The Cabin in the Pines: The True Story of the Davidson Family Murders

On a summer morning in 1994, the Davidson family packed their red Chevrolet Suburban for a four-day camping trip into the Colorado mountains.
Mark and Linda Davidson, a young couple in their thirties, were seasoned hikers. Their two children, twelve-year-old Sarah and ten-year-old Tommy, loved the outdoors.
Neighbors watched as the family loaded tents, backpacks, and fishing poles. It was July 14th—hot, bright, and perfect for a mountain getaway.

They never came back.

For fifteen years, no one could say what had happened to the Davidsons. No wrecked car, no campsite, no footprints.
Just silence, and a red SUV sitting at the trailhead as if waiting for them to return.

What began as a search for a missing family would turn into one of Colorado’s darkest and most disturbing murder cases—one that ended not in the wild, but inside a decaying cabin where unspeakable secrets had been buried beneath the floorboards.

The Disappearance

When Linda’s sister Debbie arrived at their Denver home on July 18th, the house was still and quiet.
The cat meowed at the door. The car was gone. The note Linda had left on the kitchen counter said they’d be back that evening.

By 10 p.m., Debbie called 911.

The next morning, search teams were deployed into the Blue Ridge Lake area. The Suburban was found parked neatly at the trailhead, doors locked, windows up.
Inside were a thermos of cold coffee and the kids’ jackets.
It looked like the family had simply vanished into the forest.

Over the next three days, volunteers, rangers, and rescue dogs combed through miles of trails. Helicopters scanned the ridges.
No tent, no gear, no footprints. Even the dogs couldn’t find a scent.
After a week, the only trace of the Davidsons was their car baking in the July sun.

Detective Robert Hughes, a seasoned investigator with the Denver Police Department, took over the case.
He pored over their finances, phone records, and personal histories. Nothing pointed to foul play—or to an intentional disappearance.
Mark was a steady engineer. Linda was a teacher. Their kids were healthy, social, and loved.
There were no debts, no enemies, no signs of domestic trouble.

By autumn, snow had buried the mountains. The search was called off.

A Family Erased

1994 turned into 1995.
The Davidson house was sold to cover unpaid bills.
Their case file—labeled simply Missing Persons: Four—was stacked alongside dozens of other cold cases.

In May, a fisherman found a small blue backpack near a stream forty kilometers from the original trail.
Inside were soggy notebooks, pencils, and a faded cartoon sticker.
Linda’s sister couldn’t confirm whether it belonged to Sarah or Tommy—they’d both owned backpacks like it.
No DNA, no conclusive evidence. Just another dead end.

That summer, a truck driver reported seeing a red SUV speeding down the mountain road the day after the disappearance, a woman behind the wheel.
But the Suburban had been parked at the trailhead the whole time. The driver’s memory was dismissed as mistaken.

Months turned to years.
False sightings came in from across the country—a woman in a post office, a family in a motel, strangers mistaken for ghosts.
Every lead collapsed under scrutiny.
By 1996, the case was cold.
The Davidsons, as one investigator later said, had “evaporated.”

Fifteen Years of Silence

For the next decade, the case haunted every detective who touched it.
The children’s smiling faces appeared on missing posters long after the trail had gone cold.
Every year, on the anniversary of their disappearance, local news ran the same headline: “Still Missing: The Davidson Family Mystery.”
No new evidence. No answers.

By 2009, the case was nearly forgotten.
Then, one October morning, two hunters in Aspen stumbled upon a cabin deep in the Rockies—a cabin that didn’t appear on any map.

The Cabin

Carl and Danny Miller were experienced hunters. They’d been in those woods for twenty years, but they’d never seen the structure before—half-collapsed, hidden behind a screen of pine and fog.
The front door was rotted. The roof sagged. When Carl pushed it open, the smell of decay and time filled the air.

Inside, it was dark and cold.
A single wooden table stood in the center of the room.
Behind it sat a skeleton tied to a chair with rusted wire.

The brothers fled and called the sheriff on their satellite phone.

Hours later, investigators arrived by helicopter.
What they found inside would rewrite fifteen years of silence.

The skeleton was male. Wire was wound around the wrists, chest, and ankles—tight enough to score the bone. He’d been tied there alive.
Under the cabin’s floorboards lay a shallow pit containing the remains of two children, their bones carefully laid side by side.
Nearby, a red hiking backpack was discovered—inside were a toothbrush, a hairbrush, and cosmetics.

DNA confirmed what investigators already feared.
The bodies were those of Mark, Sarah, and Tommy Davidson.

But one person was missing.

Linda.

