Lawrence and Patty Heikell hold a photo of then-missing 11-year-old Karl Heikell who went missing on Halloween of 1981. Searches continued for nearly a year after Karl’s disappearance before some of Karl’s remains were found in October 1982. (Photo courtesy of Halloween 1981 and the Daily Mining Gazette)

By RANDY CROUCH

Journal Staff Writer

MARQUETTE — When 11-year-old Karl Heikell of Calumet went missing on Halloween of 1981, it set off a nearly year-long search for the boy that wouldn’t stop until October of the following year, when Heikell’s remains were found close to his home in the Centennial Heights area of Calumet. While the search for Heikell lasted just under 12 months, questions surrounding what happened to the boy have remained for more than 40 years.

Recently, a website operated by area native Dillon Geshel has shed new light on the case through an exhaustive collection of documents, maps and accounts of the fateful hours before Heikell disappeared that Halloween.

Geshel learned about the case around 10 years ago while he worked at the Houghton Public Library.

“Another staff member told me this story they heard from a patron. The patron had bought property somewhere in the Centennial Heights area of Calumet and they had this ghost story that they were hunting in the woods and they could hear this boy crying,” Geshel said. “They came to the library to see if anything had ever happened on the property and long story short, they learned by going to the Michigan Tech archives about this missing person case where a boy was missing and then later found dead near his property. So that was of interest to me because I thought it sounded made up.”

Geshel then looked into the story to see what he could find.

“The archives keep a vertical file on all U.P. missing persons that has things like newspaper clippings and sure enough, there was this story about this 11-year-old boy who had gone missing in the area,” Geshel said. “For a couple years I had that story in the back of my mind and decided one day to see if I could FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request police reports from that case to learn more about it. Then I read through those reports, filled with curiosity, and over the years I’d talk with friends about it.”

While Geshel knew the story for some time, only in the past year did he decide to create the website to spread awareness about the still-unsolved case.

“In the last year, I decided I would make the case information public because it’s such a shame that nobody knows what happened or ever solved it,” Geshel said.

One of the biggest mysteries of the case involve Heikell’s whereabouts on the day of his disappearance and the subsequent days after.

On Halloween, Heikell told his father that he was going for a walk. This was the last time he would be confirmed to have been seen alive. The next morning, Heikell’s parents called the police to report he had not returned home the night before.

This set off a search for Heikell that involved a local volunteer search party, tracking dogs and helicopter and airplane flyovers which found no success in locating Karl.

“From the information that we had at the time, one of the things I remember from the interviews was that Karl was really afraid of the woods,” said Robert Ball, a retired Michigan State Police officer who worked the Heikell case in the years following his disappearance. “That wouldn’t be a thing he would have done. Goes out on Halloween night and doesn’t come back. It just didn’t seem reasonable to me that this kid would wander off by himself.

Ball came to the case a few years after Karl’s disappearance, at which time the case was reclassified as a homicide.

“When I came (to the Michigan State Police Calumet Post) the case had been classified as a missing persons case. I looked at the information we had really closely and I was convinced it was a homicide,” Ball said. “Cases like these aren’t closed, they’re solved.”

In early October the next year, a local bird hunter found pieces of clothing and after contacting the police, bone and hair fragments were found less than a mile from Karl’s home, an area that would have been well-searched during the subsequent days after his disappearance.

“What we know from the reports is not very specific but there are different pieces of info that pinpoint the location,” Geshel said. “There are a couple situations where witnesses that police interviewed mention groups of kids that saw Karl in the woods on that day,”

While there has never been an arrest, or even a confirmed suspect in the case, police did have their eyes on at least one individual during the investigation.

“I had worked on one individual who had looked like a possible suspect,” Ball said. “I felt good enough that I was going to bring him in and interview him. I got the guy in and he interviewed well. Then I sprung a polygraph on him and he agreed to it right away. He was upright about some other things that he had done wrong but claimed no knowledge in Karl’s case and the polygraph showed that he wasn’t deceptive. I remember looking at other possible suspects, but that’s all they ended up being: ‘possible’ suspects.”

Other people in the community have other ideas and theories about what happened to Karl, including the involvement of a 17-year-old man from Karl’s neighborhood who died by suicide around a year after Karl’s disappearance.

While the truth about what happened to 11-year-old Karl Heikell may never be known, interest in the case is high, thanks in part to the work done by Geshel.

“It started as just being curious about it, but putting the information about here publicly hopefully spurs interest. Maybe somebody knows something and can come forward,” Geshel said. “But also maybe it spurs the State Police to start actively investigating it again because it’s an open case but they haven’t produced a report on it in over 35 years.”

The website can be visited at www.halloween1981.com.

If anyone has any information regarding the disappearance of Karl Heikell, they are encouraged to contact Det. Sgt. Cleary of the Michigan State Police Calumet Post at 906-337-5145.

Randy Crouch can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 242. His email address is rcrouch@miningjournal.net.