In November of 2016.

With the official search all but over, three volunteers from the Mountainfinders group were combing the remote area north of the Alam Cave Trail.

At about in the afternoon, one of them, Ben Carter, heard a strange sound through the dense rodendrrons.

A faint, ragged breathing that sounded more like soft crying.

As he got closer, he saw a young man kneeling by the cold water of Walker Camp Prong Creek.

His figure was exhausted to the point of exhaustion.

His shoulders were shaking and his head was down.

The boy was clutching a black men’s jacket to his chest as if he was afraid someone would forcefully tear it from his hands.

The jacket was large, dirty, and torn in several places.

An adult size, not his.

When Ben said his name carefully and came closer, the boy slowly raised his head.

His eyes were blurred, his lips were chapped, and his face was covered with dirt and stubble that didn’t look like a young man.

It was 19-year-old Sam Carroll, the same one who disappeared with his father exactly one month ago.

And there was not a single trace of the adult man.

Only a jacket that the boy clutched so tightly as if it was all that was left of him.

On October 23rd, 2016, a Sunday, the weather in Great Smoky Mountains was deceptively calm.

A light fog still lingered in the lands, but the tourist parking lots at the beginning of the Alam Cave Trail were already filling up with cars.

Among them was a gray Ford Ranger pickup truck belonging to 35-year-old mechanic Chris Carroll from Knoxville.

His son, 18-year-old Sam, a slender tanned boy who had spent most weekends in the park since childhood, was on the hike with him.

The route was well known to both of them.

It was their fall tradition to hike to Alam Cave Bluffs, spend the night nearby, or just sit and take in the view.

The family has repeatedly said that for Chris, these outings were a kind of reset button.

The air, the silence, the rhythm of footsteps under the leaves.

For Sam, it was an opportunity to be alone with his father without the hustle and bustle of the city and constant minor problems.

According to the rangers reconstruction, their ascent began at about and 30 minutes in the morning.

One pair of hikers reported seeing Chris and Sam at the Alamina Arch at about in the afternoon.

The father walked first, the boy followed, both looking focused but not tired.

It was the last confirmed meeting.

Rebecca Carol, Chris’s wife, would later tell investigators that they were supposed to return no later than sunset.

When it was p.m.

and their pickup truck was still not in the driveway, she tried to call.

Both of their cell phones were turned off.

According to Rebecca, this was unusual in their family.

Chris always at least sent a short message if he was going to be late.

At , she called the park and 20 minutes later, she notified the Knoxville police.

At night, a group of rangers went out to search for him.

According to the shift instructor who was working in the park at the time, these were the first hours when a person could still be on the main route and respond to calls.

By 2 in the morning, they had combed a large part of the lower section of the trail, but to no avail.

The next morning, they were joined by a team of volunteers from the Appalachian Search and Rescue Group.

They expanded the area, clearing all the popular branches and descents to the water.

Meanwhile, the Carol’s pickup truck was found in the parking lot.

The car was locked with no signs of forced entry.

His belongings, a thermos, a sports bottle, a map, were lying exactly as Chris usually left them.

This immediately confirmed that the disappearance had occurred after the start of the route.

The rescue dog, a Labrador named Gray, picked up a faint scent from the tracks along the trail, but they broke off on a steep slope covered with fresh leaves.

According to the dog handler, this happens when a person either changes direction abruptly or finds himself in an area where the scent is lost due to humidity and wind surges.

The latter was unlikely as the weather was calm.

The search was launched every day from dawn.

The rangers checked every sheltered corner, every wooden shelter, every ledge where the wounded tourist could wait.

Coast Guard helicopters flew in the area, but the dense crowns made the inspection virtually useless.

In the first week, several streams were checked, including areas where water could have dragged the body in.

Groups with ropes descended into narrow crevices along the trail that led to Pickicket Ridge.

There was nothing, not even a scrap of cloth, a shoe print, or a piece of equipment.

The forest remained silent and clean as before a rainstorm.

By the end of the second week, the search had reached a radius of almost 5 mi.

It was the most difficult part of the park.

Dense rodendron thicket, the so-called hell tunnels, where light is lost after a few feet.

The searchers characterized this place as a maze where even an experienced tourist can lose his or her bearings in a minute.

