Hi, I'm Connie Chutton, tonight on Eye to Eye.
Peter, this is you. Please let us know where you are and how you're doing.
He graduated from Stanford with honors, and then he disappeared.
I'm looking for my son who's missing.
If he came that way, you know, they might, they might spot him.
But Peter Radcliffe was kidnapped by a demon no cop can catch.
There's a shadow in your life, but it never goes away.
The emotional voyage of two parents who won't stop asking, have you seen our son?
I think that he was in here today.
How did the world's most famous poor little rich girl become the ultimate survivor?
This is my mother, and she haunts my life.
Tonight, Gloria Vanderbilt talks about her four marriages.
He beat you? Oh, yeah. He used to beat me up, accidentally.
And for the first time, about the tragic death of her son.
I said, Carla, don't do this to me. Carla, come back. Just let go.
An Eye to Eye exclusive.
Why me? Why not me? Why is me exempt from this?
You think you can actually prove that God exists?
He's a professor with a scientific crystal ball.
I can come close to doing that.
They're buying it. Will you?
What Tipler is trying to do is just sell books.
Do you believe in life after death?
Frank Tipler says he can see forever.
Will there be sex in heaven?
Those stories and why the woman who would be queen is more like the queen mother.
Tonight on Eye to Eye.
It's Eye to Eye with Connie Chon.
With correspondents Bernard Goldberg, Edie Magnus, Ross Mitchell, Roberta Baskin, and Bill Lagatuda.
Good evening. Tonight there are nearly 400,000 people missing in this country.
Peter Radcliffe is one of them.
But unlike most of the others, no one suspects he was kidnapped, killed, or that he chose to run away.
Everyone who knows Peter believes he is a victim of his own demons.
Bill Lagatuda joins a mother and father on a relentless search for their son. Bill?
Connie, this is not just another missing person story.
Peter Radcliffe is not a child. He's 34 years old and would be a productive member of society if only he could find his way back.
Oh God. I can't believe it.
I can't believe I'm doing this. I can't believe this is really happening.
Peter's mother would do anything to find him.
It's like living with Saul every day.
There's a shadow in your life and it never goes away.
Give us a call. That's our phone number. I'm his father and that's our phone number on the flyer.
His father tells the story to anyone who will listen.
I'm looking for my son. I haven't been too successful at it.
The thought that we might never know. We may never see Peter again and we may never know what happened to him.
That's difficult.
This is no organized effort, no foundation, no volunteers.
Diana and Peter Radcliffe have no idea really how to find a missing person, except to just keep looking.
Yeah, that looks fine.
We'll accept all correct calls. And hope the next call is from someone who has seen him or maybe Peter himself.
Peter, this is you. Please let us know where you are and how you're doing.
We love you, Peter.
Peter is from San Francisco and he disappeared the way the city does under the fog, gone with barely a trace.
He was at a conference in the mountains when he simply vanished three years ago.
It's just as if the earth opened and swallowed him up.
And it's not as if Peter had any desire to drop out on his life, not the way it was going for him.
He was intelligent, good-looking, fun-loving, unforgettable.
Sometimes every day I think of Pete and when I'm in the ocean, he loved the ocean so much.
He was a superb body surfer.
He was an extraordinary athlete, but he also, I could talk to him.
Peter has a lot of charm, and his charm is real charm.
It comes from the kind of person he is, a bright, beautiful, loving person, full of compassion.
Peter graduated with honors from Stanford University, spoke fluent French, loved to read and talk politics.
This is Peter on the day he graduated high school.
His friends since kindergarten, Chris Pastey, remembers how they both had big plans.
He'd already been accepted to Stanford, and we were just both happy to be done with high school and, you know, looking forward to going to college.
I'm excited about the future. Oh, definitely, definitely.
But no matter how remarkable he was, Peter couldn't escape what was about to happen to him.
It never showed when he was a child, not as a teenager either.
But at age 23, Peter discovered he was manic-depressive, and he hit the road.
When he disappeared that first time, you were surprised.
I was totally surprised. I couldn't believe it.
No one could believe that Peter, they knew, would turn into a stranger overnight.
But the disease had taken control of his mind.
He left home and careened around the state, lived at the ocean, or on the street.
Things seemed very different. Like he would be camping on a beach or near the beach, and he wouldn't eat for three days.
You know, your mind takes you on a journey.
Something catches your attention, and you go off and follow that, and then one thing leads to another, and probably you just keep going.
Peter was on that journey for five frightening months before he snapped out of it and came home.
He got help from his doctor, who put him on the drug often used to treat manic-depressives, lithium.
There was such a simple way out, a lithium pill twice a day, and he could live his normal life.
Peter's life was back to normal. For five years, there were no more episodes until he attended that conference at a summer camp in western Massachusetts.
He seemed fine in this idyllic setting, but when friends went to wake him one day, Peter had wandered off.
He was spotted at a nearby store by Billy Joe Baxter.
He looked like a normal-day guy, but he seemed really confused and mixed up, and he wasn't really sure where he was going, but he was going somewhere.
