Backwoods Horror: The Mysterious Disappearances of Amy Bechtel & Polly Melton
One summer, a 24-year-old runner parked her car on a remote Wyoming road, left behind a to-do list with one uncrossed item "run" and was never seen again. Across the country, another woman was walking with friends on a well-traveled trail in the Great Smoky Mountains, went off ahead of her friends, and vanished without a trace. Today, we're diving into two backwoods disappearances, where the search parties found almost nothing, and the questions still go unanswered.
These are the cases of Amy Wroe Bechtel and Polly Melton.
Both of the cases in today’s episode are open and unsolved. If you have any information please contact the below:
Amy Wroe Bechtel: Please Contact Crime Stoppers at 1-800-442-8477. or the Fremont County Sheriff at 307-332-5611
Pauline Melton: Please Contact Tennessee Bureau of Investigation 615-744-4000 or the National Parks Service https://www.nps.gov/orgs/1563/cold-cases.html
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SOURCES
https://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Psyc%20405/serial%20killers/Eaton,%20Dale%20Wayne.pdf
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/37204923/thelma-pauline-melton
https://the-eye.eu/tasra/pages/DavidsWelt/media/20145.pdf (pp.153–155)
https://unsolvedappalachia.org/thelma-pauline-melton/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJiu36GZyGo
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding, as always, I’m your morbid guide into our dark curiosity, Kaelyn Moore.
I’ve asked this question before, but what could cause someone to vanish into thin air?
Sometimes I hear from our community when I pose that question, your theories and thoughts on the episode. And the answers range from the logical to the supernatural. People fall into crevices outdoors all the time, people run away to start new lives more than you’d think. Bigfoot is REAL and he’s taking people into the fourth dimension! I get that explanation more than you would think.
But what I have for you today has really left me scratching my head, and I really am curious to hear what you all think. The first story is of a woman who goes missing and a note is found in her car, in her handwriting, that reads “run”
And in the second story, a woman was out on a light walk with friends, turned a corner ahead of them, and was never seen again.
Two disappearances, two totally different circumstances, and one central question: what could cause someone to vanish into thin air?
Let’s get into it.
They say when you enter the forest you re-enter the food chain. That we as humans stop being apex predators, and anything could happen to us while we’re in there.
But what would cause someone to vanish into thin air? Well, today I want to tell you two stories of times that happened. In the first story, a woman goes missing and a note is found in her car that reads “run”
And in our second, a woman was out walking with friends, turns a corner ahead of them, and is never seen again.
The morning of July 24th, 1997, was just an average day for 24 year old Amy Bechtel. She woke up, made her to-do list, and joined her husband Steve for breakfast. At around 9:30am, the couple said their goodbyes and went their separate ways. Steve began his drive to DuBois, which was just over an hour from his and Amy’s home in Lander, Wyoming. He and his friend Sam, both outdoor enthusiasts, were going to scout new mountains to scale. While Amy headed over to the local fitness center to teach a weight-training class
After she finished her class, she ran some errands and then, at 2pm that afternoon, she dropped into a camera shop on Main Street to pick the owner’s brain about picture framing.
Around 3:30pm that day, dark storm clouds began to cover Lander and the surrounding areas, including DuBois, where Steve and his friend Sam were. With the rain now pouring down, the two decided to call it a day, and each got into their trucks and began heading back to their respective homes.
But when Steve arrived home, Amy wasn’t there. That was strange. He picked up his landline and called her parents. If she wasn’t at home, that was the second most likely place she’d be, but her parents said that they hadn’t seen her.
Steve was now starting to get pretty worried, so he dialed a couple of their other friends that might have seen Amy, but when no one had, he called the local hospital. What if she had been in a car accident while she was out and couldn’t get ahold of him.
But again, that turned up nothing. No one Steve called had any idea where Amy could be. So finally, just before 11pm, Steve reported his wife missing to the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office.
