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It was about a missing man from Kittery, Maine named Reeves Kemp Johnson III. He'd been missing since 1983. As somebody who knows the names, faces, and circumstances of most all of the unsolved cases in Maine by heart, the first thing that intrigued me was that I had never heard the name Reeves before.
Reeves Johnson. He was 31 when he went missing, lived a quiet life, came from a good family, an unlikely candidate to simply vanish. And then I saw the photo. It was a man wearing a red trucker cap with his hand blocking the camera from capturing his face. The photo is haunting, and the story of how it was captured even more so.
Detective Brian Kummer was putting this almost 40-year-old case out into the public for the first time since the initial investigation to seek answers for Reeve's surviving family. So I reached out to him and introduced myself in the show. Much to my surprise, I was invited down to view the case file and to interview him and the family.
We spent two days at the Kittery Police Department working with the files, learning about the case, talking with Reeves' siblings Sally and Hugh, and then we produced an episode that was released a month later, November of 2021. Since then, our relationship with the Kittery Police Department, Brian Kummer, and the Johnson family has evolved into a really special collaboration with one goal in mind: to figure out what happened to Reeves Johnson in 1983.
Our investigative efforts have led to new information being discovered that we didn't know in November of 2021. So if you've been here a while and you're already familiar with Reeves, this is not the same episode you heard back then. You've been asking me for an update, but I wanted to wait until we had something good to share. So today, you'll hear some familiar voices, a brand new interview, and new details and insights into the investigation as it stands.
That said, we will cover the entire story in this episode. So if you haven't heard the case of Reeves Johnson, buckle up and we'll jump right in. I'm Kristen Sevey, and this is Murder, She Told. Murder, She Told
Reeves Johnson grew up in an affluent suburb of Philadelphia called Broadax with his parents Kemp and Barbara. He was one of three children, the middle child born in September of 1951. His siblings were Sally, who was the oldest, and Hugh. The name Reeves was a family name that his father Kemp shared. They were both Reeves Kemp Johnson. The father, who was the second, went by Kemp, and his son, the third, Reeves.
Reeves was a hero to his younger brother, Hugh. Reeves was imaginative. He loved stuffed animals and would weave complex stories about their intertwining lives. He was my older brother, one year and nine days. We had the third floor of the attic room of the old house. And obviously, growing up, he was my best friend, my playmate, and my mentor, taught me everything I needed to know at the age of five.
Reeves and Hugh especially were very close. Then the boys were together up in the attic, and they were so close in age, and they played together all the time. I was a little bit of an outlier. Reeves' personality began to develop as a boy. He was thoughtful and careful, or as his mother might have said, slow. Well, my mother used to call him Speed Reeves because whatever he did, it would take forever to get it done. Ha ha ha!
Not so much a procrastinator, but he just, ah, okay, I'm sorting my clothes. Let me look at this for a minute. Okay. We used to call him Molasses in January. He wasn't speedy. He was methodical and purposeful in what he did. But if you were trying to herd three kids out of the house, he was never moving at full tilt.
Reeves and Hugh both went to Germantown Academy, one of the nation's oldest private day schools founded in 1759. Sally, too, went to private schools and eventually boarding school. He's the kind of guy that knew everybody but had a few good friends. He was very happy with his own company, very happy reading. I don't think he particularly got bored. In other words, if he wasn't reading a book, he'd just sit there and be with his own thoughts.
Reading was what he did all the time. And eventually he started to sketch and draw. When we started to drift apart and go our separate ways, a lot of it was because I was always a little physically active, high metabolism kind of kid, wanted to get out and run around.
And all of a sudden, all Reeves wanted to do was sit and read. He would read anything and everything, stuff that was really way beyond his age level, grade level, and be able to understand it. Reeves was drawn to the fantastical worlds contained in the pages of A Wrinkle in Time and Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. He was a deep thinker and found companionship with these authors and others that pondered life's difficult questions.
He was drawn to philosophical books and even philosophical comics like the popular Peanuts Gang. The focal point of the Johnson family was the dinner table. After often brief meals, the family would linger and talk. And no matter what position the kids would take, Kemp would play devil's advocate and debate them. Sally and Hugh both remembered Reeve's quiet zingers, his wicked dry sense of humor, and his deep thinking. And on occasion, his stubbornness.
Dinner at our house, you would sit down, you would eat the meal. Food was done in 10 minutes. You were still at the table an hour and a half later just talking. Conversation. Debate. What do you think about this? My father would, no matter what he thought personally, whatever you thought, he was going to take the opposite side. Tell me why do you think that? Why do you feel that? You know, explore. Explain. Don't just say something because you heard it. Tell me why.
Our dinner table was a place for discussion and friends would stop over and they'd be invited in and we're still having dinner at 7:30, 8 o'clock at night and okay come on in sit down and offer you a glass of milk or something like that but join the discussion and my father and Reeves would get into it because my father was a good one and Reeves would take it very seriously sometimes.
Reeves had his eyes set on a small New England liberal arts school situated in the downtown of Hartford, Connecticut, called Trinity College. He applied early decision and was one of roughly 500 freshmen that were admitted in the spring of 1970 as part of the class of 1974. In his junior year, he studied abroad in Italy. And when he returned home from that trip the following year, he was a changed man. When he came back,
From Rome, he was sick and I heard about it from my parents. It was obviously hypoglycemia, but it was an unnamed condition at that point. So a lot of the symptoms of hypoglycemia can be paranoia, schizophrenia, mood swings. He could sleep 18, 20 hours a day. But again, that's low blood sugar. That's...
your body crashing, which we now all recognize. And for him, he was a very severe case. Reeves dropped out of school and returned home to Philadelphia to live with his parents. He was chronically sick. His parents took him to numerous doctors and psychiatrists around Philly looking for answers. They couldn't figure out what was going on. It was the early 70s, so he had a full beard. He had long hair.
He looked a little like Rasputin. So there was this totally sweet, wonderful human being. But doctors of the day would take one look at him and say, tell him to stop taking drugs. Well, he wasn't taking drugs.
