In response, Potts' mother forbade her daughter from attending an upcoming annual performing show to be held at nearby Halloran Park on August 24.

By agreement, she and her best friend and neighbor, Patricia Swing[10] then rode to West Cleveland's Halloran Park to attend the annual summer city-sponsored children's performance event, scheduled to commence at eight o'clock.

[14] According to Swing, beyond exchanging brief greetings at Halloran Park with two thirteen-year-old girls whom both knew, neither conversed with any individual during their time together at this location,[n 3] although the sheer size of the crowd made navigating upon their bicycles awkward for both.

Swing left the park and returned to her home, arriving at approximately 8:50 p.m. She later informed investigators she had last seen Potts in the crowd, avidly watching an onstage dancing performance.

At this time, a 13-year-old boy named Fred Krause saw a girl he believed to be Potts walking diagonally across the park in a northeasterly direction, about 150 yards from the corner of Linnet Avenue and West 117th Street.

Although his visibility was limited due to the onset of darkness and the fact Linnet Avenue had only four streetlights — each partly obscured by maple and chestnut trees which lined the street in spring and summer[18]⁠— Krause recognized Potts by the distinctive way she walked with her toes pointed at outward angles, a characteristic he and other neighborhood children had termed duck-like.

[19][n 4] Other witnesses informed investigators they had seen a girl resembling Potts walking near a stationary, "battered" and crudely painted black 1937 or '38 Dodge coupé with a "smoking, noisy muffler" and recently repaired fenders on West 117th Street, apparently speaking to two young men inside the vehicle.

[27] Potts' family members were soon cleared as suspects as investigators rapidly determined that her home life had been stable and by all accounts happy, and there appeared to be no reason for her to have run away.

Another individual to report lewd behavior at the park was a classmate of Potts, Patricia Nagg, who informed police a young man had repeatedly thrust his hips back and forth in a manner simulating intercourse as he had stared at her.

Slates's name was given to authorities by a neighbor who reported he had abruptly boarded up his home the day after Potts' disappearance and left the neighborhood, having first borrowed a friend's car.

The FBI had also distributed 22,000 circulars nationwide,[32][n 9] and a $1,500 reward (equivalent to $17,608 in 2023) had also been offered by her father's labor union, AFL-Stagehands, for any information successfully leading to the whereabouts of his daughter and the identity of her kidnapper(s).

[35] Three months prior to Potts' disappearance, in May 1951, a five-year-old Lakewood girl named Gail Ann Michel had been abducted from a local department store.

[36] On August 26, all known sex offenders⁠ — with or without a predilection for children — residing in Cleveland's West Side were also questioned with regards to their whereabouts on the date of Potts' disappearance; all 65 individuals were eliminated from the inquiry.

Many senior investigators theorized the child had likely been enticed into a nearby house or car on her way home by someone she knew, perhaps with the promise of a babysitting job[n 11] or a request to run an errand, with the abduction itself most likely occurring upon a moment of opportunism.

[12] On September 4, 1951, a warehouse worker named Henry Palmer observed a human-shaped, cloth-wrapped form measuring approximately 5 feet (1.5 m) floating in the Cuyahoga River current behind the building where he worked.

[16][6] In 1980, two retired Cleveland police detectives, James Fuerst and Robert Shankland, revealed that in 1974 they had received a tip from a local attorney with a client whose brother had supposedly confessed to abducting Potts.

The detectives subsequently found and questioned the brother, who, they said, had readily admitted to having lived near Halloran Park in 1951 and making a habit of picking up and molesting young girls there.

[41] In February 1994, a couple renovating a house on Midvale Avenue, Cleveland, discovered several pieces of yellowing notebook paper alongside a man's shirt beneath old carpeting upon the stairs.

[43] Upon being traced and questioned by police, Haynik (then aged 83) admitted penning and concealing the notes, but insisted all the allegations were false; she had written and hidden the letter in 1953 solely as a revenge fantasy against her abusive husband.

[43] Beginning in July 2000, a series of handwritten letters were sent to the editorial offices of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, purporting to be from an elderly man who claimed that as he was terminally ill and "in the twilight of [his] life", he wished to confess to molesting and murdering Potts before his death.

The anonymous author pledged to turn himself in on the fiftieth anniversary of Potts' disappearance, but shortly beforehand, wrote to say he had to enter a nursing home and would be unable to honor his promise or otherwise reveal himself.

He had previously been arrested in March 1949 for making sexual advances toward an eight-year-old girl in a local movie theater, resulting in his being placed on a year's probation and his dishonorable discharge from the armed forces.

[30] Davis was a 52-year-old ex-convict arrested in the early hours of November 15, 1951, while attempting to extort a ransom payment from Potts' family having falsely claimed to have kidnapped their daughter and sister.

He had begun contacting the Potts family on November 9, claiming to be holding Beverly captive and demanding a $25,000 ransom for her release as opposed to cutting the "very sick" child's throat.

Robert Potts successfully bartered the anonymous caller's ransom sum to $5,000 and agreed to hand over the money upon the promise his daughter would be released to her mother outside the Terminal Tower "within three hours."

[47] Rush was an impoverished 47-year-old drifter and Cleveland native who had relocated from his home city to Los Angeles in the spring of 1951, where he sporadically worked as a hospital attendant.

According to the author, his brother had an extensive history of sexually molesting female children and had fled Cleveland in 1966 after being indicted for abducting two young girls, but had recently returned to Maple Heights.

[52] An investigation into this suspect's background revealed numerous arrests for child molestation, including time served at the Ohio Penitentiary for the sexual abuse of a young girl in 1951.

He was arrested approximately three weeks after his brother had sent the letter to authorities, and freely admitted to having resided close to Halloran Park in the early 1950s and to have frequently "prowled" the district in search of underage girls to molest.

[53][54] The enduring mystery of Potts' disappearance, the exhaustive — yet ultimately unsuccessful — nationwide investigation to locate the child and determine the actual motive behind her abduction has captured the imagination of the press and public alike in and around Cleveland for decades.