Shawn Hornbeck on ‘48 Hours Mystery’ Saturday
Shawn Hornbeck with CBS News’ Troy Roberts in “Kidnapped: Shawn Hornbeck’s Incredible Story,” airing Saturday on “48 Hours Mystery.”
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“48 Hours Mystery,” as it’s now called, says it has the first exclusive interview with Shawn Hornbeck, who “speaks out for the first time about his incredible story of survival” in the news magazine’s season premiere (9 p.m. Saturday on CBS). The reporter is Troy Roberts. CBS News quotes Shawn as telling Roberts:
“Nobody knows the real story except for me. There wasn’t a day when I didn’t think he was just gonna kill me…[sometimes] it seemed I was better off dead than living through that.”
My colleague Todd Frankel, who covered the case and ripped the DVD out of my hands as soon as it arrived and ran off to watch it, offers this early review:
“Shawn Hornbeck’s first extended interview about his captivity includes nuggets such as how he constantly (every day) thought he was going to be killed by his abductor Michael Devlin, that he considered the second kidnapped boy Ben Ownby to be his replacement in Devlin’s eyes, and that his greatest worry in life is not being understood (which you might expect from a young man who struggles with people who still wonder why he didn’t flee at some point in his 4-plus-years of captivity.) To anyone who followed the case there is little ‘Oh-My-Gosh’ revelatory in the hour-long piece. And the show features many of the familiar tricks of the “48 Hour” trade: plenty of recycled news footage, time-lapsed images of clouds flying across the sky, eerie close-ups of crime scene (Devlin’s apartment in Kirkwood) and disturbing, horror-movie-esque music in places.”
I was living around St. Louis when the second boy was kidnapped and when they found the 2 of them. This poor child will have a lot to deal with the rest of his life. People need to quit asking why he didn’t leave. He was a child! Until you have been in his position you do NOT know what you would do.