Origins: The Lost Brothers

How I discovered, developed, and wrote an article, book, and podcast about one of history’s most puzzling disappearances of children.

This is the second in my series of Origins essays about the spark and development of my books, articles, and other works. You’ll find the first in the series?here.

On November 9, 1997, a Sunday, I opened my local newspaper.?In the classifieds section, I saw an ad pleading for information on a trio of missing brothers — aged 8, 6, and 4 — who had been missing since 1951. I didn’t know it, but that ad had appeared in the newspaper every November for the previous 35 years. I was curious. I called a phone number listed in the ad.

I spoke with Betty and Kenneth Klein, who invited me to drive from my home in Minneapolis to rural Monticello, Minn., to meet them. They lived in an old farmhouse and had then been married for 56 years, most of that time a nightmare of not knowing, endless searching, and waiting. Their sons, Kenneth, Jr., David, and Danny, had vanished in a single afternoon, unaccountably and without resolution.

The Kleins’ story

Betty, 73 when I met her, was calm and determined, and she did most of the talking. Kenneth, 81, had recently undergone treatment for cancer. He looked pained and spoke slowly. The Kleins had a large family: five remaining sons, five grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.?They felt devoted to their family, but they could not stop thinking about the sons?who went missing after leaving home to play in a neighborhood park in 1951.

I became aware that even when entertaining me inside their home, they directed a small part of their attention outside. Their ears were especially attuned to arrivals on their long gravel driveway. The crunching of tires, footsteps, stray male voices — the Kleins strained to catch sounds like these. Someday, somehow, their sons might return home. Betty kept a collection of the missing boys’ clothing, photographs, and schoolwork.

Some people told Betty and Kenneth to give up, to stop searching for their missing boys after so many years. The Kleins refused. Kenneth pointed out that nobody had ever proven the boys dead. Nothing would stop him and Betty from worrying about them. “These kids come into the world,” he said, “and whatever happens you’ve got to stand behind them.”

An article, a book, a podcast

I left, conscious of the sounds I made on the gravel driveway, and I wrote for?Minnesota Monthly?a magazine article?about the Kleins and their missing boys. I published it in 1998, and it gave me false conviction. I thought I understood the complexities of the case and the purgatory in which the Kleins lived. I thought the case of Betty and Kenneth’s vanished sons was doomed to have no ending.

I was wrong.

Fifteen years later, I received an email from a sheriff’s deputy in Wright County, Minn. Something was developing in the case of the missing Klein boys. This case could still be solved.

The deputy and her partner met Betty Klein ten years after I did, after Kenneth’s death. Intrigued by her story, they began collecting?and organizing evidence on their own time. The Minneapolis Police Department, which had investigated the disappearance of the boys for a mere?five days in 1951 before declaring them drowned on little evidence, had nothing to share, but the FBI and a Minneapolis Park Police sergeant who had looked into the case during the 1990s provided valuable files. It was now possible to identify suspects who might have abducted the boys and to determine a new course for the investigation.

I tumbled into the story once again. This time the result was a book,?The Lost Brothers: A Family’s Decades-Long Search, published in 2019 by the University of Minnesota Press. I had collaborated with the U of M Press on two earlier books. I later teamed with Twin Cities PBS and wrote and narrated the?Long Lost?podcast based on the book and on new reporting.

A story with more to say

It’s now more than 70 years since the boys disappeared, and we are inching closer to finding out what happened to them. What Betty and Kenneth and their remaining family experienced is an unforgettable tragedy, and I wrote the book and podcast to focus on their lives.

Too few people know about Kenneth, Jr., David, and Danny and the ongoing efforts of their family to find them. It’s one of the most moving true-crime stories of recent years. It’s ready for a retelling on the screen.

#truecrime #writing #journalism #history