In October of 2011, 27-year-old Alan Mayer went deep into Humbult Redwoods Park.

He was supposed to get in touch with his brother that evening, but he never did.

10 years later, in November 2021, his body was found inside the trunk of a fallen giant seoia.

It was perfectly preserved in a block of hard transparent resin.

It became immediately clear that this was not a natural phenomenon.

But who exactly turned a living tourist into a frozen museum piece? And why you will learn in this video.

The events in this story are presented as a narrative interpretation.

Some elements have been altered or recreated for storytelling purposes.

On October 14th, 2011 at 8:00 in the morning, a silvery fog still lay thick on Matau Road, which cuts through the densest parts of Humbult Redwoods Park.

This place in Northern California is called the Avenue of the Giants.

And it was here that morning that a dark green Jeep Cherokee made in 1999 was headed.

Behind the wheel was 27-year-old Alan Mayer, a freelance sound engineer from San Francisco who hadn’t come here for the views.

He was interested in something that was becoming increasingly scarce in the modern world, absolute silence.

Allan was not an ordinary tourist who takes a selfie in front of the redwoods and returns to his car.

His brother, Eric Mayer, later told investigators that Allan was obsessed with the idea of acoustic ecology.

He was looking for points on the map where the level of man-made noise, the hum of airplanes, the echo of highways, the sound of engines would be zero for at least 15 minutes.

In his backpack was a professional Zoom H4000 recorder, a set of expensive windproof microphones, and a detailed topographic map of the sector that local foresters called the shadow bowl.

This is a deep depression between the ridges where the sounds of civilization rarely reached, and even more rarely, sunlight.

At 2:30 p.m., a video surveillance camera mounted on the gate of a private lumber yard on the edge of the park captured Allen’s car.

The grainy black and white footage shows the SUV slowly driving by, turning onto a dirt road toward the trail head of Bull Creek Flats.

The driver does not look at the camera.

His window is closed.

This was the last confirmed image of Alan Mayer alive.

According to the plan, Allan left his brother.

He was supposed to get to the recording point, spend about 4 hours there, and return to the car before sunset.

At 8:00 p.m., he promised to call Eric to confirm that he had made it to Highway 1, but the phone was silent.

At 12:45 a.m., his brother’s call was forwarded to voicemail.

At 5:00 the next morning, Eric Mayer, sensing that something irreparable had happened, dialed the Humbult County Sheriff’s Office.

The search operation began at 7:00 in the morning on October 15th.

Patrol rangers found Allen’s Jeep on a gravel road extension 2 miles off the highway.

The vehicle was locked.

Inside there was perfect order, uncharacteristic of an emergency.

On the passenger seat was a tablet with a schedule of scheduled appointments and a metal thermos with cold coffee in it.

There were no signs of a struggle around the car, no broken glass, and no signs of another vehicle in the gravel.

At 9:30 a.m., a canine team arrived at the scene.

The dog, a German Shepherd named Bark, picked up the trail from the driver’s door.

The dog confidently led the group deeper into the forest, ignoring the marked hiking trail.

Allen’s route, judging by the dog’s reaction, ran through a dense undergrowth of ferns, heading for the center of the shadow bowl.

The investigators followed the dog for exactly 1 and 1/2 miles.

However, the dog abruptly stopped near a dry, rocky bed of a seasonal stream.

The dog handler noted in his report that the animal began to behave atypically.

The dog circled in place, whed and refused to go further, as if the scent had simply disappeared into the air.

The soil in this place was changing.

Instead of damp earth, there was a thick layer of red sequoia needles half a foot thick.

This blanket left no shoe prints.

Forensic scientists combed a 300 ft radius around the point of loss of the trail, but found no clues.

Not a lost lens cap, not a bootprint, not a broken branch.

Over the next three weeks, Humboldt Park became the scene of a large-scale search.

More than 50 volunteers and professional rescuers took part in the operation.

National Guard helicopters equipped with thermal imagers circled the sector daily, but this technology proved powerless against nature.

The crowns of the giant sequoas, which reached 300 ft in height, created such a dense canopy that the thermal sensors could not pierce it to the ground.

To the thermal imaging camera operator, the forest looked like a solid cold spot.

The rangers put forward a theory about natural traps.

In this area, many old trees have burned out cavities at the roots or hidden pits disguised by ferns and rotten wood.

A person who strayed from the trail could easily fall into such a hole and be trapped underground.

Special teams with probes checked every potential depression along Allen’s likely route.

They lowered cameras into empty trunks and cleared away debris from branches, but the result was zero.

