Investigators in Kentucky have pursued many leads in the search for Randy Sellers, except for what some critics say is the most obvious one.
At first, Wanda Cotton searched the water.
She crossed the railroad tracks and scrambled down the banks of the Licking River, calling out the name of her teenage son, Randy, who went to the county fair one night and never came home.
Cotton, 2 inches shy of 5 feet tall and unable to swim, would return covered in mud and scratches. It got so when the neighbours saw her coming, they went inside.
Randy Sellers was missing for weeks, then years, then decades. For Cotton, the steep slopes of the river running past her home in Kenton County, Kentucky, were replaced by even more treacherous terrain: unresolved grief and unanswered questions about two police officers who were with Randy that night.
He vanished in 1980, the year before the disappearance of 6-year-old Adam Walsh in Florida would change the way America looked at missing children. Adam’s father, John Walsh, became a household name and a beacon for parents such as Cotton, who felt alone and ignored by authorities.
Cotton met Walsh and joined an emerging movement of families whose advocacy led to the first databases of missing children, the appearance of lost children’s photos on milk cartons and mailers, and a federal law requiring the FBI to step in if parents asked.
“Since my son’s disappearance, I have made missing children my life,” Cotton told a congressional subcommittee in 1985. “I feel the word ‘missing’ is part of my name.” Cotton gave comfort and advice to other families dealing with missing children. But the one question she could never answer was her own: What happened to Randy?
From the morning his parents reported Randy missing, police seemed to be two steps behind. Yet, the last people known to have seen him alive were two officers who were supposed to take Randy home after he got drunk at the fair.
In the years that followed, the investigation would take vertiginous twists and turns. There was a neighbour who turned out to be a child molester and a drifter who professed to be a serial killer; a psychic nurse who said she knew where Randy’s body was buried; and a naval officer who claimed he could detect magnetic currents surrounding corpses. About once a decade, a new detective has reopened the file to pursue a new lead.
No trace of Randy has been found, and no one has managed to quiet the suspicions Cotton has about the officers who were with Randy that night.
Now 77, she lives in an assisted living facility. Her younger son, Tyran, died decades ago. Her husband, John, died of cancer last February.
“God left me here for a reason,” she said. “To find Randy — or to let whoever did something to him know that, no, I’m not going to let it be forgotten.”
On the Saturday night he disappeared, Randy was ready to party. He wore a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, and his hair fell in a cascade that girls found alluring. Meeting up with friends at the fair, he flashed a $50 bill he had just been paid for a roofing job and proceeded to share a pint of whiskey, smoke pot and wash some quaaludes down with Coca-Cola, a friend later recounted in an affidavit. Eventually, witnesses said, he could not stand up.
Police took Randy to their on-site trailer, where they determined he was 17 — a minor — and looked for someone who could take him home.
Security at the fair was provided by volunteer officers from the Kenton County Police Reserve. Eventually, the reserve officer in charge that night, Sgt. Robert Wehner, decided to drive Randy home himself.
Randy was known to county police as a hell-raiser. He had been to juvenile detention and, more recently, had been hospitalised for drug use, according to deposition transcripts. Wehner was told by a supervisor that if Randy caused any problems, he should be taken to jail, according to a transcript of police radio communications that night.
Friends and family later said Randy knew that coming home to his mother and stepfather wasted was going to get him in trouble at a hopeful time, when he had earned his GED diploma and was planning to become an ironworker like his stepfather.
As the patrol car neared the country road where Randy’s family lived, he suddenly “came over the seat,” Wehner later wrote in his report, striking the officer in the forehead and grabbing him around the neck.
Wehner called for backup, and Randy was transferred to the patrol car of Jay Seifried, a full-fledged officer who had been on the force for eight years. But Randy refused to point out his house, the officers said.
Finally, the two patrol cars pulled over near a railway overpass in the tiny town of Visalia and let him out, the officers said in their reports. He was about 800 metres from his family’s house.
On Sunday morning, after hearing from neighbours who were at the fair, the Cottons called police, who said that Randy was not in custody. They called hospitals, friends and relatives. No one had seen him.
It was an era before dashboard cameras, body cameras or cellphones could have provided clues. All the Cottons had was a handwritten note from Randy saying he had gone to the fair.
That Monday, police told the family that officers had dropped Randy off without taking him home.
“The young man was to turn 18 in two weeks, it was not yet 10pm, and I felt there was absolutely no danger in releasing him in a familiar neighbourhood,” Seifried wrote in a summary of the episode for his supervisors.
A search was launched Monday, but the Cottons felt that it lacked urgency. That afternoon, a county police official requested help from a water rescue team from neighbouring Boone County, according to a call log. After being told there would be a charge, the Kenton official replied, “If there’s a fee, just forget it,” according to the call log. When the Cottons found out, they protested, and the water rescue team was brought in the next day to search the Licking River.