A truck driver gave him a lift and dropped him off somewhere here in New England.
He had left behind his eyeglasses, his ID, and most importantly, his lithium.
Peter Radcliffe, age 31, was lost.
He's wandering, and he could be amnesiac, or partly amnesiac, and not know who he is or why he's there.
I mean, do you have a sense of how horrible that is?
When Peter walked away from that conference and disappeared into these woods, his parents and friends believed he had done what many manic depressives do.
He had cut back or shaved his medication, thinking he was finally in control.
Instead, Peter had wandered right back into that nightmare world he'd spent years trying to avoid.
This is what life can be like if you're manic-depressive like Peter.
When you're manic, everything is more intense.
Lights brighter, colors more vivid, noises louder.
You're carried along on impulse, out of control.
In the grip of his awful illness, Peter thought he was invincible.
You can go any place that you want to. There's no six things private property.
The laws of nature and the laws of physics will not bind your behavior so that you can swim underwater and breathe underwater while you're swimming.
When the manic phase winds down, the world begins to lose color, slows to a crawl, closes in, and life can be utterly hopeless.
Nothing at all seems worthwhile. You feel just totally consumed by grief.
You think he feels trapped in this mental state he's in now and he just can't get out?
He's not capable of making a decision in his own best interest or a choice in his own best interest.
Were you frightened for him?
Oh, frightened?
He was terrified. God.
Well, for us, you're talking about fear. We were just in a constant state of fear all the time.
Fear that the same brain which made Peter brilliant might lead him down some dangerous path.
Since the normal Peter liked to travel, the manic Peter could be anywhere.
So finding him would seem impossible.
I'd like a 300 copies of this.
But the Radcliffe's have a plan.
We need to get those addresses.
From the library where Diana Radcliffe looks up hospitals, police stations, and truck stops one state at a time.
We always hold it like this.
To their living room, which has become an amateur missing persons bureau.
The Radcliffe's believe anyone who hears Peter's story won't be able to ignore it, especially at America's truck stops.
Hi. I'm looking for my son who's a missing person. I wondered if I could give you a flyer.
It's hardly the most efficient way to get the word out, but at every opportunity, Peter Sr. is stepping up to the cab of another big rig.
Meeting the men and women he thinks have the best chance of spotting a lost soul out on the highway.
Hi.
How long has he been missing now?
It's now almost close to three years.
No contact or nothing?
It just disappeared, yeah.
It was, after all, a trucker who gave Peter a lift shortly after he vanished.
How many truckers do you think you've talked to over the past few years?
Thousands.
And the truckers are looking.
Mrs. Radcliffe, Mr. Radcliffe, this is Joe Palmer from Pocomoke, Maryland.
In regards to your son Peter, we received a flyer at the truck stop.
I think that he was in here today. Thanks, Joe Palmer.
Of course, we've had lots of calls like this. This one might be the real one.
As Diana tried to reach the truck driver back east, Peter Sr. was out in another familiar place.
So I'd, about once a month, just walk through and check it out.
We walked with him through Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, where many of the city's homeless sleep.
A lot of people are out here because they want to be.
He would not want to be here.
Peter Radcliffe has spent countless hours staring into the eyes of these misplaced people.
His son may be one of them now.
Back at home, Diana finally reaches the truck stop in Maryland.
Oh, hi, Mr. Palmer, this is Diana Radcliffe calling you from San Francisco.
Hi.
Hi, I just wondered if you had the man come in again that you thought looked like Peter.
Not today.
Oh dear.
Yeah.
If that was Peter, he slipped away again.
It's just that terrible thing of them seeing the flyer after they've seen Peter.
The minute I hear that, my heart just sinks.
Back in the park, more disappointment.
No luck here today.
No luck here today.
When you're doing it, you just sometimes have the feeling, my God, what am I doing?
I might as well just take them and throw them into the wind, you know?
But it's sort of important to me that sometimes when I put up a flyer, it made a little sense.
And anytime I saw a beach volleyball court, I put a flyer up on the post.
It's an unusual place to put a flyer.
It might catch the attention of the players.
And I thought that if Pete came that way, you know, they might spot him, they might remember him.
He might be in shape to play.
Peter Sr. has logged 11,000 miles in the search for his son.
Every vacation from work as a college professor is another trip to some part of the country.
On this day, he came back to Massachusetts with us.
So this is where he was dropped off, dropped off, a pull into the store.
Nearly three years to the day after Peter vanished here, there were few reminders.
Most of the original flyers were gone.
I just wanted to post the flyer again on your boating board like I did three years ago.
They're back up now with an added message.
In 23 years, I've never had anybody just disappear like this and never, ever turn up again.
Lieutenant Bob Goslin is the officer who investigated Peter's case back then, and he hasn't given up hope.
In fact, the flyer he posted at the police station three years ago is still on the wall.
Well, we put it up where we could see it every day.
I didn't want Peter to get lost in the bureaucracy of things.