Local History: Mystery of abducted boy remains unsolved

In 1962, Vineland police admitted the case was at a standstill.

A standstill, in fact, which continues to this day.

For, despite their best efforts, and those of the FBI and countless volunteers who scoured the area, there had been no luck in the search for little Billy Jones.

A cute 3-year-old boy with eyes as blue as the sky, Billy had been missing since Dec. 17, 1962, when he was last seen playing in his front yard with his little sister, Jill, and the family's pet basset hound.

That day, their mother watched from a window while preparing lunch for the children. She went into a bedroom to check on her 1-year-old son, Bart, and came back to find Jill standing in the doorway, holding a plastic poinsettia.

Billy had given her the plant, she said, and a man had taken Billy.

A frantic search of the Taylor Avenue neighborhood turned up nothing, and soon led to a multi-day land and air search with volunteers coming from as far as Philadelphia.

Marshes and streams were dragged and the nearby Palace of Depression on Mill Road was searched because some feared that Billy was buried beneath the deteriorating junk castle.

Meanwhile, his parents bravely celebrated Christmas for the benefit of the other children, although Billy's presents were not placed under their shiny aluminum tree.

For several years, the family would continue to buy Christmas presents for Billy, and for decades his mother would light candles for him, awaiting a return that never came.

The sad saga of Billy's disappearance became a local legend. And one that would resurface periodically as generations of law officers attempted, sometimes through unorthodox methods, to crack the case.

In 1964, for instance, a psychic was consulted, who claimed that Billy had been struck by a man in a blue car and was buried in the area.

During the late 1970s, an artist's sketch which projected Billy's adult features failed to turn up any new leads.

And, in the 1980s, his sister Jill was hypnotized in an unsuccessful attempt to get her to recall the events of that 1962 day.

The case last surfaced in the news in July 2005 when several small bones were found not far from Taylor Avenue.

They were discovered near a former West Landis Avenue junkyard, which, four decades prior, had been searched car by car to no avail.

After examination by a forensic expert, it was determined that the bones were not human.

The Daily Journal revisited the case in 2011. The mystery remains unsolved.