my list of the most unexplained child disappearances

By Lesley Ciarula TaylorStaff Reporter
Tues., Aug. 11, 2009

Bernie Prévost was trying to unsnag his fishing line at the very start of a late-summer camping trip to Grundy Lake. Three of his children were clustered at the shore, trying to catch frogs.

Diane, 2 1/2, hung back, afraid of the water. Prévost and his wife, Claire, looked over at her, playing in the sand by the edge of the trees, then glanced back at the stubborn fishing line.

When they looked again, Diane had vanished.

Forty-three years later, not a trace of her has been found around the lake north of Parry Sound. Not a shoe, not a bit of clothing, not a bone. Nothing.

"I wonder if she's married, if she has kids," Diane's sister Lise Nastuk said yesterday, examining a forensic artist's reconstruction of what Diane would look like today.

The family is unshakable in its belief that Diane is still alive.

"Somebody must have been watching us," said Claire Prévost. "Somebody took her."

Nastuk started a website for her sister, dianeprevost.info, a year ago. She reached Diana Trepkov, who lives in Ajax, through contacts at Laurentian University in Sudbury, where Nastuk works. Trepkov is the only certified forensic artist in Canada, one of only 26 in the world.

After working with the family, Trepkov has come to share their conviction that Diane is still alive.

"I had a wild feeling inside about this case," said Trepkov. "I've done other cases where I had a sense the person had died. I see her alive."

In the hours, days, weeks and months after Diane vanished at 5 p.m. on Sept. 17, 1966, Claire tried to tell police they wouldn't find her around Grundy Lake, at what is now French River Provincial Park.

But the search was painstaking, involving dogs, divers and Royal Canadian Air Force patrols. Dozens of men – police, relatives, friends, acquaintances from around Blezard, Ont., where the family lived – walked abreast through every inch of the 2,480-hectare park, 80 kilometres north of Parry Sound.

The dogs – bloodhounds, according to one of many stories in The Sudbury Star – trailed back and forth from the spot where Diane vanished to the family trailer. They scented no other trace.

"They kept going until late in the fall," said Claire. "But even the dogs gave up, too."

On Nov. 25, 2008, the Ontario Volunteer Emergency Response Team brought its dogs, trained to sense remains through snow and earth, back to Grundy Lake. Nothing.

Now, inspired by the drawing of a 45-year-old Diane, the family is hoping once more.

Trepkov matches 21 "key identifiers" of a face for a reconstruction.

She aged Diane's face through a series of sketches, using family photos and capturing features from her brothers and sisters.

The eyes never change, said Trepkov, but gravity moves the eyebrows, nose, neck and jawline. In Trepkov's drawing, Diane's high cheekbones are still there, as is her curly brown hair on one side. On the other side, it's straight, in case she styles it differently.

The present-day Diane is shown wearing a lace blouse. Her mother and sisters remember that, even at 2 1/2, she had a fashion sense.

"Everything had to match and she could be pretty stubborn about it," said Claire.

On Father's Day weekend in 1969, the men of the Martin family from Knoxville went on an annual hiking and camping trip in the Great Smoky Mountains. Six-year-old Dennis was just a few days shy of his seventh birthday when he made the trip with his father, grandfather, older brother, and another family who had a couple of young boys.

At around 4:30 in the afternoon on June 14, the group played in the grassy area of Spence Field along the Tennessee and North Carolina state line. The boys huddled up and planned a playful prank on the adults.

"The boys were going to sneak up and scare their family. The three older boys went one way and Dennis went the other way. The plan was for them to jump out of the woods on both sides and scare the adults. The older boys jumped out and everyone laughed and had a lot of fun. Then they asked where was Dennis. When it came time for Dennis to show up and scare the family, he never showed up."

At that point, official reports say it had only been between three to five minutes since the group last saw Dennis. Nonetheless, his father, Knoxville architect Bill Martin, wasted no time and immediately started searching for his son.

Michael Wayne Dunahee (born May 12, 1986)[1] is a missing child from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, who disappeared when he was four years old, and has never been found. He disappeared from the playground at Blanshard Park Elementary School, also known as the Blanshard Street Playground, in Victoria, British Columbia on March 24, 1991. Michael was last seen around 12:30 p.m. playing at the school playground as his mother, Crystal Dunahee, was participating in a female football practice event to which his father was a spectator. Michael disappeared metres from his parents, but no witnesses to Michael's disappearance have ever been identified.

