In June of 2010, two brothers, Mark and Alex Okonnell, from Cincinnati, Ohio, went on a short hike in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

They were to return in 3 days.

Two years later, in March of 2012, workers demolishing an old canyon stop gas station a few miles from the national park noticed a bulldozer bucket fall through the concrete floor of the old garage.

Under the rubble were two bodies wrapped in tarps.

Forensic experts would identify them as Mark and Alex O’Connell, and this gas station would become the center of one of the most gruesome cases in the modern history of Tennessee.

On June 20, 2010, brothers Mark and Alex O’Connell left their home in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Mark was 28, a civil engineer, reserved, responsible, the kind of person who always checks a map twice.

Alex, 25, worked as a technician for a local security systems company.

He was more carefree, easygoing, and often said that traveling was the only thing where he could turn off his head.

They had been planning the trip for several weeks.

They wanted to hike a short 3-day route in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

It was a tradition for the brothers to go to the mountains once a year.

They had already hiked the Appalachian Trail, spent the night at Laurel Falls, and each time returned home with dozens of stories and jokes.

This time, it was going to be just as simple.

In the morning, Mark called his father, Brian O’Connell.

He told him that they were leaving and that they might be out of touch for a few days.

Brian remembered that his eldest son sounded calm and confident.

He even made a joke.

We’ll be back on Wednesday if Alex doesn’t forget his matches again.

That was their last conversation.

According to the cell phone company, the brother’s phones last detected a signal near the US 321 highway at in the evening.

After that, there was silence.

The next morning, Brian tried to call again, but the subscribers were out of range.

He wasn’t worried.

This is a common thing in the mountains.

But when 3 days passed and none of his sons answered, his anxiety gave way to fear.

On Wednesday, June 23rd, Mark was supposed to return to work.

He did not show up, did not write, did not call.

Alex did not get in touch with his colleagues either.

All calls were forwarded to the answering machine.

On June 24, around 7 in the morning, Brian called the local National Park Service office.

He was told that there had been no incidents in the Smoky Mountains area, but was advised to contact the Gatlinburg police.

A few hours later, he was in the car with coffee, old maps, and the feeling that something had gone wrong.

The drive from Cincinnati to Gatlinburg takes about seven hours.

Brian arrived in the city in the evening when the sun was already touching the ridges, and the first thing he saw at the entrance to the park was a gray Jeep Cherokee parked along the road near a wooden sign that read, “Welcome to Elkmont Trail.

” The car was locked, the windows closed.

Inside were the son’s belongings, hiking backpacks, a first aid kit, some provisions, a compass, a gas card, and clean towels.

The camera and phones were missing.

On the front seat was an old guide book to the Smoky Mountains with a folded corner of the page near the section Northern Roots.

There were no signs of struggle or haste.

The locks were intact, the tires intact.

The car looked like it had just been parked and left for a few hours.

Brian contacted the ranger on duty that night.

The report reads, “June 24, 2240.

Report of two men missing.

A car without owners was found.

There are no signs of violence.” The next day, the police officially opened a case on the disappearance of the Okonnell brothers.

Officers checked cameras along major highways.

The footage from June 20th shows a Jeep Cherokee driving through the towns of Marylandville and Weir’s Valley heading toward the park.

The last recorded shot is at the exit of a small roadside cafe around 7 in the evening.

Then the car disappears from the cameras.

The waiters from that cafe mentioned two men.

Both were wearing tourist clothes, behaving calmly, asking about the condition of the roads in the mountains.

The older one paid in cash.

The younger one left a tip.

This testimony was the last confirmed information before the brothers disappeared.

After that, there were no calls, no bank transactions, no card transactions.

It was as if they had simply disappeared on the road between the city and the park.

Brian stayed by the car for two more days.

He spent the night in a motel, returned to the parking lot every morning, walked the nearby trails, asked hikers, but no one had seen the two men matching the description.

On June 27th, he went to the police again.

That day, a short note appeared in the report.

Probable missing person.

Last known location, US 321, Elkmont area.

