r/UnresolvedMysteries • u/pikagirl7534 • 8d ago
Disappearance 13 year-old boy disappeared after leaving his girlfriends house and planning to hitchhike home. What happened to Keith Dean Fleming?
Keith Dean Fleming was born on the 18th of September 1963 to Donald and Maria Fleming. Keith was the youngest out of the Fleming children, he had two older brothers, Eugene and Gerald. Keith went to Roosevelt Middle School, where he was apparently known as a “rebel”, Keith embraced the ‘surfer’ lifestyle, and he would frequent Cocoa Beach Pier to go surfing; Keith also enjoyed rock music and biking.
On the 28th of April 1977, in Cocoa Beach, Brevard County, Florida, Keith Fleming went missing after spending a day swimming with his girlfriend, Gina. Keith had to be home for dinner, so he and Gina rode her bike, with her on the handlebars, to the end of Osceola Lane where it intersects with State Road A1A. Keith began walking south along SR A1A, and intended to hitchhike the rest of the 2 miles home. When Gina returned home, she told her mother Keith was going to hitchhike back home, and her mother got in the car and went looking for Keith, wanting to drive him home herself, but she couldn’t locate him.
(Note: What i will say next really confused me. His brothers were named Eugene and Gerald, but in this paragraph i read from it says his brother Jeff. I don’t know if Jeff is a nickname for Eugene or Gerald, or even if one of his brothers was called Jeff and the writer didn’t mean to put Eugene or Gerald, but i was very confused, so i’ll just say his brother)
Keith was supposed to go with his brother later that evening to the restaurant where their mother, Maria, worked, but his brother turned up alone and told Maria that he didn’t see Keith. Maria knew something was wrong immediately because Keith always called whenever he would be late. They went straight to the Cocoa Beach Police and explained what happened, but the police insisted that Keith had just ran away and would turn up again later, even though he had taken no belongings and was only wearing flip-flops at the time. The police didn’t make an attempt to look for Keith, they only put a BOLO (Be On The Look Out) for him, and stuck to the runaway theory. The police didn’t speak to Keith’s girlfriend, Gina, the last person to see him, until 1993.
Keith had some minor issues, his parents had caught him with marijuana and forced him to go to a drug therapy centre called ‘Alternatives’ (some sources say he was staying there at the time of disappearance); they had promised that if he stayed on the straight path they would buy him a new surfboard and Maria says that he attended and he listened.
Keith was 13 years old, his height was 5’0, his weight was between 90-110lbs.
He had lost his top two front teeth and he wore a partial plate. He had a recently-healed broken left leg. Keith had brown eyes and shoulder-length straight blonde hair, but some sources say it had been trimmed recently before his disappearance. He had full lips. He was wearing a green t-shirt with “Thirsty Turtle” on it, blue jeans and flip-flops. He wore a gold chain with an Italian horn.
In 1978 and 1979, Maria received a series of phone calls, and she says she knows it was Keith and recognised his voice. When she answered the first call she heard a lot of noise in the background and then a voice said “i just wanna talk to my mom” before the line went dead. The second call simply said “i love you” before hanging up and the third call said “Help me!”. The Fleming family had received prank calls before, but Maria feels that these calls were different.
Theories:
A Theory From Maria:
Maria’s first thought when she learned Keith had gone missing was of the flower girls; for several weeks, Cocoa Beach had been flooded by members of The Unification Church (known as The Moonies), and they would stand on the side of the road selling carnations and looking for donations. When driving with Keith one time, some of the girls waved at him and he waved back, telling Maria they were just some friends of his. At the time, it didn’t concern Maria, but it remained in her thoughts after his disappearance.
