Dontray Hunter Missing: Playing Child Vanishes

The sun blazed down on a hot August morning in Milwaukee. Temperatures reached their highest of 1975 just the day after, made to feel even hotter just miles away from Milwaukee’s industrial corridor on the city’s west side.

Under the covered porch of a white two-story duplex, sat Dontray Hunter, just 23 days from his second birthday. He wore a white Gerber shirt, olive green pants, and white tennis shoes. On the raised porch above a small green lawn, he played, watched by his sister as the sun beat down overhead.

The toddler was bow-legged and mentally and physically slow and could not walk on his own, police reports say.

Yet as his sister stepped away for only a moment, Dontray disappeared.

At least that is the story the child’s mother has told police repeatedly over the years.

Dontray Miquel Hunter went missing on Milwaukee’s west side on August 20, 1975. Police heavily investigated the case, but almost 50 years later, the case remains cold.

The investigative trail is littered with deaths.

The boy’s father, a former P-Stone ranger gangster who was one of many people questioned, later died of cancer. A relative who was accused by an acquaintance of an unverified scheme to sell the child was shot and killed in 1996. Dontray’s disappearance led police to reinvestigate the death of another child in a traffic crash. Other people tied to the case have ended up in prison, drug-addicted and homeless, or moved out of state, police reports show. Those are the challenges a missing person case faces when it has been cold for this long.

The police investigation touched on the city’s drug wars, a possible alleged P-Stone rangers gang party, and even unproven accusations that the boy was buried in a kitchen wall behind a stove and that a local tavern’s owners were selling Black children.

Milwaukee police dusted off the case several times over the years, although the police investigation appears to have ground to a halt in 2012. The mother’s boyfriend and the mother herself were asked to take polygraphs. On numerous occasions, the police investigation was stymied when people tied to the boy refused to cooperate or when stories began to contradict.

Dontray is one of 570 open missing persons cases in Milwaukee right now. Many of these cases have gone almost unnoticed by news media which academic research shows are more inclined to cover cases of missing white blonde women. The Milwaukee Police Department investigated the case but gets thousands of missing people reports each year.

 A team of 12 student journalists spent three months investigating 18 open missing people cases, most of them people of color in Milwaukee. The students spoke with family members and detectives and filed open records requests.

Police have granted Media Milwaukee access to the complete police files through an open records request; the following account is the story of the investigation.

Police Investigation

The boy was first reported missing by his mother, Diane Hunter. She and Dontray lived with Diane’s parents, Polly and Cloyce Davis, along with three other children, aged 16, 12, and 6.  

While police searched neighborhoods, alleyways, trash cans, and garages for Dontray, Diane Hunter would claim she felt the hurt of a mother losing her child. Her own mother opened up to police about her daughter’s parenting.

“Mrs. Davis describes Diane Hunter as a good mother, in where she took care of her children and very much loved her children,” the police file said. Other accounts were more critical of the mother.

Medical records showed the child had bruises and abrasions before he vanished that the mother claimed “were the results of a beating by her relatives,” police reports allege. Police reports also say the mother was later accused in an unrelated fraud case.

Another report, though, says police found the mother still in bed in the afternoon on multiple checks with her. She opened up to police officers about these struggles and her hopes to find Dontray.

“She then asked us if we believed in premonitions. She states that she has been having trouble sleeping and she feels she is going to have a premonition as to the whereabouts of her son,” police reported. “We told her that this was very possible. The mother was very inquisitive as to our continuing the investigation into the whereabouts of her son and asked numerous questions regarding the polygraph and premonitions.”

Diane later took said polygraph, which came back inconclusive, police reports allege. When asked to take another, she refused, becoming what police called “somewhat hostile.”

The mom later told police that the lie detector test was inconclusive because “she was extremely excited about the whole situation.”

Dontray’s Father

While officers searched surrounding areas for the child, early lead detectives focused on one person, Dontray’s father.

George Lee Washington, at the time aged 22 years old, was taking classes at UW-Milwaukee in community education and video. The college student was already a father to four children, who lived at the same house as he did. Outside of college, he was unemployed.

Throughout the investigation, police struggled to locate him on multiple occasions because he was a “transient,” having multiple places he would spend the night.

Outside of his life as a college student, he had previously been a member of a gang.

“Information has been brought out that George Lee Washington is a member of the ‘Black P-Stone Nation’ gang,” the police report alleged. “According to his wife, he and his comrades have automatic weapons and hand grenades in addition to other deadly weapons.”

He told police in an interview that he had been a part of the gang for seven years, but had left roughly one year prior to the disappearance. He agreed to a polygraph.

On one date, Milwaukee police checked 23 houses of alleged known P-Stone Nation members, to no avail.

But it was not his alleged gang affiliation that made him a main suspect of the case. Diane Hunter’s family felt he was the one who took Dontray. Jessie Hunter, Dontray’s uncle, was one of these people.

“George neither supported the child or has any claims on the child,” he told police. “Jessie Hunter stated that George always wanted him (Jessie) to bring the child over to his home so he could see him.”

He even added that he felt this was Washington’s way of getting even with Diane Hunter.

Police followed the lead, interviewing him twice the day Dontray went missing and even searching his house. But it was Washington’s relatives that concerned Diane more.

“Diane Hunter disclosed that she did not know any of George’s relatives and that this was the trouble because of the fact that his relatives have never seen the child,” Hunter told police. “This is why she also feels that George took the child.”

Police continued their in-depth search of the surrounding streets, even searching abandoned houses. But it was detectives John Schroder and Robert Dahl who ran into issues in the community.

While locating Washington just one day after Dontray’s disappearance, they ran into Washington’s friends at the West Lawn Housing Project. His friend’s words were of little help to police, but what they didn’t say seemed to speak much louder.

