The boy who went missing after his first day of school in 1944 (2024)

PAYNESVILLE, Minn. — Victor John “Jackie” Theel would have turned 86 years old on Feb. 15, 2024. On Sept. 5, 2024, Jackie will have been missing from Paynesville, Minnesota, for 80 years, having disappeared on the way home from his first day of school.

News accounts of the disappearance described a nice fall day in Paynesville on Sept. 5, 1944, as an excited 6-year-old Jackie walked with his two older brothers to his first day of school. He was wearing a blue sailor suit shirt, long pants and brand new shoes and was toting his new school supplies.

Being so excited, Jackie couldn’t eat his breakfast that morning and carried a bag of chips with him to school. Throughout the morning’s first-day-of-school activities of singing and games, Jackie snacked on some of the chips.

It was only a half-day of school for the first-grader, who was to walk home with his brothers at lunchtime, according to the note his mother Bernice sent with him to school.

After class was dismissed at 11:30 a.m., Jackie's teacher, Miss Dorothy Gladke, neglected to have him wait for his older brother to walk with him. Jackie left school with his teacher and a group of classmates.

Jennifer Kotila / West Central Tribune

They walked together for a short distance before going their separate ways, the teacher asking Jackie if he knew his way home and him pointing in the direction in which he thought he lived.

However, Jackie would end up going in the wrong direction and that was the last time anybody definitively saw the boy. He disappeared, apparently without a trace, carrying the bag of chips and a school registration card. He had left his new school supplies at his desk.

Sources for this article come from the Paynesville Historical Society, which has a file of old newspaper clippings from the days after Theel disappeared. Newspaper sources include the Paynesville Press, St. Cloud Times and the Minneapolis Star.

When Jackie did not arrive home for lunch on Sept. 5, 1944, his mother first called friends for help. When Jackie had not been found by 3 p.m., she notified Paynesville Mayor Russel Portinga.

Jennifer Kotila / West Central Tribune

Portinga and several businessmen started searching for Jackie under the direction of Stearns County Deputy Sheriff Ike Lunde and Constable Martin Kobberdahl. After not being able to find him, soon the whole town was involved in the search.

Jackie’s father, Harold, was an over-the-road truck driver. He was called home from St. Paul when Jackie went missing.

There were two reports of the boy being seen along Minnesota Highway 23 on the west side of town. Mrs. Pete Thompson, who was returning from a fishing trip at Long Lake with her husband, reported seeing a boy at about 1:30 p.m. fitting Jackie’s description along the highway. He was carrying a piece of paper and walking along the ditch about a block out of town.

Later that day, two boys, Robert Burr, 16, and William Johnson, 14, reported seeing a boy at about 4:45 p.m. getting into a light brown or gray car at about the same spot.

The car was traced to Willmar, Minnesota, where law enforcement discovered it was being driven by a 24-year-old combat veteran who stopped at three different garages in Willmar attempting to have the starter repaired.

News reports state the soldier was accompanied by his younger brother who was wearing a sailor suit. It is unclear how it was verified that the young boy was indeed related to the soldier or whether it could have been Jackie. A news report on Thursday, Sept. 7, 1944, stated, “The car has not been seen or heard of since.”

Jennifer Kotila / West Central Tribune

Stearns County Sheriff Art McIntee was called into the case and he called Kandiyohi County Sheriff Paul Anderson to assist. Later in the evening, the Willmar Police Department was also called to assist with the search efforts.

Searches continued until 1 a.m. Wednesday and then resumed at 6 a.m. News accounts at the time described the investigators called in to join the case as being Jack Burns of the Willmar State Crime Bureau and William Conley, an investigator with the St. Paul Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

One of Jackie’s sisters, Annabelle (Theel) Krupke, who was 16 years old when he disappeared, told the Paynesville Press in 2004 that the day of Jackie’s disappearance was nice, but the following days were rainy and cold.

Jennifer Kotila / West Central Tribune

But that didn’t stop local townspeople and others from thoroughly searching the town and countryside. Farmers searched buildings, fields, pastures, grain shocks, pits, wells and swamps.

The North Fork Crow River bed and its banks were searched several times. If Jackie had drowned, his body would likely have been found due to how shallow the river is in the fall.

The Civil Air Patrol stationed out of St. Cloud searched for Jackie by air on Wednesday and Thursday. The plane was piloted by Ray Ubracken, and Paynesville barber Les Spaeth was the observer.

Boys from Paynesville High School were dismissed Wednesday and Thursday afternoons to help with the search efforts and Paynesville businessmen closed up their shops Thursday afternoon to help.

Contributed / Robert M. Dudley

Newspapers and radio stations statewide covered Jackie’s disappearance, writing about the case and airing descriptions of Jackie, the blue-eyed, strawberry blond 6-year-old who was just getting two new bottom front teeth. He was 37 inches tall and weighed 45 pounds and had a fresh scratch under his right eye and a one-inch scar on the back of his head.

On Saturday, Boy Scouts from Cold Spring joined local Boy Scouts in the search. Also sometime in the first week, an old cistern that was no longer in use had been searched.

The following Wednesday, bloodhounds were brought in by Raymond Huelskamp (spelled Hulscamp and Hulskamp in media reports) of New Ulm. Despite the rainy weather that had occurred since Jackie went missing, the dogs were able to pick up his trail near the school and followed it to Schwartz Drug Store and then to the North American Creamery (now AMPI).

Jennifer Kotila / West Central Tribune

The trail led to the edge of the river where faint, small footprints were located, and then to the Evangelical Church and west to the William Johnson filling station in west Paynesville. Here the scent was really strong, but Johnson didn’t recall seeing a boy matching Jackie’s description.

