Carolyn Huebner Rankin

Falling Through Ice Carolyn Huebner Rankin

On May 27, 1987, the Times Picayune of New Orleans carried this front-page headline: Family Violence Adviser is Held in Plot to Have Husband Killed. The woman referred to was 29-year-old Carolyn Sue Huebner, of San Antonio, Texas. Founder and president of Texas Child Search, Inc., she had located 59 missing children since its inception in 1982, a better record than that of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Much appreciated by law enforcement and called upon for assistance by child abuse experts all over the country, she was an outspoken advocate against child pornography, child prostitution and child abuse. Treasured by the families she had helped, she had ultimately been nominated Woman of the Year by the San Antonio Light newspaper in February, 1987. How could such a woman fall from this nationally-recognized position of prestige to that of a violent criminal in just three months? There had to be more to this tale than met the eye but Carolyn Huebner, who had always been good for a terrific quote, wasn t talking. Now, more than 20 years after the events that had once garnered national attention, she is breaking her silence. With brutal honesty and written in narrative form by the woman who walked beside her as both close friend and colleague during much of her journey, Falling Through Ice brings us directly into Carolyn s courageous struggle to come to grips with the secrets in her past and the disastrous effects those secrets had on her life. Falling Through Ice demonstrates the heights to which the human spirit can soar as it seeks to emerge from darkness into light, but it never offers the abuse excuse as justification for her criminal acts. Indeed, as terrifying and lonely as it was, Carolyn Huebner s incarceration saved her life and gave her the opportunity to discover the only lost child she had been afraid to find: The child within herself.