When his disappearance occurred in the summer of 1986, Jeremy Bright was traveling with his younger sister to attend a well-known county fair in the state of Oregon. Since that time, no one has seen him.
According to an article published in 2007 by The Oregonian, Jeremy, who was already 14 years old and lived in Grants Pass, Oregon, with his mother and sister, was living with his stepfather at Myrtle Point, which is where he had spent his childhood.
According to the newspaper, Jeremy had other family members who were still living in the region, despite the fact that Myrtle Point is around two hours away from Grants Pass, which is where his mother, Diane Beatty, worked.
According to the Oregon State Police Missing Children/Adults Clearinghouse, Jeremy was last seen on August 14, 1986, when he was attending the annual Coos County Fair with his sister, S’te, who was ten years old at the time.
“Instead of them veggin’ in Grants Pass for a week, while I worked and went to school, I thought that would be a great little trip for them,” Beatty said to The Oregonian newspaper. “I have regretted it ever since.”
As the 38th anniversary of Jeremy’s disappearance draws near, the outcome of his disappearance continues to be a mystery that has not been solved.
“My brother and I never missed the fair,” S’te said to the local newspaper The World many years later.
A Ferris wheel was the location where Jeremy and his sister had been separated, according to The World, which cited the authorities. At the time of his disappearance, Jeremy was doing so while wearing a red tank top and blue nylon shorts.
In a piece that was published in The World in 2018, it was said that when S’te first attempted to inform the authorities that her brother had vanished, she was informed that he had most likely departed voluntarily with his friends. However, a day later, he still had not come home.
According to the article, it was later confirmed that Jeremy was not a runaway, and more agencies joined the hunt over the course of the investigation. However, even after over forty years, there have been very few leads discovered.
Although there has only ever been one person of interest cited in connection with the case, he has been deceased for more than ten years.
Jeremy was last seen in a vehicle with a guy called Terry Lee Steinhoff, according to a report from The World about his whereabouts.
In 2007, Steinhoff passed away while incarcerated. It was reported by KVAL and The World that he was now serving a life sentence for the murder of a lady who was a resident of Coos County.
In an interview with KVAL, the previous sheriff of Coos County, Zanni, said that “we tried multiple times to talk to him” about Jeremy’s abduction. There was never any openness from him.
Zanni disclosed to the publication that the authorities had carried out a number of searches on Steinhoff’s property as well as other locations, one of which was a pond in 2016, which the authorities felt was the location where Jeremy’s corpse may have been thrown. There has been no amount of success.
According to an article in the Statesman Journal, almost twenty-five years after Jeremy went missing, Beatty and other members of his family and friends released one thousand balloons near Myrtle Point in his remembrance.