SOLVED: South Dakota Cold Case | Leo Price, 5 | Missing Boy Found After 52 Years

On the morning of September 14th, 2023, two environmental scientists from South Dakota State University were working a grid of soil core samples near an abandoned mineshaft in the Black Hills approximately 2 miles northeast of Kuster when one of them found something that should not have been there. They were not looking for a missing child.

 They were part of a federal assessment program mapping heavy metal contamination from historic mining operations, arsenic, lead, mercury left behind in the soil from over a century of gold rush extraction. Their equipment was designed to read what lay beneath the ground on that particular September morning. In that particular grid square, it returned a reading that did not correspond to the chemistry of a 19th century mine.

 The younger of the two researchers, a doctoral student named Caitlyn Row, set down her sample tube and looked at her readout for a long moment. Then she called her supervising professor. He looked at the readout. They exchanged a glance. Then he called the Kuster County Sheriff’s Office. What had been inside shaft SC197411 for 52 years was not heavy metal contamination.

Leo Price was 5 years old when he walked into the Ponderosa pine forest at the edge of his family’s property outside Kuster, South Dakota on the afternoon of June 28th, 1974 and did not come back. He had brown hair and a red baseball cap he wore with the brim bent down on both sides. the way he had found it. He called himself captain.

He was about to start kindergarten in September. The forest kept him for 52 years. This is Leo’s story. But it begins in a way with the ground speaking. Kuster, South Dakota, sits in the southern black hills at an elevation of over 5,000 ft inside a landscape of ponderosa pine forest and granite outcroppings and creek valleys that have been worked and reworked since the gold rush of 1876 brought more people than the territory could absorb and left behind when most of them had moved on.

 A particular kind of permanence, old mine shafts going down into the hills. The faint lines of ore roads through the trees, the sense that the land has been examined carefully and holds what it holds. By 1974, the town of roughly 2,000 residents had turned like much of the southern Black Hills toward tourism.

 The proximity to Kuster State Park to Mount Rushmore 40 5 minutes north to the Crazy Horse Memorial being slowly carved from the granite a few miles away. The prices had come with the timber industry, which was still a meaningful employer in the region, and had made the town theirs over two generations. Earl Price ran a cut at a Black Hills sawmill operation, and had done so since the late 1950s.

 He was a man of straight lines and early mornings, and the particular quietness of someone who has found his place and intends to stay in it. Ruth Price Nhalloway from a Mitchell family that came west in the 1940s worked the register at a tourist gift shop on Main Street. The kind of shop that sold Black Hills gold earrings and handcarved wooden animals and postcards of the granite faces on the mountain up the road.

She had a way with the summer visitors that kept them returning, and she applied the same warmth at home with a completeness that did not distinguish between the two. Joanna was 9 years old and was in that particular phase of being nine, where she considered her younger brother a complication she had not agreed to.

She had a Donnie Osman poster on her bedroom wall. She had a best friend named Cindy who lived six blocks away and she was heading there on the morning of June 28th. Leo was five. He had brown hair that stood up in the back regardless of what Ruth did with it each morning. And he wore a red baseball cap with the brim bent down on both sides the way he had found it at a church rummage sale which was not the way baseball caps were designed to be worn.

He had adopted it with complete conviction and had not removed it voluntarily since. He called himself Captain because of a Captain America comic book he had acquired by means that neither Earl nor Ruth could fully reconstruct, and he had formed from it the view that captains were the people who determined where things went, which seemed to him to be the correct role for a person to hold.

 He carried sticks everywhere consistently. The way certain children carry objects that are not toys and are not nothing, he would select one from the yard or the forest edge and carry it until it broke or he found a better one. The stick by the back fence was always the current best candidate. He was evaluating sticks when Ruth last looked out the kitchen window. outside.

 The summer of 1974 was the summer Nixon was about to resign, which Earl followed on the radio in the truck with the CB crackling. It was the summer Evil Conval was planning to jump the Snake River Canyon on a rocket, which Leo considered real in the way 5-year-olds consider things real, completely without qualification or doubt.