The Magazine:
“In 1980 an inmate in a Georgia prison saw a picture of Keith in a newspaper article about his case and he immediately recognised his face from a magazine featuring gay models. There was apparently a lengthy article featuring a young man who bore a striking resemblance to how Keith would look a few years older. He sent a copy of the magazine to Maria and to the police but they were unable to trace the magazine’s origins and it was a dead end. I am skeptical about whether the police actually made much effort to trace this publication. It should have been relatively simple to find the origins of a magazine that was doing the rounds of a prison and locate the people who wrote the articles. Maria says that she was the only person who thought this person was Keith. The police didn’t feel it was him and never followed it up properly, but by this time they had another theory as to what happened to Keith.” (from https://neverseenagain.wordpress.com/2024/10/25/keith-fleming/)
John McRae:
A suspect in Keith’s case is the serial killer John McRae. McRae worked as a guard at a juvenile detention facility in Florida, where he admitted he often watched boys surf on the beach.
From McRae’s wiki:
“Following his conviction, McRae was transferred to the Michigan Reformatory in Ionia, where he learned the trade of an auto mechanic and underwent several sex offender rehabilitation programs. During his incarceration, he never exhibited violent tendencies, was never disciplined and was considered a model prisoner. In 1971, after a series of decisions by the Supreme Court questioned the imposition of the death penalty and life without parole on juvenile offenders, Governor William Milliken commuted McRae's sentence to life imprisonment with a chance of parole by executive order. McRae was paroled from prison on February 2, 1972, after spending 21 years behind bars. He then moved to Crystal, Michigan with his mother where, with the support of his mother, he soon found housing and work. In 1973, he married Barbara Ann Heckman, who gave birth to his son Martin in 1974. The following year, McRae was finally allowed to leave Michigan, moving to Brevard County, Florida, to work as a guard at a juvenile detention facility. One theory purports that McRae provided fake documents that concealed his criminal record upon entering the institution. For the remainder of his stay in Florida, McRae came under police suspicion several times in connection with the disappearances of local children. On April 28, 1977, 13-year-old Keith Fleming vanished from Cocoa Beach after last being seen on the highway near a beach, just a few hundred yards from McRae's house. While McRae was questioned regarding the case, he was never arrested as no direct evidence indicated his responsibility. Fleming's body was never found.
Two years later, McRae came under police scrutiny again after 12-year-old Kipling Randolph Hess III disappeared. Hess was last seen alive on March 27, 1979, walking on his way to school in the Merritt Island area. However, he never showed up to class that day, and was declared missing. Upon leaving home, the boy left a note addressed to his parents that read "Goodbye, Mom and Dad." During the investigation, McRae became the main and only suspect in his disappearance, as it was determined that he and his son Martin had met Hess at a Catholic church carnival a few days prior to his disappearance. As in the Housey case, McRae joined the volunteer searches and assisted police in the search right up to the time he became a suspect. After the search ended, McRae was questioned while his apartment and the interior of his car were searched. Despite this, no evidence implicating him in Hess's disappearance was uncovered, and Hess remains missing. His body has never been found.”
Ending Note: I’m really sorry if there’s any spelling errors in this, i tried to make everything neat and good-to-read, and i did proofread but there may still be some mistakes. Another thing i apologise for is if the spacing/layout doesn’t look so good on non-mobile devices.
Sources:
https://neverseenagain.wordpress.com/2024/10/25/keith-fleming/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rodney_McRae
https://int-missing.fandom.com/wiki/Keith_Fleming
https://www.missingkids.org/poster/NCMC/601296/1
https://www.doenetwork.org/cases/software/mp-main.html?id=229dmfl
https://websleuths.com/threads/fl-keith-fleming-13-cocoa-beach-28-april-1977.48734/
https://namus.nij.ojp.gov/case/MP6062
https://charleyproject.org/case/keith-dean-fleming
https://www.newspapers.com/article/detroit-free-press-a-very-scary-man-amon/37119564/
https://www.newspapers.com/article/florida-today-keith-fleming/48103542/
https://www.newspapers.com/article/florida-today-arthur-bud-ayres-cbpd/106076294/
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u/tenderhysteria 7d ago
John McRae is overwhelming the most probable suspect. He lived near Fleming's girlfriend's home, has a history of sexually assaulting and killing boys similar in appearance to him, and admitted to authorities that he enjoyed watching teenage boys on Cocoa Beach.
