The Missing Boys

 

[NOTE: Those of us who have lived in Fairfax have long heard rumors and speculation about the disappearance of Johnny Hundley and Jimmy McQueary. While I acknowledge the potential shortcomings of news reporting, for this post I have chosen to source primarily contemporaneous newspaper articles about the boys’ disappearance rather than personal reminiscence and speculation.]

                               Johnny Hundley                                         Jimmy McQueary

    Fairfax was a great place to grow up with a lot to explore. My mom and, decades later, my brother liked to play near Little Duck Creek. My friends and I wandered freely through the village, hunting for pop bottles at the car wash and cashing them in at one of our local stores, yelling for the workers at Keebler to toss cookies over the back fence to us, dumpster diving behind the Dragon Way office buildings, walking to Frisch’s to grab a Big Boy comic book. I have heard many people who grew up here liken Fairfax to Mayberry on the Andy Griffith Show.

    But in 1964, Fairfax bore little resemblance to Mayberry. In June a teenaged Fairfax boy drowned in the Little Miami River and a little over a month later a woman who lived on Simpson drowned in almost the same location. In August, a little girl who lived on Lonsdale was killed by a teenager who lived just a couple of blocks away. And in October two nine-year-old boys disappeared without a trace.

     On Wednesday October 14, 1964, Jimmy McQueary arrived home around 9:00 p.m. with mud on his shoes. Jimmy, his parents James and Matilda, and his siblings lived on Wooster Pike in Fairfax, where the Midas shop currently stands. There was a sewer project on nearby Eleanor Street and Jimmy had been playing around the construction site. Mr. McQueary told Jimmy to come home immediately after school on Thursday and stay in the house. The same day, Mrs. McQueary learned that Jimmy had been at Frisch’s Mainliner restaurant the previous weekend and left without paying his bill of a little over a dollar. She gave Jimmy enough money so he could go and pay the bill.

     Jimmy was a third grader at Fairfax School and, as his father instructed, came home immediately after school on Thursday October 15, 1964, walking home with his older sister. He changed his clothes, then went out to play.

     Johnny Hundley was Jimmy’s third grade classmate and the boys were said to have been inseparable. Johnny lived on Germania Avenue, just a block from the school. Johnny’s dad Robert “Toby” Hundley had died in April 1963 and his mom Gladys worked to support the family. He had a brother and two sisters. His elder sister recalled years later that Johnny came home after school that day, gathered some pop bottles, and walked to the corner store to cash them in.

     Thursday afternoon was pleasant, with fair skies and a temperature in the mid-70s. After leaving school and stopping at home, Jimmy and Johnny got together. The story goes that Johnny went to Jimmy’s house and Jimmy slipped out the back door, despite his dad’s instruction to stay in the house. At 3:45 to 4:00 p.m. that day, the boys were seen at Frisch’s Mainliner by a man who was in the parking lot with a group of friends, and a little later by a waitress. The boys told the man in the parking lot that they had found a $20 bill. The man didn’t see the money and didn’t ask questions about where they found it. The boys showed the waitress the $20 bill. The waitress said the boys had stopped in to pay their outstanding bill from the previous weekend.

     Around the same time, a schoolmate saw Johnny and Jimmy in the lot in front of the Colonial Center Building on Dragon Way. This boy lived near the dead end of Eleanor Street, which could be accessed on foot through the rear parking lot of the Joseph Ferris House next to the Colonial Center Building. The boy later reported that he last saw Johnny and Jimmy walking toward the Strietmann Biscuit Company (subsequently known as Keebler and now as Kellogg’s). One could walk through the rear parking lot of the Colonial Center Building to access a back gate to Strietmann where Spring Street dead ended at Riverview Drive.

     Years later in an interview with WCPO News, Johnny’s elder sister recalled that he wasn’t home when she finished preparing supper at 6:00 p.m. She called her mother at work, who told her to call around to see if she could locate him. She was unable to find him. At 8:00 pm., after returning home from work, Mrs. Hundley called Mrs. McQueary and learned that Jimmy was also missing. Mrs. Hundley called the Fairfax Police and they put a missing persons report on the teletype at 8:25 p.m. Johnny’s sister later recalled that police thought the boys had run away. However, both families disagreed, stating that neither boy had reason to run away. Johnny’s family said he was very conscientious about being home on time. A friend told police that one of the boys had asked him to run away several times.

