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Post by Joanna on Apr 2, 2018 15:57:50 GMT -5
What Happened to Beverly Potts?
CLEVELAND, Ohio – Clevelanders too young to remember Beverly Potts, even those born years after she disappeared in 1951, grew up knowing her name and her story. It was a mystery that became almost folklore, a warning by parents about the sort of thing that could happen, though no one knew what actually happened – only that a 10-year-old girl went to the park one August evening 67 years ago and vanished without a trace.
Meg Roberts, born in 1964, heard the story from her mother almost a generation later, and “it absolutely affected her parenting,” she said. “She was strict, and always wanted to know where we were, who we were with. “But she very seldom spoke of Beverly other than to tell us she had a sister that disappeared. She would say it was just too painful to talk about. She simply didn’t want to deal with it. It was very emotional for her, as though it happened yesterday.”
Roberts is now Beverly’s closest living relative. She lives with her family in Colorado, but returned to Cleveland last weekend for a Capitol Theatre screening of Mark Wade Stone’s award-winning documentary Dusk & Shadow: The Mystery of Beverly Potts, based on the book Twilight of Innocence, by local historian James Jessen Badal. “I want to make sure that Beverly is never forgotten. I know that she is still in the hearts of Clevelanders,” Roberts explained, pleased to see more than a hundred people – most of whom were too young to remember 1951 – at the matinee benefiting the Cleveland Police Museum.
Among those present was retired police detective Bob Wolf, who was assigned to the case in 2000, after a series of anonymous letters to The Plain Dealer promised a 50th anniversary answer to the mystery. The letters proved to be a hoax, but Wolf remains reluctant to give up on the case. Born in 1958, the backyard of the house in which he grew up back onto that of the home of the Potts family. The story he heard at the time never changed. After supper on Friday, August 24, 1951, Beverly and a neighborhood girl walked to Halloran Park on West 117th Street, no more than a three-minute walk from her house on Linnet Avenue, to watch the city-sponsored Showagon entertainment troupe. The friend left so that she could get home by 9. Beverly told her she was going to stay a little longer to see the show end. By 10 p.m., her concerned family found the park dark and deserted.
The biggest search in Cleveland’s history was launched in what became the city’s first widely- known missing-child case. There were bold headlines, increasing rewards, wild rumors and thousands of tips, but no witnesses, body, evidence, ransom note, blood or solid suspect – no “clews” the paper reported.
After a week, the despairing family accepted the conclusion of the lead police investigator and issued a statement: “We have finally come to the realization we will never see our Beverly alive again. We urge whoever did this terrible thing to write or telephone to us, or the police, the location of Beverly’s body so that we can reclaim it and give her a decent Christian burial.”
Roberts’ mother, Anita, 12 years older than Beverly, left town the following year to join the U.S. Foreign Service, was sent to Ethiopia and returned to Cleveland only once. She died in 2006. Beverly’s mother, Elizabeth, died in 1956. Her father, Robert, 14 years later.
Roberts said it was “painful but therapeutic” for her mother to speak with Wolf during his investigation and then with Badal for his book and in Stone’s film. “It was as though a weight had been lifted.”
After the film screening, an audience member asked if Beverly might have survived. Roberts said when she heard about the three women freed after a decade of captivity on Seymour Avenue, “I thought, my God, if they’ve been found there’s still hope.” But it was fleeting.
Wolf suspects the answer to the mystery is as close as it ever was – near Halloran Park – because Beverly was shy and would not have gone anywhere with a stranger.
The detective in charge in 1951 believed Beverly encountered someone she knew and was taken away in a car. But it’s at least as likely that someone familiar offered to walk her home in the dark.
Garages in the area had dirt floors back then, since paved. Wolf said a house-to-house neighborhood search was planned in 1951, but canceled after it was leaked by the press. Asked if it’s too late to search, Stone and Badal explained that cadaver-sniffing dogs have detected remains dating to the Civil War and through concrete. “We’d love to see it,” Badal admitted, but the gamble would be costly and face legal hurdles.
“I’d like to see it done except you’d have to have the cooperation of everyone involved,” Wolf added.
“I continue to pray for closure in my lifetime,” Roberts concluded, while it still would matter and while people know the name and the story. Hardly anyone alive remembers the girl who would be 77, but remains forever 10.Source: The Findlay Courier, March 31, 2018.
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Post by jason on Apr 4, 2018 17:38:05 GMT -5
It's more likely that someone she knew got her to go with him on the pretext of taking her home and took her to his house, or to some distant location, and buried her body after killing her. I'm sure there were a lot of places to bury a body in Cleveland besides the dirt floor of a garage. Also, the police back in 1951 would have probably checked all of the nearby garages even if the house to house search was canceled.
