Three years ago this week, thirteen-year-old Myron Traylor had just finished his paper route and left his South Phoenix home with his mother, Debbie, to visit his grandparents.
About a half-mile separated the two homes in South Phoenix. Myron and his mother traveled on foot because Debbie did not have a car.
At his grandparents', Myron planned to call his younger brother Charles, who was staying with an uncle in California for the summer. Debbie's home near 16th Street and Nancy Lane did not have a telephone.
It was around 6 p.m., just before Myron's classes started at the Vacation Bible School at Southminster Presbyterian Church on 19th Street near Broadway. A member of the church choir and youth group, Myron was not known to do drugs, nor was he in a gang. He wasn't apt to stay out late, and he rarely went anywhere without first telling his family.
That day, Myron wore a red-and-white-striped shirt, white shorts with blue print and white tennis shoes. His delicate, almost baby-like features were offset only by a half-inch scar on the right side of his face, a wound from a bicycle spill. He often wore a brown pair of reading glasses that matched his brown eyes, but he didn't have them on that evening.
Myron carried a plastic bag with about a change of clothes worth of laundry to wash at his grandparents' house.
As Debbie and Myron walked north in the 102-degree heat, Myron got thirsty. It was cloudy and muggy. He told his mom that he wanted something to drink.
Myron headed toward OK Fish & Chips, nearby on 16th Street north of Southern. Debbie told Myron to catch up as she headed across a parking lot toward a vacant field just east of her parents' house.
No one sat at the small picnic table outside of OK when Myron arrived. No one waited in line outside the iron-gated take-out window. Myron walked through an archway into a shaded corner and politely asked employee Lena Watt for a wild-cherry drink. He stood to the side of the window and gulped it down.
"You must be thirsty," remarked Watt, who knew him from the neighborhood.
Myron ordered another. Beverage in hand, Myron began to walk in the direction of his grandparents' house, passing the OK Barber Stylist Salon a few doors north. Watt said goodbye to Myron, and he wiggled a finger at her in response. Within a few seconds, he had vanished from her sight, and she went back to work.
Lena Watt was the last person known to have spoken with Myron Traylor.
Did he run away? Was he abducted? Did he get lost? Was he killed?
The mysteries revolving around July 27, 1988, remain, long after the daily searches stopped, long after Myron's picture came down from countless store windows and long after media coverage waned.
The flood of rumors and leads that circulated in the initial weeks and months after Myron vanished--several times as many as in typical missing-persons cases--is now a trickle, although some stories still persist.
Detectives with the Phoenix Police Department insist they are still in active pursuit.
"We'll keep searching until he is found," says Detective Ron Jones, who worked the case for a year and a half before it was transferred to Detective Fred McElvain last January.
Myron's grandmother Ruthie Traylor praises the initial investigation, but says she has yet to hear from McElvain.
"At first it seemed like the police were really looking for him," she says, "but now it seems like they dropped it. I don't know." McElvain says he can't remember the last time he contacted the family. The reason is quite simple: There isn't anything to say. Friends and relatives change their minds, seemingly daily. Some members of Ruthie Traylor's sizable clan of children and grandchildren accept that they'll never see Myron again; others are just as convinced he'll return.
As for Ruthie Traylor herself, she takes solace from television programs such as Unsolved Mysteries, which tell stories of long-lost relatives coming home after decades of being gone. Such shows, believe them or not, shine hope on a bleak screen.
As time passes, the police pursue just about any tip, no matter how unlikely. In the case of Myron Traylor, anonymous tipsters not only have called police; they've also tried their tales out on reporters.
One such tipster contends that a drug dealer in South Phoenix abducted, molested and murdered Myron and buried his body in the backyard of a crack house. Another story circulating on the streets places Myron as a drug dealer in Los Angeles who's vowing to return to Phoenix to seek revenge on his mother for having "given him away." There's no evidence that Debbie Traylor was responsible for her son's disappearance.
The stories are as way out as the people who tell them. Police interviewed two persons in prison to try to corroborate the first story; after hearing that Myron might be in California, they traveled to Los Angeles and San Diego to search for him. Both "leads" fizzled.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a private, nonprofit organization outside Washington, D.C., estimates that Myron's picture has been circulated by mailers to forty million homes nationwide. Friends and acquaintances say they've been seeing his picture all over--in an airport in Dallas, on a post-office wall in Florida, on a television show on the East Coast. But no one has reported seeing Myron.
The past three years have frustrated the Reverend George Brooks almost to the point of anger. "It's about time that something be discovered as to what happened to him," says Brooks, pastor of Southminster Presbyterian, who spearheaded initial search efforts. "Three years without one piece of information--that's a long, long time."
Indeed, three years without a trace or a solid clue--or any indication that the child is a runaway--is a long time even to people in the business of tracking down missing children.
Only about half of the center's 8,000 active cases involve children missing for two years or longer, says Charles Pickett, a case manager assigned to the Traylor case. (The center is only one of several private organizations that hunt for missing children.)