“Brown was rather reluctant to speak to us regarding any knowledge of Washington and denied knowing anything about the missing boy. He stated that Washington does not have him,” police said about their interview with Julious Brown.

They ran into similar issues as they interviewed another one of Washington’s friends.

“As we interviewed this subject, he seemed to be trying to cover up for Washington and lying to us,” the police files say.

In a later interview, the mom, now Diane Rittmeyer, said that Washington was “heavily into trafficking guns and drugs.”

George Lee Washington, passed away in 2008 at the age of 55 of cancer.

An Alleged Fight & Pistol-Whipping

The case continued to develop, littered with many who didn’t think Washington did it or who suspect others.

The mother told police she confronted George in 1990 while shopping at Warehouse Shoes where he worked, and he “knelt on his knees and had sworn to her that he had nothing to do with Dontray’s disappearance.”

Washington’s brother told police George “just about drove himself crazy attempting to locate his one and only son.”

And it’s clear that the police also looked hard at other people over the years.

Although he was never formally named as a suspect and denied having anything to do with the child’s disappearance, Diana’s boyfriend at the time, who worked at a local liquor store, was questioned numerous times.

This boyfriend, who Media Milwaukee is not naming because he has never been arrested nor charged in the case, is accused in the police reports of having gotten into a fight with Washington before Dontray disappeared. Some people alleged to police that he was upset that Washington was Dontray’s father. The fight was said to involve a pistol-whipping although its proximity to the boy disappearing is conflicting in the reports.

The mother confronted her former boyfriend when she spotted him walking on the streets in 2009, and he denied any involvement, the police reports say.

But the reports say Diane alleged that Washington and her boyfriend were involved in the fight on the front porch of the home.

One night prior to the boy going missing, she alleged that the boyfriend “pistol whipped George.” Police said she did not know the reason for the fight but she suspected that it was because the boyfriend found out Washington was the father. In another place in the reports, though, it’s alleged this fight occurred a couple weeks before the child vanished.

In 2019, the boyfriend was interviewed again. He claimed he was in Texas when the child went missing. His brother had died in Arkansas, which police proved did happen.

The former boyfriend, now living down South, later refused to take a polygraph saying that he “cannot understand his continued involvement in this investigation” and said he wasn’t even in Milwaukee when Dontray disappeared, police reports say.

However, there was a party at the house the night before the disappearance that included P-Stone Gang members, some people also told MPD.

Police were told that the boyfriend was not out of town like he claims, but he denied there was a gang party. They were told this by a relative in jail on violent charges, though this was in-exchange for parole consideration.

Other Relatives

Some people also pointed to a family member who was murdered in 1996 as possibly harboring more information on the child. A woman with a history of arrests even told police that the murdered man was involved in a scheme to steal the child and “that his share of the money had been $3,000 and that they had sold it to a woman.”

She also alleged that a different child had been struck by a car and killed, purposely, a few years before to get the insurance money. Police re-investigated the fatal crash and determined the boy was the passenger in a car hit by someone else. They did check whether that child had actually existed by getting his birth certificate – determining that he wasn’t Dontray.

Diane told police that she did not believe this story because her boyfriend was out of town in Texas and the other man was in prison in Michigan when her son was reported missing. Police checked into this and discovered that the man was not sentenced to prison until after Dontray disappeared and he was incarcerated in Green Bay, not Michigan, however.

The mother accused her former boyfriend of packing a suitcase and saying he had to catch a plane on the day Dontray disappeared. A later police report lays out some contradictions, though, saying that the mother said the boyfriend “was already in Texas when her son disappeared but a statement by his brother. . . stated he didn’t leave until that evening.”

Many Overlapping Leads

Over the years, stories have slightly changed in the other direction too. In 2012, the boyfriend told police the mother was “unemotional” over Dontray’s disappearance. Another relative in 2010 told police that while at the house the mom was “calm for the longest time and it seemed to her there was something wrong with this scenario.” She would become upset for short periods of time.

The police investigation was still active in 2012 when a relative told MPD that “she has heard from other family members different stories as to how Dontray had disappeared.” One was that he was left alone on the front porch “and a stranger had snatched him.” A second story was that the child was sold to an unknown person. The third theory involved accusations, unproven, against the mother.

There were also other bizarre twists. At one point, a man told the child’s aunt, “They have the baby and that they are getting guns,” police reports say, although who “they” was is not clear. At another point, Diane’s ex-boyfriend told police that someone called the liquor store where he worked and said, “the little boy is on n 27^th St. and W. Hadley St.,” but none of these things panned out.

An inmate claimed the child was buried behind a kitchen wall and located behind a stove. But this may be an urban legend, as police heard it from others.

Cooperation with Police

Milwaukee police say cooperation is one of the biggest issues they face when investigating missing persons cases. Milwaukee Police Missing Persons Detective Jamie Sromalla said that families are often skeptical of the police and the questions they ask.

Even though police worked diligently in this case, having over 300 pages of documentation for their search into Dontray, the media did little to print the case. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s archives and newspapers.com, Dontray was only mentioned one time, in The Milwaukee Journal. He didn’t show up in the pages until over two years after his disappearance. Early police reports do say that local television stations ran the missing child’s picture in the 1970s.

Many news organizations backtracked later on, covering it when the case was cold, publishing short updates prompted by police alerts. Diane, who now goes by Diana Rittmeyer, spoke to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 40 years after the case. She said she still believes he is alive and holds out hope. Media Milwaukee was unable to reach Diane.

That Journal Sentinel story, though, which didn’t include access to the police reports, barely scrapes the surface of the family dynamic.

And still today, the case remains cold.

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This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into missing people’s cases in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available here.