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Last month, the sorrow played out in Friendswood, Texas, a suburb of Houston. This week it was Spotsylvania County.
Each week, on average, one community in the United States has to cope with the abduction and slaying of one of its children by a stranger.
Usually, as in the case of 12-year-old Laura Kate Smither in Houston, only one child is involved. Rarely does a community have to cope with a multiple slaying.
The database at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Arlington is 12 years old and has 10,000 cases in it.
Only 43 of those cases involve the abduction of more than one child by a non-family member--the presumed scenario in the recent deaths of Kristin and Kati Lisk.
Ten of the cases are still active, according to Charles Pickett, case manager at the center, meaning that the children were never discovered, either dead or alive.
Thirty-three of the cases are resolved, Pickett said, meaning that the children returned safely to their families, or, as in the case of the Lisk sisters, were discovered dead.
According to the national center's records, the last time anything like the Lisk slaying occurred anywhere in the country was in 1993, when a man abducted two 13-year-old friends from one of their homes in Marble Valley, Ala. The remains of the two girls were discovered nine months later by two deer hunters. Each had been shot in the head.
Another similar case occurred in 1992 in Fenton, Mich., when two sisters, Melissa and Michelle Urbin, were abducted while walking near their home.
They were suffocated by their attacker and buried in a nearby cemetery. Their bodies were discovered two months later.
A Detroit man on parole for a murder conviction, living with his uncle in Fenton, was later convicted of the crime. The center has no record of an arrest in the Alabama case.
With each case, the details are depressingly similar, said Pickett, a Spotsylvania County resident. First comes the shocking disappearance, then the search parties and reward funds, the leads phoned in to police and, finally, sometimes months later, the discovery of the bodies.
Each time, there is a memorial service, and a minister talking about the bonds of hope that held the community together and how the victim had become everyone's daughter.
"This crime was not just against Laura," said the Rev. Robert E. Waering at the Smither service last month in Texas. "It was a crime against her family, a crime against the community."
No one has been arrested in the Smither case, or in the Lisk slayings.
Yesterday, according to Pickett, the national center received the report of a missing 11-year-old girl in Elgin, Ill., outside Chicago. Brittany Martinez was last seen walking to her aunt's house.
She is the latest entry to the database.
