Victor Dwight Shoemaker Jr, "J.R.", disappeared May 1 1994, Kirkby, near Short Mountain Wildlife area, West Virginia

Revised May 2024

Victor Dwight (or Dewight) Shoemaker Jr, called J.R., was five years old when he went to visit his grandfather, Oscar Wolford. His mobile home was located in Kirby (south of Augusta) near the Short Mountain Wildlife area in West Virginia.

JR was playing with his two cousins, 8 and 9, just behind his grandfather's home on May 1st, 1994, when he mysteriously vanished without a trace. 

The visit to Kirby

J.R.'s father, Victor Sr., was a maintenance man at a Leesburg apartment building, and his mother, Nettie, worked on an assembly line at an electronics plant in Loudoun. They drove from Leesburg to the Wolford property in Kirby on Saturday, April 30th.

At 8 am, on Sunday, May 1st, J.R. and two of his cousins, 8-year-old Lloyd Wolford and 9-year-old Tommy Martin, went outside to roam the woods. "They went a-huntin" said Oscar Wolford, chuckling as he considered his grandsons' lively imaginations. "That was their hobby. They'd come back and say, “Oh, I killed a big buck.”

One cousin's family lived in a mobile home on the mountain, the other was from a small town in Pennsylvania.

The boys played for about thirty minutes until approximately 8.30 am, when J.R. got hungry and said he was returning to his grandfather's home for food without the other two boys.

Sometime later, Tommy and Lloyd returned to the trailer, but there was no sign of J.R..

The search

West Virginia State Police said search teams began looking within an hour of J.R. being reported missing. They have focused on a four-square-mile area around the trailer, believing that the boy lacked the endurance to go any further. 

The boys had wandered safely in the woods together many times before and it was one of the few places where Nettie Shoemaker, who had tried for years to have a baby before conceiving J.R., would let her son play out of her sight.

Investigators interviewed the cousins several times, and they told police they lost track of J.R. while playing in the woods.

At the time of his disappearance, he was wearing a red Bugs Bunny T-shirt, red shorts and white X-Men sneakers. J.R. was familiar with the mountainside and always knew his way back.

Although J.R. was said to be strong for his age and fond of the outdoors, the rugged mountainside terrain was no place for a 5-year-old on his own. The paths are steep and twisting, the forest is thick, houses are few and far between, and a treacherously dense layer of leaves covers gullies and rocks.

Searchers using a helicopter equipped with infrared equipment to detect heat and dog teams searched the ground. Lisa K. Hannon, who helped coordinate an all-night search, was killed Tuesday, May 3, 1994, when her car ran off a road and struck a tree.

The search for J.R. lasted for five days in rainy weather with temperatures in the 30s before being called off on Thursday, May 5th, in the evening. Over the next five months, National Guard and Army Reserve units used weekend training time to search for signs of the boy. In addition, the FBI was called in, suggesting that the authorities believed that foul play might have been involved.

What happened to J.R. Shoemaker?

What happened to J.R. out in those woods while playing with his cousins that day in May 1994?

Was he injured by his cousins, got lost on his way back to his grandparents’ property, or was abducted, as his parents believe?

The suspicious behavior of the cousins could be guilt or perhaps Post Traumatic Stress from some incident that happened prior to J.R.'s disappearance.

Parents Victor Dwight Shoemaker Sr and Nettie Shoemaker stated that they believed the cousins acted strangely when they came out of the woods and they didn’t talk to them about the circumstances before J.R. vanished. When Victor Shoemaker tried to talk to the other boys, “they wouldn't say anything about it.'

Victor believes his son was abducted but there were no arrests. No suspects were ever identified, and police have found no indication of foul play or family involvement. The Shoemakers speculated that the son was brainwashed and is alive but living a different identity.

In 2014, “At this time, all investigative leads have been exhausted”, said FBI supervisory special agent Greg Heeb in Pittsburgh.

In 1997, the FBI said it was made aware of a report that a dark-colored pickup truck had been spotted in the area the day J.R. vanished. But the tip never led to anything.

Then there was the sniffer dog. Instead of keeping its nose to the ground, a police dog looking for the boy's scent held its nose in the air as it traveled across a grassy field, leading to speculation that someone had carried the boy from where he was last seen down to the road.

'You talk about a cold case. That is a cold case,' said former Sgt. B.L. Burner, a state police spokesman who retired in 2001. “There was nothing concrete. Everybody there had their suspicions.”

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Sources

http://charleyproject.org/case/victor-dewight-shoemaker-jr

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/05/05/lost-in-a-forbidding-forest/14ed224a-ca72-46b4-8d1a-4444fb378214/?utm_term=.95881649010b

https://www.websleuths.com/forums/showthread.php?11689-WV-Victor-Shoemaker-5-Kirby-1-May-1994

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2617036/Parents-want-sons-1994-W-Va-disappearance-solved.html

http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1994-05-05/news/9405050339_1_search-for-victor-hunting-area-acre

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=19940509&id=5eYyAAAAIBAJ&sjid=uAcGAAAAIBAJ&pg=4308,1607015&hl=en