Missing boy in Maricopa haunts brother 40 years later

He didn’t have it easy, but the twins had it even worse, especially 6-year-old Gary. He has been missing now for more than four decades, feared murdered by his own mother and buried somewhere on a nondescript three-acre plot in the city of Maricopa.

“He was around for six years, but he was locked away so much that I really only have two memories of him,” Hose, 51, told the Casa Grande Dispatch, recalling a contraption his mother called “the punishment box” in which she would often lock the twins. “There’s anger because I didn’t get to know him. And there’s guilt because I was the older brother — I couldn’t do anything.”

Until recently, Hose wanted to believe his missing brother had simply been one of the lucky ones, adopted out of the reach of Charlene Hose — the mother who by her son’s account hardly wanted the boys around anyway. He was 8 at the time of Gary’s disappearance and wanted to believe something good had come for him at last.

Gary’s twin Jerry had been so lucky. Beatings so awful that the bruises finally caught the attention of a concerned teacher in Boise, Idaho. Charlene Hose was arrested and convicted of felony abuse, and Jerry was sent into foster care.

That was the best day of his life, Jerry Hose would later tell “The Crusaders,” an investigative TV show that aired its own look at the Hose case in the 1990s.

And for good reason, according to his older brother.

Hose never understood why he and the youngest boy, Jeff, were not given the same reprieve.

Now, the questions continue as Gary’s remains have yet to be found, and no one has been held responsible.

Without answers or a body, Gary has joined an infamous band of Arizonans — the missing.

Saturday marks the second annual Missing in Arizona Day, an event designed to bring together families of the lost to provide support and possibly move their cases a step closer to being solved.

Families with missing loved ones are encouraged to attend ceremonies beginning at 10 a.m. at Arizona State University’s West Campus in Glendale. Photographs and DNA samples can also be brought for consideration as various law enforcement agencies will be teaming up to host the somber event.

Such efforts may be comforting to families still hopeful for answers, but for Hose, he feels the system has already failed his brother and worries justice may never be done.

Gary’s twin once approached the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in the early 1990s, explaining that he knew Gary was dead, that he could feel it. But Jerry later said he was not taken seriously and little seemed to be done to find the missing boy.

“The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office has just been nothing but ignorant and hateful toward this whole case,” Hose said of the agency that has since taken up the cold case, “and they have shown my mom more consideration and protection than they have Gary.”

He and his girlfriend, Mechele Monet — one of the few people who has helped Hose have something resembling a normal life — have felt slighted, even betrayed by the lead detective working on Gary’s case.

They provided emails she sent to a private investigator Hose hired, Michael Toth of Elite Investigation in Montana. In them, MCSO Detective Kristina Hiers expressed concern that Hose and Monet may be hurting the investigation and preventing her from properly doing her job to achieve justice for Gary while also protecting the rights of their mother.

The email came after Hose hired a backhoe to dig up the septic tank at the Maricopa property at which he believes his brother was left behind years ago. MCSO had performed its own search of the property with cadaver dogs and ground-penetrating radar but found nothing.

In Hose’s eyes, the search had been lackluster — he took matters into his own hands, much to Hiers’s chagrin.

“They jeopardized the case and their credibility in the process,” Hiers wrote to Toth, according to the emails Hose provided. “As you have experienced (and have apologized to me on many occasions for), rational thought sometimes gets lost in translation with Guy.

“Guy and Mechele should have been arrested today. The only reason that they were not is because I was not in physical control of the property so (Pinal County Sheriff’s Office) issued the trespass directive.”

Hose did encounter PCSO deputies, as evidenced by an audio recording in which the couple can be heard explaining the situation to an officer.

Monet told the officer they planned on digging up the septic tank and alerting MCSO if they found anything of note.

“You call us, we’ll come out here and secure the area, and we’ll get in contact with MCSO,” the unidentified deputy can be heard saying behind the sound of the backhoe continuing its work. “The wheels of justice aren’t perfect, and they can be very slow moving… By all means, keep doing what you’re doing. Regardless of whether it gets a conviction or not, closure is the biggest thing. We get that.”

The officer sounded sympathetic and kind, encouraging Hose toward finding peace.

Hiers, too, expressed regret for the pain Hose had been through in her email to Toth: “The system failed him and his brothers when they were young children. I want to correct that if I can.”

Hose told the Dispatch he cannot legally return to that property in Maricopa, and he does not know if MCSO plans to continue its own canvass of the scene.

He’s not sure that he’ll ever get another chance either. Charlene Hose and her husband Walter had a pact to never sell the Maricopa property until they were both dead.

Walter Hose died of lung cancer in February 2014, and his wife eventually moved to Oregon. She enlisted the services of Details and Dignity to employ a conservator, who did not immediately return a request for comment.

The mother reportedly told MCSO she did not want her son on her property, which she intended to leave to Jeff, her youngest and clear favorite.

Mary Fields remembers the abuse as clearly as Hose, though she recalls Gary just as well.

Fields was the Hoses’ neighbor for years, first at an apartment complex in Phoenix and then again when Charlene Hose moved her family into a house next to Fields — that was Fields’ idea, to keep the boys who had taken to calling her grandmother close.

She often saved the twins from their bedroom where they were left in cribs full of feces they ate out of desperation. She can still hear them screaming when their mother beat them. And she can still recall the night when Charlene Hose loaded them into a moving truck in the middle of the night, just days after Gary went missing.

“Charlene was very cruel,” Fields said. “She was a very mean woman… She was very ill, and I told Walter he needed to get her some help.”

She did not get help, though, beyond what Fields could offer before she became pregnant with a daughter and Charlene Hose turned on her, even charging at her with a knife once.

That sort of manic behavior was not unusual coming from the Hose mother nor her husband, Walter.

On the night Fields now believes may have been Gary’s last, Walter Hose had a particularly strange night.

He came to Fields’ patio door and banged relentlessly on it, startling Fields’ poodle and her as she was alone, her own husband away at the hospital. He was clearly panic-stricken — as he often was when his wife chose to turn her violence on him — but Fields did not even have enough time to put on her robe before he took off running away.

Today, Fields fears Walter Hose was coming to her to confess something had been done to Gary. It was only days later that the Hose family was gone, and all Fields could bare to think was “good riddance.”

She thought back on those days she saved the twins and on the singular time Charlene Hose sought her help with Guy. She had shoved his hand into the furnace to “teach him a lesson.”

Fields held his scorched hand in ice water through his pained screams and rubbed butter on the sores. Hose doesn’t have any scars from the incident, a result of what Fields said was her own loving remedy.

“I was angry,” she said of how playing witness to the abuse left her feeling, “but I just wiped everything from my mind and bathed them and clothed them and fed them and kissed them. That’s just what I did, just tried to love them.”

It should be noted that she often called the police and Arizona Department of Child Safety as well, but if authorities ever investigated her reports, they never told her.

“I just hope Guy gets closure,” she said with a waiver in her voice. “That’s all he was asking — for his brother’s remains so he could give him a proper burial.

Not all stories can have a happy ending, though.

While Guy Hose still dreams of one day laying his little brother to rest atop a mountain he’s chosen on a plot of 45 acres he and Monet own, a mountain befitting a child’s final resting place, the justice he also seeks may never come.

On Oct. 29, Charlene Hose died, joining her late husband beyond the reach of the law.

“Not once were my parents even questioned, let alone charged,” Guy Hose wrote to the Dispatch Wednesday. “The (Maricopa County) sheriff’s department let them get away with murder.”