 The ponderosa pines on the ridges above town stood the way they always stood. Darkbarked, patient, full of what they held. That last ordinary afternoon was June 28th, 1974. June 28th was a Friday. Earl was at the mill. Joanna had left for Cindy’s house after breakfast. She said goodbye to Ruth on her way out the door and did not say anything in particular to Leo, who was eating cereal at the kitchen table and examining a stick he had brought in from the yard.

 Because she would be back for dinner, and there was no particular reason to say anything specific to a 5-year-old brother about a 6-hour absence. She has thought about that breakfast every year for 52 years. She cannot see it clearly. She has not been able to. Ruth was in the kitchen doing dishes at approximately 2:15 in the afternoon.

Leo had been playing near the tree line at the back of the property. The forest came right up to the fence there, and there was a gap in the fence that Earl had been meaning to repair since April. She had checked on him from the window at 1:45. He had been near the gap, working his stick through the leaf litter with the focus he brought to all of his evaluations.

At 2:15, she looks out the window again. He is not at the treeine. She goes to the back door and calls his name. She goes to the fence and calls again. She pushes through the gap in the fence and stands on the pine needle floor of the forest calling into the trees. Her voice going out and coming back changed slightly flattened the way voices sound when the trees are close and the silence is bigger than the sound.

She calls until she is shouting. At 2:40, she calls Earl at the mill. At 2:45, Earl calls the Kuster County Sheriff’s Office. By 4:00, 30 people are in the forest behind the Price property. The terrain is open enough in some respects. Ponderosa forest without dense undergrowth and hostile in others, the old mine shafts, the creek ravines, the disorienting sameness of the trees at distance.

Search coordinators are aware of the shafts. They have a partial map. It is not complete. The search runs for 5 days. It covers a threemile radius from the fence gap, pulling in resources from Rapid City, from the National Forest Service, from neighboring counties. Dogs work the forest in parallel lines. On the fourth day, a searcher finds Leo’s stick near the fence gap, lying in the leaf litter as though he set it down, meaning to come back for it.

It offers no direction. It is the last physical evidence that he was there. Leo’s red cap is not found. On July 15th, 1974, the active search is suspended. Deputy Sheriff Frank Ames of the Kuster County Sheriff’s Office worked the case with the methodical urgency of a man who understood what was at stake and the resources available to a small rural department in 1974.

Which is to say he worked every available angle and ran out of angles before he ran out of willingness. He interviewed every adult within a reasonable radius. He looked at every male with any documented history of concern. One name moved through the investigation without producing a firm result. Vernon Klene was 45 years old in the summer of 1974.

a former hard rock miner who had worked several Black Hills operations in the 1950s and early 1960s before his back gave out and who had since made a living doing handyman and odd jobs work around Kuster. He had no criminal record. He drove a green pickup that was frequently visible on the forest roads in the area.

 He collected and sold firewood which required regular trips into the pines. and this was his stated explanation whenever the truck was noted anywhere. There were no witnesses who placed him at the price property on June 28th. One person said something that deputy Ames recorded and then largely set aside. Howard Breck was 41 years old in 1974, living four properties down from the prices, employed by a roofing and general contracting company whose owner had Vernon Klein’s brother-in-law as a silent partner. He told Ames that he had

seen Klein’s green pickup on the forest road approximately a mile north of the Price property on the evening of June 28th, the evening Leo disappeared and again on the evening of June 30th. He did not know if this was significant. He thought he should mention it. Ames noted it. He spoke to Klene again. Klene said he had been working wood in that area all that week and showed Ames a court of pine he was selling to a family in town. He was cooperative.

There was nothing more to act on. Howard Breck did not mention in his 1974 statement the other occasion on which he had seen Klein’s truck idling on the road near the forest edge. an afternoon some weeks earlier before Leo disappeared when he had seen Klene watching the Price children playing in the yard.

 He had not known then that this was something. By 1975, he knew it was something. He had worked for a man whose partnership with client’s family he did not want to endanger. He had told himself that what he had seen was inconclusive. He had told himself these things with gradually decreasing persuasiveness for 50 years.

 The case was reclassified from active to pending in 1977. Frank Ames retired in 1986 and died in 2004. Vernon Klein died of emphyma in January of 1991. His son Dale, who had been one-year-old in 1974, grew up in Rapid City and worked in construction. He had no knowledge of what his father had done. Joanna Price submitted her DNA to Namoose in 2019 after a news segment about cold case dena program.