     Below is a map (using 2017 satellite imagery) showing locations relevant to the boys’ disappearance:

    In the hours and days that followed, there were a number of reported sightings of the boys throughout the greater Cincinnati area. Among the sightings:

• A woman reported seeing the boys at 5:30 p.m. on the day of the disappearance as she was waiting in front of the Strietmann offices. Upon further questioning by police, the woman was unable to identify the boys as Johnny and Jimmy.
• A teenaged Fairfax girl reported seeing Johnny talking with a group of kids at 6:30 p.m. on Germania Avenue on the day of the disappearance. She didn’t know Jimmy, so she couldn’t say if he was also there.
• A B & O Railroad train inspector told Fairfax Police that he saw two boys playing in the Bond Hill train yard on Friday morning October 16. He identified one boy, with whom he spoke, as Jimmy McQueary. He said the other boy stayed in the background.
• A woman called the Hundley home and reported that on Saturday October 17 she and three other hunters encountered two boys coming out of the woods near the Beechmont Levee. They asked the boys how the hunting was there and they answered that they didn’t know because they didn’t live around there.
• On Saturday evening October 17, three people reported two little boys playing outside of Lunken Airport and cleaning up in a restroom.

    Apparently, none of these sightings was confirmed and searches found no sign of Johnny and Jimmy. Unfortunately, some of these reports were made to police hours or even days after the supposed sightings.

     Meanwhile, Fairfax Police Chief James Finan reported that police had searched all the likely spots the boys might be and found nothing. He expressed doubt that the boys were still in Fairfax and said that a community-wide search wasn’t planned. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that on Saturday October 17 only one auxiliary police officer and Mr. James McQueary were searching for the boys, looking along the Little Miami River. When asked about Chief Finan’s whereabouts, the officer on duty at the police station said he didn’t know and “He’s off on Saturday and Sunday.” The officer on duty also repeated the story that one of the boys had been talking about running away.

     Perhaps the police changed their minds about a search, because on Sunday October 18, 35 volunteers joined police for a search around the Little Miami River.

     Tips and sightings continued to be reported to police, but none led to useful information. Authorities were concerned that the boys may have hopped on a railroad boxcar and left town. Boxcars were searched both locally and hundreds of miles away. Police searched vacant buildings and warehouses. A Cincinnati Police helicopter performed an aerial search of Fairfax. Bulletins about the boys’ disappearance were distributed to hundreds of police agencies around the country.

     On Tuesday October 20, attention was turned to the sewer trench work that was being done on Eleanor Street when the boys disappeared. Because the boys had played in the area, there was speculation that they might have been buried in the trench. A load of gravel had been dumped in the trench after Johnny and Jimmy disappeared. Part of the trench was re-excavated, but crews found no trace of the boys.

    The following day, Fairfax Police picked up Johnny’s and Jimmy’s textbooks from Fairfax School and sent them to the FBI to obtain fingerprints. While at the school, the police officer spoke to around 30 children to try to get clues to the boys’ disappearance.

     On Thursday October 22, police searched the area near Columbia Parkway and Red Bank Road. On Saturday October 24, Fairfax Police and two Kentucky river patrolmen searched the Little Miami River from Mariemont to Fairfax. Chief Finan expressed confidence that the boys weren’t in the river, but still thought there was a possibility that they had hopped on a railroad box car and would be found in another part of the country.

     On Tuesday October 27, Chief Finan met with representatives of 13 local police departments to review the case and solicit ideas. The railyard and boxcar searches were unsuccessful. On November 11, Jimmy’s parents took and passed a polygraph test.  

    About a month after Johnny and Jimmy disappeared, there was a sighting with a supposedly positive identification of the boys. A truck driver from Batavia, Ohio, who knew about the missing Fairfax boys, stopped into a service station in Lily, Kentucky. The employees there told him about two boys who came into the station to get out of the rain and asked if they could spend the night there. The attendants allowed them to stay because the station was open 24 hours. The boys said they were from Fairfax, Ohio and had left home. They said they were on their way to Strietmann Biscuit Company and told how they got cookies from the carloading area. The boys left the next morning, catching a ride to London, Kentucky with a trucker. The employees identified the boys from photographs provided by police.

     A hopeful Gladys Hundley went to Lily, Kentucky to try to get more information. Sadly, it was all for naught. The parents of the boys who spent the night at the service station contacted police. These boys were teenagers from Loveland, Ohio who left home on November 13 and had since returned. Chief Finan interviewed the boys and was satisfied that they were the ones who spent the night in the service station.

     In early January 1965, Gladys Hundley tearfully described to a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter her painful holiday season. She said she thought about buying Christmas gifts for Johnny, but that doing this would make life all the more difficult for her family if Johnny were to be found dead. She said that prayer was all she had left and that she was under a doctor’s care for nervousness. Mrs. Hundley said that January 13 would be Johnny’s 10^th birthday.

     In February 1965, attention again turned to the sewer trench project on Eleanor Street. Village residents and new Hamilton County coroner Dr. Frank Cleveland were concerned that not enough of the sewer trench had been dug up in October. In March, more of the trench was re-excavated. The digging, some of it done by hand, took four days and nothing was found. One of the workers involved in the re-excavation said he was working on the trench on the day the boys went missing and there had been no sign of a cave-in. 