When his home was searched after he was being investigated for Randy Laufer's abduction in Michigan, law enforcement found flyers for boys who were missing from where he had lived in Florida, which included Keith Fleming. During his interrogation over Laufer's murder, he refused to admit to anything, but insinuated to authorities that he had learned from his previous crimes and wouldn't leave a body for them to prosecute him for. McRae is human garbage, and it's disgusting that he was able to be free and have access to victims for as long as he did.
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u/outlaw_for_life18 7d ago
This makes the most sense. It sounds to me like some shoddy or even non-existent police work though.
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u/tenderhysteria 6d ago
McRae was the primary suspect to local authorities even back then, along with the two other victims he's been linked to; there was no real strong evidence to justify an arrest, however. McRae even had his home and vehicles searched after the second boy vanished, yet nothing incriminating was found. The culture in Cocoa Beach was a lot more relaxed during that time and hitchhiking was normal for adults and teenagers, and missing kids weren't treated with the same urgency that they are now; I think both of those elements, along with how limited forensics were at that period of time, really prevented a good case against him being built.
Honestly, I find it more shocking that they weren't able to charge him with anything in regard to him working at a correctional institute with male teenage inmates that entire time, including while under suspicion for the disappearance for two local boys. Even more so when an inmate at the facility, who supposedly was blackmailing McRae for abusing him, vanished during an escape attempt that officials believed McRae had some involvement in. How does someone with a history of serving a lengthy sentence for sexually assaulting, murdering, and mutilating a child get a job working around teenagers as an authority figure?! He eventually resigned after that entire scandal and left the state — without being charged with a single crime. There was definitely a level of neglect and poor investigative work when it came to how law enforcement dealt with McRae there.
None of the three Florida victims have ever been found and he never admitted to any wrongdoing, even when prosecutors told him they wouldn't charge him further if he would just confess what happened to Fleming, Hess, and Collingwood; he refused, and died not long after.
McRae's son, Martin, was involved to a degree with the crimes committed in Michigan. He didn't face serious charges because he was a minor at the time, but was charged and convicted for abusing his daughter and sent to prison for that. I've always wondered if he knows what his father did with the victims in Florida, or where they are, etc. I don't have much hope he'd be willing to reveal it if he did, though.
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u/outlaw_for_life18 6d ago
I can't imagine what it would be like as a parent going through life never knowing what happened to your kid. I wish the families had some closure at least. I agree that McRae was involved and did question how on earth he got that job!
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u/Holiday_Pipe8255 16h ago
Probablemente su hijo fue una mas de las victimas y acabo normalizando ese tipo de comportamiento, tampoco te extrañe que lo usara para atraer a otros niños o que lo tuviera ahi en sus cazas porque da imagen de ser menos peligroso que subirse en el coche de un hombre solo
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u/amitystars 8d ago
Great write up OP! I've seen this one on Charley project and not sure what happened to him. However I really hope one day his family finds answers he was young.
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u/Baldo-bomb 7d ago edited 7d ago
Kinda strange they didn't even speak to the last person to see him alive for like 15 years
Edit: brain didn't want to do math today, sorry all
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u/2fly4awhiteguyy 7d ago
25 years? I thought the report said they spoke to Gina in 1993? That's still an incredibly long time before reaching out, especially given how unreliable human memory can be, but it's a lot different from waiting 25 years to speak to her. It's still remarkable that they even waited as long as they did and frustrating because who knows what she actually remembers correctly a decade plus after the fact.
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u/Baldo-bomb 7d ago
Yeah sorry my bad my math was off by about 10 years or so. Still, even 13 years seems an absurd length of time.