Further whereabouts unknown.

At the time, no one could have known that their Jeep was not where the journey ended, but where another story began, one that would be called the Okonnell brothers case.

2 years later, the search operation began the very next day after Brian O’Connell’s statement.

Rangers, Gatlinburgg police, and dozens of volunteers gathered near the Elkmont parking lot where the Jeep Cherokee was parked.

The area around the vehicle’s location was cordoned off with yellow tape, and searchers combed the woods in a chain, several people in a row, meter by meter.

Ranger Tom Lacy, a veteran of the rescue service, was in charge of the operation.

He divided the team into sectors.

One group examined the trail leading to the Little River.

Another examined the slopes near Clover’s Fork Pass, and the third combed the forest floor for footprints or campfires.

But by the evening, there were no results.

The brother’s car was examined by forensic experts.

Inside were sleeping bags, maps, canned food, and a first aid kit.

On the dashboard is a travel receipt from a motel near Gatlinburgg dated June 20th.

Only their fingerprints are on the body.

No keys were found in the car, which was strange only because Mark usually left a spare in the glove compartment, but now there was nothing.

The police assumed that the brothers might have left the car to check out the route and got caught in the rain.

According to the weather archive, there were short thunderstorms every day in the park that week.

Streams of water could have washed away any traces.

The next morning, volunteers from a local climbing club joined the search.

Two service dogs from Knoxville tried to pick up a trail of the brother’s personal belongings, but were unsuccessful.

The humid air and fresh vegetation knocked down the scent.

2 days later, a helicopter with a thermal imager was brought in.

More than 30 square miles of territory were surveyed from the air, but not a single heat spot that could indicate a person or a fire was recorded.

On the fifth day of the search, the rangers openly admitted that the chances of finding anyone alive were slim.

The terrain is difficult.

Rocks, swamps, dense tree crowns under which it is easy to get lost, even for an experienced hiker.

In the evenings, the volunteers returned to the base exhausted, and the map with the marks of the combed sectors was getting denser.

On June 29, the first report of a find was received.

A volunteer named Neil Weston came across the backpack three miles off the trail in a remote area of the forest.

The fabric was torn and the zipper was broken.

Inside was a water bottle, a green sweater, and a small food container.

The tag inside identified it as Alex’s.

This backpack was the only confirmation that the brothers were in the mountains at all.

The area where it was found was designated as a new search center.

In the following days, all forces were sent there, but no other items were found.

No tent, no shoes, no fragments of equipment were found.

There were no fires or traces of spending the night.

The area looked as if the person had been there a long time ago or had been brought there only for a short time.

During the press briefing, the Blount County Sheriff said that the investigation is considering several versions: an accident, an animal attack, or a crime.

However, there was no evidence of any of them.

Ranger Lacy’s report dated July 2nd states, “Trail disappears after finding the backpack.

Further direction of travel unknown.

The area was checked completely.

No people or new items found.” After two weeks of fruitless searches, the operation was scaled back.

Only a small group of investigators was left to check possible reports from local residents.

The volunteers were allowed to go home.

A sign was left in the Elkmont parking lot.

Area searched.

No further evidence found.

The brother’s car was taken to the police station.

The newspapers wrote briefly.

Two hikers from Ohio went missing while hiking.

probably got lost in a remote area.

But to Brian O’Connell, it didn’t sound plausible.

He knew his sons.

He knew their discipline and experience.

They could not just disappear into the trees.

After the official search operation was completed, the case of the Okonnell brothers was transferred to the Blount County Sheriff’s Department.

The investigation is headed by Detective Paul Richmond, a 47-year police veteran who had a reputation for not giving up, even when others had given up.

He had been transferred from the Knoxville Department precisely because of his experience in cases like this.

Missing persons in mountainous areas where the line between accident and crime is almost invisible.

Richmond started with the obvious.

He checked the brother’s financial accounts.

no transactions after June 20, 2010.

There was complete silence on their bank cards.

The phone lines were dead.

