SOMERVILLE, MA — A town known for its vibrant young community and bustling squares was thrown into uncertainty and sorrow when one of its most endearing figures, the cyclist affectionately known as Bike Boy, went missing last week. His disappearance has left not only an empty spot on the streets he once graced but also a pressing question: where had Bike Boy gone?
As if by fate, King Hunk Hub had already been working on a years-long investigation into Bike Boy’s origins when he mysteriously vanished. Based on the circumstances surrounding his disappearance and what we now know about Bike Boy’s past, our team believes it may know what—or who—may be behind it.
Our Missing Person: Somerville’s Beloved Cyclist
On any given evening in Union Square, you’d be forgiven for mistaking Bike Boy for a film star on location or a model between castings. Strong and beefy, with coal-black hair usually tousled from the wind, golden-brown eyes, and an ass that doesn’t quit, he wasn’t just another hunky cyclist—he was a phenomenon.
To the residents of Somerville, Bike Boy was a living symbol of freedom and unbridled energy. Known for his tireless rides through the Boston metro’s bike lanes and busy streets, he always donned his signature black sunglasses and a confident grin. Children waved at him as he sped by, and adults marveled at his endurance and good looks. The thought that this inspiring man, always a constant in the lives of his fans and neighbors, could one day disappear, was an unbelievable one. At least it was–until last week.
The 28-year-old vanished without warning sometime between Wednesday night and Thursday morning. He was last seen locking his beloved bike—a 2019 Specialized® Diverge gravel bike—to a pole outside a friend’s apartment in Union Square around 8:45pm that Wednesday, June 4th. According to Jayson Tatum, Bike Boy’s best friend and roommate, he was supposed to meet someone later that night. “He was vague,” Tatum says. “He said something about settling something, like tying up a loose end.” Since then, no one has seen or heard from Bike Boy.
Police launched a missing person’s investigation and revealed the following information at a press conference held on June 8th: First, at 11:47 PM, security footage shows Bike Boy unlocking his bike and heading east toward the Mystic River. Second, at 12:12 AM, his phone pinged a tower near the Mystic Valley Parkway. Then, nothing.
His bike has not been recovered. His belongings are untouched. His Snapchat—usually flooded with bike videos, flirty selfies, and the occasional blurry sunset—has gone dark.
While Bike Boy was undoubtedly a man who knew how to disappear, friends have stated that this time feels different. “He didn’t tell anyone. He didn’t take anything,” says Brad Leone, another close friend of Bike Boy’s. “He even told me last week he’d ordered a new Diverge bike that was supposed to be delivered this past weekend. There’s no way he would’ve split town without at least giving that baby a test drive. I don’t know, this just really doesn’t feel like him.”
The KHH team also found that Bike Boy had RSVP’d to over 20 parties around Boston the weekend of June 6th. And as countless in town have attested, Bike Boy was never one to miss a party. Even King Hunk, Bike Boy’s personal representative, expressed suspicion:
Given a complete lack of evidence indicating Bike Boy intended to leave Somerville of his own accord, together with Tatum’s comments about his plans to “tie up loose ends” with some yet-unknown figure, our editorial team believes Bike Boy’s disappearance may well have been planned—just not by him.
For this reason, we at KHH started to believe that the right question to ask isn’t, “Why would Bike Boy leave?” but instead, “Who would want to see Bike Boy gone?”
***
As far as we have found, there is not a soul in Somerville who has—or has ever had—an issue with Bike Boy. His next door neighbor Joyce Weekday told us, “Everyone loves Bike Boy. How could you not? He is just so pleasant. And handy! Whenever there’s something that needs fixing around Union Square, Bike Boy’s is the first number people call.”
Even his past lovers had nothing but kind words for their winsome ex. Though he had certainly left a trail of broken hearts along the way, all the women we spoke to said Bike Boy was very upfront about who he was and what he was looking for, so none of them held a grudge when Bike Boy inevitably put the brakes on their respective flings.
A Needed Break in the Case Comes Just in Time
So, with no leads in any direction, KHH decided to return to the evidence it did have. Law enforcement provided our team with a copy of the security tape. Although Bike Boy is only on screen for approximately 40 seconds, a playback of the full recording revealed Bike Boy’s silhouette cast a long shadow on a far wall before he walked into the camera’s view. After zooming in on this three-second clip, it appears Bike Boy crumpled up a piece of paper and shot it into a nearby dumpster before unlocking his bike and riding away.
