December 11, 2025 • 56 mins
In September 2012, 35-year-old Jeffrey Gebhardt vanished in the Georgia woods during an early-season deer hunt. A few hours later, search teams discovered his body on the edge of Clarks Hill Lake—hands folded neatly on his chest, gear scattered nearby, and eighteen stab wounds across his torso.
What investigators didn’t find was even more disturbing. No defensive wounds. No footprints except Jeff’s. No blood trail, no drag marks, no sign of a struggle. And a knife beneath him containing only his DNA.
Was Jeff murdered by someone hiding deep in the forest? Did he witness something he shouldn’t have? Or did he experience a darker, far more complex crisis that left even forensic experts baffled?
In this episode of Blood Trails, host Jordan Sillars breaks down the full case file—interviews with Jeff’s hunting partner, GBI agents, forensic specialists, and members of Jeff’s community—to uncover why investigators ultimately reached the most controversial conclusion of all.
This is the story of a death that defies logic, a crime scene that rewrites itself, and a mystery that refuses to stay buried.
Content warning: This episode contains discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, call 988 for free, confidential support.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode contains graphic descriptions of crime scene details. It
also deals with suicide. Listener discretion is advised. If you
or someone you know is in emotional distress or having
thoughts of suicide, call or text nine to eight eight
to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. It's free, confidential,
and available twenty four to seven.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Encountering the unexpected and inexplicable is one of the reasons
we venture into the wild. You never know what's going
to happen. On a hunt or a hike. You might
see something you've never seen before, or something you can't
quite explain. Since Jeff Gebhart was found dead in the
woods of northwest Georgia, family, friends, and investigators have been
(00:43):
trying to explain exactly what happened to the healthy, thirty
five year old hunter. All have failed.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Do you have any knowledge of his death or how
he died?
Speaker 4 (00:55):
No, sir, I should know. I can wake you in
the eye and tell you. I'm sure don't. I'm telling
you everything that I know. Honestly, I know nothing about it.
I was just trying to help him, and I believe
that I believe that I don't know anybody that would
want to heard him.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
That's Dave Smith. Dave and Jeff had met a couple
of years prior, and they'd struck up an instant friendship.
Both loved hunting, and in September of twenty twelve, they
traveled to the Clarks Hill Wildlife Management Area to participate
in a special rifle hunt for deer. Three days in,
the trip turned from a hunt to a nightmare.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
I hear the two warning shots and I'm still blowing
the horn, and I told him, I said, well, I
want to go get somebody and we'll come and help
look for you. And so we come back out here
and they think they know about where he's at. So
we ride the roads. We ride that two or three times,
and we never did see him on the road anywhere.
(01:52):
And that's when I called nine to one one.
Speaker 5 (01:54):
You told me earlier today that he sounded very not scared,
but he dressed out and you were hysterical.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Jeff had called Dave to tell him he was lost
and couldn't find his way back to the road. He
fired his rifle to help Dave locate him, and then nothing.
Jeff stopped answering his phone, and when game wardens arrived,
they didn't let Dave venture into the dark Georgia Pines
to look for his friend.
Speaker 6 (02:21):
The helicopter in about twenty minutes will be in there.
They spotted a flashlight on the shore on the lake
shore in some grass. Quickly thereafter they located the body.
They tried to hover the area. They could hover down
pretty close. They tried to hover over him to get
her repose, and he was unresponsive.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Jeff's body was found lying on his back. His hands
had been folded across his chest. His rifle and hunting
pack were a short distance away, and a folding pocket
knife was found underneath his body. When investigators arrived at
the scene and took a closer look, they saw the
stab wounds eighteen in total, most entered around Jeff's heart.
Speaker 7 (03:02):
Let me throw on something to you very quick.
Speaker 5 (03:04):
Okay, Jeff was murdered. This was no accident, This was
no suicide. This man was murdered, no question about it. Okay,
no doubt we know. And he was, like I said,
this was a murder. This was nothing.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Else that certainly seemed to be the case. No one
gets accidentally stabbed eighteen times. Whatever happened to the hours
between when Jeff hung up and when his body was
found was violent and intentional.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
I mean, Jeff was your friend, right and you know
from everything you told me, you guys had a good,
strong friendship yesterday. And you know I can tell you're
upset over this, right.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
It really yeah, mardon mean when I knew he was lost,
and especially when the day if you got there and
he didn't want anybody going in the because I was
somebody took. You know, it's really bothered me, especially today
more what's if found out.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
What happened to Jeff on that warm September night is
as disturbing and perplexing today as it was during Dave's
tearful interview with law enforcement. Maybe Jeff met a stranger
who was bent on violence, Maybe he saw something he
shouldn't have seen, or an unknown enemy use the isolation
of the woods to settle old scores. Or maybe Jeff
(04:32):
succumbed to something even darker and more bizarre than the
ill will of another human. I'm Jordan Sillers and this
is Blood Trails, Lost in the Dark, Part one Nightmare.
(04:53):
Dave and Jeff had met about two years prior at
Chambers Slaughterhouse, where they both worked in Blairsville, Georgia.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
We got along day I first made him hay Fame,
where I was working at. He was a hunter and
I was a hunter, so I mean we hit it
off and we started turrey hunting the first year, and
then deer season came along. We started deer hunting, and
then we had started hunting in this dear season.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
The recording you'll hear of Dave throughout this episode is
from two interviews he gave to agents with the Georgia
Bureau of Investigation or GBI. Dave initially agreed to be
interviewed for this podcast, but he backed out, telling me
it would be too difficult to rehash what happened. Fortunately,
I was able to obtain the case file from the GBI,
(05:41):
along with Dave's interviews with law enforcement. In the fall
of twenty twelve, Jeff and Dave had made plans to
hunt whitetail in the Clarks Hill, WMA, which is about
thirty miles northwest of Augusta. It was a three hour
drive from where the pair worked in Blairsville, but they
were able to get tags for a special rifle hunt.
The general rifle season wouldn't begin until October twentieth, but
(06:03):
the Clarks Hill WMA offered a rifle season in September
to help manage the white tail population. According to game
Warden Matt Garthwright, it was packed.
Speaker 6 (06:13):
It's visited quite a good bit. That particular weekend they
have an early rifle hunt, which Gio's hunters come in
there with a rifle and hunt early before the actual
rifle season comes in, so a lot of people take
advantage of that hunt.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
The pair arrived on Thursday, September twentieth, the day before
the hunt opened. They planned to hunt out of portable
tree stands they'd brought with them. Jeff carried a Remington
Model seven to ten bolt action rifle chambered in thirty
odd sixth Springfield, while Dave used a bolt action rifle
chambered in two seventy Winchester. They didn't shoot anything the
next morning, so they returned to the woods Friday evening.
(06:51):
They'd set up their stands in separate areas, but apparently
not the right ones. They didn't see anything, or at
least didn't shoot anything, and Dave sent Jeff text at
seven thirty nine pm that said walking back. But when
Dave got back to the truck. Jeff wasn't there.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
Friday, not when he got thrown around he shot.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
One time, Jeff had gotten lost trying to get out
of the woods. He called Dave for help getting back
to the road where they were supposed to meet at
the truck and drive back to camp. He tried firing
his rifle so Dave could locate his position and guide
him out, but for reasons that remain unclear, he still
wasn't able to find the road. As he trudged through
(07:33):
the woods, he ran into another hunter named Romey Taylor.
The reports indicate that Taylor had shot a hog and
Jeff offered to help him butcher it. Taylor told investigators
that Jeff was sweating, which wouldn't have been unusual given
tempts in the mid seventies. Taylor pointed him in the
right direction and he eventually found the road, and.
Speaker 4 (07:53):
That's when somebody coming down the road found him and
picking him up and brought him down to the bathouse,
and he walked on in. I'm pretty sure you said
it was a guy on his want and they were
going down to use a shower, and they gave him
around them later and he walked to the camper from
the shower house.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
If it sounds a little unusual that a thirty five
year old man could get so turned around trying to
get out of an area he just walked into a
few hours before, well it is. But it's also worth
pointing out that the Clarks Hill WMA is a dense
mix of hardwood and pine shot through with the westernmost
fingers of Clark's Hill. Lake roads weave their way through
(08:37):
the forest, but you might not know you were near
a road, even within fifty yards of it. These were
also the days before on X, and the case file
indicates Jeff was carrying a Verizon Pantex cell phone, one
of those devices with a sliding screen that reveals a keyboard,
so even if he had service, that phone wouldn't have
been much help getting out of the woods. Whatever the
(08:58):
reason Jeff got turned aroun he eventually made his way
back to camp. The pair had driven together in Dave's
gold colored two thousand and four Dodge Ram, and they
towed a Jacob pop up camper for sleeping. They woke
up the next morning, but instead of going hunting, they
drove into the nearby town of Thompson. They stopped at
a gas station to fill up the truck, and then
picked up a few essentials for hunting in the Georgia
(09:20):
back country.
Speaker 8 (09:22):
Do you buy anything?
Speaker 4 (09:23):
Uh? We bought some thermoussail refills, and we went across
the road to the sausage place and bought some sausage.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
It's unclear why the pair decided to skip one of
only three morning hunts they'd have on this trip. Maybe
they hadn't slept well the night before, maybe they were
getting eaten by mosquitos, or just didn't want to fight
the Orange Army on what would probably be the busiest morning.
It might not be important, but it struck me as
strange that they skipped the morning hunt rather than run
(09:54):
their errands around lunchtime. Whatever the reason, they returned to
their campsite and went back out at four on Saturday,
September twenty second.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
I dropped him off where he goes into his stand,
and I went like, I don't know, it's maybe a
half a mile on the past where I parked and
go on the other side of the road.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Dave sat in his stand until it got dark, but
once again didn't shoot any deer. He got down, walked
back out to his truck and drove to where he
was supposed to meet Jeff along the road.
Speaker 4 (10:24):
Well, I see a flashlight coming up the road, so
I think it's him, so I drove to it. Well
it's another guy. And he said he heard somebody holler,
and I said, well, I haven't heard anybody. He said, well,
they were just righting down there.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Did gave the hunter a ride back to his truck,
which is when he ran into two more hunters who
said they'd seen Jeff in the woods, and the other.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
Two guys that were there said that they had walked
in on him. They saw him sitting in his tree stand.
And then I went back there and I see it
and he called me, and I had no phone service,
but when I got phone service, it said I had
a voicemail.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Jeff had gotten lost again trying to find the road,
so he asked Dave to sound the truck horn to
try to help him determine the right direction in the dark.
Dave says this would have been about eight point fifteen
in the evening, and I blowed the horn.
Speaker 4 (11:19):
And he couldn't. I don't reckon he could hear it.
So he called back and said he was going to shoot,
so he shot twice. Did you hear those shots? I
heard the shots. This sound like there were four or
five hundred yards in front of the truck.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Dave had cell phone service by this point, so he
was finally able to get Jeff on the phone, as
you already heard. He later told investigators that his friend
sounded stressed out, almost hysterical as he tried to describe
where he was.
Speaker 4 (11:49):
He said, he was in tall grass, and I thought
he was saying something about a fence, and then he
said something about mud.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Rather than wander through the woods in the dark hoping
to find Jeff, Dave and a few fellow hunters decided
the best strategy would be to drive the roads and
honk their horns. If you look at this WMA on
on X, you'll see a network of dirt roads that
extend through the woods like a web. Since they knew
the approximate area Jeff had been hunting, they figured it
wouldn't take him long to pop out on one of
(12:18):
those roads. But Dave said they made two or three
passes up and down the road and Jeff still hadn't appeared.