Within minutes, two sheriff’s deputies met with Steve outside his cottage and got a statement about what he remembered from that day. What was Amy wearing? Did she seem upset? Is there any other place she could be? She was wearing a yellow tank top, black running shorts, Adidas running shoes, a Timex Ironman watch, and a gold wedding ring. She didn’t seem upset. And no, he couldn’t think of anywhere else to search.
Steve’s next-door neighbors volunteered to go out and look for Amy, and Steve suggested they try the Loop Road that cuts through the Shoshone National Forest, in Sinks Canyon, as she had planned to jog there that afternoon.
Two hours later, as the neighbors were driving along the 30-mile Loop Road, their headlight hit something. There, parked on the side of the road near the Burnt Gulch Road turnoff, was Amy’s white Toyota Tercel.
The couple pulled their car behind Amy’s and got out to investigate. Her car was unlocked, and inside, on the passenger seat, they found Amy’s keys, her sunglasses, and the to-do list she had made that morning, with several items on the list crossed off. One of the last items, which had yet to be crossed-off, just read “run”. It felt ominous.
The only thing missing, besides Amy herself, was her wallet—which she was known to not take with her when she jogged.
What happened to it?
They looked around Amy’s car. Puddles from that afternoon’s rainfall surrounded the car like a moat, and yet they saw no footprints in the mud, not a single one, aside from their own. Had Amy been out for a run when the sky opened up on her? Was she stuck somewhere? If that was the case, Time was of the essence.
They immediately called Steve and reported the news. Steve gathered up some lanterns and a sleeping bag, got into his truck, and headed out toward Burnt Gulch.
Now, It’s often said that “opposites attract.” And while this may be true for magnets, this concept has long been proven to not apply to success in romantic relationships, where the idea of “opposites attract” is usually just wishful thinking. The reality is, the more different two partners are, the less likely it is their relationship will last.
Few couples, however, have ever been more perfectly suited for each other than Amy Wroe and Steve Bechtel, who from almost the outset of their relationship seemed destined to live happily ever after.
Amy and Steve first started dating in 1992, when they were students at the University of Wyoming, both pursuing degrees in Exercise Nutrition.
Amy and Steve both had lives that revolved around athletics.
Steve had a passion for rock-climbing and a fearlessness that pushed him to conquer peaks that no human had previously climbed, from foreboding mountains in nearby national forests to far-flung heights in the Himalayas.
Meanwhile, Amy was a champion runner who was already breaking records in high school. And as the star runner of the University of Wyoming’s cross-country team, the Cowgirls, Amy was well on her way to competing in the 2000 Olympics.
The couple moved to Lander, Wyoming a small town by most standards after they graduated.
Lander’s economic heartbeat is outdoor recreation, and so it beckons to the athletically inclined like Amy and Steve, who settled into a little cottage on a street called Lucky Lane with a yellow lab named Jonz. in June of 1996, they finally tied the knot, and of course, their honeymoon was a monthlong rock-climbing trip in Australia.
Now, interestingly, Amy and Steve did not embark on this trip alone. Steve invited his friend Sam on their honeymoon, which was just an interesting side note I found
But, that aside, July of 1997 was an exciting time for Amy and Steve. Amy finally finished paying off her student loans, and the couple just closed escrow on a brand new three-bedroom house. All the while, Amy was busy organizing a 10K race for that September. But somehow, in the midst of all of that, she vanished.
By 2am, sheriff’s deputies had converged on the area around Amy’s car and began organizing a massive search effort. Volunteers trickled into Sinks Canyon throughout the dark early morning hours, and the search continued into the day.
But no matter how loud they screamed her name, they never heard anything back.
The sheriff’s office deployed search dogs, helicopters, and a virtual army of at least a hundred, maybe two hundred volunteers.
Investigators ended up ordering duplicates of the clothing Amy was wearing the day before and brought them out to the search site, hoping to find clothing remnants and shoeprints that matched.
