In the last summer of 1982, a little girl would be abducted only a few feet from her home and be found dead weeks later. Her murder would become instrumental in the establishment of a more codified law enforcement response to missing children cases, and serve as the basis for the 1983 passage of the Missing Children’s Act in the U.S. Congress.
Three-year-old Rachael Runyan lived in the small, seemingly safe town of Sunset, Utah with her parents and her two brothers: five-year-old Justin, and eighteen-month-old Nate. The Runyans’ house was situated adjacent to the playground of Doxey Elementary School, and was also very close to Mitchell Park, where the children often played.
It was shortly before noon on Thursday, August 26th, 1982, and the three children asked their mother Elaine if they could go to the school playground for a little while before they ate. Ordinarily, Elaine wouldn’t have allowed them to go outside to play on their own, but the playground was only fifteen feet from the house, and Elaine could keep an eye on the children through the kitchen window as she prepared their lunch, so she told them it would be all right.
Approximately one hour later, Elaine called the kids back, but only Justin and Nate answered her summons, and they seemed terrified. They told their mother that a man had approached them and told them he would take them to the nearby grocery store and buy them bubble gum and ice cream. All three children had followed him part of the way to his car before thinking better of it, but when Justin and Nate expressed doubts about accompanying him, the man had suddenly snatched up the screaming Rachael, stuffed her into his vehicle, and taken off.
The boys described the kidnapper as an African-American male in his early thirties, standing about six feet tall with a fairly slim build. They said he had a handlebar mustache and hair cut in a short Afro, and had driven away in an older model, blue four-door with wood paneling on the sides. Justin and Nate further stated that the man had been sitting in Mitchell Park drinking a cup of coffee and talking to various children before he ultimately abducted Rachael.
Authorities as well as the Runyan family wasted no time in beginning a desperate search for the child, going from house to house, distributing composite sketches of the perpetrator, and taking to the national media to ask for the public’s help in finding little Rachael. A few leads did crop up in the wake of the investigation, but sadly, all led to dead ends.
The search would proceed at full tilt until the late afternoon of September 19th, when it would come to a tragic conclusion. A family out picnicking in the town of Mountain Green, approximately fifteen miles from Sunset, discovered what they initially believed was a doll partially floating in a stream. To their horror, they soon realized that they had actually stumbled across the nude, hogtied, and horribly decomposed body of three-year-old Rachael Runyan.
Though cause of death could not be established due to the state of decomposition, the coroner surmised that the girl had perhaps been smothered. He was unable to reliably ascertain whether she had been raped, but given the fact that the child was found naked, it seemed a likely prospect.
Shortly after Rachael’s remains were laid to rest, the U.S. Congress passed the Missing Children’s Act, which would establish a database of the descriptions, blood types, and fingerprints of missing children with the FBI, and further allow parents of missing children to access this database. The state of Utah also later put in place the Rachael Alert system to quickly inform the public of active child abduction cases and prioritize media announcements when kidnappings occurred. This system was in place until 2003, when it became subsumed under the nationwide AMBER Alert system.
In 1985, police looked into the possibility that a Satanic cult had perhaps been involved with the crime, after a bizarre message was found scrawled on the wall of a laundromat near where Rachael’s body was found. It read: “Beware. I’m still at large. I killed the little Runyan girl! Remember beware!!!” The note was signed with an upside-down cross and the numbers 666. Though this avenue of inquiry was pursued, most investigators seem to have come to the conclusion that the message was written by a prankster.
The Rachael Runyan case was reopened in 2007, and though DNA tests were performed on a few items that had been found with Rachael’s body, none yielded any solid leads. But the most promising person of interest in the case came to light in 2011, when a man was arrested in Pennsylvania for assaulting his girlfriend and abducting their five-year-old son, who was luckily found unharmed.
Upon investigating this individual, detectives determined that he had been living in Sunset, Utah at the time Rachael was murdered, that he closely resembled the composite sketch produced by the description given by Justin and Nate Runyan, and that he had a relative who owned a four-door blue car with wood paneling, very similar to the vehicle the kidnapper had been seen leaving the scene of the crime in. Police do not have sufficient evidence to charge this man, whose name is Melvin Reeves, with the murder, though he remains at the top of their suspect list.
Rachael’s mother Elaine has gone on to become a tireless advocate for missing and abducted children. The park from which Rachael was taken was renamed in the child’s honor in 2016, and in 2017, Utah established the Rachael Runyan Missing and Exploited Children’s Day on August 26th in order to bring greater public attention to child safety issues.
In July of 2022, ABC4 in Salt Lake City reported that a woman had come forward and stated her belief that her uncle was the man who had kidnapped and murdered the three-year-old. She claims that her uncle was known as a sex offender within the family, and had allegedly molested a girl who was babysitting his children, serving some jail time for the crime. Police are taking her accusation seriously enough to investigate fully, though they are not releasing the man’s name, and maintain that their prime suspect is still Melvin Reeves, the man they investigated back in the 1980s. The case is still ongoing.
Crime Immemorial 