I'm Laura Norton, and this is one strange thing, the show where we search the nation's

news archives for stories that can't quite be explained.

50 miles or so north of New York City sits West Point, the United States Premier Military Academy.

When we say Premier, we mean it. Aside from a battery of entry exams, both physical and mental, one must be nominated to even apply for admission.

And if a candidate finally manages to make it in, they are for the next four years a cadet, an officer in training bound to a strict honor code, a rigid schedule, and the highest expectations in, well, just about everything. West Point's notable list of graduates is less like a list

and more like a history book. General's Patton and Sherman, Presidents Grant and Eisenhower, and the chief financial

officer of Twitter.

Even famed romantic writer Edgar Allan Poe attended the point, although that didn't actually

go very well.

Anyone familiar with his writing is probably not surprised to hear that.

In any case, West Point is an academy for serious students who were on track for serious military

careers, and its leaders take their responsibility of shepherding those cadets along their paths seriously.

In fact, in West Point's entire 200-plus year history, they've only lost track of a single cadet.

And that cadet, strangers, is the subject of today's episode.

In the first half of the 20th century, there were a handful of famous missing persons cases

that everyone knew, and the disappearance of Richard Colvin Cox, West Point Cadet, was one of them.

Though his name is not well known among modern true crime fans,

his disappearance inspired one of the most thorough searches, or you could say, man hunts

in American history. Because Richard Cox, second-year cadet, was not just a missing person.

He was, at least technically, wanted by the Army for desertion.

But let's back up just a bit.

1950 is a good year to start.

...