                                     Source: Cincinnati Enquirer, March 24, 1965 and March 25, 1965

    Mrs. McQueary hoped that the digging would be extended to include a hillside by a culvert that ran east from Spring Street to behind her home on Wooster Pike. In addition, Fairfax councilman John Pfister suggested that the boys could have been buried in dirt fill near his home on Spring Street. He said that dirt from the sewer project was being dumped there the day of the disappearance and that the boys frequently played there. However, after the second sewer trench re-excavation, no further digging was done in this area.

     In 1967, there appeared to be a break in the case. On September 14, a 17-year-old Fairfax boy who had recently enlisted in the Marine Corps and was serving in San Diego, told a minister there that he had killed Johnny and Jimmy due to a feud he had with the older brother of one of the boys. He said he had a friend with him at the time. The boy said he lured Johnny and Jimmy into the woods by promising them beer. Once in the woods, he said he stabbed one child and the other ran away. The accomplice caught the second child and then the boy stabbed him also.

     After speaking to the boy for two hours, the minister called the police at the boy’s request. The boy waived extradition and Chief Finan and a Hamilton County coroner’s office investigator flew to San Diego, took him into custody, and returned to Cincinnati.

     There were immediately doubts about the young Marine’s confession. The minister hinted in a newspaper interview that the confession might be untrue and that the boy was homesick. He also said that the boy claimed to have killed the boys “last October,” not in 1964. His parents explained that a friend with whom their son enlisted had been dismissed from the Marines a week earlier due to an eye condition. Their son was also not meeting expectations as a Marine. The boy’s father said that his son didn’t exhibit any unusual behavior after Johnny’s and Jimmy’s disappearance and didn’t hang around at the time with the boy he named as an accomplice. His parents believed he was looking for a way to leave the Marine Corps.

     The boy told investigators that he buried Johnny and Jimmy in the woods where he killed them and buried the knife in his backyard. The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation was called in to help in the search of the boy’s yard. A search with a metal detector only yielded some unrelated items. Sections of the backyard were dug up and the knife wasn’t located.

     On September 16, 1967, Chief Finan and the Marine returned to Fairfax. The boy led police to at least six different locations where he said he buried the children. Years later, Johnny’s elder sister recalled that her mother Gladys followed along with the search and said how devastated she was when nothing was found. That day, the young Marine retracted his confession, but the search for the weapon and the boys’ bodies continued. On September 18, Chief Finan called on the boy to take a polygraph, but he and his parents declined on the advice of their attorney.

     On September 19, 1967, the alleged accomplice, who had since moved to Indianapolis, passed a polygraph test. That day, the Marine’s attorney agreed to let him take a polygraph to relieve some of the harassment he said the boy’s family was experiencing and because he felt that Fairfax Police were still casting suspicion on him. He took a polygraph on September 21 and passed. Chief Finan accepted the results and felt they exonerated the boy. Years later, Chief Finan said Fairfax Police never found any evidence to link the boy to the disappearance of Johnny and Jimmy.

     Through the years, police occasionally received tips about the boys’ disappearance, but none appeared to be useful. In recent years, police even pursued a lead to Foxborough, Massachusetts where a woman alleged that her father, who was originally from the greater Cincinnati area, had abducted the boys, killed them in his basement, and buried them under the porch. There was an unproductive search of the property with cadaver dogs. Police interviewed the man, other family members, and the woman who made the report (who was being treated for unspecified mental health issues) and determined the story was untrue.

     Johnny Hundley and Jimmy McQueary have become part of Fairfax folklore, kind of like our own Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Local news broadcasts feature the story every few years to increase ratings for sweeps season. Social media loves stories like this and people who have no connection to the boys or the community offer uninformed and unfair opinions and theories. We must never forget, though, that the boys are not fictional characters.

     I recall an interview with John Kennedy, Jr. around the time the film “JFK” was released. The interviewer asked whether he would see the movie and Kennedy responded that he wouldn’t “because that’s not entertainment to me.” Johnny and Jimmy’s story isn’t entertainment for those who loved them. Their parents have passed away without knowing what happened to them. Their disappearance still hurts for those who were left behind. It is my sincere hope that the boys’ surviving family and friends find peace.

This is still an open case and there is a Violent Criminal Apprehension Program alert on the FBI website, which can be accessed at https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/vicap/missing-persons/hundley_je_mcquery_ja.pdf/view.

Sources

(Detailed sources available upon request)

Cincinnati Enquirer, various dates, October 17, 1964 to September 20, 1967

Cincinnati Post, various dates, October 17, 1964 to January 10, 1978

WCPO.com, June 15, 2017, I-Team Unsolved: What happened to Johnny Hundley and Jimmy McQueary?