Yankee Mystery Files →

Vanished Without a Trace

COMMENT

SINGLE PAGE

SHARE

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SITES

X

•  Facebook
•  Twitter
•  Buzz
•  Yahoo!
•  LinkedIn
•  del.icio.us

EMAIL

PRINT

(page 2 of 9)

After a hearty camper's breakfast -- fried potatoes, ham and eggs, toast, and juice -- Kurt put a doughnut on a stick and warmed it over the flames, then threw the paper plates into the fire. Jill gathered the mud-soaked sneakers from the day before and with her friends walked to the bathhouse fifty yards away to wash them. Kim began playing a game and assumed Kurt would ride his tricycle around the campsite. Ron climbed into his Bronco, ax in hand, and drove off to get firewood. This is where their minds halt, confused and troubled, where Ron and Jill Newton try to snatch it all back. For then a friend from her trailer heard a plaintive "Daddy, Daddy," as Kurt apparently ran to his tricycle, a determined little boy trying to catch his father, and pedaled away -- into a mystery as deep as the forest that seemed to swallow him without a trace.

From the campground, a rut-strewn logging road runs north, parting the forest, which gives way reluctantly. An abandoned horse hovel sits back from the road, nearly obscured by undergrowth, about a quarter-mile from the Newtons' campsite. Here, twelve-year-old Lou Ellen Hanson, returning from a walk, was startled to see the small boy churning past on his tricycle. "Hey," she called out, "do your parents know where you are?' but the boy made no reply as he pedaled on, and she turned toward the campground.

The road continues another quarter-mile, then forks. To the left it leads to a small campground dump on a knoll, past a shaky bridge over a stream. To the right it continues for a mile, then gives way to heavy undergrowth. For the next several miles leading to Route 27 the road is nearly impassable to all but four-wheel-drive vehicles. The road and its "back-door" access to his campground was a source of irritation to campground owner Lloyd Davidson. Fishermen would use it to fish his waters, or to use his showers. He would grumble that if it were his land and not leased from the paper company, he would have bulldozed it long ago. It was on this road, about a half-mile past the fork, where Ron Newton went to chop wood, the sounds of his ax barely audible from the dump.

Jack Hanson, Lou Ellen's father, who served as a volunteer caretaker for the campground, found the tricycle just before the steep rise leading to the dump. It was off the road, at the edge of the woods, a position that reminded a state police investigator "of a little boy who's been told never to leave his things on the road." Thinking it had been discarded, Hanson carried it over the rise and heaved it atop the trash heap, then drove back to the campground.

"We hung the sneakers on the line," Jill Newton recalls. "We'd been gone at the most ten minutes. We saw no Kurt and no tricycle, so we started walking around asking campers if they'd seen a blond boy on a big-wheel tricycle. I began to think he must have gone with the men to get firewood, but then they rounded the comer and no Kurt. We met Jack, and he told us he had found the trike at the dump. We raced to the dump, and there was Kurt's big-wheeler, but no one in sight, not a sound to be heard.

" 'My God, someone's taken him!' were my first words." The men quickly reassured her that Kurt must have thought his father was just a little ways into the woods and had wandered in after him. They would find him in no time. "How could a boy who won't even go into the woods with his sister around his own home go into these incredibly wild woods?' she asked. But it would be only the first of many baffling questions with no answers.

 I became interested in this case, last year, after reading, "The Day Kurt Newton Disappeared" in an old 1979 Yankee Magazine and did an internet search to see if this case had been solved.  
 I had hoped that Kurt had been found safe and returned to his family. 
 Having come across the old magazine again while cleaning, I once again did another search to see if anything new had come to light concerning this child's case.
 I wonder if anyone might have done a computer aging on Kurt, updating his appearance to what would be his current adult age and distributing it or perhaps publishing it in the newspaper where he grew up.  I suppose I like to believe in miracles, even at this late date.  Perhaps he would see the picture, read the story, and be reunited with his family.  Such stories have happened before.
Kurt's story still haunts my heart when I read it and see his photo.  I hope that he is alive, mentally and emotionally well and that God guides him back to where he belongs.