Monday, September 23, 2013

The Bones of Gary Hayman

Sixty-one years ago today, on September 23, 1952, Gary Hayman, a nine-year-old boy with autism, vanished from the Ladd School without a trace, never to be found ... almost.

In the afternoon while the children were lined up at the end of class on that fateful day, Gary must have bolted from the school unseen, or so reports suggest. When his teacher realized he was missing, the school's administrators took swiftly to action, rounding up small search parties of attendants and inmates, and blasting three short, sharp blows of the whistle from the smokestack at the power plant on the other side of the campus - a measure taken for all runaways from the institution.

Little did anyone know that this time, however, it would be different. When their search turned up empty-handed that night, so began a long, strange and harrowing story that remains to this day - all but forgotten - one of the most mysterious and tragic events in local history.

The search for Gary Hayman was - in the words of Dr. Ladd, the institution's superintendent - 'perhaps the largest manhunt in Rhode Island history.' It was certainly one of the most publicized for its time, and maybe the first notable account of a missing child in the State's modern history. For fourteen days rescuers looked high and low for the missing child, from the buildings and grounds of the institution to the woods, the roads, farms and abandoned fairgrounds surrounding the reservation and as far as the Connecticut border. Hundreds of local residents, police, firefighters and forest rangers led the hunt, day and night, while Gary's mother took to the hilltops and, with a megaphone in hand, called to the wilderness for her son. The bloodhounds were run, the sewer beds drained, and motorists were interrogated. Suspicions ran high, lies were told, and clues were found by the edge of the river. By the end of the second week, a fresh grave was exhumed amid dark rumors that the wrong body had been buried in the potter's field.

At last, Gary's mother, desperate for closure, consulted the famed psychic horse, Lady Wonder, as to the whereabouts of her lost son. "Is Gary Hayman alive?" The horse, manipulating a large, makeshift typewriter with her nose, spelled H-U-R-T. “Where can the little boy be found?” T-R-U-C-K. “Where is the truck?” Lady Wonder touched the machine again; K-A-N-S-A-S. "Can Gary Hayman be found?" Y-E-S.

But it was all to no avail. Fall turned to Winter, and months passed by. The case, though it remained open, was hopeless. The search parties stopped, and as time went by, the rumors faded. Gary Hayman was gone.

Then, in a strange twist of events, on a cold December morning that same year, a police officer showed up at the office of Dr. Ladd. Word of a grisly discovery had surfaced in the neighborhood behind the School in Exeter; a local farm boy, it was learned, was in possession of two human teeth which he claimed he had plucked, "for good luck," from remains he claimed to have found while hunting in the forest.

With the boy in tow, that very day Exeter police recovered the head of Gary Hayman, found hanging on the limb of a fir tree in a dry clearing by the edge of a bog deep in the woods north of the Ladd School.

His body, however, has never been found; and to this day, his skeleton remains somewhere in those woods.

From the book, The Bones of Gary Hayman and The Search for Samuel Finn:

... To reach this location, travel south on the South County Trail and at the entrance to the Exeter School, travel north on Slocumville Road. On reaching Purgatory Road or the William Reynolds Road, turn left onto the dirt road and travel west. After crossing the Queens River, turn left at the first turn over the bridge (dead end at a sand bank). Trooper then proceed south west into the woods. After about one hour of crossing two cranberry bogs and brush, the skull was located on the side of a tree where it had been hung.


Gary Hayman's case was closed December 1, 1952.

For more about this historic case, see our our book, The Bones of Gary Hayman and The Search for Samuel Finn, on sale now through December 1, 2013.

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