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XenMojo

Active Member
I first came across this story in 2008 and it has stayed with me ever since.

Dorothy Brown finds herself in crowded places peering at men she doesn't know. She looks for blue eyes and curly blond hair that remind her of her missing brother. She hasn't seen him in more than 50 years, but she holds out hope that he might be out there.

Brown's brother was 22 months old when he walked away from the family home in the secluded Catskill woods on Denman Mountain.

He was never seen again. [...]

Frederick Holmes, known as "Freddie" or "Tookie," disappeared on May 25, 1955. Hundreds of men and boys searched the rugged terrain for days. Troopers concluded that the boy fell into one of the gorges that slice across the mountain or that a black bear grabbed him. They could never explain why no remains of the boy's clothing turned up. People searched the crevices and woods for a month. No trace of the baby was ever found. [...]

Gertrude Holmes, the boy's mother, believed her baby was taken and sold. Police came to her with photographs of nameless boys that had been found. Gertrude died at age 61. Her daughters say she was never the same after her son vanished. [...]

[...]Thirteen years after the boy went missing, Roderick Holmes, a town highway worker, walked into the same woods that swallowed his son and slashed his neck and wrists. He was found lying face down in a thicket near the Tri-Valley Central School, "a stone's throw" from where the boy disappeared, the then-Times Herald reported in 1968. He was 51. [...]

[...]the sisters provided a swab sample to authorities in Sullivan County, where Haiss still lives, and in Milo, Maine, where Brown lives. It will take about six months to create the profile and then be analyzed against DNA profiles of unsolved cases around the country.

Freddie's profile could be compared with the DNA profile on file in the infamous "Boy-in-the-Box" case in Philadelphia. A boy with curly blond hair and blue eyes was found, beaten to death, in a cardboard box in 1957. He was about five years old. Brown has always feared the boy might be Freddie.

The age, date and description similarities in these two cases surprised me at first, but I have found no further information connecting the two.

Freddie Holmes, who would be 56, remains an infant in the minds of his sisters. In one of the few photographs taken of the boy, he was 14 months old and standing on the porch holding his arm out, his fingers stretched and reaching. His mother kept one of his toys, a green rubber policeman riding a motorcycle.
MissingFreddie.jpg

www.recordonline.com

My gut is telling me that the poor baby wandered off into the woods and became lost while mom was tending the garden. Denman mountain is full of places that could hide a tragedy like that. Yet, even if he was taken by an animal, the searchers would have found some sort of evidence of that in the month they spent searching for the boy, so I am torn.
 
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There's another thread about this somewhere.
Anyway, turns out The Boy in the Box is not Freddie.
I have been in contact with Miss Dororthy for awhile.
 
I searched the whole forum for mentions of Freddie, the only thread it did pull up was the boy in the box thread, which I thought was odd.

I live very close to Grahamsville, and know Denman Mountain. It must have been quite the daunting task searching that monster.
 
Oh, that's right. I discussed in the Boy in the Box thread how Freddie wasn't him.
That's why I thought there was already a thread.
 
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