Most detectives have a case that haunts them.
The specters that have haunted Onslow County Sheriff Ed Brown are a long-dead sex offender and two children missing for nearly 50 years.
On Wednesday, workers found bones beneath a demolished house once owned by convicted child molester Henry Hunt, who died in 1991 at the age of 85.
Brown hoped the bones would mean two children, 7-year-old Diana Moon Yoli and 3-year-old Mark Eugene Yoli, missing since Sept. 13, 1962, had finally been found.
It is a gut-wrenching situation Brown said he has been in before.
On her deathbed in 1992, Hunt's wife told her daughter that Hunt had picked up the two children in Midway Park and later dumped their bodies in a mine near Maysville.
"I've read about miracles in the Bible, I believe in miracles, and I believe it would take a miracle to ever find the remains of these children," Brown told The Daily News at the time.
Agents with Naval Criminal Investigate Services joined Brown, other authorities and Daily News reporter Cliff Hill in the 1992 reconnaissance of the water-filled rock quarry. Geology experts determined a search of the mine would be pointless since the quarries and lakes feeding into them had changed so many times since 1962.
The general consensus was that the Yoli children would remain forever buried in the tomb their killer chose for them. But the possibility that the children lay elsewhere has nagged at Brown since even before his time as a law enforcement officer.
In 1962, Brown, a high school student, was fond of a girl who lived on Pony Farm Road. The girl's neighborhood, like many others, had one yard you didn't go in and one man you didn't talk to -- in this case it was Hunt. When the Yoli children went missing in September 1962, search efforts centered on the Midway Park housing area and the surrounding swamp. Although base housing was 13 miles from Hunt's Pony Farm Road house, Brown always wondered whether the man was involved.
He remembered a German Shepherd belonging to Brown's then-girlfriend get loose and trying to dig beneath Hunt's home.
When Brown entered law enforcement in 1967, he kept an eye on Hunt and questioned people from time to time about the Yoli children, who were never found.
With no new leads to go on, local and federal authorities moved on to other cases. Without probable cause, Brown couldn't search Hunt's home. The case drifted into obscurity, but never dropped off Brown's radar.
The mystery of what happened to the children stretched into years, followed by decades.
With Hunt's wife's 1992 deathbed revelation, Brown learned what Hunt had told her many years prior. Hunt said he picked up the Yoli children and took them fishing. He said the boy accidentally drowned and he killed the girl in a panic.
Brown said he didn't believe the drowning story at all.
"This man had no business with these children at all," he said. "It was clearly an abduction and murder."
Brown said he wasn't sure their bodies were at the bottom of the Maysville mine and felt they might be on Pony Farm Road. But with nothing more than a gut feeling, Brown didn't want to ask someone to demolish their home.
About 10 years ago, Brown began to keep track of who owned Hunt's old house.
"The house became the haunt for me," Brown said. "I wanted to know. I feel it has been resolved for me either way. I have thought about this a long time, but wasn't sure we'd ever know for sure if the children were here or not."
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
