WHAT HAPPENED TO TIMMOTHY PITZEN?
THE DREAM STILL COMES TO HIM EVEN NOW, 10 YEARS LATER. THE IMAGES THAT UNSPOOL IN HIS MIND ARE ALWAYS THE SAME, BUT THE TRIGGER IS AS UNPREDICTABLE AS LIGHTING.
He could have drifted off reminiscing on happy times or feeling hopeful of a reunion, or he may have slipped off fighting despair and darkness. Sometimes he won’t have been thinking about the situation at all. Then, poof. There she is in his deep slumber. Amy. Alive.
She stands in front of him, her dark eyes staring, her familiar features framed by her dark hair. He feels his anger rising. He grabs her shoulders and shakes. “What did you do? Where is he?” She looks back at him. Nothing. He asks again, begs. “Where is he? Where is Tim?” But the mother just stares until her image fades and she is gone, having again not answered.
IT IS RAINING THE DAY I PULL INTO CLINTON, IOWA, AN INDUStrial town hard against the west bank of the Mississippi River. Once known as the lumber capital of the world, a place with more millionaires per capita than anywhere in the country, it is now home to a largely working-class population of 25,000.
Jim Pitzen was born and raised here, and it was to Clinton that he retreated after everything happened. He and his wife and his 6-year-old son, Timmothy, had been living in another river town at the time, this one cleaved in half by the Fox River in west suburban Chicago, a little more than 100 miles east of Clinton.
Jim had tried to stay in that Aurora home. For all the tragedy associated with it, the small house with the wood-railed front porch still held cherished memories, some of the last that the father had of his son: Tim playing with his Matchbox cars; circling the front driveway on his bike; cuddling with his gray cat; goofing around in the yard with the family’s black Lab. The father had just started building the boy a treehouse out back.
But as the days passed, the bad memories crowded out the good, the daily reminders of the unthinkable acts of his wife, Tim’s mother: how she had absconded with their son, keeping their whereabouts secret for days, then checking into a Rockford motel and sliced her own wrist and neck, leaving behind a cryptic, staggering note saying that she had given her son to people who would love and care for him but that he would never be found.
And so the father fled the home, the life he’d known, and the treehouse he couldn’t bear to finish. “The way the other house felt …, ” he says, then pauses. “ … I just had to get out of there.”
Ten years on, true to his mother’s words, Timmothy Pitzen still has not been found, and the enduring mystery haunts his father almost every hour of every day. On this afternoon, Jim sits in his living room in Clinton, looking at his hands. The room is so quiet you can hear the patter of the rain that has been falling steadily, drumming on the stripped chassis of an old tomato-colored pickup and the husk of a convertible MG half hidden on a patch of the overgrown front yard. The vehicles are projects he’s taken on over the years to take his mind off the gnawing anguish. He tinkers with them less and less of late, so they now rest like neglected tombs, slowly rusting.
He is in the process of fixing up the home, he says, so some drywall and paint cans clutter a hallway. On the way to the living room, I caught a glimpse of his bedroom, the door to which stood unapologetically open. The unmade bed