And then, before long… their efforts paid off.
Just east of Amy’s car, down the canyon creek drainage, searchers found a shoe print very similar to the soles of the shoes Amy was known to have last been wearing.
Volunteers did an exhaustive search of the surrounding area, and they found Amy’s pen—three quarters of a mile away from where her car was found. But, that was all that turned up.
Within days, Amy’s disappearance was statewide news and tips began pouring in. The Sheriff’s Office was inundated, with over a thousand tips coming in every hour—none of which sounded promising.
Meanwhile, search was expanded to a 30-mile radius of where Amy’s car was found.
The military got involved, flying in Air Force helicopters with infrared detection devices. The National Guard and Civil Air Patrol assisted with the search, as did volunteers on horseback, on ATVs, you name it. Bad weather, like the weather on the afternoon of Amy’s disappearance, kept impeding the search effort, but the Sheriff’s department persisted.
Lead investigator Dave King assured reporters that the Sheriff’s Office knew what they’re doing. They had extensive experience searching this rugged terrain for the lost and endangered, with nearly fifty Search and Rescue operations every year, so if there’s someone out there, dead or alive… they’ll find them.
Well, after a week of searching every corner of the wilderness, they found no trace of Amy beyond her abandoned car, her pen, and a single shoeprint—a shoeprint that, unfortunately, got trampled on and destroyed by the volunteer searchers before it could be preserved.
By this point, the FBI had joined the investigation and were able to obtain satellite images taken the very afternoon Amy disappeared. But this was another dead end, as the cloud cover that day blocked the satellites’ view of the ground.
Soon after that, the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office decided to end the search.
Authorities were confident that, if Amy had fallen, had a medical emergency, or even if she’d been attacked by a wild animal, they almost certainly would’ve found her.
So maybe it wasn’t that Amy had an accident while out on her run. Maybe someone wanted Amy to disappear….
When a married woman disappears, the first person police usually look at is, of course, the husband. And in Amy Bechtel’s case, investigators had more than just one reason to turn their attention to Steve.
On the surface, Amy and Steve may have appeared an ideal couple in every way. Picture perfect. But when investigators sat down with Amy’s brother Nels, what he had to say raised their eyebrows.
Nels remembered an evening not so long ago, when Amy and Steve came to his house for dinner. During the meal, Nels happened to notice that Amy had bruises on her. Nels asked his sister about the bruises, and Amy immediately averted her eyes and laughed it off by saying that Steve could get a little rough sometimes.
Her response felt ‘off’ to Nels, who also felt that Steve often talked down to Amy in a way that was condescending and sometimes just plain belittling.
And then, investigators received new information that propelled their interest in Steve even more.
A woman who’d been camping in the Burnt Gulch area on the afternoon Amy disappeared remembered seeing a blue pickup truck speeding through the mountain at around 4:45pm that day, not far from the spot where Amy’s car was later found. The witness said she saw a man behind the wheel, and a blonde woman in the passenger seat. And then, the woman claimed, she later saw that same truck again at the search-and-rescue site.
Deputies asked the woman down to the Sheriff’s station and showed her some pictures of blue pickup trucks. She identified one of the trucks as looking just like the one she had seen.
It was Steve Bechtel’s truck.
Investigators had in fact been keeping a close eye on Steve from the very beginning, because he had told them something, in the initial report, that they tried to verify and couldn’t.
Steve had claimed that, on the night of Amy’s disappearance, he had called the local hospital to check if Amy had been admitted.
Well, investigators contacted the hospital and asked them to check their call logs, to corroborate that Steve had made this call. The hospital staff checked the call log from that night—and even checked it twice—but there was no record of Steve having placed that call. And while it’s definitely possible someone slacked off and didn’t log it, investigators considered this highly suspicious.
