The Baffling Disappearance of Marjorie West
More than 85 years after Marjorie West mysteriously disappeared in Allegheny National Forest, her family and curious true crime sleuths are still searching for answers.
On May 8, 1938, in celebration of Mother’s Day, little Marjorie West, only four years old, went on a picnic with her family in the Allegheny Forest near Bradford, Pennsylvania.
After church, Marjorie and her family—her father Shirley West, who was an assistant engineer at Kendall Refining, her mother Cecelia, her older sister Dorothea, 11, and her brother Allan, 7—went along with family friends Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd Akerlind.
To get to their picnic spot, the Wests drove along Highway 219 to nearby Marshburg, a popular clearing in the Allegheny Forest. By 3 p.m., an exhausted Cecelia returned to the family car to rest. Shirley and the Akerlinds headed further into the woods to fish for trout in a nearby stream.
Soon, Marjorie and Dorothea decided to pick a bouquet of wildflowers for Mother’s Day. Their father cautioned the girls to watch for rattlesnakes, then left them in the clearing.
For a time, the West sisters gathered violets. Then Dorothea left Marjorie alone for a moment while she ran back to the car to give Cecelia a bouquet of flowers.
When she returned, Marjorie was gone.
The Wests and their friends combed the clearing and woods where the girls had been picking flowers, but to no avail. Most groups stayed to search for the lost child, while others drove to the nearest phone, which was seven miles away in the small town of Kane. Only then were the police alerted.
Initially, the police assumed little Marjorie was purposely hiding from her sister. After all, one of her favorite games was hide-and-seek. But the little girl with curly red hair never came out of hiding. The police then theorized that Marjorie wandered off and was lost in the woods.
Allegheny Woods was a dangerous place. There were bears and rattlesnakes. The ground was dotted with hundreds of abandoned oil wells, remnants of the 1870s petroleum industry that boomed in the area. And there was the fast-moving stream.
The police searched the area but could find no trace of the missing girl. They quickly realized they would need more boots on the ground. Eventually, some 200 volunteers from the local Moose and Elk lodges joined a group of people from the Citizen Conservation Corps to look for Marjorie.
Even though, as the local newspaper reported, “all available flashlights in the city were pressed into service,” the initial search was called off when it got too dark to see. The next morning, Monday, 500 volunteers arrived to continue searching the forest for the missing child. Many of them called into work so they could help locate Marjorie.
With each passing day, more volunteers assisted in the search. On Wednesday, Hugh Ryan, the mayor of Bradford, issued a plea for a thousand volunteers. More than 2,500 showed up.
On Thursday, the owners and managers of several of western Pennsylvania’s oil fields did something unprecedented: they gave their workers the day off to help in Marjorie’s search.
Hundreds of volunteers walked every square inch of the Allegheny Forest, an arm’s length apart from each other. They scoured the tangled underbrush, killed rattlesnakes, shined their lights into abandoned wells and mine shafts, and searched in and along the stream.
On May 10, two days after Marjorie West disappeared, police bloodhounds from New York were brought in. Two local newspapers reported that the bloodhounds located Marjorie’s scent and followed it “half a mile up a mountain to a cabin with its door nailed shut.” The cabin was thoroughly searched, but yielded no clues as to the child’s whereabouts.
Years later, however, descendants of the West family presented a different account of the bloodhounds’ activities. They claimed the dogs followed Marjorie’s scent until it suddenly stopped at the road next to the clearing.
In 2006, a woman named Catherine, the daughter of Marjorie’s cousin, Joyce, wrote in her blog, “The searchers found the crushed bouquet of violets, picked for her mother for Mother’s Day, lying on the ground not far from the rock.” The rock was in the same area where Marjorie and her sister, Dorothea, had collected the violets.
If this account is true, it lends credence to the new theory that police were still developing. Since the little girl was not found wandering in the woods as expected, and her body was not discovered in an old mine shaft or on the banks of the creek, authorities investigating Marjorie’s disappearance began to think that she had been taken from the forest—snatched by a stranger.
Police questioned witnesses and nearby residents about vehicle traffic on the road around 3 p.m. on Mother’s Day. They learned that three cars were seen driving past the area at that time. Less than 48 hours later, the police knew the identities of two of the drivers.
But they couldn’t track down the third driver, a man witnesses said was speeding away from the clearing so fast that another motorist in the oncoming lane had to swerve into a ditch to avoid a collision. They could only learn that the unidentified man was driving a Plymouth sedan.
Marjorie West’s disappearance occurred just six years after the highly publicized kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. The infant son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh had been kidnapped from his crib by someone demanding a ransom for the child’s return.
At the time, the Lindbergh kidnapping was the biggest news story, and the latest developments were splashed on the front pages of newspapers every day.
While there were twists and turns in the case of the Lindbergh kidnapping, there was one undeniable outcome of this incident.: people across America became aware that strangers could abduct children with nefarious intent.
The outcomes of the Lindberg kidnapping and the disappearance of Marjorie West differ greatly, but these two events rank as two of the most highly publicized missing children’s cases—with the biggest manhunts in the first half of the 20th century. Both events helped to raise awareness about child abduction and set the stage for the “stranger danger” era to come.
So, what happened to Marjorie West? The answer is: we don’t know.
No evidence has been found and the case has never been solved. As one unnamed volunteer later said, “There was no way the little girl could have been in the woods.”
Most people living in Bradford, including the police and volunteers who helped search for the child, believe that she was taken from the clearing by a passing motorist. What happened after that, however, is the subject of much speculation.
