It was the summer of '75 when Johnny Humphreys got a call at his home in California. It was the kind of call every parent dreads. His ex-wife, Patricia Thompson, was on the line from her home in Houston, Texas. Their 15-year-old daughter, Patricia Kaye Humphreys, was missing.
Apparently, Kaye and her sister, 16-year-old Deb, had been given permission to take their mom’s car to the Thunderbird Drive-In for a double feature on June 25, 1975. Their mother told them to come straight home afterwards. On the bill that night were‘Lenny’ and ‘Midnight Cowboy,’both starring Dustin Hoffman.“Deb came home without Kaye and told her mom she’d disappeared,” Johnny remembers being told. Patricia told him she’d gone to the drive-in to search for Kaye to no avail. “After a few hours of not findingher, she called me.”
Johnny recognized the seriousness of the situation immediately.“When [Patricia] told me that she was missing, I knew she hadn’t run off. She was just not the kind of kid that would do that to her mother,” he said. “So I knew something was really, terribly a mess.”
JohnnydescribedKayeas a “scrappy little kid” who was also a bit clumsy. “She had to wear glasses — and hated it — and wanted contacts. And we could barely afford them, but we got them. And then she lost them,” Johnny recalled, laughing. “And then she had to kinda go back to her glasses.”
According to her father, when Kaye was born, she was kept in an incubator because she had some fluid on her brain. It “put her a little bit behind,” he said. He spoke of his younger daughter softly, describing her as a gentle, good-hearted person. “She’s just sweet as could be,” he said. “Just very kind.”
Whatever Kaye’s difficulties were, they didn’t affect her outlook. “She was just happy in any circ*mstance,” Johnnysaid. “She just enjoyed life — as best she could.”She was also close to her sister, Deb, who their father also described as very caring.
Johnny and the girls’ mother, Patricia, divorced when Kaye and Deb were about5 and 6 years old.After that, he said, he saw his daughters every other weekend. He married his second wife, Rosemary, in 1967. In 1975 Johnny and Rosemary moved to California, so he knew he would see his daughters less frequently. He never imagined that only months after the move he would learn that he’d never see one of his daughters again.
Disappearance at the Drive-In
Dateline spoke with Detective Darcus Shorten of the Houston Police Homicide Unit about what happened on Wednesday, June 25, 1975, whenKaye disappeared from the Thunderbird Drive-In. Details of the events of that evening were as told to authorities by the teens who were present. “You have to understand, we’re gaining and grasping this information based on juvenile information,” Shorten stressed. “I have to rely on what that group is telling us.”
Shorten relayed that the group of teens said they split up to get snacks after they got to the drive-in for the double feature. At some point, Kaye walked away from the group to buy cigarettes from a vending machine on site.The details of what happened to Kaye after she left the cigarette machine are unknown. “We know we have a missing juvenile, who we can last place by the outcry of her own family — her sister — going to the cigarette machine, noticing that there’s a store right across the street from that movie theater,” Det. Shorten said. “So, there’s a probability — not a confirmation — that she probably went to the store to get the cigarettes.” According to Detective Shorten, leaving the vending machine is the last time Kaye can be placed alive.
Johnny Humphreys believes his daughter Kaye was kidnapped when she went to buy cigarettes. Det. Shorten said that while it’s possible that that theory true, her department has been unable to confirm it. “We can’t formulate that without having something to support it,” she told Dateline.
The Search for Kaye
The Houston Police Department performed searches in the days following Kaye’s disappearance. “They did their grid search,” Det. Shorten said. “They did all of the things that was necessary during that period of time”as part of what the department initially classified as a missing persons case.
Johnny Humphreys and his wife returned to Houston from California to help get word out about his missing daughter.“We organized, you know, flyers. And kids [from Kaye’s high school] volunteered their time to godistribute the flyers,” he said. “We went down to the drive-in and stood at the entrance and handed out flyers.”
