On the evening of January 14, 1982, 11-year-old Jon Dabkowski and his 10-year-old friend Gabriel Minarcin left Jon’s home in Tarentum, Pennsylvania, to walk the three doors down to Gabriel’s house and never arrived. Jon was last seen in a maroon and tan jacket, a red sweatshirt, jeans, boots, and a red and white tasseled cap. He was a Boy Scout who liked football and baseball.

Investigators found two sets of small footprints in the snow leading to the nearby Allegheny River but not away from it, and a hole in the ice near a moored houseboat. An immediate, large-scale search involving more than 100 officers, firefighters, and volunteers produced no trace of the boys. The case is classified as a non-family abduction, though law enforcement has considered the possibility the boys wandered onto the ice and fell through.

Years later, in 1998, Jon’s family briefly believed he had been located when a man named Neil Hammons used Jon’s identity; that turned out to be a theft based on information from a missing person listing and was unrelated to the disappearance. Does anyone in Tarentum from that winter remember seeing the boys or those footprints near the river that night?