Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, December 19, 1994 TAG: 9412190101
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALEC KLEIN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: KIRBY, W. VA. LENGTH: Long
State Trooper C.J. Ellyson comes to a well-beaten path, marked by a red ribbon on a sapling, and stops:
Here, the boys slipped into the woods with a loaded BB gun, imagining themselves great hunters after the kill.
Ellyson moves under towering oaks, maples and pines, bare and gnarled, retracing their steps:
Five-year-old J.R. couldn't keep up, wouldn't be quiet and didn't listen to his older cousins, Tommy, 9, and Lloyd, 8.
The trooper reaches an abandoned trailer:
Here, J.R. wouldn't go on. He wanted to go home. He was hungry. Tommy couldn't understand why his little cousin was making a fuss. J.R. turned back alone, while his cousins moved on.
That much, the polygraph and psychological tests confirm. The rest, Ellyson doesn't know. So he speculates:
Little J.R. is halfway home when he looks around. The forest casts the same seductive look in every direction. He doesn't know where he is. He doesn't know how to get home. He runs back to the abandoned trailer. But his cousins are gone. He's walking, now running. Panic sets in. Then ...
"I don't know, I don't know," Ellyson says. "My kids would have screamed."
\ This is a killing field, where men and women, armed with rifles and high-impact bows and arrows, rustle behind laurel bushes and take aim at deer, bear, turkey, rabbit and squirrel.
This is a forest that swallowed up a little boy from Leesburg, Va. On May 1, Victor Dwight Shoemaker Jr. - J.R. to his family and friends - vanished from the rugged mountainside near the remote hamlet of Kirby.
The massive searches are over, the media glare has died away, but still there are no answers. J.R.'s case is a rarity - about 95 percent of all missing Virginia children are found, and most are teen-age runaways. Another 3 percent to 4 percent are abducted by a parent. Fewer than 1 percent are kidnapped by strangers.
Foul play hasn't been ruled out, but authorities say there's no evidence J.R. was abducted or murdered. Even so, the West Virginia State Police have been joined in the investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation - under the jurisdiction of the federal kidnapping law, according to special agent Peter Krusing.
In other words, J.R. might have been taken across the state line.
But details are not forthcoming - other than the fact that the FBI was aware of the boy's disappearance and monitored the case until moving on it in about late November.
Even such dates are under close wraps. "I can't get into specifics," said Wells Morrison, the special agent supervising the case. "But the FBI considers this matter to be a high-priority investigation."
\ "This matter" was supposed to be just a family reunion.
Early that Sunday morning, cousins Tommy and Lloyd waited on the trailer stoop while Nettie Shoemaker dressed J.R., her only son, in a pair of red shorts, a red T-shirt and Nickelodeon sneakers: hunting gear - at least for a 4-foot, 40-pound suburban boy.
J.R. loved the woods, perhaps even more so because he lived in the confines of a Leesburg apartment. He loved to cross creeks and climb trees and, even in snow, hated wearing socks and shoes. Every time Nettie and his father, Victor Sr., took him to Hampshire County to visit "Pap," his step-grandfather, J.R. always recognized the turn into the Short Mountain Village subdivision, a rough-hewn pocket carved out of the wilderness.
He was sharp - a whiz at Super Nintendo video games. He was clever - a crack at imitating a Texas drawl, a West Virginia twang. And, he had a good sense of direction.
J.R. knew the woods here so well that, one time, when cousin Tommy had killed a rabbit, J.R. bounded alone back to the trailer to announce the news to his mother. "He always knew how to come back," Nettie said.
After all, the three boys had played in these woods countless times. It was no different on this particular Sunday. Nettie, a 44-year-old assembly line worker in Loudoun, went out and, at 8 a.m. on May 1, watched her little boy and his cousins go up the hill.
\ Within a half hour, Tommy and Lloyd emerged from the thicket alone, heads down. Nettie knew something was wrong.
"Where's J.R.?" she asked three times.
He's up in the woods, they said.
Pressed for details, the two boys told J.R.'s parents where they had left J.R. in the woods. Only they got it wrong:
"I don't think they lied; I just don't think they told the whole truth," Trooper Ellyson said.
The boys already knew they were in trouble - they had been told to keep an eye on J.R. Even more, they knew they weren't supposed to play around empty trailers, like the one they left behind when they last saw their cousin.