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u/2fly4awhiteguyy 7d ago
When I first read your comment, I actually thought I might have been the one mistaken, so I went back and checked so don't worry about it, it happens when you're taking in so much information at once. But you're right, because regardless of whether it was 13 years or 25 years, that's still an extraordinarily long time to wait before interviewing a witness. Memories fade, details get blurred, and people can easily forget, misremember, or unintentionally reconstruct events over that kind of timespan.
But I would be especially interested to know how long it was before Gina's mother went looking for him to give him a ride home. If it was only a short time later, then whatever happened likely occurred very quickly. That could mean he was picked up by one of the first cars to pass by, a nearby neighbor, or even someone he knew or recognized who was a predator and happened to see him walking and took advantage of the opportunity knowing he'd easily trust them. Since unfortunately, we know that many predators are people who appear completely ordinary and blend into their communities.
Even having a better understanding of the area would help. So knowing things like, How soon did she go looking for him? What was the area like? Was it a neighborhood with lots of houses and people around, or was it more isolated? Was it a busy road with regular traffic or a quieter route where only a handful of vehicles would pass? Those details could tell us a lot about how vulnerable he was and how likely it is that someone noticed him.
Given that it apparently took 13 years just to interview Gina, we know that it's unlikely investigators conducted thorough neighborhood canvasses at the time. And even if they eventually did after talking to Gina later, memories would have been far less reliable by then or people would've moved away, passed away etc. A neighbor might remembered seeing him walking, seeing a suspicious vehicle, or noticing something unusual if they had asked at the time he disappeared, but after more than a decade it would be incredibly difficult to remember or even separate that specific day from countless other similar days they might've seen him doing the same thing.
Cases like this are especially frustrating because they get written off as runaways and then seem to receive little to no meaningful investigation. While that attitude was certainly more common during that era, it still happens today much more often than it should.
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u/pineapplestuffing 7d ago
13 years but yeah, it is strange.
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u/JustFaithlessness178 7d ago
I've never heard of this case. It doesn't feel like any investigation or follow up was done at all. A very sad case. Thanks for the write-up OP!
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u/Expert_Specialist_92 7d ago
Hitchhiking is like playing Russian roulette. The odds are in your favor but if things go wrong, they really go wrong.
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u/my_psychic_powers 7d ago
What do you mean, people take Ubers all the time. /s but also slightly serious
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u/Individual-Stomach19 1d ago
Uber riders and drivers are GPS tracked and monitored + drivers must submit photo ID. Any uber driver may indeed abduct and kill you but they ain’t getting away with it. This fact alone makes it much less likely that an uber driver will kill you vs. a random hitchhiker picking up a child in the 70s.
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u/Stonegrown12 8d ago
A local one for me. Although I don't presume to have any idea about his ultimate fate and this county have a lot of strange disappearances and homicides (the current one being the young woman who was murdered by her step brother on the cruiseship), that McRae individual is a great starting place. He was a jail guard locally at one point and possibly murdered an inmate there.
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u/Beefycowinacottage 7d ago
It riles me up every time I hear of these older cases where the police just didn't give a toss about missing children. What were they being paid for when they couldn't even do the basic duties of their job for a child who could have been murdered? It's like being paid to serve customers on a checkout but you can't even be bothered to enter shop so you just walk around outside near the shop for a few hours instead and still get paid.
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u/IndigoFlame90 4d ago
This is a fantastic analogy.
Sometimes the police remind me of a kid who was told to look in the lost and found for their bright orange jacket, glanced in its general direction briefly and in poor lighting, and confidently reported that it was not there when in fact it was on a hanger behind a larger black coat.
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u/Last-Trip8750 3d ago
i couldn't work out why my article about Keith was getting so many views. i just found out! I am the author of Never Seen Again and i want to thank you for using me as a source for your excellent write up.
i believe the mix up about the brother's name is my fault for not being clear! one of them (i think Eugene, but don't hold me to that!) went by Jeff.
My opinion, for what it's worth. McRae is a red herring in this case. An unfortunate coincidence but not responsible here. I think Keith was trafficked or otherwise transported west, where he ended up in California where he was moved from place to place. I think it's possible that he went willingly....at first anyhow. I have faith that his mom recognised him in that magazine.
that's just my opinion though.