He'd also stopped answering his phone and Dave was worried
his friend might be in more serious trouble, so he
called nine to one one. The first officer to arrive
on the scene was Corporal Mark Patterson with the Georgia
(12:39):
Department of Natural Resources. The second officer was Sergeant Matt Garthwright.
Speaker 6 (12:44):
They had done an initial search of the area on
This area was bordered by roads and the lake, so
it was a pretty contained area. Should have been easy
to search and locate the hunter. If he was lost
and instilled in good shape just walking around, it should
have been easy to locate him. So they'd done that initially.
(13:05):
Then when that didn't pan out, we started thinking that
something's wrong with him, you know, you had a medical issue,
or he's had a hunting accident.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
They requested air support from the Georgia State Patrol, which
sent a helicopter to search the area. Within about twenty minutes,
they found Jeff.
Speaker 6 (13:24):
Yes, they radio and told us that they had located him,
that he was unresponsive, and they actually directed us into him.
So me and Corporal Pytterson and a deputy went to him.
And when we got to him, he was laid on
his back, his legs were straight out and his arms
were crossed his chest, and it was apparent that he
was deceased.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Hunting accidents and heart attacks are the first things that
come to mind in this situation like this.
Speaker 6 (13:50):
Yeah, that was definitely going through my mind. There was
a reported shot heard around dust dark, which would have
been a good time for somebody to mistake a hunter
for game in that timeframe there, so yeah, that was
a possibility.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
However, it quickly became clear that they were dealing with
something far more sinister.
Speaker 6 (14:11):
There was some blood on his clothing, but nothing that
looked like a gunshot wound. There was scenarios running through
your head and it didn't It wasn't adding up, so
we knew something was off. And his gun and some
hunting supplies were probably i don't know, fifty yards from
him in some tall grass, so he had things wasn't
(14:35):
added up. We knew something was off.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Sergeant Garthrait called the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to help
process the scene, and he stayed with Jeff's body all
night until the sun came up.
Speaker 6 (14:44):
The next morning, when daylight came, the GBI and our
critical reconstruction team came in and we were able to
go exserve the body and get a better understanding of
what may have took place. And while looking at the
bios said, we noticed blood on his clothing, and when
(15:05):
we kind of rolled him up, we found a knife
just right up on his right side, and that was
the wet one that was that was used.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Jeff's body had been stabbed eighteen times, seventeen in the
chest and one in the abdomen. Later examination confirmed the
cause of death to be blood loss from the three
wounds that had penetrated his heart. Not long after, on
September twenty fifth, Wilkes County Sheriff Mark Moore told the
Augusta Chronicle that they were investigating Jeff's death as a homicide.
(15:38):
Here's Special Agent Wendell Goodman with the GBI speaking to
Dave the day after Jeff died.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
The only thing I can tell you, I mean, we've
seen the body and the way this frown was committed.
It was not somebody just happened upon him and it
was quick and over with. I mean, this is somebody
that was angry, that's money that was upset.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Finding that somebody would be the aim of the investigation
that followed, and it started with Jeff's friend and hunting
partner David Smith. Part two. Dave, the number of stab
wounds and Jeff's call for help strongly indicated foul play,
(16:26):
and Agent Goodman and his colleagues at the GBI submitted
search warrants based on the probable cause that a murder
had been committed. One of those search warrants was sent
to Verizon Wireless and it asked for the text messages
and call logs of Dave Smith. As Jeff's close friend
and the only person he knew in the area, Dave
was the first person investigators looked at as a potential suspect.
(16:50):
Here's Agent Goodman, who took the lead on the investigation
for the GBI.
Speaker 8 (16:54):
Anytime there is a death, you're looking for people initially
that are close to that person. They're going to be
your best source of information. But obviously you would circle
that person in its potentially being included, just because out
of everyone that would have been in the area, you know,
they're the only person that would have had a connection
to the victim.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Dad was also the only person who knew the approximate
location where Jeff had placed his tree stand, and as
he admitted to investigators, he was a big knife guy.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Now, I know you told me you had a lot
of knives, and there were something that we took home.
I saw like a leather moon, look like a handsaw,
a small hand saw, probably used for yeah. And then
you had a few knives. It looked maybe like you
used to clean some deers. And then uh, there were
a few fixed handle knives. Yeah, staging at yours. You know,
(17:48):
a guy gave me that for Christmas. I've just like
you do, a box of the srunt. And then I
guess there was another button knife.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
Yeah, I'm one of these Abuton knifes, my brand and
knife the shop or something A lot of that if
they have one. At a reasonable cross.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Long, investigators found two browning knives, two unidentified fixed blade knives,
and a buck knife in a black sheath in Dave's
pack truck and camper. According to the case file, all
of these knives were collected as evidence. Investigators believed that
Jeff had been killed by the bloody kershaw folding knife
(18:25):
found under his body, and they were keen to find
out who that knife belonged to.
Speaker 7 (18:31):
Does that look for me?
Speaker 4 (18:33):
I really couldn't say.
Speaker 7 (18:35):
Have you ever seen this though?
Speaker 4 (18:36):
No, I've never saw that novel, because I do remember
the one he had last year. I as surrated blade
on the.
Speaker 7 (18:43):
Okay, this looks like a straight edge. Do you have
any folding knives?
Speaker 4 (18:48):
To folding knife everything I have or fixed flame?
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Of course, it's a little hard to believe that someone
with a penchant for knives wouldn't own any folders. Dave's
adamant denial here is also a little suspicious in and
of itself. Investigators hadn't told him how Jeff died, or
that a bloody folding knife was found at the scene.
How did Dave know to make exactly the right denial
(19:13):
in this situation. Either it's an innocent coincidence and he
really had strong opinions about folding knives, or he knew
how Jeff died because he was there. GBI agents were
apparently thinking the same thing. Here's agent Tony Williamson.
Speaker 7 (19:30):
This wasn't a random killing.
Speaker 5 (19:33):
This wasn't somebody that happened to be down there at
dark after dark and killed me. That that ain't happen.
That ain't happened. And I'm will be straight up, william
and I want you to I want you to be
straight up with me. Something happened. Something happened in those woods,
(19:58):
and I think you know what happened.
Speaker 4 (20:00):
No, sir, I sure do not know what happened.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Dave had the opportunity to kill Jeff alone, with him
in the woods, with access to so many knives. He
also had the means. What agents Goodman and Williamson were
trying to determine was whether he had a motive.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
You guys haven't had any type of disagreements.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
We can go along good from me. Ever since we
met each other, you know something where you just click live,
you made friends, and he was he was one of
those tops.
Speaker 7 (20:30):
People see, the kind of guy to pick a fight
if you made him.
Speaker 5 (20:33):
Man.
Speaker 4 (20:34):
Yes, well let you guys, ever getting like we never got.
Speaker 7 (20:38):
You know, you could have y'all could have.
Speaker 5 (20:39):
Come upon each other down in the woods, okay, and
then he he could have been pissed at you, because
you know, he got lost and he was mad and
you had to defenish that. I don't know.
Speaker 7 (20:50):
I never saw him.
Speaker 4 (20:52):
All I did was talked to him on the phone.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Dave denied killing Jeff in anger or self defense, but
there are many reasons for murder sex. For example, have
you ever known.
Speaker 7 (21:08):
Any women that he dated, who knows.
Speaker 4 (21:11):
I've never known him dating a Roman there where we
live at They've always been in Florida, where he used
to live, or I heard him mention one last summer
in Atlala.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Investigators wondered whether Dave and Jeff had fought over a woman,
but Dave denied having a steady girlfriend. There were texts
on Dave's phone between him and a woman named Tracy,
but Dave said they'd been set up by someone else
and had never actually met. But when Dave mentioned that
Jeff had been given a ride to the camp bathhouse
by another hunter, it sent investigators down another line of
(21:48):
inquiry related to matters of the heart.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
Now, I know you said earlier that a guy had
picked up Jeff and they went to the showers, and
as Jeff involved.
Speaker 4 (21:59):
In all of that guy, not that I don't worry
he was.
Speaker 7 (22:03):
See where I'm going, Yeah, it was.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
You haven't had any type of relationship type of moments
which have agents.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Goodman and Williamson returned to this line of questioning several
times throughout the interview. It might seem awkward or insensitive,
but it wasn't outside the realm of possibility. Neither thirty
something man seemed to have a steady girlfriend, and a
secret homosexual relationship would be exactly the kind of fraud
potentially explosive situation that could lead to a violent disagreement.
Speaker 7 (22:35):
So I don't keep me straight up with it. He's gay.
Speaker 4 (22:38):
I have no idea. You say a homosexual, I have
no idea. I mean, I don't want to hold that
against anybody, even moves against me.
Speaker 7 (22:45):
So I don't know.
Speaker 4 (22:46):
He's never talked about being another another guy.
Speaker 7 (22:49):
Let me ask you this, and it's just, you know,
we got to ask all kinds of questions, but you know,
are you a homosexual?
Speaker 4 (22:58):
No, sir, I'm no. I'm not gonna judge somebody for
doing it.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
And have you ever been physically involved with Jeff?
Speaker 4 (23:07):
No? I have never been physically involved with the guy.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Dave sticks to his guns as the interview progresses, but
it's clearly agents are baffled. It's hard to imagine a
stranger finding Jeff in the woods and stabbing him to death,
but the only person who knew the victim is adamant
that he didn't kill his friend, and he doesn't know
who did.
Speaker 5 (23:27):
Man's lost. Who in the hell would kill him. Think
about it to put yourself on our shoes. I mean,
we're just trying to find out what happened. I mean
last time, I can't. There weren't any while men down there.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
They speculate that maybe someone killed Jeff as part of
a robbery, but none of Jeff's hunting gear appeared to
have been stolen, including his rifle, and he still had
his wallet in his pocket.
Speaker 5 (23:55):
Who's gonna hat somebody in the woods, especially downa think shit,
who's a grown man and he got lost? Who is
gonna be in those woods? Who would be in those
woods that would.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
Do something like that? And see, I have no idea.
Speaker 5 (24:11):
I'm the person that killed him, knew him, Isn't that right?
Speaker 7 (24:17):
And that person is you?
Speaker 4 (24:18):
No, sir, I didn't like kill him, do not know
anything about it.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
The agents really give Dave the third degree in this interview,
and if he's innocent, it's hard not to feel sorry
for the guy. He's just lost his friend. He doesn't
have a lawyer in the room, His camper and truck
have been searched, and his property has been seized as
part of a homicide investigation. But as Agent Goodman told me,
while Dave didn't do anything that made him look overly suspicious.
(24:44):
They had to take a hard look to make sure
he was telling the truth.
Speaker 8 (24:48):
You know, he is the most connected person to mister
gab Hart. Obviously not immediately aware of what the true
nature of their relationship is. Because neither person was actually
from the area. No one in the area knew them.
They were visiting specifically for this hunt, you know, So
we really didn't have that much to go off aside
(25:10):
from you know, those initial contacts with with mister Smith.
There may be some interviews that we conducted that may
seem a little bit you know, adversarial because we're trying
to get a reaction and trying to get an understanding
of what somebody's stances on a certain topic, or you know,
whether they may or may not have been involved, or
whether you know, there was anything tumultuous that may have
(25:33):
gone on that's you know, under the surface that nobody's
aware of. So, I mean, all of those things may
have come up here and there, you know, even in
interactions with mister Smith, but it was more so to
try to get to the truth.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
The truth in this case turned out to be stranger
than either of the agents anticipated what started as a
homicide investigation morphed into something more perplexing and difficult to
explain than a lover quarrel or a robbery gone wrong.
