What happened to Little Wesley Morgan?

On March 14, 1999, Ruby Renee Havard gave birth to Wesley Dale Morgan in Slaughter, Louisiana. Two years later, the toddler vanished from the front porch of Ruby Renee’s rental home southeast of Clinton, Louisiana.

Clinton Police Captain Howard Weathers filed the following report:

“May 15, 2001, at 10:05 Tuesday morning, Chief Eddie Stewart advised Captain Weathers that [Ruby Renee] called Clinton Police Department and stated that her child was missing. Captain Weathers went to the address at 2739 Highway 63 and met with the complainant. [Ruby Renee] advised that she and her child were outside the home before she went inside to boil some eggs. She was gone for about five minutes. When she came back outside, the child was missing. She stated she searched for 15 minutes before calling the police.”

By nightfall, Louisiana State Police joined law enforcement officers from five regional jurisdictions in assisting the Clinton Police Department, searching homes and questioning neighbors. Simultaneously, local firefighters led two-hundred volunteers, including the missing toddler’s father and inmates from two local prisons, combing through the thick surrounding woods and low hills on foot, horseback, and four-wheeler recreational vehicles, stopping only occasionally to avoid snakes or poke creek bottoms with long poles.

Before week’s end, cadaver-sniffing dogs joined the search, National Guard helicopters scanned for heat signatures in the woods using thermal imaging equipment, and the FBI employed ultraviolet lighting to search three automobiles for bloodstains.

When the search ended, East Feliciana Chief Deputy Paul Perkins told reporters, “We’ve combed and recombed these woods. If [Little Wesley] was around here, we would have found him, or the dogs would have. This case is now most definitely a criminal investigation.”

Investigators, he said, believed someone either killed or kidnapped the toddler. With that statement, the case fell dormant for ten years.

In 2012, Richard K. Sobers, a retired Baton Rouge police officer, who grew up in East Feliciana Parish, concerned about the lack of progress in the case, wrote the local sheriff and volunteered to help. “In fact,” he told me this week, “I wrote several letters, but they ignored my offer.”

Richard persuaded the FBI’s New Orleans and Baton Rouge divisions to create a joint Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team and offer a $10,000 reward. As a result, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children developed an age-progressed photograph of Wesley for display on twenty-one digital billboards across South Louisiana.

Richard Sobers purchased flyers, posters, pens, and wristbands featuring the age-progressed photograph. Then, he used his own money to rent a physical billboard. He expected local politicians to step up and help morally, if not financially, but none did.

When Richard attempted to hold a candlelight vigil to remind citizens the child remained missing, some of Little Wesley’s relatives threatened a lawsuit if he did not stop pursuing the case.

“Wesley’s aunt called me regularly for a time and has recently reached out to express her gratitude for my efforts,” Richard recalled, “But back when I planned the vigil, she asked me to stop before someone got hurt.”

The aunt, Mary Dufour, spoke to Dateline NBC in 2016.

“[Wesley] would be 17 now,” Mary recalled for the camera. “But it all happened so long ago,” she said.

When Little Wesley vanished in 2001, Ruby Renee told police he had been playing with two puppies on the front porch of their Bluff Creek community home. She and her husband, Dewey Ralph Morgan, separated the year before. However, both still lived in East Feliciana Parish and met regularly in divorce court.

Although the couple shared custody of their son, Little Wesley lived with Ruby, 19, and her 37-year-old boyfriend, Burnell Hilton, Jr., who told police he was not home during Wesley’s presumed abduction.

Wesley’s Aunt Mary—Dewey Morgan’s sister—told Dateline that her brother remarried and fathered other children. “It’s always been a real struggle for him,” Mary said. “Not knowing if his child is okay,” she said.

“Some people said his mother may have given him away or something,” she told Dateline. “But we really can’t say. It’s all rumors and speculation.”

Ruby Renee did not speak with Dateline in 2016. However, later that year, her attorney told WAFB-TV in Baton Rouge that Ruby Renee still dreamed of finding her son alive and becoming involved in his life again.

Investigators questioned Ruby Renee about Wesley’s case several times following his disappearance and at various times over the years. However, she has always denied involvement in her son’s disappearance, insisting officials were biased against her due to her associates and their lifestyles.

“She knew many in law enforcement,” Richard Sobers recalled. “She once charged a deputy who Sheriff Bunch had following her with joining her for sex in another deputy’s mobile home,” he said. “That’s significant amid rumors that she worked as an occasional informant for the department.”

Today, two decades after Little Wesley’s disappearance, the mystery remains unsolved, but there is some circumstantial evidence to consider.

Two days after her son disappeared, Ruby Renee sat in the East Feliciana Sheriff’s Office lobby, crying on the shoulder of newly-elected Sheriff Talmadge Bunch.

The Zachary Police Department had just charged her boyfriend, Burnell Hilton, with second-degree murder, believing he shot a pedestrian in the face on Halloween Night in 1998. However, that was not why Ruby Renee cried.

An FBI agent had just told her she failed her polygraph test.

“They say I’ll go to prison for the rest of my life,” she told the sheriff.

Talmadge Bunch made headlines his first year in office by hiring a “psychic detective” to work Wesley’s case. Before leaving office, the four-term sheriff told reporters he felt sure Ruby Renee had sold her son.

“I’d love to find that boy,” Sheriff Bunch said in 2014. “I know he’s alive out there somewhere.”

On January 3, 2008, the Jackson Police Department charged Ruby Renee with attempting to sell another infant child for two-thousand dollars before his birth. Three hours later, District Judge William Carmichael released her with a thirty-dollar bond, the cost of paperwork.

After getting pregnant in 2007, Ruby Renee went before a notary, signing a statement declaring Ruby would give a married couple her baby for $2,000. But, when Ruby Renee gave birth, according to the couple who called the police, she refused to turn over the baby.

Ruby’s court-appointed lawyer, Rhonda Covington, claimed the money was to pay medical expenses, not purchase the baby. The hearing ended with the State Attorney General dropping the charges against Ruby Renee.

Richard Sobers grew up in East Feliciana Parish and is embarrassed at how little public officials have done to locate the missing child.

“Sometimes,” Richard Sobers said Friday, “it seems like some secret society or at least an elite level of citizenship controls justice in East Feliciana. If you are not a member of this upper echelon, it doesn’t matter how good your ideas are or how worthy your cause is. Wesley Dale Morgan would not still be missing if he had been born into these families. The whole country would know his story.”

Wesley Dale Morgan has been missing for 22 years. If he is still living, he is 24-years-old.