On a fall day in 1975, an elderly man walked away from a vehicle in the Nicolet National Forest and was never seen again despite one of the area’s largest manhunts and the use of highly efficient bloodhounds tracking his trail.

This week marks the 50th anniversary of Charles Theis’ mysterious disappearance that occurred on the afternoon of Oct. 14, 1975.

Charles, a retired Milwaukee firefighter with a vacation home on Spectacle Lake, had been out fishing with his son, Floyd. The fish weren’t biting, and at around 4 p.m., Floyd wanted to try his luck with some grouse hunting in the forest. Charles was not a hunter and didn’t wish to get his feet muddy, so Floyd instructed his father to remain in the car that he parked on Military Road near the Anvil Lake fire tower as he headed out into the woods.

That was the last time he ever saw his father. Floyd returned to the car about an hour later to find no sign of the man.

The disappearance sparked one of the largest manhunts in the area up to that time.

According to a news story printed Oct. 23, 1975, in the Vilas County News-Review, Sheriff John Scott brought in bloodhounds to track Theis’ trail, which covered about 9 miles along Military Road before disappearing without a trace at the corner of Deerskin and Military roads. The bloodhound checked the trail three times, always with the same result.

Scott’s theory was that Theis was picked up at the intersection, possibly by someone looking for an easy mark to rob, as part of a “bad prank” or maybe by somebody who wanted to help but was unable to.

“Theis is an old man with a very bad speech impediment, is hard to understand, and probably didn’t know where he was or where he lived,” Scott said at the time. Yet, if the intentions had been good, he questioned why nobody had contacted the sheriff’s office yet.

According to the story, almost 150 people from the sheriff’s department, U.S. Forest Service, game wardens and volunteers searched about 15 square miles of forest. While much of the search was on foot, helicopters, airplanes and four-wheel drive vehicles also were used. Firefighters from Milwaukee also came up to assist.

Scott said the search was very thorough, but admitted that, “Of course the woods are so thick in that part of the Nicolet that you could stand right next to him and not see him.”

Theis was last seen wearing a brown jacket and hat, which would have made him even more difficult to spot in the forest. He was described as 5-feet, 7-inches tall, weighing 160 pounds. He had gray hair and blue eyes, and was wearing glasses and hearing aids.

Scott noted after the initial search that chances of finding Theis alive in the forest were not good, due to several nights that had been below freezing. He also was in poor health, having suffered a stroke and several heart attacks. He also was likely suffering from early-stage dementia, according to later reports made by Floyd.

Psychic explorations

Deeply affected by the disappearance of his father, Floyd Theis circulated pictures of him, as well as offered a $1,000 cash reward for information leading to the location of his father — living or deceased. He even turned to the use of a psychic to help locate the missing man.

A news story printed in the News-Review on Nov. 27, 1975, stated that psychic Don Hudson, a minister in Charlotte, N.C., said he had a vision that Charles had been picked up by two men in a steel-blue car and taken to a bar in Marenisco, Mich. Hudson then said he saw Charles buried in a shallow grave south of Baker Lake in the Town of Phelps. In a later vision, he changed the site of the grave to somewhere near Sugar Maple Lake.

Floyd told the newspaper that he had located the car and the people seen in Hudson’s vision, and that people in Marenisco had claimed to have seen his father after he disappeared.

Vilas County Sheriff’s Department staff conducted a search for the grave at Baker Lake and came up empty-handed, and opted to wait for more information from Hudson before using resources to search the Sugar Maple Lake area. Although there was no mention in future stories of a search taking place at Sugar Maple Lake, no body was ever located.

Lifelong search

Mike Nichols revisited the story in a piece for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in December of 2002, nearly 30 years later. He interviewed Floyd, who was 77 at the time and still thought of his missing father every day.

Frank Tomlanovich, a detective at the time for Vilas County, said the case was considered a “missing person case with suspicious circumstances.”

Even 27 years on, Floyd and his wife of seven years, Shirley, still took out ads in the newspaper, searched the woods with metal detectors, and had hired a private detective in their time together.

“He thinks of this every single day,” Shirlety said in the article. “I mean, I have been living with him now for eight years and I know him and sometimes I can just see when he goes off thinking or moody or whatever, especially when it gets to be around October when it’s his anniversary of when (his father) died. And then I know something is wrong. I know he lives with this.”

Floyd Theis, who passed away on April 25, 2024, at the age of 99, never discovered the fate of his missing father.

Vilas County Chief Deputy Patrick Schmidt confirmed that the case still remains open.

This story was constructed using information printed in news articles from the Vilas County News-Review and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.