They brought Steve back into the station and began grilling him on what they claimed were inconsistencies in his timeline. And they couldn’t confirm his alibi of being in DuBois, 80 miles away, on the afternoon of Amy’s disappearance. The only person who could confirm it was Steve’s friend, Sam—who was reportedly there with him—and investigators hadn’t been able to get in touch with him.
The detectives told Steve they believed he knew more than he was letting on and asked him to take a polygraph test. Steve declined, and then he cut the interview short and hired an attorney.
When Amy’s family got wind of this, their suspicions grew, and only continued to grow after hearing the recording of Steve’s initial call to report his wife missing.
At the top of the call, Steve said to the dispatcher: “I've got a missing person here and wondered if you maybe had an extra”
Amy was missing and yet, here’s her husband making a joke? Why wasn’t he more panicked?
Tension grew between Steve and Amy’s family until they were pretty much estranged.
And investigators wasted little time obtaining search warrants for Steve’s home, his pickup truck, and his phone records.
Deputies showed up at the house with cadaver dogs and Luminol, which makes cleaned-up blood stains fluoresce—or, ‘light up like a Christmas tree,’ as they always say on television— They expected to find some trace that Amy had been harmed inside. but they couldn’t find any evidence of violence inside the home.
But what they did find was violence in Steve’s private journal that police confiscated during the search.
Police have never released the contents of the journal, nor have they described exactly what they found, except to say that Steve’s writings, quote, “showed a desire for power and control that may have led to murder.”
But according to Steve, these were just song lyrics and creative writings that were blown out of proportion by investigators overeager to pin his wife’s disappearance on him.
Eventually, investigators did get in touch with Steve’s friend, Sam, who corroborated Steve’s alibi. They were together in DuBois until mid-afternoon.
But they said that still could’ve given Steve time enough to kill Amy and dispose of her body somewhere.
However—a major hole in the case authorities were building against Steve opened up when they reviewed his telephone records for the afternoon of Amy’s disappearance.
It turns out, Steve had placed a telephone call from his home at 4:43pm that day, which was around the same time the camper thought she’d seen Steve’s blue pickup, with Steve at the helm and Amy in the passenger seat, speeding through Burnt Gulch. Burnt Gulch is 45 minutes from Steve and Amy’s house. He couldn’t have been in two places at once.
Nevertheless, Steve remained the prime suspect. Detective Dave King, who was soon elected County Sheriff, wasn’t shy about publicly naming Steve as the only person of interest.
And Amy’s family was nearly as vocal, even going on the Geraldo (Heraldo) Rivera Show to openly implore Steve to take the polygraph test and cooperate with the investigation.
But for Steve, life went on.
He maintained the mortgage on the house he and Amy had bought—because he needed her signature in order to sell it—until he had Amy declared legally dead. He then remarried and built a new life for himself in Lander, where suspicions in the community slowly went quiet.
Sheriff Dave King, who for years was the loudest voice keeping suspicion on Steve, ended up resigning from his position after he was indicted for stealing cocaine and opiates from the evidence locker, a crime for which he was later convicted.
But even as the case grew cold, the department returned their attention to Steve every so often, going so far as to tear up the driveway of the home Steve and Amy had purchased, after rumors circulated that he had buried Amy there.
Nothing turned up. It was starting to feel like Amy got swallowed up by a beam of light and just vanished. With nowhere else to look, her case file eventually got put up high on a shelf, where it was forgotten.
But Years later, a cold case investigator named John Zerga who had a passion for unsolved cases, pulled her file down to go through it once more. And as he started flipping through he got totally wrapped up in the mystery. Not just because of how strange the whole thing seemed, but because of how many mistakes he could tell the original investigators made…
1. They failed to treat the area as a crime scene during the original search.
2. Amy’s footprint, the only trace of her outside of her car, got trampled by searchers.
3. They allowed Steve’s truck to be driven off by his friends before detectives could process it.
Zerga wondered what else the original investigators may have overlooked. He began poring over the thousands of tips the Sheriff’s office received in the first several months of the investigation. And one immediately caught his eye.