I think it was very frustrating in that he knew something was wrong with him because he was night and day from what he was before. You know, it was very obvious something was wrong with him. That was Sally's husband, Dave. Reeves was eventually diagnosed with a low blood sugar disorder called hypoglycemia. Like Sally mentioned, at the time it was a novel diagnosis, and there wasn't much known about it. With 20-20 hindsight, I can see where
After particularly strenuous exercise, sometimes he would be very, very shaky. And I realized then that that was probably the hypoglycemia coming in, even though it was long before it was officially diagnosed.
And then it was in his senior year at college that it became quite a problem. So he kind of got a medical leave from Trinity and never really went back. Took some courses, tried to just put together enough so he'd get a diploma from somewhere.
He only had one semester to go, so not that big of a deal, but never really got to the point where he had that completion either. And I do know it was very frustrating for me to try and deal with him at that time because it didn't make any sense.
Just, you know, here's my brother, he's my best friend, and he's just not there anymore. At least not the guy I knew. It would have been interesting to see where he would have gone and what he would have done, you know, not having that with the mind that he had. Over the next few years, Reeves learned how to manage it, primarily with diet changes. It was something that ran in his family. His sister and his mom, Barbara, both had similar but milder versions of the same condition.
There was tension between Reeves and his family. They found it difficult to accept this new version of Reeves. They always thought that he would have an ambitious career, but this medical disorder had totally sidelined him.
There's two lives to Reeves in that when I met him and a lot of my interaction with him, very studious, very, very smart, read all the time and talked to him about anything. Very interesting. When he came back from that, the hypoglycemia had gotten the better of him and he couldn't concentrate and all that. So he, you know, he came home and at that point his life pretty much changed.
My father, because of his upbringing, Christian scientist and this Quaker balance, he didn't understand why Reeves couldn't make up his mind to be well and just go ahead and do it. Mother just adored him because he was sweet and charming and wonderful. At the end, I think it was improving. When he was sick and when he was living there,
He and dad would get into it because dad would, you know, pushing him to, okay, come on, you know, pull yourself together. You can do better than working as a dishwasher. And...
it would rile him. And I'm sitting there watching. I remember one of the last dinners. I happened to be there and watching the dynamic go on and wishing I could just make them both stop. You know, Dad, leave it alone. You're not getting anywhere. Reeves, back off. You know, don't let it get to you. He's just being your dad. They had very similar minds. And there was a time when
They could have long and great discussions, but I think Dad was getting frustrated with the situation and venting that frustration. And Reeves was also frustrated with the situation. He didn't want to feel the way he was feeling, but he didn't know what to do about it. And getting pestered about it, pushed about it, pressured about it wasn't going to do any good either. When he was 26 years old, after five years of living with his parents, he decided to move to southern Maine.
Sally and Dave lived close by in Cape Nettick in York, Maine. Reeves eventually settled into a small, single-room rental cabin right off the main traffic circle in Kittery, on Jewett Court, a street that no longer exists. He had a parking spot out front for his red Volkswagen Beetle. Kittery is the southernmost town in Maine, right on the border of New Hampshire. Back in the 70s, it was a rustic, rough-around-the-edges little town.
The neighboring border city was Portsmouth, and just beyond that was Exeter, where he found work at Donnelly Manufacturing. They were a medium-sized company with about 200 employees that made things out of sheet metal. Not long after Reeves settled into Kittery in 1978, Dave's then-Boston-based company was bought by a company in Georgia that decided to uproot the facility and move operations south. All employees were given notice of the move with less than a month to start.
It was a good job, so the young family, Sally, Dave, and their son Trip, packed up and moved to Georgia. With their sudden departure, Reeves was left without any nearby family. He was never a big social person, and he had a few close friends in Philadelphia and not too many at all up here that I never really knew of. So I think when he went back to Philadelphia, it was good because he was with a bunch of people.
And he enjoyed that, just being in a room full of people talking. I think he was lonelier than he wanted to admit. At first, Reeves worked as a general laborer for Donnelly. But at the suggestion of his boss, he undertook welding classes. After graduating, his family all remembered his pride at his accomplishment. It was the first educational program he'd succeeded at since leaving Trinity.
I think he enjoyed doing things. He enjoyed getting out of his head and doing things with his hands. I mean, like, he enjoyed drawing and artwork and making things. And I think this was something where he'd go to work, and at the end of the day, he can look at it and say, I made that. While Reeves was working and living in Maine and New Hampshire, he was living two or three hours away in Vermont, despite the fact that they were only separated by a modest drive. A distance had grown between them.
It wasn't so much that I'd reach out. I wasn't calling him. He wasn't calling me. Occasionally, he'd just show up at my door in Vermont, and we'd spend a weekend. But it was like, why are you here? I took a drive. But then again, I'd be there in an apartment with not much room and
And he was fine, and I certainly didn't want to do everything I could for him, but I was struggling to get my own life going. I didn't have a lot of extra cash or space or anything else to really support him or help him out. You know, we weren't close, like I said. I'd try to find out what was going on, and he wouldn't really give me any kind of real answers. One, I confronted him one time with the fact that he seemed to be in this funk all the time.
He said, yeah, well, maybe, you know, agreed that he was in it. And just whether or not you want to call it a depression or what. But I said, sometimes, Reese, I want to just grab you, smack you across the face three times, and then say, there, wake up and be happy and have it work. And he looked at me and he says, I wish you could, too.
Hugh remembered Reeves coming to his wedding in August of 1982, a small, low-budget affair that was done at a state park. The photo from this event is the only photo we have of Reeves together with his two siblings, and it was the last time that Hugh would ever see his brother.
Hugh and Sally were busy young adults getting on their feet, so communication with Reeves was limited to writing letters and occasional phone calls. They both relied on their mother to fill them in on the latest news with Reeves. She had a regular Sunday call with him to catch up on life. In December of 1982, Reeves went home to Philly for Christmas, driving down in his little red bug.