From her photo she's weird-looking, like she might be somewhat retarded. |
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Post by jane on Apr 5, 2018 4:12:40 GMT -5
I grew up in Cleveland and I remember when this happened. Beverly Potts and I were about the same age, but we didn't live in the same part of town. I suppose that now the neighborhood around Halloran Park is mostly blacks and foreigners, but back then, it was white, I guess what you'd call lower middle class people, and safe, so it wasn't unusual for people to let their kids go out at night alone. After this happened, parents started asking more questions about where their kids were going and would tell them it was important that they stay together in a group and not to go off and leave one kid on their own. Before long, though, things were back to normal and parents stopped worrying.
Recently, I saw on some TV show that a man, who worked as a truck driver and carnival worker, was a suspect in the Beverly Potts case. He was also accused of killing a little girl in Illinois in 1957 after some other man, who was innocent, had been convicted of killing her. I don't remember the other girl's name or how the police connected him to both murders -- I say murders because I suppose Beverly Potts was killed. I remember thinking when I saw the show that Cleveland was a long way from Illinois, but since he drove a truck and worked for a carnival, I guess he would have been traveling all over the country.
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Post by kitty on Apr 6, 2018 15:29:46 GMT -5
I grew up in Cleveland and I remember when this happened. Beverly Potts and I were about the same age, but we didn't live in the same part of town. I suppose that now the neighborhood around Halloran Park is mostly blacks and foreigners, but back then, it was white, I guess what you'd call lower middle class people, and safe, so it wasn't unusual for people to let their kids go out at night alone. After this happened, parents started asking more questions about where their kids were going and would tell them it was important that they stay together in a group and not to go off and leave one kid on their own. Before long, though, things were back to normal and parents stopped worrying.
Recently, I saw on some TV show that a man, who worked as a truck driver and carnival worker, was a suspect in the Beverly Potts case. He was also accused of killing a little girl in Illinois in 1957 after some other man, who was innocent, had been convicted of killing her. I don't remember the other girl's name or how the police connected him to both murders -- I say murders because I suppose Beverly Potts was killed. I remember thinking when I saw the show that Cleveland was a long way from Illinois, but since he drove a truck and worked for a carnival, I guess he would have been traveling all over the country.
Right after something like this happens, parents always start being overprotective, but if nothing else happens, it doesn't last long. The truth is that no matter how careful you are, bad things can still happen. When I was around the age of that girl, we stayed outside after dark and walked home alone. Now I guess if you let a 10 year old go to some event in a park by themselves at night, you'd have some child protective service worker knocking at your door.
I also saw that show you're talking about on TV and I seem to recall that another girl who was with the girl who was abducted looked at some photos from an old yearbook and picked out a man that she said was the one that said his name was "Johnny". I don't know the girl's name either. If anyone else remembers her name, could you please post it? I'd like to know more about the truck driver and how the police traced the other girl's abduction to him. |
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Post by Graveyardbride on Apr 9, 2018 0:51:52 GMT -5
I grew up in Cleveland and I remember when this happened. Beverly Potts and I were about the same age, but we didn't live in the same part of town. I suppose that now the neighborhood around Halloran Park is mostly blacks and foreigners, but back then, it was white, I guess what you'd call lower middle class people, and safe, so it wasn't unusual for people to let their kids go out at night alone. After this happened, parents started asking more questions about where their kids were going and would tell them it was important that they stay together in a group and not to go off and leave one kid on their own. Before long, though, things were back to normal and parents stopped worrying.
Recently, I saw on some TV show that a man, who worked as a truck driver and carnival worker, was a suspect in the Beverly Potts case. He was also accused of killing a little girl in Illinois in 1957 after some other man, who was innocent, had been convicted of killing her. I don't remember the other girl's name or how the police connected him to both murders -- I say murders because I suppose Beverly Potts was killed. I remember thinking when I saw the show that Cleveland was a long way from Illinois, but since he drove a truck and worked for a carnival, I guess he would have been traveling all over the country.
The truck driver and carnival worker was William Henry Redmond. On April 25, 1951, 8-year-old Jane Marie Althoff was found dead in a pickup truck on the fairgrounds in Philadelphia. Redmond's fingerprints were in the truck, but by the time an arrest warrant was issued, he had disappeared. It wasn't until 1988 that he was charged with the child's murder, but the case was dismissed because a police officer refused to reveal the identity of a confidential informant and other alleged procedural errors. While in jail, Redmond bragged about killing another little girl.