For an hour, J.R.'s parents searched frantically in the wrong place.
Nettie knew certain things about her little boy that worried her: Sometimes, when J.R. was hiding, he didn't respond to her calls. He was afraid of the dark. He was so friendly that he easily could be enticed by a stranger.
\ Cousins Tommy and Lloyd eventually identified the right spot in the woods, about a half-mile from home, and passed a lie detector test and play-therapy exam, according to police.
Nettie wasn't required to do the same. But J.R.'s father, Victor Sr., a 48-year-old apartment building janitor, was subjected to a polygraph and passed. So did Sherrie Lynn Musselman of East Freedom, Pa., Tommy's mother and the daughter of Victor Sr.'s half-sister.
Criminal background checks and an investigation of the movements of every family member in the area that morning turned up blank.
But Nettie isn't satisfied: "I still say, the two boys know something. I'm not saying they're guilty of anything. I'm saying they have to know something. ... Somebody had to have taken him off the hill."
The alternative is perhaps too painful for a mother to accept.
She reveals little emotion when she is reminded of J.R. That he doesn't like sweets. That his favorite food is hot dogs and Spaghetti-O's - only with meatballs. That he won't drink soda. That he likes to cut up cardboard boxes and make houses. That he likes to draw pictures of little animals and snowmen.
"Everything runs through your mind from daylight to dark, you never stop thinking," Nettie says in a monotone. ``... It's about got us ate up. We don't sleep, you cry yourself to sleep. ... We've been on that mountain with a fine-tooth comb. ... We never found a piece of hair, a shoe, a footprint, nothing, and it rained that night. ... Nothing makes sense."
Victor Sr. struggles to keep his voice from breaking: "I'd just like to have him home right now, that's it."
\ Before noon, neighbors, police and volunteer firefighters were pouring through the woods, while Robert Walker, chief of the local Volunteer Fire Co. 3, set up a command post near the family's trailers.
That night, as the search continued, temperatures hovered near freezing under a light rainfall. On Monday - Day 2 - the Assembly of God church in Kirby turned into a 24-hour command post, while the McDonald's in nearby Romney began a weeklong practice of donating hundreds of burgers and sodas to volunteer searchers.
By Day 5, Thursday, May 6, more than 400 volunteers from West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and North Carolina had rushed to Short Mountain, searching hundreds of acres. Helicopters with heat-sensor imaging devices swooped over the rugged terrain. Divers plunged into ponds. Even local schools let their children miss class to search for J.R.
Nothing.
A volunteer with the Appalachian Search and Rescue team fell asleep at the wheel after a fruitless night in the forest. She crashed into a tree and died.
The search was called off.
"I know the woods pretty well. If he was in the woods, they would've found him," said bearded hunter John Pindell, a cabin dweller in Short Mountain. "There's something phoney."
\ Nettie and Victor Sr. may never find out whether cousins Tommy and Lloyd know anything more. The families have stopped talking to each other.
In late May, "America's Most Wanted" aired a segment on J.R., and the National Guard was called in. In September, an Army reserve special forces unit descended on the scene, followed by 14 cadaver dogs.
One bloodhound appeared to pick up J.R.'s scent out of the subdivision to the paved road - the only way out by car. But Trooper Ellyson discounted it: Too many people had trampled the area.
Earlier, scant reports had tantalized, but led nowhere.
Town talk continued to simmer. In a dusty, out-of-the-big-city community such as this, speculation has a way of spinning its own life, even more than seven months after J.R.'s disappearance.
"I just think that family knows more than what they're saying," said Charles "Buddy" Wolford, making his third coffee run of the day to the local McDonald's. "If that boy was on that mountain dead, they would've found him - unless he's on that mountain buried someplace. In that case, he didn't bury himself."
Rumors have been so rife that some neighbors even figured, wrongly, that Wolford, a former Romney cop, was related to J.R. because he shares a last name with the boy's step-grandfather.
"That Smith lady in the Carolinas, I think that's got people feeling, `Things come back, maybe that happened to J.R.,''' said Short Mountain resident Charlotte D. Davis.
No reference was needed; everyone here has heard of Susan Smith, the woman who claimed her two young sons were kidnapped in a carjacking, then confessed to drowning them on Oct. 25.
For Davis, it only brought back painful memories of J.R.