The rangers investigative report completed on November 6th noted the absence of any signs of a struggle or fall.

Falling stones were also ruled out.

The soil had no fresh scree and the branches had no broken tracks typical of a body sliding downhill.

The forest looked as if no one had walked through it for many days.

On November 7th, the active phase of the search was officially completed.

The case was classified as a disappearance under unexplained circumstances.

For the family, this was the beginning of the worst, the unknown.

Rebecca came to the park parking lot every day, stood next to an empty pickup truck, and according to the rangers, stared at the trail for hours.

Sam’s uncle, who had come from Memphis, told police that there had been no conflict in the family, no reason to run away or voluntarily go into seclusion.

Everyone was waiting for at least a hint that the men were hiding somewhere, that they had been injured, but were alive.

But the forest was silent, and the longer it remained silent, the more it seemed that someone or something that should not have been there had interfered with its silence.

On November 25th, 2016, exactly one month after the official end of the active search, the autumn chill still lingered in Great Smoky Mountains.

The leaves had already lost their bright colors.

The slopes were dominated by gray and brown, and a thick cold fog was hanging over the gorges in the morning.

It was on this day that a group of volunteers from the informal organization Mountain Finders decided to return to an area that had been called unpromising during the official search.

This was the area north of the Alum Cave Trail, a place where most rescuers preferred not to go because of the incredible density of rodendron thicket.

Ranger reports describe the area with a line.

movement is possible only by crawling or with complete clearing of branches.

The volunteers knew this but nevertheless believed that such places often hide unexpected finds.

According to one of the group members, they simply could not accept the idea that two people could disappear there without a trace.

Around in the afternoon, as the group began to split up to explore the banks of the Walker Camp Prong Creek, volunteer Ben Carter heard a sound he described as barely audible, but definitely human.

It was not a moan or a call for help, he said, but rather a short, ragged breath, as if a person were trying to catch a breath after a long run.

Carter moved away from the route, weaving between branches that clung to his clothes as if trying to keep him from moving forward.

A few minutes later, he saw a silhouette kneeling at the edge of the creek.

The figure was so still that at first, Carter thought it was a mannequin or a backpack left behind by someone.

But when he got closer, it became obvious.

There was a person sitting in front of him.

The man was thin to the bone, wearing a torn shirt, his face covered with layers of mud and dark stubble that comes from weeks in the wilderness.

Most striking of all, he clutched a large black jacket to his chest.

He held it so tightly that his fingers turned white.

The jacket was clearly the size of an adult male with torn cuffs and frozen folds, as if it had been dragged along the ground for a long time.

The volunteer recognized it from a description he had seen in a police bulletin.

It was the same jacket Chris Carroll had worn on his hikes.

When Carter said his name and in his words tried to speak as calmly as possible, the man barely raised his head.

His gaze was blank, unfocused, as if he were looking through a lifeguard.

His jaw was half dropped, his lips were chapped, and his eyes were red from exhaustion.

Carter immediately called for other volunteers.

One of them recorded the time on the radio, 3 hours and 37 minutes.

This recording was later used in the official report.

It took several minutes for the guy to stand up.

He held his jacket as if he was afraid to let it go.

He had no other belongings with him, no backpack, no flask, no food, just the jacket he would not part with.

Later, doctors confirmed that it was obvious by the level of exhaustion that he had survived purely on instinct, drinking water from natural sources and moving without a plan or direction.

He was transported to Gatlinburgg Hospital with the help of local rescuers.

Carter handed the boy over to doctors at 40 minutes.

The doctors later noted that he did not respond to questions, only watched his jacket, which the nurse tried to temporarily remove for inspection.

According to her, he squeezed her so tightly that she had to convince him with gestures so that she could conduct the examination.

The official medical report documented severe dehydration, general hypothermia, critical exhaustion, numerous scratches and bruises, and signs of prolonged overnight exposure to cold air.

The doctor who conducted the initial examination noted in a comment, “This guy survived on the edge of the possible.

It seems he was driven by a single thought, but we don’t know what it was.

It was only after his identity was confirmed that it became clear that he was Sam Carroll, the same young man who had been missing with his father.

He was found 20 m away from the previous search boundary in a place where no one expected to see a living person.

