Jack Duane Morgan was a 15-year-old A+ student at a private school in San Diego, California. He had brown hair, a scar near his left eye, a warm, friendly manner, and was last seen alive in the driveway of his father’s home on December 5, 1996.

Dawna Holland, Morgan’s maternal aunt, recently told The Cold Cases, a website dedicated to examining unsolved criminal investigations, that she suspects Morgan’s allegedly abusive father may have killed Morgan because he was gay and then deliberately obstructed all attempts to investigate his disappearance.

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He and his father reportedly had “a significant argument” on the day he went missing. Morgan was gone by the time his brother came home that evening, and Morgan left behind all of his personal belongings. There was no note, no obvious signs of foul play, no body, and no witnesses, TheColdCases.com reported.

San Diego police responded to the missing persons report by classifying Morgan as a runaway, but runaways typically take personal belongings that would help them survive. Morgan did not.

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Holland said that Morgan’s father refused to talk to police about his son’s disappearance, and available records show that he prevented other family members from speaking with them as well.

The aforementioned website wrote that Morgan’s father then removed every photograph of his son from his home, threw out all of his son’s belongings, and forbade his name from being spoken inside the house.

When Jack’s mother (who was then divorced from his father) and her sister visited Morgan’s private school to try and talk with the missing boy’s friends, his father reportedly contacted the school to have the women removed from campus.

“He was a Marine,” Holland told Cold Cases journalist Dustin Reed Terry of Morgan’s father. “He was a violent man. He beat my sister. We all knew what he was capable of.”

“Jack may have been gay,“ she added. “He was affectionate, he was caring, he was so loving with everyone around him. But his father — a man like that, a Marine, a violent man — that would not have been acceptable. Not to him.”

“I believe his father killed him,” she concluded, making an unverified and unproven accusation. “I believe it was because Jack was gay, and his father couldn’t accept that. I believe he did something to Jack that day, and then he spent years making sure no one could prove it.”

Morgan’s disappearance was initially going to be covered by America’s Most Wanted, a ’90s-era true crime TV show dedicated to locating wanted fugitives and missing people. However, shortly before the show was scheduled to air, Morgan’s father reportedly called its producers and had it pulled for reasons that have never been publicly explained.

“Here was this show that exists to find missing people, and his father — the person we believed hurt Jack — was able to just call and make it go away. And they let him,” Holland said.

In 1999, the police case file on Morgan’s disappearance went missing – and with it, all witness accounts, pursued leads, and collected evidence – causing the case to be closed.

However, in 2013, a detective named Catherine Millet reopened the case. So far, no one working on it has reached any definitive conclusions. The case has since been assigned to Detective Maura Mekenas Parga of the San Diego Police Department, and Morgan’s information has been registered with NamUs – a national centralized repository and resource center for missing, unidentified, and unclaimed persons – so that if anyone matching his description appearas in a database, hospital file, or unidentified persons file, he could possibly be identified.

Holland also said that Morgan’s brother – who she said is now struggling with suicidality and refuses to talk about Morgan – has remained silent about it all.

It has now been 33 years since Morgan’s disappearance, making any potential witnesses now in their 50s and 60s. As such, investigators have missed a critical period to find vital evidence that could have explained what happened.

“I think he’s gone,” Holland said of Morgan when asked about the possibility that he may still be alive. “I think he’s been gone since that day. And I think somewhere, people know it, and they’ve been protecting themselves instead of him for 30 years.”

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