Fifteen-year-old Randy Laufer disappeared from Harrison, Clare County, Michigan, after being last seen walking toward a friend’s house on September 15, 1987. Initial hopes that he had run away faded as years passed with no trace and mounting concern that foul play was involved.

In August 1997 a farmhand in Hatton Township unearthed a skull; further excavation recovered skeletal remains later identified as Laufer’s. The remains showed he had been bound, gagged, and stabbed multiple times in the neck and back. A homicide investigation followed and attention focused on former neighbor John Rodney McRae, who had left Clare County for Arizona after the disappearance.

McRae and his son Martin were arrested in Mesa, Arizona, in 1998. John McRae was convicted of first-degree murder in 1998; that conviction was overturned on a legal issue and he was later retried, convicted again in 2005, and sentenced to life without parole. He died in prison on June 28, 2005, at age 70.

Did anyone in Clare County remember Randy’s routine or know of tensions in the neighborhood in 1987?