Grand jury investigating 1986 disappearance of 2-year-old boy from his central Pa. home
Grand jury investigating 1986 disappearance of 2-year-old boy from his central Pa. home
Updated: Feb. 15, 2022, 5:20 p.m. | Published: Feb. 15, 2022, 5:20 p.m.
The disappearance of a 2-year-old boy from his Union County home 35 years ago is the subject of a statewide investigative grand jury.
This was confirmed Tuesday to PennLive by two sources including the father of Corey James Edkin who was last seen at his mother’s New Columbia home in 1986.
Neither state police nor the state attorney general’s office would comment on the investigation.
But, James Edkin said he was called last year as a witness but is under a gag order not to say anything. A law enforcement official also confirmed the existence of a grand jury but would not provide details.
Investigators have not said anything since June 2020 when they issued a news release
expressing confidence the cold case would be solved and those who “perpetrated this tragedy” would be brought to justice.
The release cited advances in forensic testing and cooperation from individuals and that a
$10,000 reward was being offered for information that solved the case.
At the time state police were seeking the toddler’s DNA but they will not say if they obtained it.
Edkin was last seen alive about 12:10 a.m. on Oct. 12, 1986, before his mother, Debbie Mowery (then Wise), left for a convenience store in Milton to pick up a pizza.
She told police when she left the Second Street house she shared with Alberta Sones and her two children, Edkin was asleep in her bed.
Sones told police in 1986 she was awake while Mowery was gone and did not hear anything.
Investigators over the years have concluded the little boy neither walked away from the house nor was he abducted by an unknown individual, Watkins said.
State police in a 2020 post on Pennsylvania Crimestoppers stated it is believed a family member was involved in the disappearance. Corey’s parents were divorced in 1986.
James Edkin thinks the case will be solved and holds out hope his son is alive but admits he is doubtful.
He also suspects his son’s grandmother Myrle Miller has information although Union County District Attorney D. Peter Johnson has said there is no evidence she was involved in his disappearance.
Miller is awaiting trial on homicide and related charges that accuse her of poisoning her then husband John W. Nichols, 77, in 2018.
Individuals who have been interviewed over the years say they got the indication that police believe the
Edkin case may be linked to the 1986 murder of Rickey Wolfe and possibly the disappearance and presumed murder of Barbara E. Miller of Sunbury.
Wolfe’s body was found Dec. 12, 1986, at a state Fish Commission boat ramp along the Susquehanna River north of Montandon.
Miller, 30, disappeared July 1, 1989, after returning from a wedding. She never made it to a bar in Mifflinburg where she was to meet friends.
She had received threatening letters of her planning to go to police, a search warrant affidavit states.
A judge on Oct. 10, 2002, declared her dead and her death is classified as a homicide.
The state attorney general’s office last month
confirmed the Miller case investigation remains active.
It was the contention of prosecutors during trials in the Wolfe case that he was killed while blindfolded and his hands handcuffed behind him because the assailants believed he owed a considerable amount of money to cocaine suppliers and he was a police informant.
There also is a reported link between Mowery and an individual in the Barbara Miller case.
