Vanished Into Thin Air: The Mysterious Disappearance of Kyron Horman
A Family Matter
Kyron Richard Horman was born in Portland, Oregon on September 9, 2002, to Kaine Horman and Desiree Young who had divorced shortly before his birth. After sharing custody of their only child for two years, the couple decided that it would be best if his father took over as primary parent due to Desiree’s chronic health issues.
In 2007, Kaine married a thirty-seven-year-old substitute teacher and former bodybuilder named Terri Moulton. A year later, they welcomed their daughter Kiara. For a time, at least on the surface, life was as good as it gets.
Everything would change three years into the union when a tragic event would turn their world upside down and lead to speculation that a seemingly devoted parent had committed the ultimate act of betrayal against a child they professed to love.
In the Blink of an Eye
Friday, June 4, 2010, was set to be a busy one for seven-year-old Kyron Horman. Having taken part in his elementary school’s annual science fair the previous day, he had arrived bright and early to prepare his project — a study of tree frogs — for a parent/teacher event that was scheduled for later that afternoon.
Kyron’s ride that morning had been his stepmother Terri, who had stayed for several minutes to help set up his display. Once everything was in order, she had snapped a picture of the smiling second-grader proudly showing off his work.
Terri recalled that she had seen her stepson walking toward his homeroom as she was exiting the building at 8:45. What happened after that is an ongoing mystery. The only thing that is known for certain is that he never made it to class.
A Parent’s Worst Nightmare
At 3:30 that afternoon, Terri and Kaine went to meet Kyron’s school bus, which was their norm. When he failed to disembark, they had questioned the driver as to his whereabouts. To their dismay, they learned that he hadn’t gotten on the bus that day.
In a panic, they phoned Skyline Elementary School and asked if Kyron was still on the premises. They were told that, not only was he nowhere to be found, but he had been marked absent after failing to show up for his first class. At 3:46, police received a call from the school secretary regarding a missing child.
Officers arrived on the scene within minutes. After taking down all the information that was available at the time from both school personnel and the visibly distraught parents, they began making arrangements for a coordinated search of the area around the school. Even as volunteers were being recruited, investigators were gleaning as much information as possible from Kyron’s stepmother.
According to Terri, after leaving the school that morning, she had visited two supermarkets to pick up a few things, including medicine for Kiara who was suffering from an earache. In an attempt to lull the fussy toddler to sleep, she had driven around town from 10:00 to 11:40.
Her next stop had been a local gym where she worked out for an hour after dropping Kiara off at the facility’s daycare center. From there, she had gone home, arriving just before 1:30. After getting her daughter settled in, she had posted the picture she had taken of Kyron with his science fair project on her social media. Nothing of significance had occurred from that time until she and Kaine reached the bus stop later that afternoon.
With no reason to believe otherwise, the general consensus was that Kyron had wandered off and been unable to find his way back. Since Skyline was surrounded by dense woodlands, this wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. Nevertheless, those who knew him well argued that such a bold move would have been completely out of character for the bashful youngster whose eyesight was so poor — even with glasses — that he didn’t like to go anywhere alone. It should also be noted that a fence separated the grounds from the forest to prevent just such an occurrence.
By seven o’clock that evening, search and rescue teams were descending on the school. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation were also on hand to lend their expertise in finding the missing boy. Hoping to use the media to their advantage, local news outlets were notified in order to get the word out as quickly as possible.
Over the next few days, everything within a two-mile radius of the school was gone over with a fine-tooth comb. Although investigators kept the specifics to themselves, Sauvie Island, located six miles from the school, was also targeted. As hundreds of people were scouring the woods on the mainland, divers were busy searching the waters off the popular family getaway.
Secrets Come to Light
The investigation took an unexpected turn on June 10th when agents informed Kaine that the family’s landscaper, Rodolfo Sanchez, was now alleging that Terri had approached him six months earlier and asked him to kill her husband. Despite her promise of a substantial payday, he had declined the offer. In a move that would call his credibility into question, he had chosen to keep the bizarre interaction to himself.
When confronted with this bombshell, Terri had simply denied that the conversation had ever taken place. His tolerance having reached its limit, eight days later, Kaine filed for divorce. He also asked for, and was granted, a restraining order against his soon-to-be ex-wife. It was around this time that she hired an attorney and stopped cooperating with authorities.
In July, one of Terri’s closest confidants, DeDe Spicher, was subpoenaed by the Multnomah County grand jury investigating Kyron’s case. A gardener by trade, it was alleged that she had left a client’s home without explanation around 11:30 on the day of the incident, only to return at 1:00 as if nothing had happened. Rumors also swirled that she and another friend had been using burner phones to communicate with Terri in recent weeks.
Spicher, who would go on to pass a lie detector test, was adamant that she had no knowledge of what had become of Kyron. She insisted that she would never have knowingly aided anyone who would harm a child in any way. Down the line, she would tell a media outlet that she had been at the job site the entire day, despite assertions from the homeowner and coworkers that she had been absent and incommunicado for a good ninety minutes.
As for the phones, she explained that they had been purchased due to service issues that had nothing whatsoever to do with the case. Convinced that her friend had nothing to hide, she would remain a loyal ally throughout the turbulent years to come.
In the early part of August, with both law enforcement and the public beginning to suspect that Terri knew more about Kyron’s disappearance than she was letting on, she agreed to take a lie detector test to clear her name. Rather than being vindicated, she had allegedly failed miserably. To make matters worse, she had taken at least one additional polygraph with similar results.
While this was concerning, it didn’t bring investigators any closer to locating Kyron. After putting over a million dollars into a search that had become the most expensive the state of Oregon had ever known, with no money left in the till, authorities were forced to scale back the efforts to find the boy whose whereabouts remained unknown.
