BASIC CASE FACTS
DATE OF LAST CONTACT: 28th April 1977
MISSING FROM: Cocoa Beach, Brevard County, Florida
DATE OF BIRTH: 18th September 1963
HEIGHT: 5’0
WEIGHT: 90-110 lbs
DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS: Shoulder-length straight blonde hair, Brown eyes, a recently healed broken left leg, Missing front two teeth and wore a partial dental plate, full lips, slight build. He was wearing a green t-shirt with “Thirsty Turtle” on, blue jeans and flip-flops. He wore a gold chain with an Italian horn.
INVESTIGATING AGENCY: Cocoa Beach Police Department
- 28th April 1977 – Keith leaves his girlfriend’s house intending to hitchhike the 2 miles home. He never arrives.
- He is immediately reported missing but police insist he is a runaway.
- 1979 – Keith’s mother receives several phone calls from someone she is convinced was him.
- 1980s – Police identify a serial killer as responsible for the disappearance of several young men and link Keith to this. No other circumstances are ever seriously considered by them.
- 1980 – Someone matching Keith’s description is spotted in a gay porn magazine.
- A female caller arranges to meet Keith’s mother with information about Keith. She never shows up.
Keith Fleming kissed his girlfriend goodbye and walked away. He had to be home for dinner and he planned to hitchhike the couple of miles back to his home. He was never seen again.
He was immediately classified as a runaway, despite evidence to the contrary. Later, police tied his disappearance to a serial killer and focused solely on this angle despite the fact that his mother had received phone calls from someone she believed was Keith and there is evidence he may have been modeling for gay magazines.
First a word on law enforcement…I believe in giving credit and supporting law enforcement; they generally do a good job under very difficult circumstances and when I have dealt with them, such as requesting information or sending a tip, the majority are open and appreciative. However, I cannot help but be critical of the original investigators of the Cocoa Beach Police Department in Keith’s case. In the below post I won’t pull any punches in what I regard to be a catalog of inaction, lack of investigation and tunnel vision.
Although Keith’s brother commented that he believed that the police did all they could do; his parents and girlfriend certainly did not believe so. To highlight this is the below comment made by a Cocoa Beach investigator in the early 80s. Not only does it sound like the police were barely aware of the case but it also sounds as if they were totally disinterested in looking for him:
KEITH’S STORY
Keith Dean Fleming was born on the 18th September 1963. The youngest of three boys born to Donald and Maria Fleming; he had two older brothers – Eugene and Gerald. The family lived at 344 N. Brevard Avenue, a single story villa surrounded by trees on a quiet, tree-lined street. Keith attended Roosevelt Middle School and he was known as a bit of a rebel; thoroughly embracing the ‘surfer’ lifestyle. Keith loved to surf and he frequented the Cocoa Beach Pier. He enjoyed rock music and biking. But he was still a kid at heart and the family saw him as the baby – he still had teddies and soft toys – and his mom said “we were worried about him growing up fast in the maze of a culture where hitchhiking was the norm”.
Cocoa Beach was a fantastic place for a kid to grow up in the late sixties and early seventies. As well as the miles and miles of pristine beach, surfing and a slow-paced lifestyle the proximity to Cape Canaveral meant that not only could the first manned flights to the moon be witnessed close-up but the astronauts themselves were around, walking the streets. In fact, Keith’s mom, Maria, got to meet most of the early astronauts in her restaurant job. It was an exciting time and place for a kid to be!
Keith did have some minor problems. His parents had caught him with marijuana and had forced him to go a drug therapy centre called ‘Alternatives’. They had promised that if he stayed on the straight and narrow they would buy him a new surfboard and Maria says that he attended and he listened. At the time he disappeared Keith had recently broken his leg and it had only just healed. He had also had an accident resulting in the loss of both of his front teeth and had to wear a dental plate. But all in all Keith’s life was that of a normal thirteen year old who lived by the beach with a responsible family and a happy home life.
DISAPPEARANCE
Thursday 28th April 1977 was a warm, breezy day in Cocoa Beach and Keith and his girlfriend, Gina Palmer, planned to spend the afternoon together. Keith and Gina had been sweet on each other for a while and Keith used to write her love letters in class with drawings of waves on. He was Gina’s first boyfriend and she has held on to them to this day.
