The news was devastating. The man claiming to be Timmothy Pitzen, who went missing as a 6-year-old in 2011, had made the whole thing up.

He was instead a 23-year-old former inmate named Brian Rini of Medina, Ohio.

"It's been awful," Alana Anderson, Pitzen's grandmother, said after Rini's deceit was discovered. "We've been on tenderhooks."

It was almost certainly devastating as well for the families of other missing children across the U.S., including more than 90 from Kentucky and Indiana, say experts who work with missing children cases.

"When there's a recovery, it brings hope to other families," said Callahan Walsh, a child advocate with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, adding that a false recovery also can have a lasting impact. "For these families, they’re really going to be guarded in the future."

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Walsh, 34, was a boy when his brother was abducted and killed. His father, John Walsh, created the TV show "America's Most Wanted."

The center for which Walsh advocates lists 35 missing children cases from Kentucky and another 60 from Indiana, some dating back to the 1980s — all remain open and unsolved, with families still hoping for answers.

There is James Bess, who went missing as a 14-year-old from Ashland, Kentucky, in 1984. Shannon Green, who was 16 when she disappeared from Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1986. And Destiny Stockton, 18, who went missing from Jeffersonville, Indiana, in January of this year.

There are more, from Louisville, Covington, Indianapolis, Bowling Green and other cities and towns throughout Kentucky and Indiana.

Sadly, there are many missing children reports added every year. Detective Mike Lauder, one of the three detectives in the Louisville Metro Police Department's missing persons unit, handles about 2,000 cases a year.

"These are extremely difficult situations for families," Lauder said. "Not having any answers, the unknown is very difficult."

The Courier Journal reached out to more than half a dozen families with children on the national center's missing list. All declined to respond or comment.

Fraudulent information isn't uncommon in missing children's cases, Walsh said, but what made the Pitzen hoax different was just how public the information and development became when he reportedly had been found.

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Walsh credited the work of law enforcement in Ohio and Kentucky, which with the assistance of the national center, could vet the claims and information.

The key to law enforcement determining that Rini wasn't Pitzen was DNA evidence.

Rini is now charged with lying to federal agents, and a federal judge recently ordered that he be held in custody through the remainder of his case.

Lauder, who spends most of his time on longer-term missing person cases, said police often try to collect DNA from both parents and send it to a lab so they have a profile in case a person, or body, turns up years later.

Police then work with the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System to find potential matches.

The FBI in Louisville was part of the recent effort to determine that Rini wasn't Pitzen, and Special Agent in Charge Robert Brown said moving on information quickly, both in new and old investigations, makes all the difference.

The first eight to 24 hours of a child-abduction case with the FBI involved are filled with a flurry of action, Brown said, as command centers are set up, evidence is collected and witnesses and family members are interviewed.

The FBI works closely with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and has agents embedded with the nonprofit organization.

Vetting information gets easier the more cases you handle, Lauder said. Sometimes families in stressful situations will embellish details in an effort to get a stronger response from police.

"You just have to follow up on every aspect of it, and the biggest thing is experience," he said.

Lauder and other detectives will sometimes go back to witnesses or family members to keep memories fresh and keep the missing from being forgotten.

"There's just so much at stake," he said. "Every family is worried that we're going to give up on the case. But we're not going to do that."

Sometimes the cases go for years or decades before there's a resolution, such as in the case of Ann Gotlib, a Louisville girl who went missing on the first day of her summer break in 1983.

In 2008, after years of interviews, searches and tips, the LMPD said it believed that Gregory Oakley, a convicted child abuser who died in 2002, abducted and killed the girl. But her case technically remains open.

Dave Stengel, Jefferson County's commonwealth attorney in 2008, declined to charge Oakley posthumously because he would be unable to defend himself on the charges, but said he agreed with the LMPD finding.

Walsh called what the Pitzen family is going through now a travesty, but he added that if there's a silver lining it's that the country now knows Timmothy Pitzen's name and face.

"We have seen (long-term recoveries) too many times to ever give up hope," he said.

Matt Mencarini: 502-582-4221; mmencarini@courierjournal.com; Twitter:@MattMencarini. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/subscribe.

To help

You can contact the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children or view its database of missing children by visiting www.missingkids.com. You can contact the FBI in Louisville by calling 502-263-6000. And the Louisville Metro Police Department can be reached at 502-574-7111.