It was a short trip, and he left the day after Christmas. As he passed through New York City, he picked up a hitchhiker named Richard, who said that he was on the way to either Detroit, Michigan or Ontario, Canada. Kittery would be on the way to neither city, but he accepted a ride from Reeves nonetheless. He was warm and gentle, kind, kind.
would give you the shirt off his back. As my mother wrote somewhere, Reeves never could pass up a hitchhiker. When Reeves crossed over into Maine on 95 and got off on his exit for Kittery, the hitchhiker gave him no further instructions on where to drop him off. So Reeves invited him in. Reeves gave him a place to stay, helped him with meals, hooked him up with cigarette money, and took him where he needed to go. When Reeves was at work, Richard stayed at the cabin by himself.
Kemp and Barbara remembered Reeves telling them that he washed his clothes in the shower, was kind of quiet and hummed a lot. Richard stayed with Reeves from Sunday the 26th until Friday, January 7th, almost two weeks. According to the original detective's notes, someone came up from Boston to retrieve him, and Richard left while Reeves was at work. Strangely, he took a key to Reeves' cabin.
On Sunday, January 30th, Reeves had his last weekly call with his family. And later that week, on Thursday, February 3rd, 1983, he worked his last day at Donnelly Manufacturing. On Thursday morning, he picked up his co-worker, Curtis, to give him a ride to work. And after work that day, he dropped him off on his way home. On Friday the 4th, Reeves didn't show up to Donnelly.
He hadn't shared anything with his family about any plans to quit. Quite the contrary, he was proud of his welding work. But after Thursday the 3rd, Reeves didn't work another day at Donnelly. This was the last day Reeves was reliably identified as alive and well. This final day at work, Thursday the 3rd, is what I'll refer to as Day 1.
According to his bank records, that same day he deposited a $70 check, withdrew $30 in cash, and purchased a set of guitar strings. On day two, Friday, February 4th, Reeves' checkbook was used to spend $208 in today's money at a grocery store called Shaw's in Stratum, New Hampshire. The town of Stratum lies between Exeter and Kittery. It's a town that Reeves might travel through during his commute between work and home.
We've been told that Reeves was a regular at a grocery store in Kittery called Newsome's Market, and we don't really know whether he shopped at this Shaw's. Even more notable than the location, though, is the amount. $208 is a lot for a single guy living in a tiny one-room cabin with a barely functional kitchen.
Sometime between day one and day three, Reeves' neighbor, Chris Schroeder, who also lived in a one-room cabin, saw a young man knock on Reeves' door. He was let in, and a short time later, he left on foot. Chris later described the man as having black hair and a mustache, and he said he wore a black leather jacket and dark pants. On day four, Sunday, February 6th, Reeves was supposed to have a call with his sister, Sally.
His parents were overseas on a trip, and they asked Sally to check in on Reeves for their standing Sunday call. She called twice, but he didn't pick up. Also on day four, there was a big snowfall, and the snow would sit, undisturbed, in front of Reeves' door for many more days. It would later be determined that sometime between day one and day four, Thursday to Sunday, all of Reeves' valuable belongings were removed from the cabin.
On day 7, Wednesday, February 9, somebody used Reeves Ocean National Bank checkbook to make a purchase in Portsmouth.
Portsmouth, like Stratum, sits between Reeves' work and his home. The store was a specialty shop called Daymart, a winter thermal wear undergarment retailer, and it was at the height of its popularity after having been publicly endorsed by the 1980 Winter Olympic Games. The total spent was about $160 in today's money, and it was for two different articles of clothing.
Though we don't know exactly what the garments were, we know that one was a heavyweight material, size small, and cost about $87 in today's money. And the other was a regular weight extra large and cost about $75 today. Though we tried to pinpoint the exact purchase by comparing size and price, we haven't been able to narrow it down. That Day Mart store no longer exists.
The former 1811 Woodbury Avenue store is now a BJ's wholesale club. On day 8, Thursday, February 10, someone went to Reeves' bank and withdrew $30 from his checking and $50 from his savings, leaving only a few dollars left in each account.
Kittery PD detective Ron Avery later visited the bank and spoke with branch manager J. Clinton Dickerson to verify who came in that day. The bank tellers identified the person withdrawing the money as Reeves. On day 10, Saturday, February 12, someone went to a radio shack in South Portland and wrote a check from Reeves' checkbook for some bookshelf speakers. They were $130 each.
We found the exact model from a 1983 catalog, and they were called "Realistic Minimus 7 Speakers." In addition to purchasing the speakers, a down payment of about $80 was made on a Pioneer brand car radio and cassette player. The full cost of it was $738 in today's money.
South Portland is an outlier compared to the other locations where Reeves' checkbook was used. All of the other locations are within 10 miles of where Reeves lived and worked, but South Portland is 50 miles away from his home in Kittery. Furthermore, Radio Shack had a much closer location, in Portsmouth. We are not sure what to make of this.
The following day, Sunday, February 13th, or Day 11, a check for the $650 balance to take home the car radio was written out to Radio Shack in South Portland, bringing the total spent at Radio Shack close to $1,000. That entire week, from Day 5 to Day 9, Sally had been calling Reeves' cabin repeatedly to no avail. By the time Friday and Saturday rolled around, she was calling nearly every hour with no answer.
When her parents returned home to Philly from their vacation on day 10, she told them what was going on in her attempts to reach Reeves. The next day, on Sunday, day 11, Barbara and Kemp tried to reach Reeves by phone again for his normal weekly call. When they were unsuccessful, they contacted the Kittery Police Department on Monday, which was February 14th.
The next day, Tuesday, February 15th, Day 13, Officer Bromfield of the Kittery Police Department contacted Reeves' landlord and asked for his help performing a wellness check at Reeves' cabin. They found the snow in front of his cabin door undisturbed. It was clear that nobody had been there since the snowfall more than a week earlier.