When the police began documenting the discovery, the main detail that everyone noted independently remained the same.

Sam had never let go of his jacket.

According to one of the doctors, he held it even in his sleep.

Later, when investigators examined the jacket, it would become clear that it hid more than just the memory of his father.

But on that day, they knew only one thing.

The boy had survived.

And the adult man, Chris Carroll, was not there.

Not a single thing, not a single trace, not a single hint that he could have been alive or near his son before the discovery.

Amid the silence of the hospital room and the chaotic notes of the investigators, there was only one question.

How the boy had lived in the forest for a month and why he had returned with only his father’s jacket.

In the first hours after being taken to the Gatlinburgg Hospital, Sam Carol’s condition was described as depressed to the point of death.

Doctors noted that the boy responded to pain, to cold, to touch, but hardly reacted to words.

He was lying motionless, looking past the ceiling as if his attention was riveted on something far beyond the white walls of the ward.

The clinic’s psychologist who was called in that evening noted in the protocol signs of deep dissociation, a condition where the brain turns off the ability to experience complex emotions, leaving a person with only primitive survival functions.

According to the nurse on duty that day, Sam ate only when food was literally brought to his mouth.

He drank in small sips as if each swallow required effort.

He slept for short periods of time as if a month after his disappearance, his body continued to live in a threatened mode.

When the doctors tried to ask the simplest questions, how he ended up near the creek, whether he saw anyone nearby where he left his father, the boy froze, his eyes glazed over, and his breathing slowed down.

The doctor told the investigators that such reactions are typical for people who have experienced severe trauma but are unable to reproduce it in a consistent manner.

The fragments of memory that Sam voiced in fragmentaryary phrases or gestures sounded like surreal fragments.

A man’s scream, a sharp sound like a blow or a gunshot and the smell of burning which he took to be the smell of a thunderstorm.

Then darkness, escape, cold, and the constant repetition of three actions that in his words were simply necessary.

Drink, hide, sleep.

In parallel with the work of doctors, another work began at the hospital.

The work of forensic scientists.

The black jacket that Sam was holding in his hands, even in the ward, was carefully removed and sent to the laboratory.

According to the seizure protocol, the guy gave it back only after one of the nurses explained to him with gestures that the jacket would be returned.

At that moment, he was hardly speaking.

All those present at the hospital, doctors, investigators, volunteers saw the jacket only superficially, large, masculine, with torn cuffs, dirt stains, and signs of wear.

But when the forensic experts unfolded it on the examination table, the first thing that caught their eye was not the contamination.

At chest level and slightly below, they found two rounded dips in the fabric.

Their shape and edges were classic bullet holes.

Experts noted that such damage would not have been caused by a branch, stone, or fall.

Drops of dried blood found between the layers of the lining confirmed that the jacket was on the person’s body when the shot was fired.

The laboratory report received the next day cancelled all previous hypotheses.

The version of a fall of getting lost of an accidental injury.

Everything was crossed out in an instant.

A new unambiguous picture emerged before the investigators.

Chris Carol had been shot twice.

After examining the jacket, the Sevier County Major Crimes Unit officially became involved in the case.

Detectives began by analyzing the route that Chris and Sam might have taken on their last day on the trail.

The report noted that the bullet holes found changed the status of the case from a disappearance under mysterious circumstances to a criminal offense, potentially murder.

Investigators paid attention to Sam’s behavior in the ward.

The boy, who should have been relieved after being rescued, was constantly peering wearily at the door, as if he was waiting for danger to recur.

He often flinched from sharp sounds.

The psychologist explained this as a result of the adrenaline shock that had been going on for a month.

Sam could not name a single place he had been.

He could not describe the people he met.

He couldn’t even say exactly when he saw his father for the last time.

All his answers were vague, as if his mind was protecting him from his own memories.

At the single word, dad, he would stretch his hands forward again as if looking for the same jacket.

The nurse told us that he woke up several times at night, glued his eyes to an empty chair as if someone was supposed to be sitting there.

The official description of Sam’s condition included the phrase, “His psyche keeps him in a narrow range of survival commands.” This explained why he could only see what was critically necessary: water, shelter, warmth.

Everything else, including deadly details, was erased by profound amnesia.

For the investigators, this meant only one thing.