By the 1st of November, hope of finding Allen alive was lost.

In the official reports, investigators noted a strange detail.

Despite the presence of predators in the forest, cougars and bears, no traces of animal attacks, pieces of clothing, blood, or biological materials were found.

Alan Mayer simply disappeared into the landscape he was so eager to record.

The case became a missing person’s case, and his file on the shelf of the sheriff’s office began to slowly gather dust, just like the Jeep that had been sitting in the impound lot for a long time as a mute witness to its owner’s last journey.

The silence he was looking for eventually found him.

On November 14, 2021, the northern coast of California was recovering from the impact of a so-called atmospheric river storm.

This meteorological phenomenon brought record rainfall and winds that gusted up to 80 mph in Humbult Redwoods Park in the sector near the South Fork Eel River.

The storm left a mess of washed out roads, downed power lines, and dozens of downed trees.

For the team of foresters who went out to clear the debris at 7:00 in the morning, it was routine, albeit tiring work.

The crew leader, 45-year Forest Service veteran Tom Harrison, later noted in a report that the air that morning was saturated with the smell of ozone and fresh wood.

Their main target was an area of the old growth forest where a local landmark, a giant sequoia known to the rangers as the candalabra, had fallen.

This tree got its name because of a specific crown mutation.

At a height of about 100 ft, the main trunk branched into several smaller ones resembling a candlestick.

The tree, which was estimated to be 1,500 years old, could not withstand the pressure of the wind and moist soil.

It didn’t pull out by the roots, but split lengthwise, falling down a steep ravine slope.

At about 11:00 in the morning, the team reached the fall site.

The trunk of the candalabra was lying at an angle, blocking the natural drainage.

Harrison ordered them to start cutting branches to assess the extent of the damage and stabilize the trunk.

The sound of the chainsaws broke the morning silence, but after 20 minutes, the work suddenly stopped.

One of the workers, who was working around the bottom of the trunk, started shouting and waving his arms, demanding that the equipment be turned off.

When the noise of the tools stopped, Harrison went down to the fault.

What he saw did not fit the usual picture of the storm’s aftermath.

In the lower part of the sequoia, where the trunk had a natural cavity, a so-called goose pen, a hollow burned out from the inside, typical of old sequoas that have survived forest fires.

He could see something unnatural.

Usually, such cavities are black with soot and empty, but this one was filled to the brim.

A huge monolithic mass of translucent yellowish color stood out against the dark damp bark.

It filled the interior of the tree perfectly, repeating every curve of the burnt wood like a giant filling.

The first thought of the foresters was that the tree had secreted an incredible amount of resin, trying to heal the old wound.

Although botonists know that sequoas do not produce such volumes of sap, the sun, which at that very moment broke through the gaps in the clouds, struck a beam directly into this amber block.

The light passed through the muddy thickness of the material, illuminating what was inside.

It was not a chaotic pattern of wood.

In the center of the block, frozen in eternity, stood a man.

The site was so surreal that according to Harrison, his brain refused to accept reality.

The man inside looked like a giant insect trapped in prehistoric amber.

His body was in an upright position.

He was wearing a dark green Northface jacket and gray hiking pants, clothes that were perfectly preserved without losing color.

A black backpack hung on his shoulders, its straps cutting into the fabric of the jacket, creating the illusion of movement.

The most terrifying thing, according to eyewitnesses, was the face.

It was not the calm expression of a person who had fallen asleep or fainted from the cold.

The head was slightly tilted back, the mouth was half open in a mute scream, and the neck muscles were tensed so much that it was noticeable even through the thickness of the yellow mass.

The eyes were open, but the muddy material made it impossible to see.

It seemed that the substance had captured him instantly in a moment of spasm or indescribable horror.

The detail was amazing.

The workers could even see the small air bubbles frozen near his nose and mouth, evidence of his last breath.

A thin black headphone wire stretched out of his jacket pocket, disappearing smoothly into the depths of his backpack.

The block of material itself was hard as a rock.

When one of the foresters gently touched the surface with his glove, it became clear that it was not a soft natural resin, but a polymer of extraordinary strength.

Harrison immediately contacted the dispatcher by radio, reporting the discovery of a human body under the code 1144, possible death, but added that the situation requires the immediate presence of forensic scientists and special equipment.

As they waited for the police to arrive, the crew stood silently around the fallen giant.

The light played on the edges of the yellow sarcophagus, turning the scene of the tragedy into an eerie, glowing installation in the middle of a gloomy forest.

The body inside showed no signs of decomposition.