The Ghost of Linda Davidson

The discovery turned the cold case into a homicide investigation.
Detective Sarah Connors, a young but relentless investigator, was assigned to lead it.
Her first step: recheck every financial record connected to the Davidsons.

Mark’s accounts were untouched.
But Linda’s passport—long presumed missing—had been used several times since the family’s disappearance.

In 1996, it was used to obtain a driver’s license in New Mexico.
In 1998, to open a bank account in Arizona.
In 2001, to rent an apartment in Nevada.

Each time, the same name appeared: Linda Davidson.

Connors tracked down old photos and surveillance footage from those transactions.
The images were grainy, faces blurred. But the outline was familiar: short brown hair, the same build, the same age Linda would have been—alive.

Then came the break.

In 2003, a woman named Linda Morrison began working as a waitress in Boulder, Colorado—just 150 kilometers from where the Davidsons had vanished.

Connors drove there the next day.

The restaurant’s manager described her as quiet, polite, and deeply private.
She’d worked there for nearly a decade.
She lived alone in a small apartment. No family. No friends. Always paid rent in cash.

Connors obtained a warrant.

On October 27th, 2012, police arrested Linda Morrison at her apartment.
DNA confirmed her identity: she was Linda Davidson.

The mother of the missing family—long presumed dead—had been alive for eighteen years.

The Confession

At first, Linda refused to speak. She asked for a lawyer and sat in silence for three days.
Then, on October 30th, she began to talk.

Her story was horrifying.

According to her first confession, on July 17th, 1994, three days into their trip, a man appeared at their campsite.
He said his name was “Rey.”
He claimed he was lost and asked for help finding his way back to the road.
Mark offered him food and a place to stay the night.

That night, she said, Rey attacked her while the family slept. Mark intervened, and Rey knocked him unconscious with a rock.
He tied the family up and forced them deeper into the woods, eventually leading them to the cabin.

Linda claimed Rey kept them hostage for several days, beating Mark and the children.
On the fifth day, she said, he decided to kill them.
He forced her to help, threatening to kill her if she resisted.

When the ordeal was over, Rey took her identification, faked her death, and told her to disappear.

It was a shocking story—but it didn’t add up.

There was no record of any “Rey.”
No second set of footprints, no evidence of another person at the cabin.
And the timeline—the wire marks, the method of restraint, the condition of the remains—contradicted her account.

Detectives pressed harder.
Linda broke again.

This time, she said there was no Rey.
There was only her—and her brother, David.

The Dark Truth

According to Linda, she had been trapped for years in a secret, abusive relationship with her brother.
He had threatened to expose their affair if she didn’t leave her husband.
Before the family trip, he gave her an ultimatum: kill them, or he would kill himself.

Terrified and manipulated, she said, she agreed.

In her final confession, Linda told detectives that on the third night of their trip, she crushed poisonous berries and mixed them into her family’s food.
When they grew weak and disoriented, she struck them with rocks to “end their suffering.”
She buried the children beneath the cabin’s floor and tied Mark’s body to the chair, staging a scene of captivity.

She then faked her own disappearance, left the backpack behind, and met her brother at a predetermined location.
Together, they fled across states under false names.
David used her passport for years, forging documents and setting her up with a new identity.

By 2007, David was dead—heart failure, according to medical records.
And Linda was left to live in the shadow of what she’d done.

When asked why she had killed her own husband and children, she gave a chilling answer:

“I loved him. And I didn’t want to lose him.”

Aftermath

In March 2013, Linda Davidson pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder.
She received a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
She did not appeal. She did not apologize.

At the sentencing, Detective Connors told reporters:

“In all my years on this job, I’ve seen evil. But never like this—evil born out of love, dressed as devotion.”

The remains of Mark, Sarah, and Tommy were buried in Denver City Cemetery, nearly two decades after their deaths.
Friends and family gathered under gray skies as the priest read from the Book of Psalms.
Linda’s sister, who had spent years searching for answers, placed flowers on the children’s graves.
Her only words to the reporters were:

“Now I can stop looking.”

Epilogue: The Cabin Today

The cabin where the Davidsons died still stands, half-collapsed, swallowed by pine and silence.
No sign marks the site.
Hikers say the woods there feel colder, even in summer. Some swear they’ve seen a figure standing in the trees at dusk—a woman with short brown hair, watching from the shadows.

For investigators, the case remains a study in the limits of human understanding.
How does a mother turn killer?
How does love twist itself into something monstrous?

The Davidson case isn’t just a story of murder.
It’s a story of obsession, deception, and the terrible lengths one person will go to erase their life—and everyone in it.