They could not rely on the guy’s testimony.

They needed to look for the place of the shooting, find the shell casings, blood, any traces that might have been left on the route the carols had taken.

Meanwhile, Sam continued to live in his inner world.

The bright lights, the doctors in blue coats, the electronic devices.

All of this was just a background for him.

He was silent, sipped water, fell asleep again, and was afraid to open his eyes again.

Only one detail kept repeating itself.

When he was allowed to return the jacket after all the examinations, he put it next to him and touched the edge of the fabric as if it was the last thing that kept him in reality.

The investigators already realized that the answer to what happened in the forest did not lie in the hospital room.

It lies in the mountains in the place where the shots were fired and where the silence of the forest swallowed up the sound that Sam remembers only as the smell of a thunderstorm.

The discovery of bullet holes in the jacket officially changed everything.

The Carol case ceased to be a missing person’s file and turned into an investigation of an attempted murder and most likely a murder in the mountains.

The very next day, a special investigative team led by Detective Jason Klene of the Sevier County Police arrived at Great Smoky Mountains.

Klein’s memo stated that the first priority was to locate the shooting site.

The jacket with two entry holes indicated that at least one shot had been fired into the chest.

So, somewhere in the mountains, there had to be a place with traces of blood, shell casings, and possibly traces of a struggle.

The investigators proceeded from simple logic.

If Sam had survived and made it to Walker Camp Prong Creek, then even in a state of shock, he was likely to have followed the water downstream in search of easier terrain.

So, the group started not from the place where he was found, but from an area upstream where previous searches had not actually gone.

The area they went to was called Rodendren Hell by the rangers.

It was a strip of slope where rotodendran bushes grew together into a solid wall.

People had to cut their way through with secrets, machetes, and their own shoulders instead of walking.

In a report, one of the group members described it as a job where every step comes at the cost of scratches and lost orientation.

They moved slowly in marked loops, marking every sector they could see on their navigators.

After a few hours of hard work, the group came to a small rocky terrace in the middle of the thicket, an exposed area partially covered with moss with low boulders and roots sticking out.

It was there that one of the rangers noticed a detail that they had either not seen or simply could not reach during the first search.

On the surface of one stone was a dark, almost black dried spot that was sharply different from the natural color of the rock.

At first, someone assumed that it was a trace of soil or plant sap.

But when a sterile swab was applied to the spot, the reagent showed a characteristic color.

It was blood.

A few other telling details were found around the stain.

There were chaotic potholes on the wet soil as if someone had slipped, fallen, and tried to get up.

There were fragments of bark stripped from nearby trunks, broken thin branches at the height of a person’s height.

Klene called it a classic pattern of a localized struggle or sudden attack in his report.

Further events followed a standard but tedious scenario.

The area was immediately cordoned off, marked with caution tape, and unnecessary movement was prohibited.

Criminalists with metal detectors started working.

They combed every square foot of land around the rocky terrace, removing the top soil in thin slices.

In less than an hour, one of the devices beeped a short signal at the foot of a large tulip tree whose roots seemed to be holding up the stones on the slope.

The forensic scientist knelt down, carefully unwrapped the layer of leaves and earth, and saw a brass shine.

It was a shell casing.

Having fixed its position, it was removed and put into a labeled container.

On the spot, they measured the approximate angle from which it could have come out.

But in the dense thicket, it didn’t help much.

The main thing was different, the caliber.

A quick examination showed that it was a 9mm pistol cartridge case.

They continued the search.

The same day, another empty shell casing of the same type was found on the edge of a rocky area between roots and moss.

Both were lying in a place where a casual tourist could hardly lose them.

and the fact that pistol cartridges were found deep in the national park looked suspicious.

Later, ballistics analysis would confirm that both shell casings had been fired from the same barrel with a difference that corresponded to two consecutive shots.

At the time of the seizure, this was still just a guess, but the internal logic of the scene was already clear.

It was not shooting in the air and not for training.

There was no body.

All the areas adjacent to the terrace, steep slopes, ravines, natural pockets between boulders, were combed by rope teams.

There were no signs of a burial site, a dumped body, or clothing fragments.

It was as if someone had taken the wounded or dead man with them after the shots.

Against the backdrop of these findings, the fragments of Sam’s words that the doctors wrote down in the card took on a new meaning.