The last signal from both devices was recorded that evening a few miles from where the Jeep was parked.

No outgoing calls, no attempts to connect to the network.

Next up was working with witnesses.

Richmond met with anyone who might know something.

The owner of a motel in Gatlinburg recalled two polite guests who arrived on the afternoon of June 20th and left before sunset.

They didn’t seem agitated and left nothing suspicious behind.

The cashier at the roadside cafe confirmed that she had seen them that evening.

After that, there was nothing.

No one else could say where they went or what happened next.

The detective began to build versions.

The first was an accident.

Richmond had gone into the mountains with Ranger Tom Lacy to hike part of the route himself.

They spent hours climbing the trails where the volunteers had once searched.

The forest was deaf and rocky, a perfect place for a person to simply disappear.

But they never found any cliffs, caves, or traces of a fall.

If they had died here, Lacy said, nature would have shown them by now.

The second version is crime.

There were frequent cases of car thefts and attacks on tourists in Gatlinburg, but none coincided with the brother’s disappearance.

Locals recalled strange people wandering along US 321, but no one could pinpoint the exact day.

Richmond checked the list of all those convicted of violent crimes in the county.

None of them were in the area.

The third version was a voluntary disappearance.

Some speculated that the brothers might have run away from their lives, but this option was rejected almost immediately.

They had stable jobs, close relationships with their families, and no financial problems or conflicts with the law.

Their friends said the same thing.

Mark is rational to a fault.

Alex is too attached to his home to just disappear.

The examination of the car did not give an answer either.

Experts checked the seats, trunk, and underbody again.

Nothing that could indicate a crime.

The car looked as if it had been parked and forgotten.

The only item of interest was a fuel card purchased a few days before the trip.

The police used it to find an old gas station near the highway, but its owner had already gone bankrupt and left town.

It seemed like a small thing, and Richmond did not dwell on it.

Gradually, the trail went cold.

Throughout the fall, the detective received many calls from people who allegedly saw the brothers at gas stations, supermarkets, and motel.

All the reports turned out to be false.

In early winter, Richmond wrote in a report, “Probability of voluntary disappearance is low.

The probability of accident is medium.

Probability of crime, not excluded, no evidence.” In 2011, the case finally lost its priority.

The disappearance of tourists in the mountains was not uncommon, and new investigations were piling up in the area.

Brian O’Connell continued to go to the Smoky Mountains, posting photos of his sons, talking to journalists, but each article appeared less and less often.

Each new report gathered fewer viewers.

In June, exactly one year after the disappearance, Richmond received an official order to transfer the materials to the archive.

Before that, he personally reviewed every page of the case file, photographs, copies of reports, and a map with the location of the backpack.

“We have the thing, but we don’t have the people,” he told a journalist who happened to catch him outside his office.

This was a brief summary of the investigation which led nowhere.

By the end of 2011, the trail had gone cold.

In the police computers, the case had the status of a cold case.

In the paper archive, it was a gray folder labeled Okonnell, Mark and Alex, missing since June 2010.

For Brian, this was not the end, but the beginning of the wait.

He called Richmond every month to ask if there was any news.

The answer was the same.

We haven’t closed the case.

There’s just nothing to work with.

But after 2 years, even he began to realize that there was no chance of finding the brothers alive.

But the story did not end in oblivion.

In early 2012, when most people no longer remembered the Okonnell’s disappearance, a construction company in a small town near the park began dismantling an old gas station.

A few days later, the bulldozer bucket would break through the concrete floor of the garage, and Detective Richmond would receive his first phone call in a year and a half.

Little did he know that this call would put an end to a story that everyone had already written off as a natural disaster.

March in Tennessee was warm and rainy.

Along US 321, the highway that leads from Gatlinburgg to the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, there were abandoned roadside buildings, the remains of old gas stations and stores that had long since lost their customers.

One of them, Canyon Stop Gas, was closed last year.

It used to be a stop for tourists, but now it has peeling walls, cracked glass, and an old sign with faded paint.

