Boy's disappearance
Staffina Security
By Bill Smith
Of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
For 10 years, the mystery hung over this little piece of Lincoln County
like a relentless summer heat wave.
One moment, he was right there, swinging from a piece of rope that
had been tied to a tree at the end of Bluegill Circle.
The next, he was pedaling his yellow and white Huffy bicycle up
Linda Lane toward his family's mobile home.
For those few, tantalizing seconds he was almost close enough to
reach out and touch -- 4-foot-6, 75 pounds, short blond hair, blue eyes,
camouflage shirt, black tennis shoes, hole in the left knee of his pants
...
And then the 11-year-old boy with the big name -- Charles Arlin
Leon Henderson -- was gone.
Vanished. As if the ground suddenly had opened up and swallowed
him whole.
"When Arlin disappeared, it changed things," said Ron Gibson, who
has lived in the Fountain 'N Lake mobile home park for more than 25
years and whose grandsons played with Arlin.
"This area used to be just country. People felt pretty safe. Not
after Arlin. Things were different. People started keeping closer eyes
on their kids. They wanted 'em to check in more often."
Gibson's daughter, Gail Cain, was 17 at the time. A mother herself
now, she says the memories remain fresh.
"If it happened once," she said, "it could happen again."
Arlin's strange disappearance on July 25, 1991, appeared to have
been solved last week when a 23-year-old man told police that he was
ordered to shoot the boy in the head three days after Arlin was abducted
near his home.
Identified by an acquaintance as Joshua D. "J.D." Spangler of
Troy, Mo., the man was 13 when he says he murdered Arlin. He reportedly
has implicated two other men in the crime. George N. Gibson, 29, of
Wentzville has been charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal
action. Authorities suspect that Gibson's older brother, Charles C.
"Chuckie" Gibson, 37, ordered Arlin's murder. Gibson, who is serving a
30-year sentence for running a methamphetamine ring, has not been
charged.
The Gibsons are not related to Ron Gibson.
Motive remains unclear
Despite a painstaking search in an area near Winfield where Arlin
was believed to have been buried, his body had not been recovered by
Saturday.
A motive for the abduction and murder remains unclear.
The news that the case was nearing closure brought little comfort
last week to the people of Fountain 'N Lake.
"Never in my wildest dreams would I have believed this," said
Patty Moore, who moved here with her husband, Jeff, 30 years ago.
"Never. Not here."
Said Jeff Moore, "It stayed there, in your mind. It was a sad
time."
Once, in the early 1960s, this was no more than a farm field some
five miles northeast of the town of Moscow Mills, in southeastern
Lincoln County.
The developer of the property cleared the area, put in some gravel
roads and dug two ponds, one on each end of the development.
Contractors built a sand beach on one of the ponds; the other was
stocked with fish -- bluegill, catfish and bass. The first, Gibson said,
became known as the "swimming pond"; the other became the "fishing
pond."
Near the center of the swimming pond, workers put a large hose
that sprayed water like a fountain.
The locals say that is how the area originally became known as
Fountain 'N Lakes. When the swimming pond fell out of use and the beach
became overgrown with weeds, the name was changed to Fountain 'N Lake.
Now, it is an area of chalk-colored gravel roads and a scattering
of mobile homes -- some elaborately landscaped with neat petunia beds
and statuary and others littered with weeds and rusting automobile
frames. Most of the people who moved here came from St. Louis or St.
Charles. They came, they said, to get away from the rat race -- the
traffic, the crime, the hassles.
When Arlin Henderson disappeared, there were some 48 mobile homes
in the area. There are still about 48, said Gibson, who is chairman of
the village's board of trustees.
Nobody can quite remember exactly when Henderson's family came to
Fountain 'N Lake. One day, he was just there, playing baseball in the
empty lots with the rest of the boys, trading gum cards, fishing in the
pond.
Longtime residents remember that he seemed particularly close to
his father, who suffered from emphysema. When his father died, it seemed
to hit Arlin particularly hard, they said.
Just doing "what kids do"
On the afternoon that Arlin vanished, Gibson said, he remembers
arriving home to see Arlin and his two grandsons, J.J. and Nathan Faatz,
playing in a clearing near the woods. The boys called it their
clubhouse, and they went there to play with toy cars and trucks, climb
trees and "just do what kids do."
He said he had called his grandsons to the house to leave for a
family birthday party. When he did, Gibson said, he saw Arlin heading up
the street toward his home.
That night, Gibson returned home from a Moscow Mills Lions Club
meeting to find "police all over the place."
The search went on for several days. Volunteers searched the
woods, every outbuilding and derelict car and truck in the area, even
the cemetery where Arlin's father was buried.
Police dragged the swimming pond and the fishing pond.
Nothing.
The local police and FBI set up a temporary command post in
Gibson's mobile home. His wife, Geneva, made them iced tea.
The Lions Club moved in one of those campers that open up so they
could serve hot dogs and soft drinks to the searchers.
A TV news helicopter landed in Gibson's yard.
Fountain 'N Lake had never seen anything quite like it.
Everything that could be done was done.
But one by one, the searchers left. The police and FBI men shut
down their command post. The Lions Club folded up the camper and took it
away.
Fountain 'N Lake was left to heal. But, in some ways, the healing
never came.
Arlin's mother stayed on the same property -- the one on Linda
Lane with the broken-down yellow school bus in the back yard -- hoping
he would one day come home.
Whenever she left, neighbors said, she always left a note on the
door: "Arlin, we've gone to the store. Back in a few minutes."
Jeff Moore said he couldn't go out into the woods behind his home
to hunt for rabbits or squirrels, even years later, without thinking
about Arlin.
Gibson said as recently as a couple of years ago, he was outside
and noticed Lincoln County Sheriff Jim Johnson coming out of the woods.
"He said he'd been thinking about it, and he decided to go take a
walk," Gibson recalled.
Through the long summers and falls, the people of Fountain 'N Lake
talked about the mystery of Arlin Henderson often -- at neighborhood
barbecues and family gatherings.
"You'd be talking to somebody, and it'd just pop up," Gail Cain
said. "And you'd wonder, if somebody did this, who it could have been."
The history of Fountain 'N Lake, some of the locals say, seems
divided now. There is the time before Arlin Henderson's disappearance,
and the 10 years since. And they are very different.
Gail Cain said she stopped walking in the woods alone; her nephews
stayed closer to home.
In many ways, not much has changed in Fountain 'N Lake in 10
years. Traffic still kicks up clouds of dust on summer afternoons along
Linda and Genevieve lanes.
Chained dogs still bark at strangers.
And the locals, occasionally, still go down to the fishing pond to
bait their hooks with pieces of leftover bits of hot dogs.
On nearly every nice weekend, somebody will climb onto one of a
dozen or so privately owned electric golf carts and go house to house
announcing an impromptu barbecue.
It remains, the people here say, a good place to live.
Still, Patty Moore says, there is no question that something is
different. It will always be.
"It touched every one of us in one way or another," she said.
"You don't forget.
"You can't forget."
debby
killing? Debby S.<sarg...@infi.net>