At the end of October 2002, 46-year-old Thomas Reed took his old Ford pickup truck and headed for the Appalachian Mountains. Deer hunting season had begun. And Thomas, as he had done every fall for the past 15 years, planned to spend several days in the woods. His wife Susan knew the route, the northern part of the Nantala National Forest in North Carolina, where Thomas usually set up camp near an old forest road.
Thomas worked as a mechanic at a local gas station and lived in the small town of Franklin. He had two adult children who had already moved to other states. Susan later told investigators that her husband was planning to return on Sunday, October 27th. He took his hunting rifle, a sleeping bag, canned food for 3 days, and a thermos of coffee with him.
Susan helped him load his things into the back of his pickup truck and noticed that Thomas was in a good mood, looking forward to the upcoming hunt. On October 24th, Thomas stopped by the gas station to see his boss, James Parker, and told him he was taking time off until Monday. Parker knew about Thomas’s hunting trips and didn’t object.

Thomas bought ammunition at a local sporting goods store around noon and salesman Michael Green later recalled that the customer seemed calm and even joked that he would finally be able to get away from the noise of the city. After lunch, Thomas drove to the mountains. His route took him along Highway 28, then along winding mountain roads to the Forest Ranger Station.
Susan knew that her husband usually stopped at the same place near a small clearing where the forest road ended in thicket. There he could leave his car and walk to his favorite hunting spots. On Friday evening, Susan wasn’t worried. Thomas often stayed in the woods overnight, especially when the weather was good.
On Saturday, she wasn’t worried either. Her husband could get carried away with hunting and stay out for another day. But by Sunday, when Thomas hadn’t come home or called, Susan began to get nervous. Thomas didn’t have a cell phone, he considered them useless in the mountains, where there was no reception anyway.
On Monday morning, October 28th, Susan called the Mon County Sheriff. The officer on duty took a missing person report and said a search party would go into the woods that afternoon. Susan gave a detailed description of her husband, 5′ 10 in tall, weighing about 170 lb with graying brown hair, and brown eyes. He was wearing an orange hunting jacket, jeans, and brown boots.
The first search party found’s pickup truck a few hours later. The blue 1987 Ford was exactly where they expected to find it, at the end of a forest road in a small clearing. The car was locked and the keys were on the driver’s seat. All of Thomas’s belongings were found in the back of the truck, a sleeping bag, a backpack with canned food, a thermos, and even a Remington hunting rifle with a full magazine of ammunition.
Deputy Sheriff Robert Clark, who was leading the search, immediately realized that something was wrong. An experienced hunter would never leave his rifle in the car when going into the woods. What’s more, the backpack with food and the sleeping bag were also untouched. It seemed as if Thomas had simply gotten out of the car and disappeared without taking anything he needed for hunting or spending the night in the woods.
The search party consisted of eight people, four deputies and four volunteers from the local search and rescue team. They began combing the forest within a mile of the car, moving in a spiral and checking every trail and ravine. The weather was sunny but cool with temperatures hovering around 50° F. The leaves on the trees had already turned yellow and fallen, making it easier to see in the woods.
By Monday evening, the search had yielded no results. The group returned to base with the intention of continuing the next day. On Tuesday, 12 more volunteers joined the search, including Thomas’s neighbors and colleagues from the gas station. The search radius was expanded to 2 mi. They checked all the streams, ravines, caves, and rock ledges in the area.

On the third day of the search, Wednesday, a dog team arrived from a neighboring county. Two specially trained German Shepherd dogs picked up the trail from Thomas’s car, but lost it after a few hundred yards. The trail simply disappeared as if Thomas had vanished into thin air. Dog handler David Miller explained that this could happen for a variety of reasons, from rainwashing away the scent to the man getting into another car.
By the end of the first week, more than 30 people were involved in the search. Local residents organized hot meals for the search parties, and posters with Thomas’s photo were put up around town. Susan came to the search site every day and waited for news. She told anyone who would listen that her husband would never get lost in this forest.