No ransom note was ever sent to the West family or the police, so it was deemed unlikely that Marjorie was kidnapped for ransom. It was equally implausible that her parents were responsible for the little girl’s disappearance. It was widely reported that Marjorie’s father, Shirley West, refused to leave the Allegheny Forest for over a week.
He spent his time frantically searching for his lost child, barely sleeping or eating. According to one article, approaching complete exhaustion, Shirley had finally “consented to come to Bradford. He ate his evening meal at home and then returned to the forest.”
Marjorie’s mother, Cecelia, refused to leave her home. She sat by the telephone, afraid of missing a call.
The fact that Marjorie’s body was never found gives hope to residents of Bradford and members of the West family. Marjorie’s cousin, Jack Covert, gave an interview shortly before his recent death.
“She could still be living,” he said. “But she’s probably not around here.” Many people echo his sentiments.
The police investigated the child’s disappearance for about six years. Local police, FBI, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children continue to collect tips regarding the Marjorie West case to this day.
Two of Marjorie’s cousins consented to have DNA cheek swabs collected from them and sent to the crime lab at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2012. So far, there have been no hits connected to them.
Marjorie’s relatives continue to publicize her story, hoping someone will come forward with the information they need.
“I remember listening to my grandmother tell me stories about Marjorie and the sadness she felt for leaving her sister alone for those few moments,” wrote Angel, the granddaughter of Marjorie’s sister, Dorothea West. “My grandmother held on to her feeling of responsibility until her passing two years ago.”
Marjorie’s cousin, Joyce’s daughter, Catherine, maintains the family’s blog. “My grandfather searched for weeks,” she wrote, “long after the manhunt was called off, returning home late into the night. Three small children sat on the porch steps waiting for him, but they knew each night from the slope of his shoulders, he didn’t find the little girl with the bouncing red curls.”
In a 2010 book, Finding Marjorie West, author and college professor Harold Thomas Beck laid out his own personal investigation into the baffling disappearance and presented his incredible, yet unproven, theory.
Beck claimed that in the late 1990s, during the early years of the internet, he posted information about the Marjorie West case online and offered a $10,000 reward for information regarding her whereabouts.
In the post, he included a few current photos of Dorothea. Marjorie closely resembled her older sister as a four-year-old child, so Beck assumed they would look alike as adults, too.
He received several responses to his post and planned a trip to talk to some of these people. One tip came from a woman who stated that a coworker, a nurse, looked quite similar to the photographs of Dorothea.
On his travels, Beck stopped in Florida to meet this woman. He agreed that the nurse looked a lot like Dorothea, but the woman—later identified as Sylvia Waldrop London—was adamant that she was not the missing Marjorie.
Several years later, in 2005, Beck recounted that Sylvia London reached out to him again. By this time, she had returned to her childhood home, a family farm in North Carolina, to tend to her ailing mother. She invited Beck to meet her there.
Sylvia shared with Beck that her mother had made a deathbed confession. According to the mother’s story, her husband—Sylvia’s father—spent the winter of 1938 working in a refinery in Bradford. He planned to return to the farm in the spring to plant his crops.
As the story went, Beck learned that on Mother’s Day, the man drove past the Allegheny Forest on his way to North Carolina when a little girl darted into the road. He was unable to stop and struck the child with his car.
The little girl was unconscious, and the man noted that no one was around. Quickly, he put the child in the backseat of his car, intent on taking her to the closest hospital. A short time later, the child regained consciousness and seemed fine. Then, the man had an idea.
According to his wife’s deathbed confession, the man knew that Mother’s Day was particularly rough on his wife. The couple’s only child, a daughter, died during delivery just months ago.
The birth was a difficult one and the couple had been told that they may not be able to have more children. So, the man brought little Marjorie home with him and presented her to his wife. They raised the child as their own.
As the story went, a few years after this incident, the man was drafted into the military and sent to fight in World War II. He lost an arm in battle and later told his wife it was certain it was “God’s way of punishing him for what he’s done.”
Sylvia told Beck that, as a child, she told her parents about the “other family” and spoke of living in a place where the “snow was way over her head.” Sylvia’s parents told their friends that their daughter had an active imagination. Sylvia even remembers the names “Dorothea” and “Allen” as being important to her.
Beck explains in his book that Sylvia agreed to tell him this information on two conditions: that he not disclose her identity until after her death, and that he arrange for her to meet Dorothea. Sadly, by this time, Dorothea was in her late 70s and in failing health. Dorothea died in 2007, and two years later, Sylvia succumbed to cancer. Beck self-published his book in 2010.
Did Harold Thomas Beck solve the mystery of Marjorie West’s disappearance? The Bradford police don’t believe his incredible tale. Nor does the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Bob Lowery, a former leader at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, admitted that he hasn’t read Beck’s book, but stated, “I would think that anyone alive today who was living at that time would have vivid memories of this. When something happens to a child of four, there’s a need to have the truth shared so that everyone knows.”
As for Beck, he is sticking by his story. “There’s no question, it’s her,” he added. Naturally, many people have questioned why Beck hasn’t taken his information to the authorities.
To this, Beck asks, “What is it going to accomplish? One family is dead, and the other has been living under a set of circumstances they believe to be true. The mother and father were considered good people in the community.”
Even though Sylvia Waldrop London is gone, she has a daughter. Her DNA could be compared to the DNA cheek swabs from Marjorie West’s relatives that are on file at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
That would conclusively answer the question. Either this DNA analysis hasn’t yet been done—for whatever reason—or it has, and one or both families have chosen not to make the results public.
Very interesting reads! History repeats itself all the time. We read about missing small children everywhere!
Excellent content in these stories. Thank you.