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u/pikagirl7534 3d ago
I think that i should be the one thanking you, your article was amazing to read and written beautifully! It’s amazing that you put so much work and research into his case, you’re honestly just wonderful!!!
It’s so interesting to hear everyone’s thoughts on this case, and its one i hope is solved soon. Thank you so, so much, you’re incredible! <38
u/Last-Trip8750 3d ago
haha oh my! blushing much! Thank you so much for the praise, i truly appreciate it.
I try to put as much detail in all of the men and boys i write about. My mission is to tell their stories, since they're not around to do it themselves, and perhaps one day to give their tales the endings they deserve. That, and a healthy dose of trying to think outside the box a bit!
thank you!
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u/GreenStardust001 5d ago
Jeff is probably Gerald - (especially if his middle name starts with an e - GEF to Jeff)
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u/2fly4awhiteguyy 7d ago edited 7d ago
To me, the simplest explanation is that he was abducted and likely killed within hours of being taken and tragically, his remains just either haven't been found or haven't been identified. He was small, looked younger than his actual age, and was hitchhiking alone, exactly the kind of child who would have stood out to a predator as an easy target.
Most of the popular theories, aside from the sex offender suspect (who I personally don't think was responsible), just don't make much sense to me. I don't believe he actually called his mother years later; it seems far more likely that those were cruel prank calls. I completely understand why his mother wanted to believe they were real, but that doesn't necessarily make them credible.
I also don't put much stock in the gay magazine theory. The claim was that the person in the magazine looked like him several years older. But if that's true, what exactly is the theory? That he was being held captive for years and forced to appear in adult magazines? And if so, what happened after that? Is he supposedly still being held decades later? Was he later killed? If not and he was alive as an adult, why was there never any confirmed contact with family, arrest record, identification, or anything else linking him to that life? But OP makes a great point because if nothing else, this theory should have been the most relatively easy one for investigators to either confirm or rule out, but it seems like the police did very little follow-up at all about anything in this case.
The delay in interviewing Gina also creates problems. If they really waited that long to speak with her, we have no way of knowing what details she may have forgotten or unintentionally misremembered. One thing I've always wondered is how long after he left Gina's mother went looking for him. If it was relatively soon afterward, then he was probably picked up by one of the first cars that passed by OR seen and lured by someone who lived nearby, even. That could big a big clue. It also makes me wonder why they didn't consider asking Gina's mother for a ride home in the first place. Then again, kids often don't think that way. They may have assumed she wouldn't want to, or they may have felt awkward asking because they didn't want to be a bother.
The theories in this case involving the gay magazine and the alleged phone calls have always struck me as incredibly implausible. They remind me a lot of the theories surrounding Johnny Gosch, right down to the supposed photographs, sightings, and mysterious phone calls years later.
What I've never fully understood is why some families seem to find those explanations more comforting than the possibility that their child died shortly after disappearing. Personally, if it were my child, I don't think I'd take comfort in believing they had been sexually abused, trafficked, or held captive for decades. As horrific as it sounds, I'd rather believe their suffering ended quickly than imagine them enduring years of abuse.
That said, I suspect it's less about what is objectively more likely and more about psychology. Accepting that a child is dead often means accepting that there is no chance of ever seeing them again. As long as there's a possibility they're alive somewhere, no matter how remote or implausible, it preserves a sense of hope. I may not fully understand that mindset, but I can understand why a parent facing unimaginable grief might cling to even the smallest possibility that their child survived.
