Amid the jumble of legal documents and sordid accusations in the case of Wimperis vs. Wimperis, it is easy to forget that the real story has always been Adam's.

He is the little boy who missed out on recess and show-and-tell and cowboy-theme birthday parties with kids and clowns.

He never knew his last name or his next address.

Or the truth.

From the day Adam's father was accused of sexually molesting him until the moment his mother kidnapped him after losing a messy custody battle in 1990, the line between the good guys and the bad guys had become too blurry to discern.

In Adam's world, things were never as they seemed. Nothing was ever normal enough or stable enough or safe enough.

For eight years.

Now, his mother has been found and charged with abducting her son, bringing them back to Carroll County where it all began.

Since that warm June day in 1990, a father has mourned.

A mother has run.

A church has harbored a fugitive.

A little boy has become a teen-ager.

Based on interviews with family members, prosecutors, the FBI and those who hid mother and son, it's clear that everyone on every side of the case has suffered.

But one sandy-haired youngster -- a quick-witted, very confused boy named Adam James Wimperis -- has paid the biggest price of them all.

Father's Day, 1990

Sharon Wimperis decided she couldn't take any more.

Her marriage had fallen apart. Her son, she believed, was being molested by her husband. But with the charges of abuse deemed untrue and her parenting in question, she had lost custody of 5-year-old Adam.

So she fled with the boy, changing their names, leaving behind the East Coast and an older son from a previous marriage. This is what good mothers do when the father denies and the judge rules and the child suffers, she told people.

The Finksburg housewife headed west, into anonymity.

In the first place they settled, life for Adam bordered on normal.

The town was Marion, Ind., population about 30,000. Halfway between Indianapolis and Fort Wayne in a rural county, it was the perfect place to get lost.

"They literally just disappeared into thin air," says Bill Wimperis, Adam's father, left behind, accused, his only child gone.

Aided by an underground network of Christian churchgoers willing to harbor a federal fugitive whom they believed to be protecting an abused boy, Sharon and Adam moved in with a Marion couple whose own children were grown and gone.

Adam James Wimperis became Adam Ford. He didn't get a middle name.

Adam and Sharon -- who had changed her name to Ann Ford -- joined St. James Lutheran Church. They were active in the parish, joining Bible study groups and going to Sunday school.

Adam was allowed to play with other children after weekly church services. In a 1992 photo in the glossy church directory, 7-year-old Adam smiles for the camera, one front tooth missing.

Of the church's nearly 500 members, only a handful knew Sharon and Adam's secret. The Rev. Mark Carlson was one of them.

"In our church, this mother and son lived under the protecting and caring hand of love," the pastor said. "We sheltered them and concealed them. We knew it was against man's law, but we were following the leading of God in this. We believed we were exercising a higher moral law."

For 3 1/2 uneventful years, Adam lived in Marion. In 1993, the boy was enrolled at Lakeview Christian School.

"He was a happy, healthy, very normal little boy," the school's administrator, Michael Shaffer, said he was told by the boy's first-grade teacher.

Then a random mass mailing of postcards from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children landed in thousands of mailboxes around Marion. At the top of the card -- above black-and-white pictures of Adam and Sharon -- was the question, "Have you seen us?"

Many people had, and they called to report that Marion's Ann and Adam Ford were Maryland's Sharon and Adam Wimperis.

The FBI missed them by minutes. Years later, Adam would tell authorities he recalled racing down his street in one direction and seeing police cars race up in the other.

When the story hit the local newspapers, the town reeled. People had respected Sharon. The first-grade teacher described her to Shaffer as "a true lady in an age where there aren't many of them left."

Carlson fielded calls from dozens of church members, who all agreed the woman had been a doting mother.

At Lakeview Christian Elementary, 20 first-graders gathered into circle and prayed for Adam Ford.

After Marion, Sharon trusted no one, risked little. The Indiana town would be the last place Adam attended a school or church. There would be no Little League, no sleepovers with friends.