His phrase that dad fell, which he said in one of the rare moments of contact, no longer looked like a description of an accidental injury.

For psychologists, this was becoming a typical defense construct where consciousness cannot accept reality.

It simplifies it to a fall to anything that does not contain the image of a shot and death.

For the investigators, the rocky terrace among the roodendrrons was the starting point.

It was here, by all accounts, that two shots were fired at Chris Carroll.

It was from here that Sam, wounded by shock, had to break out into the thicket to find himself near the stream.

And it was somewhere between these two points, the place of the shooting and the place where he was found that the main missing link had to be hidden.

the answer to the question of where his father’s body disappeared and who was holding the gun in the mountains.

In the first days after the rescue, Sam was unable to speak.

His mind seemed to keep the door closed.

But after his condition stabilized when psychologists began to work with him longer and more gently, the first consistent fragments of memory appeared.

These were not complete stories or logical descriptions of events, but rather short fragments like flashes that the brain finally allowed to surface.

These fragments were recorded in the words of doctors and psychologists, sometimes in gestures, sometimes in single phrases.

They were collected like scattered fragments that gradually formed a complete picture.

This is how it became known that Sam remembered not only the escape, he remembered the return.

According to a psychologist who worked with the boy in the night ward, the first fragment emerged when Sam tried to explain why he held his father’s jacket so tightly that he wouldn’t let go of it even when he fell asleep.

He tapped his fingers on his chest as if to show his weight, then ran his palm across the floor, pointing down, and then he said softly, “I’m back.” The initial panic he had felt as he ran through the thicket was replaced by another.

acute shame and guilt.

Psychologists describe this as a typical mechanism for survivors of a sudden threat.

After an instinctive flight, there is an impulse to return to the one you left behind.

Sam spoke about it sporadically, but the meaning was clear.

He was trying not to leave his father.

In the investigator’s reconstruction based on these fragments, Sam returned to the scene of the shooting after he had run away the first time.

His memories of that moment were fuzzy, as if covered in a thick fog.

He remembered walking at random among the branches, returning in the same direction, although his body was trembling with fear.

Then a second persistent fragment emerges.

He found his father.

Chris was lying on his side, his chest rising unevenly.

His breathing, according to Sam, was heavy as a rock, as he explained with gestures, squeezing the air with his palms.

His father’s face was pale, and his clothes were soaked in the upper part.

All signs of injury were confirmed by the fact that his jacket had bullet holes in it.

Sam tried to lift him up, but his father barely reacted.

The boy grabbed the jacket, which was easy to pull, and dragged the body to the nearest bushes.

The place was difficult.

intertwined roots, stones, and branches stretched from all sides.

But according to the psychologist, Sam recalled fragments of this movement with amazing accuracy.

How his legs slipped, how the ground shifted under his hands, how his father’s body suddenly became heavier.

At that moment, he recalls a strange voice sounded in the forest.

It was sharp, angry, and directed in his direction.

Sam couldn’t make out a single word, but he gestured to explain that it was a scream, not a warning.

He saw a figure approaching through the thicket, a dark silhouette moving quickly and confidently.

The boy did not remember the face or could not see it at that moment.

The psychologists emphasized a characteristic detail.

Every time Sam tried to recall the figure, he tensed his shoulders as if he was being hit by a wave of fear.

This may indicate that he perceived the attacker’s movement as a direct threat to his life.

That’s when the most painful part of the memory happened.

When he pulled his father again, the jacket abruptly slipped off Chris’s shoulders and remained in the boy’s hands.

For some reason, this sudden slip stuck in his memory the most clearly.

He made a gesture like an object losing its balance and clenched his fingers as if he didn’t want to let go.

After that, there was a sound that experts later identified as a gunshot.

Sam could not explain how many shots there were.

His reaction was instinctive.

He turned and ran, clutching his jacket as if it were the last thing that still belonged to his father.

According to psychologists, Sam heard heavy footsteps behind him.

The noise of the pursuit left such a strong imprint on him that even in the hospital he would flinch from loud noises in the corridor.

He ran into the thicket without looking back.

The branches cut his hands.

The ground under his feet gave way, but he kept running until the sounds of footsteps disappeared into the silence of the forest.

