Courtesy of Jack El-Hai
Jack El-Hai, The Lost Brothers
Nobody knows exactly what happened to the Klein brothers.
The story begins in 1951 in the Hawthorne neighborhood of north Minneapolis, when the three brothers under 10 years old–Danny, David, and Kenneth Klein–disappeared during a trip to the local park.
The full details of the case that makes up Jack El-Hai’s latest investigative book, The Lost Brothers: A Family’s Decades-Long Search, are wrapped in mystery. His new book and podcast, Long Lost on TPT, chronicle the family’s seemingly endless search for the three missing boys.
November 10 marks the 68th anniversary of the boys’ disappearance, and another year that the four remaining brothers, who still continue the search that their late parents dedicated their lives to, have no answers.
Though the Kleins’ story began in 1951, it wasn’t until November 1997 when a classified ad in the Sunday Star Tribune caught El-Hai's attention. The ad said something like “‘Anyone with information about the disappearance of Kenneth Jr., David, and Danny Klein, on November 10, 1951, please give us a call.’ And then it listed a phone number,” El-Hai recalls.
He called the number and drove to Monticello to meet Kenneth Sr. and Betty Klein, the parents of the missing boys. “It was an incredible, and moving, and striking story unlike any I’ve ever heard before,” he says.
It was a Saturday afternoon when the three youngest Klein boys, 4, 6, and 8, took a trip to Farview Park, just a few blocks from their Hawthorne neighborhood home. “The boys left home, ran down the sidewalk toward the park, and nobody ever saw them again,” El-Hai says.
At the time, it was standard procedure for the police to wait 24 hours before conducting a missing-persons search. They tried many tactics with few results. A tracking dog led a trainer on a sinuous path for about seven miles before stopping along the west bank of the Mississippi River, near the Lowry Avenue Bridge. It was as close as they came to following the boys’ trail. Nothing was found along the riverbank, and it was assumed that the three brothers drowned in the ice-capped current. A bit later, El-Hai says, the police found a couple of the boys’ caps on top of the ice downriver slightly from the end of the tracked trail.
Five days after the disappearance, the Minneapolis Police Department closed the case, having determined that the three little boys drowned in the river. “Other than the dog track and the caps, there was no evidence that the boys had drowned or had ever been at the river. No bodies ever turned up,” El-Hai says. “You would expect at least one body to turn up if all three had drowned. And so, the parents were not satisfied with this conclusion, and for the rest of their lives, continued searching on their own.”
In the years that followed, the Klein family asked for additional help from government officials and the FBI, hired a private investigator, and consulted psychics. “They even had photos of the boys age-progressed and put on posters that they distributed or had friends and family distribute at truck stops all around the country,” El-Hai says.
As a freelance writer at the time, he wrote a story about the disappearance for Minnesota Monthly in the late ‘90s, which piqued the interest of many locals. But, as often happens, the story and interest died down shortly after with no results.
In the early 2000s, Betty and Kenneth Sr. died, leaving the search to their four remaining children: Gordon, who is older than the three missing boys but didn’t go with on that tragic park trip, and the three younger Klein brothers, born after the disappearance.
El-Hai kept in touch with the Klein family sporadically after his initial article on the case, but didn’t hear anything for years. At 50, he got an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College in Vermont through a remote program that required minimal facetime so he could stay in his adopted home state. He dove into his first non-fiction books in the 2000s with Lost Minnesota and The Lobotomist.
Years passed on the Klein case, until an email from a Wright County sheriff’s deputy came through his inbox about seven years ago. The officers Jessica Miller and her investigative partner Lance Salls met the Kleins by chance, heard their story, and became intrigued. “They were doing it on their own time,” El-Hai says. “They wanted to know what I still had. I still had a lot–I still had everything that I had gathered in my reporting.” The three are all certain the boys were abducted.
The Wright County deputies amassed their own research, developing a list of suspects and recommendations on how to proceed. “They had done a much more complete investigation than the Minneapolis police were able to do in 1951. And they’ve brought the case forward a long way,” El-Hai says.
Now they face a larger roadblock.
“It’s an orphan case,” El-Hai says. The Minneapolis police closed the case in under a week. After their involvement, the FBI also backed out of the case. The Wright County officers can’t officially investigate the disappearance because the original site is outside their jurisdiction. The Minneapolis police “are not going to reopen it unless there’s very compelling evidence–new evidence–or a reason to think of the case differently than the police did all those years ago,” El-Hai says. “There’s no police agency that will accept claim.”
It seems like Wright County would if they could–after all, the remaining siblings currently call the county home. The deputies are ready to give the case to a police force who will take it on, says El-Hai. “But, so far that hasn’t happened.” So, the orphan case continues to search for a home.
The possibility of a kidnapping likely never crossed the minds of the cops working the disappearance 68 years ago. Even the boys’ parents didn’t realize their sons may have been snatched until weeks after the investigation closed. “I don’t know whether [abductions] were less common, but they were certainly less known about,” El-Hai says. “There was no evidence that the boys had drowned or had even been at the river.”
It wasn’t until the case of Jacob Wetterling and others like it in the decades that followed that kidnappings entered public awareness. But not enough new, compelling evidence has surfaced yet to reopen the Klein case. “One of my goals and hopes in writing this book and working on a podcast… is that we hope to flush out somebody out there who remembers something or has heard something second- or even third-hand,” El-Hai says.
The suspects identified by the Wright County deputies can all be found in cemeteries. Reopening the investigation would not end in the conviction of a kidnapper, but rather provide some sort of conclusion for the Klein family. “The idea that the boys were abducted is what the family came to believe,” El-Hai says. “I don’t know if they’ll ever achieve closure on all this, but a resolution would really help the family a lot.”