As Agent Goodman and others followed the evidence that led
them to the fringes of psychology, the Roman Catholic Church,
(26:09):
and what Sergeant Garthright called the death hunt. That's next
on Blood Trails, Part three. The crime scene. With Dave
sticking to his story and no other likely suspects, GBI
(26:29):
investigators turned to the physical evidence they had gathered thus far.
But if they thought it was hard to explain how
Jeff met a murderer in the woods, they struggled even
more to account for what they found at the crime scene.
Speaker 9 (26:42):
It defied forensic sense.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
That's Charlotte Perdue, a forensic scientist with Florida State University.
She reviewed Jeff's case for an independent organization that takes
a second look at cold cases. She told me, it
was easy to see Jeff's trail through the still damp
lake bed, but investigators couldn't find signs of anyone other
than Jeff.
Speaker 9 (27:05):
There was an area that was all very marshy, and
you could see all of his foot prints, and then
you saw where he like threw down his rifle, he
threw down his flashlight, so he's basically leaving like a
little mini trail. There was a water bottle, but there
was only his foot print.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
Detectives confirmed that the boot prints on the damp ground
matched Jeff's, but they didn't find anyone else's. The scene
also didn't match what you'd expect to see after a
knife fight.
Speaker 8 (27:30):
Mister Gabhart himself was a fairly large man. If you
take your average person that's really in a struggle, in
a fight, the scene is gonna look brutal Normally, if
it's gonna be like a sharp force instrument that's being used,
you're gonna have blood kind of I guess, for a
lack of better terms, it's gonna be everywhere, and in
(27:52):
this instance there was not that. Initially, you really couldn't
even tell what had happened until you began to feel
back some of the layers that mister Gabhart was wearing.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
The only blood at the crime scene was pooled directly
under Jeff's torso, but even this gave investigators pause.
Speaker 9 (28:08):
All the blood ran backward, so you can tell that
he was laying down at the time, so someone would
have literally had to be on top of him if
they did it. He had no drugs or anything in
his system, so he would have been laying completely still
and not fighting, which would have been very unusual.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
This theory that Jeff was lying still as he was
being stabbed was supported by another strange fact. Jeff didn't
appear to have any defensive wounds anywhere on his body.
Speaker 8 (28:35):
Well, normally, if there's a physical altercation, you're going to
have some type of defensive wounds. So if somebody is
attacking another person with a knife, normally the person being
attacked may put up their forearms or their hands in
front of them to try to block the knife. They
may reach for the knife, and you know, depending on
how they might be reaching or they're stronger, we can
(28:57):
you might find some wounds on the hands, on the forearms.
There were no real defensive wounds that were noted. I
believe there might have been a small cut, like in
the webbing of his hand, but it's not abnormal for
somebody that carries a knife, you know, to have that
type of cut, and I don't think it was anything
(29:20):
that I would really categorize, especially based on the overall
scene as a defensive wound.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
The wound on his hand also appeared to be older,
and investigators theorized it was likely sustained during his daily
tasks at the meat processor. He also had some superficial
abrasions on his neck, but these were light enough that
they could be explained by the rifle sling or the
climbing harness he was wearing. Further testing also confirmed the
investigator's theory about that folding kershaw knife found underneath his body.
Speaker 9 (29:49):
They also did DNA tests on the knife that was
found next to his body, and it was only his DNA.
They also did DNA testing on all the knives that
were found in the camper, and they determined that they
did not have any I guess that were specific to human,
so the blood type was obviously an animal of some sort.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Whoever had done this to Jeff had left absolutely no
trace of their presence. They had murdered the hunter without
leaving blood on the knife, footprints in the ground, or
belongings in the dirt. It was like one of those
Sherlock Holmes cases where the perpetrator kills someone in a
locked room without windows, it just didn't make any sense.
(30:29):
Investigators wondered whether he'd been killed somewhere else and then
dragged to the spot where he was found. But as
any hunter knows who's dragged a dead animal through the woods,
moving a body would have left impressions in the grass
and dirt. None of the tall grass around Jeff's body
had been disturbed apart from where he himself had walked in,
and as I just mentioned, there wasn't any blood on
(30:51):
the grass except right underneath Jeff's body. What's more, Jeff
himself was six foot two, two hundred and thirty nine pounds.
They would have taken an incredibly strong person to drag
Jeff's body any distance at all. And there weren't any
wheelmarks at the scene either.
Speaker 9 (31:07):
And there was no other indication that this grass had
been mushed down anywhere else. Then it was like, well,
maybe it was carried in. Well, that would have been
very difficult because it was more than a half a
mile into the woods, so that would have been a
long way to carry him.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
None of this made any sense, and as you heard
in Dave's interview with the GBI, investigators continue to treat
Jeff's death as a homicide, but that started to change
when the medical examiner sent his official autopsy report.
Speaker 8 (31:36):
I would say that everything that really began to fall
into place would have been post to autopsy. Initially on
the front end, you look at the number and you know,
they may make you think this person was involved in
something horrific. Surely there had to be some type of
violent interaction between one person and another. But once a
(31:59):
medical examiner began to examine the wounds, the majority of
them were actually fairly superficial, fairly piercing the upper layers
of skin, and definitely nothing that would be fatal.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
Jeff had been stabbed eighteen times, but many of those
wounds hadn't gone much past the skin. This wasn't obvious
to the death investigator on the scene, but the more
thorough autopsy by the medical examiner in this case, a
doctor named Daniel Brown, noted that only three of the
wounds had been deep enough to reach his heart. What's more,
all were angled left to right. If you're looking at
(32:36):
his body from the front.
Speaker 9 (32:38):
If someone is stabbing someone, you're going to be thrashing about,
so your stabs will be all at different angles. His
were all at one particular angle.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
I reviewed some of the crime scene photos with Charla,
and she pointed out how Jeff's right hand was covered
in blood while his left hand was clean.
Speaker 9 (32:56):
If you see here, this right hand is all bloody,
this one is, and there's even blood like embedded in
the other kindzine photos. They have close up of his
hand and you can see the blood all the way
down under his fingernails. While this hand is clean.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
There is no reason why if Jeff was attacked his
right hand would be bloody while his left hand wouldn't be.
The wounds themselves were also fairly clean, meaning it appeared
like the knife slipped in and out without being jostled around.
This would have been extremely unusual if Jeff had been
stabbed by an assailant. In that case, you can imagine
him moving around to try to avoid being stabbed and
(33:33):
the knife causing wider, more jagged cuts in his body.
But these wounds weren't much wider than that Kershaw knife.
There was one wound in his abdomen, but all the
other wounds were clustered together on his chest.
Speaker 9 (33:46):
They're all in an area that he could reach. They're
all right handed, which Jeff was right handed, which we
confirmed with his brother that he was right handed.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Taking all this evidence together, the blood on Jeff's hand,
the location and angle of the stack wounds, and the
absence of another person at the scene, investigators could only
reach one conclusion. Jeff hadn't been murdered. He died by suicide,
Part four doubts. When the GBI announced their findings, you
(34:20):
can imagine the reaction from the general public. Not to
mention Jeff's family.
Speaker 10 (34:24):
I don't believe it was suicide in any way, shape
or form.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
That's Russell Cornell. Russell didn't know Jeff personally, but he
knows Jeff's family, and he's a member of the same
Roman Catholic fraternity Jeff belonged to.
Speaker 10 (34:37):
When a guy that has a loaded rifle toted it
through the woods, are you actually gonna pull utch your
knife and kill yourself with a knife. Isn't it easier
just to put a bullet through yourself.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
I've heard similar objections from pretty much everyone I've told
about this case. Most people have been impacted by suicide
in one way or another, but no one has ever
heard of something like this. Why, as Russell asked, would
someone stab themselves eighteen times with a folding knife when
they were carrying a rifle. It's a gruesome question, but
(35:09):
it must be asked. Charla has at least the beginnings
of an explanation, and I should point out here that
she was in no way connected to the GBI or
the original investigation. Families of victims ask the organization she
works for to review cases if they believe law enforcement
came to the wrong conclusion. That's what happened in this situation.
(35:30):
So if anything, Charla would have a bias against what
the GBI determined, but she largely agrees, and she has
one potential explanation.
Speaker 9 (35:40):
Jeff was pretty religious and from the Catholic faith. He
was very active in his church. He was a member
of the Knights of Columbus, so he was practicing, and
one of the suggestions was that maybe he possibly was
trying to avoid it looking like a suicide.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Catholic Church has long taught that suicide is a mortal sin.
There are nuances to this, but I think I'm on
safe ground when I say that if you're a Catholic
and you commit suicide, you're in serious danger of going
to Hell. The church has softened the stance in recent decades,
but many still hear stories about the church denying Catholic
burials to those who die by suicide. Russell, who is
(36:22):
also Catholic, confirmed that the entire Gebhart family is devout,
which is one of the reasons he doesn't believe Jeff
killed himself.
Speaker 10 (36:30):
I just don't believe a man would go on a
hunting trip the way out there, especially a Catholic man,
because yes, there are some that have committed suicide, but
that's one big thing that is of mortal sin to
the Catholic. So most Catholics won't pick their own life.
I mean, that's my belief and that's my failure. And
if you're close with God, why would you want to
(36:51):
take your own life?
Speaker 2 (36:52):
But what if Jeff was mentally distressed and committed to
ending his life. He wouldn't want his parents to be
worried about the eternal state of his soul, and he'd
want them to give him a proper Catholic burial. If
he killed himself in a way that made it look
like a homicide, he might save his parents that pain
and give them hope that they'd see him again in
the afterlife. This might also explain why Jeff called Dave
(37:15):
for help getting out of the woods. If his plan
was to make his death look like a homicide, a
call for help just a few minutes prior would definitely
move investigators in that direction. As Charlotte noted in her report,
the first time Jeff got lost may have actually been
an initial attempt at suicide.
Speaker 9 (37:33):
Getting lost might have been an attempt or thinking he
was going to but then he changed his mind for
whatever reason.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
I ran this theory past Russell, and let's just say
he wasn't impressed.
Speaker 10 (37:45):
That's someone else's theory, someone else's opinion.
Speaker 7 (37:49):
I don't think.
Speaker 10 (37:50):
I mean, I just can't see someone doing that, Really,
I can't.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
I also consulted doctor Jeff Kalshewsky, a forensic psychologist who
you may remember from episode three of this season. You'll
hear more from him later in the episode, but he
thought this plan sounded a little too elaborate for someone
experiencing a mental health crisis.
Speaker 11 (38:09):
Most of the cases that I've had where suicides occurred,
people were at the point where living is so unbearable
that they're going to take their own life, and they
don't tailor their plan around how it will affect loved ones,
they just carried out. However, there are a few cases
I've had, for example, it's a bit graphic, but I've
(38:33):
seen a couple of cases over the years where people
were going to take their life with a firearm and
they decided to shoot themselves in the heart rather than
in the face because they were thinking about a funeral.
Speaker 7 (38:44):
But that's as far.
Speaker 11 (38:45):
As I've seen it taken in my experience. When people
make that plan to take their own life, what you're
talking about trying to make it look like a homicide
so that your parents won't be upset with you for
taking your own life. That is pretty detailed and pretty sophisticated,
and I would have a hard time accepting that that theory.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
Russell also isn't sure why even if Charlotte is right
and Jeff used a knife to stage a homicide, he
would stab himself eighteen times.
