The phone rang at 5:45 on the afternoon of Saturday, January 7th, 1950. Peter Haynes, a cadet acting as charge of quarters in Company B2 at the United States Military Academy Preparatory School in West Point, New York, answered. The voice on the other end was rough and patronizing, almost insulting, and it asked for Richard Cox. When Peter explained that Richard wasn’t in his room, the caller gave a short, sharp reply: “Well, look, when he comes in, tell him to come down here to the hotel.

Just tell him George called. He’ll know who I am. We knew each other in Germany. I’m just up here for a little while and tell him I’d like to get him a bite to eat.

” Peter would later admit he couldn’t be entirely sure the name he’d been given was George — he’d answered so many calls that day, and this one hadn’t seemed important at the time. Forty-five minutes later, a man walked into the Great Hall, the area of the school where cadets could meet guests. The on-duty cadet telephoned Richard to tell him he had a visitor. The man was just under six feet tall, around 185 pounds, with fair hair and a light complexion.

He wore a belted trench coat and no hat. Richard arrived, shook hands with the man, and seemed pleased to see him. He signed out in order to take his visitor to dinner at the hotel on campus grounds. But when Richard returned to his room that evening, he told his roommates the pair hadn’t gone out to eat at all.

Instead, they had sat in the man’s car and drunk whiskey. Richard took a shower, had a nap, and then, a short time later, altered the time he had written in the departure book — changing 19:23 to 18:23 to make it appear he had attended the 6:30 p. m. Cadet Super Formation when in reality he had skipped it.

The fabrication went unnoticed at the time. It wouldn’t be discovered until 1952, when the book was forensically examined. Had his superiors found out, Richard would have been charged with violating the Cadet Honor Code. Later that night, at 10:30, when Lights Out was announced, Richard’s roommates were startled.

He woke up, ran out into the hallway, and shouted what sounded like “Alice. ” When asked who Alice was, he didn’t respond. He went back to bed and promptly fell asleep. His roommates wondered if Alice was the name of a sweetheart from before Betty Timmons, the girl he was engaged to, but there was never any evidence to support that idea.

The following day, Richard told his roommates about the man who had visited him. He never referred to him by name. He said the man was a former U. S.

Army Ranger who had served in his unit in Germany. The man had a tendency to gloat about killing German troops during World War II and often gleefully boasted about how he had cut off their genitalia afterwards. He also claimed to have impregnated a German girl, whom he then hanged to prevent her from having the baby. Richard met up with this man again a little later, returning to his room at 4:30 p.

m. He told his roommates he hoped he wouldn’t have to see the fellow again. It was clear to them that Richard didn’t particularly like the man, though it was unclear why they continued to meet. The description of this man was drastically different from the one witnesses had given of the person seen talking to Richard at the basketball game.

On January 14th, 1950, Richard had attended a game pitting Rutgers University’s Scarlet Knights against the Army’s Black Knights. Shortly afterwards, he was seen talking to a man described by witnesses as dark-haired and rough-looking. The George who had visited him on campus was tall and blonde. The two descriptions didn’t match.

Richard Culvin Cox was 21 years old. He was born in 1928 in Mansfield, Ohio, and had volunteered for the U. S. Army after leaving high school.

He underwent basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, before being assigned to the U. S. Constabulary, where he spent time in Germany and reached the rank of sergeant. In 1948, he attended the U.

S. Military Academy Preparatory School at West Point and proved to be an academically gifted student, ranking 100th out of 550. He was voted his cadet company’s top cadet and had recently become engaged to his girlfriend, Betty Timmons. His only known complaint was that he didn’t particularly enjoy life at prep school, something he discussed in letters to his family.

On the night of January 14th, after the basketball game and after his meetings with the visitor, Richard’s absence was noted at 11:00 p. m. and again at 2:30 a. m.

But because cadets were occasionally known to stay out late, even past curfew, no action was taken. It wasn’t until the following morning that his disappearance was taken seriously. His roommates raised the matter with their superior, and this time the CID and the New York State Police were notified. The FBI later became involved.

A public appeal for information was made just three days after Richard vanished. A ground and air search of campus grounds was carried out. Numerous bodies of water, including a local pond, the Hudson River, and Lusk Reservoir, were extensively searched. No sign of the missing cadet was found.

The search lasted two months, but investigators had no evidence to show for their efforts. Authorities attempted to track down George, using what they had learned from Richard’s roommates, but were unable to do so. Those who matched the description were found to have watertight alibis. Richard’s time in Germany was closely examined but produced no new leads.

The theory that he had left voluntarily was abandoned because he left behind the equivalent of over $1,100 in today’s money, as well as his civilian clothes and other possessions. One psychologist on campus suggested that Richard was gay or bisexual, in an attempt to explain why two single men met up so regularly. The FBI then decided to visit gay bars in New York City, looking for men who matched the description of George and showing Richard’s photograph to regulars and staff. Nobody recognized his image or the description.

