Left top: Photos of brothers Alexander Skelton, Tanner Skelton, Andrew Skelton, who went missing in 2010 (WDIV YouTube screengrab). Left bottom: Age progressed photos of the brothers by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Right: The boys’ father, John Skelton (booking photo via Michigan Department of Corrections).
In a petition seeking to declare her three missing sons dead after 14 years without answers, a mother from Michigan alleges that the boys’ father John Skelton — now serving time for wrongful imprisonment — concocted wild stories about their children’s whereabouts, including that a former Amish reality TV series actor and murder mystery writer knew where the children were harbored.
The children’s mother, Tanya Zuvers, posted a message about the petition on Facebook just a few days before Father’s Day and announced that she had formally filed the request with the Lenawee County Probate Court in December to declare the boys deceased.
In 2018, the children’s father claimed in an interview with local NBC affiliate WDIV that he gave his boys to an “underground sanctuary” in Ohio where they went to live with a new family of two women and a man in their 60s. The farm, he said, was along the Ohio-Indiana border. No evidence to support this claim emerged despite thorough investigation by police.
In 2011, after the boys went missing, Skelton was sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison on three charges of wrongful imprisonment — one count for each of his missing children. He is expected to be released in November 2025. His has parole was denied in 2023, according to NBC affiliate WLBT.
Reflecting this past week on her decision to finally file the petition formally declaring her children dead, Zuvers wrote:
This decision came after much thought & discussion with my family & friends. It did not come lightly and was definitely a difficult decision to make. No parent wants to lose a child, but to have to have the courts step in and declare them deceased is just unfathomable. At the end of the day, one person is responsible for the disappearance of my sons. That person, at one point, claimed the boys would hibernate until they graduate.
As of today, June 14, 2024, all 3 boys are over 18 and all would have graduated high school, yet they have not been returned to me and are still missing. At this time, we, as a family, are asking for our privacy as we continue to process this.
A pretrial hearing on the petition is slated for next week and a formal trial on the declaration is going to be held toward the end of July. Under Michigan state law, missing people are presumed to be dead after they are missing for five years
Andrew, 9, Alexander, 7, and Tanner Skeleton, 5, went missing from their home in Morenci, Michigan, on Thanksgiving Day 2010 when, according to Zuvers, she was “manipulated” by Skelton into letting the boys spend the night with him on assurances that he would bring them back to her the next morning.
But he wouldn’t bring them back.
Instead, detectives said they later uncovered that his cellphone was tracked approximately 30 miles into Ohio around 4:30 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving, only to be turned off and then switched back on around 2 hours later in Morenci.
Police and Zuvers say that just a few hours after his phone was back on, Skelton drove to a family member’s home in the area and said he needed a ride to the hospital, claiming he had broken his ankle. The boys weren’t with him during that visit and Zuvers said she later learned this “broken ankle” was actually an injury he sustained because he had tried to hang himself in his house.
Zuvers said that once she learned Skelton was at the hospital, she had called him and that’s when the lies started flowing. First, she said, he claimed the children were with a friend who would bring them back later. Then he said he did not know where the boys were, nor who had them.
That “bizarre” exchange prompted Zuvers to contact police and report the children missing. Skelton was detained as police searched. A warrant to search Skelton’s home turned up a disturbing scene: Everything in the house had been destroyed and a rope from Skelton’s suicide attempt was found hanging from a stairwell banister. Police also located “multiple tow straps,” the petition states.
It was after this search that Skelton told police the boys were at the “underground sanctuary” because he felt his ex-wife was a “danger to the boys.”
“This begs the question that if John felt his boys were unsafe with Tanya and he was able to truly hide the boys with an underground group for their safety, why would he attempt suicide? Why would he tell multiple lies and provide misdirection for the police? If his story were true, one would be led to believe that he should be happy in his endeavor to hide his boys, not suicidal. Why lie, deceive, misdirect and withhold information? His actions do not match up with the multiple lies he has told,” an attorney for Zuver wrote in the December petition.
Zuver alleges Skelton’s lies never stopped: He told police early on that the boys were with a woman named “Joanne Taylor” but an exhaustive search produced nothing and police believed the woman was likely made up.
“John also indicated to authorities that he had a vision of the boys being put in a dumpster in an area in Ohio,” Zuvers’ attorney wrote to the court.
Police searched dumpsters high and low and found nothing. Hundreds more tips flowed in from all over the country and “one by one” they were investigated with “nil results,” the petition states.
Any time police tried to talk to Skelton in prison, he allegedly would not discuss anything about the case. The boys’ mother claims that not in all this time, even on his prison phone calls or in written letters closely monitored by his jailers, has Skelton ever mentioned anyone or anything connected to the whereabouts of their missing sons.
“John has never shown any emotion if his missing boys are mentioned in conversation,” the petition notes.
But Zuvers has now claimed for the first time publicly that during Skelton’s last prison interview, Skelton “initiated a conversation with the police” where he said that detectives just needed to track down a man named Mose Gingerich in order to find the boys.
“When asked why, John stated that the ‘people’ who have the boys told him that Mose could help bring the boys back. John did not provide any further information regarding this, just that he believes Mr. Gingerich could help find his boys,” the petition states.
Tracking his tip, Zuvers says police did find Mose Gingerich, a former TV personality who appeared on a series on cable television about the Amish community following his own excommunication from the Amish in 2002. The show was called “Amish in the City.” Gingerich also produced documentaries about the Amish that were aired by the National Geographic Channel called “Amish at the Altar” and “Amish Out of Order” in 2009 and 2010. He also went on to write Amish-themed mysteries.
Skelton allegedly wouldn’t say anything more about Gingerich after this exchange, prompting police to track the man down for an interview.
The petition states that when he was reached for an interview, Gingerich and his wife told police that while they did have a boardinghouse for people wanting to leave the Amish community to enter the “real world,” he had never heard of Skelton or his missing sons or the investigation.
“He indicated that the Amish community would not engage in hiding three boys for safekeeping for a number of years. He also indicted that it would be next to impossible for the Amish community to keep something of this nature quiet for so many years,” the petition states.
Zuvers claims police even brought Gingerich back to the prison where Skelton is detained for an interview.
But “when John saw Gingerich’s face, he immediately became visibly disturbed and acted as if he would become ill,” the petition states.
Skelton allegedly told police only that he knew Gingerich by his name but he would not say anything more.
So, why did Skelton choose Gingerich?
According to Zuvers, it was likely because Skelton saw Gingerich on television while in prison.
“It should be noted that at the time John first brought up Gingerich’s name in the interview with police was around the same time he was taken out of segregation and placed in protective custody. John now had access to television and at the time, Mr. Gingerich’s television series was being aired and available for John to view,” the petition states. “Later John would indicate that the entire story about Mose Gingerich was yet another lie.”
After so many years and with so many tips investigated, Zuvers wrote in her petition that detectives have been led to believe that Skelton killed his sons.
“If the boys were still alive, they could be of age where they would now be adults. If John Skelton’s lies were true, the boys should now be able to be brought back into society, however, this has not happened and the authorities have not received any type of cooperation from John Skelton,” Zuvers and her attorney wrote.
If alive today, Andrew Skelton would be 23 years old, Alexander Skelton would be 20, and Tanner Skeleton would be 18.
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