Sarah and Philip Gehring were last seen on July 4TH, 2003 in Concord, New Hampshire leaving the annual fireworks demonstration with their Father, Manuel. Witnesses recalled seeing the three walking towards their minivan at approximately 10:00pm, and their recollections were unquestionably vivid due to the fact that the Gehring’s were in a heated and public argument. Manuel was upset with Sarah for not meeting him at the predetermined location following the event, and Philip took the somewhat rare position of defending his older sister. The debate was intensified by Manuel’s apparent disgust that Sarah had not properly charged her cell phone thereby inhibiting his ability to reach her some 50 yards away.

Repeated calls to Sarah’s cell phone and home number were made by her boyfriend and other friends on Saturday, July 5TH yet no one was able to reach her. She had plans for a sleepover on that Saturday, and most certainly never went a day without talking to her boyfriend. While certainly unusual, there wasn’t necessarily a need for panic until the next day. The Gehring children spent time following their parents’ divorce separately with Manuel and their Mother, Theresa Knight, and she was due to pick Philip up Sunday afternoon, July 6TH for two weeks of summer camp. Again, there was no great need to worry when they were not there as the normal exchange took place on Sunday evenings; perhaps Manuel just forgot about being there for Philip’s camp.

On Monday, July 7TH, there was a great, even desperate, need now to worry. Teresa Knight learned through a call placed to his employer that Manuel had in fact been terminated from his job some three weeks earlier. Employment was a necessary condition of their custody arrangement, and he had not shared this development with anyone. Still unable to reach either Manuel or Sarah on their cell phones and fearing the worst, Mrs. Knight sought and obtained a court order on Monday, July 7TH, revoking Manuel’s custody rights and compelling him to return the children. This formality enabled the police to treat the incident as a crime and a missing person’s case.

Manuel Gehring, 44, was placed into custody by Californian and Federal authorities on July 10TH, 2003 six days after the children went missing and only three days after the formal complaint was filed. At a Road Way Inn in Gilroy, California, 3,000 miles from New Hampshire, Manuel Gehring was arrested without incident. He was located rather easily by authorities by tracking his credit card purchases and ATM withdrawals clear across the country. Of great concern, however, was the fact that in Grove City Pennsylvania on the morning of Saturday, July 5TH, Manuel had stopped at 10:22am at a Wal-Mart to purchase a shovel, pick-axe, black garbage bags, duct tape, a knife and other items. Of greater concern was that Manuel was apprehended alone and in possession of two handguns. What was finally most disturbing was that Manuel’s minivan contained a great deal of blood, human tissue and bullet-holes covered with duct-tape.

During his interrogation, he confessed that he shot Sarah once in the head and Philip several times in the chest shortly after leaving the fireworks in New Hampshire, and buried his children in shallow graves with duct-tape crosses upon their chests sometime on July 5TH, 6TH or 7TH. Federal authorities garnished from Manuel very detailed information about a burial site that he said was within 2 perhaps even 10 miles off of an unidentified exit from Interstate 80 somewhere in the mid-west. The remainder of his trip became an effort to clean the van, dispose of all the evidence and apparently restart his life – all while continuing to use his credit cards, ATM card and even wire transferring thousands of dollars from a home equity line of credit back in New Hampshire.

Over the course of the next several days, he was driven by law enforcement officials through Pennsylvania, Ohio and Iowa stopping along the way at what he believed to potentially be where the children’s makeshift gravesites were dug. Having failed to find the precise location or the bodies, three days later Manuel was formally extradited to New Hampshire and charged with the murder of his children.

As of this writing, despite countless hours of searching for their remains, neither Sarah nor Philip’s bodies have been found. In an ironic turn of events that voided prosecutorial value in finding the children, Manuel, the only individual presumed to know the exact location of the graves, committed suicide in jail while awaiting his trial. Their mother, Teresa Knight, family, friends and a small New England community that were devastated by the tragedy, continue to grieve for the young children and seek answers that would provide some small sense of closure, and perhaps if at all possible, some sense of justice. Everyone, but most particularly Teresa and her family, has been denied what many may take for granted after of the death of a loved one: Burial Rights.

It is with great hope that in viewing this web-site someone will recollect an important detail either about that fateful night in Concord, or more importantly, a familiarity with the burial site located between Pennsylvania and Iowa that holds the precious young bodies of Sarah and Philip.