On March 5th, the new owner of the site, local businessman George McKenzie, began preparations for the construction of a motel.

They decided to demolish the old gas station completely.

In the morning, when the heavy equipment was already on the site, McKenzie signed a work permit and left for the city.

A few hours later, the bulldozer driver, 40-year-old David RS, felt the bucket of the equipment plummet underground.

Under the layer of asphalt was an old basement that no one knew about.

RS stopped the truck, got out, and approached the hole.

The inside smelled of dampness and rust.

When he shown a flashlight into the hole, he saw something that looked like large bundles under a layer of dust and concrete fragments.

He called his colleagues and together they carefully removed some of the debris.

Under the concrete slabs, they found two tarpolin bags tied tightly with ropes.

One was torn and a piece of bone was visible inside.

The work was stopped immediately.

At in the morning, the company’s dispatcher reported the discovery to the Blount County Sheriff’s Department.

40 minutes later, a patrol car arrived at the scene, followed by Detective Paul Richmond.

He received a call directly from his office, a short one.

possible human remains.

An old gas station near the highway.

When Richmond arrived, the area was already cordoned off.

The place smelled of dampness and old fuel.

Instead of asphalt, there was a torn hole with a concrete foundation.

The forensic expert, Dr.

Karen Foster, ordered that nothing be touched until a full team arrived.

The workers stood by, frightened and silent.

The excavation lasted several hours.

They broke the concrete carefully, layer by layer, recording every detail.

At the bottom of the basement, under the fragments of iron pipes, they found two large bundles wrapped in old industrial tarpolen and fastened with wire.

One was lying on top of the other.

The material crumbled when touched.

When the first bag was opened, they found a skeleton inside dressed in the remains of jeans and hiking shoes.

In his pocket was a wallet with an ID in the name of Mark O’Connell.

The second bag was opened more slowly.

The bones were mixed up with pieces of fabric and in some places there were remnants of a leather belt.

There were thin strips of metal on the wrists like scraps of wire.

Richmond watched in silence as the experts documented the find.

It had been almost 2 years since he had last seen these names in his reports.

By evening, the area was completely sealed off.

Journalists arrived, but the police did not comment.

Soil samples and concrete fragments were taken for analysis.

The forensic expert confirmed that the remains belonged to two adult men who had died at least 2 years ago.

In a report written the same night, Richmond noted, “The remains were found under the concrete floor of a former gas station.

The probable cause of death is violent.

A full identification is needed.

The next day, FBI investigators arrived at the site to examine the area.

In addition to the bodies, they found several small items in the basement.

An empty metal canister, a fragment of a hose, a rusty knife, and two old 9mm cartridge cases.

This indicated that the room could have been used not only as a storage facility, but also as a crime scene.

The excavations lasted 3 days.

Each tarpolin fragment and bone was photographed and packed in separate containers.

It turned out that the basement was not listed in any building plans or land documents.

It had been built much earlier, perhaps back in the 50s when the building belonged to a private workshop.

The bodies were transported to a forensic laboratory in Knoxville.

there.

After an initial examination, experts confirmed that both men had multiple rib and skull fractures as well as traces of stab wounds.

There were dried blood stains on their clothes.

When Richmond received a call from the lab and was told that an ID in the name of Mark Oonnell was found in one of the bags, he was silent for a long time.

Then he said, “Find the other guy’s ID.

I need his name.” 2 hours later, the confirmation came.

A metal key holder engraved with Alex O was found in the pocket of the second victim.

For Richmond, this was not just a coincidence.

It was the return of what he considered to be his failure.

He went to the site again late at night when the area was cordoned off.

He stood by the ruined building, listened to the wind whistling through the empty window frames, and repeated to himself, “They have never been to the mountains.” Now, everyone knew it.

The investigation moved into the forensic phase.

In the laboratory of forensic scientist Karen Foster in Knoxville, the work went on around the clock.

Samples of bone tissue, clothing, fragments of metal wire, even dust from the basement were all placed in sterile containers.

On April 3rd, forensic experts received the DNA results.