Speaker 10 (39:17):
Now, I can't see him doing stab it himself. I mean,
and that many times. This is a way. I really
don't believe there's a possible way, human possible way that
you could kill yourself like that.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
This is another objection I've heard quite a bit. It
seems like if for some reason you want to commit
suicide with a knife while you're carrying a firearm, you'd
try to get it over with. Jeff was a hunter.
He worked in a meat processing facility. He was comfortable
handling a knife, and he knew how to kill something quickly.
Why would he cause himself so much pain before finally
(39:52):
hitting his heart. There is no great answer to this question,
but we can glean some insight from the two percent
of suicide victims who take their lives with a knife.
It's a very uncommon way to kill yourself, but it
does happen.
Speaker 9 (40:07):
When someone is stabbing themselves. There's what we call hesitation marks.
So many of this dads are almost superficial. They call
that like the testing what can I tolerate? That's not
unusual either to see those what they call the hesitation marks,
where they are just kind of trying to figure out
what can I tolerate? So the number isn't really strange.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
Charlotte explained that while three of the wounds were deep
enough to pierce the heart, only one did enough damage
to cause immediate death. The other two were what Charlotte
described as a nick And I should point out here
that we're not just relying on the original medical examiner's opinion.
Charlotte's team sent the photographs and information to three other
doctors and they all reached the same conclusion. As difficult
(40:51):
as it was to believe, the crime scene and autopsy
pointed to suicide, and that conclusion was even more appealing
given the lack of suspects. Investigators spoke to Jeff's family
and friends, and none of them reported Jeff having any enemies,
and even if he did, that enemy would have had
to know where he was hunting, find him in the woods,
and stab him to death without leaving a single trace.
(41:14):
One of those friends also confirmed to Agent Goodman that
Jeff owned a folding Kershaw knife. No one else at
the campground rose to suspicion, and Dave was also eliminated
from contention. Dave had voicemails and call logs to prove
he'd spoken to Jeff around eight thirty PM, and from
that time forward he was in the company of other
(41:35):
hunters who'd helped him look for his friend.
Speaker 8 (41:37):
Based on our understanding of when the calls began to
be made, and with interviews with people that would have
been located at Holiday Park during that timeframe after he
had gone missing. There were people that were there camping
and hunting and or fishing themselves that actually wanted to
join in the search for mister deep Part and that
(41:58):
actually did to try to help locate him. So it's
my understanding very early on, like when some of those
calls came in, Yeah, he's going to be in a
company of other people there at the campground, and.
Speaker 9 (42:10):
We had a very accurate timeline because of the other
hunters that also corroborated David's story that Jeff was calling
on the phone that he was very panicked and that
he kept saying he was lost.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
What's more, they weren't able to find his blood anywhere
on Jeff's body, or Jeff's blood anywhere on Dave's clothes.
They searched his truck and his camper, confiscated his knives
and equipment, and didn't find any reason to believe that
Dave had killed his hunting buddy.
Speaker 9 (42:37):
So these are the footprints that were found at the scene.
But you can see this is David's boot and it
clearly does not match. And these were the only bootprints
that were found at the scene. They also did not
match to any of the boots that were in the camper,
because they also had additional pairs of shoes in the camper.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
With no suspects and a good deal of evidence pointing
to suicide, investigators sent the case file to the Tomb's
Judicial Circuit District Attorney's office, which convened a grand jury
in August of twenty thirteen. They issued a decision, agreeing
with the GBI and the medical examiner. Jeff's death was
ruled a suicide, and the case has been officially closed
(43:18):
ever since. I don't know how Jeff's immediate family feels today.
His brother Jason was open to being interviewed, but after
a few emails back and forth, stopped responding to my messages.
But I do know the family was at one point
doubtful of the GBI's conclusion, because they asked Charla and
her team to review the case in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 9 (43:40):
I have not spoken to Jason since we gave our report.
You know, we didn't find the conclusion that he the
family wanted.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
However the family feels these days, It's safe to say
that Russell isn't satisfied.
Speaker 10 (43:52):
It was my sin. I'd want to know who killed him.
It was something like that bizarre death. There's no way
I'm gonna accept it. Well, he went out shot buck
knife and he decided to cut himself all up and
kill himself. Somebody is guilty of this crime that they've
done to this man, Jeff, and it needs to be opened.
It needs to be a case that has looked after
(44:12):
and until it is solved.
Speaker 2 (44:14):
Whether you side with Russell or the GBI is up
to you. But there's still one more question to ask,
and it might be the most important question of all
Part five, The Darkness of the Mind. It would be easier,
(44:36):
though no less tragic, if investigators determined that Jeff had
a secret mental health issue, if he'd shown signs of
depression or had some unresolved trauma in his past, maybe
we could square away his actions and tie them up
in a tidy box. But we can't.
Speaker 9 (44:53):
No, he didn't have any mental health problems that we're
aware of.
Speaker 8 (44:57):
I don't recall anyone ever communicat any potential cause as
far as what may have led to mister gab Hart
wanting to take his own life, So I would say
no in that instance. I don't recall anyone saying anything
that would correlate him to, you know, be prone to
(45:20):
being suicidal.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
Even just a few hours after the incident. Dave reiterated
this in his interview with agents Goodman and Williamson.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
Do you think Jeffer won't hurt himself?
Speaker 4 (45:31):
Not that I know if he never mentioned anything to
me about hurting.
Speaker 7 (45:36):
His sale him.
Speaker 4 (45:38):
But he was the type of person that would have
anybody if they needed help.
Speaker 7 (45:42):
But I don't.
Speaker 4 (45:43):
I don't think you'd heard hisself.
Speaker 3 (45:46):
You haven't seen any letters, notes. If he doesn't leave
anything behind, you get the camp no sign.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
The Jason Foundation reports that one in five individuals do
not show any signs of depression before committing suicide, so
it's possible Jeff was depressed and unstable and was able
to hide it. Charlotte also points out that even though
the Gebharts never admitted their son had mental health issues,
they may have been hiding or even repressing Jeff's troubled mind.
Speaker 9 (46:15):
One of the things that we talk about in the
report is, and we've seen this with other cold cases
that we've done, is we've had people that have called
and said, oh my gosh, my son has killed himself,
and then two months later they're like there's no way
he would have killed himself. They're like, well, you even
told us so at some point you thought he might,
because that's exactly what you said. And one of the
(46:36):
things that the family kept saying was that he had
an accident, and they didn't start asking, well, who killed
him or what happened or anything like that. So that
was also part of what we thought might be unconscious
things that people don't think about, that maybe he did
have some issues that he had expressed.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
Jeff's silence about his mental health issues isn't proof that
he didn't kill himself, but the way he did so
suggests a level of emotional distress that would have been
tough to hide.
Speaker 11 (47:07):
The amount of pain that's occurring with stabbing yourself seventeen times,
you would have to be very motivated to take your
own life. In other words, sometimes you'll see suicide attempts
with stabbing where they stab themselves once but it becomes
overwhelming and they sort of back out of it halfway
through the attempt. That's not that uncommon.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
That's doctor Kolshewski again. He says seventeen stab wounds because
I misstated the number when I spoke to him. The
real number is eighteen. As per Charlotte's report, Doctor Kolshewski
works in a group psychology practice, so he hears about
cases from the other doctors in his office as well
as his own. He told me it's extremely uncommon for
someone to commit suicide without showing any warning signs.
Speaker 11 (47:52):
There's always something there once you dig a little bit
below the surface. They interview people in the workplace. Co
workers have had no idea, We had no idea, But
usually people that are closer, when you dig a little deeper,
you'll find some things that would be consistent with creating
a plan and carrying it out to take your own life.
Speaker 2 (48:11):
Jeff's decision to take his life in such an inaccessible
area is also inconsistent with suicide.
Speaker 11 (48:17):
A lot of times, if people make this plan to
carry out taking their own life and they want to
be found, a lot of them do they remain in
a place where it's going to be easy to find them,
not wandering off into the woods carrying all your stuff.
So so many things to me are contra intuitive to
a person planning and carrying out a suicide that it
(48:39):
just makes me ask so many more questions rather than
being able to narrow in on one theory as most likely.
I'll tell you what. It's one of the oddists. If
it was a suicide, it's one of the artist suicides
I've ever seen or heard of, for sure.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
Matt Garthright, one of the first game wardens on the scene,
also mentioned a theory that makes a brief appearance in
SLA's report. Maybe rather than hatching an elaborate plan to
kill himself and make it look like a homicide, Jeff
had some kind of mental break in the woods.
Speaker 6 (49:10):
The only I guess you can call it a rumor
that I heard was he was very scared of the
dark and spiders, so being lost in the woods, if
he did have that fear, could have resulted him doing
something that he would not usually have done.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
And that's my theory. Of course.
Speaker 6 (49:29):
You know, he was lost in the thick grass area,
it was dark, and that may have led to his decisions.
Speaker 2 (49:38):
It's tough to predict how someone will respond to extreme
stress or fear. Dave reported that his friend sounded almost
hysterical on the phone, so it's possible he was having
some kind of episode. But while doctor Kalshewsky acknowledges that
people can have psychotic breaks, that mental instability doesn't come
out of nowhere.
Speaker 11 (49:58):
He just don't, you know, walks through the woods and
then ten minutes later have a psychotic break and kill yourself.
If you were going to have a psychotic break, there
would be evidence before that.
Speaker 10 (50:09):
You know.
Speaker 11 (50:10):
The second thing is the idea that someone has a
psychotic break and immediately kills themselves in an elaborate way
doesn't fit either, because if you're talking about a psychotic
break where you just kind of lose it and you
kill yourself, now we're talking about an impulsive act. Well,
if this indeed was a suicide, this was definitely not impulsive.
Seventeen stab wounds, so that doesn't jibe either. I think
(50:35):
there's a lot of missing information here. And again when
I mentioned earlier, the idea of a psychological autopsy would
be something very important in this case if we really
want to understand what happened, trying to understand a person's
frame of mind at the time of the incident, and
was from gathering all that data and all that information,
was he in a frame of mind where he could
(50:55):
have carried out taking his own life. And if we
don't see that, then again, just because the wounds aren't
consistent with what you normally see in a homicide doesn't
mean a homicide did not occur.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
Of course, there is one other theory, if you can
call it that more like a tidbit of information, and
you can do with it what you will. When I
had finished asking Sergeant garthright my list of questions, I
asked if there was anything else he wanted to cover.
Here's what he said.
Speaker 6 (51:30):
This particular hunt happens every year, and for several years,
there's been a death on this hunt. So whether it
be a heart attack or you know, this situation here.
So it was a few years there that this hunt
was a kind of strange.
Speaker 2 (51:44):
Really, So on this WMA, on this particular hunt, this
early rifle hunt, people passed away for how many years
in a row? Do you think?
Speaker 6 (51:55):
I want to say three?
Speaker 2 (51:57):
And were the others also suspicions are mysterious or you
mentioned a heart attack.
Speaker 6 (52:02):
They were just there were natural health issues like a
heart attack.
Speaker 2 (52:06):
Yeah, that must have been weird for you to be
called out there again several years, like what's going on
with this hunt?
Speaker 6 (52:12):
That's that's exactly what we were thinking, what's up with
this hunt? I kind of nickname him to death hunt.
But for the last couple of years now we hadn't
had any issues.
Speaker 2 (52:21):
It stopped.
