A worker in a manufacturing company, John Dixon Clinkscales lacked whims as a literary author.
Until the day he felt compelled to write, more out of a sense of emotional survival than to carve out a career in the world of books.
In 1981 he published his only work, Kyle’s Story, Friday Never Came. Friday was the day he and his wife, Louise, believed they would see his 22-year-old son, Kyle, who disappeared on the night of January 27, 1976.
That Friday never came for the couple, a neighbor of LaGrange (Georgia). John passed away in 2007 in his eighties. Louise survived him until January 2021, when she passed away, aged 92. Neither one nor the other, who dedicated their energy to the search for their son. they had a chance to find out what had happened to Kyle.
“It was as if the earth opened up and he vanished inside it,” the mother told the local press after a while.
Only eleven months after Louise’s death, the land opened up again, this time due to the effect of drought, which caused the level of the riverbeds to drop.
On December 7, 2021, someone discovered a vehicle in a Cusseta, Alabama creek and reported it to authorities. It was then explained that the tailgate had been opened and was above the waterline, allowing the vehicle to be seen.
The car and some objects found inside suggested that it was him. This week the results of the genetic analyzes of the skeletal remains found inside have been released and it has been confirmed that they corresponded to Kyle Clinscales.
The last time he was seen was that day 47 years ago at the Moose Club bar in LaGrange where he worked. He was preparing to drive the 60 kilometers back to the university in Auburn, Alabama in his Ford Pinto (it was white, although the color is unrecognizable in the photo), a model that was discontinued in 1980.
He never showed up for Auburn. The clothes and bathroom items in his dorm were still there for a while, untouched or used. They say he had $50 in cash, but he never signed a check again.
“We are relieved that our suspicions have been confirmed, happy that this positive identification has brought an end to the family’s long grief,” Troup County Sheriff James Woodruff said.
The police received numerous leads on the whereabouts of Clinkscales over the past decades. This led him to excavate an area where he was supposedly buried and even drained a lake in search of a body in a barrel.
The sheriff’s office investigation led to the arrest in 2005 of two people who allegedly were present when a third killed the young student, perhaps because they heard something about his killer, and both saw the perpetrator put the body in a concrete drum The two arrested were imprisoned for hindering the investigations.
Just as they entered, they left. There were no accusations against anyone.
“For years there has been a lot of rumors and speculation and it now seems to make sense that Clinkscales ran off the road that night and could not be found,” Woodruff said. Why didn’t anyone see the Ford Pinto before? This is the great doubt ”he added.
Case closed? Although one unknown has been resolved, there are more to be resolved. “There are questions for which we don’t have answers and I don’t know if we will find them,” she said.
The heart of the case centers on finding out how Clinkscales died. Was it something more than a traffic accident? This prevents the investigation from being terminated.
It is well known that sometimes the dead reveal secrets. The parents of the missing person spoke of receiving a “strange call” from someone who had reason to believe that his son had been murdered and buried. But the sheriff now warns that, due to the state of the remains, it will be difficult or impossible to reach a conclusion.