Of the center's cases, only 338 are classified as "nonfamily abductions," and only five of those involve Arizona children missing as long as Myron. But that's not the entire picture. Nationwide, according to 1990 U.S. Department of Justice figures, there are between 3,200 and 4,600 missing children who fall in the category of nonfamily abductions.
"I'm starting to learn what years are about," says Pickett, who began distributing Myron's picture throughout the country about six months after the boy disappeared. "Knowing the base situation, you get very concerned with the length of time the child's been gone."
Pickett continues to send Myron's photograph to newspapers and other organizations, which in turn may distribute the photograph to other groups. He writes the Traylors every month.
"When this first happened," Pickett says, "you were hoping, probably like a lot of people, that this was just like a little guy who was gone and who'd be back in a day. That's it."
For age thirteen, Myron wasn't exactly a little guy. He was five foot five and weighed 106 pounds. The week before he vanished, his grandmother had signed him up to play organized football. He often played pickup ball--tackle-style--with his cousins and neighbors.
Was Myron strong?
"Heck, yeah, he was strong when he hit me," Myron's thirteen-year-old cousin Martel Wiley says with conviction.
That summer, Myron began lifting weights across the street from his grandparents' house in the home of Nkosi Burton, one of his closest friends.
"We had just started lifting weights," Nkosi says, "and we was about to get back into it. Then he didn't come back."
Myron and Nkosi tried to attend church as much as they could. Afterward, they'd often eat with Reverend Brooks. The night Myron disappeared, family members assumed he had caught the bus to Bible school at Brooks' church. When Myron didn't come home after classes let out at 9:30 p.m., his relatives were concerned. "He never stayed out this late," says his grandmother, shaking her head. "Never."
If Myron was unhappy enough to run away from home, he didn't tell anybody. In fact, he was a quiet boy. Myron enjoyed drawing and reading, but he didn't speak much about his dreams, even to Brooks. The reverend, however, says he knew the boy had a bright future. "He was a kid that was going to make it," Brooks says. "And if he didn't, it was because somebody interfered with him."
In so many words, that is what the police believe more and more.
Myron showed none of the signs of a runaway--telling friends of his plans, attempting to contact them soon afterwards. With his picture circulated nationwide, police say Myron would have had a difficult time concealing himself for such a long time.
Police also can't say it was a child-custody dispute: Myron's father Leroy Williams was in prison when Myron disappeared; when Williams was released earlier this year, he told Ruthie Traylor he would help to find the boy. It is difficult not to fear the worst.
"You have to believe that some harm has happened after this long to cause him to vanish off the face of the earth," says Detective Ron Jones. "You have to speculate something bad has happened."
The number of tips was "considerably" higher at first than in other missing-persons cases, says Jones, but all of them led to dead ends. These days, there are few tips to choose from. "After somebody's been missing that long," Jones says, "you have to take every call as a serious lead."
The most persistent tipster of late is a caller who links Myron's disappearance to a "well-known crack dealer" in South Phoenix. Last year, police traced one of the tipster's calls, swooped down on him at a telephone booth and brought him in for questioning.
The man, who says he has lived in Phoenix for 35 years and worked for the city for twenty, contends that his story comes from someone who heard the dealer bragging during a drug haze about murdering and molesting a child. According to the tipster, the dealer got into a fight with his wife on the same night in July of '88 that Myron vanished. The dealer went to a bar near OK Fish & Chips. He left the bar drunk and came across Myron. According to the man, the dealer abducted Myron, molested him, beat him to death with a rock and buried him in the backyard of a crack house.
Detective Jones says he has dealt with the caller several times and has checked and rechecked his story. None of it panned out, police say. "There's no chance that this guy's right," says Jones' boss, Sergeant John Locarni, who went out of his way to discredit the tipster's story. Both Jones and Locarni say no one, not even two women the tipster claimed knew the same information, has corroborated the story.
The tipster admits he has only "hearsay" information, but insists in an interview that it's true. Why would he peddle the story? Sergeant Locarni speculates the tipster may have been trying to impress a woman who had left him to live with the dealer.
Reverend Brooks has followed other leads--and has been misled. In the first few months after Myron disappeared, Brooks pursued several trails and even endured a phony hostage-return scenario.
He received a call from a person telling him that he could meet Myron in Hermosa Park, at 20th Street and Southern. The caller requested that Brooks go alone--at 3 a.m. "I braved it and went out there, all by myself," Brooks recalls. "I waited and waited and waited." No one showed. Brooks returned to the park, with others, for several nights, but no Myron.
Another tipster said Myron had been seen living in an abandoned house, also on 20th Street. Again, Brooks and company waited at the house, but no one showed up. A woman claimed that Myron was buried near a tree on 24th Street near Vineyard Road. Brooks poked around the area, but saw nothing. "I know a fresh grave when I see it," he says. "He wasn't there."
Some people who knew Myron try to link his mother to the boy's disappearance. "I think his mom owed money to someone," says Myron's friend Nkosi Burton. "Usually she would stay there with him at OK. Why'd she leave?"
