The Boy in the Ravine

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The moment you see the yellow t-shirts, you know it's him, the missing boy. The one whose poster is plastered all over town.
A number of emergency vehicles are on the

scene by now, each contributing its own set of flashing emergency lights to the chaotic symphony

of colors bouncing off every surface. All eyes are on you as you kneel beside the body and feel for

a pulse. It doesn't seem likely that the boy is still alive, but then again, stranger things have happened.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there.

No one was going to be there. No one was going to be there.
No one was going to be there. especially with this case.
Days ago, a prediction was made about this missing boy. It was dismissed as the crazed ramblings of a homeless man at the time.
But now it might be time to reconsider. Because as unbelievable

as it may be, his haunting words are proving true. October 23rd, 1981.
Early on a Friday evening. A teenager named Sam Carroll waits on a curb for his friend to arrive.
It's chilly already, the sun dipping below the horizon. He suppresses a shiver and tightens his jacket.
At last, he spots his friend bounding across the pavement toward him, smiling broadly and concealing something in his coat. This is 17-year-old Kurt Sova, a small, lanky kid with long brown hair.
He gives Sam a peek at what's hidden in his coat. It's a bottle of Everclear, already partly empty.
Kurt hiccups and proudly explains how he convinced a liquor store patron to buy it for him. Sam's impressed.
He hadn't thought of Kurt as much of a party animal, but his friend's been full of surprises lately. Sam asks for the bottle, and Kurt passes it over without hesitation.
The curb they're standing on is not far from where Kurt lives with his parents and three older brothers. These are the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio, where the city gives way to rural neighborhoods, factories, and farms.
Sam wouldn't exactly describe Kurt as a yokel, but he's closer to one than any of the Cleveland boys he knows. Passing the bottle back and forth, the two boys walk up the street.

The Everclear stings Sam's throat.

It's strong.

He might even have a good buzz going by the time they reach the party.

When Kurt asks about the party, Sam explains that it's being held at a duplex that's technically outside the Cleveland city limits and the adjacent town of Newburgh Heights. Still, it's not far, and they'll be able to walk there.
The host of the party is a girl named Susan, who shares the upstairs unit with two roommates. Kurt doesn't know Susan or her roommates, but says he's excited to meet them.
Sam doesn't doubt that. Kurt's been branching out a lot lately, meeting a lot of new people.
People that Kurt's parents and brothers don't even know about. Kurt stumbles a couple times on their walk, but laughs it off.
Sam, though, is growing wary. He takes the Everclear bottle from his friend, hinting that maybe they should pace themselves.
Kurt is already on steady, and they haven't even reached the party yet. Sam quietly hopes that he won't have to babysit his friend all night.
Kurt and Sam arrive at the duplex. They step inside and disappear into the noise of raucous voices and teenage revelry.
Sam loses track of Kurt in the crowd, but before long, someone's tapping his shoulder to get his attention. It's one of Susan's roommates, frowning with their arms crossed.
She tells Sam that his little friend Kurt is making a mess of the place. He's thrown up and is knocking things over.
Someone needs to get him out of there. Sam tries to reassure her.
His friend is a lightweight and he just needs some air. He locates Kurt and, with a little difficulty, guides him down the stairs and out into the cold October night.
Sam immediately regrets not bringing their jackets along. He had been in such a rush to get Kurt outside that they're both still in t-shirts and it's well below freezing.
Sam tells Kurt that he'll be right back. He's going to run upstairs and grab their jackets.
Figuring Kurt's too drunk to feel the cold anyway, Sam leaves him leaning up against a chain-link fence and darts back inside. Upstairs, he locates his and Kurt's among the massive pile of coats, then returns outside, and Kurt is gone.
The chain-link fence he had been hanging on is empty. Right away, Sam scours the area.
He expects to find Kurt passed out by the front porch or maybe wandering aimlessly around the back of the house. But he's not there.
He's not anywhere. Sam calls out into the dark, jacket clutched in his shivering hands.
He starts walking through the neighborhood, shouting for his friend. He knows Kurt can't have gone far, not in the state he's in.
And yet, the streets around the duplex are empty. So too is the nearby parking lot, which belongs to a J.L.
Goodman furniture warehouse. Sam is baffled, because there aren't many places a teenager could hide around here, even at night.
Eventually, Sam returns to the party. He figures that Kurt went home, probably picked up by one of his older brothers.
After all, he disappeared so fast that he must have taken a car. Kurt can take care of himself, Sam decides.
Newburgh Heights is a small, quiet town. There's no need to be alarmed.
Right? The following morning, Saturday, October 24th,

Kurt's mother, Dorothy Sova, waits in the kitchen for her sons to come downstairs for breakfast.