The door was unlocked. They found the interior of the cabin freezing cold, and the pipes had even frozen. The place was abandoned. They could tell that the cabin had been cleared out, and it was later determined that things of Reeves were missing.
a black and white television set, a nice acoustic guitar, a Pioneer record player and amp, and all of Reeves' vinyl records. A Javi brand bicycle was gone, all of his expensive welding equipment, and strangest of all, every single piece of Reeves' clothing was missing. All that was left behind were the guitar strings that were purchased on day one,
a pair of slightly torn stereo speakers, the box for the record player and amp that was kept for a future move, and his contact lenses.
Unbeknownst to the cops or his family, that same day, Day 13, Reeves' red 1972 Volkswagen Beetle was towed to a nearby mechanic shop for repairs. The mechanic on duty at the Exxon service station in Elwynn Park, New Hampshire, later identified the man who dropped off the vehicle as Reeves, based on a snapshot the police presented to him. He said that Reeves had told him that he wanted quick repairs because he was planning to, quote,
Head south. Elwynn Park is the southernmost part of Portsmouth, and it's only about 10-15 minutes from his cabin in Kittery. Most difficult to explain is a reported sighting of Reeves around this time by the owner of the grocery store where he was a regular, Mr. Newsome of Newsome's Market. He remembered Reeves coming in sometime around the 16th or 17th, which would have been day 14 or 15.
It's unclear when Mr. Newsome made this statement, if it was a fresh recollection from just days prior, or if it was simply a store owner trying to think back about a quiet customer weeks later. And unless cash was used, there is no bank record of a check being used here.
However, there is a record of Reeves' checkbook being used again on Day 17 at the same Shaw's grocery store in Stratum, New Hampshire that was visited on Day 2. The purchase was made for $185 in today's money on February 19th.
On day 19, the mechanic who was working on the repairs to Reeves' Red Beetle said that somebody claiming to be Reeves came to the shop and attempted to pay for the repairs with a check. When the mechanic refused the payment, the man left on foot. On day 20, Barbara and Kemp arrived in Kittery in person to try and find their son. It was Tuesday, February 22nd.
Kittery PD had previously called up Donnelly Manufacturing and asked them to hold on to Reeves' final paycheck and to ask anyone looking for it to come in person to pick it up. But when Barbara called Donnelly to ask about it, they told her that Reeves had called and that he requested that the check be mailed to his post office box in Kittery. And despite the request of law enforcement, the check was in the mail.
Either the person on the phone didn't get the memo about Reeves being missing, or they were convinced the person on the other end was who they were claiming to be. The man purporting to be Reeves had told Donnelly that he had found another job and that he had informed his parents of his new whereabouts. And with those assurances, they decided to mail the check. On day 21, someone who claimed to be Reeves called up the Exxon in Elwynn Park.
The man tried to sell Reeves' car to the shop to cover the cost of the repair bill, but they weren't interested. The man said that he had originally bought the car for $1,200, but in reality, the Volkswagen Bug had been a gift to Reeves from his father Kemp. At this point, the cops and Reeves' parents had no knowledge of these many purchases and the repairs to his vehicle.
The best lead that they had was the check being sent from his employer. So Barbara asked the Kittery Police Department if they could keep a watch at the post office. They said that they unfortunately didn't have the resources to do so, but a lack of manpower didn't stop Barbara and Kemp Johnson. They instead asked if they could step in and assist, and were granted permission to stake out the Kittery post office themselves, hoping to encounter their son.
In speaking with employees at the post office, they learned that Reeves' P.O. box had been cleared out on day 14 or 15, about a week earlier. Barbara and Kemp spent two days waiting, rotating shifts from the lobby to the car, pretending to be tourists in the winter, inside the post office of an empty seasonal summer town. Their story might have been a little thin.
They showed up as soon as they unlocked the front doors and stayed all day, waiting for somebody to show up and get the check from Donnelly Manufacturing that sat amongst junk mail inside post office box 451. Would it be Reeves? Barbara prepared herself, practicing inside her head for the moment she would confront her son over the worried pit that took up residence in her stomach. Where have you been the past three weeks?
On the afternoon of Thursday, February 24th, 1983, day 22, somebody did show up to open Box 451. Somebody who had a key. Only it wasn't Reeves.
The man was young, maybe 20s or early 30s, white, about 5'10", with longer reddish-brown hair and a beard. He wore dark green coveralls, a short-brimmed red baseball cap with a white logo, and he had the key to Reeves' mailbox. The man opened Reeves' P.O. box and pulled out the mail, opening, reading, and tossing out everything except for the check from Donnelly.
Barbara snapped a photo of the man on her tourist camera. This was it. This was the moment she would finally have the answer to where her son was. Petite Barbara confronted the man, demanding to know where Reeves was and why he had a mailbox key. The man replied, "'He's in an apartment in Portsmouth. I'll take you to him if you have a car.'"
She followed the man out of the post office. But as soon as they got out the door, he took off running on foot. Barbara and Kemp never caught up with him. As luck would have it, Kemp was away at that moment, and it was Barbara alone who had to deal with the situation. They developed the film right away. "Everyone will see this photo and know your face. Somebody will know who you are." When she flipped to the photos in the post office, her heart sank.
The photo of the man, the only photo that she had taken of the man stealing her son's mail at the post office, was a photo of his hand covering the exact spot where his face should be. He had foiled her attempt and successfully eluded being captured on film.
She must have thought she had his picture. That was probably her deepest hope that she had that and how heartbreaking it must have been when she got the pictures developed and a man's hand is perfectly placed in a place so you can't see his face. Five seconds either way and you might have got his face. It's bothered me ever since plus the fact that we never released that picture because we didn't have it. I
I had never seen that picture before I met with Reeves' brother and sister, and they provided that picture. I put it out. I mean, it's just so late in the game to put a picture like that out. Reeves' final check was never cashed, and it was eventually canceled by Donnelly. That chance encounter, Barbara's face-to-face meeting with a man who probably knew what happened to her son, was the only encounter she would ever have.
