Dick knew Sandy was upset about Farren's disappearance, so he figured he'd do a little looking. "I did some simple things, and it just snowballed from there," Dick says. "The more I looked, I started to get angry that nobody -- none of the agencies or the police -- knew anything about him. Nobody was looking for him, nobody had any record of him." So Dick bought books on how to find missing people and began an organized search.
Dick wrote to celebrity private investigators who have national reputations for finding people. "They did a little looking for me, some pro bono stuff," Dick says. "Mainly some cursory computer searches." No luck.
He went to the library and searched phone books from across the nation, looking for the last name Stanberry. "I wrote to hundreds of them. I made up a postcard with his picture on it and sent out thousands of those. I blanketed the San Francisco area, looking for anybody who knew anything at all. I got absolutely zero response."
He talked to the John Day police chief, who gave Dick copies of all the original police reports. Dick contacted the San Francisco police. "I talked to missing persons down there. They don't have any record, no file on him, nothing."
As the years went by, the bug to find Farren bit Dick harder. Three years ago, he says, his search became "intensive."
"I wrote to the Air Force, to all the Stanberrys in Alaska, to the TV show 'America's Most Wanted.' I did many, many searches on America Online. I wrote the American Bar Association, the American Bowling Congress -- because Farren liked to bowl -- the American Council of Life Insurers. What they'll do, if he ever takes out a life insurance policy, they'll notify me.
"I wrote the American Red Cross, which referred me to the Salvation Army, and they checked their shelters. I wrote to the Arkansas DMV, because there's a Farren Stanberry in Arkansas. They wouldn't respond to my letters, so I got the police on them. They checked, and it's not our Farren. He was Assembly of God in John Day, so I wrote them, and they don't have any record of him. I wrote places in Australia. That's just the A's."
Behind the other letters of the alphabet in Dick's notebooks are hundreds of letters to some pretty unusual places: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Interpol. The Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C. State fish and game commissions. The State Department said Farren had never had a passport. "He liked to read Reader's Digest, so I asked them to look for his name. The Social Security administration has a death index, and he's not in that."
Dick went down to Sacramento, to talk to the folks at the California Bureau of Identification. "They identify remains from deceased unknowns," Dick says. "They don't have a record of anybody like him going through there."
Not a single lead, from any source. Dick would not give up.
"I went to a cult education program. I was thinking that sometimes cults will take a child and just give him a new identity." No leads.
Dick contacted the hotel in San Francisco where Farren was last seen. "I found out he was visiting a gay man there. This man eventually died of AIDS." Was Farren gay? "Possibly," Dick says. "We wouldn't care one way or the other."
"No matter what, we love him," Sandy says. "We just need to know if he's alive or if he's dead."
Dick thinks he's dead. "He was a naive country kid. I don't think he had the expertise to plan a disappearance like this. I think he was murdered and just buried somewhere. He's out there in the California landscape. But we'd just like to find out, to get closure on the thing. His grandmother is in her late 70s. It's a real heartbreak for her, having him just disappear like that."
Even after 18 years, Beulah Harrison has a hard time talking about her grandson. She still lives in the same house, she still has the same phone number. She waits for Farren to call. "If someone would just let me know if he's all right," Beulah says. "That would be a wonderful thing. I think about him every day and every night. You'd think it would get easier, but it doesn't.
