Who Killed Keenan Wright??

The Cold Case of 12 year old Keenan Ray Wright

(Found at Find a Grave)

Birth: 1964, Loma Rica

Death: Sep., 1976, Yuba County

"More than 30 years later, (now 40) could renewed attention help shed some light on the mystery of the death of 12-year-old Keenan Wright?

More than 30 years have passed since the sixth-grader from Loma Rica, 15 miles northeast of Marysville, said goodbye to his mother, cut school and never returned home again. His battered body was found 50 days later, concealed in a rock formation on a remote ridge about three miles from his home.

The 1976 disappearance and murder of Keenan Ray Wright is a complex story about growing up poor in one of California's poorest counties, and the belief -- real or imagined -- that the system doesn't work for people on the edges.

It is about a close-knit American Indian family besieged by tragedy and violence, sometimes stemming from their own poor choices and sometimes just bad luck. Woven in are persistent rumors that prominent people committed the act, then hid behind their power and rural influence.

Absent a resolution, it is a damning look at how missing-children cases were handled a quarter-century ago.

Keenan, the youngest of 11 kids, disappeared in an era before John Walsh and Marc Klaas elevated missing children to practically a national obsession. Keenan was killed before the routine use of DNA analysis. Before the elimination of waiting periods for filing missing children reports. Before the Internet or blanket cable coverage.

The 12-year-old boy fell into a void where things we now take for granted -- Amber alerts and Court TV and missing-children networks -- were nonexistent.

The last day anyone knows for sure that Keenan Ray Wright was alive was Sept. 24, 1976. A Friday.

The day dawned clear and cool in rural Yuba County, then home to about 47,000 residents. As is true today, the percentage of county residents living below the poverty line was among the highest in the state.

The Wright family was in this group, straining to survive. Mildred Wright, Keenan's mother, was a member of the Maidu Indian tribe, whose roots run deep in the area. His father, Benjamin Wright, moved to California from Arkansas as a boy, met his wife and worked as a woodcutter.

Keenan was the last of Millie and Ben Wright's 11 children, born at home on April 2, 1964. With so many children, the Wrights eventually moved into side-by-side houses in tiny Loma Rica, with the older kids free to roam one house and Keenan and the younger ones next door with their parents.

"They were a neat bunch of little kids," said the Rev. Bill Taylor, who lived near the Wrights and enjoyed the kids' frequent visits to his pond. "They were nice kids, and they were very close as children."

By the fall of 1976, Keenan had grown to be a 4-foot-11, 110-pound boy with green eyes and a crescent-shaped scar on his right cheek, a reminder of his premature attempt at shaving.

While his older brothers and father had had run-ins with the law, Keenan was what one relative described as a "mama's boy" -- protected, a little spoiled and guilty of little more than neighborhood mischief. He loved baseball and was commended in writing for helping win the 1974 Little League championship by batting 66 times and making 22 singles, nine doubles and two home runs.

On this Friday, Keenan dressed for school in a yellow T-shirt, green trousers and black tennis shoes. Remembering him as a good student who made mostly A's and B's, his sixth-grade teacher later would describe Keenan to investigators as a "very bright boy."

But this had not been his best week. Keenan had been disciplined the day before by his teacher and had cried in class. That Friday, he decided, he wasn't going to school.

Instead, Keenan left his house about 7:30 a.m. and went to a house down the road, where his older sister, Amy, then 13, was hanging out with a group of kids.

"It was the first time (cutting school) for both of us," said Amy Wright, now 44, who never saw her little brother again after that chance meeting.

What happened next appears to be a source of great confusion for law enforcement, who could not fully untangle the stories from the young witnesses who tried to describe Keenan's movements that Friday, according to documents obtained by The Bee. Many admitted to being in drug- or alcohol-induced fogs; their recollections frequently changed.

Deputies believe the last credible sighting of Keenan was at Marysville High School that afternoon. But Amy Wright believes her brother was riding around in a green Ford Mustang with friends, who eventually dropped him off at the old A&W stand (now a church) on Highway 20 on the eastern outskirts of Marysville. The friends didn't have enough gas to drive Keenan on to Loma Rica, Amy said, so her brother apparently decided to hitchhike the 15 miles home.

He never made it.

Where, his family wondered, would a 12-year-old kid go?

Almost immediately, Keenan's mother knew something was wrong, the siblings say today. That Saturday, she reportedly called the Yuba County Sheriff's Department but was told she had to wait 24 hours to file a report. On Sunday, Sept. 26, Millie Wright went into the department to officially report her son missing, but the office wrote it up as a "runaway juvenile."

Millie took matters into her own hands, marching the other children out into the county daily to scour ditches, walk fence lines and knock on doors.

"When Mom burned out one of us, she'd grab another one and take off," said Paul Wright, now 55, the oldest of the Wright kids.

"He was just nowhere," said sister Ava Baker, 50.

