Two details frame the disappearance of two-year-old Richard Ray Barnett. He was last seen on August 31, 1982, sitting on a hay wagon in front of a chicken barn on his grandparents’ egg and dairy farm north of Grangeville, Idaho, while workers unloaded chickens. Within about 15 minutes he was gone and an immediate search turned up no clues.

Over 250 volunteers and bloodhounds conducted a four-day search; the dogs followed Richard’s scent to a fence line and then lost the trail. Richard had been staying at the farm for a couple of weeks with his father while his mother was in southern Idaho. Grandparents Waldo and Martha McChoard were suspects for nearly two decades, with one theory that they placed him into an underground adoption network; Martha later passed a polygraph in 2001 and was cleared. Another theory points to a farm worker, but no evidence has supported that idea.

Richard has never been found and his parents, now living in Oregon, continue to seek answers. Does anyone have information about the farm, the workers who were there in late August 1982, or remembers that day?