These fragments don’t show the full picture, only fragments.

But it was from them that investigators made the most important conclusion.

Sam saw his attacker.

Not up close, not clearly, but he saw him.

He witnessed not only the shots, but also what happened after them.

And these memories, which broke through a month after the events, were the first and so far the only key to answering what really happened in the Smoky Mountains that day.

The investigation, which until a week ago had been based on fragments of memories and guesswork, was given concrete coordinates after the shell casings were found.

Detective Jason Klene assembled a separate task force that was tasked with combing the area around the rocky terrace where the shots were likely to have been fired.

The place looked quiet, almost innocent.

Mossy ledges, old tulip trees, dense fern undergrowth, a typical corner of the Great Smoky Mountains.

But it was here, according to experts, that the tragedy began.

The forensic team worked from morning until dusk.

They marked each area with tape, manually cleared the ground of leaves, and worked with metal detectors on every inch of soil.

A few tens of meters from the initial discovery, the device beeped again.

The forensic scientist who was raking up the fern picked up another 9mm cartridge case.

This confirmed the hypothesis of several shots fired in different directions.

But more importantly, two additional smaller caliber shell casings were found nearby.

Experts identified them as 22 LR rounds, which are small caliber rifle cartridges commonly used by novice hunters and those who hunt for fun, not professionally.

Klene would later record in his official report what he said on the spot.

There were two here.

This was not an official conclusion, but it was supported by the logic of the findings.

Two different calibers, different types of shell casings, different trajectories.

The hypothesis of two shooters changed the entire direction of the investigation.

The first one armed with a small caliber rifle could have fired at a distance, not to kill, but rather to intimidate or stop.

This was consistent with the nature of the first shot, which according to the jacket’s examination did not fully penetrate the body.

The second shooter with a 9mm pistol acted differently.

This type of pistol was used at short range and required a clear approach to the target.

The combination of these features did not seem to be a coincidence.

People shooting at tourists in a national park didn’t look like they were just making a mistake or mistaking someone for an animal.

It looked like organized behavior, fast, deliberate, and aimed at eliminating witnesses.

Searchers with dogs received a new task to find a place where they could hide the body.

They moved in concentric circles away from the terrace, stopping at every depression, every damp slope where there might be fresh earth or a drag mark.

The dogs picked up Chris’s scent only in the area of the shots, after which the trail was lost between the stones.

This indicated that the body, if it was there, could have been moved or lifted onto a vehicle.

But no tires or shoe prints were found.

The ground was too rocky and the undergrowth too thick for a clear trail.

Klein began checking another line of inquiry.

Illegal activity in the park.

Every year there were cases of poaching in Smoky Mountains, mostly at night.

Many of the confiscations involved small caliber rifles.

In recent months, Ranger reports have made several references to unidentified men seen on remote trails with sacks and knives to butcher the animal.

These records had no direct evidence, but were consistent with the theory that Chris and Sam had accidentally stumbled upon something illegal.

Perhaps an illegal hunt or a place where someone was butchering a carcass.

In such cases, poachers often act nervously and aggressively, fearing encounters with witnesses.

Ballistics expertise added another layer.

The findings confirmed that the shot from the small caliber rifle was fired from a relatively long distance and could have been a warning shot.

But the marks on the jacket from 9mm rounds indicated close contact.

It was already a strike aimed at killing.

That is first someone wanted to drive him away and then to silence him.

The version Klein presented in his departmental report looked like this.

Chris and Sam went off the trail and came across two poachers in the process of illegal activity.

The first shot was supposed to drive them away or stop them.

But for some unknown reason, the men did not leave or did not have time.

When Chris tried to drag Sam to cover or retreat calmly, the situation got out of hand.

The next shots were fired almost at close range.

Sam confirmed this indirectly.

his memories of the chase.

Fragments of footsteps behind him, a dark silhouette.

Everything fit into this picture.

After the shooting, the perpetrators probably chased the boy, but because of the thicket and darkness, they could not catch up with him.

Then they returned to hide the body.

If they took him away, they most likely had the tools and means to move him a distance.

But the most difficult question remained the same.

where exactly Chris Carol’s body was now.

Klene ordered a check of all the registers of violations in the park over the past year, from illegal logging to hunting with spotlights.

