The way his boy ran, with a funny little waddle-shuffle “like a chubby old man,” always made Jim chuckle. “He was super smart, high energy, funny,” the father says, leaning forward. Ten years on, true to his mother’s words, Timmothy Pitzen still has not been found, and the enduring mystery haunts his father most every hour of every day. To one side, framed photographs of Tim and his crooked, dimpled grin cover nearly every inch of the wall: donning a Blackhawks jersey, light brown bangs peeking from under a cap beaming while sitting cross-legged in a spare tire, resting his head on the cat. Pac-Man arcade game, its acrylic top a film of dust. Across from him is an old piano that hasn’t been played in years to his left, a busted Ms. He wears a dark, loose-fitting long-sleeved T-shirt over jeans, a ball cap thumbed back on his head. Jim folded his 6-foot-1 frame into a comfortable-looking chair. Still, his eyes fill and his voice thickens at times when he speaks of his son. Jim walked me past that chaotic room with an utter lack of self-consciousness that seemed in keeping with a man of few words, not easily given to outward emotion. For a long time, Tim’s moon-face night-light had hung on Jim’s bedroom wall, but the pain of seeing it often led him to take it down. It looked like the unkempt room of a teenager, a 16-year-old maybe, the age his son would be today. The unmade bed was buried under a jumble of shirts and socks. On the way to the living room, I caught a glimpse of his bedroom, the door to which stood unapologetically open. He is in the process of fixing up the home, he says, so some drywall and paint cans clutter a hallway. He tinkers with them less and less of late, so they now rest like neglected tombs, slowly rusting. The vehicles are projects he’s taken on over the years to take his mind off the gnawing anguish. 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. On this afternoon, Jim sits in his living room in Clinton, looking at his hands. 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. “The way the other house felt … ,” he says, then pauses. The father had just started building the boy a treehouse out back.īut 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.Īnd so the father fled the home, the life he’d known, and the treehouse he couldn’t bear to finish. 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. Jim had tried to stay in that Aurora home. 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 Pitzen was born and raised here, and it was to Clinton that he retreated after everything happened. 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. It is raining the day I pull into Clinton, Iowa, an industrial town hard against the west bank of the Mississippi River.
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