Replies

It sounds to me as if Devlin had him brainwashed.

At Imo's Pizzeria, where Devlin was a manager, an employee who did not want to be identified told the newspaper that a boy called the restaurant Friday afternoon looking for Devlin, who was being questioned by the
FBI at the time. The worker noticed on the caller ID that the call came from Devlin's home. The boy told him, "I'm Shawn Wilcox. My father is a friend of Mike Devlin."

Hornbeck spoke with a Kirkwood police officer to report his bike stolen about 10 months after he was kidnapped from nearby Washington County.

The report says Hornbeck identified himself to police officer Christopher Moss as Shawn Devlin and gave police no indication that he had been kidnapped. He told police the bike had been taken from outside the apartment where he lived with his alleged captor Michael Devlin.

Hornbeck, while kidnapped, carried on a relationship with a girl at one of St. Louis' most elite private schools.

Students at Visitation Academy, an all-girls school, say Hornbeck dated a freshman there for several months. The students said Hornbeck and the girl were even spotted holding hands at an area mall.

The couple even went to what's described as the "social event of the season," the Visitation-Priory Dance, at the St. Louis Priory school.

His girlfriend, a freshman at all-girl Visitation Academy, was devastated to learn Shawn was the boy abducted four years ago and living with his alleged captor just two miles from her home, friends told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

"I know it's getting hard for her because everyone is giving her a hard time," one of her schoolmates said. "They're saying, 'Oh, you must have known he was missing or had been abducted.' "

"But, honestly, she had no idea," the classmate added.

on Sept. 29, 2006, a police officer in suburban Glendale stopped Shawn late at night because he was wearing dark clothes and didn't have reflectors on his bike.

According to the police report on that encounter, Hornbeck told the officer his name was Shawn Devlin and gave him the birth date July 7, 1991, 10 days off his true date of birth. He told the officer he was riding his bike to his apartment in Kirkwood after visiting a friend's home.

On Friday, Hornbeck's stepfather, Craig Akers, said he was haunted by having dismissed a series of messages he apparently posted on a Web site his parents had created in their search for him. "How long are you planning to look for your son?" read one of the messages, signed "Shawn Devlin."

"Never in my wildest dreams would have I have imagined it was my son who had done that," Akers said, adding that he had assumed the messages were like many others sent by people who falsely claimed to be Shawn or to know where he was.