Two weeks later, an officer thought he spotted Randy in the back seat of a Mustang but lost the car in traffic.
The Cottons, for their part, jumped on every lead. They called police when they spotted buzzards at a nearby dump. When Cotton learned that Wade Gibson, a neighbour who had given Randy a ride to the fair, had pleaded guilty to molesting a stepchild, she told police she was certain Randy was buried on the hill behind the Gibsons’ trailer.
Increasingly frustrated by the investigation, Cotton and her husband even sued the county. They claimed police had recklessly endangered Randy by failing to take him into custody or hand him over to his parents, and in 1984, the Cottons received a US$21,000 ($34,000) settlement — and a promise that police would follow every lead on Randy and “not close the file until he is found.”
In the 1990s, police pursued a claim by an incarcerated man that Randy was one of more than 70 people he had killed. Officers, forensic anthropologists and cadaver dogs repeatedly searched a state park, and federal marshals even transported the man from federal prison to Kentucky in hopes that he would indicate where the body had been buried.
Far less energy was devoted to examining a possibility much closer to home: that police had played some role in the disappearance.
Early on, the two officers who dealt with Randy that night passed polygraph exams, although subsequent studies, including by a congressional commission, have concluded that polygraph tests are neither scientifically valid nor especially effective. From the beginning, the accounts of the two officers present that night differed on basic facts, such as what time they dropped him off, which side of the railroad trestle they were on and how intoxicated the teenager was.
In the mid-2000s, Detective Fred Scroggins of the Kentucky State Police began investigating tips that Randy was buried on property belonging to the father of a law enforcement officer who had been friends with Seifried. He interviewed Wehner, then in his 60s and close to retirement from a job as a maintenance man.
Both officers had repeatedly said, including in depositions, that they had not hit or harmed Randy. But in his interview with Scroggins, Wehner changed his story, saying that Seifried had stopped behind a nearby store and smacked the teen in the face.
Wehner, apparently realising the significance of what he had just said, tried to backpedal, Scroggins said in an interview. But Scroggins, who is retired from policing, said that after the disclosure, “his whole mood, mindset and everything changed. The guy was in emotional distress.”
Scroggins thought the next step was to interview Seifried, who lives outside Chicago. But he could not get permission to go. He was told, he said, that the trip was too expensive. A Kentucky State Police spokesperson, Capt. Paul Blanton, said Scroggins’ notes did not reflect that he had made a request to travel.
The Cottons, their hopes dashed after the serial killer proved to be a dead end, were left with their original suspicions. “I always thought the cops did something because they denied it. They denied having him,” Cotton said.
Virginia Braden, a private investigator who has been examining the case pro bono, said she was struck by how many people with some connection to the case were still around. “I think what’s unusual is the amount of time that has passed and the lack of willingness to take the common-sense next step,” she said.
In September 2022, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children sent two retired law enforcement officers to review the Sellers file. The investigators came to much the same conclusion as Scroggins.
“The most glaring and probable suspect(s) regarding the MP’s disappearance and probable death are two members of law enforcement,” the investigators wrote in a 17-page report to the Kentucky State Police.
They were especially critical of Seifried, noting that he had a history of wrecking cruisers, had been caught flirting with a woman while he was supposed to be on patrol and had quit the year after Randy disappeared.
The investigators wrote that Seifried’s “arrogance,” which they said was apparent in his statements and disciplinary records, could be exploited in a professional interrogation in a law enforcement setting, to prevent him from being “too comfortable and controlling.”
When approached by a reporter outside his home in Libertyville, Illinois, Seifried, 73, declined to comment, saying, “There’s nothing to look into, from my perspective.”
A woman who answered the door at the rural Kentucky home of Wehner, 79, declined to speak to a reporter.
Spike Jones, current chief of the Kenton County Police, said in a written statement that the Randy Sellers case remains open. He and the department welcome “any attention that can be brought to this case.”
The Kentucky State Police initially told The New York Times that there had been no recent developments in the case. But in a follow-up response last month, Blanton said that new information about “possible involved individuals” had led to additional interviews and that “plans are in process to reinterview” Seifried.
Cotton long ago gave up the idea that Randy had drowned in the Licking River, saying if he had, the body would have been found by now. She always knew he had not run away, in part because he had been about to turn 18 and inherit enough money to buy a used car.
She and her husband, John, erected a headstone for Randy before John died. But it did not feel complete. “If I could find one bone that belonged to Randy,” she said, “I could bury him with my family.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Shaila Dewan
Photographs by: Madeleine Hordinski
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