KALAMAZOO, MI -- It was a typical school day in May as Bob Holderbaum remembers it.

He left Woodward School, stopped at the corner store to pick up a Kalamazoo Gazette and headed toward his house on Douglas Avenue.

Holderbaum, then 9, was making his usual trek north on Douglas on May 23, 1955, when a schoolmate, 8-year-old Jeannie Singleton, caught up, eager to show him her shoes.

He recalls little of what they discussed. They knew of each other, but only casually from going to and from school.

But for some reason, on this day, the shoes Jeannie wore stuck with him. They were multi-colored. He's never forgotten that.

Their encounter was brief, as the two walked to the corner of Douglas and Blakeslee Street.

Holderbaum continued north to his house. Jeannie turned west onto Blakeslee toward hers.

He would never see her again.

"It was just a common school day and she went her way and I went mine," Holderbaum, 69, said recently. "It wasn't until the next day that I knew how significant that little event was."

Jeannie loved everyone

Jeannie's parents thought little of it when the second-grader didn't show at home right after school.

She was a friendly girl, the fourth of six children for Dorothy and Steve Singleton. At 4 feet tall and 60 pounds, she was small for her age. She walked with a limp, brought on by a bout with rheumatic fever at age 4 that left her right leg shorter than her left.

On her way home from school, she often would stop to talk to neighbors. She'd chat up firemen at the station on Douglas. If someone moved into the neighborhood, she was first to meet them.

Her parents tried to warn her about strangers.

But Jeannie loved everyone.

That made her special. And it made her a target.

From the street corner where Holderbaum last saw Jeannie to her house was about one-tenth of a mile, less than the length of two football fields. But she never made it to her doorstep at 1310 Blakeslee. She had vanished.

When she hadn't shown up by early evening, her mother called police and soon the search was on for a little girl wearing a pink plaid dress, white socks and multi-colored sandals.

8 days of searching

Jeannie's disappearance prompted what, at the time, was the largest organized search ever in the Kalamazoo area. Every local police agency, Michigan State Police, the Civil Air Patrol, Michigan National Guard and U.S. Naval Reserves were involved. Between 800 and 1,000 people took part, including locals who were given time off work to help.

They scoured fields and streams. Police rounded up known sexual deviants and questioned them.

"The first night I sat on the porch all night and prayed," Dorothy Singleton said for a Gazette story May 25, 1955. "Last night I got a little sleep. But the nights are the worst.

"I can hold up in daylight, but when it gets dark I just can't take it."

Steve Singleton, acting on a tip, twice searched an abandoned building in Cutlerville, near Grand Rapids. Police joined him the second time, but found nothing.

In Kalamazoo, parents watched their children closely. Kalamazoo Public Schools Superintendent Loy Norrix told children to go to and from school in groups. Teachers and principals were instructed not to let children loiter after school or accept rides from anyone they didn't know.

The search for Jeannie spanned eight days.

On day nine, June 1, 1955, five children engaged in a game of hide-and-seek at their favorite play spot, a pine-covered hill about 15 miles north of Kalamazoo, found Jeannie's body. Her pink plaid dress was still on her lifeless body. She had been sexually assaulted. She'd been strangled.

Her body had begun to decompose, leading investigators to believe she was killed the day she disappeared.

A dirt road led back to the grove, a desolate spot near Doster in extreme southeastern Allegan County that police concluded could be found only by someone familiar with the area. Police found faint footprints believed to have been left by a man and a child leading to where Jeannie was found. The larger footprints could also be seen heading away.

Steve Singleton, as it turned out, had been searching that day about a mile from there. Acting on a psychic's tip, he had been driving between Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids almost every day trying to find his daughter.

"All I have to say about this is that the man who killed my little girl should be killed himself," Singleton said the day her body was found. "I wish we had capital punishment in Michigan," he told the Gazette.

60 years and no arrests

Singleton would never see his daughter's killer brought to justice. He died in 1984 in Decatur.

Dorothy Singleton didn't either. She died in 2007.

To this day, no arrests have been made.

Police interviewed more than 1,000 people. After Jeannie was found, they zeroed in on Stanley B. Edgerton, a 29-year-old electrician from Kalamazoo.

Edgerton voluntarily went to police after a sketch of a possible suspect, which he believed resembled him, appeared in the Gazette. It was drawn with the help of a 14-year-old girl who told police a man twice had tried to pick her up the day Jeannie disappeared.

Edgerton admitted to trying to pick up the girl and later was convicted of accosting a minor. He was put on probation, fined and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment.

But he denied any involvement in Jeannie's slaying and submitted to a lie detector test. Police deemed the results unsatisfactory and administered a second polygraph test, which was inconclusive.

Edgerton was not charged and, according to public records, died last year in Arizona at age 88.

In 1973, police also investigated another suspect, who had died in 1962. The man had a lengthy history of sexual violence and his wife had gone to police because she believed he was responsible for killing Jeannie.

