If you haven’t yet read The Amazing Destiny of Forest Bixler, click here!

If you’ve read The Amazing Destiny of Forest Bixler, you may have some unanswered question. I sure do!

• Who were the Bixlers?
• What was their connection to Sarah Lewis (George’s grandmother) and her daughter Susie Pyle?
• Was the woman little George called “Emma” really his Aunt Susie?
• Who was the little girl and what became of her?
• Most importantly, why did they kidnap George?

As to the last question, the why of it, if we could answer that, everything else would either become clear or immaterial. Why did George’s grandmother, Sarah Lewis, and her neighbor, Alfred Bixler, run away with this little boy and steal him from his father?

I did a little research to see what I could learn about everyone involved. My Ancestry subscription is outdated right now (it’s expensive) but I did look in every free database I could find. I had no luck tracing Sarah Lewis and Susie Pyle but I could see they had both lived in Emporia before the kidnapping.

The fact that Sarah Lewis at least twice mentioned running away with the boy is highly suspicious. The word grandmother brings to mind someone older but Sarah was quite young. At the time of the kidnapping, Sarah would have been in her mid-to-late 30s, and Susie in her late teens or early 20s.  That does put things in a different light.

We know that Sarah and her married daughter Susie Pyle disappeared from Emporia right when George did.  But George’s memories never included his grandmother. If she had been involved in his life at all after he was taken from his home, she would have been someone familiar—a continuous link. George didn’t have anything like that. He never mentioned her again. He remembered living with Alfred, Emma, and a little girl. I wondered if possibly “Emma” was Susie. Susie was married, but there’s no indication she left town with her husband. Maybe she and Alfred were together and she adopted a different name in case her husband came looking for her.  If George didn’t know his aunt, that might have worked. If not, the fate of Susie is as much a mystery as that of her mother.

I would guess that whatever the reason was for kidnapping George, it probably had little to do with Alfred. That’s not to say he wasn’t deeply involved and guilty of the crime–he definitely was. He seemed to have no motive for his involvement. He didn’t demand ransom. He seemed to have treated the boy well. He couldn’t have had a grudge against Alta–he’d never met him. He also didn’t want to keep George. Soon after Emma died, Alfred found a good home for the boy and abandoned him there.  He did return a few times, which suggests he at least cared about the boy.

George did not mention what happened to the little girl when he was taken to Stark County. Who was she? Another kidnapped child? Alfred and Emma’s daughter?

I did come to one conclusion. The man who kidnapped George and took him to Ohio probably was named Bixler. It turns out, at least at that time, there are many Bixlers living in the Columbus area, the very city where Alta traced George.

I located one Alfred Bixler who was around the right age, but I ruled him out. He was a farmer and a family man with four children and seems to have never left Ohio. Definitely, he wouldn’t have been able to live in a different place or with a different woman for several years. There were many Emma Bixlers too, but none of them were the right age. Nevertheless, I think the kidnapper’s last name really was Bixler. Hundreds of people with that surname were living in Franklin, Delaware, Licking, and Union counties. It makes sense that he would go to Ohio where he had lots of family to shield him.

And that was all I was able to find out! I suppose this is one of those mysteries that is lost to history but I would love to know what really happened there.