He knew these places like the back of his hand. The search parties checked all known trails within a 5mi radius of Thomas’s car. They searched abandoned cabins, old mines left over from the gold rush in these parts, and even several abandoned farms on the edge of the forest. They found nothing.
No signs of a struggle, no torn clothing, no personal belongings of Thomas. In the second week, a Coast Guard helicopter joined the search. The pilots flew over the entire area, paying particular attention to the hard-to-reach parts of the forest. The helicopter was equipped with a thermal imager that could detect a body, even if it was covered by a layer of leaves.
But the aerial search also proved fruitless. Sheriff Thomas Johnson personally took control of the case. He interviewed all the local residents who could have seen Thomas’s pickup truck that day. It turned out that several people had noticed a blue Ford driving along the mountain road at around 300 p.m. on October 24th, but no one saw the driver himself, and no one paid much attention to the car.
During hunting season, such vehicles were a common sight in the mountains. Investigators also checked for the possibility of an accident. There were deep gorges in the area where a person could have fallen and been killed. Rescue climbers descended into all accessible crevices and canyons, but no bodies were found.

They also checked the possibility of a bear attack. There were black bears in the Appalachians that were preparing for hibernation in the fall and could be aggressive, but no signs of a struggle with an animal were found. After 3 weeks of intensive searching in mid- November, the sheriff was forced to officially suspend the operation.
By this time, the first snow had already covered the ground, making further searches virtually pointless. The case of Thomas Reed’s disappearance was classified as unsolved. Although it was not formally closed, Susan Reed could not come to terms with her husband’s disappearance. After the search was officially called off, she continued to drive to the forest regularly, hoping to find at least some clue.
Every weekend, she parked her car near the spot where Thomas’s pickup truck had been found and walked the trails for hours, carefully examining every bush and every rock. Neighbors and friends tried to dissuade her from these trips, but Susan was adamant. The winter of 2002 to 2003 was harsh. Snow lay in the mountains until mid-March, completely ruling out any search.
But as soon as the spring thaw began, Susan got back to work. She drew up a detailed map of all the places that had already been searched and methodically examined areas that the search teams might have missed. Sheriff Johnson occasionally sent a patrol car into the forest to check for new leads. Deputy sheriffs questioned tourists and hunters who visited the area, but no one could provide any useful information.
The Thomas Reed case was gradually forgotten, although his photo still hung on the bulletin board in the sheriff’s office. In the summer of 2003, a small fire broke out in the forest. The fire destroyed about a 100 acres of forest, mostly dry underbrush and small trees. After the fire was extinguished, foresters surveyed the burned area and found several animal bones, but nothing that could have belonged to a human.
Susan personally came to look at the ashes, but she also found nothing. In the fall of 2003, exactly one year after Thomas’s disappearance, a local resident named Carl Wittman contacted the sheriff’s department. He said that while hunting, he had stumbled upon a strange place in the forest, an area of land where the grass was much greener and thicker than the surrounding area.
According to Wittmann, this usually happens where organic matter gets into the ground. Deputy Sheriff Clark went to the site and indeed found a suspicious area. They brought shovels and started digging. At a depth of 3 ft, they came across a large flat stone that had clearly been placed there artificially. There was a hole under the stone, but it was empty.

Only a few small animal bones and old tin cans. Apparently, someone had used this place as a dump many years ago. Susan, who rushed to the excavation site, was very disappointed. By 2004, interest in the Thomas Reed case had finally died down. The new sheriff, who replaced Johnson had more pressing crimes to deal with. Theft was on the rise in the county, and a veritable epidemic of drug trafficking had begun in neighboring areas.
The department’s resources were directed toward combating these problems. Susan, meanwhile, continued her search, although not as regularly as before. She hired a private investigator from Asheville, but after a month of work, he was unable to find any new leads. The detective suggested that Thomas might have decided to start a new life and deliberately disappeared.
But Susan categorically rejected this version. She knew her husband better than anyone and was sure that he would never leave her without an explanation. In 2005, Susan moved to Georgia to live with her daughter. She sold the house in Franklin and spent some of the money on private investigators and search operations.
