On a spring day in April 1979, ten-year-old Randy Doyle Parscale Jr. disappeared while hiking with his grandfather and two brothers in Peppersauce Canyon in the Santa Catalina Mountains near Oracle, Arizona. Randy wandered ahead, was last seen around a bend in the trail, and when family members reached that spot moments later he was gone. He was 4 feet 6 inches, about 70 pounds, with brown hair and blue eyes. At the time he wore a long-sleeved red and green striped shirt, an olive-green hunter’s vest or jacket, blue jeans, and shoes with a bulls-eye pattern on the soles.

Searchers scoured the canyon, caves and old mine shafts for nearly a week using scent dogs and helicopters but found no trace. A set of Randy’s footprints led to a dirt road and stopped there, prompting investigators to consider the possibility he got into a vehicle. Randy Parscale, and a 1989 report of a man using Randy’s Social Security number at a Phoenix construction site; neither produced a resolution. The Pinal County Sheriff’s Office lists the case as an active cold case and classifies it as a possible non-family abduction, though theories also mention him getting lost or falling into an abandoned mine shaft.

Did anyone hike Peppersauce Canyon in April 1979 or have information about the dirt road where Randy’s footprints stopped?