Speaker 6 (52:22):
But yeah, there was just a couple of years there
that you know, somebody dragging a deer out got have
a heart attack or or going to a stand and
you know, had a heart attack.
Speaker 2 (52:31):
Yeah, that's that's very strange. That's very strange. Part six,
No good answers Asian Goodman almost didn't talk to me
about this case. He believes without question that Jeff committed suicide,
(52:51):
and he doesn't want to cause the geb Hearts more
pain and confusion by casting doubt on that conclusion, something
true crime podcast are pretty much always going to do.
Speaker 8 (53:03):
You know, always still think about them. I think about
the time that I met with his father, and being
a father myself, I could only you know, begin to
imagine what that's like having to deal with. So I
would just want it to be said, you know, I
always still think about the family, and you know, I
always want to be respectful anytime you know, I've spoken
(53:25):
about this to their feelings on the situation.
Speaker 2 (53:29):
I share that priority. But the fact is this isn't
a case that's ever going to feel closed It's possible
the GBI missed something or is hiding something, but that's
not really what I'm talking about. Even if we acknowledge
that Jeff stabbed himself eighteen times, we still don't know why.
We can speculate, but we'll never know for sure. And
(53:51):
that's really the grit that gets stuck in the craw
of this story. It's hard enough to explain why a
young man would kill himself. It's another thing entirely to
explain why he would do it with a pocket knife
on a hunt, after calling his friend for help, and
without showing any signs of depression. There's something we don't
(54:12):
understand about this case, and right now we don't have
any good answers.
Speaker 8 (54:18):
You opening theness of it. It can be a little anticlimactic,
and you never did that direct answer aside from physical
evidence and physical evidence isn't a talking person or the
words of the person. And I think everybody just wants
some form of resolve, and in these types of cases,
you don't always get it.
Speaker 9 (54:38):
Like you said, it's all speculative. And one of the
things we say in the report isn't the only person
who really knows the answers is the one person who
can't answer them.
Speaker 2 (54:53):
Thanks for listening to this episode of Blood Trails. I
want to encourage you, like we said at the top,
to get help if you're feeling to pray or having
thoughts of suicide. Hundreds and anglers are often loaners. We're
independent and self sufficient, but that sometimes means we don't
like asking for help. Don't let the fear of embarrassment
or vulnerability keep you from reaching out. You can call
(55:15):
the Mental Health Crisis Hotline at nine eight eight to
speak with a counselor. It's free and confidential, and they're
trained to talk about whatever you might be facing. As always,
you can visit the meateater dot com slash blood trails
to check out images related to this case. You can
also send us an email at blood Trails at the
meateater dot com if you have feedback on this episode
(55:37):
or know about another case you think we should cover.
Big Thanks to Special Agent Wendell Goodman, Charlotte Purdue, Russell Cornell,
and doctor Jeff Kalshewsky. See you next time. Stay safe
out there,
This episode contains graphic descriptions of crime scene details. It
also deals with suicide. Listener discretion is advised. If you
or someone you know is in emotional distress or having
thoughts of suicide, call or text nine to eight eight
to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. It's free, confidential,
and available twenty four to seven.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Encountering the unexpected and inexplicable is one of the reasons
we venture into the wild. You never know what's going
to happen. On a hunt or a hike. You might
see something you've never seen before, or something you can't
quite explain. Since Jeff Gebhart was found dead in the
woods of northwest Georgia, family, friends, and investigators have been
(00:43):
trying to explain exactly what happened to the healthy, thirty
five year old hunter. All have failed.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Do you have any knowledge of his death or how
he died?
Speaker 4 (00:55):
No, sir, I should know. I can wake you in
the eye and tell you. I'm sure don't. I'm telling
you everything that I know. Honestly, I know nothing about it.
I was just trying to help him, and I believe
that I believe that I don't know anybody that would
want to heard him.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
That's Dave Smith. Dave and Jeff had met a couple
of years prior, and they'd struck up an instant friendship.
Both loved hunting, and in September of twenty twelve, they
traveled to the Clarks Hill Wildlife Management Area to participate
in a special rifle hunt for deer. Three days in,
the trip turned from a hunt to a nightmare.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
I hear the two warning shots and I'm still blowing
the horn, and I told him, I said, well, I
want to go get somebody and we'll come and help
look for you. And so we come back out here
and they think they know about where he's at. So
we ride the roads. We ride that two or three times,
and we never did see him on the road anywhere.
(01:52):
And that's when I called nine to one one.
Speaker 5 (01:54):
You told me earlier today that he sounded very not scared,
but he dressed out and you were hysterical.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Jeff had called Dave to tell him he was lost
and couldn't find his way back to the road. He
fired his rifle to help Dave locate him, and then nothing.
Jeff stopped answering his phone, and when game wardens arrived,
they didn't let Dave venture into the dark Georgia Pines
to look for his friend.
Speaker 6 (02:21):
The helicopter in about twenty minutes will be in there.
They spotted a flashlight on the shore on the lake
shore in some grass. Quickly thereafter they located the body.
They tried to hover the area. They could hover down
pretty close. They tried to hover over him to get
her repose, and he was unresponsive.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Jeff's body was found lying on his back. His hands
had been folded across his chest. His rifle and hunting
pack were a short distance away, and a folding pocket
knife was found underneath his body. When investigators arrived at
the scene and took a closer look, they saw the
stab wounds eighteen in total, most entered around Jeff's heart.
Speaker 7 (03:02):
Let me throw on something to you very quick.
Speaker 5 (03:04):
Okay, Jeff was murdered. This was no accident, This was
no suicide. This man was murdered, no question about it. Okay,
no doubt we know. And he was, like I said,
this was a murder. This was nothing.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Else that certainly seemed to be the case. No one
gets accidentally stabbed eighteen times. Whatever happened to the hours
between when Jeff hung up and when his body was
found was violent and intentional.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
I mean, Jeff was your friend, right and you know
from everything you told me, you guys had a good,
strong friendship yesterday. And you know I can tell you're
upset over this, right.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
It really yeah, mardon mean when I knew he was lost,
and especially when the day if you got there and
he didn't want anybody going in the because I was
somebody took. You know, it's really bothered me, especially today
more what's if found out.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
What happened to Jeff on that warm September night is
as disturbing and perplexing today as it was during Dave's
tearful interview with law enforcement. Maybe Jeff met a stranger
who was bent on violence, Maybe he saw something he
shouldn't have seen, or an unknown enemy use the isolation
of the woods to settle old scores. Or maybe Jeff
(04:32):
succumbed to something even darker and more bizarre than the
ill will of another human. I'm Jordan Sillers and this
is Blood Trails, Lost in the Dark, Part one Nightmare.
(04:53):
Dave and Jeff had met about two years prior at
Chambers Slaughterhouse, where they both worked in Blairsville, Georgia.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
We got along day I first made him hay Fame,
where I was working at. He was a hunter and
I was a hunter, so I mean we hit it
off and we started turrey hunting the first year, and
then deer season came along. We started deer hunting, and
then we had started hunting in this dear season.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
The recording you'll hear of Dave throughout this episode is
from two interviews he gave to agents with the Georgia
Bureau of Investigation or GBI. Dave initially agreed to be
interviewed for this podcast, but he backed out, telling me
it would be too difficult to rehash what happened. Fortunately,
I was able to obtain the case file from the GBI,
(05:41):
along with Dave's interviews with law enforcement. In the fall
of twenty twelve, Jeff and Dave had made plans to
hunt whitetail in the Clarks Hill, WMA, which is about
thirty miles northwest of Augusta. It was a three hour
drive from where the pair worked in Blairsville, but they
were able to get tags for a special rifle hunt.
The general rifle season wouldn't begin until October twentieth, but
(06:03):
the Clarks Hill WMA offered a rifle season in September
to help manage the white tail population. According to game
Warden Matt Garthwright, it was packed.
Speaker 6 (06:13):
It's visited quite a good bit. That particular weekend they
have an early rifle hunt, which Gio's hunters come in
there with a rifle and hunt early before the actual
rifle season comes in, so a lot of people take
advantage of that hunt.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
The pair arrived on Thursday, September twentieth, the day before
the hunt opened. They planned to hunt out of portable
tree stands they'd brought with them. Jeff carried a Remington
Model seven to ten bolt action rifle chambered in thirty
odd sixth Springfield, while Dave used a bolt action rifle
chambered in two seventy Winchester. They didn't shoot anything the
next morning, so they returned to the woods Friday evening.
(06:51):
They'd set up their stands in separate areas, but apparently
not the right ones. They didn't see anything, or at
least didn't shoot anything, and Dave sent Jeff text at
seven thirty nine pm that said walking back. But when
Dave got back to the truck. Jeff wasn't there.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
Friday, not when he got thrown around he shot.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
One time, Jeff had gotten lost trying to get out
of the woods. He called Dave for help getting back
to the road where they were supposed to meet at
the truck and drive back to camp. He tried firing
his rifle so Dave could locate his position and guide
him out, but for reasons that remain unclear, he still
wasn't able to find the road. As he trudged through
(07:33):
the woods, he ran into another hunter named Romey Taylor.
The reports indicate that Taylor had shot a hog and
Jeff offered to help him butcher it. Taylor told investigators
that Jeff was sweating, which wouldn't have been unusual given
tempts in the mid seventies. Taylor pointed him in the
right direction and he eventually found the road, and.
Speaker 4 (07:53):
That's when somebody coming down the road found him and
picking him up and brought him down to the bathouse,
and he walked on in. I'm pretty sure you said
it was a guy on his want and they were
going down to use a shower, and they gave him
around them later and he walked to the camper from
the shower house.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
If it sounds a little unusual that a thirty five
year old man could get so turned around trying to
get out of an area he just walked into a
few hours before, well it is. But it's also worth
pointing out that the Clarks Hill WMA is a dense
mix of hardwood and pine shot through with the westernmost
fingers of Clark's Hill. Lake roads weave their way through
(08:37):
the forest, but you might not know you were near
a road, even within fifty yards of it. These were
also the days before on X, and the case file
indicates Jeff was carrying a Verizon Pantex cell phone, one
of those devices with a sliding screen that reveals a keyboard,
so even if he had service, that phone wouldn't have
been much help getting out of the woods. Whatever the
(08:58):
reason Jeff got turned aroun he eventually made his way
back to camp. The pair had driven together in Dave's
gold colored two thousand and four Dodge Ram, and they
towed a Jacob pop up camper for sleeping. They woke
up the next morning, but instead of going hunting, they
drove into the nearby town of Thompson. They stopped at
a gas station to fill up the truck, and then
picked up a few essentials for hunting in the Georgia
(09:20):
back country.
Speaker 8 (09:22):
Do you buy anything?
Speaker 4 (09:23):
Uh? We bought some thermoussail refills, and we went across
the road to the sausage place and bought some sausage.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
It's unclear why the pair decided to skip one of
only three morning hunts they'd have on this trip. Maybe
they hadn't slept well the night before, maybe they were
getting eaten by mosquitos, or just didn't want to fight
the Orange Army on what would probably be the busiest morning.
It might not be important, but it struck me as
strange that they skipped the morning hunt rather than run
(09:54):
their errands around lunchtime. Whatever the reason, they returned to
their campsite and went back out at four on Saturday,
September twenty second.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
I dropped him off where he goes into his stand,
and I went like, I don't know, it's maybe a
half a mile on the past where I parked and
go on the other side of the road.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Dave sat in his stand until it got dark, but
once again didn't shoot any deer. He got down, walked
back out to his truck and drove to where he
was supposed to meet Jeff along the road.