 She drove to a collection site in Sou Falls on a Saturday morning and gave the swab and went home and did not allow herself to expect anything specific from it because she had learned over 45 years not to attach too much anticipation to any single available action. She had been taking the available actions since she was 9 years old.

Earl Price died of a heart attack in January of 1998. He was 57 years old. He had spent 24 years going to the same mill and coming home past the same fence line without finding an answer to the question the fence line had attached to itself in June of 1974. He died without one. Ruth Price is 81 years old.

 She has been in a memory care facility in Rapid City since 2021 when it became clear she could no longer safely manage the house outside Kuster alone. Her memory is uneven in the way that ninth decade memory becomes uneven. She will lose the thread of a recent conversation and then without transition produce the words of a song from 1963.

She has always known what happened in June of 1974. She has never been confused about that specific fact. She asks about Leo in her lucid periods. She has been asking for 52 years. Joanna Price is 61 years old. She taught elementary school for 30 years and retired in 2022 and has spent her retirement doing several things she deferred while working and also continuing to do what she has always done, which is try to reconstruct the breakfast table on the morning of June 28th, 1974.

She remembers leaving the house. She remembers saying goodbye to her mother. She does not have a clear memory of what Leo was doing when she walked out, whether he looked up, whether she looked at him, whether there was a word between them that last ordinary morning. She has been working at this for half a century, it has not gotten clearer.

 If Leo’s story found you today, subscribe so you’re here for the next case. There are more families like the Prices, and they deserve to be followed. Back to Leo. Howard Breck is 93 years old. He lives in an assisted living facility on the edge of Kuster in the town where he spent his adult life and where he knows has always known more than he said.

 He has outlived Vernon Klene by 32 years and has spent those years in a careful private argument with himself about what he saw in 1974 and what it meant and what he owed and to whom. He told part of the truth to a deputy in the summer of 1974 and was not asked the follow-up questions that would have required him to tell the rest.

 and he had allowed himself for half a century to live inside the distinction between these two things. He is 93 years old. He has run out of arguments that satisfy him. When the South Dakota D team comes to his facility in the fall of 2023, Howard Breck is ready to tell them everything. The EPA’s abandoned mineelands program had been assessing historic mine sites in the Black Hills for contamination since 2021.

Arsenic and lead and mercury left in the soil from a century of extraction. Sites that posed ongoing environmental and safety risks and that required systematic documentation. In the late summer of 2023, a South Dakota State University team was covering a grid of sites in the Kuster area, including a cluster of small shafts from the 1890s in a stand of ponderosa pine 2 miles northeast of town.

 On the morning of September 14th, Caitlyn Row is running her sample equipment when the readout from a position 40 feet from shaft SC1 197411 returns a signature that does not belong to the contamination profile of a 19th century gold extraction site. She checks her calibration. She runs a second sample. The reading is consistent. She calls her professor.

He arrives. He looks at the readout and then he looks at the shaft and then he calls the Kuster County Sheriff’s Office and says something that the duty officer will later describe as the most unusual sentence he received in 22 years of that job. The South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation dispatches a forensic team on September 16th.

 The mine shaft gated with an original iron mechanism, corroded but still functional, showing evidence of deliberate operation, is excavated with the specific care of investigators who are not sure yet what they are working with. On September 18th, they know the remains are consistent with a child. They are in a position consistent with having been placed rather than having fallen.

Physical trace materials recovered from the shaft, pine splinters, a soil variant inconsistent with the surrounding geology, a fragment of fabric, are documented and analyzed. Dena comparison runs against Joanna’s 2019 reference sample in November of 2023. Detective Sandre Bird of the South Dakota Decki calls Joanna Price on a Tuesday morning.

 She tells her that remains have been found. She tells her that the Dena is a match. She tells her that Leo has been found. Joanna is quiet for a moment. Then she says, “I need to call our mother.” Howard Breck had not in 1974 known with certainty what he was seeing. He had not known when Klein’s truck sat on the forest road the evening Leo disappeared what the truck contained or where it had been.