Debbie Traylor could not be reached for comment, but police say there is no evidence she had any involvement in Myron's disappearance.
"All the information was checked," Detective Jones says. "We don't have any facts to support those allegations."
Ruthie Traylor, who also has heard accusations that her daughter was involved, doesn't give much credence to any of the stories on the streets, especially after a man and woman came by her house in August of last year.
The two people said they had seen Myron living near his old home. At the time, Ruthie Traylor was meeting with two detectives, who immediately went with the man and woman to check out the lead. Nothing turned up. "I was just so sure they knew what they was talking about," she says. As it turns out, the two were intoxicated. "I guess they wanted some reward money to get drunk with," says Ruthie Traylor.
Police detectives have spent hundreds of hours on the case, but of late they've had nowhere to go. They insist they haven't dropped the case, despite not maintaining contact with the family. "It doesn't do the family any good to say, `I have nothing,'" says Detective Jones.
Pickett, of the missing-children's center, says police tend to stay away from relatives when they don't have anything new to say. "They start hiding from the family," he says. "They know what they are going through. They don't like going back with nothing."
All the same, Ruthie Traylor says, "I would rather hear from them, just to say, `We don't have no clues.' If they don't say anything, I feel like they're not still looking for him."
Without a doubt, police know where to find Ruthie. The Traylor family has lived in the same neighborhood for twenty years. The one-story home on Pecan Road and 12th Way serves as a family core and meeting place for children and grandchildren alike.
Myron is one of Ruthie Traylor's "twenty-some" grandchildren. She has nine children from two marriages; Debbie is the oldest from her second husband.
On a recent July afternoon, four grandchildren are on hand. As a reporter enters the house, asking to speak with their grandmother about Myron, a child's eyes light up. "You know something about Myron?" he asks. The gleam dies when he learns the reporter doesn't know.
"We talk about him everyday," Ruthie Traylor says. "Whether he's dead or alive, I'd like to find out what happened."
In a closet just off the living room, she keeps fliers with Myron's photograph on them. The family, the church, even strangers helped distribute thousands of them. On the wall, near the door, is a "Have you seen me?" mailer with Myron's face on it.
The picture is old now. The missing children center will soon do an "age enhancement," a computer process that merges a photograph of the missing child with ones of relatives similar in appearance.
Most likely, Myron the budding artist would have been fascinated by the process.
"He liked to draw," Ruthie Traylor says. Above her bed, a piece of his artwork hangs. Myron made the picture in a sixth-grade art class at Sierra Vista Elementary a few months before he disappeared. The collage of cut-out shapes is colored with various shades of crayon. An inverted heart with an arrow through the center overlaps green and yellow circles. A question mark provides dramatic irony. It is better than what you would expect from a sixth grader, and his grandmother knows it.
She stares out the window and repeats what police and missing-children workers believe: "I know Myron--he's gone, but he didn't go by himself. He would've called someone, or one of his friends."
Actually, the Traylors have received two calls in the past three years that they think might be linked. One came in June of last year, from a male caller who asked for Myron. When Myron's grandfather told him the boy was missing, the caller hung up. Another, a few months earlier, came from a voice Ruthie Traylor thought she recognized as a granddaughter in Texas. But when she questioned the child about her mother, the caller paused and hung up. She now wonders whether the voice belonged to Myron.
Yet another call was answered by Myron's friend Nkosi Burton, at his home across Pecan Road. The caller, referring to Ruthie Traylor, asked Nkosi, "How's grandma been doing?" He told the caller she had recovered from an illness for which she had been hospitalized. After the caller hung up, Nkosi began to wonder whether the voice was Myron's.
Myron's younger brother Charles currently lives with his grandparents. Debbie Traylor, family members say, has been unemployed since she stopped working as a cook at Red Lobster a few months ago. She no longer has a place of her own, and no one in the family is quite sure where she lives.
Charles plays with a toy truck in his bedroom, talking of Myron as if he were in the next room. He speaks in the present tense when he talks about Myron's favorite foods. "He likes those butter tortillas," Charles says. "And homemade donuts. He makes them from biscuit rolls, with cinnamon and sugar."
The children of different fathers, the two brothers did not always live under the same roof. Charles remembers little about the last time he saw Myron--just before Charles left for California at the start of the summer in 1988. They ate dinner that evening at the home of the parents of Charles' father.
"He didn't really say nothing," Charles says. "He just said, `Bye.'"
Still, Charles holds on. He likes to think his brother is living a better life somewhere, after having escaped from abductors.
"One day he'll come back, and you won't recognize him," Charles says, raising his voice, and then lowering it. "But he'll come back."
end part 2 of 2
"Three years without one piece of information--that's a long, long time."
If Myron was unhappy enough to run away from home, he didn't tell anybody.
"He was a kid that was going to make it," Reverend Brooks says. "And if he didn't, it was because somebody interfered with him."
"I guess they wanted some reward money to get drunk with."
"It doesn't do the family any good to say, `I have nothing,'" says Detective Jones.
"I know Myron--he's gone, but he didn't go by himself.