Speaker 4 (10:24):
Well, I see a flashlight coming up the road, so
I think it's him, so I drove to it. Well
it's another guy. And he said he heard somebody holler,
and I said, well, I haven't heard anybody. He said, well,
they were just righting down there.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Did gave the hunter a ride back to his truck,
which is when he ran into two more hunters who
said they'd seen Jeff in the woods, and the other.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
Two guys that were there said that they had walked
in on him. They saw him sitting in his tree stand.
And then I went back there and I see it
and he called me, and I had no phone service,
but when I got phone service, it said I had
a voicemail.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Jeff had gotten lost again trying to find the road,
so he asked Dave to sound the truck horn to
try to help him determine the right direction in the dark.
Dave says this would have been about eight point fifteen
in the evening, and I blowed the horn.
Speaker 4 (11:19):
And he couldn't. I don't reckon he could hear it.
So he called back and said he was going to shoot,
so he shot twice. Did you hear those shots? I
heard the shots. This sound like there were four or
five hundred yards in front of the truck.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Dave had cell phone service by this point, so he
was finally able to get Jeff on the phone, as
you already heard. He later told investigators that his friend
sounded stressed out, almost hysterical as he tried to describe
where he was.
Speaker 4 (11:49):
He said, he was in tall grass, and I thought
he was saying something about a fence, and then he
said something about mud.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Rather than wander through the woods in the dark hoping
to find Jeff, Dave and a few fellow hunters decided
the best strategy would be to drive the roads and
honk their horns. If you look at this WMA on
on X, you'll see a network of dirt roads that
extend through the woods like a web. Since they knew
the approximate area Jeff had been hunting, they figured it
wouldn't take him long to pop out on one of
(12:18):
those roads. But Dave said they made two or three
passes up and down the road and Jeff still hadn't appeared.
He'd also stopped answering his phone and Dave was worried
his friend might be in more serious trouble, so he
called nine to one one. The first officer to arrive
on the scene was Corporal Mark Patterson with the Georgia
(12:39):
Department of Natural Resources. The second officer was Sergeant Matt Garthwright.
Speaker 6 (12:44):
They had done an initial search of the area on
This area was bordered by roads and the lake, so
it was a pretty contained area. Should have been easy
to search and locate the hunter. If he was lost
and instilled in good shape just walking around, it should
have been easy to locate him. So they'd done that initially.
(13:05):
Then when that didn't pan out, we started thinking that
something's wrong with him, you know, you had a medical issue,
or he's had a hunting accident.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
They requested air support from the Georgia State Patrol, which
sent a helicopter to search the area. Within about twenty minutes,
they found Jeff.
Speaker 6 (13:24):
Yes, they radio and told us that they had located him,
that he was unresponsive, and they actually directed us into him.
So me and Corporal Pytterson and a deputy went to him.
And when we got to him, he was laid on
his back, his legs were straight out and his arms
were crossed his chest, and it was apparent that he
was deceased.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Hunting accidents and heart attacks are the first things that
come to mind in this situation like this.
Speaker 6 (13:50):
Yeah, that was definitely going through my mind. There was
a reported shot heard around dust dark, which would have
been a good time for somebody to mistake a hunter
for game in that timeframe there, so yeah, that was
a possibility.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
However, it quickly became clear that they were dealing with
something far more sinister.
Speaker 6 (14:11):
There was some blood on his clothing, but nothing that
looked like a gunshot wound. There was scenarios running through
your head and it didn't It wasn't adding up, so
we knew something was off. And his gun and some
hunting supplies were probably i don't know, fifty yards from
him in some tall grass, so he had things wasn't
(14:35):
added up. We knew something was off.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Sergeant Garthrait called the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to help
process the scene, and he stayed with Jeff's body all
night until the sun came up.
Speaker 6 (14:44):
The next morning, when daylight came, the GBI and our
critical reconstruction team came in and we were able to
go exserve the body and get a better understanding of
what may have took place. And while looking at the
bios said, we noticed blood on his clothing, and when
(15:05):
we kind of rolled him up, we found a knife
just right up on his right side, and that was
the wet one that was that was used.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Jeff's body had been stabbed eighteen times, seventeen in the
chest and one in the abdomen. Later examination confirmed the
cause of death to be blood loss from the three
wounds that had penetrated his heart. Not long after, on
September twenty fifth, Wilkes County Sheriff Mark Moore told the
Augusta Chronicle that they were investigating Jeff's death as a homicide.
(15:38):
Here's Special Agent Wendell Goodman with the GBI speaking to
Dave the day after Jeff died.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
The only thing I can tell you, I mean, we've
seen the body and the way this frown was committed.
It was not somebody just happened upon him and it
was quick and over with. I mean, this is somebody
that was angry, that's money that was upset.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Finding that somebody would be the aim of the investigation
that followed, and it started with Jeff's friend and hunting
partner David Smith. Part two. Dave, the number of stab
wounds and Jeff's call for help strongly indicated foul play,
(16:26):
and Agent Goodman and his colleagues at the GBI submitted
search warrants based on the probable cause that a murder
had been committed. One of those search warrants was sent
to Verizon Wireless and it asked for the text messages
and call logs of Dave Smith. As Jeff's close friend
and the only person he knew in the area, Dave
was the first person investigators looked at as a potential suspect.
(16:50):
Here's Agent Goodman, who took the lead on the investigation
for the GBI.
Speaker 8 (16:54):
Anytime there is a death, you're looking for people initially
that are close to that person. They're going to be
your best source of information. But obviously you would circle
that person in its potentially being included, just because out
of everyone that would have been in the area, you know,
they're the only person that would have had a connection
to the victim.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Dad was also the only person who knew the approximate
location where Jeff had placed his tree stand, and as
he admitted to investigators, he was a big knife guy.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Now, I know you told me you had a lot
of knives, and there were something that we took home.
I saw like a leather moon, look like a handsaw,
a small hand saw, probably used for yeah. And then
you had a few knives. It looked maybe like you
used to clean some deers. And then uh, there were
a few fixed handle knives. Yeah, staging at yours. You know,
(17:48):
a guy gave me that for Christmas. I've just like
you do, a box of the srunt. And then I
guess there was another button knife.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
Yeah, I'm one of these Abuton knifes, my brand and
knife the shop or something A lot of that if
they have one. At a reasonable cross.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Long, investigators found two browning knives, two unidentified fixed blade knives,
and a buck knife in a black sheath in Dave's
pack truck and camper. According to the case file, all
of these knives were collected as evidence. Investigators believed that
Jeff had been killed by the bloody kershaw folding knife
(18:25):
found under his body, and they were keen to find
out who that knife belonged to.
Speaker 7 (18:31):
Does that look for me?
Speaker 4 (18:33):
I really couldn't say.
Speaker 7 (18:35):
Have you ever seen this though?
Speaker 4 (18:36):
No, I've never saw that novel, because I do remember
the one he had last year. I as surrated blade
on the.
Speaker 7 (18:43):
Okay, this looks like a straight edge. Do you have
any folding knives?
Speaker 4 (18:48):
To folding knife everything I have or fixed flame?
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Of course, it's a little hard to believe that someone
with a penchant for knives wouldn't own any folders. Dave's
adamant denial here is also a little suspicious in and
of itself. Investigators hadn't told him how Jeff died, or
that a bloody folding knife was found at the scene.
How did Dave know to make exactly the right denial
(19:13):
in this situation. Either it's an innocent coincidence and he
really had strong opinions about folding knives, or he knew
how Jeff died because he was there. GBI agents were
apparently thinking the same thing. Here's agent Tony Williamson.
Speaker 7 (19:30):
This wasn't a random killing.
Speaker 5 (19:33):
This wasn't somebody that happened to be down there at
dark after dark and killed me. That that ain't happen.
That ain't happened. And I'm will be straight up, william
and I want you to I want you to be
straight up with me. Something happened. Something happened in those woods,
(19:58):
and I think you know what happened.
Speaker 4 (20:00):
No, sir, I sure do not know what happened.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Dave had the opportunity to kill Jeff alone, with him
in the woods, with access to so many knives. He
also had the means. What agents Goodman and Williamson were
trying to determine was whether he had a motive.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
You guys haven't had any type of disagreements.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
We can go along good from me. Ever since we
met each other, you know something where you just click live,
you made friends, and he was he was one of
those tops.
Speaker 7 (20:30):
People see, the kind of guy to pick a fight
if you made him.
Speaker 5 (20:33):
Man.
Speaker 4 (20:34):
Yes, well let you guys, ever getting like we never got.
Speaker 7 (20:38):
You know, you could have y'all could have.
Speaker 5 (20:39):
Come upon each other down in the woods, okay, and
then he he could have been pissed at you, because
you know, he got lost and he was mad and
you had to defenish that. I don't know.
Speaker 7 (20:50):
I never saw him.
Speaker 4 (20:52):
All I did was talked to him on the phone.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Dave denied killing Jeff in anger or self defense, but
there are many reasons for murder sex. For example, have
you ever known.
Speaker 7 (21:08):
Any women that he dated, who knows.
Speaker 4 (21:11):
I've never known him dating a Roman there where we
live at They've always been in Florida, where he used
to live, or I heard him mention one last summer
in Atlala.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Investigators wondered whether Dave and Jeff had fought over a woman,
but Dave denied having a steady girlfriend. There were texts
on Dave's phone between him and a woman named Tracy,
but Dave said they'd been set up by someone else
and had never actually met. But when Dave mentioned that
Jeff had been given a ride to the camp bathhouse
by another hunter, it sent investigators down another line of
(21:48):
inquiry related to matters of the heart.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
Now, I know you said earlier that a guy had
picked up Jeff and they went to the showers, and
as Jeff involved.
Speaker 4 (21:59):
In all of that guy, not that I don't worry
he was.
Speaker 7 (22:03):
See where I'm going, Yeah, it was.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
You haven't had any type of relationship type of moments
which have agents.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Goodman and Williamson returned to this line of questioning several
times throughout the interview. It might seem awkward or insensitive,
but it wasn't outside the realm of possibility. Neither thirty
something man seemed to have a steady girlfriend, and a
secret homosexual relationship would be exactly the kind of fraud
potentially explosive situation that could lead to a violent disagreement.
Speaker 7 (22:35):
So I don't keep me straight up with it. He's gay.
Speaker 4 (22:38):
I have no idea. You say a homosexual, I have
no idea. I mean, I don't want to hold that
against anybody, even moves against me.
Speaker 7 (22:45):
So I don't know.
Speaker 4 (22:46):
He's never talked about being another another guy.
Speaker 7 (22:49):
Let me ask you this, and it's just, you know,
we got to ask all kinds of questions, but you know,
are you a homosexual?
Speaker 4 (22:58):
No, sir, I'm no. I'm not gonna judge somebody for
doing it.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
And have you ever been physically involved with Jeff?
Speaker 4 (23:07):
No? I have never been physically involved with the guy.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Dave sticks to his guns as the interview progresses, but
it's clearly agents are baffled. It's hard to imagine a
stranger finding Jeff in the woods and stabbing him to death,
but the only person who knew the victim is adamant
that he didn't kill his friend, and he doesn't know
who did.
Speaker 5 (23:27):
Man's lost. Who in the hell would kill him. Think
about it to put yourself on our shoes. I mean,
we're just trying to find out what happened. I mean
last time, I can't. There weren't any while men down there.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
They speculate that maybe someone killed Jeff as part of
a robbery, but none of Jeff's hunting gear appeared to
have been stolen, including his rifle, and he still had
his wallet in his pocket.