It was January 2, 1999, and 9-year-old Kimber Biggs and her 11-year-old sister were playing in the street in their Mesa neighborhood while waiting for an ice cream truck.

After a while, Kimber got cold and went inside for her jacket; her sister stayed to wait, clutching the quarters she got from her mom to buy ice cream.

When Kimber returned minutes later, her sister had vanished, her bike lying abandoned on the sidewalk beside two quarters strewn in the street.

Kimber would never see Mikelle Biggs again.

More than 16 years later and the case of Mikelle Biggs — one of the Valley’s most infamous child abductions— remains unsolved. Kimber is now speaking out to ensure her sister’s case, and her memory, are not forgotten.

“I hope we will get justice some day. I just don’t know in what form,” Kimber says. “I will definitely hold out hope. I feel like somebody does know something, and I feel like it’s impossible for no answers to never come up.”

The day Mikelle disappeared, Mesa police launched an investigation, while her family and neighbors desperately scoured the Valley for the missing sixth-grader. But few leads were uncovered, and eventually the case went cold.

Mikelle was simply gone.

Just two years apart in age, Kimber and Mikelle had been inseparable.

“We were pretty close. We both liked to read and we would read together at night,” she says. “We played all the time. Little girls playing pretend all day.”

Because she was the last person to see Mikelle alive, Kimber blamed herself for what happened.

“At the time I was young, and I had it in my head that I shouldn’t have left her alone because if I was there this wouldn’t have happened,” she says. “I still get that feeling that I wish I could have been out there. I wish I could have prevented this somehow.”

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/sister-still-haunted-by-mikelle-biggs-1999-mesa-abduction-7813591

Missing Arizona children: In 90 seconds, Mesa's Mikelle Biggs disappeared while waiting for ice cream truck

The 11-year-old blond, hazel-eyed girl was determined to wait as she rode her younger sister’s bike in big circles at the road’s T-intersection.

The 9-year-old watched, holding onto their dog’s leash, until she became too cold. She was going inside to grab a coat, she said. She’d be back.
The 11-year-old blond, hazel-eyed girl was determined to wait as she rode her younger sister’s bike in big circles at the road’s T-intersection.

The girl could count the steps to her door and the four front yards that were in between.

When she got home, she told her mother, who was talking with a visiting relative, that she was tired of waiting for the ice-cream truck.

“Go get your sister. Tell her it’s getting dark outside,” her mom responded.

The girl hollered her sister’s name as she walked out to the sidewalk and peered down the street.

“It’s time to come in. Mom said so!” she said.

She got back no response.

Her sister wasn’t there and the bike was strewn on the street, closer to their house, laying on its side.

The girl was mad. She thought, how could her sister just leave the bike she had let her borrow in the middle of the road before running off?

The wheels on the white bike with painted purple-pink ribbons still spun as she approached. Light bounced off the clips that she had placed on the spokes.

The two quarters given to her sister by their mother, which surely were going to be spent on her favorite gumball Popsicle, was spotted nearby.

The girl had vanished.

It’s been 18 years since Mikelle Biggs disappeared Jan. 2, 1999. Her sister, Kimber Biggs, was the last person to see her.

Mikelle is one of Arizona's 59 missing children in the National Institute of Justice’s Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a database under the U.S. Department of Justice.

Photos: Missing Arizona children

Her case officially remains open today.

Her body never has been found.

No suspect ever has been identified.

No firm evidence of what happened to her has been uncovered.

There are theories — and they have run the gamut, sending detectives chasing tips from Pennsylvania to Mexico. Theories of drug smugglers taking Mikelle to Mexico. Speculation that the ice-cream truck finally arrived on the block but accidentally hit her. Suppositions that a sexual predator, a neighbor, snatched her.

But they are only theories.

very long article here

http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/mesa/2017/01/02/missing-arizona-children-mesa-mikelle-biggs-1999-disappeared-90-seconds-while-waiting-ice-cream-truck/94563828/

SALMON – It’s been more than 18 months since DeOrr Kunz Jr. vanished while on a camping trip in Leadore.