He and his wife also conducted their own searches. “Going to warehouses in the area — anything that looked like an abandoned warehouse in the area — seeing if we could find a way in,” he said. “All night long for two nights.”
While he and his wife were out searching, his ex-wife, Patricia, stayed at the home she shared with their daughters. “Home waiting,” Johnny said. “Hoping that Kaye would show up.”
She never did.
About a week after Kaye’s disappearance is when, still searching for his daughter, Johnny came to a realization.“I wasn’t holding on to much hope,” he said. “I was just — after the first week, I was just thinking, ‘Well, now we’re looking for her body.’”
Johnny returned to work in California and waited for the inevitable phone call.
Finding Kaye
The phone call came on November 30, 1975, about five months after Kaye disappeared. “I got the call from the police department that they found her body,” Johnny said. “I said that I hadn’t held out any hope, but I guess I had. ‘Cause I was pretty devastated.”
According to Det. Shorten, Kaye’s body was found by children playing about 100 feet behind a Baptist church in the 5600 block of Hopper Road in Houston. It is unknown how long Kaye’s body had been there before it was recovered by the police department.
Detective Shorten told Dateline that while Kaye’s official cause of death could not be determined, the manner was homicide. 15-year-old Patricia Kaye Humphreys had been murdered.
Johnny Humphreys told Dateline that back in 1975, detectives had told him his daughter had likely also been raped, but Det. Shorten said that the department was unable to officially determine if that was true.
Based on the approximate 20-mile distance between the church and the drive in, Det. Shorten said it can be assumed that Kaye either went voluntarily or was taken by force, as “it would most likely had to have been by vehicle,” she said.
The Houston Police Department conducted DNA testing on Kaye’s remains and her clothing but, according to Det. Shorten, “We were not able to gain anything from it.” The only hope now is if “new information or a new technology is developed from what we have now,” she noted.
Detective Shorten told Dateline a woman came forward in 2014 claiming she had a suppressed memory about the night of June 25, 1975 — and that she knew the person who had taken Kaye. “I had a very, very extensive forensic interview with that individual,” the detective said. She would not, however, share any more details about that conversation with Dateline.
The Long Wait for Justice
“I’m not looking to put it behind me at all,” Johnny Humphreys told Dateline 49 years after his daughter’s murder. “I’m still asking myself, ‘What angle could I pursue to locate who did this?’”
He said he is now the only one left to push for justice and keep Kaye’s memory alive.
Kaye’s sister, Deb, died in 2013. She was 54 years old. Johnny described Deb as “very guilt-ridden and upset” during the investigation of what happened to her sister that June night at the Thunderbird Drive-In. Johnny told Dateline that Deb didn’t talk about Kaye much towards the end of her life. “I think she tried to put it behind her — tried to move on,” he said. “She would, every once in a while, kind of fail at that and talk about Kaye. But not often.”
Deb and Kaye’s mother, Patricia, died seven years later. Johnny had always been told that the grief following Kaye’s murder “just kind of destroyed her,” he said of his ex-wife. “She was never the same after that.”
Johnny Humphreys told Dateline that while he is able to cherish memories of Kaye and some of the sweet, idyllic moments in her childhood, he is haunted by other thoughts. “The one that’s probably the most frequent is what she must’ve felt like when they were killing her,” he said. “And [her thinking] ‘Wh—where’s my dad?”
No one has ever been arrested or charged in connection to the murder of Patricia Kaye Humphreys. Detective Shorten, however, is still hopeful Kaye’s case can be solved. “You’d be surprised — who didn’t talk five years ago may talk now,” she said. “Every case I’m assigned, I’m very hopeful that we can have solvability.”
Anyone with information about Kaye’s murder is asked to contact the Homicide Unit at the Houston Police Department at 713-308-3600.Crime Stoppers of Houston is offering a reward of $10,000 for information leading to the identification, charging and/or arrest of the suspect(s) in the case. They can be reachedat 713-222-8477.
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