“The FBI is the most sophisticated law enforcement agency in the world, pursuing the most dangerous criminals when a 9-year-old boy vanishes from a school bus stop.”
“It’s the worst feeling in the world. We didn’t know if we’d ever see Jimmy again.”
The bureau mobilizes.
“We were getting leads from every person you can imagine. I had a vision that he was buried under trees, more than one tree. I did see black containers.”
“I knew that I was dealing with somebody that was super intelligent, super cunning. It was a chess match.”
—
September 11th, 1995. It’s about 3:00 p.m. when 9-year-old Jimmy Rice steps off his bus in the Miami farming community known as the Redlands.
“It’s very different from the way most people envision Miami. It’s a rural-type area. Just, uh, a lot of things to do for kids, and um, none of the problems that you have in a city.”
Jimmy walks the short distance home for his Monday piano lesson.
“We were about the fourth house down from the intersection. He just walk home. You know, it’d take him a minute or two.”
Normally, Jimmy’s mother is home to greet him, but this day, Jimmy’s 18-year-old neighbor is babysitting while the Rices are out of town on a business trip and birthday celebration. Around 3:30 p.m., several hours north of the Rice home, Don walks in the hotel room and finds his wife in a panic.
“So, if he didn’t come home from school today and for his lesson, we have to go home.”
“She was teary-eyed and very upset. And yes, I—I knew when I first saw her there, there’s something wrong. And that’s when she told me, ‘I just called, and uh, Jimmy hadn’t showed up at the house yet.’ And, uh, not only I hadn’t taken the lesson, but no one knows where he is.”
Jimmy has not returned home from school.
“Jimmy was a kind of kid that you could really count on. Some kids, if they disappear, you think, ‘Well, [they’ve] done it again.’ But with Jimmy, if he said he was going to be somewhere, wanted to be somewhere, or needed to be somewhere, that’s what he would do.”
Don immediately calls the house again and speaks with his older son, Ted.
“I said, ‘Please check around the neighborhood. I—I don’t believe that he would have done this, but he may have somehow forgotten about the lesson. Could you check and see?'”
“There were a couple of neighborhood kids where he would, you know, go from time to time to, to play.”
But Jimmy is nowhere to be found. A call to his school confirms he rode the bus home that day. The Rices don’t waste any time. They immediately check out of their hotel and start driving the 2 1/2 hours back home. As they speed south down Florida’s Turnpike, Don calls the Miami-Dade Police, who alert the missing person’s unit. The Rices hope for the best.
“We kept thinking, well, you know, for God’s sake, some—something, uh, is wrong. But maybe—maybe they’ll find Jimmy, and it’ll turn out to be, uh, something innocent.”
Even so, they can’t help but fear the worst—that someone has taken Jimmy to try and extort money from them.
“We thought if there were kidnappings, it would be for ransom. And that was what we were thinking had occurred, that some—some person thought, ‘Well, these people have a really nice house, everything. They must have some money.'”
“It’s just—it’s the worst feeling in the world. You don’t know where your kid is, and he’s not the kind of kid to just disappear like that. Something was seriously wrong.”
“What happened?”
No, Miami-Dade police is already on the scene when the Rices pull up to their gated home a few hours later. A helicopter circles overhead. Lead missing person’s unit detective, Juan Morius, heads up the search.
“When a child goes missing, uh, it’s one of our, uh, biggest priorities. We go to all lengths to try and—and follow up as many leads as we can.”
Investigators question Jimmy’s babysitter and get a description of what Jimmy was wearing that morning: white sneakers, jean shorts, a white shirt, and a brown and green backpack with a suede bottom. The babysitter tells police that the boy had woken up late that morning and missed his bus. Fred arranged for his girlfriend to drive Jimmy to school, but when she showed up, he wouldn’t get in the car.
“First with her. And Fred had to say, ‘It’s okay,’ before he would.”
“I don’t know her. She’s a stranger.”
“Don’t worry, she’s my girlfriend. We’re going to be late to school. Come on.”
It’s clear that Jimmy is well-trained to avoid strangers. But where is he? Investigators canvas two miles on both sides of Jimmy’s home but turn up empty-handed. As night approaches, they head off to run down more leads. Detective Morius is still hopeful there is an innocent explanation for Jimmy’s disappearance.
“Most of these cases, uh, what we do is you got to give it a little time to see if anything will come up with the next day. A lot of—most of these kids will end up at a friend’s house overnight without their parents knowing about it.”
Don and Claudine aren’t so sure. Sick with worry, they search their home for any sign of their little boy.
“We looked in car trunks and trash cans, everywhere where we thought he might have been—been hiding.”
“So we spent the night awake. We got five minutes sleep, I doubt it.”
The next day comes and goes with no change. By Wednesday, September 13th, Jimmy has been missing for almost 48 hours. Investigators are now certain that something is terribly wrong.