Cocoa Beach is a very long, narrow town and Keith and Gina lived at opposite ends so he was given a ride to Gina’s home which was a couple of miles away and was told to be back for dinner. They swam in Gina’s pool and then went over to a friend’s home. When Keith told Gina that he had to get home for dinner they rode her bike, with Gina on the handlebars, to the end of Osceola Lane where it intersects with State Road A1A. They kissed goodbye – it was Gina’s first kiss – and Keith began walking south along SR A1A, she would never see him again. He had told her that he intended to hitchhike back to his home, which was very common at the time and Gina said in 2003 “People hitchhiked all the time. It was a quick way to get from side of town to the other. We never thought too much about it”.
The last confirmed sighting of Keith was southbound on SR A1A, about a block north of the intersection with State Road 520.
The area where Keith was last seen is today a busy intersection, but in 1977 it was much quieter. The roads were filled with potholes and lined with pine trees. There were many fewer residences along his route and, as can be seen in the 1977 survey map above, the place he was last seen did not have the businesses it did later and in fact there was a park there at the time. Sunset was at 7.56pm that day and there was a full moon so it is likely it was still light while Keith was walking.
Not long after Gina returned home and told her mother that Keith planned to hitchhike she got in her car and went out looking for him, intending to drive him home, but she couldn’t find him and it is presumed that he had already entered someone’s vehicle at this point.
Later that evening Keith was supposed to go with his brother Jeff to collect their mom from the restaurant she was working at but Jeff arrived alone and told Maria “Mom, I never saw Keith”. Maria says she immediately knew something was wrong because Keith always called to let them know he’d be late. She had a feeling something bad had happened and they went straight to the Cocoa Beach police and tried to make their case. The police insisted that Keith had run away and would turn up, despite the fact that he had taken no belongings and was wearing flip-flops at the time. Besides putting out a BOLO (Be On The Look Out) for him, they made no attempt to locate him and stuck to the runaway theory. Perhaps most disturbing of all the police never even bothered to speak to Gina, the last person Keith was known to be with, until 1993! The statement made below by Gina in the 2003 Florida Today says it all:
THOSE DAMN FLOWER GIRLS…
Maria’s first thoughts when she learned Keith was missing was “those damn flower girls”. For several weeks Cocoa Beach had been inundated by members of The Unification Church (commonly referred to as Moonies) who would stand in the median strip of the roads selling carnations and seeking donations. Maria remembered one time, driving with Keith, when some of these girls waved at him and he waved back. When she asked who they were he responded “Oh, just friends of mine”. She thought nothing more about it, but later wondered if Keith had become friendly with the Moonies.
This angle becomes more likely when you take into account how the Unification Church recruited it’s members; through brainwashing and mind control. Members were eventually encouraged to distance themselves from their family and were married in mass ceremonies to complete strangers chosen by the church leadership. From the mid-seventies to mid-eighties there were at least 400 kidnappings by family members to retrieve their relatives and place them in reprogramming therapy. There are many stories about members who escaped.
The Moonie alternative lifestyle appealed to people; community, love, idealism. They presented a picture of true happiness. Something that an impressionable young teenager might be drawn to. Then later the brainwashing would begin until the recruit feels they can no longer exist without the group and has suffered a loss of self. It is an intriguing thought that Keith may have left willingly with the Moonies to start a new life and in fact later events may seem to support this idea. The police, of course, never looked into this angle.
PHONE CALLS
In 1978 and 1979 Maria received a series of phone calls. She knew immediately it was Keith; she recognised his voice. When she answered the first call she heard a lot of noise in the background and then a voice said “I just wanna talk to my mom” before the line went dead. The second call simply said “I love you” before hanging up and the third call said “Help me!”.
Keith’s family had received prank calls before, especially after Keith’s face appeared on the side of milk cartons and in newspapers, but these calls were different.
The caller didn’t seem to be trying to get anything or to be playing a trick and Maria was convinced it was her son’s voice. The first call sounds like someone was unhappy about Keith calling home and ended the call. In the second call the quick and simple message telling his mom he loves her doesn’t sound like a prank, nor can I imagine that it was a wrong number; what are the chances! The third call has escalated to a cry for help.
