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Vanished Without a Trace
by Mel Allen
From Yankee Magazine September 1979
Even now, four years later, Ron and Jill Newton will sometimes let their minds drift back and silently relive that Labor Day weekend, hour by hour, trying to snatch it all back and hold it still at 10:00 A.M. Sunday, August 31,1975.
It had been a grand weekend, camping with their children, Kimberly, age six, and Kurt, age four, and three other families from their home in Manchester, Maine. Natanis Point Campground was small and remote, its fifty-eight sites cut from a paper-company forest 1,300 feet above sea level in Chain of Ponds, a wilderness township six miles below the Canadian border at Coburn Gore. Campers fished from two ponds that were deep and cold. When a fisherman landed a salmon from the small wooden bridge below the thread of beach, he would yelp with pleasure and a crowd would gather. Mountains loomed over the ponds, and when at night a loon wailed and the forest pressed close on all sides, you knew you were away.
That Friday the Newtons arrived first. It was their first trip with the recently acquired secondhand tent trailer, what Jill called "our luxury." They gathered wood along an abandoned logging road nearly a mile from their campsite. "It isn't camping without a bonfire," Kurt said happily. On Saturday their friends arrived, and Kimberly raced her bicycle through mud puddles while Kurt furiously pedaled his big-wheel tricycle after her, trying to keep up. It was the end of a summer, and there were huge meals and laughter and quiet, chilly nights by a roaring fire. To Jill Newton things felt "just right," which was not unusual.
"We'd been married eight years," she would say later, "and everything just seemed to work right. We got along so well. We had saved for four years to buy a house, and when we were ready, there was our house across the street from the elementary school. From before we were married we always said we'd have two children and no more. We had a girl and then by a stroke of luck we had a boy, just what we wanted. It became a sort of joke between Ron and me. We'd say, 'How did we get so lucky? "
Sunday broke with a heavy mist over the ponds. Ron took the bite off the morning, using the last of the wood to light a fire. Kurt slept until nine, fighting off a cold; when he awoke he shivered. "I'm so glad Daddy built a bonfire," he said. Ron dressed Kurt for the damp, chilly morning: red jersey, navy blue sweatshirt, speckled red and black corduroys. Kurt tugged on dark brown shoes over mismatched white socks and topped off his outfit with a favorite navy blue jacket decorated with baseball emblems.
Jill called Kurt "a head-turner," a striking child with an impish sweet face, bright blue eyes, and platinum blond hair. "The loveliest, sweetest towhead kid you ever saw," said a neighbor. Though he was rugged, Jill I worried that Kurt was "tied to my apron strings." He was painfully shy and afraid of being alone, even for a few moments. "Sometimes when grocery shopping, I'd walk around the corner and he'd stand there, and I'd come back and find him almost in tears," Jill said. "I could put him outside to play all day and he would never leave. He always made sure I knew where he was."
Kimberly would often spring into the shallow woods behind their house and implore her brother to join her climbing the trees or playing hide-and-seek. As Kurt quivered on the edge of the lawn, she would tease, "Kurt's such a baby." Once Jill asked him why he wouldn't go with Kimberly into the woods. "Momma, there's monsters in there," he answered.
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