Soden's half-brother, Ronald Soden, contacted the sheriff's office with a story of returning from serving in Vietnam to learn that while he was gone his mother had put Soden and his younger sister into an orphanage.
Dart said Ronald Soden was told his younger half-sister, April, was still living at the orphanage, but Steven had disappeared a few months earlier. Soden and a 12-year-old boy who also lived at the orphanage ran away in April 1972 during a group camping trip at the Bass River Camp Grounds in New Jer