Joe Boyd Wright was 16 when he left his family home in Delhi, Louisiana, at the end of April 1963. One of fourteen children, he reportedly told relatives he planned to change his name and never return. After that day he was not seen again by those who knew him. He was last officially sighted in Shreveport, about 140 miles west, and was described as having brown hair, hazel eyes, and a scar on his left arm; he was wearing a khaki suit.

The case has been treated as an endangered runaway. In December 1983 the family learned a man arrested in Texas using the alias Jack Wright and several dozen other names was the same age Joe would have been. That man, who had a lengthy record of petty crimes, was released before the family could travel to make a positive identification, and it remains unknown whether he was Joe.

Did anyone who lived in Shreveport or Delhi in the 1960s and 1980s ever see a young man matching Joe’s description or hear of a Jack Wright arrested in Texas in 1983?