Speaker 5 (23:55):
Who's gonna hat somebody in the woods, especially downa think shit,
who's a grown man and he got lost? Who is
gonna be in those woods? Who would be in those
woods that would.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
Do something like that? And see, I have no idea.
Speaker 5 (24:11):
I'm the person that killed him, knew him, Isn't that right?
Speaker 7 (24:17):
And that person is you?
Speaker 4 (24:18):
No, sir, I didn't like kill him, do not know
anything about it.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
The agents really give Dave the third degree in this interview,
and if he's innocent, it's hard not to feel sorry
for the guy. He's just lost his friend. He doesn't
have a lawyer in the room, His camper and truck
have been searched, and his property has been seized as
part of a homicide investigation. But as Agent Goodman told me,
while Dave didn't do anything that made him look overly suspicious.
(24:44):
They had to take a hard look to make sure
he was telling the truth.
Speaker 8 (24:48):
You know, he is the most connected person to mister
gab Hart. Obviously not immediately aware of what the true
nature of their relationship is. Because neither person was actually
from the area. No one in the area knew them.
They were visiting specifically for this hunt, you know, So
we really didn't have that much to go off aside
(25:10):
from you know, those initial contacts with with mister Smith.
There may be some interviews that we conducted that may
seem a little bit you know, adversarial because we're trying
to get a reaction and trying to get an understanding
of what somebody's stances on a certain topic, or you know,
whether they may or may not have been involved, or
whether you know, there was anything tumultuous that may have
(25:33):
gone on that's you know, under the surface that nobody's
aware of. So, I mean, all of those things may
have come up here and there, you know, even in
interactions with mister Smith, but it was more so to
try to get to the truth.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
The truth in this case turned out to be stranger
than either of the agents anticipated what started as a
homicide investigation morphed into something more perplexing and difficult to
explain than a lover quarrel or a robbery gone wrong.
As Agent Goodman and others followed the evidence that led
them to the fringes of psychology, the Roman Catholic Church,
(26:09):
and what Sergeant Garthright called the death hunt. That's next
on Blood Trails, Part three. The crime scene. With Dave
sticking to his story and no other likely suspects, GBI
(26:29):
investigators turned to the physical evidence they had gathered thus far.
But if they thought it was hard to explain how
Jeff met a murderer in the woods, they struggled even
more to account for what they found at the crime scene.
Speaker 9 (26:42):
It defied forensic sense.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
That's Charlotte Perdue, a forensic scientist with Florida State University.
She reviewed Jeff's case for an independent organization that takes
a second look at cold cases. She told me, it
was easy to see Jeff's trail through the still damp
lake bed, but investigators couldn't find signs of anyone other
than Jeff.
Speaker 9 (27:05):
There was an area that was all very marshy, and
you could see all of his foot prints, and then
you saw where he like threw down his rifle, he
threw down his flashlight, so he's basically leaving like a
little mini trail. There was a water bottle, but there
was only his foot print.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
Detectives confirmed that the boot prints on the damp ground
matched Jeff's, but they didn't find anyone else's. The scene
also didn't match what you'd expect to see after a
knife fight.
Speaker 8 (27:30):
Mister Gabhart himself was a fairly large man. If you
take your average person that's really in a struggle, in
a fight, the scene is gonna look brutal Normally, if
it's gonna be like a sharp force instrument that's being used,
you're gonna have blood kind of I guess, for a
lack of better terms, it's gonna be everywhere, and in
(27:52):
this instance there was not that. Initially, you really couldn't
even tell what had happened until you began to feel
back some of the layers that mister Gabhart was wearing.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
The only blood at the crime scene was pooled directly
under Jeff's torso, but even this gave investigators pause.
Speaker 9 (28:08):
All the blood ran backward, so you can tell that
he was laying down at the time, so someone would
have literally had to be on top of him if
they did it. He had no drugs or anything in
his system, so he would have been laying completely still
and not fighting, which would have been very unusual.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
This theory that Jeff was lying still as he was
being stabbed was supported by another strange fact. Jeff didn't
appear to have any defensive wounds anywhere on his body.
Speaker 8 (28:35):
Well, normally, if there's a physical altercation, you're going to
have some type of defensive wounds. So if somebody is
attacking another person with a knife, normally the person being
attacked may put up their forearms or their hands in
front of them to try to block the knife. They
may reach for the knife, and you know, depending on
how they might be reaching or they're stronger, we can
(28:57):
you might find some wounds on the hands, on the forearms.
There were no real defensive wounds that were noted. I
believe there might have been a small cut, like in
the webbing of his hand, but it's not abnormal for
somebody that carries a knife, you know, to have that
type of cut, and I don't think it was anything
(29:20):
that I would really categorize, especially based on the overall
scene as a defensive wound.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
The wound on his hand also appeared to be older,
and investigators theorized it was likely sustained during his daily
tasks at the meat processor. He also had some superficial
abrasions on his neck, but these were light enough that
they could be explained by the rifle sling or the
climbing harness he was wearing. Further testing also confirmed the
investigator's theory about that folding kershaw knife found underneath his body.
Speaker 9 (29:49):
They also did DNA tests on the knife that was
found next to his body, and it was only his DNA.
They also did DNA testing on all the knives that
were found in the camper, and they determined that they
did not have any I guess that were specific to human,
so the blood type was obviously an animal of some sort.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Whoever had done this to Jeff had left absolutely no
trace of their presence. They had murdered the hunter without
leaving blood on the knife, footprints in the ground, or
belongings in the dirt. It was like one of those
Sherlock Holmes cases where the perpetrator kills someone in a
locked room without windows, it just didn't make any sense.
(30:29):
Investigators wondered whether he'd been killed somewhere else and then
dragged to the spot where he was found. But as
any hunter knows who's dragged a dead animal through the woods,
moving a body would have left impressions in the grass
and dirt. None of the tall grass around Jeff's body
had been disturbed apart from where he himself had walked in,
and as I just mentioned, there wasn't any blood on
(30:51):
the grass except right underneath Jeff's body. What's more, Jeff
himself was six foot two, two hundred and thirty nine pounds.
They would have taken an incredibly strong person to drag
Jeff's body any distance at all. And there weren't any
wheelmarks at the scene either.
Speaker 9 (31:07):
And there was no other indication that this grass had
been mushed down anywhere else. Then it was like, well,
maybe it was carried in. Well, that would have been
very difficult because it was more than a half a
mile into the woods, so that would have been a
long way to carry him.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
None of this made any sense, and as you heard
in Dave's interview with the GBI, investigators continue to treat
Jeff's death as a homicide, but that started to change
when the medical examiner sent his official autopsy report.
Speaker 8 (31:36):
I would say that everything that really began to fall
into place would have been post to autopsy. Initially on
the front end, you look at the number and you know,
they may make you think this person was involved in
something horrific. Surely there had to be some type of
violent interaction between one person and another. But once a
(31:59):
medical examiner began to examine the wounds, the majority of
them were actually fairly superficial, fairly piercing the upper layers
of skin, and definitely nothing that would be fatal.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
Jeff had been stabbed eighteen times, but many of those
wounds hadn't gone much past the skin. This wasn't obvious
to the death investigator on the scene, but the more
thorough autopsy by the medical examiner in this case, a
doctor named Daniel Brown, noted that only three of the
wounds had been deep enough to reach his heart. What's more,
all were angled left to right. If you're looking at
(32:36):
his body from the front.
Speaker 9 (32:38):
If someone is stabbing someone, you're going to be thrashing about,
so your stabs will be all at different angles. His
were all at one particular angle.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
I reviewed some of the crime scene photos with Charla,
and she pointed out how Jeff's right hand was covered
in blood while his left hand was clean.
Speaker 9 (32:56):
If you see here, this right hand is all bloody,
this one is, and there's even blood like embedded in
the other kindzine photos. They have close up of his
hand and you can see the blood all the way
down under his fingernails. While this hand is clean.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
There is no reason why if Jeff was attacked his
right hand would be bloody while his left hand wouldn't be.
The wounds themselves were also fairly clean, meaning it appeared
like the knife slipped in and out without being jostled around.
This would have been extremely unusual if Jeff had been
stabbed by an assailant. In that case, you can imagine
him moving around to try to avoid being stabbed and
(33:33):
the knife causing wider, more jagged cuts in his body.
But these wounds weren't much wider than that Kershaw knife.
There was one wound in his abdomen, but all the
other wounds were clustered together on his chest.
Speaker 9 (33:46):
They're all in an area that he could reach. They're
all right handed, which Jeff was right handed, which we
confirmed with his brother that he was right handed.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Taking all this evidence together, the blood on Jeff's hand,
the location and angle of the stack wounds, and the
absence of another person at the scene, investigators could only
reach one conclusion. Jeff hadn't been murdered. He died by suicide,
Part four doubts. When the GBI announced their findings, you
(34:20):
can imagine the reaction from the general public. Not to
mention Jeff's family.
Speaker 10 (34:24):
I don't believe it was suicide in any way, shape
or form.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
That's Russell Cornell. Russell didn't know Jeff personally, but he
knows Jeff's family, and he's a member of the same
Roman Catholic fraternity Jeff belonged to.
Speaker 10 (34:37):
When a guy that has a loaded rifle toted it
through the woods, are you actually gonna pull utch your
knife and kill yourself with a knife. Isn't it easier
just to put a bullet through yourself.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
I've heard similar objections from pretty much everyone I've told
about this case. Most people have been impacted by suicide
in one way or another, but no one has ever
heard of something like this. Why, as Russell asked, would
someone stab themselves eighteen times with a folding knife when
they were carrying a rifle. It's a gruesome question, but
(35:09):
it must be asked. Charla has at least the beginnings
of an explanation, and I should point out here that
she was in no way connected to the GBI or
the original investigation. Families of victims ask the organization she
works for to review cases if they believe law enforcement
came to the wrong conclusion. That's what happened in this situation.
(35:30):
So if anything, Charla would have a bias against what
the GBI determined, but she largely agrees, and she has
one potential explanation.
Speaker 9 (35:40):
Jeff was pretty religious and from the Catholic faith. He
was very active in his church. He was a member
of the Knights of Columbus, so he was practicing, and
one of the suggestions was that maybe he possibly was
trying to avoid it looking like a suicide.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Catholic Church has long taught that suicide is a mortal sin.
There are nuances to this, but I think I'm on
safe ground when I say that if you're a Catholic
and you commit suicide, you're in serious danger of going
to Hell. The church has softened the stance in recent decades,
but many still hear stories about the church denying Catholic
burials to those who die by suicide. Russell, who is
(36:22):
also Catholic, confirmed that the entire Gebhart family is devout,
which is one of the reasons he doesn't believe Jeff
killed himself.
Speaker 10 (36:30):
I just don't believe a man would go on a
hunting trip the way out there, especially a Catholic man,
because yes, there are some that have committed suicide, but
that's one big thing that is of mortal sin to
the Catholic. So most Catholics won't pick their own life.
I mean, that's my belief and that's my failure. And
if you're close with God, why would you want to
(36:51):
take your own life?
Speaker 2 (36:52):
But what if Jeff was mentally distressed and committed to
ending his life. He wouldn't want his parents to be
worried about the eternal state of his soul, and he'd
want them to give him a proper Catholic burial. If
he killed himself in a way that made it look
like a homicide, he might save his parents that pain
and give them hope that they'd see him again in
the afterlife. This might also explain why Jeff called Dave
(37:15):
for help getting out of the woods. If his plan
was to make his death look like a homicide, a
call for help just a few minutes prior would definitely
move investigators in that direction. As Charlotte noted in her report,
the first time Jeff got lost may have actually been
an initial attempt at suicide.