It did seem that Keenan had vanished. Then, on the afternoon of Nov. 13, 1976 -- nearly two months after his disappearance -- four young hikers made a grisly discovery on private land about three miles east of Loma Rica.

Near the top of a ridge, tucked beside a distinctive rock formation, was a badly decomposed body lying on its side. A boulder appeared to have been dragged and placed in front of the head. A small boulder rested on top of a hand and oak limbs were stretched across the head and torso, suggesting that someone had tried to conceal the body.

The responding officers could tell it was the body of a boy.

Dental records confirmed it was Keenan, and an autopsy concluded the boy had suffered massive skull fractures.

e appeared to be wearing the same clothes he was last seen in on Sept. 24: a stained T-shirt, green pants and black-and-white tennis shoes. A combination padlock was secured to a brown belt with a large buckle and double row of holes, recognized by family members as a hand-me-down cut to fit the smallest Wright boy. His pockets were empty.

Curiously, the coroner noted, the boy wasn't wearing underwear.

The murder investigation began.

It is hard to fathom today how small a ripple Keenan Wright's case made in the fall of 1976.

In California and the nation, the crime case consuming the public was Patty Hearst's sentencing in San Francisco. In rural Yuba County, headlines were dominated by the murder trial of a man accused of a stabbing death at a Marysville park.

"It didn't seem to me that there was any big outcry (over Keenan)," said a former classmate, Noelle Wilson of West Chester, Ohio, a schoolteacher and the daughter of Roberta D'Arcy.

Fast forward to 2007, when the January disappearance of a 13-year-old Missouri boy created a national media frenzy. Amid live televised briefings, police in a different jurisdiction recognized a truck being sought in the case and discovered not one but two abducted boys -- both alive.

For Keenan, the cultural timing of his disappearance may have been deadly.

It was not until the 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz in Manhattan, followed by the 1981 abduction of 6-year-old Adam Walsh in Florida, that the nation awakened to the terrifying possibilities.

Keenan, whose disappearance on Sept. 24, 1976, did not even merit a mention in the local newspaper until Nov. 11 -- two days before his body was discovered and 46 days after his mother reported him missing.

Even then, the Marysville Appeal-Democrat ran only a small picture of Keenan on Page A-2, saying he was "believed to be in the Marysville-Yuba City area" and to contact the sheriff's office with information.

Yuba County's newly elected sheriff, Steve Durfor, acknowledges that today's protocols would have made the boy's disappearance a higher priority, particularly given his age.

While Durfor, 43, did not personally know much about the case, he said his review of the records indicates that the department did investigate thoroughly after the body was discovered near Browns Valley.

internal sheriff's department records reveals that deputies talked to dozens of witnesses and friends of the boy, whose accounts often conflicted. Investigators found themselves chasing down rumors, at one point interviewing a first-grader who had repeated gossip at school about the killing.

Hard evidence proved elusive. The padlock found on Keenan's body belonged to his school locker. At least 11 people were given polygraph exams, including one brother, but no suspects emerged.

The investigators considered it notable that Keenan wasn't wearing underwear and compiled a list of sex offenders in the area. The boy's family members are divided today over what that detail means. The temperature reached 89 degrees the day Keenan disappeared, and some siblings believe he may have skipped underpants because of the heat. Others worry about the implications.

The investigation did not wither without protest. In December 1976, fliers appeared around town under the name of the "Citizens Committee for Decent Law Enforcement," complaining that the Yuba County sheriff's office had bungled the case.

In January 1977, a group called the Native American Training Associates Institute asked the state attorney general to intervene, but the department reported back a month later that it had found no improprieties or coverups, as the group alleged. The FBI forwarded its investigation to the U.S. Justice Department's civil rights division, but that agency concluded in July 1977 that no further action was needed.

Then the case went cold.

Another 16 years passed before the 1993-94 Yuba County grand jury took another look at the case, but nothing came of it. To this day, rumors persist that the grand jury focused on at least two prominent citizens, whose sexual proclivities, combined with other evidence, prompted the inquiry.

"It had to be somebody he knew," said his sister, Ava. "I don't believe Keenan would get in a car with just anybody."

Keenan Wright is buried on a gentle slope in Keystone Cemetery near Dobbins, where the markers are testament to one family's heartache.

There is Keenan, whose gravestone makes solemn note that he was "Age 12." Nearby are sisters Marilyn and Sheryl, killed by a train in Gridley in 2000 while walking home from a bar. There is a grave for sister Julie, murdered in Reno in 1990. Brother Anthony was killed in a car accident in 1971 at age 18. Their father, Ben, died in 1978, mother Millie in 2003.

Sheriff Durfor vows to pursue any leads in the Keenan Wright case. Given the body's condition and the lack of today's sophisticated forensics, a DNA breakthrough is unlikely, he said. But he urges people to call, no matter how trifling the information seems, and let his department gauge its value.

The surviving siblings say they welcome any new inquiry into the death of the littlest Wright.

"If there is the slightest opportunity to see justice," Ava said, "then I'm for it."..."


SOURCE

https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=17891516