It is every parent’s worse nightmare.
A 3-year-old goes missing and can’t be found. Such was the case in Medfield during the winter of 1936 when 3-year-old Dale Tibbetts went missing. The young boy was last seen by his parents at 11:15 a.m. playing in the yard during the morning of January 15, 1936.
Looking out and not seeing the boy, the Tibbett parents, Ada and Silas Tibbetts, panicked and began yelling for him and searching everywhere. Not finding the boy they called Medfield Police Chief Coleman J. Hogan. Hogan put out a call for a search party and within an hour over 300 from Medfield had responded, including 75 students from Medfield High School. They began searching through the neighborhood as well as a nearby swamp and woods. That night the town was hit by a 14-inch snowstorm which seriously hindered the search. State police with bloodhounds were brought in to aid in the search.
Natick airport pilot J. Leslie Morton volunteered his plane and flew just above the treetops. Jewell’s and Danielson’s Ponds were filled with boats manned by the state police who began the grim work of dragging the nearly frozen waters. Hour after hour for two days they probed the bottom mud but with no signs of the child. In the woods and fields and along the railroad tracks men from the Franklin Civilian Conservation Corps (C.C.C.), townspeople, the high school students and Medfield boy and girl scouts went over every inch of ground, again without any clues of the missing boy. The American Red Cross came and supplied food and hot coffee to the searchers.
On the third day, local poultry farmer August Reinhart reported to police that he had seen a boy crossing the field by the railroad tracks near his house. Men of the C.C.C. extended the search to that area. But after state and Medfield police questioned neighbors, it turned out Mr. Reinhart saw the small daughter of a farmer who lived nearby and who was dressed in a snow suit similar to the missing Tibbetts boy. The same day, Gladys Rawding of Elm Street reported to police that she observed a man and woman driving away with a boy whom she thought was Dale Tibbetts. An all-points bulletin when out for a gray car with two adults and a small boy.
The boy’s uncle, Harlow Tibbetts, found a spoon which the child had been carrying on a path about 200 yards from the house that led to a gravel pit where the boy often played. The search then shifted to the gravel pit, again, with no sight of the boy. The army of Medfield searchers then went through every barn, woodshed and abandoned buildings in town, hoping perhaps the boy had sought relief from the cold and snow.
Police also began to think of the possibility that Dale could have been murdered or kidnapped. After three days the searchers had covered a radius well beyond the limits that a young 3-year-old might be expected to reach on foot. Both Ada and Silas Tibbetts were now hoarse from calling their son’s name but even after three days still clung to the tenuous belief that their baby boy would come home safely. But the reality of the toddler wandering away from home and becoming lost in the woods now seemed decreasingly unlikely.
Without food or shelter for so long a time and being exposed to snow and a strong wind made it difficult to think the boy could have survived. The only other alternatives police began to investigate was that the boy was killed by a hit-and-run driver who then concealed the body or that he was killed by one of the state hospital residents who had recently escaped. Chief Hogan investigated the murder theories and questioned the residents who had escaped from the hospital and who had recently been returned. The Chief left the hospital feeling the escapees did not have any role in the boy’s disappearance. Concerning a hit-and -run, the Chief felt only time would tell if the boy’s body would eventually be found somewhere in the underbrush near the Tibbetts home.
Seven days later on January 22 a new theory surfaced when a news agency in Willimantic, CT contacted police saying a man claiming to be Dale’s father wanted a back issue of a Boston paper, as he was interested in the “missing boy” from Medfield.
Medfield and state police immediately rushed to Connecticut, along with FBI agents, as, if true, it now would be a federal case for crossing state lines. Their thinking was the man might have been the boy’s kidnapper, as Dale’s father, Silas, had never left Medfield. It turned out however, the man had stolen an automobile in Brookline the same day Dale disappeared, and he was seeking back issue of the Boston paper as a way to find out if his theft had been reported. It turned out the man had no connection what-so-ever with the Medfield case.
On January 23 the case took an even stranger turn when a Rochester, NY man wrote to the Tibbetts saying that “spirits” told him the boy was hiding in a barn near the Tibbetts’ home.
Chief Hogan and 10 state troopers spent the night searching four barns in the vicinity for the second time again without turning up any clues. Then, on February 3, the Tibbetts received another letter, this time from a “psychic in Lakeport, NH who said the boy was with a “Beatrice O’Donnell” living in Providence, RI. An investigation in Providence did not turn up with anyone having that name.
On March 14, uncovered by the receding flood in Mine Brook (today called Mill Brook), the body of 3-year-old Dale Tibbetts, missing since January 15, was found by a search party just 400 yards from his home. The body, clad in a snow suit, was caught on a sunken tree limb at the bottom of the brook, which had previously been solidly locked in ice. Death was ruled as drowning.