She rubs the sleep from her eyes as she cooks at the stove.

As the mother of four boys, she's accustomed to losing sleep over worrying,

but last night was especially bad. She hasn't seen her youngest, Kurt, since yesterday morning.
Dorothy didn't hear him come home last night either, although that's to be expected. The Sova household is a two-unit family home.
Dorothy and her husband Kenneth lived downstairs while her four boys were signed up above. The upstairs unit has its own entrance, so it would have been fully possible for Kurt to come home late last night without her noticing.
Kurt's three older brothers arrive for breakfast. Dorothy anxiously keeps an eye on the door, hoping Kurt won't cross that threshold next.
But her youngest son doesn't show. Dorothy asks the others if they know where Kurt is, but they can only shrug.
They didn't see or hear him come home last night either. Unsettled, Dorothy picks up the phone.
She's no helicopter parent. The Sova boys have always been given a

long leash, but 24 hours with no check-in from Kurt is setting off alarm bells for her.

She calls the neighbors to ask if Kurt is there. He and two of the neighbor's kids are inseparable,

to the point that they're known around the neighborhood as the Three Musketeers.

But the neighbors haven't seen Kurt. He didn't hang out with the Musketeers at all yesterday, not even at school, because Kurt never showed up to class.
At this point, Kurt's father, Kenneth, grabs his keys and starts scouring the neighborhood in his car. Dorothy continues making calls.

Word spreads fast,

and many of the Sova's friends join in the search of Hurt.

By the end of the day,

there are upwards of 40 people searching for him.

They check nearby ravines,

schoolyards,

back alleys,

and parking lots.

Dorothy becomes so desperate

that she even starts checking dumpsters, but none of them find anything. The next day, after another sleepless night, Dorothy escalates her efforts.
She files a missing person report and prints out flyers. She wallpapers the surrounding streets with pictures of her son, handing them to local store owners and placing them on telephone poles.
That afternoon, Dorothy gets her first tangible lead. Sam Carroll reaches out and tells her about the house party that Kurt attended Friday night.
Dorothy is beyond grateful for the information and she drives straight over to Susan's duplex. There, a girl answers the door, one of the roommates who shares the house with them.
Dorothy asks if she knows about the party that was held there the other night. Yet the girl, perhaps hoping to avoid trouble with an irate parent, insists that there was no party on Friday.
But Dorothy doesn't buy it. By now, she's heard about the party from two separate sources, Sam Carroll and also a delivery man who delivered pizza to a rowdy party at this very address on Friday night.
Dorothy demands the truth. She doesn't care about the underage drinking.
She's just trying to find her son.

She keeps pestering them, calling them, and knocking on their door repeatedly until the roommates finally reach their breaking point.

They admit that there was a party, and they provide Dorothy with proof that Kurt was there.

His jacket, which was left behind after all the other party goers went home that night.

Susan and her roommates insist that they don't know anything else about Kurt's whereabouts, and they demand that Dorothy stop bothering them about it. They even go as far as to report Dorothy to the police for harassment.
Reluctantly, Dorothy agrees to stay away from the duplex, for now, but she's determined to find the truth. Someone knows more than they're letting on.
She's sure of it. It's Monday morning now, a little over two days since Kurt Sova was last seen.
A few blocks away from the Sova's house, a woman named Judy Orroz is opening her record shop for the week. She's used to strange encounters with odd customers.
It's just part of the job. But that morning, a strange man shuffles up to her shop, pointing to something in the store window.
She's seen him before. He's a local homeless man, someone who usually doesn't cause much trouble.
When Oro steps out to ask the man if she can help him with anything, he shakes his head. He's not pointing to any of the records, but rather at the missing persons poster of Kurt Sova.
He tells her that she should take it down. And when she asks why, he responds with this chilling statement.