When they were coming up here to Kittery, I said, can I come up and help? And they said, no, no, we've got that. And I keep wondering, what if that guy at the post office, if I had been there and I could have chased him, what if, what if? This encounter at the post office on day 22 was the final known action taken by Reeves or whoever was impersonating him. There were no more purchases. There were no more sightings. The car was abandoned. ♪
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Sometime around Friday, February 25th, Reeves' landlord, Charlie Bold, and his daughter spotted Reeves' red Beetle at the Exxon in Elwynn Park. Up until this point, no one had known where Reeves' car was at. Kemp went to the Exxon station, paid the bill, and took the car to Kittery PD, turning it over to them and giving them permission to give it to Reeves if he appeared and presented proper identification.
Inside the car, he found brochures for Canon and Minolta cameras and for RadioShack. That same day, Ocean National Bank closed Reeves' account. It was overdrawn by $226 in today's money, and the checks from the purchases made at Daymart, RadioShack, and the second round of groceries at Shaw's had bounced. And that was it. Three weeks after his final shift at Donnelly, Reeves Johnson was gone.
Right away, I knew something was very wrong. Knowing Reeves was not somebody who was going to do something like this, not going to disappear, didn't have the resources. He's not somebody to get involved with dangerous people. It just left me completely at a loss as to what could have happened.
In the early days, both Detective Avery and Reeves' family believed that he was alive and well, but just out of touch. They believed that he wanted to disappear for a while. They had numerous witnesses that told them so. The mechanic shop in Elwynn Park, where Reeves' car was being repaired, looked at a photo of Reeves presented by the detective and ID'd him. The Ocean National Bank teller ID'd him from a snapshot.
Donnelly said that they had gotten a call from Reeves asking to mail his final check. Mr. Newsome of Newsome's Market, Reeves' local grocery store, told Detective Avery that he remembered Reeves coming in around day 14 or 15.
But were these sightings accurate? The people who said they saw him likely didn't know him all that well. And they were being asked to recall a specific day, perhaps two weeks or more after the fact. Was their memory that good? Reeves' appearance, his long hair, his facial hair, his height, his complexion, was so ordinary in 1983 that Reeves could have been easily misidentified by any number of people.
I say that he looks like the everyman of the 80s. The last day that there is conclusive evidence that Reeves was alive was on his final day of work, Thursday, February 3rd. Everything after that could have been done by someone who had a passing resemblance to Reeves.
Without any obvious leads to pursue, the case went cold almost immediately. The detective, Ron Avery, who handled the case initially, continued to be the lead on the case for decades. The family, meanwhile, pursued their own leads, hiring a private investigator and conferring with a friend who worked at the FBI. Though the family had many questions and no answers, they speculated on possibilities of what could have happened.
His family knew that Reeves was drawn to philosophy, so they thought that perhaps Reeves could have been persuaded to join an underground, left-leaning, cult-like group. Barbara even tried to see if this was a possibility by connecting with other parents whose kids were in a cult and were trying to get them out.
Cults were in the news. I mean, there were churches that had underground groups and you had to be vetted before you were allowed into the group because cults would send spies in because these parents were trying to get family members back.
Another possibility was suicide. Reeves lived a solitary life with a limited support network and contended with a debilitating medical condition and depression. Perhaps he had decided to take his own life and had given his stuff to somebody he knew with instructions to keep his death quiet. But a key part of that story doesn't square with everything the family knew about Reeves, though, was that he left so many things undone and unknown.
Had Reeves made this decision, his family felt like he would have let them know rather than leave them with unanswered questions for decades. The same goes with going off the grid. He would have let his family know. As the years crept by, the Johnson family increasingly began to believe that something had happened to Reeves. Something nefarious.
The first thing that stuck out was the money. The purchases that were made were out of character for Reeves. He was financially conscientious and would include in his letters home to his parents regular updates on his bill payments.
Things were tight. The notion that he would have spent, in today's dollars, $260 on bookshelf speakers, $738 on a car radio, $381 in groceries, $131 on thermal clothing, and would have withdrawn $278 from his checking and savings for a total of $1,800 in just a couple of weeks was completely out of character for Reeves.
Not to mention, his car was in the shop, and he was theoretically facing an expensive auto repair. Plus, all that money he spent? He didn't have it. The checks bounced. His account was overdrawn, and the bank promptly closed it. The businesses that had sold that stuff? They were left holding the bag. They never got paid.
Reeves would buy groceries last after he had paid the rent and the oil bill and the electric bill and made sure he had gas money for the week. So if he had said to someone, I'm going to go visit my sister in Georgia, my car needs repairs or broke down, that's what he would have saved money for.
The second thing that was strange was the condition of his cabin. When the police conducted a wellness check, they found most of his valuables gone. But what was left raised questions. He needed glasses or contacts to drive, indicated on his driver's license and by his family, and his contacts were left behind.
His brand new guitar strings that he'd just purchased before his disappearance were left as well. Why would Reeves leave these things that were so important to him and abandon his place? Not to mention how suddenly it all happened. He worked on Thursday, and by day four, the Sunday snowstorm, his place had been cleared out. Where was all of his stuff moved to? His car, later found in the mechanic shop, was empty.
all Reeves' belongings. You're talking about clothing, things that you would not, nobody would take unless they were trying to make it look like Reeves had moved out, took his stuff and left. There would be no other reason you're going to take a guy's t-shirts, underwear, socks. That's what makes me think it's somebody who knew him. Plus the fact that they knew where he worked. They were able to convince somebody at Donnelly Manufacturing that they were Reeves.
I just find it hard to believe it's not somebody who knew him at least in a casual way and targeted him from that either friendship or that acquaintance.
On the 15th, his car was towed into the mechanic shop in Portsmouth. But a large purchase of groceries was made four days later in Exeter on the 19th. How did he even get to the grocery store? It was 20 miles from Kittery. Where did he take the groceries? Someone had transportation other than Reeves' red Volkswagen.
