A boy who went missing in Indiana nearly 20 years ago has been found alive, well and married in Minnesota.
Richard Wayne Landers Jr. was abducted by his grandparents on July 29, 1994, according to state police.
The then-five-year-old was considered "missing and endangered" when he disappeared in Wolcottville, Ind.
Warrants were issued for Richard and Ruth Landers, but charges were dropped in 2008 after police could find no trace of either the boy or his grandparents.
But Landers' parents continued to search for their son, police said in a release Thursday.
Landers' stepfather gave detectives the boy's Social Security card last October, and detectives found a man, who turned out to be the missing boy, using the number in Long Prairie, Minn.
The grandparents, who are from his father's side, are living in Browerville, Minn., under aliases but admitted their identities to police and verified that the 24-year-old man is Landers.
I knew a woman who raised her nephew from the day he was born because his biological parents were both alcoholic and neither wanted to nor were capable of raising the child. However, the mother never granted full adoption rights and used that fact to blackmail and otherwise terrorize the woman raising the boy. As in, give me money for this month's rent or I'll take the kid back. This went on till the boy was legally an adult. The woman who raised him was unable to have children of her own, loved the boy as if he were her child, and lived in more or less constant fear of losing him. So, there are circumstances wherein the best interests of a child are served by removing that child from any contact with the "natural" parents. Could a lawyer have helped. Don't know. But this was at a time when parental rights usually trumped child welfare in courts of law.
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