Although a long shot, our team needed to confirm whether something written on that piece of paper could give us any answers–or at least new questions.
In a rush to beat the trash removal services scheduled to clear out the dumpster the morning of June 9th, we sent two of our reporters late the night before to collect and sort through every tossed-away item. After hours of sifting, we found the piece of paper in question:
Who is T.M. and why would they write this? Who would ever threaten Bike Boy?
After poring over the note for hours, a member of the KHH team returned to our Origin Files on Bike Boy and noticed a detail–really, a clue–that we had all missed. In order to explain its significance, we have to take you back. Back to Bike Boy’s adolescence. Back to where Bike Boy became Bike Boy.
From the Bike Boy Origin Files: A Childhood in Motion
As we have come to learn, Bike Boy grew up the youngest of two siblings in a fast-paced but loving household. His mother, from Long Island, and his father, from Boston, raised Bike Boy on Philip Marlowe novels and noir flicks on TCM. As a result, he developed a thick, questionably Brooklyn accent alongside a 1930s vocabulary and sense of style that he never outgrew.
His fascination with bicycles also began at an early age. Family photos obtained by KHH show Bike Boy as a toddler with a wide, gap-toothed grin standing next to a bright red tricycle in the family driveway. By the age of three, he had already graduated to his first two-wheeler, a hand-me-down bike from his older brother.
Childhood friends remember him as the boy who was never without his bike. Rain or shine, Bike Boy could be found pedaling along neighborhood sidewalks, his laughter echoing through the streets. A former babysitter, Emily Gulp, recalls watching a young Bike Boy riding around for hours on days she looked after the kids. “He wasn’t the type to sit in front of a TV or play video games,” she said. “The bike was his world.” Based on countless interviews with friends and family, it seems Bike Boy spent most of his childhood outside: riding bikes, dodging trouble, and learning how to live without asking permission.
Bike Boy’s parents moved the family around a lot for much of his youth, but they eventually put down roots in Boxford, Massachusetts, a town 25 miles north of Boston, when Bike Boy turned 11 years old.
It was around that same age that Bike Boy’s aptitude for building and fixing things began making itself known. “His skills were wild from the jump,” says Nate Conversation, one of Bike Boy’s childhood friends from Boxford. “One time in seventh grade, he took apart a rusted Schwinn he found in a junk pile and rebuilt it into a BMX hybrid. No manual, just instinct.” Nate describes the Bike Boy he grew up with as “restless but the coolest of cool.” He remembers how Bike Boy would disappear into the woods behind his house for hours with only a backpack, a notebook, and a crescent wrench. “He was always moving,” he says. “The only time he stood still was when he was sketching bikes.”
Because of this, kids at his middle school started calling him Bike Boy, and the name stuck.
In school, teachers were split on Bike Boy. Some saw promise, others saw disruption. He was smart, but allergic to structure. By high school, he was skipping classes but building homemade bike frames out of salvaged tubing. He had an eye for balance, geometry, and motion: a self-taught engineer in the body of a young beef cake.
Despite his spotty attendance record, Bike Boy was incredibly popular among his classmates, especially the ladies. While Bike Boy was too on-the-go to commit to a girlfriend, every female classmate we interviewed claimed to have had a crush on him at some point during high school. Kelsey Cabinet, a former classmate, told us last fall: “Bike Boy had a confidence and swagger none of the other boys in school had. He wasn’t afraid of rejection so he never stifled who he was. All the boys in our class looked up to him for this. Well, except maybe one.”
While our KHH Team was only profiling Bike Boy when we interviewed Kelsey, our reporter was still struck by the fact that there was finally someone who didn’t adore Bike Boy in the world, so he asked for his name:
The Entrance of Kurt Cam
High School is often a time of discovery, growth, and, for some, insecurity and rage. For Kurt Cam, as we would discover, those four years were marked by a unique and corrupting envy that developed into a seething hatred for the boy who seemed to effortlessly captivate everyone around him.
