held.
At least they thought everyone knew everyone else.
Because Tara Sue Huffman never completed the short walk to her friend’s house. Instead, she vanished without a trace.
On that warm spring day in May 1981, Tara Sue’s older brother, Richard Huffman, was one of the many individuals who immediately started to search for the little girl.
Today, Richard Huffman still recalls when he passed by a certain house on the street: On the porch a boy was observing the search crew. Richard Huffman thought there was something odd about the boy…and he could not help looking at him. When the boys, who were peers, made eye contact, the look in the observer’s eyes shocked Richard Huffman. He would later describe the boy as having a motionless stare.
After a while the thirteen-year-old boy suddenly stepped off the porch and decided to help search for Tara Sue. But he had not joined the group for long before he wandered off on his own, just as the search team reached an old city dump. Shortly after the boy screamed:
“I found her, I found her.”
When the group approached the boy, they saw he had picked up Tara Sue’s body and was holding it in his arms. In this manner Tara Sue was found dead a few hours after she had disappeared.
Richard Huffman made eye contact with the boy again later that afternoon when he was sitting in the back of a police car before being taken in for questioning at the police station. Again Richard Huffman was met by the boy’s motionless, dead look. Shortly afterwards, prosecutors accused the boy, Timothy Buss, of having snatched Tara Sue before smashing her head and leaving her lifeless body in a barrel that he had hauled to the dump on a wagon. The teenager was also accused of having sexually molested the little girl with a stick. Timothy Buss was tried as an adult and convicted of murdering Tara Sue by use of blunt force trauma.
Later, law enforcement officers recounted how shocked they were when they realised that the boy showed no emotions while he was sentenced to spend twenty-five years in prison. However, the convicted murderer was released on parole after serving twelve years of his sentence. Only a few members of the local community, however, knew of the killer’s early release from prison. As a result of Timothy Buss being freed, Richard Huffman’s gaze once again met the cold, numb eyes of the killer.
Witnesses had told investigators that when Christopher went missing from the boat launch, he had been talking to a man. One of the witnesses was a fourteen-year-old boy who had been approached by the same man. The boy told police that the man had explained he had been raised in Aroma Park but that he recently had been living and fishing in Florida before returning to his hometown. During the conversation the boy noticed that the man had a filet knife with lures; the boy described the knife as being too big to be used for fishing. And the witness was also able to provide the police with a good description of the man. The suspect had dark hair, a distinctive moustache, and other distinguishing characteristics that would help law enforcement construct a composite sketch. When it was completed, the sketch was distributed by the local media, and when Richard Huffman opened his newspaper to read about Christopher’s disappearance he could hardly believe what he saw. He was once again looking directly into the characteristic eyes of the person who had killed his sister fourteen years earlier.
“It was like he had become Freddy Krueger of Kankakee County,” Richard Huffman later told the television show Shattered in an episode that aired on October 24, 2018.
NO GOODBYE
Investigators could not believe what they heard when Richard Huffman showed up at the police station to tell the officers they were looking for a predator who had already taken a child’s life. None of them knew that Timothy Buss had been released on parole—and that he had moved back to Kankakee County—until they called the Department of Corrections. Once they found out that Timothy Buss had been released, law enforcement immediately put a watch on him while investigating his whereabouts around the time Christopher went missing.
“But after they started following him,” Mika reports, “they saw that he was trying to approach another child. And law enforcement decided to intervene.”
Officers approached Timothy Buss while he was fishing along the same section of river that Christopher had disappeared from. When he was confronted, the ex-convict snapped at the officers and asked whether they were going to come question him every time a child went missing. But at the same time he did not mind cooperating when officers asked if they could search his car. He voluntarily signed a waiver letting them do so.
Meanwhile the local media was following the case closely. A missing child in Kankakee County was a big story. For her part, Mika always hoped the coverage would lead to her son’s recovery. But one day Christopher was no longer the most noteworthy news.
“On Sunday morning the [main] story was that Jerry Garcia from Grateful Dead had died. I just got so angry when I found out they had pushed Christopher’s story down. If there is no progress in the search for a missing child, media and people lose interest. But I could not accept that. We were talking about my little boy. He was missing and in danger, and I just thought, how dare you run another story before telling people about Christopher?” Mika recalls.
However, Christopher’s disappearance would again lead the news when law enforcement revealed that the trunk of Timothy Buss’ car had been found to be full of blood, and that officers had even managed to collect hair samples from the trunk. DNA testing quickly revealed a match. Christopher had been held hostage in the trunk while bleeding to death. Timothy Buss was once again charged by Kankakee County authorities—this time, with sexual assault and the murder of a child.
After the discovery of Christopher’s dead body the people of Aroma Park honoured the murdered child by putting up blue ribbons around town and tying bows to trees, mailboxes, and lampposts. At the same time rage against Christopher’s killer grew.
“Some [people] literally wanted to kill him,” Mika recalls, “and when he was arrested police did not do a normal physical line up. Instead, they made a video arrangement [that is, a montage] at the courthouse, probably because they were afraid someone was gonna try to kill him.”
While some citizens in Kankakee County wanted to harm the accused, other people speculated about what had driven Timothy Buss to kill two innocent children. Some stated that his evil had been awakened fourteen years earlier, when, one month prior to the murder of Tara Sue, his mother told her kids that she wanted nothing to do with them. But Mika did not care about that. She just wanted justice for her son, and to see him one final time.
When Christopher was found his body underwent an autopsy before being brought to the funeral home. Mika met with the home’s director. After discussing the burial of her son, Mika asked to see Christopher and to say goodbye. But the funeral director refused to let her.
“He explained that Christopher had been laying outside in the summer heat for eight days, and that there was not much left of him to see. The funeral director could not let that be the last look and memory I would have of Christopher,” Mika explains.
The last time Mika saw Christopher was therefore when he picked up his fishing equipment and headed to the boat launch. Today, Mika clearly recalls how she told him to be home by five p.m. However, there is something she does not remember—something very important—and that has been haunting her for nearly twenty-five years.
“I don’t know for sure if he knew how much I loved him. I just wish I could remember if I also told him that when he left to go playing,” Mika says.
People’s love for Christopher, however, was undoubtedly on display when he was buried. At the funeral Mika’s coworker—the one who had received the drawing Christopher made for her birthday—asked permission to say a few words. Peg told how affected she had been by Christopher’s gesture, and she described Christopher as a butterfly that was now free to fly and play.
When the funeral procession walked out of the church and made its way to Christopher’s grave, Mika was struck by a beautiful sight. A big butterfly started to float around the graveside as her son was laid to rest. Mika was not in doubt: this was Christopher’s way of saying goodbye. And when the mother returned to the graveside a week later, a butterfly alighted on the grave. Mika tried to brush the butterfly away, but it would not move.
“I ended up stroking it,” Mika recalls, “and when I went back to my car it followed me. It was like Christopher was saying, ‘Hey Mom, it’s all okay’. Today, I can still go up to a butterfly, put my fingers underneath [it], and it will just sit. I believe missing children send signs to their parents. I believe that children are much closer to angels than we are as adults,” Mika asserts.
However, she met no angels while she followed Timothy Buss’ trial in court. At times the description of what the killer had done to her son was so brutal that Mika had to leave the courtroom. This was especially true when she learned that her son had been stabbed more than forty times, and that he had defensive wounds on his hands and arms.
