Mother leaves her child while she goes out - and returns to an empty house. No, not the McCann case but the true story behind a gripping new filmShe was a devoted mother, hard-working, determined and tough. Then, one spring morning, Christine Collins kissed her little child goodbye (leaving him under the eye of neighbours), before returning in the evening to an empty house. Her beloved son had vanished without a trace.
A continent-wide hunt was launched and a shocked nation was kept agog by a string of leads - only for their hopes to be cruelly dashed as each clue led to a dead end.
The child was never seen again, the mother was heartbroken and the community was left divided by suspicion and mistrust.
Grief-stricken: Angelina Jolie stars as Christine Collins in Clint Eastwood's new film Changeling. In 1928, Collins' son went missing and was never seen again.
It could be the tragic story of Kate and Gerry McCann and their three-year-old daughter, Madeleine, who was abducted last year while on holiday in Portugal, and who remains missing to this day. But, in fact, it is the plot of Clint Eastwood's latest film, Changeling, which opens in Britain later this month.
Starring Angelina Jolie as the distraught mother, it is a chilling portrait of how bungling authorities persecuted a grieving mother and treated her with cynical contempt.
It is all the more powerful because it is based on a horrific true story.
The so-called 'Wineville chicken coop murders' took place on the outskirts of Los Angeles in 1928.
And while they happened 80 years before Maddie McCann disappeared, there are startling parallels between the two.
The McCanns' grim experience in Praia de Luz - and how they were made suspects by bungling local police - was widely reported.
But Christine Collins suffered even worse treatment at the hands of the LA Police Department. As the investigation into her missing child failed to yield results, she was even locked up in a mental asylum.
Her story begins during the Prohibition era, in the stretch of land south of LA, where the desert slowly turns into farming country.
There, in the small town of Wineville, the single mother was raising her nine-year-old son, Walter. At the time, her husband was in prison for running a speakeasy.
Despite the hard times, Christine was lucky enough to have a job as a supervisor with the local phone company. But it meant that she was often away from home and had to rely on the neighbours to look out for young Walter.
All went well until one Saturday morning, when she decided to work an extra shift. She gave Walter some money to see the latest cinema release, and set off for work.
A poster of her son Walter that Christine Collins handed out in her desperate bid to find the eight-year-old
Christine Collins never saw her son again. When she returned home that night, Walter was missing - and she reacted just like
Madeleine McCann's mother.She knew instinctively her son had been kidnapped and reported his absence to the police.
Just as in Portugal, officers refused to begin an immediate search, wasting valuable time as they waited 24 hours before acting on the distraught mother's suspicions.
Meanwhile, Christine looked everywhere. She quizzed neighbours and learned that her son had been last seen on the afternoon of his disappearance, at a crossroads near his house.
She issued pictures of Walter with a detailed description: 5ft 5in, weighing 70lb with brown hair, blue eyes and a fair complexion. He was wearing a plaid lumber jacket, brown corduroy trousers, a grey cap and black shoes.
When the police finally jerked into action, they drained a local lake in full glare of the photographers and manipulated the story with false leads and bizarre theories.
But from the start, it seems, the mother was their prime suspect.
She had claimed the youngster had been kidnapped, and yet she couldn't come up with a motive. Nor had she received any demands for money - although she said she had received a note which read cryptically: 'Boy bad sick, afraid to call doctor.'
The hunt was further complicated by the fact that her husband, an inmate of the notorious Folsom prison, near San Francisco - where Johnny Cash would later famously sing - was a 'straw boss' (a convict in charge of other prisoners), sparking one police theory that Walter had been kidnapped by an ex-con who held a grudge against his father.
Meanwhile, newspapers speculated that Christine was secretly negotiating to get the boy back.
As in the McCann case, rumour followed rumour.
Neighbours suddenly remembered that for several days before Walter disappeared, a middle-aged, slouchily dressed man, about 5ft 9in, had been seen hanging around the neighbourhood.
He had, they recalled, been accompanied by a small, foreign-looking woman, who had stayed in the car while the man knocked on doors asking for the Collins' house.
A month later, hopes were raised when a local petrol station owner reported that a strange Italian-looking man had refuelled at his garage. And in the back seat of the car, lying lifeless under a bundle of newspapers, he claimed, was the missing boy.
The news sparked yet another statewide search - but to no avail.
Christine Collins was distraught. And yet somehow she, like Kate McCann, refused to fear the worst.
Then, six months after Walter's disappearance, Christine was told the crime had been solved
Changeling is directed by Clint Eastwood
From small-town Illinois, 2,000 miles to the north-east, came the incredible news that her son had been found.
Imagine her anticipation as she waited at the railway station for her son's arrival, surrounded by a mob of Press photographers organised by the police, who were as keen as ever to take full credit for the discovery.
But Christine's nightmare was far from over. As soon as she saw the boy, she realised she had been cruelly duped. For even though the boy insisted he was her missing son, she knew he was not.
The boy claimed he had been kidnapped, but Christine saw right through his story, realising he had pieced it together from the newspaper reports.
Yet no one took her protests seriously - and in the days before DNA testing, it was impossible for her to prove beyond doubt the boy wasn't hers.