But the most important thing was the man in the post office. This man had a key to the box, a key that only Reeves would have. Did Reeves give him the key, or did he take it? The only reason that he was there was to collect Reeves' final paycheck. Was he getting it for Reeves, or for himself? In order to cash it, he would only need to convince a bank teller that he was Reeves.
something that a man with a similar appearance in 1983 could accomplish. He lied to Reeves' mother, promising to take her to him in Portsmouth, but instead dashed away. Why would he want to prevent contact between her and her son? But most importantly, he blocked her camera lens perfectly with his hand. Imagine the reflexes and precision required to do that.
If everything was above board, why would he want to stop her from identifying him? After producing the original episode on Reeves in November of 2021, we kept working on the case and dug for more information. Over time, the relationship went from producing an episode on the case to working on the investigation with Detective Kummer, who I should actually call Sergeant Kummer because he was just promoted this month.
I'm happy to say he will still remain the lead on the case. I'm Detective Brian Kummer from the Kittery Police Department. Should you be calling yourself Sergeant? Yeah, Sergeant Brian Kummer from the Kittery Police Department. I'm going to have to get used to that one, too.
Being promoted to sergeant, obviously, I have different responsibilities that aren't investigative like as a detective. However, my chief and lieutenant assured me when I took the sergeant's position that I would be able to keep Reeve's case. I was pretty happy about that. I think they also understand that I've poured a lot into this case, and I don't know that the next person is going to understand the case as much as I do.
I wish every family I've worked with had an officer like Brian working their case. Investigating a 40-year-old disappearance, especially one where the locations no longer exist and there's no physical evidence, suspects, or even witnesses, is no easy task. And I imagine that if Reeve's case were in a pile of other unsolved cases, it would sadly be at the bottom of the pile, simply because of the tenacity required to make even the smallest progress.
But there's a family who still misses their brother and just wants answers. And for them, I'm glad they have Brian. That being said, how do you even begin to investigate a case like that? So for context, we're talking about the 80s, 1983. You know, I think about that time period and how different that time period is from today.
Just trying to find Reeves' address originally was very difficult. I searched in all kinds of maps and books and old tax maps, and I could not find the road that Reeves was listed as living.
Finally, I learned that Dewitt Court does not exist any longer. And it was really sort of a driveway for the cabins that Reeves lived on. There was really nothing else on them. There were three cabins right near the Kittery Traffic Circle, if you're familiar. And just finding that took me quite some time.
Detective Avery was a very good detective, but it was a different time and the way that detectives operated back then, completely different than now. For one example, if I go out and take information from somebody, I bring that information back and I immediately type it into my reports.
Back then, it was more like they would keep a lot of that information in their head or in their own notepads, and a lot of times it would never get translated over. So when I ran into that, it was difficult. Like, I would get, we talked to Jim, and he said he didn't see anything. It didn't say who Jim was, and it didn't say where he lived or what his last name was. I will say that Reeve's mom did a tremendous job of documenting her research and her investigation.
There were some things that the original episode and the work that came after set out to accomplish. First, we wanted to learn more about Donnelly and connect with people who actually worked there. We also wanted to talk to people who knew Reeves during his time in Maine. His siblings remembered that he had a girlfriend who may have had a young son, but they didn't know much else about her. Even her name was a mystery.
Maybe if we figured out who she was, she could answer some questions about his day-to-day life. Of course, there were other things, but those were the core questions. Since we started working together, we've called dozens of people who used to work at Donnelly and learned more about what it was like there.
Unfortunately, key people who would have been great to talk to, like the manager in the welding department at the time, have passed. But we managed to speak with five people who worked there around the time that Reeves was employed, some of whom had excellent memories. The most baffling thing is that we haven't found a single co-worker who remembers him.
Their accounts of him were very vague. You know, it was almost like somebody who was there, but nobody really was close to. I haven't spoke to anybody that had long and deep conversations with Reeves and provided those to me.
It's not that Reeves didn't make a mark on people. I mean, he did. Some of these people didn't even know Reeves was missing. Some of the people at his business where he worked did not realize he was missing. They thought he had just moved on to another job.
Some of them were very surprised to hear that somebody from their workplace was missing, but couldn't provide any more information. Because I think initially when Reeves went missing, many people, probably the police included, thought that Reeves was just on a journey. Being the way social media is now, we expect that, hey, if somebody goes missing, you're going to have so much information. We're talking about a two-week period between the time he went missing and anybody really started looking. You know, that's an eternity.
For a while, it started to shake our confidence in the timeline of when Reeves worked at Donnelly. Was he there for five years, as we'd originally thought? We knew at the very least he was working there in 1983 when he disappeared. And from Sally and Hugh, we thought he'd started in 1978. But what if they were mistaken? Further confusing us was the first major clue we discovered, the identification of another one of Reeves' employers.
Brian had the idea to look through Kittery's police records from around the time of Reeve's disappearance to see if anything piqued our interest. Most of these records hadn't been opened since they were originally sealed in manila envelopes with now rusty metal brads. We were specifically looking for police reports on certain types of crimes: robberies and break-ins, fraud and bad checks, and maybe certain violent offenses.
I took on the dispatch logs. I started with the week Reeves was reported missing and just started reading it line by line. This tedious task will make your eyes cross after a certain amount of time. I saw Kemp's request for a wellness check on day 12, February the 14th, and the call to officially report Reeves missing the next day.
Once that report was made, Kittery PD put out a bolo to other nearby departments for Reeves and his red Volkswagen Bug.
Other PDs checked their records to see if they had anything on Reeves. York PD, the next town north from Kittery, called back and said they had a record of Reeves being given a traffic warning. During that exchange, Reeves gave the officer a couple of important pieces of information about himself that were new to us. One, that he lived at a York address in 1981. And two, that he worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant called Borderline.
This is the only reference we've seen to Reeves working anywhere but Donnelly Manufacturing. The siblings don't remember him working anywhere else either. I started digging into Borderline. It was only in existence for a short time, and it was difficult to find out much about it. But I did find out that it was located on Route 1 across from the Kittery Trading Post, which is still going strong today. It was located approximately where the Weathervane restaurant is today.