The skin looked pale, but intact.

It seemed that time had stopped for this man the second the viscous substance closed over his head.

None of the people present knew the victim’s name, but for one of the rangers who had worked in the park for over 15 years.

The clothes and backpack looked familiar.

He remembered a 10-year-old search for a young man who was looking for quiet.

Now he had found it.

Alan Mayer became a part of the forest in the literal sense, merging with the tree that was supposed to be his hiding place, but became his eternal prison.

On November 15th, 2021, at 8:45 in the morning, a National Park Service truck pulled into the backyard of the Humbult County Morg in Eureka.

It took almost an hour to unload the object, which was listed in the accompanying documents as exhibit 1.

It was a massive piece of redwood trunk and was immensely heavy with a yellowish capsule glowing dimly inside.

For the morg staff who were used to standard autopsy procedures, this case was an unprecedented challenge.

The county’s chief pathologist, Dr.

Marcus Vance, later noted in his report, “We were faced not just with a body, but with a monolithic structure where biological matter and synthetic shell had become one.” An initial examination conducted on the same day instantly destroyed the theory of the substance’s natural origin.

Chemical analysis of surface samples showed that it was neither wood resin nor amber.

Sequoas, even the oldest ones, are physiologically incapable of secretreting such a quantity of olaresin.

Laboratory spectral analysis identified the material as an industrial two component high viscosity epoxy polymer.

This type of substance is commonly used in ship building for pouring decorative countertops or preserving museum exhibits.

Experts found traces of a yellow ochrebased pigment in the composition which was added deliberately.

The person who created this sarcophagus deliberately tried to imitate the natural color of wood resin so that the cache would not be obvious to casual passers by.

Dr.

Vance faced a technical problem.

It was impossible to remove the body from the polymer block in the traditional way.

After polymerization, the epoxy resin became harder than bone.

Any attempt to break or saw the cocoon would have led to irreparable damage to the victim’s tissues.

Therefore, it was decided to conduct a virtual autopsy.

On November 16th, the object was transported to the radiology department of a local hospital where a powerful industrial tomograph was available.

The results of the scan, which appeared on the monitors in the control room, silenced even experienced forensic experts.

The highresolution layerbylayer images revealed the gruesome chronology of Alan Mayer’s death.

The images clearly showed horizontal lines of material density demarcation.

This indicated that the sarcophagus was not poured at one time.

The process took place in stages.

Experts counted five separate layers.

This meant that the killer came to the tree for several days, poured another portion of the polymer, waited for it to harden, and came back again.

A scan of the body confirmed the worst suspicions.

Alan Mayer was alive when the pouring began.

His legs were fixed by the first layer, which reached his ankles.

The next layer bound his knees.

The posture of his arms showed a desperate but stiff attempt to lift them up to protect himself from the rising viscous liquid.

The diaphragm was unnaturally constricted and the lungs looked burned in the pictures.

The fact is that epoxy curing is an exothermic reaction.

When mixed in large volumes, the substance can heat up to 150° F and emit toxic fumes.

The official cause of death, which Dr.

Vance wrote in the certificate on November 17th was chemical esphyxiation, thermal shock, and acute intoxication by volatile compounds.

Allan was effectively boiled alive in his own trap, slowly suffocating from the poisonous gas released by the polymer.

His face, frozen in a grimace of pain, was the result of a final spasm as the heated mass reached his neck.

To obtain samples for toxicology, technicians had to use diamond drills to make a thin hole in the victim’s thigh.

Tissue analysis revealed a high concentration of ketamine, a powerful dissociative anesthetic in the blood.

This explained why the young and physically healthy man was unable to get out of the tree cavity at the initial stage.

The killer injected him with the drug, which immobilized his body, but probably left his consciousness partially lucid.

Alan Mayer saw and felt himself being turned into a part of the tree, but could not move even a finger to escape.

The report also noted that the victim’s clothes were completely intact.

His pockets were not turned out.

It was not a robbery.

The backpack remained on his shoulders, the headphones in his ears.

On the CT scan, experts noticed a rectangular outline of an electronic device near Allen’s waist, which also got into the flood zone.

It was a digital recorder that Allen used to record silence.

The polymer sealed the gadget, protecting it from moisture and decomposition for 10 years.

Now, in order to find out what exactly the device recorded in the last minutes of the tourist’s life, forensic scientists had to perform a delicate operation to cut the equipment out of the monolith without damaging the fragile electronics.

On November 20, 2021, a specialized courier delivered a sealed container labeled biological hazard physical evidence to the digital forensics laboratory in San Francisco.