Over the next few years, there were several unconfirmed sightings of Richard. One sighting didn’t emerge until 2021, over 70 years after the disappearance. A high school classmate named Ursula saw him just days after he went missing. She was walking on Fourth Street in Mansfield, Ohio, when she saw him walking along the railroad tracks.

She recognized him immediately because of his distinctive gait. The pair waved at one another. Ursula assumed he had just gotten off the train at Union Station nearby, and she waited for the passing train between them to move so she could approach him. But by the time the train had moved on, Richard was gone.

She never reported the sighting, because she didn’t want to jeopardize his life or career, believing he had possibly gone to work for an intelligence agency. She asked that the sighting not be made public until her death, speculating that at such a time it would be safe to reveal and would avoid upsetting Richard’s life. In respect of her wishes, the writer who made the sighting public did not do so until Ursula passed away in 2020. Another sighting occurred just four years after Richard went missing.

Ernest Shotwell, who had attended the military prep school at the time, told the FBI that he had bumped into the missing cadet in 1954 at a Greyhound bus station in Washington, D. C. He had simply assumed that Richard was no longer a missing person. Richard reportedly told Ernest that he had left the school and was moving to Germany.

Ernest surmised he was living nearby because he was dressed in light clothing despite the cold weather. Richard seemed uncomfortable to see him and was very vague about his life and plans. He departed after just five minutes. By the late 1950s, the FBI deemed the investigation closed.

They had followed all the leads and tips, and it had led nowhere. Richard’s family had him declared dead in 1957. Still, the agency occasionally continued to follow up on sightings and potential leads. In 1960, an FBI informant believed he had seen Richard and spoken with him at a bar in Melbourne, Florida.

Acquaintances called him Richard, while he introduced himself as R. C. Mansfield. He apparently revealed information that lined up with Richard’s life and even stated that Mansfield was not his real surname — Cox was.

Some of the things he told the informant suggested he was working for an American intelligence agency. But although the FBI searched for such a man, they were never able to find him. Many of the theories pertaining to Richard’s disappearance conclude that he joined an intelligence agency. This was the conclusion of a reporter named Jim Underwood, who wrote about the case in 1982.

He spoke with a high school classmate of Richard’s who later became a prosecutor and had connections with the FBI. The old classmate told Underwood that he had learned from one agent that they had come close to arresting Richard, but had been ordered not to pick him up, leaving them to speculate that he was undercover or working in intelligence. The classmate also stated that for years he had requested to see the case files for himself, but excuses were always made, and by the time he was finally able to access them, the majority of the reports were redacted. A retired high school teacher named Marshall Jacobs also spent time looking into the disappearance in the 1980s.

He learned that Richard had written to a woman he had met in Germany, asking about Soviet activities in the country, though the letter was returned as undeliverable. Furthermore, an American man named John H. Noble, who was captured and imprisoned by the Soviets between 1945 and 1955, claimed that a prisoner by the name of Cox was being held in Siberia. The FBI informant who had bumped into R.

C. Mansfield in Florida was also deemed to have been credible, given the information he supplied about Richard’s life. The closest investigators came to identifying George was when they discovered that a man named Robert Frisbee had been stationed at Fort Knox at the same time as Richard. He matched the description of George and was known to have sold fake IDs in New York City in the 1950s.

Investigators speculated that Richard had attempted to obtain one in order to disappear voluntarily. Frisbee was arrested for murder in 1985 and stated that he didn’t know Richard and had never done business with him. Marshall Jacobs, meanwhile, concluded that a man named David Westervelt, who served with Richard in Germany, was George. Westervelt fit the physical description and was interviewed several times about the disappearance by police at the time.

Jacobs believed that Westervelt was a recruiter for the CIA. He believed that Richard voiced his unhappiness at the military school and that he had been offered a way out, one that involved leaving behind everything and everyone he knew and changing his name. This way out was likely to work with the CIA or another intelligence agency. In the mid-1990s, Jacobs further learned from a retired CIA official that Richard was allegedly part of a team in Europe who worked to smuggle high-priority officials out of the Soviet Union.

He later retired to Idaho but was then diagnosed with a terminal illness. At the time of the account, he was reportedly at the National Institutes of Health facility in Bethesda, Maryland. But even Jacobs himself admitted there were holes in the story and contradictory information floating around. Writers and online sleuths have noted the strangeness of recruiting a young man who was ranked only 100th out of 550 students, as opposed to picking someone from the top ten.

Others still wonder about having him suddenly disappear one day, drawing attention to himself and leading to his photograph being printed in newspapers all across the country. Adding to the mystery is that many of the CIA and FBI files Jacobs obtained contain redacted information that is impossible to figure out, in the same way Richard’s classmate had mentioned. Over 160 pages are missing from the files. Jacobs later contacted Harry Mayher, a graduate of the school Richard attended who had become a history writer later in life.

The pair worked on a book about the disappearance together, in which Harry noted that even Jacobs had accepted the fact that neither he nor anyone else would ever know the full story. Whatever happened to Richard Cox remains unknown over seven decades later. And George has never been identified.