I found this anniversary article of four-year-old Kurt Newton‘s disappearance from a remote campsite in Maine, near the Canadian border. He’s been missing for 35 years this month. Also, a 1979 article about the same kid and his parents’ search for him in the years following his disappearance.
That poor family. I sit there imagining them licking all those stamps and sealing all those envelopes, sending posters to every school superintendent in the country. And that colossal search effort in the woods — it looks pretty certain he was kidnapped, it seems like if he had been in the woods they would have found him, with all the searchers and bloodhounds and helicopters. The abduction theory wasn’t considered for weeks, until after the search effort was exhausted. I can’t blame the cops there — Kurt vanished from a very remote wilderness area, no one saw or heard anything suspicious, and people simply weren’t as aware of child kidnappings as they are now. But of course by the time they got around to thinking of that possibility, Kurt and whoever took him were both long gone. The abduction conclusion here was reached more through process of elimination than anything else.
I wonder if his parents are still alive, or if they had any more kids after his disappearance, or if they ever gave up hope. I wonder, if he is still alive, whether he remembers them at all or has some vague sense of unease about his origins.