Boy Wonder

Laura Mehmert is only just recovering from the onslaught of the media. However, she says, she'd do it again. "I think about that little girl and how frightened she will feel with him back in the home," she says. "The press were all, 'That poor little boy.' What about her? And I'm worried that someone will see what happened to me and decide not to report something like this. You have to."

James Bludworth

Brett Amole

Seen of the crime: Laura Mehmert looks out her window at the former Wuthrich yard.

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More About

• Beverly Wuthrich
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She describes most of the mail and telephone calls -- at least until she changed her number -- as "hateful." But there were some that vindicated her actions. "They were mostly from women who had been the victims of incest," she says, "saying things like, 'I wish a neighbor had been there to save me.'" A few days after the judge's decision, Mehmert says she was on Peter Boyles's radio talk show when a woman called who said she'd had a child in Beverly's daycare center. "She went over to pick up her child, a two-year-old, and the little girl didn't have any panties on," Mehmert says. "She asked where they were, and she was told that the little girl had cut them up with scissors. She was given the panties, and they had been cut into strips...Now you show me a two-year-old with the manual dexterity to handle a pair of scissors like that. Needless to say, she didn't take her child back."

By the time Mehmert appeared on the radio show, Raoul had already left the country and arrived in Switzerland. Beverly Wuthrich told reporters that the entire family, including his little sister, was looking forward to the reunion. The girl was seeing a counselor, she said, and when Raoul gets home, she intended to see that he got therapy, too. Not for the alleged sexual abuse, or fire-setting, or animal abuse, but for the trauma of his incarceration. Of Raoul's little sister, Beverly told the press, "She carries a picture of him with her. His absence has caused her some problems."