Teenage boys often find ways to keep themselves occupied and to have a little fun. They tend to be a bit more rough and tumble than their female counterparts. Teenage boys are more likely to get themselves into a da*ngerous situation, but it shouldn’t result in their m*urders.
Don Henry and Kevin Ives
Don Henry (16 years old) and Kevin Ives (17 years old) were best friends and spent a lot of time together. They grew up in Bryant, Arkansas, and liked spending time in the wooded areas that were close to town.
Don and Kevin chose to go night hunting just before midnight on August 22, 1987. The plan was for them to stay along the railroad tracks when they went into the woods not far from Don’s house. It would be the last time their family and friends saw them alive.
4 Hours Later
A Union Pacific freight train with 75 cars was going through Bryant on its way to Little Rock, Arkansas, as it does every night. Stephen Shroyer, the train engineer, saw the two teenage boys lying next to each other on the tracks with a green tarp over part of their bodies.
When Shoyer blew the horn, he was trying to get the boys to move out of the way of the coming train. The boys never moved from where they were, though. Shoyer tried to stop the train but it was already going too fast. The train did not stop until it got to the nearby town of Benton. It had been going 50 miles per hour. The boys were hit by the train.
The crew told the police about the two teenage boys on the tracks as soon as Shoyer was able to stop the train. When the police got there, they saw a very bad scene. Both of the boys’ bodies had been cut up. Another one of the boy’s guns was found next to the tracks. But the green tarp was not to be found.
The Investigation
The boys ended up on the train tracks, and the police didn’t know what happened. They started an investigation. The first step was to do an autopsy on the boys’ badly hurt bodies to see if they had left any clues.
The state medical examiner, Dr. Fahmy Malak, was the first person to look at the bodies. Malak found that Don and Kevin were comatose because they had smoked too much marijuana, after looking at their bodies. Malak said that the deaths were likely accidents or even suicides.
The results shocked Don and Kevin’s families, who didn’t think marijuana could have put the boys to sleep, and who also didn’t think they killed themselves. Kevin’s family chose to hire a private investigator to find out more about what was going on.
The private investigator first went to the police station to find out more about the case. He was shocked, though, when he ran into trouble and the police refused to work with him. There was a joint press conference between the two families to try to get the police to pay attention and reopen the cases of their sons. Their hard work paid off.
Don and Kevin’s case was taken up by prosecutor Richard Garrett so that it could be looked into further. His plan was to have their bodies dug up so that a new pathologist could do a second autopsy. The pathologist said that the boys had a small amount of marijuana in their bodies, which was not enough to make them unconscious.
The pathologist was also able to say that Don was already dead when the train hit him and that Kevin was not awake when the train hit him. The pathologist thought it was likely that someone killed the boys.
Garrett wanted to be sure, so he had another autopsy done to see if a different pathologist could find any more evidence. The pathologist saw that Don’s shirt had been stabbed and that Kevin had been hit in the head with the butt of his rifle. Death certificates for both boys showed that they were killed.
Garrett kept looking into the murders of Don and Kevin until he found a case like theirs that happened in Oklahoma just six weeks after they were killed. A murder case was opened for the deaths of two teenage boys who were found on the train tracks. Garrett thought there might be more to the story.
Garrett also learned that a man dressed in military fatigues had been acting strangely in the same general area where Don and Kevin’s bodies were found a week before they were killed. The man shot at the police and then ran away when they got close. The man in fatigues was seen again around the time the boys were killed, but the police never found him.
Thirty Two Years Later
Threety-two years after Don and Kevin were killed, on January 28, 2018, Billy Jack Haynes, a famous professional wrestler from the 1980s, put out a video. In it, Haynes said he saw Don and Kevin get killed and knew who did it.
Haynes said that in the 1980s, he was hired as a police officer to help with drug trafficking. And during that time, he met a well-known politician from Arkansas who is also a high-level drug dealer. Haynes says the politician told him to kill Robert F. Kennedy’s son David Kennedy in 1984. David Kennedy, who was 28 years old at the time, was found dead in 1984 after apparently taking too many drugs. Haynes does not admit to killing Kennedy.
After that, Haynes said that the same politician called him in August 1987 and asked him to help guard an Arkansas drug stop in case something went wrong. The politician thought it was possible that some of the drug drops were being stolen, and he didn’t want that to keep happening.
As a security guard at the drug drop site, Haynes said he saw Don and Kevin stumble upon the scene. He then said that the boys’ deaths were caused by people working for the politician and that he had nothing to do with it. Haynes said that he told Kevin’s mother, Linda Ives, and her private investigator the names of everyone involved, but he won’t make them public.
Present Day
Most people think that Don Henry and Kevin Ives were killed because they saw a big drug deal and the people involved didn’t want them to be witnesses. At the time, Bryant was a known drug hub, so it’s not impossible that this could happen. The boys’ killer is still unknown, though, and no one has ever been punished for the crime.