Keith’s father was always cautious about believing these calls were his son but Maria was not. As the one who answered them and heard her son’s voice she said she said she finds it difficult to accept it was anyone but Keith. I am drawn to the idea that this was Keith who called his mother and I believe she would have recognised her son’s voice. I believe this young man wanted to hear his mom’s voice and let her know he was OK and that later, wherever he was, he wanted to escape. Whether he was with the Moonies or with someone else, I can believe that this was Keith.
THE FINAL CALL AND THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER
At some time in the early 80s Maria received another phone call, the last one in fact from whom she believed was her son. The caller simply said “How’s the surfing back east?”. The police managed to trace this call to Long Beach, California. They found that it had come from an abandoned building and that the number was now out of service…and that was it! Clearly the number had been in service when the call was placed not long before and yet the police didn’t think to trace who had owned the building, who had lived there, who it was connected to, was it known as a hang out for anyone? None of this was ever looked into.
The fact that the caller was asking how the surfing was back east is tantalizing because Keith loved to surf and the fact that the call came from Long Beach, with it’s long surfing history, simply adds to the possibility that this was Keith. Of course, Keith’s love of surfing had been mentioned in the press; but this was mostly in Florida newspapers – would someone in California really know and go to the trouble of making such a hoax? It is possible, but it is also possible that this was Keith wanting to let his mum know he was OK in a way he knew that she would understand.
Later that same year Maria received a mysterious call from a woman she identified as sounding Asian. The woman referred to Keith and said she had information and asked to meet with Maria at a shopping mall in West Melbourne, just forty minutes south of Cocoa Beach. Maria went and waited at the prearranged meeting place, but the caller never arrived.
Who was this person? Was it a hoax or did someone really have information but panicked at the last minute? It is extremely interesting to note that the Moonie movement started in Korea and the likelihood is that many of the flower girls who had been in Cocoa Beach when Keith disappeared were of Korean ancestry and would have had the ‘Asian’ accent that Maria identified from the call.
MAGAZINE
In 1980 an inmate in a Georgia prison saw a picture of Keith in a newspaper article about his case and he immediately recognised his face from a magazine featuring gay models. There was apparently a lengthy article featuring a young man who bore a striking resemblance to how Keith would look a few years older. He sent a copy of the magazine to Maria and to the police but they were unable to trace the magazine’s origins and it was a dead end. I am skeptical about whether the police actually made much effort to trace this publication. It should have been relatively simple to find the origins of a magazine that was doing the rounds of a prison and locate the people who wrote the articles.
Maria says that she was the only person who thought this person was Keith. The police didn’t feel it was him and never followed it up properly, but by this time they had another theory as to what happened to Keith…
THE ONLY SUSPECT
In 1976 a monster moved to Brevard County. John Rodney McRae was a convicted child murderer who had been sent to prison when he was just 16 in 1951 for the murder of an 8 year old neighbour boy in Michigan. He served just twenty years and was released. In 1976 McRae, now married with a son, moved his family down to Florida where he got a job in The Brevard Correctional Institute – a juvenile detention centre; Yes…I will let that sink in for a second – a convicted child murderer got a job working with vulnerable kids!!!
Young men had a habit of disappearing around McRae and I will give a quick account of his crimes. Two years after Keith vanished, another young man called Kip Hess, aged 12, disappeared from Merritt Island; just a few miles from both Cocoa Beach and near to where McRae was living and working. Kip Hess had been a friend of McRae’s son. Nine months later another boy disappeared; 19 year old Charles Collingwood. Collingwood actually disappeared from the Brevard Correctional Institute; where McRae was employed at the time and – even more damning – McRae and Collingwood were said by other inmates and guards to have been having a sexual affair at the time. McRae was questioned in Hess and Collingwood’s disappearances and police noted he was acquainted with both missing boys but in 1980 he and his family suddenly left the state, moving back to Michigan. Low and behold, some time later McRae’s 15 year old neighbour, Randy Laufer, disappeared and McRae and his family fled once more to Arizona. Randy Laufer’s body was discovered in 1997 on McRae’s old property and he was arrested and convicted of his murder.
Later, when talking to police, McRae’s wife Barbara told them that he had admitted to killing Laufer, Hess and Collingwood. No mention of Keith was ever made.