“We definitely looked at it very seriously, thinking that someone had probably—had kidnapped them.”
Miami-Dade PD need help, and they need it fast. They reach out to the worldwide experts in child abduction cases: the FBI. They alone have the resources and investigative manpower to bring Jimmy home. Special Agent Rick Lun hits the ground running.
“It’s crucial to attempt to locate the child within a 24 to 48-hour time frame because, um, in previous cases that has been identified as the most likely, uh, time frame that the child will remain alive. And so if we can identify or locate the child, uh, it’s better odds that we will recover the child.”
Special Agent Lun’s urgency is personal as well.
“I had a 10-year-old boy at the time, and I only lived a few miles away from the Rice residence. So the case really hit home. It—it really brought into the fact that this could happen to anyone.”
Agents need to learn everything about Jimmy Rice. To find clues about what happened to him, they interview family and friends and search his room to put together a victimology.
“He was a typical 9-year-old boy who, uh, loved, uh, sports and school and music. Um, he was a good student. He was a good kid, a child you would look at and feel like he was your own.”
Though Jimmy seems to have a loving family, FBI Special Agent Wayne Russell, a 12-year veteran with the bureau, knows that appearances aren’t always as they seem.
“The home unfortunately can be a very dangerous place for a child. Um, I didn’t know if walking into the home whether or not I was walking into a crime scene.”
Investigators must find out who took Jimmy fast. And at this point, no one can be ruled out as a suspect, even the most trusted friends and family.
“We want to, um, identify a person of interest as quickly as possible. So we start from the inside. Who was closest to Jimmy?”
—
“Was so despicable that he couldn’t bring himself to verbalize it.”
Finally, almost 50 hours into the interview, Chavez makes an unusual request.
“Can I get some milk?”
“I’ll never forget him saying, ‘Can I get some milk?’ And I knew once he wanted some milk that he had heartburn. That the gases in his stomach were telling him it was over.”
Chavez finally reveals the truth, and it’s horrifying. On September 11th, Chavez saw a group of boys swimming in their underwear in a canal. It excited him, and he went on the prowl.
“Well, he described that he was, uh, traveling north on the street and, um, he had, uh, seen Jimmy walking home.”
Chavez pulled over in front of Jimmy and pointed Susan’s stolen gun. The 6’3″ man asked the little boy:
“Do you want to die today?”
When Jimmy said, “No,” he shot him. Chavez forced him into the truck and drove to the trailer on the horse farm where he sexually assaulted him. Later that day, Chavez says he heard helicopters overhead. When he looked up, distracted, Jimmy tried to escape. He says that Jimmy ran to the door of the U-camper trailer that was here in this location, and that he basically shot him and caught Jimmy just above his rib cage, uh, on the right side of his back. Chavez held Jimmy as he took his last breath, then stored the body for 3 days in an abandoned van nearby. He later dismembered the body, placed the parts in three plastic 25-gallon planters, and filled them with cement. He killed a few of Susan’s dogs to cover up the smell and stripped the pickup truck of any evidence of his crime.
The FBI confiscates the planters and finds a child’s body inside. Dental records confirm it is Jimmy Rice.
“When you’re removing a—a child who was, you know, kidnapped and raped and murdered and then chopped up and then placed in a cement, uh, container, there’s no training in the world that can prepare you for that. That—that will remain with me for the rest of my life.”
Agents tell the Rices the news they don’t want to hear.
“They sat the family down and they said, ‘Uh, we—we found a child’s remains that’s been identified as your son.'”
Grief-stricken, the Rice family decides to address the public at a press conference.
“We had asked all these people to help all along, and we wanted to thank them, and, uh, to set, uh, the proper tone for how the news should be received and how, uh, it was important to us, said, ‘Jimmy… you know, that that this news go out in a positive fashion for him.'”
When reporters cut off their cameras, many break down in tears.
“Chavez goes to trial in 1998. He recants his confession and pleads innocent. The jury doesn’t believe him and finds Juan Carlos Chavez guilty of kidnapping, sexual battery, and first-degree murder. He is sentenced to death.”
“Juan Carlos Chavez, uh, could have, uh, killed other kids that no one knows about. And if—if he wasn’t caught in this particular case, uh, he would have done the same thing to someone else.”
“We’re going to do what we can to make sure no other child in this country ever has to go through the hell that he did. Whatever it takes.”
Claudine and Don Rice are at President Bill Clinton’s side when he signs an executive order making it legal to post photos of missing children in federal buildings and parks. They also start an organization that trains law enforcement in handling child abductions. But the ordeal takes its toll. In 2009, Claudine Rice dies at the age of 66.
“Claudine died just as much as if he’d shot her in the heart, but she died of a heart attack from grief.”
Don takes solace in knowing that his wife and son are back together.
“It gives me some comfort knowing that they’re side by side, and that, uh, someday I’ll be laid to rest next to him.”