There has been no sign of the Idaho Falls toddler, who was 2 years old when he disappeared, and nobody has been arrested.

But Lemhi County Sheriff Steve Penner tells EastIdahoNews.com the case is still very active.

“We’re working on this nearly every week,” Penner says. “We’re reviewing old information, receiving new tips and conducting interviews.”

Penner was the Lemhi County Sheriff’s Office chief deputy when DeOrr was reported missing in July 2015. He was elected sheriff in November when Lynn Bowerman retired.

Penner was one of the first investigators to respond to the Timber Creek Campground on July 10, 2015 when DeOrr’s mother, Jessica Mitchell, called 911.

“My 2-year-old son … we can’t find him,” Mitchell told a dispatcher around 2:30 p.m. that day. “He was wearing cowboy boots, pajama pants and a camo jacket, and he’s got shaggy blond hair.”

Mitchell and her then-boyfriend, Vernal DeOrr Kunz, were camping with Mitchell’s grandfather, Robert Walton, and Isaac Reinwand, a friend of Walton’s.

After numerous searches of the campground and surrounding areas, no clues of DeOrr’s whereabouts have ever been found.

Last January, Bowerman named Kunz and Mitchell as suspects in DeOrr’s disappearance, but the parents were never charged or arrested. They maintain they have nothing to do with their child vanishing.

Penner has spent thousands of hours working on this case in conjunction with the FBI and the Bonneville County Sheriff’s Office.

“We’re still getting reports of occasional DeOrr sightings,” Penner says. “We investigate all of them and follow up on any new information that comes in.”

Penner won’t say if he believes there will a break in the case soon, but promises investigators are “pursuing all avenues” and won’t stop until it’s solved.

“We’re working hard. We haven’t forgetten about this,” Penner says.
DeOrr Kunz Jr. Chronology

https://www.eastidahonews.com/2017/01/lemhi-sheriff-deorr-case-still-active/

people mag wrote:
1. DeOrr vanished almost a year ago
On July 10, 2015, DeOrr’s father, also DeOrr Kunz, and mother Jessica Mitchell were camping in the Salmon-Challis National Forest with their little boy. Mitchell’s grandfather Robert Walton and Walton’s fishing buddy Isaac Reinwand were also at the remote campsite.

That morning, Kunz and Mitchell say they took DeOrr to a general store for supplies and snacks after cooking up a full breakfast. Following their return to camp, they say they went looking for a place to fish. Kunz says they made it 50 yards from the site before discovering some minnows he thought DeOrr would love to see.

“I walked up the embankment and when I looked over, he wasn’t in his chair and he wasn’t with [Walton],” Kunz tells PEOPLE.

Mitchell panicked, screaming and scouring the area for the toddler who loved his cowboy boots and Hot Wheels toys.
Missing 2-year-old DeOrr Kunz on the cover of PEOPLE

2. Searchers scoured miles of land and water and no sign of him was found
Just over an hour after DeOrr vanished, the two-mile radius around the area was quickly swarmed by officers from the Lemhi County Sheriff’s office. Search and rescue crews used all-terrain vehicles to comb the landscape, while divers scoured the nearby reservoir.

Even with 200 volunteers searching over the next two days, there were no signs of the little boy.

3. None of the four adults on the trip have been cleared in the investigation
Investigators have interviewed everyone at the site “multiple times,” Lemhi County chief deputy Steve Penner tells PEOPLE. “There were four people there, and they have been less than truthful. No one has been cleared.”

DeOrr’s parents maintain to PEOPLE that they have nothing to hide, and insist that they cooperated fully with police up until the point that they were named suspects.

Sheriff Lynn Bowerman tells PEOPLE that while there are inconsistencies in DeOrr’s parents’ statements and timelines, police have yet to find physical evidence for proof

5. The remote area is home to multiple animals – and possibly people
Mitchell and Kunz tell PEOPLE they believe DeOrr was kidnapped by people living in the mountains, perhaps off the grid.

However, weather conditions would make it difficult for someone to live in the 4.2 million-acre national forest year-round, Chuck Mark, forest supervisor for the Salmon-Challis, tells PEOPLE.

Sheriff Bowerman says they don’t believe DeOrr was abducted by any humans – or animals, such as the ones who live in known bear dens near the campsite.