Earnest Cagle Jr.

Status:

Open

Jurisdiction:

Sangamon County Sheriffs Office (IL)

Missing From:

Buckhart, Illinois

Summary:

Earnest Doss Cagle Jr., a 2-year-old boy, vanished from his family's car parked outside Cecil Delay's tavern in Buckhart, Illinois on August 27, 1950. Despite massive searches and investigation by Sangamon County authorities, he was never found and the case remains unsolved.

Vital Statistics

Circumstances of Disappearance:

On the evening of August 27, 1950 (Saturday), Earnest Cagle Sr. and his wife Adeline went to Cecil Delay's bar in Buckhart with three of their children. Earnest Jr., age 2, was left asleep in the family car with his 1-year-old sister Vicky Lorraine, while the parents entered the tavern with their eldest daughter Mary Lynn (age 3). Earnest Sr. checked on the children around 1 a.m. and found both sleeping peacefully in the car. About an hour later, when the tavern closed and the parents returned to the vehicle, Earnest Jr. was discovered missing. The child was very small, weighing only 19½ pounds, and was blonde-haired. He was wearing blue shorts, a yellow polo shirt, sandals, and a red Hopalong Cassidy jacket. The car doors were heavy, and according to Earnest Sr., dust on the window frames appeared undisturbed, suggesting the child could not have exited the vehicle on his own.

Additional Details:

Sangamon County law officials theorized the boy had been kidnapped. Earnest Cagle Sr., who worked on a farm near Illiopolis, believed his son had been abducted, noting the car doors were too heavy for a toddler to open and questioning why the child would have run into the dark rather than toward the lighted tavern. Both parents underwent questioning by authorities and took lie-detector tests. Dozens of onlookers converged on Buckhart as the search continued, and hundreds of curiosity seekers flooded the community as both taverns did heavy business with people waiting for news of the boy's discovery. The desperate search never produced any results. In a retrospective a year later, the Register reported the case was still marked unsolved. Adeline Cagle, who was pregnant when Earnest Jr. vanished, delivered a baby girl in July 1952 and named her Ernestine. The case sat outside official missing persons databases for 76 years until being added to NamUs in 2026 by the Buried Bylines podcast, which highlighted how the child's disappearance had been forgotten by systems meant to track missing children.

Case Last Updated:

Nov 15, 2026