It would mark the last time he would stay in one place long enough to call it home or use a name for long enough to know how to spell it.

And it would mark the last time he would be able to see a police officer without panicking.

Frozen in time

For Bill Wimperis, that Father's Day in 1990 was the day time came to a standstill.

His only child was gone. His reputation was smeared.

From then on, one unchanging image would represent his Adam an 8-by-10 framed photo on top of the living room entertainment center in which a mischievous 5-year-old in a starched white karate uniform grins into the camera.

In the father's mind, Adam never grew beyond the little boy enthralled with E.T. and Ninja Turtles and plastic Fisher Price three-wheelers. For Bill Wimperis, his little boy stayed little, just on the brink of kindergarten, just shy of his first pair of sneakers with laces.

That summer, Bill made a conscious choice to freeze his world in time.

If Adam came home, he would find life just as he left it. The teddy bear still on the bed. The dusty pile of rocks he had brought in from the front driveway still on the kitchen counter. His colored pictures still on the refrigerator.

After he remarried, Bill even balked at his wife's suggestion to put new siding on the house.

The siding company no longer produced the original color, and the anguished father had bad dreams that Adam would someday try to make his way back home but not recognize the changed house.

The years passed. But life inside the two-story rancher in Finksburg was at a standstill.

Around town, at work, among friends, people never knew what to say to Bill, he says.

Those who believed he was the sexual predator his former wife had publicly accused him of being had already turned away.

But those who believed in the straight-talking engineer would nervously fumble around the subjects of kids and school plays and loss.

"I would tell them, 'It's OK. Go ahead and ask me about him. Talk about him. I need this, too, because talking about Adam is the only way I have of keeping him alive and real for me.' "

At the Wimperis house, the once-bright colors in little Adam's drawings were beginning to fade. The boy was starting to disappear.

Bill Wimperis framed the drawings and tried to keep them out of direct sunlight.

And every year, on Adam's birthday, he took the day off to celebrate and grieve alone.

Leads and sightings

The Baltimore office of the FBI had received hundreds of leads on Sharon Wimperis' whereabouts since she fled. While sightings of Adam came in from all over the country, most were from the Midwest, prompting investigators to focus their attention there.

The mother and son had moved often during their eight years on the run, usually taking a plane or train to new destinations, according to an FBI official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Later, Bill Wimperis says, Adam would estimate they lived in more than 10 different places, including Oregon, Michigan, Missouri, Illinois and Pennsylvania.

"We were tracking her here, there and everywhere," the FBI source said.

When the FBI tracked Sharon to the church in Marion, agents interviewed numerous people who had hidden the mother and child but denied knowledge of the case.

The same church members later admitted "a lack of candor with the FBI and to assisting Wimperis and her son to elude authorities," according to an FBI report.

Over the years, Bill Wimperis twice received calls from authorities who believed they had located Adam. Both times, though, fingerprints proved the boy in question to be someone else, some other child snatched by one parent and hidden from another.

Seven Father's Days and eight birthdays passed.

Eight years of worry

Sharon's mother, Dorothy Quigley, knows what being a mom is all about. It's about worrying and wondering and praying that God will help you do the right thing.

All her life, Quigley's children have tried to hide things from her. "We don't want to worry you, Mom," they always say.

But Quigley usually found out their secrets anyway. And then she'd wag her finger and say: "Whenever you keep something from me in an effort not to worry me, I end up with a much bigger worry on my hands."

In June 1990, Sharon Wimperis didn't tell Quigley of her plans to run.

"One day she was just gone," her mother says. "And now all I've done for eight years is worry."

Quigley is not one of those mothers who thinks her children can do no wrong.

Ask her whether Sharon should have taken the boy, taken him who knows where to live who knows what kind of life, and she pauses for a long drawn-out moment.

"I can't answer that," Quigley says. "I believe she thought what she was doing was right at the time. Does she still? I doubt it.

"If, eight pain-filled years later, you find yourself right back where you were originally, I don't see how you could think you made the right move."