The tipster was a man named Richard Eaton, who told detectives they should look into his brother Dale, an itinerant laborer with mental health issues, who had been camping in the Burnt Gulch area around the time that Amy disappeared.
Zerga’s heart stopped when he saw this tip. Because 1. There was no evidence that this tip was ever followed up on. And 2. he immediately recognized the name Dale Eaton.
In September 1997, Dale Eaton was driving his van down a desolate stretch of highway in the Wyoming desert when he came across a family stranded outside a broken-down vehicle. Eaton offered to give them a ride, which they accepted, but then he pulled off the highway down a lonely dirt road and pulled a gun on them. Luckily, they were able to overpower Eaton and beat the daylights out of him.
Eaton was charged with kidnapping and accepted a plea deal. He was sent to a halfway house from which he soon escaped. He was captured after 44 days on the run, while hiding out in the Shoshone National Forest.
Eaton’s DNA was entered into the national criminal database, and in July 2002, his profile was matched to an unsolved murder—the infamous 1988 killing of an 18-year-old Montana woman named Lisa Kimmell, who disappeared while driving through Wyoming and was later found raped, murdered and dumped in a river. Lisa’s car, a brand new Honda sportscar with a distinctive vanity plate, was never found.
But after the DNA from Lisa’s rape kit was matched to Dale Eaton, authorities dug up the property where he was living at the time, and there, buried beneath six feet of desert sand, they found Lisa’s long-missing 1988 Honda with its personalized plate.
At the time Eaton was identified as Lisa Marie Kimmell’s killer, Steve Bechtel and his father actually tried to convince the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office to look into him as a potential suspect in Amy’s disappearance, but investigators were dismissive. At that point they had tunnel vision on Steve and they insisted that he was the only person of interest.
And this was long before Sgt. John Zerga took over the case and found the old tip from Dale Eaton’s brother, which itself was from 1997—years before Eaton would be linked to Lisa's murder.
Zerga decided to visit Eaton on death row, where he had been sent following his conviction for Kimmell’s murder. But this didn’t yield anything- Eaton basically told the detective to get lost.
Authorities now suspect that Dale Wayne Eaton may be a serial killer, potentially responsible for a series of killings known as the “Great Basin Murders”—which date all the way back to the early 1980s. Eaton has refused to talk to authorities. And Sgt. Zerga’s official position now is, there’s good reason to believe Dale Eaton may have been involved in Amy Bechtel’s disappearance.
In 2014, Sheriff’s deputies returned to Burnt Gulch with cadaver dogs in a renewed effort to find Amy. And this time, the dogs followed a scent down Burnt Gulch to a depression in the dirt, which had the characteristics of a clandestine grave. Authorities painstakingly sifted through every cubic centimeter of soil within the depression, but all they ever found was a single twist tie.
We may never really know what happened to Amy Bechtel, who seemingly parked her car on the turnout, went for a run, and vanished into the landscape.
Could she have had an accident? Investigators didn’t think so. And while it still seems possible that Amy may have fallen into something that permanently pulled her out of view, the consensus among detectives is that someone put her somewhere she’ll never be found. As for Dale, well he’s still alive. He was the last person on death row in Wyoming when his sentence was overturned 10 years ago. But he’s getting older, and time might be running out if he knows anything about Amy’s whereabouts. Though it might be the last chance we have at answers.
The point is, something happened to Amy, she couldnt have just vanished into thin air, even though at times when I read this story, it literally feels like that thats what happened.
And next I want to tell you another story that’s kept me up at night. Another story where it feels like someone truly dematerialized out of this world while on a hike.
Our next case takes place on September 25, 1981—a Friday afternoon in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.
These mountains are a subrange of the Appalachians, and they loom large over the Tennessee / North Carolina border.
