Our card this week is Bobby Joe Fritz, the five of spades from Wisconsin.

When five-year-old Bobby Joe vanished one afternoon in the early 80s, no one suspected

right away that he'd been abducted, because stuff like that just didn't happen in his

tiny hometown.

But as days went by without any sign of the little boy, the clues started to point to

a worst-case scenario and revealed something much more sinister going on in northern Wisconsin.

I'm Ashley Flowers and this is The Deck.

On May 14, 1983, in the small northern Wisconsin village of Campbell's Port, 10-year-old

Sinda Fritz and her five-year-old brother Bobby Joe were out playing kickball with some

neighborhood kids.

It was a Saturday afternoon and the group was playing in an empty field across from

East Main Street where Sinda and Bobby Joe lived.

The kids played there all the time because the field was close enough to their row of

houses that most of their parents could step outside their front doors and see them.

But Campbell's Port, especially back in the 80s, was one of those small Midwestern towns

where all the kids roamed wherever they felt like it until it was time to go home for dinner.

This is how Fondulac County Sheriff's Detective Eric Mullenbach describes it.

Campbell's Port's small, everybody knows everybody literally.

So even back then, you know, you could say, hey, that's the Smith's, you know, they're

12 doors down and they drive, you know, a green car.

And they just clean all their movements because it's a small town.

May 14th was a nice spring day and the kids played kickball for hours that afternoon.

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