The Rise and Fall of the Missing Children Milk Carton Campaign
Before there were AMBER Alerts and GPS tracking, milk cartons were a popular way to create awareness of child abductions.
One of my favorite books growing up was The Face on the Milk Carton, a young adult novel written by Caroline B. Cooney. The book is about a 15-year-old girl named Janie Johnson, who lives with her loving parents. One day Janie is startled to see her face on a milk carton under the heading “Missing Child.” The milk carton claimed that Jennie Spring was kidnapped from a New Jersey shopping mall at age 3. The rest of the book explores Janie’s journey to find the truth as she begins having flashbacks of people and places that suggest her past isn’t what she thought.
To my surprise, I didn’t realize that this book was eerily similar to a real-life case. In the 1980s, 7-year-old Bonnie Lohman saw her face on a milk carton and set off a chain of events that would lead her to be reunited with her father.
The Milk Carton Campaign
In the late 1970s and 1980s, several high-profile missing child cases dominated the news, prompting the founding of The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 1984. The most famous of these cases included the disappearance of Etan…
