Leroy Mills Sr., a 77-year-old Black man, was last seen the evening of March 21, 1988, leaving his home on Fairview Street in Lake City, Florida. A neighbor reported him missing the next day, March 22, and two days after that his wallet was found in a dumpster behind Weggie’s Saloon on US 441. Investigators searched woods, swamps, neighborhoods and dumpsters, even using mounted teams, and a task force was formed, but Mills was never located.

The case file has been described as unusually thin, reportedly only six pages, and one page carried an odd note saying he had been removed from the National Crime Information Center as a missing person during an audit by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Before he disappeared, Mills had been gambling with a neighbor, Carlis Lindsey Sr., and told people Lindsey would probably know something if anything happened to him. Lindsey was treated as a person of interest but was never charged in Mills’s disappearance; he was later imprisoned for separate 1991 murders and died in prison in 1997.

The Lake City Police Department remains the investigating agency. Does anyone who knew Mills or his routines in 1988 have information that could help reopen leads?