Disappearance of Beverly Potts

More letters were sent to reporter Brent Larkin of the Cleveland Plain Dealer beginning in 2000, purporting to be from an elderly and infirm man who claimed that he wanted to confess to molesting and murdering Potts before his imminent death. The anonymous author pledged to turn himself in on August 24, 2001, the fiftieth anniversary of Potts' disappearance, but shortly beforehand wrote again to say he had to enter a nursing home and would be unable to honor his promise or otherwise reveal himself. An extensive investigation failed to turn up any clues to the author's identity; Larkin now believes the letters to have been a hoax.

In 1994, a letter was discovered under a carpet in a Cleveland house, written by a woman who claimed to have caught her husband disposing of Potts' body in their furnace. Upon being traced and questioned by police, the woman said that the allegation was false; she had written the letter solely as a revenge fantasy against her abusive husband.

William Henry Redmond, an Ohio native and former carnival worker, was indicted in 1988 for the 1951 Pennsylvania murder of eight-year-old Jane Marie Althoff. While in prison, Redmond reportedly told a cellmate that he had killed three other young girls. When questioned about the Potts case in particular, Redmond refused to make a statement one way or the other. He was in the general area at the time of Potts' disappearance and had a record of child molestation convictions dating back to 1935; however, Potts would have been considerably older than his previous victims.

In 1980, two retired Cleveland police detectives, James Fuerst and Robert Shankland, revealed that in 1974 they had received a tip from a local attorney with a client whose brother had supposedly confessed to abducting Potts. The detectives subsequently found and questioned the brother, who, they said, had readily admitted to having lived near Halloran Park in 1951 and making a habit of picking up and molesting young girls there. The man did not remember abducting Potts in particular, but said he had "flashes" of memory involving a girl named Beverly. Fuerst and Shankland were convinced the man was guilty, but the county prosecutors' office refused to pursue the case, citing a lack of evidence.

Potts was known to be unusually shy, especially around men, and particularly cautious of strangers. Investigators theorized that she had most likely been enticed into a nearby house or car on her way home by someone she knew, perhaps with the promise of a babysitting job (despite her youth, Potts was regularly hired as a sitter for neighborhood children) or a request to run an errand. It was thought that Potts might have been killed by a neighbor and buried in or around one of the nearby houses on Linnet Avenue, and at least one search to that effect was carried out in 1973, in the basement of what by then was an auto body shop. However, no signs of Potts were found there or elsewhere, and no plausible local suspect has ever been uncovered.

Potts' mother died in 1956—her demise reportedly hastened by "heartbreak" over her daughter's disappearance—and her father in 1970. Beverly's only sibling, Anita, continued to search for her until her own death in 2006. There is a memorial marker to Beverly situated next to the graves of her parents.

In 1955, Harvey Lee Rush, a drifter and Cleveland native, told police in California that he had killed Potts after luring her to a nearby bridge with candy; however, he placed the murder in 1952, a year after Potts' actual disappearance. Rush recanted his entire story shortly after being extradited to Cleveland, saying that he had confessed merely as a way to get back to his hometown.

Blonde, blue-eyed Potts was described as a (shy), quiet, responsible child, fascinated by the performing arts, who was to enter the fifth grade in autumn 1951. At the time she was living on Linnet Avenue with her parents Robert and Elizabeth Potts and her 22-year-old sister Anita.

Beverly Rose Potts (born April 15, 1941) was an American girl from Cleveland, Ohio who in 1951 became the subject of a famous missing persons case when she disappeared (only a few blocks) from her home, after attending a show in a nearby park. She has never been found and her disappearance remains unsolved.

At about 9:30 pm, when the show had ended and the park was emptying, a 13-year-old boy who knew Potts saw her heading diagonally across the park in a northeasterly direction, about 150 yards from the corner of Linnet Avenue and West 117th Street. This would have been the quickest route to Potts' home, which would then only be a few minutes' walk away. The boy recognized Potts by her distinctive "duck-like" gait, walking with toes pointed outward. Several other witnesses said they had seen a girl resembling Potts near a battered black 1937 Dodge coupe idling on West 117th Street, apparently speaking to two young men inside. The various witnesses placed this encounter anywhere between 8:30 and 9:30 pm, but none of them had seen the girl entering the car.