That day, 58 year old Polly Melton got a call from two of her friends, Trula and Red, asking if she wanted to go on a stroll with them on Deep Creek Trail.
Deep Creek Trail is a wide and well-traveled path that isn't much of a challenge to complete. The canopy of trees along the Trail give shade from the sun.
It would be a short little stroll, so short, in fact, that Polly didn’t even think she needed to take the spaghetti sauce she was simmering off the stove.
She turned to her husband, Bob, told him where she was going, and then left her Airstream to join her friends at around 3:15.
During the hike, Polly lagged behind her friends, who joked with her about her being a slowpoke. This was typical of Polly, who smoked two packs of Virginia Slims a day, had high blood pressure and chronic nausea. They did give her credit though because despite all this she still made an effort to walk with them when she could.
They eventually reached the turnaround point at the end of the trail, where they stopped for a few minutes so Polly could smoke a cigarette. Afterward, they began the hike back to their trailers.
They ambled along, making small talk, laughing with each other—much like many past strolls they’d taken across the many summers they've enjoyed together in North Carolina.
But then, Polly suddenly picked up her pace—in fact, she began walking so fast, it was like she was trying to lose Trula and Red, who looked at each other and grinned with amusement, thinking perhaps Polly was playing a prank.
Red called out to Polly and joked that she didn’t want to compete with her in a foot race.
Polly glanced back and laughed but kept on down the trail, picking up even more speed—far outpacing her friends, who watched as Polly grew smaller in the distance until she reached a rise in the trail, and as she passed over its peak to the other side, she disappeared from view.
It took some time for Trula and Red to reach the rise, assuming they’d find Polly plum tuckered out and resting on the bench at the other side of it.
But when they reached the other side of the hill, Polly was nowhere in sight.
This was puzzling, but they weren’t too concerned. It was still daylight and Polly knew the trail. And she certainly wouldn’t venture off it, because she had a paralyzing fear of snakes and was also afraid of falling into the creek below. The ladies thought their friend would slow down eventually—and they’d probably catch up with her before they returned to their trailers.
Trula and Red were quite surprised, then, when they made it all the way back to the campground without running into Polly. Apparently she had beaten them there.
So The women rushed to Polly’s trailer expecting to find her inside, but when they knocked, they were stunned to find Polly’s husband, Bob, all by himself.
Bob said he hadn’t seen Polly since she left for her hike. Trula and Red explained what had happened and then began circling the campground, asking everyone there if they had seen Polly. No one had.
Where could she have gone?
They began calling everyone Polly knew, but nobody had a clue where she was.
With the evening sky beginning to dim, Trula and Red knew it was time to find the park rangers and report their friend missing.
Park Ranger Dennis Burnett knew Polly well, from the nearly two decades she had been spending her summers at Deep Creek, and so did the other rangers, who immediately closed the trail and began searching for signs of the missing woman.
Along the way, the rangers questioned everyone in the area, providing a description of Polly and the clothing she was wearing. Nobody remembered seeing her.
As the temperature dropped to the low fifties and the sky turned black, rangers used high-powered flashlights to search the creek.
Polly’s father and brothers soon arrived to assist with the search, meanwhile Polly’s poor husband Bob was so distressed, he started having trouble breathing and was admitted to the hospital.
Over the next few days, the search efforts increased, with up to 350 people getting involved —friends, family, volunteers, park rangers, and dog handlers.
One of the search dogs, a bloodhound, zeroed in on one particular area: a fallen tree beside the trail, where hikers would sometimes sit to rest. The bloodhound’s handler believed Polly may have stopped here.
However—when the dogs reached the spot where Polly was last seen, just beyond the rise in the trail, the dogs suddenly began howling and spinning around in circles. It was as though Polly had simply been whisked up into the sky. Or like she had just… spontaneously evaporated.
But dogs failed to detect any scent beyond these two spots, which handlers believed may have been due to the excessively dry weather.