They're going to find him in two days,

and they're not going to know what happened to him.

On Monday morning, at practically the same time, the homeless man is making his cryptic prophecy, something else is happening a couple miles away across town. A young man named David Trusnick is out driving when he spots something up ahead.
A teenager he knows from the neighborhood is out walking, alone.

The boy has long brown hair, a yellow t-shirt, and skirt sova.

At this point, Kurt's family hasn't seen him for over two days.

Yet here he is, walking around town in broad daylight.

But the driver, David, doesn't know any of this.

He hasn't heard about Kurt's disappearance yet.

He hasn't seen any of the missing person signs. The most surprising thing about this situation is that Kurt isn't at school on a Monday morning.
He's not about to ride him out, though. Instead, David pulls over to ask Kurt if he needs a ride to wherever he's headed.
He never gets the chance, though, because Kurt has just noticed something across the street. An unmarked van that David has never noticed around these parts before.
Kurt's eyes light up when he notices it, and he jogs off towards it, shouting out a name in greeting as he disappears into the vehicle.

David thinks little of it and drives on.

It's not until later, once he hears about Kurt's disappearance, that he realizes the importance of what he saw that morning.

He is now the last person to have seen Kurt.

The boy is alive, but for whatever reason,

he hasn't made contact with his friends or family. When asked about the name Kurt shouted out as he jogged towards the van, David replies that it sounded something like Franco.

Tuesday, October 27th. Day four since Kurt was last seen at the house party.
The phone at the Sova household rings, and Kenneth snatches it up immediately. His son is still missing, and desperation is starting to set in.
The voice on the other end doesn't introduce itself. All it says is that it has information that the Sobas need to hear.

Kenneth presses the receiver tightly to his ear and asks the voice to go on.

They explain that underneath the duplex where Susan's party was held, there's a basement.

In this basement, there's a boy sleeping on a cot.

Though the individual doesn't say it outright, the implication is clear. This is where Kurt's been for the last four nights.
The family springs into action. Kenneth and Kurt's three brothers pile in the car and race over to see for themselves.
It doesn't matter that the duplex's residents have accused Dorothy of harassment. This is their chance to find Kurt, and they won't be denied.
Kenneth doesn't knock or even alert the duplex residents upstairs. He walks straight to the basement door and kicks it down.
Calling Kurt's name, he and his boys rush inside. The basement is unfurnished, barren concrete with sparse light pouring in from ground-level windows.
There's a cot on the floor, but no Kurt. If there was a boy being kept here, by this point, he's been moved.
Deflated, Kenneth and his sons retreat back to their car before Susan or her roommates can add breaking and entering to their list of complaints against the Sovas. They return home to give Dorothy the bad news that they still have no clue where Kurt might be.
This claim, however, is about to change. Later that evening, around 5.30pm,

three neighborhood boys make a gruesome discovery in Newburgh Heights. They're walking past a ravine behind the Republic Steel Yards when a horrifying sight stops them in their tracks.
There's a body there, lying face up Wearing a yellow t-shirt and no shoes

It's Kurt Sova. His body is only 500 yards away from Susan's duplex.
The kids run straight to the Newburgh Heights police, a department so small that it has no forensic specialist and only one detective. They swarm to the scene.
When the officers arrive, Kurt Sofa's body looks laid out, almost like he was crucified. But in spite of the dramatic pose, the body is not in poor shape.
Apart from a few scratches,

there's little evidence of physical violence.

His right shoe is lying 10 feet away.

The left shoe is nowhere to be found.

There's no way the search party missed this ravine on Saturday.

He must have been dropped here after death.

The state of the body seems to confirm this. He's only been dead for 24 to 36 hours.
This place is the time of death sometime between Sunday and Monday. The police call the Sova family to give them the news.
They think they've found Kurt's body. Someone will have to come to the coroner's office to identify him.
And ultimately, it's Kenneth who makes the trip. They conduct the autopsy not long after.
The medical examiner finds a bruise on Kurt's cheek and additional bruises on his shins. But aside from that, no visible injuries.

