It was July 2, 1938 - and the Beilhartz
family had decided to go camping deep within the Rocky Mountain National Park
as a summer vacation. On the day in question, they were going to Estes Park to
do some fishing - and were hiking along a trail close to a creek by the name of
Roaring River at approximately 8am. Their son, Alfred Edwin Beilhartz, was
roughly 4 years old at the time, and was walking along at the back of the line
formed by his family. His parents would eventually realise that he had
seemingly fallen severely behind and was now no longer anywhere they could see
him. This would begin a desperate 10-day-long search operation throughout the
region - but Alfred Beilhartz would never return...
The child in question
Bloodhounds and the Damned Dam
His parents briefly performed a preliminary
search to try and find their missing son (he was just one son of apparently ten
children in the Beilhartz family), and when they had no luck they decided to
call in the park service for assistance. The rangers were operating under the
assumption that Alfred may have fallen into the nearby creek and drowned, and
so they proceeded to dam the river. This dam consisted of a fence line adorned
with barbed wire - there was no way that his body could be carried downstream
and not be instantly found by the team of rangers searching for the unfortunate
child. When this returned no results, they dragged the bottom of the river for
good measure, but also found nothing to indicate where Alfred had gone. After
five days, they gave up searching the river.
His parents told the rangers that they were
certain that he must have been abducted. They knew that their son wouldn't just
leave his family - and they were (unsurprisingly) unconvinced that he had
fallen into the river. At this point, the rangers called in some bloodhounds
from the nearby Colorado State Penitentiary. According to David Paulides (one
of the usual suspects when it comes to discussing cases such as this) claimed
that the bloodhounds were able to follow the boy's scent '500ft uphill'
from where his parents had been when he vanished. This is obviously exceptionally
bizarre, seeing as he disappeared when he was behind them as opposed to in
front of them as the scent trail suggested. More bloodhounds were apparently
called in, and followed the same paradoxical trail, only to lay down in defeat
when they reached a fork in the road. The search was eventually called off
after a total of 10 days spent looking for the missing child.
The Devil's Nest and the Mystery Man
Meanwhile - on July 3rd - William J. Eells
and his (unnamed in the newspaper report) wife were also hiking in the Rocky
Mountains National Park. They had made it quite far up the Old Fall River road
when they got tired and decided to stop for a rest. While resting, they decided
to look up at the beautiful slopes of Mount Chapin - only to see a young boy
sat on a rock in a section of the mountainside known as the Devil's Nest. This
spot was six miles west of where Alfred Beilhartz had intially vanished from,
and Mr. Eells expressed his disbelief that any child could have gotten up to
that spot without assistance.
The child - presumed to be Alfred at this
point - apparently made a 'shrill noise', walked out to look over the
ledge and then left the scene. Paulides says that it was as if he was jerked
back out of view, but Wikipedia instead asserts that he simply walked out of
sight. The Eells decided to retreat to the carpark, where they heard the news
about the missing boy. Upon returning home, they checked the newspaper and
confirmed that the photograph of Alfred Beilhartz within it matched the child
they had seen in the Devil's Nest. They promptly drove back to the park and
talked to the rangers, but the rangers stated that it would've been 'totally
impossible' for Alfred to have made his way up to the slope in question - and
that the rangers themselves couldn't even manage it themselves in under two
days and without carabiners and ropes. They did eventually send a group of over
150 men to search Devil's Nest, but they came back empty handed.
The next development in this increasingly-bizarre case came on July 8th, when the FBI announced that it was performing forensic tests on a piece of 'soiled' bandage that had been found in an abandoned cabin in the park. The disclosure of this finding was prompted by the insistence of the boy's parents that their son must've been kidnapped. Apparently Alfred had a blister on his foot at the time he had vanished, and his mother had bandaged it using similar material. It is unclear what came of this test, but I can be fairly sure that nothing did - otherwise there would be information available about it.
The Beilhartz family
On this same day, a woman by the name of Mrs.
CA Linch who lived in Big Spring, Nebraska, allegedly saw Alfred and a
mysterious man walking along a highway together as she and her husband were
driving from Big Spring to Ogallala. She told her brother-in-law WB Linch (of
Lincoln, Nebraska) about her sighting, and he then went to speak to a Denver
detective sergeant by the name of Fred Renovati two days later on behalf of his
sister-in-law. He said that she 'was positive the boy was the one whose
picture she saw'. Seemingly nothing came of this odd lead either.
Held for Ransom?
Alfred Beilhartz had been missing for five months when his father was given a ransom note in November. It contained instructions for leaving $500 (equivalent to $8,900 as of 2018) in a tin can one block away from the Beilhartz family home in return for the safe return of their missing son in 24 hours, and also ominously said that 'the boy doesn't take to us'. However, by the 29th of that month the police were fairly certain that this was a hoax. This belief was all but confirmed by another police announcement announcement a day later saying that they had investigated two possible suspects - who were accused of attempting to extort money from the family. The suspects were not named and were apparently not being held, but here is where the trail of information about the Beilhartz disappearance stops - and so it is difficult to know what happened next. I imagine that it would've been announced if the suspects were confirmed to be guilty, but the ransom note was also never confirmed to not have been a hoax.
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