Where Bike Boy was warm, magnanimous, and silly, Kurt was cold, resentful, and standoffish. “Kurt was…different,” Kelsey continued. “Very different than Bike Boy for sure. He was deadly serious and hated noise. He thought all animals were gross and disliked any music that wasn’t pop punk or arena country. I honestly don’t know if he had any friends.”
The one thing Kurt had going for him was that he was bright and excelled in academics. Due to this and all their other differences, Bike Boy was anathema to Kurt: he simply couldn’t understand why anyone would find a class clown like Bike Boy interesting, let alone swoon-worthy. Where everyone else saw a dreamboat, Kurt saw an annoying rule-breaker.
Most maddening of all, Kurt simply could not understand why people were impressed by Bike Boy’s cycling or his Frankenstein bike builds. “Kurt was a gearhead through and through,” his old locker-mate Doug Placement told us. “That anyone would care about a means of transportation that didn’t include an engine was confusing and borderline offensive to Kurt. He liked big cars and thinking up ways of making them bigger. He couldn’t have been more different than Bike Boy.”
Kurt’s mother (we have been unable to locate or get in contact with Kurt directly) provided us with a box of his old diaries this winter, which confirmed Kurt’s bitter state of mind during those years: Kurt penned numerous entries about his feelings for Bike Boy. It seemed watching his total opposite get praise and attention heaped on him day after day quietly ate away at Kurt. It wasn’t until the spring of senior year, however, that Kurt’s entries about Bike Boy turned malignantly violent.
The Birth of a Vendetta
Kurt actually had two loves as a teenager,” Kurt’s sister Casey told us. “Suped-up cars, particularly trucks, and Alice Helmet.” Alice was a classmate of both Kurt and Bike Boy’s who was known for being nice to everyone. For senior prom, Kurt decided to spend his entire savings and inheritance on a new Ford truck that he had chromed-out and custom lifted, thinking this would impress Alice as much it did him.
What Kurt didn’t know was that Alice didn’t much care for cars or trucks despite the fact that she always politely listened whenever Kurt brought them up. And perhaps more devastating still, she had herself been madly in love with Bike Boy since middle school. Kurt would come to learn this in an incredibly painful way.
One early Friday morning before school, Kurt drove his new lifted Ford truck to the senior parking lot for the very first time. On each side of the truck’s bed he had affixed matching signs that read, “Will you go to prom with me Alice?” As detailed in his diary entry from the night before, his plan was to wait for Alice to arrive at school, honk his horn to get her attention, and then get out of the car and hand her a bouquet. In Kurt’s mind, this would be the beginning of the rest of his life, which would finally be a happy one, with Alice by his side.
Kurt sat and waited for over an hour in his front seat, steeling himself for the upcoming proposal, waiting for the sight of Alice’s car. What Kurt hadn’t noticed was that Bike Boy had set up two large ramps on each side of the truck, and had drawn an audience.
Danny Bottle, another classmate who was at the parking lot that morning, told us: “Bike Boy had been jumping cars and trucks for years. But he hadn’t come across a truck as tall as Kurt’s. He viewed its height as a sort of dare I think.”
By pure coincidence, Alice pulled into the parking lot just as Bike Boy was about to take off for his jump. Kurt, as planned, honked his horn and caught Alice’s attention as soon as she stepped out of her car. But the first thing she noticed wasn’t the truck, but Bike Boy–soaring high t above it, hitting the down-slope ramp perfectly, and headed straight to her on his bike. Then, she noticed the sign on the truck.
“I couldn’t believe Bike Boy had done all that for me,” Alice gushed in an interview last July. “He always tore up the floor at dances but he never brought a date. The second he skidded to a stop in front of me I remember shouting, ‘Of course I’ll go to the prom with you!!’ and giving him a big kiss.”
“The truth was, Bike Boy had never intended to ask Alice or any girl to the prom. I don’t think he even saw the signs on Kurt’s truck,” Nate Conversation said. “He didn’t understand why Alice thought he was asking her to prom, but he just rolled with it like he always did.”
