Remains found in 2021 ID’D as 22-year-old last seen in 1976
Their son had been missing for decades, but every time Louise and John Clinkscales left their home in Lagrange, Georgia, to search for him, one of them would leave behind a note.
If Kyle returned while they were gone, his parents wanted their only child to know that a lot had changed since he was last seen in 1976 at the age of 22. They loved him, the couple would write, and there, on the dining room table, was a spare car key for him.
“They left no stone unturned,” Louise Clinkscales’ sister, Martha Morrison, 88, of Oxford, Alabama, said in an interview.
Kyle Clinkscales’ parents died before authorities made a remarkable discovery in December 2021: a 1974 Ford Pinto poking out from a creek, identification inside the rusty car belonging to him, and about 50 skeletal fragments encased in the mud.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation confirmed last week that the remains were of Kyle Clinkscales. Erin Hackley, the coroner in Troup County, Georgia, said it might take investigators months to determine a cause of death, if they can pinpoint one at all, given the age of the remains.
For a little more than 47 years, residents of Lagrange, about 70 miles southwest of Atlanta, wondered what had happened to a sports-obsessed young man who was attending Auburn University in Alabama.
At the university, he was beginning to search for his place in the world and mapping out what career to pursue. On Jan. 27, 1976, Clinkscales left his part-time job at a bar in Lagrange and headed out for the roughly 45-minute drive to Auburn University, where he was a sophomore.
Investigators believe that something happened at some point in his trip, and his whereabouts remained a mystery ever since.
Sgt. Stewart Smith of the Troup County Sheriff ’s Office said a driver in Cusseta, Alabama,
about 30 miles southwest of Lagrange, was on a two-lane road on Dec. 7, 2021, when he saw the hatchback of a rusted vehicle sticking out of the creek and called authorities. It was not clear what allowed the car to become visible from the road after all this time.
The creek in Chambers County, Alabama, outside Lagrange, was probably never searched because the road would not likely have been Clinkscales’ main route to Auburn, though it might have been an alternate one.
“We were shocked,” Smith said, noting how deputies felt when they realized that the oldest missing-person cold case in the county was at last ending, just 11 months after Louise Clinkscales died in January 2021 at age 92.