A Michigan father whose three young sons vanished without a trace nearly 15 years ago has been charged with their murders – just weeks before he was set to walk free from prison.
John Skelton, 53, was charged in Lenawee County with three counts of open murder and three counts of tampering with evidence, court filings show. The charges were filed on November 12, according to WTVG.
Skelton has been behind bars since 2011 after pleading no contest to unlawful imprisonment for abducting his sons – Andrew, 9, Alexander, 7, and Tanner, 5 – from Morenci, Michigan, over Thanksgiving weekend in 2010.
He was serving a 10 to 15 year sentence and was scheduled to be released on November 29.
The boys were last seen at their father’s home in Morenci after spending the holiday with him. Skelton and their mother Tanya Zuvers were in the middle of a spiteful divorce at the time.
Zuvers, who had sole custody, was due to pick them up the next day. But when she arrived, neither her sons nor Skelton were there.
Zuvers has long maintained that she believes her ex-husband is responsible for their disappearance and deaths.
“He took them from me,” she told WTVG in a prior interview. “And I believe he killed them.”
Earlier this year, a judge granted Zuvers’ request to have her sons declared legally dead, a decision she said she sought to find closure. But the judge said at the time there was no “clear and convincing evidence that John Skelton murdered these children.”
In the Zuvers’ petition, which she filed in Lenawee County Probate Court last December, she wrote that Skelton has been “unable or unwilling to offer any plausible explanation as to the whereabouts of these children.”
Skelton, 52, “has done nothing to assist the authorities, his family, or his ex-wife’s family in what has become an exhaustive search for [the boys] since they went missing in 2010,” the petition states. “In the immediate hours after [they went missing], Skelton began his journey of misdirection and lies when his story began to unfold as to the whereabouts of his sons.”
Investigators used cellphone records to retrace Skelton’s movements during the period in question, which the petition says “completely contradict[ed] the story he began telling his wife and the authorities.”
Skelton denied harming his sons and previously said they were with an underground group for their safety, among other murky explanations, according to investigators.
The case has long haunted the small community of Morenci. Despite years of searches, their remains have never been found.
Although years have passed, the Skelton brothers have not been forgotten. A plaque with their names and images is attached to a rock at a park near Bean Creek. It says, “Faith, Hope, Love.”