It was a sterile white room filled with the hum of servers and the smell of ozone, creating a stark contrast to the dank, dirty forest from which the object had come.

Inside the container was a fragment cut from a polymer block.

A black rectangle was visible through the muddy yellow layer.

A Zoom digital recorder that had been on Alan Mayer’s belt for 10 years.

The lab’s chief engineer, Dr.

Sarah Chen, faced a technical dilemma that could have destroyed the evidence before analysis could begin.

The epoxy resin had bonded tightly to the plastic case of the recorder.

Any attempt to break the shell with a hammer or cut it with a circular saw would have created vibrations that could have damaged the fragile contacts of the memory card.

In addition, the heat from the tools could melt the chips.

Therefore, it was decided to use a high precision laser router with a liquid cooled system which is commonly used to open black boxes after airplane crashes.

The process of freeing the device took 12 hours of continuous operation.

Millimeter by millimeter, the laser vaporized the polymer until the engineers reached the memory card compartment.

When Dr.

Chen finally pulled out the card, a 4 GB SD card, it looked as if it had been bought yesterday.

Paradoxically, the killer had created ideal conditions for preserving the information by pouring resin over the body.

The vacuum environment without access to oxygen and moisture prevented the contacts from oxidizing.

On November 21st at 10:00 in the morning, homicide detectives and audio experts gathered in the listening room.

The memory card was connected to an isolated terminal.

The system recognized the file structure.

A list of 52 audio files appeared on the screen.

All of them were dated in 2011.

The last file titled October 17th silence attempt 3 was created on the day Allan disappeared.

It was 42 minutes long.

The expert pressed the play button.

The first 30 minutes of the recording featured only the white noise of nature, the rustling of the wind in the crowns of redwoods 300 ft up, the distant cry of a jen’s rhythmic breathing, and the crunch of pine needles under his boots.

Acoustic analysis showed that he was moving through a deep canyon where the sound bounced off the slopes, creating the effect of a closed space.

At the 38th minute mark of the recording, the visual spectrogram on the monitor changed.

The green line, which indicated background noise, jumped sharply into the red sector.

It was a sound that did not belong to the forest.

The experts played this moment five times, applying noise reduction filters.

It was a dry, clear, metallic click.

One of the detectives, a former military officer, identified the sound as the shutter of an old mechanical camera or the cocking of a trigger, although there was no characteristic spring ringing.

It could also have been some kind of specific construction tool.

Immediately after the click, Allen’s footsteps stopped.

The recording shows him abruptly stopping, rustling his jacket.

Then his voice is heard, clear, a little surprised, but without panic.

He speaks as if addressing a random passer by.

I’m sorry.

I didn’t know this was a private area.

It’s a park on the map.

I’m just looking for a quiet place to record.

In response, there is a 4-se secondond pause.

The silence is so deep that you can hear Allen’s own heartbeat accelerating.

Then another voice comes on.

It is quiet, even devoid of any emotional coloring or accent.

Spectral analysis showed that the speaker was standing no further than 10 ft from the microphone.

The voice spoke only one phrase.

There is no way through here.

The tone was not threatening or aggressive.

It was stating a fact as indifferently as an answering machine.

Immediately after the last word, the spectrogram shows a sharp amplitude spike.

This is the sound of a dull impact, a heavy, blunt object hitting soft tissue.

Allan did not have time to scream.

All he could hear was a sharp exhalation, as if all the air had been instantly knocked out of his lungs.

Then there was the sound of a body falling, the rustle of ferns breaking under the weight of a person, and a dull thud on the ground.

The recording did not end immediately.

The recorder continued to work for another 18 seconds lying on the ground.

During this period, the microphones recorded slow, heavy footsteps approaching.

Someone approached Allen, who was lying down.

There were no words, no swearing, no heavy breathing after the blow.

Only the squeak of leather boots and a strange sound like unwinding duct tape or rustling polyethylene.

Then the recording stopped.

Probably the attacker noticed the device or simply turned it off.

Although the stop button was not pressed, the file was terminated due to an emergency power outage, but the data was saved.

This audio recording was a turning point.

It transformed the case from a body discovery into a cold-blooded murder investigation.

The unknown man’s voice was so clear that forensic scientists were able to create his voice profile.

He was a man between the ages of 40 and 50.

Calm, confident, and in control of the situation.

The phrase, “There’s no way through here,” sounded not like a warning from a security guard, but like a sentence.