He wasn't shot, stabbed, or injected with anything. And when they test his blood,

they find that he had a blood alcohol level of 0.11. He had been drunk, but at no risk of alcohol poisoning.
Other drug tests turn up negative. They cannot determine how he died, and his paperwork

Thank you. but at no risk of alcohol poisoning.
Other drug tests turn up negative. They cannot determine how he died, and his paperwork simply reads, Probable accident.
Dorothy Sova is baffled. How could the coroner not know how he died? He was a healthy 17-year-old boy with no previous medical conditions that would put him at risk.
The investigation for her is merely beginning. There has to be something she's missing that'll shed light on the death of her son.
What happened to Kurt between Friday and Tuesday? That gap of unaccounted-for time would ultimately become the focus of Dorothy's investigation. Meanwhile, only a few blocks from her home, a new clue drops into her lap.
On Thursday morning, Judy Oros is opening up the record shop as usual. She's heard about Kurt's death, and it reminds her of the chilling encounter she had with the homeless man on Monday.
How had he known that the Sova boy would turn up dead? As she's pulling out the keys to unlock her store's front door, one of the neighboring shopkeepers gets her attention. Someone's dropped off a delivery for her.
It's a bouquet of flowers, and with it, a note. Judy opens it and reads,

Roses are red. The sky is blue.
They found him dead, and they'll find you, too.

Weeks pass. Dorothy Sova's investigation is slowing to a crawl.

She's gathered newspaper clippings, interview notes, maps, and timelines describing her son's movements on Friday.

She knows about the party.

She's even heard about David Trusnick's sighting of Kirk that Monday.

But none of it fits into a cohesive home. There's still far too much missing information.
And the police aren't holding up their end of the case either. At the record shop, Judy Oros had called the cops after receiving the threatening note, seemingly connected to Kurt's disappearance.
The police had listened to her story,

even taking the homeless man in for questioning.

But ultimately, they wind up releasing him,

dismissing him as just a crazy, harmless transient.

When Dorothy hears this whole story,

her frustration only increases.

There's no coordination on the police side.

They're treating her son's death as an accident that doesn't need investigation. With no new info coming to light, time rolls by slowly.
Kurt's absence in the Sova household is a painful daily reminder. Then in December, a curious name pops up in the local headlines.
A young man named Craig H. Franco is shot dead at a gas station in Cleveland.
His employers offer a $10,000 reward for any information as to the perpetrator, but no one comes forward, and the killer is never found. The man's name, Franco, leads some to believe that he could have been driving the unmarked van Kurt got into the Monday after his disappearance.
But there's no way to prove this. There are no apparent connections between Craig H.
Franco and Kurt Sova. In February, another local news story catches the Soba's attention.

One of their neighbor's kids, 13-year-old Eugene Kovett, has been found in a ravine across town.

The similarities with Kurt's case are undeniable.

Eugene, a teenage boy from the same neighborhood, had left for school,

then somehow wound up dead at the bottom of a ravine. And much like Kurt, he was missing a shoe.
However, in this case, the coroner doesn't hesitate to declare the death an accident. Eugene, it's determined, fell into the ravine and drowned in the stream.
Police seem confident that there's no connection between Eugene and Kern's deaths.

Any similarities are merely a coincidence.

Dorothy accepts their explanation,

and yet a small part of her has to wonder whether some other boy from the neighborhood will be next.