The scent grew weaker as it traveled west to Highway 23 and then vanished near the location in which the boy was spotted by the couple returning from a fishing trip. The hounds were brought to Hawick to search the ditches on both sides of the highway going north, but Jackie’s scent was never picked up again.

Screen capture / Paynesville Press

By Thursday, Sept. 21, 1944, the Paynesville Press was reporting that hope of finding Jackie alive was waning, but that the search would continue until Jackie was found dead or alive. It also reported that the Civil Air Patrol had again searched by air the previous Friday.

The report also shared speculations of what may have happened to Jackie, including wandering off into thicker woods or swamps and perishing, having been kidnapped from the side of the highway or becoming the victim of a “sex maniac.”

Spiritual faith healers and fortune tellers had been contacted by Jackie's father Harold and were certain Jackie was still in the area and alive, according to the report. However, within the first week of his disappearance, a faith healer had given the opinion he was in a nearby mud hole, which was searched to no avail.

McIntee and Conley told the Paynesville Press that in all their experiences, they had never seen anyone cooperate as well as the people of Paynesville in searching for Jackie. “Everyone from the school age boy to the farmer has done a magnificent job. (McIntee and Conley) said that everyone seemed to think it was their boy that they were searching for. A more thorough and efficient search has never been carried on,” stated the article.

Jackie never has been found. The Paynesville Press interviewed Jackie’s siblings Fay and Annabelle for an article that was published Sept. 22, 2004. KARE 11 News interviewed Jackie’s sister Judy Espelund for a news piece that aired Feb. 4, 2016.

Annabelle and Fay, who was 5 years old when Jackie disappeared, told the Paynesville Press that there have been numerous rumors that circulated throughout the years that Jackie has been missing.

"I tend to believe that someone saw him wandering and picked him up," Annabelle said in 2004. "I don't see how it could have been anything else."

Fay said that he also believed that the most likely scenario was that Jackie was kidnapped. This was at the height of World War II and soldiers could get out of the army if they had dependents, which could have been a motive.

Both Annabelle and Fay told the Paynesville Press they thought the story about the car that was spotted picking up a boy dressed in a sailor’s suit and later located in Willmar was quite a coincidence. They wondered how the Willmar police identified that the “brother” was not Jackie.

The Willmar Police Department does not have records dating back to the 1940s, according to the 2004 article in the Paynesville Press. Stearns County records go back only to 1960 and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension does not have records of the case, according to the KARE 11 report.

A former Paynesville school teacher in the 1960s wrote Annabelle a letter stating she had seen a man getting off a Navy ship in California that resembled a Theel and signed his name “Jackie Theel.” He told the teacher he had been adopted.

Then in the 1980s, Fay was told a man came into Tuck’s Cafe in Paynesville looking for family, but could not find the name Theel in the phonebook. Fay reported the incident to the FBI, but doubted the story since there were Theels that lived in town and had their names listed in the phonebook.

"It's impossible to know," Fay told the Paynesville Press in 2004. "You don't know if he's dead or alive."

Jackie's mother Bernice was traumatized by his disappearance, Annabelle and Fay told the Paynesville Press. "Ma turned gray overnight," said Fay. "She had salt-and-pepper hair, but she turned white practically overnight."

The Minneapolis Star in September of 1945 reported, “A sobbing mother sent a five-year-old son for the first time here today, recalling the tragedy in a similar experience a year ago.” This was in reference to Fay’s first day of school. “I hope it doesn’t turn out the same way with him,” Bernice said, according to the report.

It stated that Bernice had several theories about Jackie’s disappearance, but would not disclose what they were. “I can’t prove any of them.”

It also stated that McIntee theorized that Jackie had been taken by someone, which was investigated by the FBI. “There is something in the community we haven’t figured out,” the Star reported McIntee saying.

In a Websleuths forum thread about Jackie’s disappearance, Gary L. Theel joined the conversation. He stated he was the son of Jackie’s brother, Tom, who was supposed to walk with Jackie home from school.

He shared that each time his family would come to visit his grandparents in Paynesville, his father would talk about the day his brother disappeared and the cloud that hung over the family.

“When he would speak his voice would sometimes break, and you could hear the sadness in his tone,” Gary wrote. “... I guess, looking back in retrospect, this could be why we were so guarded as children.”

Gary also shared that his father died in 2004, and would have wanted answers to what happened to his brother. However, Gary and the people on the Websleuth forum have not gotten any closer to solving the mystery of Jackie’s disappearance.

He attempted to track Federal Bureau of Investigation records regarding the case, contacting the Minnesota office of the FBI, the Washington, D.C., offices and the FBI national archives in Maryland and was told there were no records.

He also checked with the federal Department of Justice and was told there are no records of the case there.

Jennifer Kotila / West Central Tribune

It is not unreasonable to think that Jackie could possibly still be alive if he were kidnapped, as several family members have been long-lived. Fay is 85 years old. Annabelle died in December of 2023 at the age of 96.

Jackie’s father and mother lived to 86 and 83, respectively. Cross-referencing a photo of the Theel children from 1944 and Annabelle’s obituary, brothers Carl and Denton are still alive and in their 90s and a brother Norman is alive in his early 80s. A sister, Judy Espelund, born five years after Jackie disappeared, is in her 70s.

Eight other siblings, Donald, Lloyd, Floyd, Milton, Tom, Andrea Calendar, Dorothy and Myron, are all deceased. Dorothy died as an infant and Myron died just six months after Jackie went missing at a little over a year old.

Jennifer Kotila / West Central Tribune

Many online mystery sleuths have written about or created videos about Jackie’s disappearance and there is also a chapter about it in the book “Cold Cases of Stearns County, Minnesota” by Robert M. Dudley.

Those who have information regarding the case should contact the Stearns County Sheriff's Office at 320-259-3700.