Man behind hoax posts in unsolved missing boy case is ex-employee, Kansas sheriff says
The Butler County Sheriff said Monday that social media posts claiming to be from an 11-year-old boy who vanished without a trace home from his Towanda home in 1999 are a hoax perpetrated by an ex-employee.
“I’m very comfortable in saying this is a hoax. This is not Adam Herrman,” Sheriff Kelly Herzet told The Eagle by phone.
Herzet said the man responsible for the posts is 24-year-old Stephen Chadwick Smith, a former employee who worked at the Butler County Jail for a short time a few years ago. Herzet said he couldn’t discuss under what terms Smith left the position, but “he wasn’t here long enough for me to even hardly remember him.”
Smith did not respond to a reporter’s request for an interview on Twitter.
A Twitter account, @herrman_adam, from a person claiming to be the missing boy began tweeting about the case at 10:32 p.m. Saturday, including tagging news media. Two videos, each several minutes long and published under a user account called “Shiftless,” showed up Sunday on YouTube.
The posts have caused a stir on social media and questions about the legitimacy of their claims.
“He (Smith) was born in the hospital here in El Dorado, Kansas. I know his mother. I know his father. I know the family,” Herzet told The Eagle. “He is not Adam Herrman.”
Herzet said after he learned of the posts Sunday, a detective sergeant currently assigned to the Adam Herrman case contacted Smith and asked for an interview. But Smith declined.
“Stephen refuses to cooperate with us. He will not come in for an interview,” Herzet said.
Herzet said he spoke with the Butler County Attorney’s Office about whether Smith’s conduct rises to a prosecutable offense. It doesn’t, he says he was told.
“Our county attorney is pretty adamant that he cannot be charged with anything at this point.”
Herzet said this is the first time anyone has claimed to be Adam in the more than 20 years since the boy vanished from the mobile home where he lived with his adoptive parents, Doug and Valerie Herrman. Valerie Herrman claims Adam ran away after she spanked him with a belt. But she and her husband lied to family members about his whereabouts and collected thousands of dollars from adoption subsidy for Adam’s care until May 2005 — years after he was seen last.
Authorities didn’t learn of Adam’s disappearance until 2008, when his adoptive sister called state welfare officials hoping to find information about him.
In the years since, authorities have conducted an extensive search for him that included digging for remains in the mobile home park where Adam once lived and contacting other men nationwide who share Adam’s name.
The last “good tip” authorities received about Adam’s disappearance came in about three years ago, Herzet said without elaborating on what it was. A $100,000 reward offered in 2014 for information leading to the boy’s whereabouts and the arrest of the people responsible is no longer on the table, he said.
Herzet has previously said he thinks the boy is dead and that his adoptive parents are the main suspects in his disappearance.
Adam’s adoptive father died in 2016, and his adoptive mother now lives in the area of Howard, the county seat of Elk County, Kansas, he said.
Adam would turn 33 this year.
Herzet said the hoax “is sad for the integrity of the investigation, in my opinion. It’s very sad for the family of Adam Herrman. ... I got a called yesterday from one (family member) that really had hoped that this was Adam. But after we visited and after she heard some of the stuff and seen some of the YouTube stuff, she was let down and disappointed.”
He added: “The only positive thing I see out of this whole thing — and I try to stay very positive — is that it does have Adam’s name out there again, and hopefully the right person or persons that might know something about this case would come from, and we could get the little piece of evidence or something that we need to get the Herrmans charged. Or to find his remains.”
Anyone with information related to the case is encouraged to call the Butler County Sheriff’s Office at 316-322-4254.
This story was originally published February 24, 2020 at 1:03 PM.