Now, the detectives had not just a body in a tree, but the sound imprint of the killer who had met Allan 10 years ago in a part of the forest where, according to the maps, there should not have been a single living soul.

On November 23rd, 2021, the investigation into the murder of Alan Mayer changed its vector.

If earlier detectives were looking for the answer to the question who, now the key to the solution was the question how.

The technical report provided by the chemical engineers contained staggering figures.

In order to fill a cavity in a sequoia trunk of this size, the killer needed at least 80 gall of liquid polymer.

In terms of weight, this is more than 700 lb of material.

This amount would not fit in a tourist backpack.

This was not a spontaneous act, but a large-scale logistical operation that required transportation, money, and most importantly, access to specific industrial materials.

Detective Richardson, who led the financial investigation, realized that it was impossible to buy that much epoxy quietly.

This is not a product sold in a regular hardware store.

A polymer of this quality, capable of solidifying in bulk without cracking, was expensive.

At the prices of 2011, the cost of 80 gallons was about $5,000.

Investigators began checking the records of all chemical suppliers within a 200-m radius of Humbult Park.

It was a tedious job.

Most companies had already switched to digital databases, but old paper invoices from 2011 were often stored in basement or destroyed.

However, they got lucky in the industrial zone of Eureka.

A company called Bay Area Industrial Resources, which specialized in materials for repairing yacht and fishing vessel hulls, had preserved its archives.

On November 25th, detectives entered the warehouse where the air was saturated with the pungent smell of styrene and solvents.

The owner of the company, an elderly man who had been running the business for more than 30 years, remembered the strange customer even before the police showed him the warrant to inspect the documents.

According to him, in the fall of 2011, a man began to visit them, buying Marin clear cast resin, an expensive transparent compound used for deep pouring.

According to the surviving invoices, the first visit took place on October 5th, 2011, 9 days before Allen disappeared.

The man purchased 10 gallons of base and hardener.

But that was only the beginning.

Over the next 3 weeks, he returned four more times, each time buying 15 or 20 gallons.

This perfectly coincided with the pathologist’s conclusions about the layered pouring of the body.

The killer bought the material in batches, poured a layer, waited for it to harden, and then went for a new portion.

One detail in the receipt dated October 12th drew the investigators attention.

In addition to the resin, the buyer purchased two cans of industrial dye in the color golden ochre.

The warehouse owner said that he asked the customer why he needed to tint the clear marine varnish.

The man answered briefly and dryly to restore antique furniture.

This explained the yellowish hue of the sarcophagus that made it look like natural oolaressin.

The client gave his name as Robert.

Of course, a check showed that there was no person with that name and address.

He always paid in cash, bringing 20 and $50 bills with bank rubber bands.

There were no security cameras in the warehouse in 2011, but the manager remembered the customer’s vehicle.

It was an old Ford F-150, probably from the early ’90s, dark blue or black in color with faded paint on the hood.

The most important detail that the witness remembered was a sticker on the rear bumper of the pickup.

It was the logo of a well-known local environmental organization, a stylized image of a redwood tree in a green circle with the words, “Save the giants.” This fact dramatically changed the suspect’s psychological profile.

The detectives realized that they were not looking for a poacher who killed a tourist for the sake of robbery, nor a random drug addict.

The killer was a fanatic.

He was carrying gallons of chemicals in his trunk to turn a man into a piece of wood and at the same time declared his love for nature.

He didn’t just hide the body, he created a monument.

Robert was methodical, patient, and had enough physical strength to carry heavy containers of chemicals along forest trails.

An analysis of the geoloccation of sales showed that in addition to Eureka, similar batches of resin were purchased through private ads in the towns of Arcada and Fortuna.

The killer tried to disperse the purchases to avoid arousing suspicion, but his need for a huge amount of specific material left a clear paper trail that began to lead the investigation out of the darkness 10 years later.

On December 2nd, 2021, the investigation that began with a forest discovery led a group of detectives to the quiet, almost pastoral town of Ferndale.

This place, known for its Victorian homes and foggy mornings, seemed the exact opposite of the gloomy slums of Humbult Park.

However, the address, which was identified through an analysis of polymer sales and used pickup truck owner databases, pointed to the outskirts of town, where the asphalt turned into a broken dirt road leading to an abandoned farm.

The object of interest was a house that belonged to Marcel Brand, a man who turned 45 in 2011.

For the locals, he was a ghost even before his disappearance.

Neighbors interviewed by the police that morning described Brand as a recluse with a heavy glassy gaze.

A former taxiderermist who had lost his license for unethical handling of biological waste.

