Terry's stepfather dropped him and his younger brother, Alan Westerfield, off at the Broadway Theater on Hay Street in Fayetteville, North Carolina on September 12, 1964. The two brothers were never seen again and it is unclear if they actually walked into the theater.

Police questioned the boys' stepfather, Carl Bock, who said he dropped Terry and Alan off at the theater at 5:30 p.m. When he went to pick them up at 8:00 p.m., he said, they had disappeared. Some employees at the theater remember seeing the Westerfield children that evening, but other theater workers do not. They were regular customers and could be easily recognized. Bock was separated from the children's mother at the time Terry and Alan vanished. He was an Army sergeant who worked in the Criminal Investigations Division at Fort Bragg in 1964, and was shipped overseas a year after his stepsons disappeared.

Investigators believe Bock was in some way involved in the Westerfield children's disappearances. They think the boys were both killed a short time after being abducted. No one has ever been charged in the cases, however. It was raining on the night they disappeared. Terry and Alan's biological father was interviewed and ruled out as a suspect. Bock has since divorced from Alan and Terry's mother and now lives in Wisconsin; he was last interviewed by police in Virginia in 2000. The Westerfields' cases remain unsolved.