CANTONMENT, Fla. — For the first time in 44 years, detectives are closer than ever to solving the murder of a 9-year-old Cantonment boy.
Kenny Underwood went missing after a bird hunting trip with his friends in 1981. Search crews found his body hours later hidden beneath a rotting log.
“He was a good kid. Fun, loved to draw, a people person, he was a good cool kid. I miss him so much,” said, Edward Underwood, Kenny’s uncle.
Edward Underwood was just 18-years-old when his nephew was murdered.
“God knows it’s hard,” he said.
He remembers his sister, Kenny’s mom, worried when her son didn’t come home by sundown.
“All [of] us went out looking for him. We found him about 2 o’clock that morning in the woods with a log across his neck,” Underwood recalled.
“As far as the severity of the wounds and that sort of thing, we can say that it’s gruesome,” detective James Larry Hall Jr. said.
Retired detectives James Larry Hall Jr. and Ted Chamberlain have returned to investigate cold cases. They’ve been working together on Kenny’s case for months.
“The two of us feel fairly confident in our theory. Putting together who actually did what becomes the challenge,” Hall explained. “Problem is there’s always wild cards.”
So, what do we know about Kenny’s death?
We know he was out bird hunting near Booker Road with other boys.
“He had a one of the old-style kind-of red rider style bb guns and they were hunting birds and at some point, these boys separated,” Hall explained. “[Kenny] was eventually discovered under the log and the bb gun had been used as a weapon, as a blunt trauma weapon.”
Hall continued, “And it would have required someone of some strength to have accomplished everything, or multiple people involved in it because there were some things that would indicate that it wouldn’t be something that a small child would be able to do. That’s kind of where everything becomes a mystery for us, because we don’t really know what exactly happened during that time or what happened immediately afterwards.”
That’s where Hall and Chamberlain picked up the case more than 40 years later. As they review the case file, they review people hoping time reveals a new lead.
“You look for the statements over and over again and you compare them to what said presently as opposed to what was said previously and you look for those inconsistencies or the consistencies and sometimes that can tell you just as much,” Hall said. “People who have something to hide, they’ll tell us a partial truth, or they won’t tell us the truth at all, and we run into that as a snag for us and as a barrier getting to the bottom of things.”
Detectives are also re-submitting evidence in this case. The hope is that time has done them a favor in allowing technology to advance enough to show something they’ve never been able to uncover before.
“We have some things out there now that that may give us the proverbial smoking gun where we can actually put somebody there at the scene and we’re hopeful that that’s going to occur,” Hall said. “So, to be in 1981 case it’s very viable. From our perspective as a cold case it’s extremely viable.”
Not only would closing this case take a killer off the streets, but it would also bring peace to Kenny’s family members who died before getting answers.
“[Kenny’s mom, Patsy,] knows that the people in that neighborhood know what happened that day,” detective Ted Chamberlain said, “and she really feels that they’re there and there’s people that know what happened, but they just don’t want to say nothing you know. With Kenneth being dead and now his mother’s dead, something that James and I would like to do is to have somebody come up give us some information so we can definitely solve this case so they both could rest in peace.”
Kenny Underwood would be 53-years-old this year.
Although he and his mom have passed, others, like Uncle Edward, continue in their place as the search for justice continues.
“I pray to god every night that something come up,” Edward said. “He wasn’t doing nothing wrong. He wasn’t going nothing wrong. I don’t know if he’d seen something in the woods or what. He didn’t deserve that.”
He believes the answers will come and time will only tell.
“God’s going to make it happen,” Edward said.