Nine-year-old James McQueary and his best friend Johnny Hundley were last seen leaving the Frisch's Mainliner restaurant on Wooster Pike in Fairfax, Ohio, at around 4 p.m. on October 15, 1964. By 10:30 that night, they had not come home, and their families called police. Sixty-two years later, James's sister is still searching for answers about what happened to her little brother that afternoon.
The case is detailed in FBI Violent Criminal Apprehension Program records, which lay out the exact timeline of the boys' last known movements and confirm the case remains active today. As reported by WKRC, a Tri-State woman is still seeking answers about what happened to her brother James decades after he disappeared alongside his friend.
At the time he vanished, James stood 3 feet 6 inches tall and weighed 65 pounds, according to federal missing person records housed in NamUs. He was last seen wearing a blue-and-yellow horizontal striped polo shirt, brown trousers, and tan high-topped shoes — details that have remained part of the official case file for more than six decades.
A Hazardous Trench and a Theory That Went Nowhere
Just a day before the boys disappeared, on October 14, 1964, McQueary and Hundley were reprimanded for playing in an open neighborhood sewer construction trench, according to reporting by The Clermont Sun in 2022.
Early in the investigation, police also pursued an entirely different theory. According to cold case documentation compiled by the Charley Project, reports at the time suggested Hundley had talked about running away, which led investigators to issue nationwide alerts focused on freight train lines. Those train alerts produced no confirmed leads, and the runaway theory was eventually abandoned.
A Village Already on Edge
A Previous Tragedy in Fairfax Just two months earlier, in August 1964, 4-year-old Debbie Dappen was killed in the village by a 13-year-old.
A Confession, a Recantation, and a Polygraph
Three years after the boys vanished, in 1967, a 17-year-old U.S. Marine stationed in California who had once lived in Fairfax confessed to stabbing and burying both boys, according to Charley Project records. He later recanted, claiming he had invented the story in hopes of getting a military discharge, and he subsequently passed a polygraph test maintaining his innocence. The confession-turned-recantation remains one of the case's strangest chapters, briefly suggesting a resolution before dissolving into another dead end.
Who's Still Working the Case
The Fairfax Police Department remains the lead agency on the investigation, cataloged under Case #MP64-2, with support from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation's Missing Persons Unit and the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, according to official FBI records. Tips are still processed through Fairfax Police and FBI ViCAP channels more than six decades after the boys went missing.
A Case Still Unresolved
The 1964 disappearance stands out against the broader backdrop of missing children cases in Ohio.
James McQueary's case has remained unresolved for 62 years, with his sister still hoping someone, somewhere, remembers something that could finally bring answers.