Before it was Borderline, it was a Chinese restaurant called Dragon Seed, which had been in operation for 20 years, opening in 1960 and closing in 1980. Borderline Restaurant was short-lived and was foreclosed on in 1982. It was also known as the Captain's Table Restaurant and Lounge during its brief life.
We still don't have a clear timeline of when he worked for who and when. It just seems like there was some disjointed information about when he worked for Donnelly and when he was working as a dishwasher, whether he was two jobs at once.
I would love to be able to say Reeves worked at these places during these times, but those records don't exist. You can't go to the IRS or you can't go to the state of Maine. They're just, they don't exist anymore. So his records, as far as his employment records and things like that, there's just nowhere to get them to verify where somebody worked in 1983. So how would learning that he worked as a dishwasher help us with the investigation?
To start, having another work location means another specific set of people to seek out who could remember Reeves. So not only are we targeting people who worked at Donnelly, we're now seeking people who worked at Borderline in 1981. We don't know how long he worked there. We also don't know if he worked at Borderline full-time or if he was moonlighting as a dishwasher to supplement his Donnelly wages.
Could the reason that nobody at Donnelly remembers him be because he actually didn't work there as long as we thought? When we discovered the borderline detail, I was convinced that was possible. Perhaps he hadn't started working at Donnelly until 1982, and even including the welding training, it was just a shorter period than we thought. But this thought was squelched when we found our next big clue. The biggest one yet.
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After the success of searching the dispatch logs manually, we thought that maybe digitizing everything would help. There were a lot of records at our disposal. Dispatch logs, police reports, the family's blue box of records, and Brian's case file that had grown from a few pages to a full binder. We hadn't looked at the family's box for well over a year. Now we knew what we were looking for and we could come at it with a fresh set of eyes and better context. Plus, having
Having it digitized meant we could review stuff from home, and everything would be organized. In February of 2023, around the 40th anniversary, we took two scanners and two days at the Kittery police station to get the job done. I'm talking thousands of pages, documents, and photos, some of which couldn't be fed through the scanner in batches. They had to be done one at a time. Did I mention the room was absolutely freezing?
Around midnight on day two, we were in the home stretch. It was only Byron and me because Brian had to be at the station bright and early. We were exhausted and pushing through the last pieces of the family's box with a two-hour drive ahead back to Central Maine.
The very last letter in the box was a letter from Reeves to his dad in 1978. It read, in part, Happy Father's Day. Sorry I didn't get in contact with you last week, but I was planning a longer letter in reply to yours and never got to it. Cheryl always has my spare time overplanned anyway. Cheryl. His girlfriend's name was Cheryl. It had to be Kismet, a pivotal moment in the movie version of this investigation.
This moment made everything worth it. The cold, the monotony, the rusty staples and sore fingertips. It felt like the universe was telling us to keep going. The information is out there and you will find it. It's not going to be easy, but it will be worth it. Knowing Brian had an early shift, I didn't want to wake him up, so I sent him an email at 12.09am with the subject line in all caps. Her name is Cheryl.
Yeah, that was a pretty amazing moment because we had been racking our brain trying to figure out how we could figure out who she was. And it gave me hope at that point that we were going to be able to find Cheryl. I'm an optimist, so I always view it as, all right, this is it. Like, Cheryl is just going to call me. And he did get a call from Cheryl.
I received a phone call from an intoxicated woman who said she was Cheryl, but really could not provide any information about Reeves. She didn't know anything. And, you know, the kicker was that she didn't have kids. She didn't know anything about where he worked. It was obviously somebody who was, I think, deep down wanted to help, wanted to believe maybe she was that Cheryl, but she's not that Cheryl.
We are still looking for Cheryl. Her name is spelled C-H-E-R-Y-L, and she lived in the Seacoast, Maine or New Hampshire area in the late 70s. We don't have her last name. She likely had a York address at some point. We believe that she had a young child at the time, and she dated Reeves in at least 1978 when he was 27. She was likely in her 20s or early 30s, which would make her about 65 to 70 years old today.
Oh, and Cheryl isn't a suspect. Really, if he's going to talk to anybody about his daily work life and give us some insights to Reeves' thoughts, like what his thinking was, you know, Cheryl could possibly fill in a lot of gaps in his life in Kittery because that's where they were.
Cheryl is the first person we've come across who was close with Reeves while he was living in Maine, even if only for a short period of time. We have got to find her. It's possible she doesn't even live in New England anymore, and she probably doesn't realize that her boyfriend from 1978 is missing. So, Cheryl, the real Cheryl, if you hear this, we'd love to talk to you.
In that same letter that mentioned Cheryl, Reeves also mentioned working for Donnelly. This means that despite the curveball in our timeline of Reeves working at Borderline in 1981, his siblings' memories were right when they said that he started work at Donnelly in 1978.
The letter also mentioned that he had answered an ad for Donnelly in April of 1978 looking for a welder's apprentice. What we still don't know is if he worked there consistently for all five years between 78 and 83, or if he left and returned at different points in time.
This letter is interesting. Reeves wrote about how Donnelly was likely scamming some of their major customers by lying about costs. He also mentions how poorly they paid their welders. Reeves came right out in the letter and said that it was kind of a crooked situation, like it didn't seem right, that they weren't honorable, which...
That was obviously before he went missing, quite a bit before he wrote this letter, but who knows what went on. If you're watching someplace and they're not an honorable company and you're working for them for years, it could build on you until you say something to the wrong person. I mean, that's just speculation, but that letter is very interesting.
Donnelly was originally a union shop located in Massachusetts that moved operations to Exeter, New Hampshire for the express purpose of becoming non-union to pay employees less. Despite their efforts, in October of 1980, 77 of Donnelly's workers in their new location voted on whether or not to unionize again. And though it was very close, the nays won. Donnelly would remain non-union.
