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A heartbroken Michigan mom will take one step closer to closure on Monday, with a scheduled evidentiary hearing on her petition to have her three sons, who have been missing for nearly 15 years, declared legally dead.
Tanya Lynn Zuvers’ boys, Andrew, Alexander and Tanner Skelton, disappeared in November 2010. They spent Thanksgiving with their father, John, and were last seen in his backyard in Morency, Michigan, a town of 2,200 near the Ohio state line. The children, who were 9, 7 and 5 when they vanished, have not been seen since.
In the years immediately following the boys’ disappearance, Zuvers reportedly continued to keep their Christmas presents ready for them upon their eventual return.
Last month, Zuvers posted an announcement on a Facebook page set up to receive tips and leads from the public, sharing her decision to file the petition, saying she chose to do so “after much thought & discussion with my family & friends.”
“It did not come lightly and was definitely a difficult decision to make,” Zuvers wrote. “No parent wants to lose a child, but to have to have the courts step in and declare them deceased is just unfathomable. At the end of the day, one person is responsible for the disappearance of my sons… As of today, June 14, 2024, all 3 boys are over 18 and all would have graduated high school, yet they have not been returned to me and are still missing.”
John Russell Skelton, who is currently incarcerated, has been “unable or unwilling to offer any plausible explanation as to the whereabouts of these children,” according to Zuvers’ petition, which she filed in Lenawee County Probate Court last December.
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.”
Zuvers was unable to be reached on Monday. Her attorney, R. Burke Castleberry, did not immediately respond to The Independent’s request for comment.
Skelton was sentenced in September 2011 to 10 to 15 years behind bars, on three counts of unlawful imprisonment, related to his three sons. He has never been charged in their deaths, and is scheduled for release in November 2025, according to jail records. Skelton and Zuvers, who had sole custody of the boys, were in the middle of a spiteful divorce at the time.
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 broke his ankle while attempting suicide the next day, and was hospitalized for his injury, the petition explains.
When Zuvers called Skelton to find out where the boys were, Skelton told her, untruthfully, that they were “with a friend of his” and that they would be back home shortly.
“He later lied again and stated he did not know where the boys were because he was unsure who had the boys,” the petition goes on. “Because of the multiple lies and bizarre circumstances that led to John having these conversations with Tanya while he was in the hospital from his suicide attempt, Tanya had called the authorities and notified them the boys were missing. John was soon placed into custody.”
Skelton’s story would further shift multiple times under questioning by police, telling them, variously, that he had handed the children off to “a type of underground group” to protect them from Zuvers, who he claimed was “a danger.” Another story was that he had given them to an apparently non-existent woman named Joanne Taylor, and that “he had a vision of the boys being put in a dumpster in an area in Ohio,” according to the petition.
All of Skelton’s prison calls and letters were monitored, but, the petition says, “there has never been any mention from John or anyone he has been communicating with as to the well-being or whereabouts of his children. There has never been any mention of when the boys would be returned. John has never shown any emotion if his missing boys are mentioned in conversation.”
At some point “years later,” the petition says Skelton told investigators to speak with a local man who ran a boarding house for members of the Amish community who wanted to leave and enter the “real world,” about the boys’ location.
However, when detectives tracked down the man Skelton had named, he said he had never heard of the dad before. As it turned out, Skelton had seen the man on a reality show on the cellblock TV and concocted the phony tale out of whole cloth, the petition states.
“All of the information provided by the last person to see the boys, John Skelton, leads investigators to believe that [he] killed his sons,” the petition concludes. “At this time, all three boys would be over the age of 18… If John Skelton’s lies were true, the boys should now be able to be brought back into society, however, this has not happened and authorities have not received any type of cooperation from [him].”
Declaring the children legally deceased, according to Castleberry, will give Zuvers a degree of closure, as well as paving the way for her to settle assorted legal and financial issues stemming from the heartbreaking loss.
