Newburgh Heights, Ohio
October 28th of 1981
Exactly 39 years ago tomorrow, seventeen year old Kurt Sova attended a Halloween party. The underage teen was one of the youngest in attendance that night; the liquor flowed freely and young Kurt spent the night getting pretty wasted. After a few hours of partying, a fellow party goer named Sam took Kurt outside in order to get some air and sober up a bit. It was chilly that night and Kurt was cold so that Sam ran back inside for just a few moments to grab his red jacket; when he returned with Kurt’s coat, the teen had vanished.
When Kurt failed to come home that night, his parents, Dorothy and Kenneth, reported their son missing. They did exactly what most of us parents would do: they hung up missing person posters all over town and went out in search of their kid. When they found out about the party Kurt had attended, they headed over to speak with the people who lived in the duplex. The person who lived there, Debbie, said that not only had she never seen Kurt before, but there had not been any party of any sort of that particular evening. This was a flat out lie; not only had Kurt’s red jacket been found at the duplex, but there was a pizza delivery guy who came forward to state that he’d delivered a large order to the residence on the night in question. The driver told police that he definitely remembered seeing Kurt at the party during said delivery.
Armed with this info, police interviewed those who resided at the the duplex and finally the party was admitted to. But police dropped the ball – instead of searching the home as they should have, they actually warned the missing boy’s parents that if they contacted the tenants of the duplex again that they would be the ones charged with harassment! Can you imagine that?
Kurt’s father received a phone call; the person on the other end of the line said that a young man believed to be Kurt had been sleeping on a cot in the basement of the duplex! Threats of harassment charges be damned, Kurt’s dad went straight to that home, kicked the door in, and ran down to that basement. It was set up exactly as the caller had said it would be, complete with a cot which appeared to have recently been used but sadly, there was no Kurt.
Six days after the teen had gone missing, Kurt’s remains were found in a ravine just 500 yards from the duplex. He was fully clothed, yet barefoot – Kurt’s left shoe was found just 12 feet away from his body, but his right shoe was completely missing. Though his body had suffered some cuts and minor abrasions, there was no obvious cause of death; unfortunately the autopsy failed to explain what had transpired.
The corner reported that Kurt had been dead between 24-36 hours when found, he did not have a toxic level of alcohol in his system, and that he’d possibly died of natural causes. Kurt’s family absolutely did not agree with these findings since they had personally gone through every inch of that neighborhood with a fine toothed comb; the parents had even searched that particular ravine within the last 24 hours before the discovery! There was absolutely no way Kurt had been laying there for a full day!
Now for the weird stuff, and it does get strange so stay with me here! Just a couple of days after Kurt had gone missing, a man walked into a record store where a poster of Kurt had been hanging in the window. He told the store manager, Judy, that the corpse of young man on the poster would soon be found but that police would never know what happened to him. The manager was creeped out by this man and his strange prophecy; she called the police. Later, on the day which Kurt was found, that same man went back to the record store. The manager he’d spoken with last time, Judy, was not there; the weirdo left something with an employee to give to Judy when she came in. It was a bouquet of flowers accompanied by a creepy letter which read:
“Roses are red,
the sky is blue.
They found him dead,
And they’ll find you, too.“
Now obviously feeling a bit threatened herself, Judy called the police again. The man was tracked down; investigators claimed he was a harmless homeless man who had nothing to do with the case.
Another aspect worth mentioning is Kurt’s friend, David Trunsnik. David claims to have seen Kurt walking with a man just 3 days after the party, then the two males entered a van and drove away. He remembered Kurt yelling out the name “Franko” but at the time David didn’t think anything of this as he’d not been aware that Kurt was missing. Another witness, this one named Angeline Reddicks, claims she personally witnessed two men dragging a teen boy in the direction of the ravine before Halloween. She swears to have reported the incident to police, but nobody cared enough to even interview her about what she had seen.
So you might be thinking that maybe Kurt got really drunk that night, maybe so drunk that he had alcohol poisoning. It’s possible that the adults who threw the party were too afraid to call for help that they kept him in their basement until the teen died. This would explain a lot of things, including why they lied; what it wouldn’t explain is Eugene Kvet.
So, 3 months to the day after Kurt went missing, on January 28th, a 13 year old boy named Eugene Kvet went missing. On February 1st of 1982, Eugene was found dead in another ravine less than three miles away from where Kurt’s lifeless corpse had been discovered. It looks like police noticed the obvious correlation between these two cases pretty quickly; we know a lot about Kurt’s case, but they have been pretty secretive about the details surrounding Eugene’s death. What we do know is that the younger boy was also found exactly 6 days after he went missing, he was discovered fully clothed yet barefoot, and guess what? His left shoe was found near the scene but his right shoe was completely missing. Autopsy showed that he died from falling into the ravine, but we do not know the circumstances surrounding his death. Was he pushed? Could all of this possibly be a coincidence?
Years ago the television series “Unsolved Mysteries” aired a segment about this case; in this episode investigators did admit that they believe Kurt had been dumped in that ravine by someone who knew the area very well and that his death was probably an accident. They are still hoping to find this “Franko” who Kurt’s buddy claimed to see him walking with on the 3rd day of his disappearance. All things considered, police did a terrible job investigating this case. Another clear example of this, did you see that crime scene pic in the attachments? That’s actually a reenactment. They had to reenact the scene because police failed to actually take photos of Kurt’s body laying in that ravine. They obviously had a camera handy as there were Polaroid photos of Kurt on the gurney and others of him in the ambulance, but absolutely none were taken of the deceased at the crime scene. You must know that is absolutely unheard of for a case like this, considering the corpse belonged to a young and healthy individual who had been missing for nearly a week! All this makes you wonder, was this simply shoddy police work done by a small town police force, or was it something more sinister? Maybe they hoped Kurt’s death would be seen as accidental and that it would just go away? Surely they never expecting a second young man to turn up dead.
Sadly both of Kurt’s parents have passed away in recent years, they never received any of the answers they deserved. The world will likely never know what really happened to Kurt and Eugene.
