There is an empty plot in Glendale Cemetery beside John and Gertrude Marlow. There is no headstone, no marker; no flowers are left there.

It’s just waiting, for Richard.

Richard Marlow vanished from outside his house 17 kilometres away on Beta St. in Etobicoke, nearly 70 years ago.

He was 9 years old.

His family — later generations, nieces he has never met — are still looking for him.

Nicknamed “Peewee,” Richard was small for his age, painfully shy. He was in Grade 3, “getting along nicely,” his mother, Gertrude, told the Star in 1947.

“He was always the first away to school in the morning. He didn’t want to be late,” she said. “He was very quiet and would never go into a dark room and wouldn’t talk to strangers at all.”

It was a Tuesday evening, July 18, 1944, on Beta St. Most of the family went to a picture — it could have been Bing Crosby in Going My Way, or maybe Gary Cooper in The Story of Dr. Wassell.

Richard had been the night before, so he stayed home with his brother. His father, John, was in the military and stationed out of town. His two oldest brothers were fighting in Belgium, as Allied soldiers inched across the country ousting Hitler’s forces.

In the little blue hat he always wore perched, peak up, on the back of his head, Richard was in front of the house riding his older sister’s bicycle. Brother Gerald was just inside, keeping an eye on him.

And then he was gone.

The bicycle was left in the yard.

There was a search. Police scoured the neighbourhood, an army militia was called in. They drained ponds, dredged creeks, checked down wells and outhouses. They looked for days and days and days.

“There was never any evidence found,” said Gayle Dykeman, whose mother, Aileen Lubbock, Richard’s only sister, was 18 at the time.

John, Richard’s father, came home to help in the search. Psychics offered to tell the family where Richard was, for a price too steep for them. Reported sightings came from Western Canada and Florida. If a body was found in the area, John and Gertrude had to trek down to the morgue to take a look, see if it was their boy.

“It never was,” said Dykeman.

Gertrude wrote letters to police forces across Ontario, pleading for them to look for Richard; she wrote to the FBI, she wrote to newspapers.

She mailed out a hundred photos of Richard: blond, shy smile, bright blue eyes.

Nothing.

The family bought presents each Christmas, wrapped them up and put them under the tree for Richard. In 1947, it was a sleigh, a crokinole board and some clothes. Every Christmas, Gertrude lit a candle and put it in the window.

“The superstition says that when the candle burns down, he will come back,” she told the Star. “Although three candles have burned themselves out, I am going to light another one this Christmas.”

For the first three years, Gertrude dreamed about Richard. He appeared “clear as day” and asked, ‘Were you worrying about me, Mommy?’

“But for the past year, I haven’t dreamed like that,” she said.

Ten years after Richard vanished, his mother died.

“It went on and on and on, and it just broke her heart,” said Dykeman. Gertrude had medical issues, of course, but they all knew what it really was — not knowing where her baby went. She was 56.

John died in 1973, at 80.

Three of Richard’s brothers have passed away, too.

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“I really think it haunted them, that they died not knowing what happened to their brother,” said Dykeman. “It tormented them. It’s something that I think was on their mind every day.”

Aileen, Dykeman’s mother, and Robert, three years older than Richard, are all that’s left of his immediate family.

Dykeman took up the search a few years ago, after retiring from the University of Toronto. The “big break” occurred after she read about the Ontario Provincial Police’s Missing Persons and Unidentified Bodies Unit.

She sat down at a computer with the 70-year-old photo of Richard and scoured the OPP’s online database of unidentified bodies, looking at photos of hundreds of bodies, people whose names have never been found.

She called and got Const. Kevin Baddington on the line. Now retired, Baddington helped her get Richard listed in the OPP missing persons database and connected her to MissingKids.ca, an online resource centre operated by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection.

Richard’s profile was featured on the website database and plastered on billing envelopes mailed out across the country.

MissingKids.ca director Christy Dzikowicz said Richard’s case is extreme — it’s just been so long.

“We absolutely believe that telling these stories is critical,” says Dzikowicz. “We owe it to Richard. He’s a human being and as a society we cannot forget him. So to honour him and his family, we tell his story and show his picture — that’s important.”

And, you never know when or how something might be triggered, some memory, some shred of information, that could finally answer the question: what happened to Richard?

“Sometimes, it’s just a matter of putting the information out there enough times, in enough ways,” said Dzikowicz.

Jessica Huzyk, the case worker for Richard’s file, said they’ve focused the search on seniors, the group most likely to remember anything.

“We can only hope that the more people who see this, there might just be that one person who says, ‘OK, I remember this.’ ”

The pain of a missing child is unlike, well, anything, said Dzikowicz.

“We learned that a long time ago, that you can’t send families of missing children to grief therapists — that’s not what they’re experiencing,” she said. “Generations down, the impact is huge on the whole family — the brothers, the sisters, the nieces, the nephews — because there’s a hole in their family that hasn’t been filled.”

Some families feel guilty if they try to live their lives, she said. They fear the search will be abandoned, their loved one lost forever. They burn themselves out. MissingKids.ca tries to take some of the weight.

“We can step in and at least say to them, ‘You can take a break from the search. We’ll carry this and when you’re ready to come back . . . you can come back,’” said Dzikowicz. “It’s really important for them to know that if something happens to them, it won’t be forgotten. We’re going to continue with this.”

Aileen will be 88 this April. She has celebrated Richard’s birthday, Feb. 9, 1935, 70 times, every year since he disappeared. She talks about it more now, said Dykeman, worried that when the last of Richard’s siblings are gone, he will be forgotten. She worried about the plot in the cemetery, that his final resting place beside his mother and father could one day be sold off to someone else. Dykeman said the family was assured that will never happen.

“It will remain there forever, waiting for his bones,” she said. “If they ever find them.”