AUBURN — About noon on a July Thursday in 1954, 12-year-old Daniel “Kenny” Wood Jr. phoned his mother from a store in Gray to tell her he’d taken a job doing door-to-door sales in Lewiston.

She told him not to go.

Daniel “Kenny” Wood Jr.  Pennell Institute yearbook

Brushing her off, Kenny replied, “I’ll be back tonight before dark.”

That was the last time his family saw or heard from him.

Authorities pulled the boy’s body from the Little Androscoggin River in Auburn more than a week later.

Though investigators cast a wide net and interviewed many potential witnesses, they never figured out who killed him, though the Maine State Police is still trying.

Lt. Thomas Pickering, who heads the unsolved major crimes unit, said the case remains “open and active” but he could not offer any details of the probe.

Pickering said police “believe that is it possible that someone has information that can help resolve this case,” which remains by far the oldest cold case on the state’s tally of unsolved murders. The second longest-standing case dates from 1968, 14 years later.

Within two days of Kenny’s disappearance, police had searched in three counties, and Portland, Lewiston and Auburn without shedding light on the missing boy.

The boy’s father, Daniel K. Wood, said his son, who was wearing jeans the day he vanished, had wanted to take a summer job. They had already agreed, he said, that the boy could join a bean-picking crew at harvest time, according to a story in the Lewiston Evening Journal.

By the following Wednesday, police were focusing their search on Lewiston and Auburn after getting reports the boy had been seen selling sewing needles door-to-door in several areas of the Twin Cities.

A schoolmate, Donna Aberle, said she noticed Kenny on Thursday when she saw him in a car driven on Poland Spring Road outside Gray by a white-haired man who had a woman and two smaller children with him as well.

She told police that Kenny shouted, “Hi, Donna” as they passed, according to the Lewiston Daily Sun.

Other reports put him in an ice cream parlor and selling magazines in West Hartford, Connecticut.

But State Trooper Camille Carrier told the paper that Wednesday that he was “satisfied in my own mind that the Wood boy was in Lewiston” two days earlier.

The following day, though, Carrier said that despite five Lewiston residents identifying Kenny as selling them needles, the lead hadn’t helped. A few days later, another youngster went to the police to tell them he had actually been the one peddling needles.

The Aug. 2, 1954, front page of the Lewiston Daily Sun carried the sad news that Daniel “Kenny” Wood Jr.’s body had been found in Auburn.

Meanwhile, the boy’s father spoke to Auburn police to tell them Kenny “had wanted to go fishing,” but had been denied permission. His fishing tackle was missing, Daniel Wood said.

A week after Kenny vanished, dragging operations were underway on one of the lakes near Gray, the Journal said.

On Saturday, July 31, the search came to an end.

Two anglers from Freeport spotted his nearly naked body in the Little Androscoggin River in Auburn that afternoon. It had a bit of string tied to one of his wrists, which police said indicated Kenny had been tied up before his murder.

Auburn police Chief Alton Savage said Kenny’s body was in “pretty good” condition except for wounds from a vicious beating on his head.

The medical examiner, Dr. Paul Chevalier, said Kenny had suffered seven wounds on his head, from 1 to 4 inches deep.

He said it looked like a “fiendish beating” with blows so severe that they almost drove an eye from its socket.

“It looks like the act of a sex maniac,” the police chief said. “It’s either a sex crime or it was committed by some vicious insane person.”

Police found Kenny’s argyle socks the next day along the riverbank.

After an autopsy, authorities said the body had been in the water no more than five days and as few as three. But they were unsure how long he had been dead.

They could determine, though, that he had died before he wound up in the river because he didn’t have water in his lungs, a sign of drowning.

If he was killed shortly before his body was tossed in the river, it would mean his death occurred at least four days after Kenny phoned his mother.

“No one knows where this thing happened,” Savage said. The chief added, “It could have happened in Oxford, Cumberland or Androscoggin County.”

The chief’s many comments caused the medical examiner to take another look at Kenny’s body.

Chevalier said afterward that he found no indication of any sexual attack. He also found that the boy’s hands had been tied together before his murder.

As officials scurried to crack the case, Gov. Burton Cross weighed in.

“We will not rest until the culprit is apprehended,” the governor said.

Daniel “Kenny” Wood Jr.  Lewiston Evening Journal

The family buried Kenny in a hillside cemetery in Gray on a Tuesday as a steady rain fell.

Hoping to catch his killer, police went on to interview more than 500 people and follow dozens of promising leads.

But none of them panned out.

“Prospects for an early arrest of the murderer who beat Kenny to death and then tossed his nude body into the Little Androscoggin River appeared as bleak as the funeral,” the Sun said.

Despite occasional flurries of attention to the case in the decades that followed, police could never make a case against anyone.

More than seven decades after the boy’s death, the mystery remains unsolved.

Kenny would be 82 now.

Most of the people who knew him or investigated the case are, at best, long into retirement. His parents are dead. Most of the witnesses and investigators are also gone.

Actuarially speaking, his killer is probably dead, too.

Even so, despite the years, there is still a chance that somehow, somewhere, a clue or confession might yet emerge to bring at least an element of closure to a case where justice has remained elusive.

If anyone has information that might help police, Pickering said they should contact the Maine State Police Major Crimes Unit-South, One Game Farm Road, Gray, ME 04039. The phone number is 207-624-7076 extension 9 or people can use the online tip form.