Drop everything

Three weeks ago, Bill Wimperis got a call from an FBI agent who tried to sound casual as he asked, "Hey, Bill, you going to be around there tomorrow?"

"I'm going to be over on the Eastern Shore," the father answered.

"Well, I think we're going to need to talk to you tomorrow morning, so call in about 11: 30."

At 11: 15 the next morning, while driving through eastern Maryland with his wife, Bill's cell phone rang.

"Where are you?" the agent asked.

"Why?" Bill asked nervously.

"Because wherever you are, you better do a 180-degree turn and put yourself on a plane to Michigan. We've got Adam."

An anonymous tip had led the FBI to Sharon and Adam's apartment in Belleville, Mich. Since then, everything has happened at breakneck speed.

Within 36 hours, Bill and his new wife, Brenda Wimperis, were in Detroit. On the plane, Bill Wimperis said he kept asking himself the same questions: "Will he remember me? Will he love me? Or hate me?"

When Adam walked into the courtroom, father did not recognize son.

The court hearing releasing Adam to his father's custody took less than 20 minutes.

According to bystanders in the courtroom, everyone was crying, and when asked if he knew of any reason he should not go home with his father, Adam looked directly at the judge and replied, "No, ma'am."

Now 13, Adam doesn't seem to know why he and his mother were on the run all those years.

"He knew they were hiding, but from what was not clear," Bill Wimperis said in an extensive interview at the family's home last week. He would not allow Adam to be questioned, and he adamantly denies that any sexual abuse ever occurred.

On the first night Adam was home, Bill Wimperis sat down with him and said, "I hope you know I would never hurt you."

Adam responded, "I know," and Bill started to cry.

One recent night, Brenda Wimperis heard Bill and Adam talking in the upstairs hallway. As they said good night, Bill told his son he loved him.

"Then Adam said, 'I love you too, Dad,' " Brenda said.

Bill came into their bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed and sobbed.

Sorting out the truth

Adam watched his mother get arrested. He knows she faces a year in jail for his abduction.

He knows that Sharon -- who declined to comment for this article -- is being held in the Carroll County Detention Center.

"We're telling him the whole truth," Bill Wimperis said. "He hasn't always led the most truthful life, you know. He knows that what his mother did was wrong, but he still loves her. That isn't going to change.

"And for my part, I have to work at getting over the fact that I personally feel cheated. Adam has two parents, and no matter how I feel about what Sharon has done, I have to deal with that."

The family has hired a therapist, who has already spent hours with Adam.

In the three weeks he has been home, Adam has started to remember pieces of his life as a 5-year-old.

"Didn't my toy box used to be there?" he asked his father the other day.

He can go outside whenever he wants now. But he is scared to begin the eighth grade, wondering how the other children will react to him.

Almost as if the past eight years have drained him, the boy has eaten constantly and slept a lot.

Adam's life on the run has changed him. As Brenda Wimperis describes it: "It's almost like in some regards he is still a 5-year-old and in others he's a 35-year-old."

He has never been inside a post office, a common place for fliers with pictures of missing children. He hasn't been to a doctor or dentist in eight years. And last week, at a mall with his stepmother, Adam froze when he saw a state trooper.

"Oh, God," he told Brenda. "There's an officer."

"That's OK," she responded. "We're not afraid of them anymore."

Lost years of childhood

After all his lost years, Adam is clinging to the artifacts of his childhood. He has dragged his toys -- action figures and stuffed animals -- from storage, pored over photo albums and looked at the "missing child" posters bearing his name and photo.

His beloved dog, Misty, died just eight months before Adam came home.

"He missed out on so much that he can never get back," Bill Wimperis said.

Everyone did. Dorothy Quigley hasn't yet seen Adam: "I don't want to confuse him even more." His older half-brother, David, has not been by. He has not been allowed to talk with his mother.

But a new framed photo now sits next to the picture of the karate-dressed, mischievous 5-year-old.

In it, a smiling 13-year-old is hugging his dad.

Pub Date: 8/30/98