It’s been six days since 3-year-old Kamille “Cupcake” McKinney disappeared from a Birmingham birthday party and experts say time is no friend to child abduction investigations.

Teams of law enforcement agencies have joined in the hunt for Kamille and remain hopeful they will bring the exhaustive search to a successful end.

“In my heart, I do believe she is alive, and we are going to press forward,'' Birmingham Police Chief Patrick Smith has said. “It is my hope and prayer that we bring her back home to her family safely.”

Since day one, investigators have treated Kamille’s disappearance as a stranger abduction, though they say they have not ruled out any scenario. Such incidents grab headlines, but are rare in any city in the U.S.

On average, fewer than 350 people under 21 have been abducted by strangers in the U.S. per year since 2010, according Reuters citing FBI statistics. From 2010 through 2017, the number ranged from a low of 303 in 2016 to a high of 384 in 2011.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children assisted law enforcement and families with more than 25,000 cases of missing children in 2018. Of those, less than 1 percent were non-family abductions.

The last time Birmingham experience anything close to Kamille’s disappearance was on Thanksgiving Day, 1993, when 6-year-old Peggy Chappell was seen getting into a van or SUV with a man who witnesses said kissed her on the cheek.

Her body was found the next day, stuffed in a garbage bag and dumped on a heap of trash in the rubble of a ruined house within a block of her family’s Norwood Gardens apartments home. A 12-year-old boy made the gruesome discovery.

Investigators said Peggy was hit on the head with an iron pipe. The blow was forceful enough to kill her, but investigators believed she lived for up to an hour before someone slit her throat.

A medical examiner found no evidence Peggy was sexually assaulted, but police found a pornographic magazine next to her body in the garbage bag.

Peggy Chappellbn

Authorities charged Peggy’s mother, Katie Chappell, in 1994 with hindering prosecution because she wouldn’t help police find her daughter’s killer. Investigators insist Katie Chappell knows who coaxed Peggy into the van and why he took her.

Katie Chappell passed one polygraph test, but stumbled on the next three after investigators found more information and made the questions more specific.

She pleaded guilty to hindering prosecution in 1999 and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. That was reduced to five years of probation if she would cooperate with police.

The judge revoked her probation when she refused to help and sent her to prison for three years. Investigators several years ago consulted with FBI profilers in Quantico, Va. who said the killer was someone close to the family. They found it significant that Peggy’s clothes were neatly folded inside the garbage bag and that her body was dumped close to her home.

Her killing remains unsolved. Where Katie Chappell is today is not clear.

“From what our Behavior Analysts folks say, it’s not very common to have a 3-year-old abducted by a complete stranger,’’ said Birmingham’s FBI Special Agent in Charge Johnnie Sharp Jr. “When you’re looking at child predators who are looking to abduct a child for sexual purposes, those children tend to be older.”

Police say Kamille was abducted between 8 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. Saturday while attending a birthday party in Tom Brown Village in North Avondale. According to other children in the area, a man was handing out candy to children. At some point, they said, he snatched a barefoot Kamille, put her into a Toyota SUV and drove off.

Since then, a massive search comprised of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies has been underway. Within about 16 hours of Kamille’s disappearance, the FBI was brought in.

“We were aware of Kamille’s abduction and we offered our assistance at the outset. We’ve got a great relationship with the Birmingham Police Department,’’ Sharpe said. “Come Sunday, they said, ‘This is going to turn into a longer, more protracted investigation so we need FBI resources.’’

The FBI mobilized its Child Abduction Rapid Deployment teams to Birmingham. “Any time you have a missing or abducted child, history has demonstrated that time is of the essence’’ Sharpe said. “Every minute, literally every second, counts -- especially when the child is abducted by a stranger.”

Those cases are far more troubling than the “non-parental custodial type issue” law enforcement deals with on a frequent basis, he added.

“When it’s truly an abduction by a stranger, 99 percent of the time it’s for nefarious purposes so we know generally it’s not going to have a happy ending.”

“The quicker we can throw resources at trying to find the missing child or the abducted child the better because leads go cold pretty quick,’’ he said. “We get hot on a trail by throwing a lot of resources at one time – federal, state and local.”

“We’ve seen a lot of success where we’ve had examples around the country where kids were recovered in less than two hours,’’ he said. “That is why it’s critically important that as soon as there’s any notification about an abducted or missing child, we throw a lot of resources at it.”

Though the FBI is acting in a supporting role to Birmingham police, the agency has opened its own kidnapping investigation as well. “The presumption is made whenever there is an abducted child that there’s the potential that they cross state lines,’’ Sharpe said. “That goes back decades when the FBI first got involved in kidnapping investigations going all the way back to the Lindbergh baby.”

The FBI in 2005 created the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team which Sharpe said has taken decades of lessons learned in kidnappings and abductions and tried to develop best practices to investigate those.

The CARD team members - based in the FBI’s 56 field offices - are experts in crimes against children, specifically kidnappings involving abductors who aren’t related to the child. Team members in Birmingham to help with Kamille’s abduction include agents from Quantico, Kansas City, Knoxville and elsewhere. The team brings 200 cases of experience to help in the search.

“They help provide organization and structure, because as you might imagine, when you’re starting to chase leads down on an abducted child, you’re going in 20 different directions,’’ Sharpe said. “You could easily lose site or track of what’s been done so we install structure in that.”

In addition to the CARD team, the FBI has brought in the Behavioral Analysts team from Quantico. They have a psychology background and start analyzing facts of a case to build a profile of who investigators are likely looking for in terms of a suspect.

“They also have researched and studied countless abduction children matters so they already know there is a fact pattern here, things that are common to look for, things that are probably red herrings and you don’t want to look for,’’ Sharpe said. “Once law enforcement authorities narrow it down to a specific suspect or suspects, they are going in and analyzing things to help investigators with certain questions … to hopefully lead to the successful recovery of a child.”

Thirdly, the FBI’s Evidence Response Team has assisted Birmingham in a number of searches already, most notably when an SUV sought in the case was recovered by police 24 hours after Kamille’s disappearance.

No two abduction cases are exactly alike, and there is no standard time frame for cracking a child abduction case.

"If you’re dealing with a stranger abduction, history shows and case studies have documented, that the longer the time elapses between the time of the abduction and when the child is recovered, they typically don’t have a happy ending,’’ Sharpe said.

“There’s other case examples where there have been abductions that have been gone for years and then we’re able to recover the child and now they’re grown, and obviously went through some horrible things while they were in captivity, but they weren’t murdered,’’ he said.

Sharpe said he doesn’t yet know how long the CARD team will stay in Birmingham.

“As long as we have enough leads to justify these resources, then we’ll keep going as long as we need to go,’’ he said. “As leads dry up, we will scale back our resources.”

Reward money for information in the case is now up to $25,000 - $20,000 from Crimes Stoppers and $5,000 from the office of Gov. Kay Ivey.

Anyone with information on Kamille’s disappearance is asked to call the Birmingham police tip line at 205-297-8413, Crime Stoppers 205-254-7777, *HP or 911.