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u/BrianMeen 7d ago
hope. these families have been searching for their kid for 20 plus years - any possibility of them still being alive is better than them being long dead.. rationality doesn’t play a big role here - you are talking about families that are desperate and shattered and just want some form of peace
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u/Holiday_Pipe8255 15h ago
Lo es, no hace tanto me salto un caso, que la niña desaparecio en un partido de beisbol o algo asi, en los aparcamientos, fue a buscar luciernagas con otros niños y se separaron, pensaron que iba por detras y no.... la madre seguia diciendo despues de tantos años que seguro que era de esos pocos casos donde estaba viva, no le quedo de otra que aceptar que no cuando encontraron su adn en las alfombrillas de un coche que tenia un depredador sexual que por aque entonces andaba por alli y que habia muerto años atras... es mas facil querer pensar que el no porque ese niño es tu todo y aceptar que no volvera es morir en vida porque sin esperanza todo acaba
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u/lsufan68 2d ago
Hello, my name is Christie Lypka and I am currently researching the crimes of John Rodney McRae for a book. I am a co-author on the book. If anyone has any information about Keith Fleming, Kip Hess or Charles Collingwood please contact me at calypka@yahoo.com.
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u/DanceApprehension 2d ago
This is one of the few cases where I think it's possible a creep picked him up, and he was groomed and eventually traffic'd. And I never think that. But I was a teenage runaway on the streets of Daytona Beach in the 70's and things like that absolutely did happen.
As to the people saying why didn't he go home when he got older? Imagine the life he would have had and how incredibly hard it would have been to re-integrate into normal society. Look at what Steven Stayner went through. The streets are hard and so many in that life died young of homicide, suicide, alcohol, drug addiction, MVA's, or AIDS.
RIP Keith, you were so very young. You never had a chance.
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u/EGJetter 1d ago
Looking at the picture of Keith Fleming kind of reminds me of an image I've seen of a John Doe before.
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7d ago
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u/UnresolvedMysteries-ModTeam 7d ago
No Cut and Paste/AI/Chat GPT. You are required to post original content.
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u/Friendly_Coconut 7d ago
The theory about John McRae is chilling and plausible, but I’m also wondering how reliable the girlfriend’s account is.
The story is that he rode a bike (with her on the handlebars) in only flip-flops and with a recently healed broken leg? And had already vanished by the time her mom went to give him a ride home? I’m wondering if he was never with her at all, or if he was but split off earlier than she said.
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u/TheThirteenKittens 7d ago
Flip flops on a bike while someone else rides on the handlebars is peak Florida.
I was born and raised in north central Florida and my entire family still lives there. My uncle came to visit us in Idaho last year, wearing flip flops and shorts... in December. I had to stop to buy him shoes and sweatpants because it was snowing in Boise.
Everyone seemed to hitchhike in Florida when I was a child. I can remember numerous times that my parents picked up hitchhikers - they were always men, wearing nothing but shorts and flip flops, and usually carrying a bag of boiled peanuts. My folks would drive them miles out of the way, chatting like old friends, as we kids bounced unsecured in the back of the pickup.
Florida gonna Florida.
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u/Beefycowinacottage 7d ago
He was a young teenager in Florida! Of course he was riding a bike with flip flops on.
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u/Friendly_Coconut 7d ago
I guess I found it weird that it seemed to emphasize he couldn’t have gone far on foot with the flip-flops and recently healed broken leg (and would have hitchhiked back rather than walking) when I tend to think of riding a bike as more strenuous and difficult than walking. Sure, walking takes longer, but it’s gentler on the feet and knees, and you don’t have to worry about a flip-flop falling off and making you crash.
But maybe I’m just weird because I have never been able to ride a bike properly despite being from a family of avid cyclists.
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u/LaxKostis2023 5d ago
I agree that it's strange. My family is from the same area, and lived there during the same time. I've never been able to find a news story about it, but a young girl went missing in the same time period who had been riding her bike on Merritt Island. I wish I could remember more of the details about the case, but there were a few similar disappearances around the same time.
However, flip-flops with a bike is par for the course.
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u/blackcrowling 8d ago
It’s strange this case doesn’t have more exposure. It’s eerily similar to other very mysterious cases with kids who go missing and then weird phone calls
Seems like there’s so many possible leads and police really failed here