Where's David?

The large advertisement in the Sunday New York Times was as intriguing, if somewhat less informative, as anything in the huge paper's news columns that day. "Has anyone seen my son David Rosoff?" it asked. It showed a picture of a small boy wearing a cowboy hat. Below the picture was a date more poignant than the question: the photograph had been taken in 1968. TIME Correspondent Marion Knox explored the strange story behind the ad and sent this report:

It is first necessary to get the cast of characters straight. There are five principal actors in the bizarre Rosoff saga: 1) Jo Oppenheimer, 39, tousled, troubled and wealthy; 2) Adolph ("Dolph") Rosoff, 52, a familiar Greenwich Village character, who is now languishing in jail; 3) Thelma ("Teddy") Sucker Feldman, 51, his longtime companion and a self-styled therapist, who is also in jail; 4) Micah, 25, Teddy's son by a 1945 marriage, who spirited David away on Dolph and Teddy's instructions; and 5) the missing David, who is now twelve, the offspring of Jo and Dolph.

It all began in a Village coffeehouse in 1961 where Jo, then a 25-year-old receptionist from Chicago, met Dolph and Teddy. The three hit it off, and the group, including Micah, agreed to live together as a free-style "family," sharing everything, including sex, in Jo's Washington Square Village apartment. Some shared more than others: Jo paid most of the family's communal expenses out of her $60,000 yearly income from stock dividends and a trust fund set up by her father, who owned a sausage-casing company. "We had somewhat of an open family," says the burly, bearded Dolph, interviewed in jail. "We were trying to live as truthfully and honestly with each other as we could. Jo came along. She was a rich girl living alone who latched onto us."

In 1962 they decided to open a coffeehouse and formed a corporation called the Big Ffor (after the initials of each member's last name), and Jo bought them a four-story house and storefront on West 4th Street. From all accounts, including her own, Jo was "in emotional trouble." According to Teddy, she was once found on the roof of a house tossing away checks, had attempted suicide several times, and often spent days cocooned in bed weeping.

Soon she became pregnant by Dolph.

For five months after David was born, Jo took care of him. Then, Teddy charges, she began to put ground glass and soap in the child's formula, stepped on his fingers and fed him overdoses of medicine. "They asked me about all of those things, and I finally admitted to having done them," says Jo. "Somebody had to be the crazy one in a group like that. The role was chosen for me, and I accepted it. The family attracts emotionally sick people."

The family decided that Jo could no longer be trusted with David, so Teddy took over as his mother, and David grew up believing that Jo was his sister. He was raised by the family's notions of total freedom; he was kept out of school and picked up his education from the people who gravitated to the storefront seeking food and shelter. The storefront, which the group turned into a factory to produce Tiffany-style lampshades rather than into a coffeehouse, overflowed with dogs, vagrants, hanging lamps, plants, glass-cutting equipment, books, rags and grime.

How to Cry. Dolph claims that David was autistic and had terrible tantrums. "Teddy worked with him 24 hours a day teaching him how to cry as a child should. We couldn't have sent him to school with the problems he had, but he has been educated. He reads at a junior high school level, knows script and everything about dinosaurs."

In 1970 Jo finally "ran from the family," as she puts it, leaving her son behind. "I realized that if I were ever going to get him out I had to get out myself." In the next two years, she got psychiatric help, moved to Peekskill, N.Y., where she bought a house, set up another lamp-making studio, enrolled at Empire State College, joined the community ambulance corps, and once even sent the impoverished family $75,000 to keep up mortgage payments.

Gradually she began to see David again, but always under the watchful eye of family members. In 1973 she asked that he be told that she was his natural mother and had a writ of habeas corpus served on Dolph. After Dolph failed to produce the boy for testing before the question of custody could be settled, he was sent to jail. Teddy also refused to comply with the court order and, before going to jail herself, told Micah and Peter Yee, 15, a storefront regular picked up by the family in a nearby park, to hide David. In October 1973 the three disappeared and were last thought to be somewhere in Connecticut. In desperation, Jo Oppenheimer has offered a $2,500 reward to anyone who can help her find her son. Only a few people have responded with information about a boy they believe to be David. In addition, she has spent some $100,000 on detective fees, newspaper ads and lawyers. But Dolph and Teddy seem prepared to stay in jail indefinitely to keep David from his mother.

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