The union investigated the circumstances of the company leading up to that vote and discovered that management had used threats and intimidation to coerce employees to vote against unionizing. The union had recourse and they pressed the matter in court.
The judge easily sided with the union's well-documented claims and voided the results of the first election. When Donnelly appealed the vote, it was once again found that they had violated the National Labor Relations Act. They had to post notices at the facility to all their employees that explained that they had violated the law. The bulletins stated the rights of their workers and the responsibility of management to respect them.
Upon talking to former employees who worked there, we learned that Donnelly remained non-union. In late August of 1982, the Environmental Protection Agency accused Donnelly of dumping hazardous waste at Keefe Environmental Services, a garbage facility in nearby Epping, New Hampshire.
Donnelly Manufacturing is still owned by a UK-based entity called the Brockhouse Corporation. But upon contacting them, they said that Donnelly no longer exists in the same form it had in the 70s and 80s, and that their records are gone. It's unclear what role Donnelly plays in Reeves' disappearance, if any at all. It could just be that it was the last place he was reliably seen and nothing more. A location in our story.
But what if there is something more? I'm willing to listen to any theory that somebody who worked at Donnelly Manufacturing has as far as what was going on at the time. If they think that Donnelly Manufacturing, the employment there, in some way led to Reeves' disappearance, I would love to hear...
Even the remotest rumors that they had back at that time or maybe people talked afterwards and there was stuff going on that hasn't been shared. I really wish the people at Donnelly would really scrub their brains for any kind of suspicious activity or behavior from anybody during that time. And I know it's a long time. It's a long time ago.
If you worked at Donnelly Manufacturing in Exeter, New Hampshire, ideally between 78 and 83, or you know somebody who did, we want to hear from you. If we've already talked to you, we'd love to chat again. Every conversation opens the possibility for new insights that we may not have had before. There are a lot of things I know that all of us investigating this case wish we had.
I wish we had a clear photo of the man in the red hat. I wish Detective Avery had thought to have Barbara sit with an artist and do a composite sketch. I wish we had the letters from Reeves' P.O. box that were handled by the mystery man. I wish that they'd dusted for prints on the mailbox and in the cabin, or maybe even tried to see what luminol brought to light at 6 Jewett Court.
I wish more articles and news stations would have considered this newsworthy back then, and that the photo of the man had been seen by locals in 1983. I wish Unsolved Mysteries wouldn't have turned down Reeve's story in the late 80s. I wish we still had access to things like bank records, tax records, and employment history prior to 1983.
There's a lot I wish we had, but looking back, I understand why we don't. Hindsight is 20-20. In 1983, without any real signs of foul play beyond circumstance, they had a philosophical young adult who maybe left his life behind for a fresh start.
In 2024, we have 41 years of no Social Security, job or banking activity, and no letters or phone calls to family. It is a lot easier to be on the outside investigating this than being on the inside investigating this. I mean, just the fact that the time period in between when Reeves actually went missing and when he was reported is...
And the fact that we don't have the same tools then that we have now. We don't have social media. We don't have cameras everywhere. We can't track people. We can't ping their phones back then. Like I said, when I read this report and it said Reeves wrote a check and bought some groceries at this grocery store. Well, we don't know that and we don't suspect that at all now.
But that's all they had to go on. Well, who else would have wrote it? Now we know that it was somebody else. It wasn't Reeves. But at the time, they're tracking Reeves, they think, in real time, in relative real time, for what they have. There's no use wishing for what we will never get back. We have to work with what we have and keep pushing to find more moments of kismet.
A lot has changed in two years. Reeves Johnson went from having zero hits on the internet to having articles on Oxygen, The Daily Beast, and almost every local newspaper and TV news organization in New Hampshire and Maine. His story has been heard by thousands of people.
"I'm always thinking of ways to get this case out there in front of people. So in 2021, I came up with the idea for a reward. It's currently at $6,000 and it's comprised of donations from Murder, She Told, the Kittery Police Department, the Johnson family, and from Brian Kummer personally. We produced an event at the Star Theater at the Kittery Community Center that was a major success. We invited press, the chief announced the reward,
I told Reeves' story, and we had a panel discussion with the family. We had never done anything like that. It was a scary new challenge, but it was worth it. I asked Brian what's next. I really would love to find somebody who hung out with Reeves when he was in Kittery. Not just at work, but when he lived here. Because I don't know his pattern of life. I've narrowed it down a little, but you really can't get that good of a sense from the information that we have.
figuring out what Reeves did every day, where he went after work, if he went and had a beer, if he went to a local bar or hangout, you know, if he went and played music. We don't know any of that because I have not been able to find one person in Kittery that remembers him.
Maybe doing another live event where people can come and talk. It's helpful to get in front of people and have them ask you questions because it always, for me, it sparks more questions that I could be asking. It may not be right away that what they ask me, I can answer it, but then it gets me thinking. And that's how my mind works.
Please keep sharing this story with your family and friends. Facebook and social media are great connectors of long-lost networks of people. Getting Reeves' face in front of the right person might be all that's needed to find the truth. We all appreciate every email, every share, every comment. It's all taken to heart.
Thank you for caring about Reeves and his family. There is still a lot of work to be done, and we're going to continue to chip away at this decades-old mystery. And with your help, we may just find some answers. You guys have been tremendously helpful and great to work with, and I definitely view you as colleagues and friends. ♪
If you have any information about Reeves Johnson, you worked at Donnelly Manufacturing, Borderline Restaurant, or you know who Cheryl is, please reach out to the Kittery Police Department at 207-439-1638. And you can always email me at helloatmurdershetold.com.
Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't left a five-star review, I would love it if you took a few minutes and left some kind words. You can follow Murder, She Told on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram for more. A detailed list of sources and photos can be found at MurderSheTold.com.
Thank you so much to Brian Kummer and to the Johnson family, Sally, Hugh, and Dave for sharing their insights and memories. Also a big thanks to the Kittery Police Department and Chief Richter for their ultimate trust. I'm Kristen Seavey. Thank you for listening.