All Roads Lead to Terri
In 2011, investigators managed to track down a former boyfriend of Terri’s named Sean Rea, who they had reason to believe had been the victim of a botched murder-for-hire that had taken place in 1990.
They had come to this conclusion after interviewing a man serving time in Oregon who had confessed to participating in a contract killing that had gone south over twenty years earlier. When they asked Rea to recount his story, the details matched those of the inmate to a T.
The incident in question had taken place at a park where he and Terri were enjoying a picnic lunch. As they sat minding their own business, a man had jumped out of the bushes and pointed a gun at Rea. For whatever reason, the would-be assailant had a last-minute change of heart and instead of firing the weapon, had hesitated for a moment before fleeing.
Since no one had been hurt, Rea had brushed the whole thing off. After realizing that things weren’t working out between them, he and Terri ended their relationship a short time later and never saw each other again.
While this had made alarm bells go off for the detectives working Kyron’s case, there was nothing to indicate that Terri had any involvement in what occurred that day in the park. Even so, it was an odd coincidence to be sure, given that she had also been accused of attempting to hire someone to kill her former spouse. Since no charges were filed in either instance, she is presumed innocent until proven otherwise.
Moving on, in June of 2012, two years after Kyron was last seen, his mother Desiree sued Terri in civil court for $10 million, claiming that she was responsible for her son’s disappearance.
When Desiree’s attorney attempted to depose DeDe Spicher, he ran headfirst into a brick wall. Loyal to a fault, she had pleaded the Fifth to the hundred plus questions that were posed to her. Standing on principle, she had even refused to acknowledge that she knew the family or had ever met the missing boy.
Over a year later, an emotionally drained Desiree decided to drop the civil case. Fearing that her efforts to get to the truth were hindering the criminal investigation, she withdrew the complaint against Terri.
In June of 2014, after a lengthy custody battle in which the presiding judge referred to Terri as the “prime suspect” in her stepson’s disappearance, Kaine was awarded full custody of five-year-old Kiara. It was further ordered that her mother, whom her ex had described as “emotionally disturbed,” be allowed only bi-monthly supervised visits.
In 2016, Terri made an appearance on a popular daytime talk show. When confronted by the host as to the state of her marriage at the time her stepson went missing, she admitted that it had been an unhappy union. This came as a surprise since she had previously maintained that she and Kaine had gotten along famously.
Though it wasn’t addressed on air, this admission bolstered the persistent rumor that she had asked the landscaper to kill her husband because she knew a divorce was imminent and wanted to collect on his life insurance while she still could. Again, this is another bit of conjecture that she has steadfastly denied.
In her defense, Terri had store receipts showing that she had indeed gone shopping after leaving Kyron at school. In an effort to be helpful, she had also told investigators that she had learned that a man driving a white truck had been seen behaving erratically in the parking lot of a convenience store on the other side of town as the family’s ordeal was unfolding. While this may have been true, no correlation was ever found between the two incidents.
With that said, the scrutiny she faced, and continues to experience, is understandable. One glaring tidbit that made locals view her with a suspicious eye were the claims by other parents that they had seen an unidentified individual sitting in the Horman’s white truck while Terri was inside the building with Kyron on the morning of June 4th. Although she refuted this, the witnesses held to their stories.
Another telling bit of information alleged that the expanded search efforts had been ordered after it was discovered that Terri’s phone had pinged off a cell tower on Sauvie Island on the day her stepson went missing. It has also been put forth that her bank cards were used in locales she failed to disclose to authorities during the initial investigation.
The aforementioned incidents, along with the landscaper’s allegations and an alleged propensity to fudge the truth, have kept Terri at the top of the list of possible suspects from the start, though she has never officially been named a person of interest in the case.
Terri’s supporters are quick to mention that her movements could be accounted for right up to the time they learned Kyron was missing. While this is true to some extent, since by her own admission she had spent nearly two hours driving her daughter around in circles, her alibi is hardly ironclad. Even so, being unable to account for every minute of one’s day is not proof of wrongdoing.
Though unrelated to Kyron’s case, her detractors point to Terri’s later arrests as evidence that she’s not the law-abiding citizen she portrays herself to be. She was arrested in California in July of 2016 after allegedly stealing a firearm from her roommate. Five months later, she landed in jail again, this time for being in possession of a stolen vehicle.
No End in Sight
Today, over twelve years after he was last seen, Kyron Horman’s fate remains unknown. While some believe he conquered his fears and traipsed off into the forest alone with no destination in mind, only to get hopelessly lost, others are convinced that he was the victim of foul play.
Since the thick woodlands around Portland’s Skyline Elementary School have been searched countless times to no avail, it would seem an unlikely resting place for the youngster, if he did indeed perish as a result of exposure. Be that as it may, those familiar with the site say that it wouldn’t be unheard of for an individual to be consumed by the forest, leaving no trace behind.
If, however, Kyron was taken by a stranger — or someone he knew — his abductor has proven remarkably adept at keeping investigators at bay. While speculation abounds as to the identity of the perpetrator, the road to actually bringing them to justice has been — and continues to be — a long one marked by twists and turns that, so far, have led to dead ends.
Wherever the answers lie, perhaps someday soon, his grieving parents will finally learn what became of the little boy who went to school on a rainy Friday morning and, for all intents and purposes, fell off the face of the Earth.
Resources:
·abcnews.com
·fbi.gov
·people.com
·columbian.com
·facebook.com
·websleuths.com
·oregonlive.com
·wcnc.com
·kpic.com
Images used under provisions of the Fair Use Act for purposes of reporting and education.