Free The Skeleton Crew by Deborah Halber

Sean Lewis Cutler, seven years old, was living with his divorced mother in an apartment complex in Kentucky. A carbon monoxide leak killed Sean’s mother and plunged Sean into a months-long coma. When he awoke, doctors told his father, Lewis, that Sean’s brain had been severely damaged. He would be blind and wheelchair-bound for life.
    The owner of the apartment building and the contractor who caused the accident settled with Lewis Cutler for $1.6 million. After lawyer’s fees, around $800,000 was set aside for Sean’s care. Lewis Cutler remarried a few years later. His new wife legally adopted Sean.
    In 1992, shortly after Lew gained control of his handicapped son’s trust fund, his life started unraveling. He told his wife that he saw no reasonto go on living because planetary forces would destroy the world in May 2000. Calling him deranged and emotionally abusive, she filed for divorce and moved to Florida.
    In 1994, Lewis rented a house in Wayne, New Jersey, for himself and Sean, but the next year he told family members that he had signed custody of his disabled son over to a nursing home in Canada.
    In July 1996, Lewis Cutler was arrested for drunk driving, drug possession, and providing false information in the form of a driver’s license in his son’s name. An investment firm wired him the fraction of the trust money that he hadn’t frittered away. A week later, Lewis Cutler’s rented house burned to the ground.
    Arson investigators picking through the rubble found the bodies of Cutler and a man named William Spitzer, a friend of Lewis’s. They determined that someone had intentionally ignited a natural gas line in the basement. The windows had been tightly sealed and a battery to a smoke alarm was tucked in Spitzer’s pocket.
    At first, investigators who found the driver’s license in Sean’s name believed Sean, too, must have died in the fire. But they found no trace of him.
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    When Carol spotted Sean’s photo in MPCCN, she read that Sean’s family believed he was in a nursing home in Canada. If that was the case, Carol knew that there would be a paper trail. Somebody will find that boy, she thought, and moved on to the next web page.
    That same day, Carol happened upon an online notice posted by the Vermont State Police that included an artist’s rendering of a young man who had a strong jaw and a shock of dark hair. She scanned the details: the remains had been discovered in 1997 in a remote area of southern Vermont when a Labrador retriever had trotted home one day with its teeth clamped around a human skull. A day or so later, the dog brought back a lower jaw, then a femur. The police outfitted the dog with a radio collar, but no more bones turned up. Based on certain characteristics of the thighbone, the medical examiner thought the deceased might have been disabled.
    Carol went back to the missing-person listing for Sean Cutler. The skulland bones were discovered less than a year after the suspicious fire. The clay model based on the remains showed a dark-haired young man with a prominent brow, an unnaturally jutting chin, slightly parted lips. “There were so many things in common: the geographical similarities, the look, the disability,” Carol recalled later. “I looked at it, and I knew.”
    A man named Patrick Harkness, Sean’s cousin, had posted an Internet plea for help finding Sean. Carol e-mailed Harkness.
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    Carol learned from Harkness that Lewis and Sean Cutler had lived for a time in upstate New York in the early 1990s, not far from rural, woodsy Readsboro, Vermont. Harkness told her about the carbon monoxide poisoning that disabled Sean, the settlement, and Lewis Cutler’s cutting off all ties with the family in 1995.
    Exactly how and when Sean Cutler died is still a mystery. To Harkness and others who reconstructed the last few years of Lewis Cutler’s life, a picture emerged of a troubled man who,