Before leaving, she visited the place where her husband disappeared for the last time. Thomas’s old pickup truck had already been taken from the impound lot and sold at auction. The clearing where it had stood was overgrown with tall grass. In the spring of 2006, the case took an unexpected turn.
A human skull was found in the forest. Forestry workers who were clearing fallen trees from a stream bed stumbled upon the bone a few miles from the sight of Thomas’s disappearance. The skull was sent for examination, and the result showed that it belonged to a Caucasian male between the ages of 40 and 50. Susan immediately flew in from Georgia as soon as she heard about the discovery.
The examination showed that the skull had been in the ground for 3 to 5 years, which coincided with the time of Thomas’s disappearance. However, it was not possible to identify the remains with certainty. The skull was badly damaged and the teeth were partially destroyed. DNA analysis was expensive and not always accurate at the time, especially when dealing with badly decomposed remains.
The search resumed, but this time it focused on the area where the skull was found. The area within a half mile radius was combed with metal detectors in the hope of finding Thomas’s personal belongings, his wedding ring, watch, or at least metal clothing items. But the search was again unsuccessful. Two weeks later, the operation was called off.
Meanwhile, there was a change in leadership at the sheriff’s department. The new sheriff, David Harris, decided to review all unsolved cases from the past 10 years. The Thomas Reed case turned out to be one of the most mysterious. Harris personally studied all the materials and came to the conclusion that the search had been conducted correctly, but that some important details may have been overlooked.
Harris instructed Detective Mark Stevens to reinter all of Thomas’s witnesses and acquaintances. During these interviews, some interesting details came to light. Several neighbors said that Thomas had a conflict with another local resident, Christopher Doyle, who lived a few miles from Reed.

The conflict concerned property boundaries. Doyle claimed that Thomas had illegally erected a fence and enclosed part of his Doyle’s land. The dispute had been going on for several years and had even gone to court, but the case had not been finally resolved. Witnesses said that the men had argued loudly several times, and once it had almost come to blows.
Detective Stevens decided to talk to Christopher Doyle. He lived in an old farmhouse on the edge of the forest about 10 mi from where Thomas disappeared. Doyle was 52 years old, worked as a carpenter, and lived alone after divorcing his wife. Neighbors described him as a withdrawn and quick-tempered man who preferred to solve problems with force rather than conversation.
When Stevens arrived at Doyle’s house, Doyle was acting nervous. When asked where he was on the day Thomas disappeared, Doyle replied that he didn’t remember. Too much time had passed. He said he had heard about his neighbor’s disappearance, but had never participated in the search because he and Thomas didn’t get along.
Doyle also mentioned that he often hunted in the same forest where Thomas disappeared, but he had not been there that day. Stevens noted that Doyle corrected his testimony several times as if trying to remember a pre-planned version. It seemed particularly suspicious that Doyle first said he was working in his workshop on the day of Thomas’s disappearance and then claimed that he had visited relatives in a neighboring town.
The detective recorded all the contradictions, but at that point it was not enough for an official charge. Two years later, in the spring of 2007, an event occurred that completely changed the course of the investigation. A group of teenagers from a local school decided to explore abandoned buildings in the forest for a school project on the history of the region.
Among them were 16-year-old Jason Cole, his younger brother Brad, and their friend Mike Davis. The boys knew of several old farms that had been abandoned in the 1950s when many local residents moved to the cities. One of these farms was about a mile from where the skull was found and 3 miles from the clearing where Thomas’s pickup truck was discovered.
The teenagers plan to photograph the ruins of the buildings and gather information about the former owners. The farm belonged to the Mlelen family who grew tobacco and kept a small herd of cows. After the death of old Mlelen in 1954, his children sold the land to the forestry department and the buildings remained abandoned.

By 2007, all that remained of the farm were the stone foundations of the main house, a dilapidated barn, and an old well. The well was located away from the main buildings in a small grove. It was lined with stone and was about 20 ft deep. The well used to be covered with a wooden lid, but by the time the teenagers visited, it had rotted and fallen inside.