The scheming police chief, an infamous figure named J. J. Jones, made matters even worse. He was determined to be proved right and insisted she take the boy home.
He claimed Christine's memory was affected by grief and said that if the boy was a little shaky on the details, it was because he had suffered a blow to the head during the kidnapping.
Jones cruelly branded Christine an unfit mother and accused her of trying to get the state to take responsibility for her son.
Christine finally took the child home - only for Jones to note triumphantly that Walter's pet spaniel took to him immediately.
But she did not give up her fight. She continued to protest that this 'Walter' was three inches shorter than her real son and, unlike him, circumcised.
Crucially, she also found a champion in local radio preacher, Rev Gustav Briegleb (played by John Malkovich in the new film).
Briegleb, who had a huge public following thanks to his crusade against the sordid sex lives of Hollywood stars, convinced Christine to fight the police department and uncover the truth.
And so, three weeks later, armed with her real son's dental records and statements from his teacher, she returned her 'imposter son' to the authorities.
From now on, just as with Kate McCann, it would be war between her and the police. Police boss Jones's next act was to invoke legislation that he had introduced, called Code 12, which authorised him to incarcerate troublesome women in a lunatic asylum and submit them to treatment, including electric shock therapy.
As Christine testified later, Jones told her: 'You're insane and ought to be in a madhouse. You're under arrest and I am going to send you to the psychopathic ward.'
And with that, he threw her into the grim LA County General Hospital. Christine was incarcerated for a week until, in another bizarre twist, the boy revealed what she knew all along - that he was not her son.
Eastwood and Jolie pose for the press before Changeling's premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May
Instead, the child admitted he was Arthur Hutchins Jr from Iowa. The son of divorced parents, he ran away after his mother died and got as far as Illinois, when someone spotted his uncanny likeness to Walter Collins.
Arthur had gone along with the deception because he wanted to get to California - to meet his cowboy star hero, Tom Mix.
Christine Collins was vindicated, but there was far worse to come. For behind the scenes, the real story about her son's disappearance was slowly, and horrifically, beginning to unfold.
The facts came to light when Sanford Clark, a 15-year-old illegal immigrant from Canada, was detained by police in LA and told them that his uncle was a serial killer.
Sanford said he had grown up in Sasketchewan and two years previously had been kidnapped by his uncle, 21-year-old Gordon Northcott.
He had been transported several thousand miles south to the ranch of Gordon's parents, Cyrus and Louise Northcott, in Wineville, California, where he had become his uncle's sex slave - and had been forced to watch the torture and killing of four young boys, including Walter Collins, whom he identified from a photograph.
Sanford claimed his deranged uncle had tied Walter to a bed and tortured him for a week - before Louise Northcott had finally killed the boy. And the macabre story did not end there.
Sanford then described how his uncle had imprisoned two local brothers, Lewis and Nelson Winslow, aged 12 and ten, and how he had been forced to kill Nelson himself.
The authorities were sceptical until they were told that Gordon's killing spree had begun with a young Mexican, who had been beheaded with an axe. At this point, bells began to ring.
A few months previously, the headless body of a Mexican had been found near the roadside wrapped in a bag, with no clues as to how it had got there.
The police rushed to the ranch to find considerable evidence that corroborated Sanford's story. In one room, there was a whistle, Boy Scout badges and a library book belonging to the Winslow brothers.
They also found a blood-stained bed and, in one of the chicken coops, a bloody axe covered with human hair. And 50 yards from the ranch's chicken house, there were also empty graves, where Sanford said the missing boys had been buried.
No bodies were found, but there were enough traces of bone and hair - not to mention the head of the Mexican boy - to point the finger squarely at the rancher.
The remains had been buried in quick lime in an attempt to destroy the evidence. And when it was discovered that a consignment of lime had, quite unusually, only recently been delivered to the ranch, the case against Gordon seemed watertight.
Having apparently anticipated the police raid, Gordon slipped through the net and fled to Canada dressed as a woman with his mother.
His freedom, however, was short-lived. Less than a week later, in September 1928, Gordon was arrested and taken back to LA with his mother, who confessed to all the killings in an attempt to save her son.
Gordon then started changing his story to suit his mood. He admitted to murdering the Mexican boy, and then denied everything. At one point, he even took the police into the desert to search for the remains of as many as 20 victims.
Gordon's trial began in January 1929, and he was found guilty of murdering the two brothers and the Mexican. Meanwhile, his mother was sentenced to life imprisonment in San Quentin for her part in the crimes. While she claimed that she had killed Walter, his body was never found.
Throughout the trial, Christine Collins begged Gordon Northcott to tell her the facts, however grim. But her pleas fell on deaf ears.
Just before he was due to hang, in October 1930, he sent Christine a telegram saying he was ready to reveal all. The night before the execution, she hurried to his cell - but Gordon simply protested his innocence and blamed the crimes on his mother and nephew, who had been sent back to Canada.
The next day, he was dragged screaming to the gallows, where it took him ten minutes to die at the end of the hangman's noose.
His death was no comfort for the grieving Christine, who never gave up the search for her son.
She sued the incompetent local police department, won damages of $10,000 and vowed to spend every last cent on uncovering the truth.
But Walter had vanished without a trace and his fate looks set to remain a mystery for ever.