It wasn’t like Kurt to take off on his own. In fact, his mother would later remark it was very unlike him. Kim, in her older sisterly-ness, would always try to coax him into the woods behind their house to play. But Kurt would hesitate, staying just at the end of their backyard.

When his mother asked him why he didn’t want to go play in the woods with his sister and he uttered simply:

“Momma, there’s monsters in there.”

JACK HANSON WAS A CARETAKER FOR THE CAMPGROUND. It was his daughter, Lou Ellen, who was the last to see Kurt Newton alive. Not long after Kurt had taken off down the dirt road, Jack drove along it and saw the abandoned tricycle. It was fairly close to “the dump,” — an area of discarded trash that was piled at the end of the road. He studied the tricycle a moment and then, deciding it must have been left there on purpose, tossed it onto the trash heap.

Meanwhile, back at their campsite, Jill Newton had lost sight of her little boy while she was washing mud off the kid’s sneakers. Kurt was not the type of child to go running off and getting himself into trouble, though.

She would later recall to interviewers how, even if they were separated momentarily in the grocery store, Kurt would freeze and quietly cry until she found him. Whenever he would play outside in the yard, she never had to worry he would run off with neighborhood children: he always kept a close eye on her. He always knew where his mother was.

Which is why Jill didn’t automatically assume Kurt was in danger. She figured he must have caught up with his father and together, they were companionably chopping wood. After some time passed with no sign of either of them, she off-handedly asked a few of the neighboring campers if they’d happened to see Kurt on his bike earlier. As she was chatting with them, Ron came back.

Kurt wasn’t with him; he never had been.

Maine State Police file photo of Kurt Ronald Newton

When the couple ran into Jack Hanson and asked if he’d seen their little boy and his red tricycle, the groundskeeper’s reaction must have given them a horrible feeling in the pit of their stomachs: Jack had seen the tricycle, yes, but no sign of the boy. He took them to the trash heap where the abandoned tricycle lay, undisturbed.

Kurt was nowhere to be be seen. In fact, there was no sign he had ever been there at all.

Anguished, Jill immediately thought the worst: a kidnapping. But everyone at the campsite rallied around her and said, “No, no, he’s probably just wandered into the woods on foot, looking for his Dad. He couldn’t have gone far.”

That would seem to be true: the dense wood before them was not the kind of place a child could navigate with ease. As they set off on foot through the pucker brush, Jill kept thinking that she’d see him around the next corner, sitting by a tree. Perhaps in tears, realizing he’d become lost.

It wasn’t long before the other campers joined the Newtons, forming the beginnings of what would turn into the largest organized search the state of Maine had ever seen.