We did a river clean up after Helene and were digging through piles of debris on the islands of the river, there were kayaks and tires and bits of docks sticking out of the piles and it was a bear to dig out debris just a few inches deep. There’s no way they can find everybody who is missing.
A retired ranger friend of mine told me about someone hunting mushrooms in the Shenandoah National Park found an entire human skeleton in the woods. They never did figure out who it was or what happened.
Out of curiosity, did they go “Ah! A human body!” and notify authorities right away to ensure the scene was properly examined, or did they go “Oh, neat. A human body. I guess I’ll pick up a stick and start excavating… Oh, super cool! There’s actually two sets of human remains here, which I will happily proceed to fully uncover. I guess I’ll just stand looking whimsically at them and wonder what sort of story they might tell, if only they could talk…”
For those who don’t want to chance the link, I am satirizing (actually, just accurately summarizing) the opening scene to First Cow, and the link is to its Wikipedia page.
No, they were freaked out and ran to the ranger station screaming. This would have been in the 80s or 90s. I asked my friend if they ever went back to use new technology to figure it out and he said, “I don’t know, I retired.” Fair point.
You were spot on with this observation.
The number of people missing in the Kerrville area due to the Hill Country floods has been reduced to 97, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said during a news conference on Monday.
That number is significantly lower than the 161 missing people that Kerr County officials reported on Thursday morning at a press conference.
That is a mystery book just crying to be written.
That’s kinda what they did with Ötzi but it was even more Grab-Ass. Ice Axes, Hiking Poles and a power drill. Probably destroyed lots of valuable learnin’ in what turned out to be one of the most studied human beings that ever walked the face of the planet.
The Mystery was solved. The girl killed her Mom for with-holding food. Apparently it was an ongoing problem.
The folks were very backwoods, probably some inbreeding going on.
The younger woman was institutionalized til she died.
Someone published a detailed thing in a Regional rag we have here, about it.
So all that can be known, is known.
The story was kinda famous because when sheriffs went to get the woman out of the house her crazy brother showed up, throwing bricks, and a deputy killed him.
It was a few decades ago.
Flash forward…and her head shows up in the outhouse.
I found her false teeth first. That was unnerving. Let me tell you what.
My BFF’s dad unearthed a skeleton while plowing a field, in the 1970s or 1980s. The farm had been in the family since at least 1900, and they never knew a person had been buried there, and because it was rural, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation got involved. They were only able to determine that the bones belonged to a Caucasian man in his 40s who had probably been dead for at least 100 years, and someone organized a county-paid funeral for him at a local cemetery, and the stone says something like “White Man, Found Outside (town and the date), Died Before 1900, Known But To God.”
This story came from my area in 2017. A man went out one early morning to get his paper and saw the fire in the darkness; he grabbed his fire extinguisher, probably destroying a lot of evidence (but the authorities understood) and at first, he thought it was a large dog but the First Responders knew immediately that it was a person.
Because the body was so small, they thought it was a child (and it was so badly burned, they didn’t know if it was male or female until the autopsy). It turned out to be a man with a mild type of dwarfism who had a long criminal record, and he finally really pissed off the wrong person.
That it happened in a middle-class neighborhood made it fairly big news here.
p.s. Might help if I posted a link.
An update to that, they got and convicted the perpetrator:
Were they connected to the rest of her? Yikes!
I was thinking of a mystery book, not connected to your mystery, with that as a title. It’s a great title.
“The toilet snake came out bloody!” I don’t recall cozy mysteries starring a plumber.
No the false teeth were found as I was raking the remnants of the “crap” Mr.Wrekker was pulling out of the hole.
He’d grab a scoop transfer it to the trailer.
Stuff was everywhere, so I was on the rake, shovel and wheelbarrow.
I saw a glint of white shiny stuff. Bent down thinking dog toy or kid toy. I was not happy to have “shitty” false teeth in my hand. Creeped me right out.
Still, we were not thinking a head down there.
We figured they were accidentally dropped in the hole.
The head rolled off the scoop on to the trailer and I said to myself, “surely, not…”
It had some bottom teeth, though half the jaw was missing. A big indentation in the back of the head. And a tuft of a root sticking out of the eye socket.
Seriously jarring to look at.
I kinda wanted to keep it.
The Sheriff said I was plumb morbid.
And no, I couldn’t have it.
A nice cozy mystery could be fashioned from this. I suppose.
Kerrville city manager admits he had weather alerts turned off ahead of deadly flooding. He says this doesn’t matter as he has employees monitoring the weather constantly–yet still he didn’t inform the mayor until 5:30 am–4 hours after the major NWS alert.
https://www.chron.com/weather/article/kerrville-city-manager-weather-alerts-off-20770484.php
Let the lawsuits fly!
Maybe they should hire the Uvalde police to investigate. Keystone meet Kops.
Hey, it IS Texas.
I think the cart before horse applies here.
We gotta know who to blame, first.
Then sue them into proverty!personally, I would start at the top…as in the fascist who cut the NWS
Mining my memory data bank, they did catch him pretty quickly.
I was just thinking this situation reeks of the same incompetence and indecisiveness as what happened in Uvalde.
The number of people still missing in a Texas county ravaged by deadly flooding over the Fourth of July holiday weekend now stands at three, down from nearly 100…
At one time, state officials said about 160 people were unaccounted for after the flooding in Kerr County alone. Kerr County officials said the number of missing people decreased as victims were recovered, contact was made with people who were found safe and some reports were found to be unsubstantiated or falsified.
So the total number of deaths is going to end up being a great deal fewer than previously predicted. [the number of bodies found is now 135].