He had a feeling that he wrote down in a memo, “Someone in this district knows what happened that day.

They have known for a long time, but they are silent.

And if you find this someone, you will also find that hole in the ground or that abandoned quarry where the most important answer in this case is hidden.

After finding traces of two types of weapons and confirming the presence of at least two shooters, the investigation finally changed direction.

Detective Jason Klene focused his attention on possible poachers.

the only group of people who regularly worked in the deeper parts of the park away from official trails and the gaze of tourists.

To do this, he requested summary statistics on all violations of the environmental regime over the past 6 months.

The materials came from several sources, internal ranger reports, reports from local residents, and complaints from hunters who had encountered suspicious activity in Great Smoky Mountains.

One trend clearly stood out in these materials.

An increase in cases of illegal deer hunting with the use of flashlights.

This is the illumination of the animal at night with car headlights or special spotlights, a method prohibited in all states.

Several rangers recorded traces of salted bait placed in deep parts of the forest, indicating the systematic activity of experienced poaching groups.

In one report dated around the same time as the Carol’s disappearance, a ranger described a suspicious off-road vehicle seen on a dirt road near the illegal ambush zone.

He was unable to make out the brand, but he remembered the color clearly, maroon.

Additional descriptions included a worn hood and a trunk that looked like it was often used to transport heavy items.

Klene connected this description to other evidence and realized that this could be a vehicle associated with the shooters.

He ordered the analytics department to collect data on all maroon Toyota Tacoma pickups registered in Sevier, Blount and Kaka counties.

Hunting was popular in these areas and such vehicles were common, but the detective hoped to find repeated matches complaints, previous arrests, suspicions of illegal hunting.

At the same time, the police held a public briefing distributing a description of the SUV.

Klene did not disclose any details about the shell casings or the investigation, only asked people to report if they saw a car whose owner’s behavior might seem suspicious.

The first person to come forward was a resident of Pigeon Forge, a middle-aged man who often rode his bike near forest roads.

He said that a few days before the disappearance of the tourists was announced on television, he had seen a maroon Tacoma on a remote road leading to a part of the park that was difficult to access.

He noticed the strange behavior of two men who were pulling something out of the trunk and dragging a large sack into the bushes.

The witness explained that at first he thought it was garbage.

It happened often in the region.

But the men acted as if they were afraid of prying eyes.

According to him, as soon as they noticed the cyclist, both abruptly stopped pulling the sack, quickly got into the car, and drove away without saying a word.

He tried to see the license plate, but it was dirty.

All he remembered was that there were two people in the car, a driver and a passenger, both of them strongly built and wearing hunting jackets.

This was the first real evidence linking the suspicious vehicle to the events that took place on the day of the Carol’s disappearance.

The coincidence in time and place seemed too precise to be accidental.

Klene ordered all records of poaching groups operating in the region to be pulled up.

Particular attention was paid to two men who had been suspected of night hunting for several years, but could not be prosecuted due to lack of evidence.

In internal documents, their names were mentioned in passing, but they appeared regularly, either in the context of confiscating equipment or in references to traps or bait found.

At the same time, forensic experts analyzed the route the shooters could have taken after the shooting incident.

For people who knew the forest, it was easy to take side roads and enter one of the technical trails that were rarely patrolled.

An off-road vehicle of this type could easily drive through gravel areas, reaching a place where the body could be removed or evidence could be hidden.

The version built by the detectives suggested that Chris and Sam had accidentally stumbled upon the poachers while transporting or cutting up their prey.

Such groups worked quickly, roughly, and almost always armed.

The first shots may have been a warning, but the situation likely escalated when Chris tried to protect his son or got too close.

Neither the detectives nor the poachers knew that Sam had returned to his father.

To them, he was most likely a witness who had fled into the thicket.

The logical next step for these types of people was to chase him down and then return to the site to retrieve the body.

The absence of footprints on the ground only confirmed the hypothesis that they had taken him with them.

The more information Klene gathered, the more convinced he became that the events were no accident.

Some of the local poachers had something to hide.

They were armed, moved through the forest as others do in their own backyards, and according to rangers, repeatedly avoided patrols.

The investigation had a concrete direction.

But in order to identify the men involved definitively, Detective Klene needed more than eyewitness accounts and a general picture.

He needed hard evidence weapons, blood stains, objects left at the crime scene, or anything that would link specific people to that rocky terrace in the heart of the forest.

After putting out an APB for the maroon Toyota Tacoma, detectives received information about several owners of similarly colored cars, but only one matched the minor violations known in the park.

The car belonged to a Sever County resident named Liam Weiss.

His record included fines for illegally setting traps and ranger reports mentioned several times the name of a man who avoided patrols in the evening.

His friend David Bradley often appeared with him.

The two men lived in an old wooden house on the outskirts of Pigeon Forge, a place where a strip of woods came so close to the backyards that the shadows of the trees fell directly on the windows.

The house looked rund down.

The roof was sagging, and the backyard was cluttered with scrap metal, tools, and hunting gear.

It was an area where it was difficult to determine the line between household clutter and what someone wanted to hide.

The detectives arrived early in the morning when the fog was still lingering between the tree trunks.

When they pulled up in front of the house, the door was thrown open and Liam Weiss, seeing the police, ran across the yard.

His friend David Bradley ran after him and tried to hide in a shed.

Both were detained within minutes.

The escape attempt only confirmed the suspicions.

While searching the garage, detectives came across the first clues.

On the table among the tools and dried earth was a small caliber rifle.

Next to it was a 9mm pistol.

The weapon was seized and even before receiving the laboratory report, experts assumed that the external signs matched the type of weapon used to shoot Chris Carol.

But the real find was waiting outside.

Klene ordered a search of the backyard.

Behind the house, under an old spreading tree, the ground looked disturbingly fresh.

In this area, the foliage was thick, but here it was almost non-existent, as if someone had rad up the fallen leaves, dug up the ground, and tried to put it back.

When the detectives cleared away the top layer of soil, they saw a piece of cloth.

Then they saw human remains.

Official identification took several hours.

It was Chris Carol.

Later, a forensic expert testified that the nature of the injuries was consistent with wounds that could have been caused by the same weapons that were seized from Weiss and Bradley’s garage.

After the discovery of the body and weapons, Liam was the first to break down.

He was interrogated in the presence of a lawyer, and much of what he said was recorded by investigators.

He did not deny the fact of illegal hunting.

According to him, he and David went out into the mountains late in the afternoon and were just finishing butchering a deer when they heard footsteps.

The phrase he used in his testimony was short.

We weren’t expecting people.

When Chris and Sam arrived at the clearing, they found the poachers at work.

David panicked.

He raised his small caliber rifle and fired a shot in the air.

In Liam’s words, to drive the others away.

But Chris didn’t back down, perhaps protecting his son, perhaps trying to explain that they were just passing through.

David pulled out a gun.

According to Liam, it all happened too fast.

One shot and Chris was down.

Sam ran away and the poachers, scared that he would call for help, ran after him.

When the boy disappeared into the thicket, they returned to the clearing and realized that Chris was still alive.

At that moment, according to Liam, it was he who fired several shots at the wounded man to save himself.

The wording he used did not indicate remorse, but fear.

Fear of being caught, fear of losing his freedom, not fear of having killed a man.

When they were sure that there were no more witnesses, they put Chris’s body in the cargo hold of the Tacoma and drove it home.

there.

They buried him, hoping that the investigation would never go beyond a search in the mountains.

Klene recorded that their version of events was consistent with the evidence.

The shell casings found on the slope, the jacket with two bullet holes, Sam’s behavior running the way the pursuing group was supposed to.

But even after receiving a full confession and finding the body, investigators realized it was not the end for Sam.

He wasn’t fighting for answers.

He was fighting to get back the part of himself that he had lost in those thickets.

When the boy was informed about the arrest of the poachers, he did not show the emotions that psychologists expected to see.

He did not cry or sigh with relief.

According to the doctor, he just sat on the bed for a long time, clutching the edge of the blanket the same way he used to clutch his father’s jacket.

The truth did not bring his father back to him, but it did at least give him an understanding of what had happened.

The emptiness that had kept him in the mountain darkness for a month began to give way to something else.

Not with peace, but with movement forward.

Sam began to ask what would happen next.

Not about the past, but about the future.

This was the first question that was not about the forest.