Two-year-old Ruben David Felix disappeared from a family gathering at the Tanupa Ranch along the Little Wood River near Shoshone, Idaho, on the afternoon of February 23, 1997. He was last seen about 4:30 p.m. in the front yard drinking from his bottle while in the care of his stepfather, Aurelio Mireles. Mireles says he went inside briefly and returned to find Ruben gone. The family searched for roughly two hours before contacting police.

Search dogs tracked Ruben’s scent about 200 yards across a field, over railroad tracks and to the riverbank, where a small footprint was found in the snow.

In late March 1997, Ruben’s bottle turned up in the yard after that area had been searched multiple times; authorities could not explain how it got there. Ruben’s mother believes some relatives who left for Mexico the day after the disappearance may be connected; a van belonging to those relatives was later found burned in Arizona, though they said it was unrelated. She also received a phone call from a man claiming to be an FBI agent who said Ruben had been found in Guadalajara after being sold to a wealthy family, a claim the local FBI office did not corroborate. Does anyone have information about Ruben’s movements that afternoon or about the relatives who left after he vanished?