The match was 100%.

The bodies belonged to Mark and Alex Okonnell.

The news was officially passed on to Detective Paul Richmond, who personally notified the family.

According to eyewitnesses, Brian O’Connell listened in silence and then only said, “I knew they weren’t lost.” The time of death, according to experts, was around June 20, 2010.

The cause was multiple stab wounds.

More than 20 injuries caused by a medium-length knife were found on the bones and tissue remnants.

Some of the stabbings were inflicted after death, a characteristic sign of aggression, not an attempt to conceal the crime.

There were traces of wire on the wrists of the victims.

The official expert opinion removed all doubt.

It was a premeditated murder, not an accident, not an animal attack, not a robbery.

Someone deliberately took the brother’s lives.

From that moment on, the old Canyon Stop gas station turned into a full-fledged crime scene.

The territory was put under guard.

Richmond invited forensic scientists from Knoxville and the FBI to re-examine the site.

They found tiny brown spots on the basement walls, blood that had not been washed away, even by time.

In the upper corner, under a layer of plaster, they found a palm print.

Experts confirmed that it did not belong to either brother.

The detectives checked all the documents for the building.

It turned out that until it was closed in 2011, the owner was a 52-year-old Roy Dempsey, a native of Tennessee and a former auto mechanic.

After the bankruptcy, he sold the land through an intermediary and moved to a neighboring county.

Little was said about him in the city.

He was quiet, had no family, and kept to himself.

Richmond immediately noticed something strange.

Dempsey disappeared from the city almost at the same time as the investigation into the brother’s disappearance was officially closed.

At the time, no one was interested, but now it looked like an escape.

On April 10th, police obtained a search warrant for his new home, a small house on the outskirts of Cleveland, 40 mi from the crime scene.

When the team arrived, the door was locked and a rusty pickup truck with no license plate was parked in the yard.

Neighbors reported seeing Dempsey several times a week, usually at night.

He worked in the garage and rarely went out into the city.

During the search of his house, dozens of strange items were found.

old maps of the park, keys to various cars, tourist items, including a compass and a metal flask with the letters M O engraved on it.

On a shelf in the garage, there is a box with small items, buttons, flashlights, and several women’s earrings.

Each item was labeled with a date.

For Richmond, this was a signal.

He was dealing not just with a killer, but with a collector, a man who keeps the memory of his crimes alive.

The next day, Dempsey was put on the wanted list.

His profile was sent to all police departments in the state.

He was found only a week later on the outskirts of the small town of Englewood.

He was living alone in a trailer near an old parts warehouse.

He was arrested without resistance.

During the first interrogation, Dempsey remained calm.

He denied knowing the brothers and claimed that he had never entered the basement after selling the gas station.

But in the garage where he lived, a box with fragments of metal wire, the same type that had been used to tie the victim’s hands, was found.

An expert examination confirmed a complete match.

After his arrest, Roy Dempsey remained silent for several days.

During interrogations, he sat up straight, showed no emotion, and answered briefly.

Detective Paul Richmond did not put pressure.

He was waiting for the moment when words would say more than denials.

During the third interrogation, he was shown a box with seized items, knives, keychains, compasses, old cameras.

Among them was a metal flask with the initials M O.

Dempsey was silent for a long time, then asked, “Did you find the rest?” Richmond replied, “Two so far.” After that, Dempsey began to speak.

No pressure, no lawyer, no explanations.

He said he didn’t have a big plan, just a scheme.

It had been working for years.

He waited by the highway or national parking lots, watching for people coming alone, or in couples.

He would approach them in a friendly manner, offer to help, advise a shorter route or a cheaper gas station.

When people agreed, he would invite them to stop by the garage for a minute, and that was the end of it.

After that, he would destroy all traces.

He wrapped the bodies in tarpolins, put them in the basement or took them to abandoned industrial areas, covered them with concrete and construction waste.

He left their belongings in plain sight to create the illusion that the victims had disappeared into the mountains.

He killed the Okonnell brothers the same evening they stopped at his gas station.