Almost a year later, more shocking news arrives for Dorothy, this time from her husband. Kenneth arrives home after a walk, looking like he's seen a ghost.
He frantically explains to Dorothy how just now, a woman named Angeline Reddix stopped him on the street. She apologized for not coming to him sooner because she has a piece of crucial information related to Kurt's disappearance.
She believes she saw the men who killed Kurt. Dorothy's jaw drops.
It's been ages since they've had any new leads, and this is an eyewitness account. She urges Kenneth to go on.
He explains that Angeline lives near the ravine where Kurt was found. During the initial investigation, Angeline recalled looking out of her window and seeing two men dragging an unconscious teenage boy down the alleyway next to her house.
At the time, she thought it was just a couple teens who had too much to drink. And when she heard of Kurt's death, her husband had told her to mind her own business.
And so, for nearly a year, Angeline had kept this information secret from the police, from the Sovas, from everyone. But now, the cat was out of the bag.
Dorothy says that they have to give this new info to someone, but contacting the Newburgh Heights police force seems increasingly pointless. She's called regularly ever since Kurt's disappearance and their only detective, Robert Karras, wants nothing to do with her.
The feeling is mutual. Dorothy wants to go over his head and get a competent detective on the case.
Since the Sovas live in Cleveland, she hopes that she can get a more well-funded police force to look into his death. Finally, she succeeds.
The Cleveland police relents to Dorothy's constant pestering, and they agree to send a detective from their department to take over the case from Detective Karas. Dorothy is elated.
For the first time in as long as she can remember, she has hope. Even if they can't get justice, maybe they can at least get answers.
The Cleveland PD assigns Detective Al Figler to the case, and from the moment he arrives at the Newburgh Heights Police Station, he can tell why Dorothy Sova wanted him to come on board. Detective Robert Karras is a difficult personality, and he doesn't seem to be particularly good at his job either.
After Karras hands the Kurtzowa case file over, Detective Figler can't believe what he's saying. This so-called case file is a handful of pieces of paper and four Polaroids haphazardly stuffed into a manila folder.
To make matters worse, all of the Polaroids showed the body on the stretcher as it was taken away. Not a single picture of how they found the body.
And even more baffling, it seems Detective Karras wasn't properly following up on the developments in the case. The similarities to Eugene Kavett, the death of Craig H.
Franco, Angeline Reddick's eyewitness account, none of it was being seriously investigated. It was the most amateur-looking case file Figler had seen in a long time.
When he asks Karras about the incomplete file, the detective just answers with a shrug. There wasn't a lot of information,

Karas argues. When word of the woefully incomplete case file reaches the press,

the local police chief defends his department, saying that Detective Karas did a fine job with

the sparse information he had. Figler is understandably irritated by this response.

If Newburgh Heights was understaffed, they should have contacted Cleveland or any other larger police department to provide aid.

But there's nothing he can do to fix what's already been mishandled. He dives into the case, and fortunately has plenty to work with,

because for the past year, Dorothy Sova has been tirelessly collecting all of the information

Detective Karras was supposed to be gathering. Detective Al Figler winds up working this case for eight years, following up on leads that Karas didn't even consider.
With Dorothy's help, he rebuilds the case file from the ground up. There are some things they'll never be able to recreate, though.
The original crime scene, for instance. But by pulling together info from the Cleveland PD, they could build a more complete timeline and catalog of evidence.
Finally, in 1990, something begins to come into focus. And Figler begins to understand the reason why Kurt's initial investigation might have been botched way back in 1981.
1990. Nine years have passed since the death of Kurt Sova.
Detective Karras drives through the darkened streets of Newburgh Heights. Everything seems to be going wrong for him.
His career is in jeopardy. He didn't expect the chief to mind the beatings, but the drugs, someone must have ratted him out.
Fury rises in his chest with nowhere to go. Up ahead, he sees a car waver.
He turns on his police lights and siren. Not your lucky day, pal.
When the man pulls over, he haves a heavy flashlight and walks over to his car. Karas demands that the man turn off the engine and get out of the car.
The driver does, hands up defensively, asking what's

wrong. Karas accuses the man of drunk driving.
When the suspect objects, Karas demands that he

hand over his case. He refuses.
Karas hefts his police flashlight and clumps the man across the

head. As he's stunned, Karas handcuffs him.
He picked the wrong guy to talk back to. On the way to the police station, Karas stops the car behind J.L.
Goodman Furniture. It's a desolate part of town, ravines and empty parking lots, the perfect place for him to let off some steam.
He opens the rear door as if to give the suspect a chance to run. Let's play games.
The suspect, holding his head, refuses to take the bait. Karas scoffs and slams the car door, and the two of them drive on to the police station.
It wasn't until later that the suspect would realize where Karas had taken him. It was the ravine where Kurt Sova's body had been found.
The unsolved death that Detective Karras has always seemed so disinterested in solving. In the years since Kurt Sova's death, it becomes abundantly clear that Newburgh's only detective is a menace.
The driver Karas hit with his flashlight is the fifth suspect the detective has beaten in the past three years. Compounding the charges of police brutality, Karas is found guilty of 76 counts of drug trafficking.
In January of 1991, he's fired from the Newburgh Heights Police Department. The police chief who had defended the handling of the Sova case had been banned from law enforcement five months prior.
As the detective's career goes down in flames, he receives an accusation from a Cuyahoga County assistant prosecutor. Did he have any hand in the death of Kurt Sova?

