The Remains of a Son Missing for Nearly 50 Years Are Identified

Their son had been missing for decades, but every time Louise and John Clinkscales left their home in LaGrange, Ga., to search for him, one of them would leave behind a note.

If their son, Kyle, returned while they were gone, his parents wanted their only child to know that a lot had changed since he was last seen in 1976 at the age of 22. They loved him, the Clinkscales would write, and there, on the dining room table, was a spare car key for him.

“They left no stone unturned,” the sister of Ms. Clinkscales, Martha Morrison, 88, of Oxford, Ala., said in an interview.

Mr. Clinkscales’s parents died before the authorities made a remarkable discovery in December 2021: A 1974 Ford Pinto poking out from a creek, an identification inside the rusty car belonging to Mr. Clinkscales and about 50 skeletal fragments encased in the mud.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation last week confirmed that the remains were of Mr. Clinkscales. Erin Hackley, the coroner in Troup County, Ga., said that it might take investigators months to determine a cause of death, if they can pinpoint one at all, given the age of the remains.

For a little over 47 years, the residents of LaGrange, which is about 70 miles southwest of Atlanta, wondered what had happened to a sports-obsessed young man who was attending Auburn University in Alabama.

At the university, he was beginning to search for his place in the world and mapping out what career to pursue. On Jan. 27, 1976, Mr. Clinkscales left his part-time job at a bar in LaGrange and headed out for the roughly 45-minute drive to Auburn University, where he was a sophomore.

Investigators believe that something happened at some point in his trip, and his whereabouts remained a mystery ever since.

Sgt. Stewart Smith of the Troup County Sheriff’s Office said that a driver in Cusseta, Ala., about 30 miles southwest of LaGrange, was on a two-lane road on Dec. 7, 2021, when he saw the hatchback of a rusted vehicle sticking out of the creek and called the authorities. It was not clear what allowed the car to become visible from the road after all this time.

The creek in Chambers County, Ala., outside of LaGrange, was probably never searched because the road would not likely have been Mr. Clinkscales’s main route to Auburn, though it might have been an alternate one.

“We were shocked,” Sergeant Smith said, noting how deputies felt when they realized the oldest missing person cold case in the county was at last ending, just 11 months after Ms. Clinkscales died in January 2021 at age 92.

The Troup County Sheriff’s Office and the Clinkscales had intensively searched for Mr. Clinkscales in those initial weeks after he was missing. Lakes were drained. Rewards were promised. Deputies searched woodlands for a single clue.

For Louise and John Clinkscales, the effort was a passionate, all-consuming quest, mirroring scores of other missing-person cases across the country, with loved ones pleading for tips, searchers growing wearier with each unsuccessful venture and members of an exhausted community looking on, aghast that something so haunting could have happened to one of their own.

Their determination was the source of admiration for many.

Kyle Clinkscales had always liked New Orleans, so the couple bought ads in the city asking for help to find their son. He had loved Hawaii when he visited once on vacation as a boy, so his parents sent letters to every police department in the state, according to an interview they gave to The Auburn Plainsman in 1978.

And when tips came in that a person had been found matching his description — strong jaw, shaggy brown hair, thick eyebrows — they drove to the places where those tips originated. Two years after their son’s disappearance, the Clinkscales had distributed nearly 5,000 bumper stickers seeking information.

They became supporters for families of others who had missing relatives and tried to call attention to cases not as well publicized. The Clinkscales were among those invited to the White House in 1985 to meet with President Ronald Reagan about ways to address the issue of missing and exploited children, The LaGrange Daily News reported.

In their home — the same one where Kyle Clinkscales had been raised and that was decorated with pictures of him smiling and wearing a bow tie — his parents’ drive to find their son would sometimes give way to fatigue, said Ms. Hackley, who knew the family.

In an interview with The Plainsman in 1978, John Clinkscales expressed unease: Maybe, he said, his son, who did not really like college, had felt like he was a financial burden on his parents. Instead of dropping out or sharing his feelings, he “might just have wanted to make it easier on us by disappearing,” John Clinkscales said.

Nothing out of the ordinary was found at Kyle Clinkscales’s apartment to suggest that he ran away or had moved elsewhere.

In fact, Ms. Clinkscales recalled that her son, who was last seen on a Tuesday, had promised to pick up clothes she had pressed for him by Friday. Ms. Hackley said that, years later, when John Clinkscales thought about a title for his book about his son, he used a phrase that replayed in his thoughts: “Friday never came.”

John Clinkscales, who died in 2007, submitted DNA samples to investigators for testing in case his son’s remains were ever found, Ms. Hackley said. Ms. Clinkscales did the same. Ms. Hackley, who was with Ms. Clinkscales when she died, said she had been searching for her son until her last days.

Ms. Hackley said when she got the call from investigators that the remains had been identified, she called Ms. Morrison, who responded with relief and regret that Mr. Clinkscales’s parents were not alive to hear the news.

“They were very strong Christians,” Ms. Morrison said. “They had faith that things would work out for them. And they never gave up hope.”

When the remains of Kyle Clinkscales are returned to his relatives, they plan to drive to Shadowlawn Cemetery in LaGrange, Ms. Morrison said.

There in the soft dirt, between the graves of his mother and father, he will be buried, nestled in a space set aside years ago.