Jonelle Matthews was one of the first missing children featured on milk cartons.

 

When the 12-year-old disappeared from her home in Greeley, Colorado, on Dec. 20, 1984, placing children’s faces on milk cartons was a common practice. Since then, the ways in which authorities and child activists address missing children cases has changed drastically. From the invention of Amber Alerts to the establishment of California’s Three Strikes Law, several missing children cases have inspired legislation and altered investigative policies—some widely accepted and some controversial.

 

Here are five cases that were pivotal in enacting these changes:

 

Polly Klaas and Three Strikes Laws

 

On October 1, 1993, 12-year-old Polly Klaas was hosting a slumber party at her house in Petaluma, California, when a man wielding a knife entered her bedroom. According to the Polly Klaas Foundation, the intruder tied up Klaas’s friends and placed pillow cases over their heads. Then, he took Klaas. One of the girls freed herself and woke up Klaas’s mom. They called the police immediately, and a search ensued.

 

Klaas’s body was recovered on Dec. 3, 1993. The intruder, who was later identified as Richard Allen Davis, murdered Klaas and disposed of her body in an abandoned lumber mill north of town, according to The New York Times.

 

Davis is currently on death row at San Quentin State Prison in California. When he murdered Klaas, Davis had two prior felony convictions for the abductions of Frances Mays and Selina Varich and several other felony convictions for crimes including assault and burglary, according to SFGate. He was on parole when he murdered Klaas.

 

In response to the Klaas case, California authorized the Three Strikes Law, which requires felons with three convictions to serve a minimum of 25 years in prison, and they are only able to limit time served by 20%, according to the Los Angeles Times. If this law existed prior to Klaas’s murder, Davis would not have had the opportunity to abduct and murder Klaas because he would have been completing a sentence for one of his prior convictions.

 

Although this law would have prevented Klaas’s murder, it was immediately controversial and classified as one of the harshest sentencing laws. Even Gil Garcetti, Los Angeles County’s district attorney at the time, criticized the law, fearing it would clog the courts by incentivizing more not-guilty pleas, according to the Los Angeles Times.

 

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, other reasons to criticize the law are that it disproportionally affects minority offenders, costs too much money, limits judicial discretion and enforces harsh punishments on crimes where it is unwarranted.

 

Despite its controversy, by the end of the decade, over half of all states implemented laws resembling California’s Three Strikes Law, according to the American Bar Association. Many states have overturned or weakened their versions of Three Stikes since the 1990s, but they were all, in part, inspired by Klaas’s case. And, although harsh, some may have prevented similar crimes.

 

Megan Kanka and Megan’s Law

 

Jesse Timmendequas lived across the street from 7-year-old Megan Kanka in Hamilton Township, New Jersey. He was a twice-convicted sex offender, according to the New York Times. On July 29, 1994, Timmendequas lured Kanka to his home, promising to show her a puppy. Timmendequas raped and murdered Kanka minutes later. According to the Megan Nicole Kanka Foundation, her parents were only 30 yards away.

 

The Kanka family did not know about Timmendequas’s convictions because, at the time, there were no laws requiring registered sex offenders to notify the public of their status. Following Kanka’s murder, more than 400,000 people signed a petition, requesting immediate legislation to ensure their “right to know” about the whereabouts of register sex offenders.

 

According to the Megan Nicole Kanka Foundation, New Jersey passed Megan’s Law in an unprecedented timeline--the law, which requires registered sex offenders to notify law enforcement, their victims or their neighbors, depending on the severity of their crime, was enacted 89 days after Kanka’s murder. On May 17, 1996, the United States Congress passed a federal version of Megan’s Law.

 

Timmendequas received the death penalty but is now serving a life sentence, following New Jersey’s abolishment of capital punishment.

 

April Tinsley and Genealogy DNA

 

April Tinsley was walking home from her friend’s house on April 1, 1988—something she did all the time despite being only 8-years-old. Sometime during her walk, a man whisked Tinsley into his truck, raped and murdered her, and then abandoned her body in a ditch outside her hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana, according to the FBI.

 

Authorities received a call two years later regarding a message scrawled in pencil or crayon on a barn door near the ditch. According to the FBI, the message read, “I kill 8 year old April Marie Tisley I will kill agin.”

 

Fourteen years after this discovery, in the spring of 2004, Tinsley’s murderer dropped off baggies at four residences in Fort Wayne. Each baggie contained a letter and either a used condom or a Polaroid picture, featuring the killer’s body in sexual positions. His face was not pictured. Each letter referenced Tinsley. One letter read, "Hi Honey I Been watching you I am the same person that kinapped an Rape an kill April Tinsely you are my next vitem." Detectives compared the semen in the condoms to the semen found in Tinsley’s underwear. It was a match. They knew it wasn’t a copycat.

 

Despite all of this, the case remained cold until 2018. Two weeks after the capture of the alleged Golden State Killer through the use of genealogy DNA, the Fort Wayne Police Department tested Tinsley’s killer’s DNA through similar means.

 

Genealogy DNA testing refers to comparing DNA to ancestry databases to locate familial matches and narrow suspect lists. It worked. The testing conclusively found that their killer was either 59-year-old John D. Miller or his brother.

 

Detectives found a used condom in Miller’s trash and tested the semen. It matched the other semen samples in evidence, and Miller confessed to the more than 30-year-old murder a few days later.

 

As one of the first successful implementations of genealogy DNA, Tinsley’s case laid the foundation for future cases to use the same method and hopefully received the same results.

 

Adam Walsh and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children

 

Six-year-old Adam Walsh accompanied his mom to a Sears in Hollywood, Florida, on July 27, 1981. According to Time Magazine, while she shopped, Walsh played a video game a few aisles over. When she went to retrieve Walsh, he wasn’t there. The department store called for him over the speaker, but he didn’t respond. Two fishermen found Walsh’s head floating in a canal sixteen days later. His case has never been solved.

 

Walsh’s murder motivated several child advocacy initiatives. Notably, his father, John Walsh, co-founded the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 1984. NCMEC has aided in the recovery of nearly 300,000 children, according to the organization’s website. NCMEC is responsible for furthering cold case investigations as well. In fact, Matthews’ case is currently the oldest one on file with the organization.

 

After the establishment of NCMEC, John Walsh famously went on to host the TV show “America’s Most Wanted” and work on numerous other criminal justice initiatives.

 

Amber Hagerman and Amber Alerts

 

Nine-year-old Amber Hagerman was riding her bike through a grocery store parking lot in Arlington, Texas, on Jan. 13, 1996 when an unidentified person pulled her off the bike, threw her in their truck, and sped away. According to NBC News, no one saw the perpetrator, but several eye-witnesses watched a blue truck peel out of the parking lot around the same time Hagerman disappeared, leaving her bike behind. Five days later, a dog walker found her dead body floating in a creek. Hagerman’s case remains cold today.

 

According to the Dallas Police Department, the first few hours following a child abduction are the most critical. But at the time of Hagerman's abduction, there were no policies in place to aid in the immediate recovery of missing children. The same year Hagerman was murdered, law enforcement and broadcasters in the Dallas-Fort Worth area came together to establish a system that is now nation-wide: America’s Missing Broadcast Emergency Response Alert.

 

AMBER Alerts are initiated in serious kidnapping cases and broadcasted through several mediums--namely, cell phones, radio stations and highway signs. The alerts include identifiable information about abductions in hopes that someone in the public will see the abductor and report them. This information includes things like the license plate number of the vehicle used in the abduction, the clothing the child was wearing when they were abducted and more. Since its inception, AMBER Alerts have recovered about 1,000 children, according to amberalter.gov.

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