He lived behind a high fence and rarely went out.

One of his neighbors, 70-year-old Mrs.

Gable told the investigator that Marcel had a strange, almost religious philosophy about death.

She recalled a conversation that took place a few months before Alan Mayer disappeared.

Brand was standing by his fence watching utility workers cut down a rotten oak branch.

He said, “People live too fast, they fuss, and then they die in a disgusting way.

They rot, spoiling the earth.

This is not right.

Beauty should be captured, not given to worms.

At the time, the woman did not attach any importance to this, writing off the words as the eccentricities of a lonely man.

But now, these phrases sounded like a manifesto.

Marcel Bran disappeared from the radar of social services and the tax authorities in 2015.

His house had been boarded up for 6 years.

The mail piled up in the box until it was no longer delivered and the yard turned into a thicket of blackberries.

Officially, he was considered to have left or died without relatives.

At 10:00 and 30 minutes, a special police unit received permission to enter by force.

The door of the workshop, located in a separate garage behind the house, was locked with a heavy padlock that had to be cut off with hydraulic scissors.

When the door opened, the police were hit in the face with the smell of stale air mixed with the pungent sweet aroma of formulin and old chemicals.

Inside was darkness, cut only by the beams of tactical flashlights.

The room looked as if time had stopped here.

There were jars of cloudy liquids on the shelves, and tools for working with wood and bones were neatly laid out on a workbench.

It was not just a workshop, but a fanatics’s laboratory.

In the corner stood a mannequin covered with plastic wrap and the walls were covered with detailed anatomical maps not of animals as expected of a taxidermist but of people.

During the search, which lasted more than 5 hours, Detective Richardson found a thick black leatherbound sketchbook under a pile of old newspapers.

It was the key piece of evidence that connected the theory to reality.

The pages of the album were filled with graphite drawings of incredible detail.

Marcel Brand was a talented artist, but his talent served his morbid imagination.

The first pages dated back to 2010.

They depicted attempts to fit small animals, squirrels, birds into natural wood grain.

But then the author’s ambitions grew.

The drawings became more complex.

On a page dated August 2011, the police saw a sketch that made their blood run cold.

It was a detailed diagram of a human body standing upright inside the hollow trunk of a sequoia tree.

The drawing was called symbiosis.

The author had calculated everything.

The angle of the body, the position of the arms, even the drilling points for injecting preservatives.

Notes were made in the margins in small handwriting.

Reaction temperature is critical.

Cooling is required.

The subject must be alive to preserve the natural expression of the facial muscles.

This explained why Allen was poured alive.

Brand wanted to capture the moment of life, not death.

On the next page, there was a sketch called specimen number one.

The face in the drawing bore a striking resemblance to Alan Mayer.

The same cheekbones, the same shape of the chin.

Brand apparently observed his victim before the abduction or made a sketch while preparing the installation.

The caption under the drawing read, “Silence achieved, Eternal Sleep in the Heart of a Giant.” But the worst thing was that the album did not end with Allen.

Next came sketches titled Sample Number Two and Sample Number Three.

They were less detailed.

Some were just sketches of locations in the park marked with crosses.

This indicated that Marcel Brand had no plans to stop.

He saw the forest as his personal gallery and people as material for creating what he considered to be perfect art.

In addition to the album, forensic experts found in the studio the remains of the same yellow epoxy resin produced by Marin clear cast and empty cans of ochre pigment.

On the floor near the workbench was an old map of Humbult Redwoods Park.

On it, a red marker circled the area of the Shadow Bowl, exactly where Allan disappeared.

Marcel Bran’s workshop was the place where his madness took shape.

Here he planned his crimes.

Here he dreamed of creating an eternal forest of people.

But the guardian himself was not here.

The house looked abandoned.

Things were covered in dust.

The investigators had to find out where the man who considered himself the savior of human beauty had gone and whether he had managed to create other exhibits that the world had not yet known about.

The discovery of the sketches turned the investigation into a race against time because the paper had other dates on it later than 2011.

On December 5th, 2021, the investigative team led by Detective Richardson returned to the office, the walls of which were now covered with photocopies of pages from the found Marcel Brand sketchbook.

What had initially seemed like the ravings of a mad artist now took on a clear, terrifying logic.

Analyzing the sketches titled sample number two and sample number three, forensic scientists concluded that Alan Mayer was only part of a much larger plan.

Marcel Brand was not just burying bodies.

He was creating an exhibition.

In his notes, he referred to the forest as a gallery and the old redwoods burnt from the inside as natural molds for eternal casting.