The woman told police her husband had driven with her to the pine grove near Doster on the day Jeannie's body was found and in subsequent years would drive by the Singleton's house on Blakeslee. She also said her husband sexually assaulted her in 1959 in the same spot in the pine grove where Jeannie's body was found.

As with Edgerton, though, police never had enough evidence for an arrest.

"Do I have any realistic hopes that it's going to be solved? No," a Kalamazoo detective told the Gazette in 1985. "And, what purpose would it serve at this point in time other than to mark the file closed?"

A silent voice

Nicole Du Shane and her husband, Rob, have four books to their credit, all focusing on the paranormal, including "Haunted History of Kalamazoo" and "Ghosts of Grand Rapids."

Two years ago, they visited the Kalamazoo Public Library to research what was to be their latest installment, "Wicked Kalamazoo," a book focusing on local scandals.

Searching the library catalog, they typed in "mystery." And with that, Jeannie Singleton's story was brought back to life.

"It was like this instant connection and all the research we were going to do that day for 'Wicked Kalamazoo' was just gone," Nicole Du Shane said. "Everything just kind of fell in place."

The couple became enamored by the case. They contacted police, but found that few knew much of the old case.

They posted a message on the Facebook page "Vanished Kalamazoo" and got responses from people who vividly remembered Jeannie's disappearance and tragic discovery.

They spoke of the terror parents felt, how the case tore away the veneer of innocence for many of them.

"All of the sudden, it was just, 'We should write a book about this," Nicole Du Shane said. "For the last two years, she has never been far from our minds."

"One Silent Voice: The Jeannie Singleton Story" is scheduled to be published this fall.

"Ideally, we'd like to see the case get solved," Rob Du Shane said.

"But," his wife interjected, "we know the more years that go on and more suspects die and more witnesses die and there's no physical evidence ... the chances become slimmer and slimmer."

Denise McDonald, who was the foster daughter of Jeannie's older sister, Patsy, hopes the book will help keep Jeannie's memory alive and that one day someone will come forward to give her family closure.

"I don't care how old he is, he deserves to be punished," McDonald, of Adrian, said of the killer. "If he is still alive, he still deserves to go to prison and get his punishment dealt out.

"What he did to Jeannie was horrific."

Case still open

Kalamazoo police have a thick file on the Singleton homicide and it remains an open case with Michigan State Police.

MSP Detective Sgt. Mike Spring began looking into it in 2004 when he received a tip about a possible suspect. And there was another tip in 2012.

Neither panned out.

"A couple of the guys we actually got tips on have died. Actually, when I got this, I was surprised anyone was still alive," Spring said of potential suspects.

In fact, Spring said police identified "a very, very good candidate" as a suspect but didn't have enough evidence to present a case to a prosecutor.

In 2012, he and his boss, Detective 1st Lt. Chuck Christensen, interviewed the man, who they declined to name but said lived in a southwestern state. Christensen said he believes they were face to face with Jeannie's killer.

"The individual that we interviewed is a very strong suspect and I believe we will never have the exact story of what happened to her because he has since passed away," Christensen said. "His behavior at the time (of the killing) would cause me to look at him as a suspect."

Spring notes that in the 1950s investigators lacked the type of science and forensic tools detectives have at their disposal today. That the case involved an apparent stranger abduction was an anomaly too, he said, since most abductions and killings - 90 to 95 percent - involve someone known to the victim.

In the days after Jeannie's disappearance, her parents and an aunt and uncle of hers were interviewed by police and given lie detectors tests in order "to end the vicious rumors" a story in the Gazette reported. All four passed and were cleared.

"It's definitely an uphill battle," Spring said of prospects for solving the case. "Just the time alone that's gone by. Obviously, the odds of solving it after this many years is pretty slim.

"However, it doesn't mean we stop trying."

Letting her rest in peace

The vacant lot on Blakeslee Street where the Singleton home once stood looks overgrown now from the sidewalk. A bush full of vibrant, pink peonies can be seen along the portion that fronts Blakeslee.

Phil Bassett, who has lived on the street since 1989, bought the lot at 1310 Blakeslee in 1994 and heard talk of how it once belonged to the Singleton family.

For several years, Bassett said, he maintained a memorial for Jeannie that included a cross.

"I wanted to honor Jeannie," Bassett said. "I didn't want to come on here like we were taking her property."

Today, the property includes a garden that Bassett tends to. There's a hammock and a grill, even a disc golf basket.

For Bassett, it's a piece of shaded tranquility in the middle of his neighborhood. "I feel really blessed with this," he said.

The memorial Bassett once had for Jeannie isn't there now. He said it's time now to let her rest in peace.

Rex Hall Jr. is a public safety reporter for the Kalamazoo Gazette. You can reach him at rhall2@mlive.com. Follow him on Twitter.