When police began joining the dots they realised that Keith had disappeared while McRae had been living in the area and in a subsequent interview he had commented that he liked to watch the young men surfing at Cocoa Beach. Police said that Keith matched the profile of McRae’s victims and never explored any other angle; sure in the knowledge that he was McRae’s first victim in Florida.
I can completely understand why police linked Keith to McRae’s murders. It is very tempting to conclude that a missing young man must be a victim of a serial killer who was active in the area, but I am not absolutely convinced and I believe there are some glaring differences between Keith and the other boys that would possibly exclude him as a potential victim. Police stated that Keith “fits the profile”, but as far as I can tell that is only in the fact that he was a young man.
The first thing to note is that McRae confessed all of his killings to family and friends. He told his father about the killing in 1950 and subsequently admitted to his wife and friends that he had murdered Hess, Collingwood and Laufer. He never admitted to, or even mentioned, Keith. You have to wonder why unless he wasn’t responsible.
Secondly; all of McRae’s victims were known to him in some capacity (neighbours, friend of his son, inmate where he worked) but there is no evidence that Keith knew McRae at all. Of course, it is possible that Keith had encountered McRae while he was at the beach, but this isn’t known.
And finally; it is assumed that Keith was taken while he was hitchhiking. McRae is not known to have abducted his victims but rather to have lured them in because they already knew him.
It is my opinion that Keith only fits McRae’s victim profile because he was a young male. Everything else about Keith’s case seems different to McRae’s known modus operandi and I believe that the police linked Keith’s disappearance to McRae too easily, to the detriment of investigating other leads.
THE FINAL HEARTBREAK
In 1997 Cocoa Beach Police called the Flemings to say they had located Keith and he was in Arkansas. Keith’s brother Gerald immediately hopped on a plane to bring his lost brother home – but when he arrived his heart sank. He knew this wasn’t his brother; for a start the man had blue eyes while Keith’s were brown. It turned out to be a man with a criminal history of identity theft and fraud who had stolen Keith’s identity. CBPD had told the Flemings they had found Keith without even checking this basic information. It was heart-wrenching for Maria who said it was a good job she hadn’t flown to Arkansas to find this young man because “if I’d seen him, I’d have strangled him”.
WHERE’S KEITH?
Police believe that Keith’s body is buried along with Hess and Collingwood somewhere near to the trailer McRae was living at in 1977. They have conducted searches with ground penetrating radar and cadaver dogs but have never found anything. The area is acres and acres of undeveloped woodland and it may be that, if they are there, they will never be found. As tempting as it is to add Keith to the list of McRae’s victims, I have serious doubts as to whether this is the case. I believe the police developed tunnel vision, unable to see any other possibility while personally I don’t think Keith does actually fit the profile.
Could Keith be alive? Unfortunately I don’t think so. I can’t believe that he would stay out of touch with his family for such a long time. But I do think there is a chance that he was still alive in the early-1980s and possibly living in California. I firmly believe that Maria recognised her son’s voice in those phone calls because they were in fact Keith and I also believe that she recognised her son in that magazine. And of course there was that unidentified ‘Asian’ caller who claimed to have information.
It is tempting to think that Keith may have left with the Moonies, and I wish more investigation into them had happened; such as when did they leave town and where did they go? Could Keith have escaped after his “Help me” call and subsequently settled in Long Beach, perhaps later finding work as a model? Many transient young men in this period turned to modeling and sex work in the gay porn industry; perhaps this was a reason for him to stay out of touch with his family. He may have passed away in the 1980s under a different identity.
Of course, the McRae connection cannot be completely ruled out and neither can the possibility that Keith accepted a ride from another person with evil intent and was subsequently either murdered or forced into a sex-ring.
If he was still alive Keith would be 61 years old. His father died in 2003 – some of his final words were “Somebody knows something”. His mom passed away in 2016, she never stopped looking for her son and believed that she had spoken to him on the ‘phone to the end. Both his brothers still live in the Cocoa Beach area and say they just want closure: “All we really want is an end. Whether it’s good or bad we just want to know. It’s like a wound…that won’t heal. What we really want is some kind of closure”.
SOURCES
Florida Today, 30th December 1980
Florida Today, 18th September 2003
Detroit Free Press, 29th November 2004
Never Seen Again 