They asked for directions and he said he could show them on a map in the garage.

He hit the older one with a metal pipe and grabbed the younger one when he tried to run away.

The bodies were left under a concrete slab and he drove the car himself to a parking lot near Elkmont.

Fuel went up in price and the desire disappeared.

He explained when asked why he stopped after 2010.

A metal cabinet with a combination lock was found in his trailer.

Inside were ID cards, keys, small jewelry, and tourist items.

22 names.

Some belong to people who had been reported missing for years in Blount, Monroe, and Sevir counties.

The rest have not yet been identified.

During the investigation, Dempsey marked several places on the map where he could have left the bodies.

Some of the territories have already been built up or blocked by new highways.

That is why investigators assume that the total number of his victims could be much higher than officially established.

When asked about his motive, he answered simply, “There is no motive.

I did it because I could.” Excavations at the former gas station continued for another month.

Under the concrete layer, they found fragments of fabric, pieces of shoes, metal hooks, everything that could have belonged to the other missing people.

Forensic experts recorded this evidence, but many things remained unidentified.

In July, prosecutors charged Dempsey with five counts of premeditated murder.

At the trial, he behaved the same way he did during interrogation, silent, without visible emotion.

When the judge read out the list of victims, he sat with his arms down and looked off to the side as if listening to something of his own.

In August of 2012, the court found Roy Dempsey guilty of five murders and sentenced him to life without parole.

After the verdict was announced, Detective Richmond stood at the entrance to the courthouse.

He was asked by journalists if he was satisfied with the outcome.

He answered briefly.

This is not a result.

It’s a line.

A week later, the former Canyon Stop gas station was completely demolished.

New construction has not started.

The land remained fenced off and overgrown with grass.

Local drivers still detour around the site, even if it adds a few minutes to their journey.

After the verdict was announced, Roy Dempsey was sent to a maximum security correctional facility in Tennessee.

For the Blount County Police Department, this was the end of a case that had been going on for more than 2 years.

The department closed all open proceedings and the physical evidence was transferred to the archive.

All official commentary stopped within weeks.

The site of the Canyon Stop gas station was left undeveloped.

The construction company abandoned the motel project, citing reputational risks.

In the fall, a fence and a no trespassing sign were installed there.

Over time, the area was overgrown with tall grass, and even the road sign was rusting.

Drivers who took tourists to the park stopped stopping nearby, and locals avoided the area.

Brian O’Connell did not give interviews.

He refused to participate in TV programs that offered to reconstruct the events for a documentary.

The only thing he did was to give the city museum a copy of the map of the Smoky Mountains with his son’s route.

In the catalog, the exhibit is briefly captioned, the route that does not return.

In October of 2012, the missing person’s commission released a report.

Five murders involving Dempsey were confirmed.

Several other cases remained open as some of the physical evidence had not been identified.

The report noted that the total number of his victims could be higher, but there was a lack of documentary evidence.

Detective Paul Richmond, who spent two years on the case, resigned from the force a few months later.

colleagues recalled that on his last day of work, he took a map with red markings off the wall and burned it in the courtyard of the department.

No one asked why.

Subsequently, journalistic publications appeared that tried to explain how Dempsey could have gone unnoticed for years.

Some blamed the negligence of the local police, while others blamed the isolation of the community where no one asks unnecessary questions.

The official version remained laconic.

Random encounters on the highway that ended in murder.

In Gatlinburgg, the story has become an urban legend.

The old gas station was occasionally mentioned on the evening news as an example of how even an ordinary building can hide years of silence.

In schools near the park, teachers used this incident as an example of why tourists should be informed of the route and not stop in unknown places.

In the spring of 2013, a small stone slab with the names of the five victims found during the investigation was installed at the entrance to the national park.

No portraits and no date of death, just a phrase.

Their journey ended here.

Over the years, the case has lost media attention, but there is still a rule among local rangers.

If they see a lone traveler near abandoned buildings along US 321 while on duty, they always stop just to make sure that the person is really a tourist.