To Kurt, this was all intentionally and carefully orchestrated by his nemesis. In his diary entry written that night, Kurt swore a blood oath to kill Bike Boy, or at least make it so Bike Boy could never ride a bike again:
“I will never forgive Bike Boy for what he did to me. Using my own effort and the truck I spent everything on to ask the girl I’ve been in love with since preschool to prom right in front of me??? Bike Boy is pure evil. I don’t care if it takes me my whole life, I will find a way to end him and wipe that self-satisfying smirk off his face just before I do.”
The night before the prom, we learned Kurt drove to Bike Boy’s house and yelled at him to come outside. “Kurt absolutely unloaded on him,” Bike Boy’s brother told us. “He told him about his decade-long crush on Alice, how Bike Boy basically stole his prom proposal, and how he felt Bike Boy basically ruined his life. I could tell Bike Boy felt completely awful about it, and tried to apologize. But Kurt wasn’t having any of it.”
“He pulled a knife out of his jeans and started running and swinging it at my brother. Kurt tackled him and was about to cut his left Achilles tendon when I caught his arm and stopped the attack. I pushed Kurt off Bike Boy but Kurt wouldn’t stop screaming that he’d kill Bike Boy one day. Our mom called the cops and Kurt drove away. It was really nuts; it was the only time I’ve ever seen my brother scared.”
***
The school found out about the attack and Kurt was promptly expelled and not allowed to graduate. Extra security was hired for the prom in case Kurt decided to try again.
The following month, the Cam family moved away and as far as we know, no one in Boxford has seen or heard from Kurt Cam since.
Between Then and Now
From one of his later diaries we learned Kurt had in fact tried doing Bike Boy in at least one other time. In 2016, while Bike Boy was out partying with college friends at a local bar, Kurt snuck up behind Bike Boy’s group and “accidentally” bumped a 40-pound rock salt lamp off its post. It fell several feet before hitting Bike Boy squarely on the top of his head.
Kurt’s diary entry after the attack shows he believed he had successfully maimed or even paralyzed Bike Boy that weekend. However, Bike Boy’s medical records show that while the injury required several stitches, Bike Boy did not suffer any serious physical damage.
As Kurt’s mother only had possession of his personal diaries through 2017, it is possible he has tried again in the intervening years to hurt Bike Boy. But the truth is, there is no proof of Kurt attempting any other attacks, so this is only conjecture. And besides, most teenagers who feel a passionate rage about someone or something typically grow out of it.
So, why has our team urged the Somerville Police to consider Kurt Cam as a primary suspect in Bike Boy’s recent disappearance? The answer is simple:
What’s in a Name
Looking back at the note recovered from the dumpster, it was clearly signed “T.M.” by whoever wrote it. Obviously, those are not Kurt Cam’s initials. But the signature shouldn’t be viewed in isolation–it needs to be considered in the context of the entire note.
The worst thing you can do in an investigation is make assumptions, but that’s exactly what the KHH team did; we assumed the drawing was a reference to the truck yards off Mystic where he wanted Bike Boy to go. We hadn’t considered that it might be part of the signature.
“T.M.” written just above a truck and a stick figure may have been telling us exactlywhat T.M. stands for: TRUCK MAN.
Obviously, we know Kurt loved trucks and cars, but that still felt too tenuousness a connection. Still, it was a lead, and it brought the right questions to the forefront:
Why would the person threatening Bike Boy use TRUCK MAN as a pseudonym instead of something else? KHH hadn’t learned of anyone in Bike Boy’s life who went or goes by “Truck Man” in all the years we’ve been profiling him. For Bike Boy to understand the stakes, wouldn’t T.M./”Truck Man” have to mean something to Bike Boy? Wouldn’t he have to know who he was meeting?
That’s when one of our reporters saw it: Kurt’s name, written below the only photograph we have of him. KURT NATHANIEL CAM.
KURT N. CAM.
Rearranging the letters, his name spelled:
T R U C K M A N.
***
This is why we believe Bike Boy knew who left him that note. Why he decided to take it seriously. Why he rode off that fateful night to tie up loose ends. Why he’s now missing.
What Now?
This is an ongoing story; the search for Bike Boy continues. Police are now asking for any tips regarding the whereabouts of Kurt Cam, while friends and fans have offered a reward for information on either Bike Boy or Kurt Cam. But for now, Somerville waits.
If you have any information about the whereabouts of Bike Boy or Kurt Cam, contact the Somerville Police Department at (617) 625-1600.