June 4 will mark the 15th anniversary of the disappearance of 7-year-old Kyron Horman from Skyline Elementary School in rural Northwest Portland.

The event launched the largest missing person search in Oregon history. Although local, state and federal law enforcement agencies all investigated the case, no trace of Korman has ever been found, leaving his mother, Desiree Young, repeatedly calling for answers on every anniversary.

“I never thought I would be here. I’ve always thought Kyron would be home by now, whatever happened,” Young told the Portland Tribune. She will be in town during the grim anniversary to call attention to her son’s disappearance as another year passes.

The fact that no one has been arrested in the case is one of Oregon’s most puzzling mysteries. Kyron’s stepmother, Terri Horman, emerged as a possible suspect early in the investigation. She drove him to school that morning and was widely reported as the last person to see him alive.

Terri Horman, who has remarried and is now named Terri Vasques, has denied knowing anything about Kyron’s disappearance. Contacted by the Portland Tribune, her attorney, Stephen Houze, said she would not be commenting on the anniversary.

Meanwhile, Young has not remained silent about her suspicions. She sued Horman, as she was still named, in Multnomah County Circuit Court within two years of the disappearance to hold her accountable. She only dropped the case under pressure from investigators.

“I didn’t want to do it, but I was told investigators would stop sharing information with families going forward if I continued, and I didn’t want to be responsible for that,” Young said.

But Young has continued to build a circumstantial case against Horman since then in numerous interviews, publications and public appearances. She most recently spoke publicly about the case at the True Crime Fest Northwest in Portland over the 2024 Labor Day Weekend.

Young’s theory

Among other things, Young has repeatedly said:

• Contrary to Horman’s claims that she left Kyron at the school, four people saw her leading him back to her truck on the morning of his disappearance.
• Horman failed two lie detector tests in the days following Kyron’s disappearance, then refused to take a third one. Everyone else passed their test, including Young and Kaine Horman, Kyron’s father, who was at work when the youth disappeared.
• Horman cannot fully account for all of her time after leaving the school on the morning Kyron disappeared, instead saying that she was mostly driving though the heavily wooded West Hills trying to comfort an ailing young daughter. A close friend of Horman’s named Dede Spicer was working in the West Hills at the time and was reported missing for a couple of hours by co-workers.
• After Spicer came under investigation, she admitted using disposal burner phones to communicate with Terri Horman around the time. The phones have been recovered by investigators, where evidence related to the investigation has been recovered from them.
• Horman was investigated for murder-for-hire plots three times before Kyron disappeared. She allegedly hired an ex-con to kill a boyfriend before moving to Portland and tried to hire two men to kill Kyron’s father, Kaine Horman, before they separated and divorced following Kyron’s disappearance.

Few words

Asked about Young’s accusations, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office declined to deny them.

“We are very aware that the 15th anniversary is approaching. We are still deciding internally what to do or say to mark the occasions,” Pat Dooris, communications director for the Multnomah County District Attorney’s office, said.

Young said that no other credible suspects have surfaced over the past 14-plus years.

“Investigators cleared everyone who was at the school the day Kyron disappeared, all of the neighbors near the school, and all registered sex offenders in the area at the time. The reason the investigation focused on Horman is because of her own behavior,” Young said.

“I won’t give up until Kyron is home.”

From victim to fighter

Anyone who has lived in the Portland area for any length of time is probably aware of Desiree Young. Although she and her husband live in Medford, she has kept a high profile over the years to continue calling attention to the case. Among other things, she has traveled to Portland on most anniversaries, frequently choking up during televised interviews when she pleads for anyone with information to come forward.

But, although Young admits she easily becomes emotional when talking about her son, she is not helpless. In person, she projects strength, not weakness. Her local appearances are frequently at fundraisers where she raises money to continue organized searches for Kyron in and around the rugged hills where Terri Horman said she was driving the day the youth disappeared.

Over the years, Young has also become an expert in the dynamics of missing persons cases, speaking about her personal experiences at law enforcement gatherings and counselling other parents whose children have disappeared.

And she has continued talking to some of the people involved in the investigation, including witnesses, where she learned the things she has disclosed, and some things she says she has not yet disclosed.

Seattle author Rebecca Morris worked with Young on a book about the case, “BOY MISSING: The Search for Kyron Horman.” It was published in 2020 and first reported many of the reasons why Young came to suspect Terri Horman and Spicer.

Young’s persistence has inspired a loyal following that has tracked the case closely, launched websites about it, and supported Young’s fundraising efforts to continue the search for Kyron. A large group called Kyron Horman’s World Soldiers has its own Facebook page and has produced YouTube videos about the case. Several of them staffed a support table at True Crime Fest Northwest, where both Young and Morris spoke.

Researcher pursues public records

Another writer interested in the case is O’Neill Robben, a former Portland Tribune reporter who covered the so-called Oregon City Missing Girls case in 2002. She focused on the families of the two victims, Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis, and that of suspect Ward Weaver III, both before and after he was arrested. Weaver was charged with and convicted of murdering Pond and Gaddis after their bodies were found at his Oregon City rental home.

Robben, a former Clackamas County prosecutor and crime victims advocate, became fascinated with the case, continued researching it, and wrote an in-depth book about practically everyone connected to it that was published in 2023 titled, “CLOSE TO HOME: Sexual Abusers and Serial Killers, Memoir and Murder.”

That work helped spark an interest in the difficulty of solving murders when bodies cannot be located, even when investigators have identified likely suspects and gathered circumstantial evidence.

“Within three years of Ashley’s and Miranda’s disappearances, that case had a spectacularly successful conclusion: The girls’ neighbor, Ward Francis Weaver III, pled guilty or no contest to every charge in the 17-count indictment against him and is serving life in prison with no possibility of parole,” O’Neill Robben said.

“Fifteen years later, Kyron’s mother doesn’t know, for sure, what happened to him, although she has a theory. His remains have never been found. No one was ever charged with any crime in connection with his disappearance.”

To learn more about Kyron’s case, O’Neill Robben has used her legal expertise to file public records requests with public bodies that have been involved in the case, including the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office, the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office and other law-enforcement agencies. While Oregon law conditionally exempts records from open criminal cases from disclosure, restricting what reporters and the public can find out about them, Robben is arguing that that exemption doesn’t apply in Kyron’s case.

O’Neill Robben also has requested financial and time-worked records about the investigations and the public funds spent on them, which the sheriff’s office agreed are not exempt from disclosure. Among other things, such records could reveal how active the investigation actually is. The Portland Tribune will report the results of her research.

“Would it ever be possible to make a successful no-body murder case against someone based on all of the information about Kyron’s disappearance that the DA’s Office and the investigators on the case have available to them? And could the public obtain at least some of that information by using Oregon’s Public Records Law?” O’Neill Robben said of the requests she is financing.