Missing persons: the Bobby Desmond case

[Slater]

Sad but not unique, I'm sure. Sounds like his parents may have committed the perfect crime: Murder and then live out their lives unpunished.



"Nobody seems to remember Desmond. According to Borst, nobody seems to recall his disappearance almost 60 years ago.

Not anyone in law enforcement. Not the reporter who once covered an aspect of the case. Not any classmates or anyone else who was around in town since the 1960s.

“Surprisingly, nobody remembers this,” Borst said.

The state attorney general’s office once had an open case on Desmond, Borst said, but when he inquired about it, he learned it had been “closed, archived and destroyed.”

“I’ll never forget those words,” Borst said. “I thought, ‘That would never happen today.’ I don’t know why it happened. I don’t know how it could happen.”

And anyone else who might have information about Desmond’s disappearance — including his mother, Alice, and stepfather, Chet — has died, Borst added."


https://www.yahoo.com/news/parents-never-reported-maine-boy-090019245.html

[Waylander]

The bigger failures seem to be the people that didn’t do anything about the POS parents before and not long after the boy went missing. At least well before it became a cold case and again before the parents died.

The sister not seeming to remember what happened until she was an adult and going to therapy seems a little shaky but the new cop seems to believe her.

[flenna]

I listen to a podcast called The Vanished, will need to see if this case is in there. There are a lot of cases that are just head scratchers and others, like the Bobby Desmond case, that kids grew up in horrific conditions and more than likely the parents were involved. But in the age before internet and electronic record keeping so many just fell to the wayside. Sad.

[Slater]

I know that cold cases get solved every now and then, but the cops have very little to go on with this one. If Bobby was murdered, what happened to the body?