Mankato Free Press, July 19, 1983
Still Missing
Michael Larson
Free Press Managing Editor
On Oct. 2, 1965, a Saturday, Richard Huerkamp had planned to hunt geese near Mapleton with some friends.
“When the alarm went off in the morning,” his sister remembers today, nearly 18 years later, “he turned it off and went back to sleep.
“When he did wake up, he asked my sister to use her bike so he could ride out to where he was supposed to meet two other guys.”
HUERKAMP PEDALED the bike to the Maple River south of town.
His friends apparently had waited for a short while. “At the last minute, they decided to go off somewhere else, so he ended up out there by himself,” says Huerkamp’s sister, Kathy Beyer, who now lives in Waseca.
Law enforcement officials later followed the boy’s tracks to the edge of the river. That’s the last trace they would find of him.
A newspaper account from Tuesday, Oct. 5, three days after Huerkamp left his home, included a report that “bloodhounds led searchers repeatedly to the river’s edge in the hunt for [the] missing Mapleton boy Monday, and that’s where efforts are concentrated today.”
HUERKAMP HAD JUST turned 15 when he disappeared.
The son of Mr. and Mrs. Mathias Huerkamp, he was a sophomore at Mapleton High School. He would have been 33 this September.
“The boy is small for his age, actually appearing several years younger than his 15 years,” an Oct. 6 newspaper account read. “He is 4 feet, 9 inches tall and weighs 80 pounds. He has brown hair, brown eyes and wears glasses.
Would his sister recognize him if she saw him today? “I doubt it,” she says. “Whether he’s changed or not, I don’t know.”
HUERKAMP HAD RIDDEN his bike along County Road 7 to the “edge of a cornfield on the Archie McGregor farm in Mapleton Township,” according to newspaper accounts.
Mrs. Beyer says he had brought along his gun in its case and a sack lunch. His guncase, his unopened lunch and several shells were found with the bike.
“Clothing the boy was wearing when he disappeared include herring-bone coveralls, a duck-hunting camp and combat boots with a buckle on top,” the newspaper said on Oct. 4.
Authorities found no clues. They did not find his gun. “His hunting hat, which floats, was never found,” Mrs. Beyer says.
HIS FAMILY had expected Huerkamp to stay with some friends at a nearby farm home. They contacted authorities when they discovered he was not at the farm.
About 300 people helped the Bue Earth County Sheriff’s Department hunt for the boy. Three airplanes flew low overhead. And on the river, eight boat operators maneuvered their crafts to drag for a body.
Emil Meurer, then Blue Earth County sheriff, told reporters that on at least two occasions, bloodhounds “went from the bicycle at the edge of the cornfield to the banks of the Maple river.”
But the searches uncovered nothing, not a solitary clue.
IN ADDITION to the Blue Earth County Sheriff’s Department, the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigated the case. LaRoy Wiebold, now the county sheriff, said there was never any evidence of foul play.
“At the time,” Mrs. Beyer says, “there was no reason to suspect he would run away from home. There was no reason that he would.”
Newspaper accounts told of the Maple River swelling beyond its banks, with the river flowing 6 to 8 feet deep in some places. He could have gotten into trouble there, but again, any theories are pure conjecture
HUERKAMP’S DISAPPEARANCE proved difficult for his family, “and it still is,” Mrs. Beyer says.
Huerkamp was the oldest child in the family. His two sisters are now aged 30 and 31. His father died of a heart attack in 1968.
Family members think of the missing boy often, Mrs. Beyer says.
Other people do, too.
In 1968, Huerkamp’s classmates dedicated their yearbook to him.
When Meurer retired as sheriff, he reportedly called the case one of the most frustrating, and said it still bothered him that it hadn’t been solved.
Wiebold says it remains “an open missing person’s case,” and he would like to see it solved.
“I would hope someday something would turn up,” he says. “I don’t’ like open cases, whether I inherit them or not.”