As the autumn chill set in, the trees began to shed their leaves, erasing the ceiling over the trail—allowing helicopters to join the search with a clear bird’s-eye-view of the area. But even with that view, they observed nothing out of the ordinary.
The search continued until, by October 2nd, every corner of the Deep Creek Trail and Campgrounds had been searched: every fork, every side trail, every recess. And not a single trace of Polly Melton was found. No clothing, no shoes, no jewelry, no Virginia Slims. Nothing.
Investigators felt like there was a chance that Polly was no longer in the park. But if she didn’t go home where did she go?
Well, one investigator noticed that near the last spot Polly was seen, there was a parking lot, and the trail allows vehicle traffic up to a certain point. Is there a chance there was someone waiting there for her. But who would it have been?
It felt like a total stretch, but the more investigators started talking to people who knew Polly about the events leading up to her disappearance, the more plausible it felt…
Polly was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, one of four children—and throughout the years, Polly had multiple careers that included teaching and stenography.
Polly’s first husband was a Korean war vet who died in 1967 after an extended illness. Polly remarried shortly after, and not long into that marriage, her second husband died from throat cancer, leaving Polly a widow once again.
In 1975, Polly married once again—this time to her father’s business partner, a man named Bob Melton who was 22 years Polly’s senior. Bob and Polly’s father co-owned campground space in Deep Creek, and for nearly twenty years, Polly had been spending her summers there—which is a tradition she continued after marrying Bob.
Polly and Bob settled in Jacksonville, Florida, where they lived in an Airstream trailer, which they unhitched every summer for the trip up to Deep Creek.
During her summers in North Carolina, Polly volunteered at a church nutrition center, where she served meals to seniors every day of the week. Polly had been doing this for many years, and the seniors and other volunteers there loved her. They saw her as friendly, reliable, and whip-smart.
But in recent years, Polly had been hit with depression. Her husband Bob was beset by progressive health problems like heart disease and emphysema, rendering him increasingly unable to participate in life and pushing Polly into the role of full-time caregiver. And in 1977, Polly’s mother died, which had a profound impact on her.
With Polly’s own health struggles, and her husband’s increasing dependence, a world without her mom left Polly in need of some relief, and she found it in the form of Valium.
Polly seemed to be slowly pulling herself out of her darkness, though those close to her, like the pastor of her church, observed that Polly’s spirits were taking a bit of a dive in recent weeks. And she had also been doing things that seemed… out of character.
The day before Polly disappeared, her fellow volunteers at the church nutrition center noticed that Polly had done something that she had never done before in the many years she volunteered there: she had used the church’s phone. Not just once, but multiple times. No one knew whom Polly called or what was discussed.
When investigators later learned of this, they examined the church’s telephone bill, but it revealed nothing—because the phone bill only listed long-distance calls. Whatever number Polly called had to have been a local number.
That same afternoon, Polly had done something else unusual: she failed to sign up to volunteer the following morning. And indeed, on Friday morning, the day of her disappearance, she didn’t volunteer. In all the many years she’d volunteered at the center, she had never missed a day.
But, that afternoon, Polly had left a pot of spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove before heading out on her hike with her friends—which would seem to indicate Polly intended to return to the trailer.
Trula and Red, puzzled as ever, couldn’t wrap their heads around this situation. They speculated that maybe Polly had met someone she knew along the trail, that person had a car parked nearby, and she left with them.
Polly’s friends and family were at a loss, with each person coming up with their own explanation to help make sense of the sudden disappearance.
Trula believed that Polly may have suffered a mini-stroke that left her disoriented. Perhaps she simply walked off the trail and got lost.
Others theorized that maybe Polly became dazed from her Valium use. In fact, Bob—Polly’s husband—had discovered that a small bottle of Valium prescribed to him was missing from their trailer, which he only realized after Polly disappeared.
