Terry Lee Westerfield would be 71 today. His little brother would be 64.
Yet for many in Cumberland County, the young stepsons of a Fort Bragg military police officer will forever be 11 and 7, their freckles visible for eternity in the black-and-white photographs distributed in the wake of their disappearance decades ago on Sept. 12, 1964.
“There’s always a part of you that wants to believe they are still alive, somewhere,” mother Margie Crawford told The Fayetteville Observer in 1994. “I hope and pray that they will be found alive. But that’s only a hope.
“Sometimes I don’t think God will let me die without knowing what happened to my children.”
But just as every hope of finding her only children was dashed since she learned that rainy night 60 years ago they were gone, Crawford went to her grave in 2003 never knowing what happened to her only children.
Despite having never been found, their names appear on a headstone in the Cumberland Cemetery that bears their mother’s name, too: