16 years ago, a girl went into the mountains alone and never returned.

2 years later, tourists found her body in a stone pit, mummified, covered in wax, as if someone had tried to preserve her forever.

The person who did this lived an ordinary life, and worked with the dead everyday.

White Mountains, New Hampshire, the northern part of the Appalachian, where mountain ranges rise above valleys covered with dense forests.

This place is both beautiful and dangerous.

In summer, thousands of tourists come here to walk the trails, climb the peaks, and enjoy the views.

In winter, the mountains turn into an icy desert where temperatures drop to minus30° and the wind knocks you off your feet.

Even experienced climbers die here, losing their way in a snowstorm or falling off cliffs.

Locals say that the mountains take those who do not respect their power.

In August 2009, 27year-old Leah Thompson was preparing for another hike.

She lived in conquered the capital of New Hampshire, a small town with a population of 40,000 where everyone knows each other, crime is rare, and the main news is related to local festivals and school competitions.

Leah worked as a biologist in a university research laboratory studying the impact of climate change on local bird populations.

Her work was her passion.

Colleagues described her as a quiet, focused, determined young woman who could spend hours pouring over a microscope or analyzing data.

But there was another passion in Leah’s life, the mountains.

She had been hiking with her parents since childhood, and when she grew up, she began to travel alone.

She said that the silence of the mountains helped her think that she felt truly alive there.

Her friends were worried.

Solo hikes are dangerous, especially in places like the White Mountains.

But Leah was always careful.

She left detailed route notes, took a GPS navigator and a satellite phone in case of an emergency.

She never took unnecessary risks.

Leah was short, 5’3, thin, with dark hair that she usually wore in a ponytail and gray eyes behind thin rimmed glasses.

She had a soft smile and a calm voice.

She didn’t stand out in a crowd or attract attention.

She lived alone in a small apartment on the outskirts of conquered and was dating a guy named Brian, an engineer from a neighboring town, but the relationship was calm and dramaree.

Her parents, Robert and Martha Thompson, lived an hour away in the town of Lebanon.

She visited them every 2 weeks for Sunday dinner.

It was the ordinary, quiet life of an ordinary person.

On Saturday, August 15th, 2009, Leah loaded her backpack into her old blue Honda Civic and drove toward the mountains.

The weather was perfect for hiking.

Clear skies, a temperature of around 25°, and a light breeze.

She planned a 3-day route along the Mount Adams Ridge, one of the most beautiful but challenging sections of the White Mountains.

The summit was 1.5 km high and the trail was about 20 km long in one direction with an elevation gain of more than a kilometer.

It wasn’t for beginners, but Leah had done this route before.

She left a trail note at the Ranger Visitor Center at the entrance to the national park.

She wrote that she planned to set out on the trail on August 15th at around a.m., climb to the summit of Mount Adams by evening, spend the night there, then descend the Eastern Slope to Great Gulf Lake, where she planned to spend the second night, and returned to the parking lot by noon on August 18th.

She provided her satellite phone number and asked that her parents be contacted if she did not return on time.

Leah parked her car in the parking lot at the trail head.

Surveillance cameras at the entrance recorded her car at a.m.

The video showed her getting out of the car, putting on her backpack, checking her shoelaces, locking the car, and walking toward the trail.

That was the last time she was seen alive.

On Tuesday, August 18th, when Leah was supposed to return, her car was still in the parking lot.

By evening, when she had not shown up, the rangers checked her itinerary and tried to contact her on her satellite phone.

The number did not answer.

They called her parents.

Robert and Martha said that their daughter had not been in touch since the 15th, which was unusual, but they were not worried, thinking that she was just enjoying the hike.

But now they were worried.

Martha immediately called Brian, Leah’s boyfriend.

He said he had spoken to Leah on the morning of the 15th before she left.

She was in a good mood, excited about the upcoming hike.

They had not communicated since.

The rangers sounded the alarm.

On the night of the 15th, the search operation began.

The search party consisted of national park rangers, volunteers from the local search and rescue team, and police officers from conquered, about 50 people in total.

They divided into teams and began combing the route Leah had indicated.

They used dogs, a helicopter with thermal imaging, and checked every trail and every fork in the road.

2 days later, they found their first clue.

At an altitude of about 1 kilometer, approximately 5 km from the start of the trail, they discovered the place where they had spent the night.

There were the remains of a campfire carefully extinguished.

Nearby were traces of a tent on the soft ground and empty packaging from freeze-dried food, beef and rice, the same brand that Leah usually took with her.

Her parents confirmed this, but the tent itself was gone.

No backpack, no sleeping bag, nothing.

Only traces that someone had been there.

The searchers continued up the trail.

They combed the entire summit of Mount Adams.

They searched all possible campsites.

They checked the surrounding gorges and ravines where she could have accidentally fallen.

The dogs picked up the trail from the campfire site, but lost it after half a kilometer on a rocky section where there were no footprints.

They checked cell phone signals.

The last signal from her cell phone was recorded by a tower on August 18th at a.m.

The location was 3 km northeast of where the campfire was found.

It was a remote area off the main trails.

After that, the phone either turned off, ran out of battery, or was destroyed.

The satellite phone had not transmitted any signals since August 16th.

The last signal was recorded in the same area where they found the campsite.

The search continued for 2 weeks.

Dozens of square kilometers were combed.

All trails, all known caves and shelters were checked.

Other tourists who were in the mountains during those days were interviewed.

Several people recalled seeing a young woman with dark hair and a backpack walking along the trail on August 15th.

But no one noticed anything unusual.

No pursuers, no suspicious characters.

They began to consider different scenarios.

The first was an accident.

Leah could have slipped, fallen into a crevice or ravine, hit her head, and lost consciousness.

Her body could have been hidden under rocks or in the water of a mountain stream.

The second scenario involved wild animals.

There are bears and cougars in the mountains.

Attacks are rare, but they do happen.

The third theory was that Leah got lost, strayed from the trail, tried to find her way back, and died of hypothermia or dehydration.

The fourth theory, which they didn’t want to voice aloud, was foul play.

The police began to investigate the latter theory.

They questioned Brian, Leah’s boyfriend.

He confirmed that their relationship was peaceful with no conflicts or reasons for quarrels.

On the day of Leah’s disappearance, he was at work and his alibi was verified and confirmed by his colleagues.

They questioned her parents.

They were heartbroken, but had no useful information.

Her colleagues from the lab were interviewed.

Everyone said that Leah was nice, that she had no enemies, no strange situations at work.

Her computer, email, and social media accounts were checked, nothing suspicious, just normal correspondence with friends, work emails, posts about hiking, and photos of nature.

But Detective David Connor, who was leading the case, noticed something interesting.

Leah was active on the trail heads New England hiking forum where she discussed routes, shared hiking reports, and asked questions.

A few months before her disappearance, she had been corresponding with several forum members, including a user named Mountain Watcher.

They discussed routes in the White Mountains area.

Mountain Watcher gave advice, shared his experience, and recommended littleknown places.

Detective Connor tried to contact this user through the forum administration.

He received information that the account was registered to an email address that turned out to be temporary created through an anonymous service.

The IP addresses of the login were from different locations in New Hampshire, but none of them led to a specific person.

Mountain Watchers stopped posting on the forum after Leah’s disappearance.

It was a lead, but it led nowhere.

Too little information, too much anonymity.

A month after her disappearance, the search was called off.

Nobody was found.

There was no evidence.

The case was classified as a disappearance under suspicious circumstances, and transferred to the cold case department.

Leah’s parents didn’t give up.

They hired private investigators, put up posters all over the state, gave interviews to local media, and asked anyone with information to come forward.

They set up a fund to search for people missing in the mountains.

But months passed and there was no information.

Hope was fading.

Life and conquered gradually returned to normal.

People stopped talking about Leah Thompson.

Her case became just another unsolved mystery, another name on the list of missing persons.

But the truth was close.

Closer than anyone could have imagined.

On July 23rd, 2011, almost two years later, two tourists from Massachusetts, Kevin and Jennifer Hart, were on a day hike on one of the side trails in the Mount Adams area.

It was not a popular trail, more of a game trail used by the occasional traveler seeking to escape the crowds.

The weather was good, sunny, and warm.

They walked slowly, enjoying the views, photographing flowers and birds.

About two kilometers from the main trail, on the slope of a small ravine, Kevin noticed something strange.

Between two large boulders, he could see stonework that was clearly man-made.

The stones were neatly stacked on top of each other, forming a wall.

On top lay a large, flat boulder pressed tightly against the others.

It looked like an old grave or some kind of storage place.

Kevin came closer and called Jennifer.

They tried to move the top boulder, but it was too heavy.

They looked into the cracks between the stones.

It was dark inside, but there was a strange smell.

Not the smell of decay, but something chemical, waxy.

They photographed the site, noted the coordinates on their GPS, and went down to the nearest ranger station.

They reported their discovery.

The ranger, a young guy named Tyler, initially thought it was an old cellar or a trap for animals which hunters sometimes built in the past, but he decided to check it out anyway.

The next day, July 24th, Tyler along with two colleagues and Kevin went up to the site.

They brought shovels, crowbars, and flashlights with them.

They began to dismantle the stonework.

They worked carefully, stone by stone.

When they removed the top boulder and cleared away several layers of stones, a pit opened up.

It was about a meter deep and lined with smaller stones on the inside.

And inside was something wrapped in darkened tarpolen.

The rangers exchanged glances.

Tyler climbed down into the pit and carefully pulled back the edge of the tarpollen and froze.

Under the tarpollen was a body.

The body of a woman covered with a thick layer of dark wax.

The wax was applied evenly, covering the entire body like a cocoon.

Through the wax, the outlines of the face, hands, and feet were visible.

The body was lying on its side in a fetal position, arms crossed over the chest.

Tyler climbed out of the pit, took out his radio, and called the police and forensic experts.

Within an hour, the area was cordoned off.

Detectives, a medical examiner, and technicians arrived.

They began their examination.

The body was removed from the pit very carefully.

The wax was hard but brittle.

They did not attempt to remove it on site, but transported it as is to the morg of the district hospital in Berlin, the nearest large town.

The medical examiner, Dr.

Elizabeth Green began the autopsy the next day.

What she saw shocked her.

The wax covered the body in a layer 2 to 5 cm thick.

It was dark brown in color with a matte surface.

Dr.

Green carefully began to remove the wax, heating it with special instruments.

Underneath the wax, the skin was mummified, dry, but surprisingly well preserved.

The facial features were distinguishable.

Some of the hair was preserved, dark and short.

The body was clothed.

A light blue hiking jacket, a t-shirt, trekking pants, thermal underwear.

Everything was soaked in wax, but recognizable.

A driver’s license was found in the pockets.

Leah Thompson.

The news exploded in the local media.

The girl who had disappeared 2 years ago had been found dead, mummified, hidden in a stone pit in the mountains.

Detective Connor, who had been leading the missing person’s case, immediately took over the investigation.

He understood that this was not an accident.

It was murder.

Carefully planned, carefully concealed.

Dr.

Green continued the autopsy.

She discovered several important details.

There were marks on Leah’s neck from strangulation, thin stripes as if from fabric or rope.

The hyoid bone was broken.

Death was caused by asphyxiation.

There were puncture marks on her arms near the elbow bends.

Small, barely noticeable, but characteristic of injections.

Tissue analysis showed traces of suinal choline, a muscle relaxant used in anesthesiology for temporary paralysis during surgery.

In large doses, it is lethal, but in this case, the dose was insufficient to cause death.

The drug was probably used to immobilize the victim.

The wax was sent to a forensic laboratory for analysis.

The results showed that it was not ordinary beeswax or paraffin wax.

It was a specialized compound based on polyethylene glycol and resins, which is used in morgs and laboratories to preserve bodies and organs.

This type of wax is not sold in regular stores.

It can only be purchased through specialized medical equipment suppliers.

Dr.

Green determined that death occurred approximately 4 to 5 days after Leah’s disappearance.

That is on August 19th or 20th, 2009.

The body was treated with wax shortly after death within 24 hours.

The wax, the low temperature in the pit, and the lack of air created conditions for mummification.

Thanks to this, the body was preserved for almost 2 years.

Leah’s mouth was tightly closed with a piece of cloth wrapped around her head.

The fabric was analyzed.

It was ordinary cotton, the kind used for bandages or medical dressings.

Detective Connor realized he was dealing with a criminal with specialized knowledge, someone with a medical or biological education, someone who knew how to work with bodies, someone who had access to specialized materials and preparations.

He began by checking everyone who could have had contact with Leah.

He questioned Brian, her boyfriend, again.

Brian worked as an engineer for a construction company and had no connection to medicine.

His alibi for the days of Leah’s disappearance and presumed death was checked again.

Everything was clear.

His colleagues from the laboratory were checked.

Most were biologists, but none of them had access to the morg or funeral supplies.

Moreover, they were all at work on the days of Leah’s disappearance, and their alibis were confirmed.

Connor returned to the lead with the travel forum user Mountain Watcher.

He contacted the forum administration again and asked them to provide all available information.

He received the login logs for the last 3 years.

He began to analyze them.

Most of the login were from public places, libraries, cafes with free Wi-Fi, but several login were from the same place, the hospital in Manchester, the largest city in New Hampshire.

more precisely from the hospital network which included several buildings including the morg.

Connor requested a list of hospital employees who worked in 2009.

He received a list of 200 people.

He began to narrow down the circle.

He needed someone who worked with bodies who had access to wax and chemicals who was familiar with the preservation process.

Five people worked in the hospital’s pathology and morg department.

two pathologists, one assistant, two technicians.

Connor began checking each one.

One of the morg technicians, Richard Flowers, 42 years old, caught his attention.

He had been working at the hospital since 2006.

His duties included preparing bodies for autopsy, cleaning and preserving them, and working with biological materials.

He also volunteered for an organization that repatriated the bodies of Americans who had died abroad.

His job was to prepare the bodies for transport, imbalming, treating them with preservatives, and packing them.

Connor checked his biography.

Richard Flowers was born in Manchester and had lived in the state his entire life.

He had a secondary vocational education and had taken courses in pathological anatomy techniques.

He was not married and had no children.

He lived alone in a small house on the outskirts of Manchester.

He enjoyed hiking and often went to the mountains.

No criminal record, not a single offense.

A gray, unremarkable life.

But Connor dug deeper.

He requested financial records and he discovered some interesting purchases.

In March 2009, 5 months before Leah’s disappearance, Flowers bought 10 kgs of preservation wax from a specialized supplier.

The official reason for the purchase was for work at a volunteer organization, but the organization’s records made no mention of the wax being used.

Where did it go? In July 2009, Flowers bought ampules of succininal colon from an online pharmacy that required a prescription.

The prescription was fake, but this has only now been discovered.

Back in 2009, the pharmacy did not check thoroughly.

Connor obtained a search warrant for Flores’s home.

On July 29th, 2011, a group of police officers and forensic scientists arrived at the address.

Flores was at home, greeted them calmly, and said he was ready to cooperate.

The search lasted several hours.

A small workshop was found in the basement of the house.

On the shelves were jars of chemicals, dissection tools, and containers of wax.

In one of the cabinets, they found a folder with newspaper clippings, articles about body preservation, mummification, and ancient rituals for preserving beauty after death.

There were handwritten notes by floors in the margins.

He wrote about how to preserve a body in its natural state, how to prevent decomposition, how to create eternal beauty.

Another folder contained photographs.

Photographs of women taken with a hidden camera.

Different women in different places on trails, in parking lots, in cafes.

Among them were photos of Leah Thompson.

Dozens of photos taken a few months before her disappearance.

Leah by the car.

Leah on the trail.

Leah in the lab through the window.

On Flor’s computer, they found correspondence on a travel forum.

The login and password for the Mountain Watcher account.

He really was the user who corresponded with Leah and gave her advice on roots.

The browser history contained searches for preservation of human bodies, mummification at home, and how to preserve a body after death.

The searches were conducted between January and July 2009.

But the most shocking discovery was in the freezer in the basement.

There, among the frozen food, lay a sealed plastic container.

Inside were Leah’s personal belongings, her backpack, tent, sleeping bag, GPS navigator, satellite phone, and camera.

Everything was neatly stacked as if they were museum exhibits.

Flores was arrested on the spot.

He was taken to the police station where the interrogation began.

Detective Connor conducted the interrogation himself.

Flores sat calmly, his hands folded on the table, his face expressionless.

Connor asked questions and presented evidence.

Photos: Leah’s belongings, records of purchases of wax and chemicals.

Flowers listened silently.

When Connor asked him directly if he had killed Leah Thompson, Flowers looked at him for a long time.

Then he said he wanted a lawyer.

The interrogation was stopped.

Flowers was assigned a public defender.

The investigation continued.

Forensic experts reconstructed the chronology of events.

Flowers had been following Leah for several months.

He studied her habits, hiking routes, and schedule.

When she posted her plans for a hike in the White Mountains in August on a forum, he decided to act.

On August 15th, 2009, Flores took a vacation from work.

He drove to the mountains in his dark green Ford F-150 pickup truck.

He parked in one of the side parking lots, not where Leah was, so as not to attract attention.

He set out on the trail with his own backpack, dressed in ordinary hiking clothes.

He looked like a typical hiker.

He knew Leah’s approximate route.

He knew where she planned to spend the first night.

He waited until dark.

He crept up to her camp.

Leah was sitting by the fire cooking dinner.

He approached her, introduced himself as a fellow hiker and struck up a conversation.

Leah, trusting and friendly, did not sense any danger.

At one point, Flores offered her an energy drink he had made.

He said it was a special hiking recipe that would give her strength.

Leah drank it.

A few minutes later, she felt weak.

Her legs and arms stopped responding.

The succinyl choline had taken effect.

Flores tied her up and gagged her.

He waited until she was completely immobilized.

Then he suffocated her with a cloth slowly and methodically.

He watched as the life drained from her eyes.

After that, he wrapped her body in the tarpollen he had brought with him.

He gathered all her belongings, extinguished the fire, and erased all traces of the camp.

He hoisted the body onto his shoulders and carried it away.

He was strong, accustomed to physical exertion.

He carried it several kilometers to a place he had prepared in advance.

It was a pit in the slope of the ravine that he had dug a few days earlier and camouflaged with stones.

He placed the body in the pit.

He returned to his pickup truck, brought containers of wax and heating equipment.

He had hidden all this in advance in the forest near the pit.

He melted the wax on a portable burner and poured it over the body layer by layer, covering it completely.

He worked all night and finished by morning.

He sealed the hole with stones and covered it with a boulder.

The location was chosen so that a casual tourist would not notice it.

It was just another pile of rocks among hundreds of others in the mountains.

Flores returned home and hid Leah’s belongings in the freezer.

He continued to live his normal life.

He went to work, socialized with colleagues, and went hiking.

No one suspected anything.

Why did he do it? Investigators tried to understand his motive.

They studied his psychological profile and hired experts.

It turned out that Flores suffered from a hidden form of necrilia.

He was not attracted to violence against bodies, but to their preservation, the creation of perfect eternal beauty.

He saw it as art.

Leah attracted his attention with her naturalenness, her love of nature.

He wanted to preserve her exactly as she was, young, alive, but at the same time dead, eternal.

In his notes found on his computer, there were fragments of a diary.

He wrote that he wanted to create the perfect image to combine life and death, beauty and peace.

He wrote that Leah was the perfect candidate, that after death she would become even more beautiful, freed from the transients of life.

It was an illness, a dangerous, perverse illness that he had hidden for years.

The case was referred to court.

The trial began in March 2012.

Flores was charged with first-degree murder with aggravating circumstances, kidnapping, and desecration of a corpse.

The defense tried to get him declared insane.

They hired psychiatrists who claimed that Flores suffered from a mental disorder and was not aware of the criminal nature of his actions.

But the prosecution presented evidence of careful planning, purchasing materials months before the crime, stalking the victim, preparing the scene, destroying evidence.

All of this indicated that Flores acted consciously, methodically, with full understanding of what he was doing.

The jury deliberated for 3 days.

They returned a verdict of guilty on all counts.

The judge sentenced Richard Flowers to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Leah’s parents, Robert and Martha, attended all the court hearings.

When the sentence was announced, Martha cried, not out of joy or relief, out of pain.

Their daughter was dead.

Justice had been served, but it did not bring Leah back.

Leah’s body was cremated.

Her ashes were scattered in the mountains she loved so much.

A memorial plaque was placed on one of the trails on Mount Adams.

It reads, “In memory of Leah Thompson, who loved these mountains, may her spirit always be free.” Leah Thompson’s story became a warning.

That danger can come from where you least expect it.

That monsters don’t always look like monsters.

That a person who works with the dead every day can become someone who creates the dead.

Richard Flowers is serving his sentence in a maximum security federal prison.

He rarely talks to other inmates and spends his time alone.

The psychologists working with him note that he shows no remorse.

He just stays silent.

Girl vanished in Appalachian Mountains — 2 years later hikers found her MUMMY covered in WAX…

16 years ago, a girl went into the mountains alone and never returned.

2 years later, tourists found her body in a stone pit, mummified, covered in wax, as if someone had tried to preserve her forever.

The person who did this lived an ordinary life, and worked with the dead everyday.

White Mountains, New Hampshire, the northern part of the Appalachian, where mountain ranges rise above valleys covered with dense forests.

This place is both beautiful and dangerous.

In summer, thousands of tourists come here to walk the trails, climb the peaks, and enjoy the views.

In winter, the mountains turn into an icy desert where temperatures drop to minus30° and the wind knocks you off your feet.

Even experienced climbers die here, losing their way in a snowstorm or falling off cliffs.

Locals say that the mountains take those who do not respect their power.

In August 2009, 27year-old Leah Thompson was preparing for another hike.

She lived in conquered the capital of New Hampshire, a small town with a population of 40,000 where everyone knows each other, crime is rare, and the main news is related to local festivals and school competitions.

Leah worked as a biologist in a university research laboratory studying the impact of climate change on local bird populations.

Her work was her passion.

Colleagues described her as a quiet, focused, determined young woman who could spend hours pouring over a microscope or analyzing data.

But there was another passion in Leah’s life, the mountains.

She had been hiking with her parents since childhood, and when she grew up, she began to travel alone.

She said that the silence of the mountains helped her think that she felt truly alive there.

Her friends were worried.

Solo hikes are dangerous, especially in places like the White Mountains.

But Leah was always careful.

She left detailed route notes, took a GPS navigator and a satellite phone in case of an emergency.

She never took unnecessary risks.

Leah was short, 5’3, thin, with dark hair that she usually wore in a ponytail and gray eyes behind thin rimmed glasses.

She had a soft smile and a calm voice.

She didn’t stand out in a crowd or attract attention.

She lived alone in a small apartment on the outskirts of conquered and was dating a guy named Brian, an engineer from a neighboring town, but the relationship was calm and dramaree.

Her parents, Robert and Martha Thompson, lived an hour away in the town of Lebanon.

She visited them every 2 weeks for Sunday dinner.

It was the ordinary, quiet life of an ordinary person.

On Saturday, August 15th, 2009, Leah loaded her backpack into her old blue Honda Civic and drove toward the mountains.

The weather was perfect for hiking.

Clear skies, a temperature of around 25°, and a light breeze.

She planned a 3-day route along the Mount Adams Ridge, one of the most beautiful but challenging sections of the White Mountains.

The summit was 1.5 km high and the trail was about 20 km long in one direction with an elevation gain of more than a kilometer.

It wasn’t for beginners, but Leah had done this route before.

She left a trail note at the Ranger Visitor Center at the entrance to the national park.

She wrote that she planned to set out on the trail on August 15th at around a.m., climb to the summit of Mount Adams by evening, spend the night there, then descend the Eastern Slope to Great Gulf Lake, where she planned to spend the second night, and returned to the parking lot by noon on August 18th.

She provided her satellite phone number and asked that her parents be contacted if she did not return on time.

Leah parked her car in the parking lot at the trail head.

Surveillance cameras at the entrance recorded her car at a.m.

The video showed her getting out of the car, putting on her backpack, checking her shoelaces, locking the car, and walking toward the trail.

That was the last time she was seen alive.

On Tuesday, August 18th, when Leah was supposed to return, her car was still in the parking lot.

By evening, when she had not shown up, the rangers checked her itinerary and tried to contact her on her satellite phone.

The number did not answer.

They called her parents.

Robert and Martha said that their daughter had not been in touch since the 15th, which was unusual, but they were not worried, thinking that she was just enjoying the hike.

But now they were worried.

Martha immediately called Brian, Leah’s boyfriend.

He said he had spoken to Leah on the morning of the 15th before she left.

She was in a good mood, excited about the upcoming hike.

They had not communicated since.

The rangers sounded the alarm.

On the night of the 15th, the search operation began.

The search party consisted of national park rangers, volunteers from the local search and rescue team, and police officers from conquered, about 50 people in total.

They divided into teams and began combing the route Leah had indicated.

They used dogs, a helicopter with thermal imaging, and checked every trail and every fork in the road.

2 days later, they found their first clue.

At an altitude of about 1 kilometer, approximately 5 km from the start of the trail, they discovered the place where they had spent the night.

There were the remains of a campfire carefully extinguished.

Nearby were traces of a tent on the soft ground and empty packaging from freeze-dried food, beef and rice, the same brand that Leah usually took with her.

Her parents confirmed this, but the tent itself was gone.

No backpack, no sleeping bag, nothing.

Only traces that someone had been there.

The searchers continued up the trail.

They combed the entire summit of Mount Adams.

They searched all possible campsites.

They checked the surrounding gorges and ravines where she could have accidentally fallen.

The dogs picked up the trail from the campfire site, but lost it after half a kilometer on a rocky section where there were no footprints.

They checked cell phone signals.

The last signal from her cell phone was recorded by a tower on August 18th at a.m.

The location was 3 km northeast of where the campfire was found.

It was a remote area off the main trails.

After that, the phone either turned off, ran out of battery, or was destroyed.

The satellite phone had not transmitted any signals since August 16th.

The last signal was recorded in the same area where they found the campsite.

The search continued for 2 weeks.

Dozens of square kilometers were combed.

All trails, all known caves and shelters were checked.

Other tourists who were in the mountains during those days were interviewed.

Several people recalled seeing a young woman with dark hair and a backpack walking along the trail on August 15th.

But no one noticed anything unusual.

No pursuers, no suspicious characters.

They began to consider different scenarios.

The first was an accident.

Leah could have slipped, fallen into a crevice or ravine, hit her head, and lost consciousness.

Her body could have been hidden under rocks or in the water of a mountain stream.

The second scenario involved wild animals.

There are bears and cougars in the mountains.

Attacks are rare, but they do happen.

The third theory was that Leah got lost, strayed from the trail, tried to find her way back, and died of hypothermia or dehydration.

The fourth theory, which they didn’t want to voice aloud, was foul play.

The police began to investigate the latter theory.

They questioned Brian, Leah’s boyfriend.

He confirmed that their relationship was peaceful with no conflicts or reasons for quarrels.

On the day of Leah’s disappearance, he was at work and his alibi was verified and confirmed by his colleagues.

They questioned her parents.

They were heartbroken, but had no useful information.

Her colleagues from the lab were interviewed.

Everyone said that Leah was nice, that she had no enemies, no strange situations at work.

Her computer, email, and social media accounts were checked, nothing suspicious, just normal correspondence with friends, work emails, posts about hiking, and photos of nature.

But Detective David Connor, who was leading the case, noticed something interesting.

Leah was active on the trail heads New England hiking forum where she discussed routes, shared hiking reports, and asked questions.

A few months before her disappearance, she had been corresponding with several forum members, including a user named Mountain Watcher.

They discussed routes in the White Mountains area.

Mountain Watcher gave advice, shared his experience, and recommended littleknown places.

Detective Connor tried to contact this user through the forum administration.

He received information that the account was registered to an email address that turned out to be temporary created through an anonymous service.

The IP addresses of the login were from different locations in New Hampshire, but none of them led to a specific person.

Mountain Watchers stopped posting on the forum after Leah’s disappearance.

It was a lead, but it led nowhere.

Too little information, too much anonymity.

A month after her disappearance, the search was called off.

Nobody was found.

There was no evidence.

The case was classified as a disappearance under suspicious circumstances, and transferred to the cold case department.

Leah’s parents didn’t give up.

They hired private investigators, put up posters all over the state, gave interviews to local media, and asked anyone with information to come forward.

They set up a fund to search for people missing in the mountains.

But months passed and there was no information.

Hope was fading.

Life and conquered gradually returned to normal.

People stopped talking about Leah Thompson.

Her case became just another unsolved mystery, another name on the list of missing persons.

But the truth was close.

Closer than anyone could have imagined.

On July 23rd, 2011, almost two years later, two tourists from Massachusetts, Kevin and Jennifer Hart, were on a day hike on one of the side trails in the Mount Adams area.

It was not a popular trail, more of a game trail used by the occasional traveler seeking to escape the crowds.

The weather was good, sunny, and warm.

They walked slowly, enjoying the views, photographing flowers and birds.

About two kilometers from the main trail, on the slope of a small ravine, Kevin noticed something strange.

Between two large boulders, he could see stonework that was clearly man-made.

The stones were neatly stacked on top of each other, forming a wall.

On top lay a large, flat boulder pressed tightly against the others.

It looked like an old grave or some kind of storage place.

Kevin came closer and called Jennifer.

They tried to move the top boulder, but it was too heavy.

They looked into the cracks between the stones.

It was dark inside, but there was a strange smell.

Not the smell of decay, but something chemical, waxy.

They photographed the site, noted the coordinates on their GPS, and went down to the nearest ranger station.

They reported their discovery.

The ranger, a young guy named Tyler, initially thought it was an old cellar or a trap for animals which hunters sometimes built in the past, but he decided to check it out anyway.

The next day, July 24th, Tyler along with two colleagues and Kevin went up to the site.

They brought shovels, crowbars, and flashlights with them.

They began to dismantle the stonework.

They worked carefully, stone by stone.

When they removed the top boulder and cleared away several layers of stones, a pit opened up.

It was about a meter deep and lined with smaller stones on the inside.

And inside was something wrapped in darkened tarpolen.

The rangers exchanged glances.

Tyler climbed down into the pit and carefully pulled back the edge of the tarpollen and froze.

Under the tarpollen was a body.

The body of a woman covered with a thick layer of dark wax.

The wax was applied evenly, covering the entire body like a cocoon.

Through the wax, the outlines of the face, hands, and feet were visible.

The body was lying on its side in a fetal position, arms crossed over the chest.

Tyler climbed out of the pit, took out his radio, and called the police and forensic experts.

Within an hour, the area was cordoned off.

Detectives, a medical examiner, and technicians arrived.

They began their examination.

The body was removed from the pit very carefully.

The wax was hard but brittle.

They did not attempt to remove it on site, but transported it as is to the morg of the district hospital in Berlin, the nearest large town.

The medical examiner, Dr.

Elizabeth Green began the autopsy the next day.

What she saw shocked her.

The wax covered the body in a layer 2 to 5 cm thick.

It was dark brown in color with a matte surface.

Dr.

Green carefully began to remove the wax, heating it with special instruments.

Underneath the wax, the skin was mummified, dry, but surprisingly well preserved.

The facial features were distinguishable.

Some of the hair was preserved, dark and short.

The body was clothed.

A light blue hiking jacket, a t-shirt, trekking pants, thermal underwear.

Everything was soaked in wax, but recognizable.

A driver’s license was found in the pockets.

Leah Thompson.

The news exploded in the local media.

The girl who had disappeared 2 years ago had been found dead, mummified, hidden in a stone pit in the mountains.

Detective Connor, who had been leading the missing person’s case, immediately took over the investigation.

He understood that this was not an accident.

It was murder.

Carefully planned, carefully concealed.

Dr.

Green continued the autopsy.

She discovered several important details.

There were marks on Leah’s neck from strangulation, thin stripes as if from fabric or rope.

The hyoid bone was broken.

Death was caused by asphyxiation.

There were puncture marks on her arms near the elbow bends.

Small, barely noticeable, but characteristic of injections.

Tissue analysis showed traces of suinal choline, a muscle relaxant used in anesthesiology for temporary paralysis during surgery.

In large doses, it is lethal, but in this case, the dose was insufficient to cause death.

The drug was probably used to immobilize the victim.

The wax was sent to a forensic laboratory for analysis.

The results showed that it was not ordinary beeswax or paraffin wax.

It was a specialized compound based on polyethylene glycol and resins, which is used in morgs and laboratories to preserve bodies and organs.

This type of wax is not sold in regular stores.

It can only be purchased through specialized medical equipment suppliers.

Dr.

Green determined that death occurred approximately 4 to 5 days after Leah’s disappearance.

That is on August 19th or 20th, 2009.

The body was treated with wax shortly after death within 24 hours.

The wax, the low temperature in the pit, and the lack of air created conditions for mummification.

Thanks to this, the body was preserved for almost 2 years.

Leah’s mouth was tightly closed with a piece of cloth wrapped around her head.

The fabric was analyzed.

It was ordinary cotton, the kind used for bandages or medical dressings.

Detective Connor realized he was dealing with a criminal with specialized knowledge, someone with a medical or biological education, someone who knew how to work with bodies, someone who had access to specialized materials and preparations.

He began by checking everyone who could have had contact with Leah.

He questioned Brian, her boyfriend, again.

Brian worked as an engineer for a construction company and had no connection to medicine.

His alibi for the days of Leah’s disappearance and presumed death was checked again.

Everything was clear.

His colleagues from the laboratory were checked.

Most were biologists, but none of them had access to the morg or funeral supplies.

Moreover, they were all at work on the days of Leah’s disappearance, and their alibis were confirmed.

Connor returned to the lead with the travel forum user Mountain Watcher.

He contacted the forum administration again and asked them to provide all available information.

He received the login logs for the last 3 years.

He began to analyze them.

Most of the login were from public places, libraries, cafes with free Wi-Fi, but several login were from the same place, the hospital in Manchester, the largest city in New Hampshire.

more precisely from the hospital network which included several buildings including the morg.

Connor requested a list of hospital employees who worked in 2009.

He received a list of 200 people.

He began to narrow down the circle.

He needed someone who worked with bodies who had access to wax and chemicals who was familiar with the preservation process.

Five people worked in the hospital’s pathology and morg department.

two pathologists, one assistant, two technicians.

Connor began checking each one.

One of the morg technicians, Richard Flowers, 42 years old, caught his attention.

He had been working at the hospital since 2006.

His duties included preparing bodies for autopsy, cleaning and preserving them, and working with biological materials.

He also volunteered for an organization that repatriated the bodies of Americans who had died abroad.

His job was to prepare the bodies for transport, imbalming, treating them with preservatives, and packing them.

Connor checked his biography.

Richard Flowers was born in Manchester and had lived in the state his entire life.

He had a secondary vocational education and had taken courses in pathological anatomy techniques.

He was not married and had no children.

He lived alone in a small house on the outskirts of Manchester.

He enjoyed hiking and often went to the mountains.

No criminal record, not a single offense.

A gray, unremarkable life.

But Connor dug deeper.

He requested financial records and he discovered some interesting purchases.

In March 2009, 5 months before Leah’s disappearance, Flowers bought 10 kgs of preservation wax from a specialized supplier.

The official reason for the purchase was for work at a volunteer organization, but the organization’s records made no mention of the wax being used.

Where did it go? In July 2009, Flowers bought ampules of succininal colon from an online pharmacy that required a prescription.

The prescription was fake, but this has only now been discovered.

Back in 2009, the pharmacy did not check thoroughly.

Connor obtained a search warrant for Flores’s home.

On July 29th, 2011, a group of police officers and forensic scientists arrived at the address.

Flores was at home, greeted them calmly, and said he was ready to cooperate.

The search lasted several hours.

A small workshop was found in the basement of the house.

On the shelves were jars of chemicals, dissection tools, and containers of wax.

In one of the cabinets, they found a folder with newspaper clippings, articles about body preservation, mummification, and ancient rituals for preserving beauty after death.

There were handwritten notes by floors in the margins.

He wrote about how to preserve a body in its natural state, how to prevent decomposition, how to create eternal beauty.

Another folder contained photographs.

Photographs of women taken with a hidden camera.

Different women in different places on trails, in parking lots, in cafes.

Among them were photos of Leah Thompson.

Dozens of photos taken a few months before her disappearance.

Leah by the car.

Leah on the trail.

Leah in the lab through the window.

On Flor’s computer, they found correspondence on a travel forum.

The login and password for the Mountain Watcher account.

He really was the user who corresponded with Leah and gave her advice on roots.

The browser history contained searches for preservation of human bodies, mummification at home, and how to preserve a body after death.

The searches were conducted between January and July 2009.

But the most shocking discovery was in the freezer in the basement.

There, among the frozen food, lay a sealed plastic container.

Inside were Leah’s personal belongings, her backpack, tent, sleeping bag, GPS navigator, satellite phone, and camera.

Everything was neatly stacked as if they were museum exhibits.

Flores was arrested on the spot.

He was taken to the police station where the interrogation began.

Detective Connor conducted the interrogation himself.

Flores sat calmly, his hands folded on the table, his face expressionless.

Connor asked questions and presented evidence.

Photos: Leah’s belongings, records of purchases of wax and chemicals.

Flowers listened silently.

When Connor asked him directly if he had killed Leah Thompson, Flowers looked at him for a long time.

Then he said he wanted a lawyer.

The interrogation was stopped.

Flowers was assigned a public defender.

The investigation continued.

Forensic experts reconstructed the chronology of events.

Flowers had been following Leah for several months.

He studied her habits, hiking routes, and schedule.

When she posted her plans for a hike in the White Mountains in August on a forum, he decided to act.

On August 15th, 2009, Flores took a vacation from work.

He drove to the mountains in his dark green Ford F-150 pickup truck.

He parked in one of the side parking lots, not where Leah was, so as not to attract attention.

He set out on the trail with his own backpack, dressed in ordinary hiking clothes.

He looked like a typical hiker.

He knew Leah’s approximate route.

He knew where she planned to spend the first night.

He waited until dark.

He crept up to her camp.

Leah was sitting by the fire cooking dinner.

He approached her, introduced himself as a fellow hiker and struck up a conversation.

Leah, trusting and friendly, did not sense any danger.

At one point, Flores offered her an energy drink he had made.

He said it was a special hiking recipe that would give her strength.

Leah drank it.

A few minutes later, she felt weak.

Her legs and arms stopped responding.

The succinyl choline had taken effect.

Flores tied her up and gagged her.

He waited until she was completely immobilized.

Then he suffocated her with a cloth slowly and methodically.

He watched as the life drained from her eyes.

After that, he wrapped her body in the tarpollen he had brought with him.

He gathered all her belongings, extinguished the fire, and erased all traces of the camp.

He hoisted the body onto his shoulders and carried it away.

He was strong, accustomed to physical exertion.

He carried it several kilometers to a place he had prepared in advance.

It was a pit in the slope of the ravine that he had dug a few days earlier and camouflaged with stones.

He placed the body in the pit.

He returned to his pickup truck, brought containers of wax and heating equipment.

He had hidden all this in advance in the forest near the pit.

He melted the wax on a portable burner and poured it over the body layer by layer, covering it completely.

He worked all night and finished by morning.

He sealed the hole with stones and covered it with a boulder.

The location was chosen so that a casual tourist would not notice it.

It was just another pile of rocks among hundreds of others in the mountains.

Flores returned home and hid Leah’s belongings in the freezer.

He continued to live his normal life.

He went to work, socialized with colleagues, and went hiking.

No one suspected anything.

Why did he do it? Investigators tried to understand his motive.

They studied his psychological profile and hired experts.

It turned out that Flores suffered from a hidden form of necrilia.

He was not attracted to violence against bodies, but to their preservation, the creation of perfect eternal beauty.

He saw it as art.

Leah attracted his attention with her naturalenness, her love of nature.

He wanted to preserve her exactly as she was, young, alive, but at the same time dead, eternal.

In his notes found on his computer, there were fragments of a diary.

He wrote that he wanted to create the perfect image to combine life and death, beauty and peace.

He wrote that Leah was the perfect candidate, that after death she would become even more beautiful, freed from the transients of life.

It was an illness, a dangerous, perverse illness that he had hidden for years.

The case was referred to court.

The trial began in March 2012.

Flores was charged with first-degree murder with aggravating circumstances, kidnapping, and desecration of a corpse.

The defense tried to get him declared insane.

They hired psychiatrists who claimed that Flores suffered from a mental disorder and was not aware of the criminal nature of his actions.

But the prosecution presented evidence of careful planning, purchasing materials months before the crime, stalking the victim, preparing the scene, destroying evidence.

All of this indicated that Flores acted consciously, methodically, with full understanding of what he was doing.

The jury deliberated for 3 days.

They returned a verdict of guilty on all counts.

The judge sentenced Richard Flowers to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Leah’s parents, Robert and Martha, attended all the court hearings.

When the sentence was announced, Martha cried, not out of joy or relief, out of pain.

Their daughter was dead.

Justice had been served, but it did not bring Leah back.

Leah’s body was cremated.

Her ashes were scattered in the mountains she loved so much.

A memorial plaque was placed on one of the trails on Mount Adams.

It reads, “In memory of Leah Thompson, who loved these mountains, may her spirit always be free.” Leah Thompson’s story became a warning.

That danger can come from where you least expect it.

That monsters don’t always look like monsters.

That a person who works with the dead every day can become someone who creates the dead.

Richard Flowers is serving his sentence in a maximum security federal prison.

He rarely talks to other inmates and spends his time alone.

The psychologists working with him note that he shows no remorse.

He just stays silent.

16 years ago, a girl went into the mountains alone and never returned.

2 years later, tourists found her body in a stone pit, mummified, covered in wax, as if someone had tried to preserve her forever.

The person who did this lived an ordinary life, and worked with the dead everyday.

White Mountains, New Hampshire, the northern part of the Appalachian, where mountain ranges rise above valleys covered with dense forests.

This place is both beautiful and dangerous.

In summer, thousands of tourists come here to walk the trails, climb the peaks, and enjoy the views.

In winter, the mountains turn into an icy desert where temperatures drop to minus30° and the wind knocks you off your feet.

Even experienced climbers die here, losing their way in a snowstorm or falling off cliffs.

Locals say that the mountains take those who do not respect their power.

In August 2009, 27year-old Leah Thompson was preparing for another hike.

She lived in conquered the capital of New Hampshire, a small town with a population of 40,000 where everyone knows each other, crime is rare, and the main news is related to local festivals and school competitions.

Leah worked as a biologist in a university research laboratory studying the impact of climate change on local bird populations.

Her work was her passion.

Colleagues described her as a quiet, focused, determined young woman who could spend hours pouring over a microscope or analyzing data.

But there was another passion in Leah’s life, the mountains.

She had been hiking with her parents since childhood, and when she grew up, she began to travel alone.

She said that the silence of the mountains helped her think that she felt truly alive there.

Her friends were worried.

Solo hikes are dangerous, especially in places like the White Mountains.

But Leah was always careful.

She left detailed route notes, took a GPS navigator and a satellite phone in case of an emergency.

She never took unnecessary risks.

Leah was short, 5’3, thin, with dark hair that she usually wore in a ponytail and gray eyes behind thin rimmed glasses.

She had a soft smile and a calm voice.

She didn’t stand out in a crowd or attract attention.

She lived alone in a small apartment on the outskirts of conquered and was dating a guy named Brian, an engineer from a neighboring town, but the relationship was calm and dramaree.

Her parents, Robert and Martha Thompson, lived an hour away in the town of Lebanon.

She visited them every 2 weeks for Sunday dinner.

It was the ordinary, quiet life of an ordinary person.

On Saturday, August 15th, 2009, Leah loaded her backpack into her old blue Honda Civic and drove toward the mountains.

The weather was perfect for hiking.

Clear skies, a temperature of around 25°, and a light breeze.

She planned a 3-day route along the Mount Adams Ridge, one of the most beautiful but challenging sections of the White Mountains.

The summit was 1.5 km high and the trail was about 20 km long in one direction with an elevation gain of more than a kilometer.

It wasn’t for beginners, but Leah had done this route before.

She left a trail note at the Ranger Visitor Center at the entrance to the national park.

She wrote that she planned to set out on the trail on August 15th at around a.m., climb to the summit of Mount Adams by evening, spend the night there, then descend the Eastern Slope to Great Gulf Lake, where she planned to spend the second night, and returned to the parking lot by noon on August 18th.

She provided her satellite phone number and asked that her parents be contacted if she did not return on time.

Leah parked her car in the parking lot at the trail head.

Surveillance cameras at the entrance recorded her car at a.m.

The video showed her getting out of the car, putting on her backpack, checking her shoelaces, locking the car, and walking toward the trail.

That was the last time she was seen alive.

On Tuesday, August 18th, when Leah was supposed to return, her car was still in the parking lot.

By evening, when she had not shown up, the rangers checked her itinerary and tried to contact her on her satellite phone.

The number did not answer.

They called her parents.

Robert and Martha said that their daughter had not been in touch since the 15th, which was unusual, but they were not worried, thinking that she was just enjoying the hike.

But now they were worried.

Martha immediately called Brian, Leah’s boyfriend.

He said he had spoken to Leah on the morning of the 15th before she left.

She was in a good mood, excited about the upcoming hike.

They had not communicated since.

The rangers sounded the alarm.

On the night of the 15th, the search operation began.

The search party consisted of national park rangers, volunteers from the local search and rescue team, and police officers from conquered, about 50 people in total.

They divided into teams and began combing the route Leah had indicated.

They used dogs, a helicopter with thermal imaging, and checked every trail and every fork in the road.

2 days later, they found their first clue.

At an altitude of about 1 kilometer, approximately 5 km from the start of the trail, they discovered the place where they had spent the night.

There were the remains of a campfire carefully extinguished.

Nearby were traces of a tent on the soft ground and empty packaging from freeze-dried food, beef and rice, the same brand that Leah usually took with her.

Her parents confirmed this, but the tent itself was gone.

No backpack, no sleeping bag, nothing.

Only traces that someone had been there.

The searchers continued up the trail.

They combed the entire summit of Mount Adams.

They searched all possible campsites.

They checked the surrounding gorges and ravines where she could have accidentally fallen.

The dogs picked up the trail from the campfire site, but lost it after half a kilometer on a rocky section where there were no footprints.

They checked cell phone signals.

The last signal from her cell phone was recorded by a tower on August 18th at a.m.

The location was 3 km northeast of where the campfire was found.

It was a remote area off the main trails.

After that, the phone either turned off, ran out of battery, or was destroyed.

The satellite phone had not transmitted any signals since August 16th.

The last signal was recorded in the same area where they found the campsite.

The search continued for 2 weeks.

Dozens of square kilometers were combed.

All trails, all known caves and shelters were checked.

Other tourists who were in the mountains during those days were interviewed.

Several people recalled seeing a young woman with dark hair and a backpack walking along the trail on August 15th.

But no one noticed anything unusual.

No pursuers, no suspicious characters.

They began to consider different scenarios.

The first was an accident.

Leah could have slipped, fallen into a crevice or ravine, hit her head, and lost consciousness.

Her body could have been hidden under rocks or in the water of a mountain stream.

The second scenario involved wild animals.

There are bears and cougars in the mountains.

Attacks are rare, but they do happen.

The third theory was that Leah got lost, strayed from the trail, tried to find her way back, and died of hypothermia or dehydration.

The fourth theory, which they didn’t want to voice aloud, was foul play.

The police began to investigate the latter theory.

They questioned Brian, Leah’s boyfriend.

He confirmed that their relationship was peaceful with no conflicts or reasons for quarrels.

On the day of Leah’s disappearance, he was at work and his alibi was verified and confirmed by his colleagues.

They questioned her parents.

They were heartbroken, but had no useful information.

Her colleagues from the lab were interviewed.

Everyone said that Leah was nice, that she had no enemies, no strange situations at work.

Her computer, email, and social media accounts were checked, nothing suspicious, just normal correspondence with friends, work emails, posts about hiking, and photos of nature.

But Detective David Connor, who was leading the case, noticed something interesting.

Leah was active on the trail heads New England hiking forum where she discussed routes, shared hiking reports, and asked questions.

A few months before her disappearance, she had been corresponding with several forum members, including a user named Mountain Watcher.

They discussed routes in the White Mountains area.

Mountain Watcher gave advice, shared his experience, and recommended littleknown places.

Detective Connor tried to contact this user through the forum administration.

He received information that the account was registered to an email address that turned out to be temporary created through an anonymous service.

The IP addresses of the login were from different locations in New Hampshire, but none of them led to a specific person.

Mountain Watchers stopped posting on the forum after Leah’s disappearance.

It was a lead, but it led nowhere.

Too little information, too much anonymity.

A month after her disappearance, the search was called off.

Nobody was found.

There was no evidence.

The case was classified as a disappearance under suspicious circumstances, and transferred to the cold case department.

Leah’s parents didn’t give up.

They hired private investigators, put up posters all over the state, gave interviews to local media, and asked anyone with information to come forward.

They set up a fund to search for people missing in the mountains.

But months passed and there was no information.

Hope was fading.

Life and conquered gradually returned to normal.

People stopped talking about Leah Thompson.

Her case became just another unsolved mystery, another name on the list of missing persons.

But the truth was close.

Closer than anyone could have imagined.

On July 23rd, 2011, almost two years later, two tourists from Massachusetts, Kevin and Jennifer Hart, were on a day hike on one of the side trails in the Mount Adams area.

It was not a popular trail, more of a game trail used by the occasional traveler seeking to escape the crowds.

The weather was good, sunny, and warm.

They walked slowly, enjoying the views, photographing flowers and birds.

About two kilometers from the main trail, on the slope of a small ravine, Kevin noticed something strange.

Between two large boulders, he could see stonework that was clearly man-made.

The stones were neatly stacked on top of each other, forming a wall.

On top lay a large, flat boulder pressed tightly against the others.

It looked like an old grave or some kind of storage place.

Kevin came closer and called Jennifer.

They tried to move the top boulder, but it was too heavy.

They looked into the cracks between the stones.

It was dark inside, but there was a strange smell.

Not the smell of decay, but something chemical, waxy.

They photographed the site, noted the coordinates on their GPS, and went down to the nearest ranger station.

They reported their discovery.

The ranger, a young guy named Tyler, initially thought it was an old cellar or a trap for animals which hunters sometimes built in the past, but he decided to check it out anyway.

The next day, July 24th, Tyler along with two colleagues and Kevin went up to the site.

They brought shovels, crowbars, and flashlights with them.

They began to dismantle the stonework.

They worked carefully, stone by stone.

When they removed the top boulder and cleared away several layers of stones, a pit opened up.

It was about a meter deep and lined with smaller stones on the inside.

And inside was something wrapped in darkened tarpolen.

The rangers exchanged glances.

Tyler climbed down into the pit and carefully pulled back the edge of the tarpollen and froze.

Under the tarpollen was a body.

The body of a woman covered with a thick layer of dark wax.

The wax was applied evenly, covering the entire body like a cocoon.

Through the wax, the outlines of the face, hands, and feet were visible.

The body was lying on its side in a fetal position, arms crossed over the chest.

Tyler climbed out of the pit, took out his radio, and called the police and forensic experts.

Within an hour, the area was cordoned off.

Detectives, a medical examiner, and technicians arrived.

They began their examination.

The body was removed from the pit very carefully.

The wax was hard but brittle.

They did not attempt to remove it on site, but transported it as is to the morg of the district hospital in Berlin, the nearest large town.

The medical examiner, Dr.

Elizabeth Green began the autopsy the next day.

What she saw shocked her.

The wax covered the body in a layer 2 to 5 cm thick.

It was dark brown in color with a matte surface.

Dr.

Green carefully began to remove the wax, heating it with special instruments.

Underneath the wax, the skin was mummified, dry, but surprisingly well preserved.

The facial features were distinguishable.

Some of the hair was preserved, dark and short.

The body was clothed.

A light blue hiking jacket, a t-shirt, trekking pants, thermal underwear.

Everything was soaked in wax, but recognizable.

A driver’s license was found in the pockets.

Leah Thompson.

The news exploded in the local media.

The girl who had disappeared 2 years ago had been found dead, mummified, hidden in a stone pit in the mountains.

Detective Connor, who had been leading the missing person’s case, immediately took over the investigation.

He understood that this was not an accident.

It was murder.

Carefully planned, carefully concealed.

Dr.

Green continued the autopsy.

She discovered several important details.

There were marks on Leah’s neck from strangulation, thin stripes as if from fabric or rope.

The hyoid bone was broken.

Death was caused by asphyxiation.

There were puncture marks on her arms near the elbow bends.

Small, barely noticeable, but characteristic of injections.

Tissue analysis showed traces of suinal choline, a muscle relaxant used in anesthesiology for temporary paralysis during surgery.

In large doses, it is lethal, but in this case, the dose was insufficient to cause death.

The drug was probably used to immobilize the victim.

The wax was sent to a forensic laboratory for analysis.

The results showed that it was not ordinary beeswax or paraffin wax.

It was a specialized compound based on polyethylene glycol and resins, which is used in morgs and laboratories to preserve bodies and organs.

This type of wax is not sold in regular stores.

It can only be purchased through specialized medical equipment suppliers.

Dr.

Green determined that death occurred approximately 4 to 5 days after Leah’s disappearance.

That is on August 19th or 20th, 2009.

The body was treated with wax shortly after death within 24 hours.

The wax, the low temperature in the pit, and the lack of air created conditions for mummification.

Thanks to this, the body was preserved for almost 2 years.

Leah’s mouth was tightly closed with a piece of cloth wrapped around her head.

The fabric was analyzed.

It was ordinary cotton, the kind used for bandages or medical dressings.

Detective Connor realized he was dealing with a criminal with specialized knowledge, someone with a medical or biological education, someone who knew how to work with bodies, someone who had access to specialized materials and preparations.

He began by checking everyone who could have had contact with Leah.

He questioned Brian, her boyfriend, again.

Brian worked as an engineer for a construction company and had no connection to medicine.

His alibi for the days of Leah’s disappearance and presumed death was checked again.

Everything was clear.

His colleagues from the laboratory were checked.

Most were biologists, but none of them had access to the morg or funeral supplies.

Moreover, they were all at work on the days of Leah’s disappearance, and their alibis were confirmed.

Connor returned to the lead with the travel forum user Mountain Watcher.

He contacted the forum administration again and asked them to provide all available information.

He received the login logs for the last 3 years.

He began to analyze them.

Most of the login were from public places, libraries, cafes with free Wi-Fi, but several login were from the same place, the hospital in Manchester, the largest city in New Hampshire.

more precisely from the hospital network which included several buildings including the morg.

Connor requested a list of hospital employees who worked in 2009.

He received a list of 200 people.

He began to narrow down the circle.

He needed someone who worked with bodies who had access to wax and chemicals who was familiar with the preservation process.

Five people worked in the hospital’s pathology and morg department.

two pathologists, one assistant, two technicians.

Connor began checking each one.

One of the morg technicians, Richard Flowers, 42 years old, caught his attention.

He had been working at the hospital since 2006.

His duties included preparing bodies for autopsy, cleaning and preserving them, and working with biological materials.

He also volunteered for an organization that repatriated the bodies of Americans who had died abroad.

His job was to prepare the bodies for transport, imbalming, treating them with preservatives, and packing them.

Connor checked his biography.

Richard Flowers was born in Manchester and had lived in the state his entire life.

He had a secondary vocational education and had taken courses in pathological anatomy techniques.

He was not married and had no children.

He lived alone in a small house on the outskirts of Manchester.

He enjoyed hiking and often went to the mountains.

No criminal record, not a single offense.

A gray, unremarkable life.

But Connor dug deeper.

He requested financial records and he discovered some interesting purchases.

In March 2009, 5 months before Leah’s disappearance, Flowers bought 10 kgs of preservation wax from a specialized supplier.

The official reason for the purchase was for work at a volunteer organization, but the organization’s records made no mention of the wax being used.

Where did it go? In July 2009, Flowers bought ampules of succininal colon from an online pharmacy that required a prescription.

The prescription was fake, but this has only now been discovered.

Back in 2009, the pharmacy did not check thoroughly.

Connor obtained a search warrant for Flores’s home.

On July 29th, 2011, a group of police officers and forensic scientists arrived at the address.

Flores was at home, greeted them calmly, and said he was ready to cooperate.

The search lasted several hours.

A small workshop was found in the basement of the house.

On the shelves were jars of chemicals, dissection tools, and containers of wax.

In one of the cabinets, they found a folder with newspaper clippings, articles about body preservation, mummification, and ancient rituals for preserving beauty after death.

There were handwritten notes by floors in the margins.

He wrote about how to preserve a body in its natural state, how to prevent decomposition, how to create eternal beauty.

Another folder contained photographs.

Photographs of women taken with a hidden camera.

Different women in different places on trails, in parking lots, in cafes.

Among them were photos of Leah Thompson.

Dozens of photos taken a few months before her disappearance.

Leah by the car.

Leah on the trail.

Leah in the lab through the window.

On Flor’s computer, they found correspondence on a travel forum.

The login and password for the Mountain Watcher account.

He really was the user who corresponded with Leah and gave her advice on roots.

The browser history contained searches for preservation of human bodies, mummification at home, and how to preserve a body after death.

The searches were conducted between January and July 2009.

But the most shocking discovery was in the freezer in the basement.

There, among the frozen food, lay a sealed plastic container.

Inside were Leah’s personal belongings, her backpack, tent, sleeping bag, GPS navigator, satellite phone, and camera.

Everything was neatly stacked as if they were museum exhibits.

Flores was arrested on the spot.

He was taken to the police station where the interrogation began.

Detective Connor conducted the interrogation himself.

Flores sat calmly, his hands folded on the table, his face expressionless.

Connor asked questions and presented evidence.

Photos: Leah’s belongings, records of purchases of wax and chemicals.

Flowers listened silently.

When Connor asked him directly if he had killed Leah Thompson, Flowers looked at him for a long time.

Then he said he wanted a lawyer.

The interrogation was stopped.

Flowers was assigned a public defender.

The investigation continued.

Forensic experts reconstructed the chronology of events.

Flowers had been following Leah for several months.

He studied her habits, hiking routes, and schedule.

When she posted her plans for a hike in the White Mountains in August on a forum, he decided to act.

On August 15th, 2009, Flores took a vacation from work.

He drove to the mountains in his dark green Ford F-150 pickup truck.

He parked in one of the side parking lots, not where Leah was, so as not to attract attention.

He set out on the trail with his own backpack, dressed in ordinary hiking clothes.

He looked like a typical hiker.

He knew Leah’s approximate route.

He knew where she planned to spend the first night.

He waited until dark.

He crept up to her camp.

Leah was sitting by the fire cooking dinner.

He approached her, introduced himself as a fellow hiker and struck up a conversation.

Leah, trusting and friendly, did not sense any danger.

At one point, Flores offered her an energy drink he had made.

He said it was a special hiking recipe that would give her strength.

Leah drank it.

A few minutes later, she felt weak.

Her legs and arms stopped responding.

The succinyl choline had taken effect.

Flores tied her up and gagged her.

He waited until she was completely immobilized.

Then he suffocated her with a cloth slowly and methodically.

He watched as the life drained from her eyes.

After that, he wrapped her body in the tarpollen he had brought with him.

He gathered all her belongings, extinguished the fire, and erased all traces of the camp.

He hoisted the body onto his shoulders and carried it away.

He was strong, accustomed to physical exertion.

He carried it several kilometers to a place he had prepared in advance.

It was a pit in the slope of the ravine that he had dug a few days earlier and camouflaged with stones.

He placed the body in the pit.

He returned to his pickup truck, brought containers of wax and heating equipment.

He had hidden all this in advance in the forest near the pit.

He melted the wax on a portable burner and poured it over the body layer by layer, covering it completely.

He worked all night and finished by morning.

He sealed the hole with stones and covered it with a boulder.

The location was chosen so that a casual tourist would not notice it.

It was just another pile of rocks among hundreds of others in the mountains.

Flores returned home and hid Leah’s belongings in the freezer.

He continued to live his normal life.

He went to work, socialized with colleagues, and went hiking.

No one suspected anything.

Why did he do it? Investigators tried to understand his motive.

They studied his psychological profile and hired experts.

It turned out that Flores suffered from a hidden form of necrilia.

He was not attracted to violence against bodies, but to their preservation, the creation of perfect eternal beauty.

He saw it as art.

Leah attracted his attention with her naturalenness, her love of nature.

He wanted to preserve her exactly as she was, young, alive, but at the same time dead, eternal.

In his notes found on his computer, there were fragments of a diary.

He wrote that he wanted to create the perfect image to combine life and death, beauty and peace.

He wrote that Leah was the perfect candidate, that after death she would become even more beautiful, freed from the transients of life.

It was an illness, a dangerous, perverse illness that he had hidden for years.

The case was referred to court.

The trial began in March 2012.

Flores was charged with first-degree murder with aggravating circumstances, kidnapping, and desecration of a corpse.

The defense tried to get him declared insane.

They hired psychiatrists who claimed that Flores suffered from a mental disorder and was not aware of the criminal nature of his actions.

But the prosecution presented evidence of careful planning, purchasing materials months before the crime, stalking the victim, preparing the scene, destroying evidence.

All of this indicated that Flores acted consciously, methodically, with full understanding of what he was doing.

The jury deliberated for 3 days.

They returned a verdict of guilty on all counts.

The judge sentenced Richard Flowers to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Leah’s parents, Robert and Martha, attended all the court hearings.

When the sentence was announced, Martha cried, not out of joy or relief, out of pain.

Their daughter was dead.

Justice had been served, but it did not bring Leah back.

Leah’s body was cremated.

Her ashes were scattered in the mountains she loved so much.

A memorial plaque was placed on one of the trails on Mount Adams.

It reads, “In memory of Leah Thompson, who loved these mountains, may her spirit always be free.” Leah Thompson’s story became a warning.

That danger can come from where you least expect it.

That monsters don’t always look like monsters.

That a person who works with the dead every day can become someone who creates the dead.

Richard Flowers is serving his sentence in a maximum security federal prison.

He rarely talks to other inmates and spends his time alone.

The psychologists working with him note that he shows no remorse.

He just stays silent.