If either of these theories were true, though, then why did no trace of Polly turn up? Every corner of the Deep Creek Campground had been searched. It seemed impossible that, if Polly collapsed or was injured, she wouldn’t have eventually been spotted.
And all the side trails lead back to civilization, so Polly surely would have found her way back to safety if she’d gotten lost or become disoriented.
Ranger Burnett offered up a theory of his own.
Polly was wearing valuable diamond jewelry at the time she went missing. And there was a drug drop site in the Deep Creek area that was known as the “poke patch.” Ranger Burnett wondered if one of the addicts who frequented the “poke patch” might have spotted Polly, and her expensive diamond jewelry, and abducted her from the trail.
The problem with this theory, though, was that the “poke patch” was about four miles away from the spot where Polly was last seen. And Polly weighed close to 180 pounds. Dragging her off the trail wouldn’t have been easy, and surely, the ensuing struggle would’ve attracted attention, as Deep Creek Trail was busy and well-traveled, yet no one reported seeing or hearing anything unusual that day.
Polly’s sister still thought this theory seemed plausible, and would explain why Polly’s body never turned up.
Polly’s family was adamant that Polly wouldn’t have just voluntarily disappeared. If she were unhappy in her marriage, she would’ve simply gotten a divorce. Why vanish and not contact loved ones? It didn’t make sense.
But—that was the conclusion park officials ultimately reached. In a press conference they gave after the search was called off, park officials reported that all the available evidence—which admittedly wasn’t very much—pointed to Polly having left the park of her own free will. And probably in a vehicle.
The fact that Polly didn’t sign up to volunteer at the nutrition center that day, and those uncharacteristic phone calls she made the day before—was there perhaps a mystery suitor who swept her away to a new life?
Polly’s pastor remembered a conversation he’d had with her a few years earlier, where Polly had, seemingly unprompted, begun talking about people who cheat on their spouses, and how she would never do such a thing. For some reason, the pastor was left feeling like maybe Polly in fact had done such a thing and this was her way of ironing out her guilt.
Park investigators learned that some of Polly’s friends from the campground also suspected she might be involved with another man. In fact, Trula and Red had been teasing her about this very thing during their final hike.
Investigators also talked to some of the seniors from the nutrition center, and one of them remembered an interesting remark Polly had made shortly before her disappearance. During a conversation in which Polly was asked what she might wish for if she were granted one wish, Polly thought for a moment and then answered that if fate granted her one wish, she would wish to be light enough to walk without leaving footprints.
Polly’s family never heard from her again. And no trace of her would ever again surface—except… for one tantalizing discovery seven months after her disappearance.
In April 1982, it was learned that a check made out to Polly Melton was cashed at a bank in Birmingham, Alabama. The check was from the Birmingham Trust National Bank for interest earned. Authorities examined the signature on the check, and it appeared consistent with Polly Melton’s. So they interviewed the teller who processed that check—and the teller had no memory whatsoever of the person who presented it. So—the check ended up being a dead end.
It’s worth noting that Polly had left behind $2000 in her savings account. Why take the risk of cashing an interest check while leaving two grand untouched?
Poor Bob Melton deteriorated quickly after Polly vanished.
After his release from the hospital, he returned to Florida in the Airstream trailer, which his sons helped him sell before moving him into a nursing home, where he died in October of 1982.
Bob’s sons didn’t mention Polly in their father’s obituary and have refused to talk about her disappearance with the media
Polly’s family maintains that she was probably abducted while out on the trail. Her sister believes that, had Polly been attacked by animals, the search party would have at least located her clothes. And if she’d wandered away in a daze, someone would have eventually found her.
Her sister insists there’s just no way Polly left on her own accord.
Polly’s family had her declared legally dead in 1988. The National Park Service still lists her in their database as a missing person.
What causes a person to just vanish in the backwoods? Now, I turn to you guys, truly, what do you think? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if a person vanishes out there, who can say they didn’t simply go poof?