The girl who was abducted and murdered in Illinois was Maria Ridulph, 7, who was grabbed while playing near her home in Sycamore on December 3, 1957. Her body was found five months later almost a hundred miles away near Woodbine, Illinois. In 1997, it was determined Redmond had killed the girl and the case was closed.
In 2008, Jack McCullough, fka John Tessier, was blamed for the murder of Maria Ridulph by his half-sister, who claimed their mother confessed on her deathbed that he had killed the child. Kathy Sigman (now Kathy Chapman), the friend Maria was playing with when she disappeared, identified McCullough from a photo array as the man who approached the girls that day. However, back in 1957, she had positively identified another man, whom investigators later determined wasn't in Sycamore at the time the girl was abducted. McCullough was convicted of killing Maria Ridulph in 2012 and sentenced to life in prison. In 2016, following an investigation by the state's attorney, it was determined McCullough wasn't in Sycamore at the time of the abduction and he was exonerated and set free.
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Post by jane on Apr 9, 2018 6:49:29 GMT -5
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Post by Joanna on Jul 19, 2018 7:53:00 GMT -5
Last Chance to Solve 1951 Disappearance of Beverly Potts
CLEVELAND, Ohio – With the 64th anniversary of the most famous unsolved missing person case in Cleveland history, new information has surfaced in the 1951 disappearance of 10-year-old Beverly Potts. Cracking a case more than six decades old is almost unimaginable, but local law enforcement and FBI officials have examined enough small, but tantalizing, bits of potential new evidence to issue a public plea for help. What they need is the person who called the Cleveland Crime Stoppers anonymous tip line in early August to call back at (216) 252-7463. Absent this, the person can leave more information on the Crime Stoppers, identity-protected web site (25crime.com), or contact the Cleveland Police Department homicide unit, the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s office, or the Cleveland FBI.
In the early August telephone call, an unknown person provided pieces of information about a possible suspect in Beverly’s disappearance from Halloran Park on Cleveland’s West Side on the night of August 24, 1951. Police investigated the information provided by the caller and found it to be accurate. But they need more, so they’ve increased the standard Crime Stoppers reward to $15,000 from the standard $2,500. “The major part of our most recent tip is very intriguing,” said Rich McIntosh, Crime Stoppers interim director. “A piece of it was specific enough to check out, but we need more specificity to proceed. Our investigators need this person to call back.”
Beverly Potts became the little girl many Greater Clevelanders never forgot when she seemingly vanished into thin air after she and a girlfriend left the Potts family's Linnet Avenue home and went to the nearby park after dinner to watch some entertainers. The girlfriend, Patricia Swing, returned home around 9 p.m. Beverly was never seen again. Less than a day after her disappearance, the biggest search in Cleveland history was already under way. In a front page editorial, Louie Seltzer's Cleveland Press urged, “Let’s All Join Hunt for Missing Child.” Thousands did, helping police comb the city for clues. Hundreds more city workers were reassigned to search parks, streams, culverts and fields. Tips poured in at a rate of 1,500 a day. Police interviewed dozens of suspects. It was all for naught.
But the search never really ended. Over the years, Cleveland police identified many potential suspects. But all trails led to a dead end.
Beverly’s disappearance has been the subject of a regular rehashing in the city’s newspapers, in the book Twilight of Innocence – the Disappearance of Beverly Potts, by local historian James Badal; and in a television documentary, Dusk and Shadow – the Mystery of Beverly Potts produced by Mark Stone.
The last potential break in the case came in the summer of 2000, when the Plain Dealer received an unsigned letter in which the writer confessed to the killing. That letter was turned over to Cleveland police and assigned to Detective Robert Wolf. Over the next year, police received three additional letters, two of which included some alleged details of Beverly’s abduction and subsequent death. One of them promised a “sealed brown envelope” and a rare coin Beverly had in her change purse that night would be forwarded upon the killer’s death. The third of four letters included a promise by the author to turn himself in at Halloran Park at noon on the 50th anniversary of the abduction. “Fifty years is long enough to live with what I’ve done,” was the explanation. But instead of a surrender, that anniversary produced only a final letter offering a feeble excuse for the non-show.
Over time, the entire Potts family has slipped into history. Her mother, Elizabeth, died in 1956. Robert, Beverly’s father, died 14 years later, in that same West Side neighborhood. Beverly’s sister, Anita, died in 2006.
Beverly’s disappearance baffled police and haunted tens of thousands of Greater Clevelanders who had never even met the shy, polite 10-year-old. For more than half a century, it became just another part city history from which we cannot escape. Now, time has almost run out. Common sense and the calendar tell us this is probably the last chance to find out what happened to the person who became known as the little girl Clevelanders can’t forget.
Source: Brent Larkin, Northeast Ohio Media Group, August 24, 2015.
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