On the night of April 30, 1974, Police officers in Phoenix, Arizona, spotted a young boy wandering the streets alone. The boy, Gary Ray Hose, had run away from home to escape his parents’ abuse.
The officers asked him where he lived and returned him that evening, not knowing they had doomed the boy.
In the early hours of May 1st, Gary’s eight-year-old brother, Guy Hose, was woken up by loud shouting and chaotic voices coming from the living room.
Guy walked in to investigate and found Gary standing silently next to their mother. His brother was severely bruised from head to toe and was bleeding. Guy could only look on, terrified.
Challenging their mother, Charlene, or their stepfather, Walter Ray Hose, was not an option for either child. Charlene sent Guy back to his bedroom, and that was the last time he saw his brother.
They woke up the next day, and Gary was missing. But the alarming thing was that there was no search or investigation. He just ceased to exist, and the parents carried on, as if nothing had happened.
Within days of Gary’s disappearance, though, Walter and Charlene forced the other children to pack up their things. In the middle of the night, the family abandoned their home near Cave Creek in Phoenix.
They set out for a remote three-acre desert property outside of Maricopa, Arizona, where they moved into a trailer. Immediately after they moved, Guy asked his parents where Gary had gone, and they aggressively told him never, ever to say his name again.
To keep the children from bringing up the matter again, they told them that Gary had gotten lucky and had been adopted by a family in Texas. Guy apparently believed this tale until he became an adult.
Pattern of Abuse at the Hose Household
Walter and Charlene raised four children. The first three boys were from a previous marriage to a man named Grosser. Charlene’s first was Guy, who was born in 1965. He was eight at the time of Gary’s disappearance.
Afterwards, she had two twin boys, Gary Ray and Jerry Lee Hose, who were born in 1968. Walter and Charlene had one more son after leaving Phoenix, named Jeff.
Growing up in a tiny home in Phoenix during the 1970s, Guy stated that he and his brothers were regularly abused by their mother and stepfather. It was the twins, though, who got the worst of it.
“Our stepdad was abusive to the extent that he went a little crazy with the belt. But it was our mother who was responsible for the broken bones, beatings, the hospitalisation, and the internal bleeding,” Guy stated. “I was beaten, but I got a fraction of what the twins got. It was horrific what the twins went through.”
He said Jerry was the more passive of the twins, but was defiant. This is because he refused to submit to his mother’s control, leading to him getting singled out for more abuse. As punishment, Charlene locked Gary in a dark closet for extended periods.
The abuse at the Hose home was not invisible to the outside world. One of the neighbours, Mary Fields, lived close enough to hear what was happening.
She often rescued the boys from their bedroom cribs, which were said to be filled with faeces. The boys used to call Mary ‘grandmother’ as a term of affection because she was a safe haven for them.
Mary described Charlene as a vicious woman who was suffering from mental illness. As Charlene’s instability and outbursts got worse, she, on one occasion, pulled Walter aside and begged him to get help for his wife. When Charlene learned of this, she pulled a kitchen knife and charged at Mary.
Though Mary survived the close call without physical injury, this event showed how dangerous Charlene was in the time leading up to Gary running away.
On the night that Gary went missing, Walter reportedly came up to Mary’s patio door and banged relentlessly on it. She was alone that night, considering her husband was admitted to the hospital.
Walter ran away before Mary had time to put on her robe and answer the door. She believed that he was there to confess that something had happened to Gary that night. The family moved away within days. For Mary, it was good riddance.
She did recall often contacting the police and the Arizona Department of Child Safety, but whether they investigated her claims remains to be determined.
The family babysitter, Dora Wolf, told a very similar story. When she came to babysit the boys, she said Charlene would tell her to leave the twins locked in their bedroom. She was not to feed them or give them water.
Dora would always disobey these instructions and give them something when their mother wasn’t looking. Dora also informed her mother of the conditions at the Hosés’, and she called the police, but the children were not removed.
When the Hose family packed up and fled North Phoenix, they severed ties with the neighbours, so Dora was not aware of what had happened to Gary until much later.
The Escalation of Abuse and the Punishment Box
When the Hose family moved to the desert, they were effectively far from any assistance or prying eyes. This allowed Charlene to escalate her abuse of the children to even new heights.
Because Gary was gone, Charlene now focused her unchecked violence on his passive twin, Jerry. She began beating him with escalating intensity over the years.
Childhood friends noted, though, that she learned to hit him in less noticeable places, like under his scalp or back, to keep neighbours from seeing the marks.
After one year of living in isolation in the trailer, the family then packed up and left the state. They didn’t sell the desert property, though, and never set foot on it again.
