Francis was last observed in Santa Ana, California on April 9, 1979. On that particular day, he had accompanied his father, Dennis, who was engaged in delivering water tanks to various businesses and private residences.
Upon completing his work duties, Dennis left Charles at the intersection of Chestnut Avenue and Lyon Street while he attended to unloading his truck. Concealing Charles's presence from his employer, Dennis instructed his son to proceed to an address in the 300 block of South Lyon Street and await his return.
Upon returning to the designated location ten minutes later, Dennis discovered Charles's absence. After scouring the neighborhood for half an hour, he promptly alerted the authorities.
At the time of his disappearance, Charles's parents were embroiled in a custody dispute. While legal custody rested with his mother, Charles had predominantly resided with Dennis. The duo had recently relocated from Colorado to California, preceding a custody hearing scheduled for April 26. Authorities explored the notion of one of the parents concealing Charles, yet no substantive evidence corroborated this hypothesis.
The prime suspect in Charles's disappearance, as well as in the vanishing of 9-year-old Jack Phillips from Big Bear Lake in 1995, is the convicted child killer James Crummel. Infamous for his violent acts of serial sexual abuse, Crummel possessed a disturbing history of child molestation dating back to the 1960s. Almost all of his known victims were young boys, akin to the age group of Charles and Jack.
Accompanying this summary is a photograph of Crummel. In August 1967, he perpetrated the abduction of a fourteen-year-old boy from Wisconsin, subjecting him to molestation and near-fatal assault. Following a five-year incarceration for this crime, Crummel faced conviction in 1983 for the murder of an Arizona boy in February 1967. However, this conviction was overturned in 1987 due to legal inadequacies. Subsequently, he pleaded guilty to kidnapping in the Arizona case and was released later that year.
In 1997, Crummel faced charges for the murder of Jamey Trotter, a thirteen-year-old neighbor boy who had vanished in 1979. Although Crummel claimed to have "discovered" Trotter's skull in 1990, its identification did not occur until 1996. Upon his arrest for Trotter's murder, investigators approached Crummel regarding Jack's case, to which he offered a confession in exchange for avoiding the death penalty. However, this proposal was rebuffed, leading to Crummel's eventual conviction for Trotter's murder in 2004 and subsequent sentencing to death. He met his demise by suicide on death row in June 2012, employing an electric cord as his method of hanging. Notably, he left behind no written correspondence.
Charles's disappearance is shrouded in suspicion, with investigators entertaining the notion of foul play. To this day, his case remains unresolved.
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