On September 12, 1964, seven-year-old Alan Westerfield and his eleven-year-old brother Terry vanished after their stepfather, Army sergeant Carl Bock, said he dropped them at the Broadway Theater on Hay Street in Fayetteville, North Carolina for a double feature. Theater staff remembered the boys as regular patrons, but recollections about seeing them that day conflicted. Bock told investigators he returned that evening and could not find them, waited outside, then left assuming their mother Margaret had picked them up. Margaret did not report them missing until the early hours of September 13 after returning home and finding their beds empty.

Heavy rains from Hurricane Dora hampered the initial search. Investigators noted contradictions in Bock’s account, found it odd he never went inside the theater when he could not find the boys, and later came to suspect he was involved and that the boys may have been killed soon after they were last seen. Margaret divorced Bock during the investigation and later died in 2003; their biological father, Mel Westerfield, died by suicide in 1978. Bock was interviewed multiple times, including as late as 2012, refused an offered immunity deal, and died in 2016.

This remains the oldest unsolved disappearance in North Carolina. Does anyone who lived in Fayetteville in 1964 remember the boys, the Broadway Theater on Hay Street, or saw anything unusual around September 12 that could help explain what happened?