People and incidents
Donald Caldwell and Steven Soden (1972)
Sources compared and paraphrased
Two residents of Paterson’s Kilbarchan Home disappeared during an April 1972 camping trip near Bass River; remains found in 2000 were identified as Soden’s decades later.
Disappearance and later identification
Steven Soden, 16, and Donald Caldwell, 12, disappeared on the night of April 3, 1972, while among 18 children and four adults camping at Bass River. Contemporary reports said the boys headed toward the Garden State Parkway and may have hitchhiked. A 13-state alert produced no result. Later coverage gave their ages as 17 and 13, a discrepancy that should be checked against the dated missing-person records. The boys lived at the Kilbarchan Home on 39th Street. Caldwell was nicknamed “Pal.”
Soden was described as tall and slender, with shoulder-length blond hair and green eyes; Caldwell as Black, medium-build, about 5 feet 3 inches, with an Afro, wearing pants and a blue denim jacket. Family accounts said neither used drugs. In 2000 an off-duty state trooper found human remains in Bass River State Forest. Modern DNA work later identified them as Soden’s. The source record’s modern account says Caldwell remains missing.
An identification, with questions still open
The identification grew out of the Cook County effort to name unidentified victims of John Wayne Gacy. A family DNA sample did not match those victims; a national database comparison instead linked the family to the remains recovered in New Jersey. Additional half-sibling samples and testing at the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification helped confirm Steven’s identity. The May 14, 2013 account reported his cause of death as undetermined. This was a connection between identification efforts, not evidence that Gacy killed Soden. Daily Herald report of the announcement.
Identifying Steven did not establish what happened to Donald or explain how Steven died. The accounts reviewed here supply no resolution of Caldwell’s disappearance. The original hitchhiking report remains a reported possibility, not a documented journey out of the forest.
Sources and further reading
- Contemporary missing-person newspaper clipping, masthead and date not visible in the source record scan.
- New Jersey State Police, May 14, 2013, announcement identifying Steven Soden, cited in the earlier research; original release URL could not be retrieved during the September 2026 review. The linked Daily Herald account independently documents that day’s identification announcement.
- “Bones Identified as NJ Boy Missing Since 1972”