Friday, March 21, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
It takes just a second to get involved -- to call police when something seems suspicious, to connect a photo on a missing child poster with a face on the street, to stop and think about a life other than your own.
That second has come to define Judy Gifford's existence.
The past three years have seen her circulating fliers, tacking up posters, and appealing to audiences to help find missing children -- first her own daughter, Kali Ann Poulton, and now other people's.
She's learned the hard way that it takes a community to save a child, a lesson that for Kali boiled down to a second.
Weeks before her 4 1/2-year-old daughter disappeared, Gifford said her neighbor unknowingly had the chance in the spring of 1994 to save Kali's life. The neighbor, also a mother, was told one day by her child that a man in their apartment complex had exposed himself to her while she was playing.
The mother could have called police the second she found out, but didn't, Gifford said. A short time after that, Kali disappeared. Her strangled body was found 27 months later at the bottom of a 33,000-gallon tank of coolant after the same man confessed to the blue-eyed blonde's murder.
Gifford does not dwell on those moments; she shared them candidly this week at the Las Vegas Convention Center hoping to reach the ears of a society too busy to listen until they, too, become a victim.
"We always think we are so busy, that we are being pulled in so many different directions," said Gifford, who has opened the Kali Search Center to help find other missing children.
"Every 40 seconds, a child is reported missing. This society seems to look at children as if they are expendable. That mother's decision not to get involved ended in my child's murder. Children affect all of us. They are our future."
Gifford's brief visit in Las Vegas was timed to coincide with the National School Supply and Equipment Association trade show. Once geared to buyers of books and audio-video equipment, the biannual gathering's focus now includes missing children.
David Thelen's trade show booth represents that collective consciousness.
Since he launched the nonprofit Committee for Missing Children in 1991, he has managed to get 535 missing children's photos published 550 million times on fliers, mailers and posters that now hang in Sam's Clubs and Wal-Marts across the country.
One of his proudest successes sprang from an idea developed after spending 15 years as a school supplies sales representative.
Realizing that some missing children could be alive and living under different names -- by abduction, black market adoption, or even as runaways -- Thelen convinced paper suppliers to start printing missing children's photos on construction paper wrappers.
Sure enough, one day a teacher in a school in the Midwest recognized a student in her class as the boy on the construction paper wrapper she'd just opened.
"Adam had been missing for four years," Thelen said. "We found him."
Thelen since has devoted his entire life to CMC, surviving off his wife's salary as a head secretary for a Brinks delivery service branch manager.
"Children are not widgets; this isn't a business you get into to make money," Thelen said. "All of us have to take a loss on this. I'm doing this because I want parents to have the best possibility of finding their children. We should think of the child first, the parent second, and making money after that."
Thelen said he doesn't charge parents to print their missing children's photos; he only needs their permission.
"The biggest problem is finding out who's missing," he said. "According to statistics, 8,000 children disappear every year. That means 8,000 this year, 8,000 last year, 8,000 the year before. I will print up fliers of anyone's child, as long as they promise to pass them out."
CMC targets schools and businesses, Thelen said, and is the second largest distributor of missing children's photos, behind Advo, which regularly distributes 53 million cards a week in residents' mailboxes across the country.
"What I've always admired about David is that he didn't have to lose a child to realize the need to help other parents find theirs," said Gifford, who Thelen helped by sending Kali's photo even into Mexico. "He did it all on his own."
* WANT TO PUBLISH the photo of a missing child in CMC's resources? Call (800) 525-8204.
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