Karas denies any involvement

and afterward refuses to talk to reporters.

He vanishes from the case soon after

and no tangible evidence tying him to the Sova death ever emerges.

And so the uncertain question hovers over the case for years. Was he just a corrupt cop, or did he have more to hide than his drugs and taste for violence? In 2014, Dorothy Sova succumbs to a brain aneurysm.
But the questions that drove her do not die with her. In 2019, there is only one member of the Sova family still alive.
Kurt's older brother, Kevin. Out of nowhere, Kevin gets a call from the Newburgh Heights police chief.
They're interested in reopening Kurt's case, alongside criminal justice students from the nearby Tiffin University. Kevin is elated.
He still has the closet full of evidence his mother left behind, and he takes it all back to Newburgh. The investigation again begins, and soon, Ward spreads far beyond Tiffin University into the greater true crime community.
Today, Kevin maintains a Facebook page and tip line to monitor for any developments. There's a $5,000 reward for anyone who can give them a new lead about Kurt's death.
It's understandable why this case continues to fascinate people to this very day. We know just enough about Kurt Soba's movements to provide a timeline, but not enough to have a grasp of what happened.
That fateful weekend between October 23rd and October 28th haunts us with possibilities. According to the coroner, Kurt was alive for as many as three days after he vanished from Susan's party.
If his friend David is to be believed, he was still active around that Monday, being driven around in a strange unmarked van by someone called Franco. If there's a connection between the 1981 murder victim, Craig H.
Franco, and Kurt's death, however, it has yet to be definitively proven. The questions remain.
If Kurt was out and about after Susan's party, why hadn't he checked in with his parents? Why hadn't any of his brothers heard from him? Even at his most rebellious, this was severely out of character for him. Had he been held against his will somewhere or cut off from a phone? The homeless man from the record store was able to perfectly predict how the case would turn out from a single glance.
Perhaps the Cleveland PD had been too quick to dismiss this man as a lunatic. Even if he wasn't one of the killers, perhaps he had known something that only a man living on the street would have been able to see.
There are plenty of other loose ends to choose from. The two mysterious men seen dragging a teenager down an alleyway.
The abandoned cot in Susan's basement, unexplained to this day. The threatening note left for Judy Oros, which may have been written by the homeless man or some unknown third party.
And then there's Robert Karras, the lone detective in Newburgh Heights during the time of Kern's death, a man who was proven to be violent and unstable, as well as tied up with drugs. If he had some connection to the crime, he was in the perfect position to destroy the trail of evidence.
And for all we know, perhaps he did. Even still, it's quite likely that the real culprit is someone who was never identified.
At the heart of this case is a story of an everyday teen, growing more independent from his family. His parents didn't know many of his new friends, and he was increasingly interested in spending time away from his brothers.
It's this very distance that enabled him to disappear so completely from their lives. Whether someone killed him or whether he died of some drunken mishap, it's this realization that's haunted his family afterwards.
None more so than his dedicated mother. In her final years, Dorothy wished that she could have been closer to him, could have known his life a bit more.

In any other context, this is a normal part of growing up.

But in the case of Kurt Sova, it was an opportunity for the unspeakable to happen.

It's a truth that all parents must eventually come to terms with.

You simply can't protect your kids from everything forever. By me, Mr.
Ballin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt. Our head of writing is Evan Allen.
This episode was written by Robert Diemstra. Copy editing by Luke Baratz.
Audio editing and sound design by Alistair Sherman. Mixed and mastered by Schultz Media.
Research by Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Evan Beamer, and Stacey Wood. Fact-checking by Abigail Shumway.

Production supervision by Jeremy Bone and Colt Ocasio.

Production coordination by Samantha Collins and Avery Siegel.

Artwork by Jessica Cloxton-Kiner and Robin Vane.

Theme song by Ross Bugden.

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