Catch Me If You Can

Catch Me If You Can

When Robert Wood Jr. disappeared in a densely forested Virginia park, searchers faced the challenge of a lifetime. The eight-year-old boy was autistic and nonverbal, and from his perspective the largest manhunt in state history probably looked like something else: the ultimate game of hide-and-seek.

By: DEAN KING

A BALL OF FIRE with twinkling blue eyes, Robert Arthur Wood Jr. is a four-foot-six, 70-pound eight-year-old who loves to swing. His doting grandmother, Norma Jean Williams, calls him Bud, and he gives as good as he gets when he and his brother, Ryan, a year younger, scrap over a toy. Robert can see and hear fine, but he can’t talk, swim, sit still for a movie, or use the bathroom by himself, because he is also severely autistic.

Ryan, a dark-haired version of Robert and also autistic, but less so, hugs and kisses his brother. Robert is not as affectionate. He is prone to repetitive motions, like hitting himself over and over with an empty plastic soft-drink bottle. But most of all he enjoys swinging. If you let him, he’ll do it until his hands blister and the skin on the back of his legs rubs raw. Even then he keeps swinging.

Robert and Ryan are both in constant motion, jumping, rocking, and pounding things. Like many children with autism, they are fearless. As a toddler, Robert liked to climb on top of the television and the refrigerator. He also likes to wander—or, as behavioral specialists call it, “to elope.” At Walmart, Robert’s mother, Barbara Locker, still puts him in the shopping cart. If you don’t hold him by the hand or by his shirt, he might run off.

That’s exactly what happened on October 23, 2011, a warm Sunday afternoon. After lunch, the boys’ father, Robert Wood Sr., 34, known as Robbie, and his girlfriend (Wood and Locker have been separated for six years) took Robert and Ryan for a walk at the rarely visited 80-acre North Anna Battlefield Park, in Virginia’s Hanover County, 15 minutes from the boys’ home in Ruther Glen. This was no ordinary walk in the park. The hilly green thickets of central Virginia, where Grant vied with Lee in an epic battle for nearby Richmond, are prickly and hardscrabble, with skin-ripping greenbrier and blackberry bushes, not to mention coyotes and bobcats. In this land of rivers, ravines, swamps, mosquitoes, and water moccasins, the Union general soon discovered, inhospitality was endemic.

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