Where is Timmothy Pitzen? - A Cruel Hoax, A Father's Heartbreak

For 24 hours Jim Pitzen thought his son, missing for nearly 8 years, had finally been found—but it turned out to be a lie. Inside his fight to keep hope alive

- Jeff Truesdell

The call Jim Pitzen had been waiting eight years to hear came shortly before noon on April 3. Someone claiming to be his son Timmothy had turned up on the street in Newport, Ky. Jim tried to keep his heart from leaping. On May 11, 2011, Timmothy’s mother had taken the 6-year-old out of his Aurora, Ill., kindergarten class citing a family emergency. Three days later her body was found, dead by suicide. But Timmothy hadn’t been seen since. Now detectives were on their way, and Jim couldn’t keep his mind from racing ahead—to registering his only child, who would now be 14, for school, advising him on how to shave, teaching him to drive. “I thought, ‘The next couple of weeks are going to be crazy,’” he says. “‘I’m going to be getting my son, change my routine, get back into family mode.’ It’s like shift from low gear to high gear, I’ve got to try to get him stable and back to trusting people.”