Denise Sue Clinton was an adorable nine-year-old with a reddish-blonde pixie cut, freckles, and a maturity far beyond her years. In early July of 1965, she had just come back from a two-week vacation in California with her parents and her six-year-old sister Diana.
On the evening of July 7th, her parents dropped her off at the Great Plains Motel right off of U.S. 71 in Kansas City, an establishment which was run by her maternal grandparents, Chelcie and Dorothy Reynolds. The motel and its adjoining bar and restaurant were somewhat remote, with no other businesses or residences nearby. Denise was going to spend the night there as she sometimes did, sleeping on a daybed in her grandparents’ living quarters behind the check-in.
At approximately twenty minutes past two on the morning of July 8th, the bell in the lobby went off, signifying that a customer wished to get a room for the night. Dorothy Reynolds got out of bed and sidled up to the front desk, faced with a handsome, dark-haired young man with piercing blue eyes. She asked if she could help him, but then, the man pulled out a revolver and pointed it at her. “Don’t say nothing. Just give me the money,” he said.
Dorothy, trying to keep her calm, opened the cash register and handed over the two-hundred-forty-six dollars within. The robber pocketed the money, and then forced Dorothy back into the rear bedroom of the living quarters, where her husband Chelcie was still asleep. The gunman bound the Reynolds’ with duct tape and shoved rags in their mouths, then silently disappeared into the night.
Dorothy and Chelcie, relieved that the terrifying ordeal was over and that no one had gotten hurt, managed to free themselves from their bonds, and went to check on their granddaughter Denise, who was presumably still sleeping on her cot in the next room.
But to their horror, they discovered that nine-year-old Denise was gone.
Police arrived at the motel within minutes and immediately set up roadblocks all along the highway in an attempt to apprehend the kidnapper. They also roused every other guest of the motel, and interviewed all the staff members of the restaurant and bar next door, asking them if they had seen anything unusual.
One of the motel guests gave police a lead by stating that he had seen a white 1959 Oldsmobile sedan in the parking lot shortly before the girl had vanished. Authorities eventually delved into the backgrounds of the thousands of owners of such vehicles in the states of Kansas and Missouri, but came up empty-handed.
Likewise, showing Dorothy Reynolds a series of booking photos of possible suspects produced no useful information, as she did not recognize the assailant among the pictures. And although detectives had managed to obtain a clear, partial fingerprint from the duct tape that had been used to restrain the Reynolds’, no match to any known offender was ever discovered.
The whereabouts of little Denise Clinton would not be revealed until 1967. Out in the American West in September of that year, two cowboys riding through a forest near Sundance, Wyoming made a grim discovery: the skeletal remains of a little girl.
Upon forensic examination, the bones were found to belong to nine-year-old Denise Sue Clinton. The site where her body was found lay more than eight-hundred miles away from where she had been taken.
Investigators were unable to obtain much useful evidence from the skeleton, and though the Clinton family was somewhat consoled by the fact that they finally knew what had become of the child, the individual responsible for her death was never identified.
Denise’s parents have since passed way, but in 2015, her sister Diana White told the Kansas City Star that even if the killer was eventually found, she probably would not want to know who it was, stating, “It’s not going to bring her back or change the impact on our lives.”
The murder investigation, however, remains active.
Crime Immemorial 