According to a profile compiled by Federal Bureau of Investigation Behaviorists, Brand operated exclusively during the dead season, late fall or winter when hiking trails were closed due to rain and the threat of landslides.

This gave him weeks and sometimes months of absolute solitude in the Bull Creek sector.

He searched for specific trees, the so-called goose pens.

These are giant redwoods whose core burned out during forest fires centuries ago, forming natural caves protected by thick bark.

For Brand, these were ready-made sarcophagy.

All he had to do was place the object inside and fill the entrance with polymer.

On December 7th, at 7:00 in the morning, a combined group of 20 officers reinforced by engineers with ground penetrating radar left for the Shadow Bowl area.

The task was unprecedented to check every tree with signs of a cavity within a onem radius of where Allen was found.

Ground penetrating radar, which is typically used to find underground utilities or archaeological sites in the ground, had to be adapted to scan trunks vertically.

The operators set up the devices to look for density anomalies that would differ from the structure of living or rotten wood.

The work progressed slowly.

The forest, which in summer seemed like a majestic temple of nature, looked threatening in the December fog.

Every tree seemed suspicious.

The operators put sensors to the bark, peering at the monitors, but the first 4 hours of searching yielded only false results.

The devices recorded accumulations of water, rodent nests, or stones embedded in the roots.

The radar did not provide a 100% guarantee as the thick wet bark of the sequoia trees shielded the signal creating significant interference.

The risk of missing another body was extremely high.

So each suspicious area was additionally inspected visually looking for signs of artificial intervention, a natural resin buildup or drilling marks.

At about 2:30 p.m., the group reached the eastern slope marked on one of Bran’s sketches with an unsigned cross.

Here, among the dense ferns, stood a majestic sequoia, 15 ft in diameter at the base.

The tree looked perfectly healthy, its crown lost in the fog at an altitude of 300 ft.

However, on the northern side, hidden from the trail by shrubbery, the trunk bore a distinctive fire scar.

a narrow slit that appeared to be overgrown with moss and spiderw webs.

The GPR operator moved the sensor along this crevice.

A clear, geometrically correct spot appeared on the screen of the device.

The signal showed that inside the tree, behind a 4-in thick layer of bark and wood, there was a material with a uniform ultra high density that did not allow radio waves to pass through.

It was not an empty hollow.

It was a monolith.

The density readings perfectly matched those obtained during the scan of Alan Mayer’s sarcophagus.

The head of the operation ordered an invasive test.

The technician took out a cordless drill with a long wood drill bit.

The sound of the tool biting into the bark broke the silence of the forest, causing birds to fly off the branches.

For the first 2 in, the drill went easily, throwing out red bark chips.

Then the resistance changed dramatically.

The tool began to make a higher pitched sound, typical of drilling hard plastic.

When the technician pulled the drill back out, everyone present froze.

Instead of dark wood or rot, a thin translucent yellowish spiral was wrapped around the tool’s spiral.

It was the same modified epoxy polymer, Marin clear cast.

One of the detectives illuminated the drilled hole with a powerful tactical flashlight.

The beam of light, once inside, broke in the muddy thickness, and the depths of the wood momentarily shown with a dim amber light.

There was no doubt.

This tree was also filled.

It had stood there for years.

Thousands of tourists had passed by.

Rangers had led tours, not even suspecting that another victim was hidden behind the layer of bark in the heart of a living organism.

Marcel Brand really created his museum right under the nose of the authorities.

He used centuries old trees as the safest safes in the world, turning the forest into a cemetery where the gravestones continued to grow and breathe.

The discovery confirmed the serial nature of the crimes.

Now, the police knew that the sketches in the album were not fantasies, but an inventory list.

The only question was how many more of these exhibits Humbult Park was hiding, and whether all the points on Bran’s map had already been realized.

The sun began to set behind the ridges, plunging the forest into darkness.

And in this twilight, the majestic silhouettes of the Seoas no longer aroused admiration.

They looked like mute guards of a terrible secret.

The operation was suspended until morning, but the place was surrounded by tape.

Realizing that tomorrow they would have to open another time capsule.

On December 8th, 2021, the automated fingerprint identification system, AFIS, gave a match that finally closed the circle in the investigation of the Shadow Bowl case.

The prints taken from chemical cans in an abandoned workshop in Ferndale matched perfectly with the fingerprint of a patient who was listed in the database of missing and unidentified persons under the code name John Doe number 64.

It turned out that Marcel Brand had neither died nor fled to another country.

