Lawrence and Pat Heikell holding up a photo of missing son KarlDaily Mining Gazette
Lengthy article.
Oct. 29, 2022 rbbm.
By Sarah Portney
Michigan librarian dedicated to 41-year-old Halloween cold case
11-year-old Karl Heikell told his parents he was going for a walk in Calumet, Michigan. He never returned home.
www.nbcnews.com
Forty years later, locals in the town of Calumet are still wondering what happened that Halloween night in 1981.
Now, after all these years, a local librarian is trying to bring the case back into the minds of Calumet residents. Dillon Geshel lives in Chassell, Michigan, just a few miles from Calumet. About 10 years ago, he heard a story that he could not believe.''
In an interview with Dateline, Dillon said he was told this story by a fellow library employee. “So the story was there was someone who moved to the Calumet area for a new job,” Dillon said. “They had a 40-acre plot of land that they were going to use to hunt on. The very first night he was up in a tree stand and he could hear a boy crying in the forest. When he would turn his floodlight on to look around, the crying would stop. Likewise, when he shut the light off, he could hear more crying. He felt like, at times, the crying was maybe getting closer to him.”
Dillon continued. “So this person apparently approached local librarians with this story to say, ‘Can you help me find out if anything strange happened on my property in the past?’”
Dillon said that it was on a return visit to the library that the person read Michigan Tech University’s archives about a child who went missing and was later found on his property.
Dillon’s curiosity was piqued immediately. “So I went to the Michigan Tech University’s archives and pulled the vertical file on missing persons in Michigan's Upper Peninsula,” Dillon said. “And sure enough, I found newspaper clippings about Karl Heikell going missing.”
The young librarian was eager to learn more about this local mystery. “So I put in Freedom of Information Act requests to the state police to get their files and looked to other Upper Peninsula libraries to find some more newspaper clippings,” Dillon said.
As he read through the documents, the decades-old story began to unfold…''
The detective told Dateline he is hoping to close the case. “It's not cold in my opinion anymore,” he said. “I would call it warm.”
After all this time, Dillon Geshel is hoping that his work will help uncover more answers about the boy who went missing all those years ago.
He has compiled the information he’s gathered into a website that details the case.''
''Patty is hoping that the recent interest in her brother’s case brought on by Dillon Geshel’s work will lead to answers. “Over the past 40 years, my parents -- they found out where my brother was at,” she said. “But they don't know what happened to him. So there was never really closure at all,” she said. “Give my mom some peace.”
If you have information about the disappearance and death of Karl Heikell, contact Detective Sergeant Cleary of the Michigan State Police Calumet Post at 906-337-5145''