Instead, someone had placed a heavy concrete slab over it, completely covering the opening. Jason Cole was the first to notice that the slab looked relatively new compared to the old mosscovered stones of the well. The boys tried to move the slab to look inside, but it was too heavy. Then they brought an old iron pipe from the ruins of the shed and used it as a lever.
After half an hour of effort, they managed to move the slab a few inches. Jason shown his flashlight into the gap that had formed and saw something white at the bottom of the well. At first, he thought it was rocks or debris, but upon closer inspection, he realized he was looking at human bones. The boys immediately stopped trying to move the slab and drove to town to report their discovery to the sheriff’s department.
Detective Stevens arrived at the abandoned farm 40 minutes after the teenager’s call. He was accompanied by a group of technical experts and a photographer. The first thing they did was cordon off the area around the well with yellow tape and begin photographing the site from all angles. The concrete slab did indeed look much newer than the stonework of the well.
There was no moss on it and the edges were relatively clean. Special equipment was called in to lift the slab. The crane operator carefully hooked the slab with steel cables and lifted it. Under the slab, they found a complete human skeleton lying at the bottom of the well. The bones were partially covered with fallen leaves and dirt, but the overall picture was clear.
These were definitely human remains. Forensic expert Dr. Elena Washington descended into the well on safety ropes to conduct a preliminary examination. The first thing she noticed was that the skeleton’s hands were tied behind its back with the remains of a rope. The legs were also tied at the ankles. This immediately ruled out the possibility of an accident and pointed to foul play.
There were two large holes in the skull, one in the temporal region and the other in the occipital region. Dr. Washington suggested that these were marks left by a blunt object. In the chest area, she found several cuts on the ribs, which could have been knife wounds. The exact cause of death could only be determined after a detailed examination in the laboratory.
Fragments of clothing lay next to the skeleton, pieces of denim, and the remains of leather boots. The metal parts of the clothing, buttons, zippers, belt buckles, were heavily corroded, but still distinguishable. A leather wallet was found in the jeans pocket, which despite damage from moisture, could still be examined.

When the remains were brought to the surface, it became clear that the skeleton belonged to a man of medium height and build. A preliminary age estimate indicated between 40 and 50 years old. All of these parameters match the description of Thomas Reed. However, final identification could only be made through DNA analysis or dental records.
Detective Stevens immediately contacted Susan Reed in Georgia and reported the discovery. The woman arrived in Franklin the next day. She brought her husband’s medical records with her, including dental X-rays taken several years ago. She also provided DNA samples. Thomas’s hair from his comb, which he had kept intact all these years.
An examination of the wallet yielded the first concrete results. Despite the damage, it was possible to recover the driver’s license number. It did indeed belong to Thomas Reed. The wallet also contained the remains of several banknotes and a credit card with Thomas’s name on it. This made it almost certain that the remains found belonged to the missing hunter.
Dental examination confirmed the assumptions. Dr. James Kilpatrick compared the skeleton’s teeth with Thomas’s X-rays and found a perfect match. Particularly telling was an old filling in the upper left moler. It was exactly the same as the one in the 2001 X-ray. DNA analysis conducted at the state laboratory finally confirmed the identity of the deceased.
Now, the investigation was no longer a missing person case, but a murder case. Sheriff Harris personally took control of the investigation and appointed Detective Stevens to lead the case. First, they returned to examining the circumstances of Thomas’s disappearance and began compiling a list of suspects. Forensic examination showed that Thomas died from multiple stab wounds to the chest and abdomen.
A total of seven wounds were found, three of which damaged vital organs. The blows to the head were inflicted with a blunt object, possibly a hammer or a heavy stone. The expert suggested that the victim was first beaten and then finished off with a knife. The rope used to tie Thomas’s hands and feet turned out to be a common household cord sold in any building supply store.
There were no special marks or manufacturing labels on it. The knots were tied simply without any special skills, which ruled out the possibility of a professional killer. The murder clearly did not take place in the well. There was too little blood for such a number of stab wounds. Thomas was killed somewhere else and then his body was carried to the well and thrown in.