 What he had known, what he had carried, in a form that would not resolve into anything he could use to talk himself out of it, was the afternoon some weeks earlier when he had seen that truck idling near the forest edge on a road where Klene had no particular reason to be, and had seen Klene watching the price children in the yard below.

He had filed this separately from the truck on the road sighting he gave to Deputy Ames. He had told himself it was unrelated. He had told himself many things across 50 years with diminishing conviction. The DC investigation moved in two directions after the September 2023 discovery.

 Forensic analysis of the shaft and its materials and a line by line review of every document in the original 1974 Kuster County case file. Detective Bird found Howard Breck’s statement in Frank Ames’s notes. She found his address. She drove to his facility in Kuster in October. He told her what he had told Ames in 1974. Then he told her what he had not told Ames.

the physical evidence, the soil variant, the trace materials, the gate mechanism’s wear pattern, combined with the geographic record placing Klein’s known firewood roots in proximity to the shaft with the documentation from the 1974 file of his presence in the forest in the days around Leo’s disappearance with Howard Breck’s full account was sufficient for the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation to formally name Vernon Klein as the person responsible for Leo Price’s death. Klene had been dead for

32 years. He could not be prosecuted. A formal statement was issued by the South Dakota Attorney General’s Office on February 11th, 2024, naming Vernon Klene and closing the Leo Price missing person’s case. Dale Klene was notified before the public statement. He was 60 years old. He cooperated fully with the investigation.

He released a statement expressing his condolences to the Price family. He said he had no knowledge of what his father had done and that he was glad, if glad was the right word, that the truth had finally been named. The community of Kuster received the news with the particular quality of response that small communities produce when a familiar name is attached to an unfamiliar act.

 The days of disbelief, the rearrangement, the quiet that settles when something long carried has been finally officially set down. Howard Breck was asked by a Rapid City Journal reporter whether he wished he had said more in 1974. He said, “I’ve been wishing that since 1975.” There is a photograph of Leo Price from Easter of 1974. taken on the front steps of the house outside Kuster 3 months before he disappeared.

He is wearing a new blue shirt Ruth had bought for the occasion and his red cap. And he is squinting into the morning light with the expression of someone who has been asked to hold still and has decided to cooperate briefly and under protest. You can see the ponderosa pine tree line at the back of the property behind him, dark and patient at the edge of the frame.

 The tree line is still there. Ruth Price was in her room at the memory care facility in Rapid City when Joanna arrived in November of 2023 to tell her. Ruth’s memory was having a difficult week, but she understood what Joanna was telling her. She held her daughter’s hand. she said after a long quiet. I always knew he was in those trees.

 I just didn’t know which ones. Joanna Price has said in the months since the case closed that she expected the resolution to release her from the morning she cannot reconstruct. She expected clarity. She is not sure she has gotten it. She still cannot see Leo at the breakfast table on June 28th, 1974. She still does not know whether he looked up when she walked out.

 What she knows now and what she says she is still absorbing is that this is simply a fact about memory and not a failure of love. That the last ordinary morning did not need to be seen clearly in order for it to have been his last ordinary morning with her. That 52 years of searching for it was not wasted because it could not be found.

She said she is working on believing that fully. She said she thinks she will get there. Cases like Leo’s ask questions that do not close with the case. What do we owe to the people who hold partial truths for decades? Who made a calculation in 1974 that protected their livelihood and their comfort and cost a family 52 years of not knowing.

and who have been conducting their own internal accounting of that cost ever since. Is a truth that arrives at 93 still the same truth it would have been at 41? And what do we owe to the forests, the mines, the geographies of places that hold things we have not yet found? the shafts and ravines and silences that keep what we have lost until someone’s instrument reads something wrong on an ordinary Tuesday morning.

Leave those questions in the comments. Tell us what part of Leo’s story stayed with you. Justice came for Leo Price after 52 years through an environmental survey, through a readout that should not have been what it was. through a 93year-old man who ran out of arguments for silence. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next case.

 More solved cold cases are in the description. Leo Price was 5 years old. He wore a red cap with the brim bent down. The forest kept him for 52 years. And then the ground spoke.