"I think there was foul play," she says, suddenly bringing both hands to her face to hold back a flood of tears. "I always thought the family knew what happened, everyone pretty much feels the same way, that they know. Things just don't click, don't add up."
Again, her hands rise. She thinks of her 7-year-old grandson. "It really affected him. He couldn't sleep, he kept asking questions. `Was the little boy dead?'''
\ If only Clinton Jay Ellyson knew. "I've never had one like this," the West Virginia State Police trooper says.
He is lead investigator on the J.R. case. When it broke, he was assigned to no other case for two months; he was even given two senior officers who reported directly to him.
But then, leads started drying up - and slight gray patches began cropping up on his temples. "I never really noticed them till about six months ago," he says, catching himself. "But I don't think it's connected to the investigation. I just think old age is setting in."
Ellyson is 32 years old.
"I try to leave the job at the office," he says, then betrays himself. He has a 9-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter. "I find myself keeping a closer eye on my kids. I caught myself doing that as recent as last night at the mall."
At home, in bed before falling asleep, or waking up in the middle of the night, semi-conscious, "I run these scenarios through my mind. I actually get up and write them down before I go to sleep."
Ellyson has been over everything, again and again. The woods ... the family ... their trailers ...
"There are times I sit and wonder, What is there I could be doing that I haven't done?"
\ A few weeks after J.R.'s disappearance, events seemed to repeat themselves. Ellyson was hunched over his desk, reworking the case, when a call came in.
The same dispatcher uttered those words again: A kid's missing. The same sergeant who took the first report on J.R. took this one: A 7-year-old boy from the D.C. area was missing in Short Mountain.
Oh God, not again, Ellyson thought.
He was about to go off-duty. He didn't.
Ellyson immediately called for officers to close off the area until the dogs got there.
Within an hour, the boy was found - lost on the other side of the mountain, where he was picked up by a real-estate agent and buyer. They fed him at McDonald's, then took him to the sheriff's office.
That's what should have happened to J.R., but, from the beginning, his case seemed touched by grim omens. A week earlier, a power line had fallen, igniting a 23-hour fire fight in Short Mountain. The day J.R. vanished, May 1, was a witch's holiday, and the Rev. Bobby Basham of the Hayfield Assembly of God said, "There is Satanism here." That same week, another Shoemaker - no relation - was found dead, buried in a shallow grave in his garden in a neighboring county. What did it all mean?
\ Nothing was ruled out. Not even the self-proclaimed psychics.
Ellyson was naturally skeptical when he got a call early in May from a man named Louis Gonot, a raspy-voiced 41-year-old from Bridgeport, Ohio. But he listened to the man's vision anyway:
"I seem to be the little boy ... I'm on this hillside. The sun would move from my right to my left. There's a crevice to this hillside. I'm looking into a valley, not a deep valley. And straight ahead of me, there's this house, a shack, something of that nature, and there seems to be a hill behind it. Looking to the right of the shack, behind it, there are trees. To the left of the shack, the trees seem to diminish. As the hill drops straight down, there is a road there. Sitting there, looking down at the shack, the boy, I feel, ends up at the shack."
As Gonot described the scene, Ellyson became increasingly uncomfortable. The place being described in the woods existed - down to the last detail.
And there was more. Gonot had helped locate a body before in West Virginia. On Dec. 2, 1991, a coal miner was swept away in a flood. Gonot drew a map for authorities, indicating the man's body would be found in a fork of the creek under a bright yellow marking.
On Jan. 13, 1992, two beaver trappers found the body in a fork of the creek under a tree pierced with a bright yellow feather-tipped arrow.
"There was a wild-looking person with a beard, long hair, that had something to do with this boy's disappearance," Gonot says, continuing his vision. "He seemed to be watching this boy as he moved through the forest. He knows the woods, but he doesn't know the boy. Now, remember, when I'm the boy on the hill, that may mean I'm being guided to see what I need to see. The police keep missing something. There's only one vision I see every time. That is the little boy in a hole in the ground. I see it over and over again. Trapped ... He seems to be in a fetal position. There's still some life energy there. I don't feel dead."
Gonot's call sent Trooper Ellyson rushing back to the woods. He found nothing.
But the Shoemakers can't stay away. They return almost every weekend to look for their son.
"Every time you go back," Nettie says, "you feel close to him."
by CNB