A concrete slab was placed on top to hide the crime. This indicated that the killer knew the area and had planned in advance how to dispose of the body. Detective Stevens compiled a chronology of events. Thomas disappeared on the afternoon of October 24th, 2002. His body was discovered on April 23rd, 2007.
During that time, someone must have brought a heavy concrete slab to the farm and placed it on the well. One person could not lift such a slab. either machinery or the help of several people was needed. Investigators questioned all local residents who might have seen or heard something. The farm was located away from the main roads, but hunters and berrypickers sometimes stopped by.
Several witnesses recalled seeing a truck near the old farm in late 2002 or early 2003, but no one could remember the make or license plate number. Special attention was paid to Christopher Doyle. His farm was only 2 miles from where Thomas’s body was found. He had a truck with a crane, which he used for work, transporting lumber and installing wooden structures.
Such a crane could easily lift and install a concrete slab on a well. When Detective Stevens visited Doyle again, he became even more nervous. When asked if he had ever been to the old Mlelen farm, Doyle said no, but then corrected himself and said that he might have driven past it. He claimed that he knew nothing about the concrete slab and had never seen the well.
Stevens asked for permission to search Doyle’s house and workshop. Doyle agreed, but it was clear that he was very nervous. In the workshop, the detective found several concrete slabs of exactly the same size and shape as the one covering the well. Doyle explained that he used them as bases for wooden structures, but could not say exactly how many slabs he had originally had.
The truck with the crane was parked in the garage. The vehicle was old, but in good working order. Stevens noticed scratches and dents on the body, but Doyle said they were normal damage from work. The detective photographed the truck from all sides and asked Doyle for permission to take paint samples for examination. The most interesting thing was the attic of the house.
Climbing up there, Steven saw a lot of old things. Furniture, boxes of papers, hunting equipment. In the corner, under a pile of old blankets, he found an orange hunting jacket. The jacket was the same size and style as the one Thomas Reed was wearing on the day of his disappearance. Doyle claimed that the jacket belonged to him and that he had bought it several years ago at a local store.
But Stevens noticed dark stains on the jacket that looked like dried blood. He seized the jacket for examination despite Doyle’s protests. The detective also took DNA samples from Doyle, strands of hair, and a scraping from his mouth. The examination of the blood on the jacket yielded sensational results. DNA analysis showed that the stains belonged to Thomas Reed.
Moreover, the blood type matched the records in the deceased’s medical file. This was direct evidence that the jacket was somehow connected to the murder. When Stevens presented Doyle with the results of the examination, he initially claimed that the jacket was not his and that he had no idea how it had ended up in his attic.

Then he said that he might have bought it secondhand from one of the local hunters, but he could not explain how Thomas’s blood ended up on the jacket. The detective obtained a warrant for Christopher Doyle’s arrest on suspicion of murder. The arrest took place early in the morning on April 27th, 2007. Doyle was detained at his home without resistance.
Upon arrest, he claimed he was innocent and demanded a lawyer. The house was thoroughly searched and a large amount of physical evidence was seized for further investigation. Doyle spent three days in a holding cell, refusing to give a statement. His lawyer, Robert Henderson, argued that all the evidence against his client was circumstantial and did not prove his guilt.
The jacket could have ended up with Doyle in various ways, and there was no evidence to confirm his presence at the old farm. The breakthrough in the case came when investigators decided to take another detailed look at Doyle’s workshop. Using luminol, a chemical that glows when it comes into contact with blood, experts discovered a large stain on the workshop floor that had been thoroughly cleaned, but traces of blood remained in the cracks between the boards.
Analysis of these blood stains again showed a match with Thomas Reed’s DNA. This meant that the murder had taken place in Doyy’s workshop. A knife with a deer antler handle was also found in the workshop, and microscopic traces of blood and bone fragments were found on the blade, which matched the wounds on Thomas’s skeleton.
Faced with irrefutable evidence, Christopher Doyle agreed to testify. On April 30th, 2007, in the presence of his lawyer and detective Stevens, he recounted how Thomas Reed’s murder took place. His confession fully explained all the circumstances of the crime which had remained unsolved for almost 5 years.