The Hoses moved to Idaho, settling in the Boise area. Charlene gave birth to a boy. At that time, the dynamic shifted into an inexplicable hierarchy. The new baby and the oldest son, Guy, were largely spared from the abuse.
Charlene turned her rage solely on Jerry. Year after year, she beat Jerry, and the structural trauma from repetitive head injuries caused him to suffer irreparable brain damage.
The Arrest and Conviction
Despite the attempts to hide the abuse, Jerry arrived at Eagle Elementary school with severe injuries which could not be concealed. A sharp-eyed teacher at the school noticed the pattern of trauma on Jerry’s legs, face and back.
The teacher noted these as non-accidental injuries and called the local police and child protective services. Responding law enforcement assessed Jerry’s condition, and Charlene Hose was formally booked on felony child abuse.
In 1982, Charlene was convicted of felony child abuse. She did, however, avoid prison time, and the judge sentenced her to five years of probation.
After the conviction, though, Child Protective Services stripped Walter and Charlene of custody over Jerry. He was then placed into emergency foster care to protect him. The court did not take the other children.
This was because, in the early 1980s, the child welfare infrastructure treated cases on an individual-victim basis. Since Jerry’s physical injuries were seen by his school teacher and he had evident brain damage, the state considered him to be in imminent danger.
Following Jerry’s removal from the home, the dynamic shifted to protecting Jeff, the youngest brother. Jeff was completely shielded from any violence that was involved within the home.
Considering Gary and Jerry were no longer in the picture, Charlene now put her sights on Guy. She was more careful, though, noting police and the CPS were monitoring the family. So the parents moderated their actions to avoid it, leading to visible injuries.
The very moment that Guy reached legal age, he fled the house. Haunted by the memories of abuse and seeing Gary, bloodied in the living room, Guy cut off all communication from his parents.
Jeff remained in the home as an only child and the favourite of his parents. Walter and Charlene used this time to retreat from their transient lifestyle, while also ensuring their public image remained as unremarkable as possible.
Jerry Comes Forward
Jerry came forward to the police on January 11, 1994, and told them his mother had killed his brother back in 1974.
Jerry, who had been adopted out of the family as a teen and was still suffering brain damage, explained that Charlene had beaten Gary to death on April 30, 1974. This was just after the police brought him back.
Jerry also connected with investigators and producers from ‘The Crusaders’, a television news magazine. An episode of the case aired in 1994, featuring Jerry.
Reporter William La Jeunesse revealed the history of the Hose family abuse, illustrating that Gary is still missing. In one scene, Jerry presented to Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who then promised to devote resources to solving the case.
“You deserve to know the truth,” Arpaio told Jerry. “We’ll do everything. I’ll assign some detectives to the case.”
A missing persons file was opened, but Walter and Charlene also hired an attorney and exercised their constitutional right to remain silent under the Fifth Amendment.
Private investigator Michael Toth was later hired by Guy and Jerry Hose. He said, “Not much was done. And all these years passed as the case sat growing colder. The investigators did the absolute minimum of what they needed to do.”
Two Failed Searches and the Three-acre Property
Guy Hose believed that Charlene and Walter must have buried Gary’s body somewhere on the land in Maricopa. This is considering that they lived there for a year but have never set foot on the property since then.
During a lucid moment, Charlene allegedly admitted to one of her children that Gary was buried on that property. Police obtained a search warrant and brought in cadaver dogs. They dug extensively, but found nothing.
Another tip in 2015 implied that Gary’s body was buried in the backyard of the original house in Cave Creek. It was supposedly encased in concrete. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office got two search warrants for the home. They dug, but found nothing again.
Frustrated after the initial searches came up empty, Guy drove a backhoe himself to the Maricopa property in November 2015. He started digging behind the septic tank.
The lead detective on the case arrived as he was excavating the earth and threatened to have him arrested for trespassing. Guy was ordered to leave immediately. At the time, the property still belonged to Charlene.
Investigator Toth declared that the authorities would not spend more money searching for Gary. The property was three acres, but they only searched a very small part of it.
Charlene passed away on October 29th 2016. She had multiple health issues at the time, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Walter had already succumbed to lung cancer in 2014. Neither of them was even questioned for Gary’s murder.
No Body, No Charges, and No Closure
Gary’s disappearance remains unsolved, but foul play is suspected. His remaining family still hopes to locate his remains and provide him with a proper burial.
As of June 2021, Gary was ruled out as one of 13 unidentified decedents in the United States. Had he lived to date, he would be in his late fifties.
The Charlie project, the largest privately run internet database for cold-case missing persons, still carries his entry.
Guy Hose’s perspective of the situation has never shifted: “The sheriff’s department has already told us that Gary is not a priority — they got other cases that are more important and more current. My brother has been lying dead out in the desert for almost 43 years now. When is he going to get justice?”