Hutchinson ? When Randy Schmidt walked away from his prison work detail on July 18, 1980, he seemed to vanish into thin air.

But his family, and a state prison investigator, have not forgotten him.

Schmidt has called his family twice since he escaped while working at the Kansas State Fair, but family members say they have no idea where he is, or if he is even still alive.

Schmidt is the only escaped convict from the Hutchinson Correctional Facility who has not been recaptured, a state prison official said.

A woman who escaped from Lansing in 1974 and a man who escaped from Norton Correctional Facility in 2003 are the only other state prisoners still at large, said Darrin Perrin, special agent with the Kansas Department of Corrections, the lead investigator on the Schmidt case.

Schmidt’s older brother, Ken, said Randy called him shortly after he escaped from the work detail with another inmate, Stanley Pendergrass. Randy said he was fine and Ken told his brother he didn’t want to know where he was.

That was the last time they talked.

“My suspicion is, he must be living a straight and narrow life or he is dead, one of the two,” Ken Schmidt said.

Randy Schmidt, then a 28-year-old convicted rapist, and Pendergrass, 29, escaped in a dump truck being used by the work detail. Pendergrass was captured nearly two weeks later in Hennessey, Okla., at a motel with his wife. The dump truck was recovered near Cherokee, in far eastern Oklahoma.

Ken Schmidt, who now lives in North Carolina, admits he wasn’t too surprised when his brother was arrested on two counts of aggravated sodomy and two counts of rape from crimes in September 1974 in Sedgwick County. He said his brother was on drugs and running with the wrong crowd.

Schmidt was sentenced April 8, 1975, to a cumulative 40 years to life in prison. At the time, inmates were eligible for parole after serving about a third of their sentence.

Ken Schmidt said that while they were growing up in the central Kansas town of Marion, no one would have guessed that Randy would get in trouble.

“We were a pretty close family,” he said. “If we were dysfunctional, maybe it would be easier, but we were all very tight and close to one another.”

Schmidt’s trail has been cold for some time, but state officials still are looking for him, Perrin said. The investigator said he keeps the file in his car and follows whatever leads come in.

“I’m surprised it has been 25 years,” Perrin said. “One of these days, we’ll get him.”

Randy Schmidt called his father, Kenneth Schmidt Sr., about 10 years ago.

“He just wanted to know how we were doing,” the elder Schmidt said. “Naturally, we miss him.”

But if his son is leading a good, clean life, he doesn’t want him to come home, he said.

“He’d just go back to jail,” Kenneth Schmidt said.

Still, the family wonders, said his sister, Yvonne Hill.

“We don’t know if he is married, has kids, if he is OK,” she said. “I wonder where he is at all the time.”