For the past 5 years, he had been in the Napa State Psychiatric Hospital, a closed facility for people with severe mental disorders located just 200 miles south of the crime scene.

According to medical records, on February 12, 2016, patrol officers found him on the median of Highway 101.

He was walking, wearing dirty clothes, dehydrated, and in a deep catatonic stouper.

He had old chemical burns on his hands.

Since the man did not respond to questions and did not have any documents, he was admitted to the clinic as an unknown person.

For 5 years, he did not say a single word.

On December 10th, 2021, Detective Richardson, accompanied by the clinic’s leading psychiatrist, Dr.

Elisa Wong, entered the high security ward.

Marcel Brand, who was already 55 years old at the time, was sitting in a chair by the barred window.

He looked much older than his age, gray hair, sunken cheeks, and a completely empty gaze directed at a single point on the white wall.

Attempts to establish verbal contact were feudal.

Brand ignored questions about his name, the workshop, and the forest.

Then the detective pulled out a photo from a folder that had been taken by forensic experts at the site of the Candalabra Sequoia fall.

The photo showed a close-up of Alan Mayer’s face frozen in the yellow polymer, illuminated by the sun.

Richardson silently placed the photograph on the table in front of the patient.

The reaction was instantaneous.

Bran’s pupils dilated and his breathing became ragged.

He reached out with a trembling hand and ran his finger over the glossy surface of the photo as if trying to feel the texture.

Dr.

Wong noted in her report that this was the first time the patient had shown emotion during the entire observation.

His lips moved and he uttered his first sentence in a quiet voice from the long silence.

It was not a confession of murder.

“Why are you looking at this with horror?” he asked, not looking up at the detective.

You see death and I see salvation.

When the detective asked why he did this, Marcel responded with a monologue that was later included in the court case as evidence of his complete loss of contact with reality.

People are weak.

They live for a moment and then rot in the damp earth.

They are eaten by worms.

They turn into dirt.

It’s disgusting.

I gave them a chance for eternity.

Now they are part of the giants.

They will stand for a thousand years as long as the forest is alive.

Isn’t that what he wanted? That guy with the microphone.

He was looking for absolute silence.

I gave him the purest silence in the world.

He became the heart of the tree.

He can now hear the roots growing.

These words confirmed the investigator’s guess.

Bran did not just track down the victims.

He listened to them, studied their desires, and distorted them through the prism of his sick philosophy.

For him, it was not a murder, but an act of symbiosis, a term he used to sign his sketches.

After this monologue, Marcel Brand fell silent again and returned to a state of catatonia from which doctors were unable to bring him out.

Meanwhile, the fate of Alan Mayor’s body was being decided at the Humboldt County Morg.

Pathologists and chemists conducted a series of experiments on polymer samples trying to find a solvent that could destroy the epoxy without damaging biological tissue.

The conclusion was disappointing.

The industrial compound marine clear cast had penetrated so deeply into the pores of the skin and the structure of the clothing over 10 years that it had become one with the body.

Mechanical removal of the resin would have meant the actual destruction of the remains.

Allen’s family, including his brother Eric, faced a terrible choice.

Cremate the block with the polymer, which would require a special industrial oven due to the toxicity of burning epoxy or bury it in the condition in which it was found.

After difficult consultations, the family decided to keep Allen intact.

The funeral took place on January 20th, 2022 at the cemetery in Kulma, a suburb of San Francisco.

It was a private ceremony.

The coffin had to be ordered according to individual drawings.

It was wider and deeper than the standard one to accommodate the trunk fragment along with the body.

The total weight of the structure exceeded 400 lb, so a special lifting mechanism was needed to lower it into the grave rather than ordinary straps.

Eric Mayer stood by the open pit holding his brother’s old tape recorder, the one that had been cut out of the sarcophagus.

He did not turn it on.

The silence in the cemetery, broken only by the sound of the wind from the ocean, seemed like an ominous mockery of Allen’s dream.

His search for zero noise was successful, but the price for this piece was absolute.

Humbult Redwoods Park gradually returned to normal.

Hiking trails were opened in the spring of 2022.

However, the Shadow Bowl sector was removed from all guide books and the trails to it were closed under the pretext of ecosystem restoration.

The rangers know the truth.

There are still giant trees with scars on their bark deep in the forest.

They were checked with GPR and those containing exhibits were marked with special beacons, but not cut down.

The removal of the bodies was recognized as technically impossible and ethically controversial.

The forest remained a gallery and Marcel Brand locked in a white room in the hospital still believes that he is the only one who has understood the true essence of eternity.

day.