Speaker 9 (37:33):
Getting lost might have been an attempt or thinking he
was going to but then he changed his mind for
whatever reason.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
I ran this theory past Russell, and let's just say
he wasn't impressed.
Speaker 10 (37:45):
That's someone else's theory, someone else's opinion.
Speaker 7 (37:49):
I don't think.
Speaker 10 (37:50):
I mean, I just can't see someone doing that, Really,
I can't.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
I also consulted doctor Jeff Kalshewsky, a forensic psychologist who
you may remember from episode three of this season. You'll
hear more from him later in the episode, but he
thought this plan sounded a little too elaborate for someone
experiencing a mental health crisis.
Speaker 11 (38:09):
Most of the cases that I've had where suicides occurred,
people were at the point where living is so unbearable
that they're going to take their own life, and they
don't tailor their plan around how it will affect loved ones,
they just carried out. However, there are a few cases
I've had, for example, it's a bit graphic, but I've
(38:33):
seen a couple of cases over the years where people
were going to take their life with a firearm and
they decided to shoot themselves in the heart rather than
in the face because they were thinking about a funeral.
Speaker 7 (38:44):
But that's as far.
Speaker 11 (38:45):
As I've seen it taken in my experience. When people
make that plan to take their own life, what you're
talking about trying to make it look like a homicide
so that your parents won't be upset with you for
taking your own life. That is pretty detailed and pretty sophisticated,
and I would have a hard time accepting that that theory.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
Russell also isn't sure why even if Charlotte is right
and Jeff used a knife to stage a homicide, he
would stab himself eighteen times.
Speaker 10 (39:17):
Now, I can't see him doing stab it himself. I mean,
and that many times. This is a way. I really
don't believe there's a possible way, human possible way that
you could kill yourself like that.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
This is another objection I've heard quite a bit. It
seems like if for some reason you want to commit
suicide with a knife while you're carrying a firearm, you'd
try to get it over with. Jeff was a hunter.
He worked in a meat processing facility. He was comfortable
handling a knife, and he knew how to kill something quickly.
Why would he cause himself so much pain before finally
(39:52):
hitting his heart. There is no great answer to this question,
but we can glean some insight from the two percent
of suicide victims who take their lives with a knife.
It's a very uncommon way to kill yourself, but it
does happen.
Speaker 9 (40:07):
When someone is stabbing themselves. There's what we call hesitation marks.
So many of this dads are almost superficial. They call
that like the testing what can I tolerate? That's not
unusual either to see those what they call the hesitation marks,
where they are just kind of trying to figure out
what can I tolerate? So the number isn't really strange.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
Charlotte explained that while three of the wounds were deep
enough to pierce the heart, only one did enough damage
to cause immediate death. The other two were what Charlotte
described as a nick And I should point out here
that we're not just relying on the original medical examiner's opinion.
Charlotte's team sent the photographs and information to three other
doctors and they all reached the same conclusion. As difficult
(40:51):
as it was to believe, the crime scene and autopsy
pointed to suicide, and that conclusion was even more appealing
given the lack of suspects. Investigators spoke to Jeff's family
and friends, and none of them reported Jeff having any enemies,
and even if he did, that enemy would have had
to know where he was hunting, find him in the woods,
and stab him to death without leaving a single trace.
(41:14):
One of those friends also confirmed to Agent Goodman that
Jeff owned a folding Kershaw knife. No one else at
the campground rose to suspicion, and Dave was also eliminated
from contention. Dave had voicemails and call logs to prove
he'd spoken to Jeff around eight thirty PM, and from
that time forward he was in the company of other
(41:35):
hunters who'd helped him look for his friend.
Speaker 8 (41:37):
Based on our understanding of when the calls began to
be made, and with interviews with people that would have
been located at Holiday Park during that timeframe after he
had gone missing. There were people that were there camping
and hunting and or fishing themselves that actually wanted to
join in the search for mister deep Part and that
(41:58):
actually did to try to help locate him. So it's
my understanding very early on, like when some of those
calls came in, Yeah, he's going to be in a
company of other people there at the campground, and.
Speaker 9 (42:10):
We had a very accurate timeline because of the other
hunters that also corroborated David's story that Jeff was calling
on the phone that he was very panicked and that
he kept saying he was lost.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
What's more, they weren't able to find his blood anywhere
on Jeff's body, or Jeff's blood anywhere on Dave's clothes.
They searched his truck and his camper, confiscated his knives
and equipment, and didn't find any reason to believe that
Dave had killed his hunting buddy.
Speaker 9 (42:37):
So these are the footprints that were found at the scene.
But you can see this is David's boot and it
clearly does not match. And these were the only bootprints
that were found at the scene. They also did not
match to any of the boots that were in the camper,
because they also had additional pairs of shoes in the camper.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
With no suspects and a good deal of evidence pointing
to suicide, investigators sent the case file to the Tomb's
Judicial Circuit District Attorney's office, which convened a grand jury
in August of twenty thirteen. They issued a decision, agreeing
with the GBI and the medical examiner. Jeff's death was
ruled a suicide, and the case has been officially closed
(43:18):
ever since. I don't know how Jeff's immediate family feels today.
His brother Jason was open to being interviewed, but after
a few emails back and forth, stopped responding to my messages.
But I do know the family was at one point
doubtful of the GBI's conclusion, because they asked Charla and
her team to review the case in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 9 (43:40):
I have not spoken to Jason since we gave our report.
You know, we didn't find the conclusion that he the
family wanted.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
However the family feels these days, It's safe to say
that Russell isn't satisfied.
Speaker 10 (43:52):
It was my sin. I'd want to know who killed him.
It was something like that bizarre death. There's no way
I'm gonna accept it. Well, he went out shot buck
knife and he decided to cut himself all up and
kill himself. Somebody is guilty of this crime that they've
done to this man, Jeff, and it needs to be opened.
It needs to be a case that has looked after
(44:12):
and until it is solved.
Speaker 2 (44:14):
Whether you side with Russell or the GBI is up
to you. But there's still one more question to ask,
and it might be the most important question of all
Part five, The Darkness of the Mind. It would be easier,
(44:36):
though no less tragic, if investigators determined that Jeff had
a secret mental health issue, if he'd shown signs of
depression or had some unresolved trauma in his past, maybe
we could square away his actions and tie them up
in a tidy box. But we can't.
Speaker 9 (44:53):
No, he didn't have any mental health problems that we're
aware of.
Speaker 8 (44:57):
I don't recall anyone ever communicat any potential cause as
far as what may have led to mister gab Hart
wanting to take his own life, So I would say
no in that instance. I don't recall anyone saying anything
that would correlate him to, you know, be prone to
(45:20):
being suicidal.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
Even just a few hours after the incident. Dave reiterated
this in his interview with agents Goodman and Williamson.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
Do you think Jeffer won't hurt himself?
Speaker 4 (45:31):
Not that I know if he never mentioned anything to
me about hurting.
Speaker 7 (45:36):
His sale him.
Speaker 4 (45:38):
But he was the type of person that would have
anybody if they needed help.
Speaker 7 (45:42):
But I don't.
Speaker 4 (45:43):
I don't think you'd heard hisself.
Speaker 3 (45:46):
You haven't seen any letters, notes. If he doesn't leave
anything behind, you get the camp no sign.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
The Jason Foundation reports that one in five individuals do
not show any signs of depression before committing suicide, so
it's possible Jeff was depressed and unstable and was able
to hide it. Charlotte also points out that even though
the Gebharts never admitted their son had mental health issues,
they may have been hiding or even repressing Jeff's troubled mind.
Speaker 9 (46:15):
One of the things that we talk about in the
report is, and we've seen this with other cold cases
that we've done, is we've had people that have called
and said, oh my gosh, my son has killed himself,
and then two months later they're like there's no way
he would have killed himself. They're like, well, you even
told us so at some point you thought he might,
because that's exactly what you said. And one of the
(46:36):
things that the family kept saying was that he had
an accident, and they didn't start asking, well, who killed
him or what happened or anything like that. So that
was also part of what we thought might be unconscious
things that people don't think about, that maybe he did
have some issues that he had expressed.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
Jeff's silence about his mental health issues isn't proof that
he didn't kill himself, but the way he did so
suggests a level of emotional distress that would have been
tough to hide.
Speaker 11 (47:07):
The amount of pain that's occurring with stabbing yourself seventeen times,
you would have to be very motivated to take your
own life. In other words, sometimes you'll see suicide attempts
with stabbing where they stab themselves once but it becomes
overwhelming and they sort of back out of it halfway
through the attempt. That's not that uncommon.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
That's doctor Kolshewski again. He says seventeen stab wounds because
I misstated the number when I spoke to him. The
real number is eighteen. As per Charlotte's report, Doctor Kolshewski
works in a group psychology practice, so he hears about
cases from the other doctors in his office as well
as his own. He told me it's extremely uncommon for
someone to commit suicide without showing any warning signs.
Speaker 11 (47:52):
There's always something there once you dig a little bit
below the surface. They interview people in the workplace. Co
workers have had no idea, We had no idea, But
usually people that are closer, when you dig a little deeper,
you'll find some things that would be consistent with creating
a plan and carrying it out to take your own life.
Speaker 2 (48:11):
Jeff's decision to take his life in such an inaccessible
area is also inconsistent with suicide.
Speaker 11 (48:17):
A lot of times, if people make this plan to
carry out taking their own life and they want to
be found, a lot of them do they remain in
a place where it's going to be easy to find them,
not wandering off into the woods carrying all your stuff.
So so many things to me are contra intuitive to
a person planning and carrying out a suicide that it
(48:39):
just makes me ask so many more questions rather than
being able to narrow in on one theory as most likely.
I'll tell you what. It's one of the oddists. If
it was a suicide, it's one of the artist suicides
I've ever seen or heard of, for sure.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
Matt Garthright, one of the first game wardens on the scene,
also mentioned a theory that makes a brief appearance in
SLA's report. Maybe rather than hatching an elaborate plan to
kill himself and make it look like a homicide, Jeff
had some kind of mental break in the woods.
Speaker 6 (49:10):
The only I guess you can call it a rumor
that I heard was he was very scared of the
dark and spiders, so being lost in the woods, if
he did have that fear, could have resulted him doing
something that he would not usually have done.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
And that's my theory. Of course.
Speaker 6 (49:29):
You know, he was lost in the thick grass area,
it was dark, and that may have led to his decisions.
Speaker 2 (49:38):
It's tough to predict how someone will respond to extreme
stress or fear. Dave reported that his friend sounded almost
hysterical on the phone, so it's possible he was having
some kind of episode. But while doctor Kalshewsky acknowledges that
people can have psychotic breaks, that mental instability doesn't come
out of nowhere.
Speaker 11 (49:58):
He just don't, you know, walks through the woods and
then ten minutes later have a psychotic break and kill yourself.
If you were going to have a psychotic break, there
would be evidence before that.
Speaker 10 (50:09):
You know.
Speaker 11 (50:10):
The second thing is the idea that someone has a
psychotic break and immediately kills themselves in an elaborate way
doesn't fit either, because if you're talking about a psychotic
break where you just kind of lose it and you
kill yourself, now we're talking about an impulsive act. Well,
if this indeed was a suicide, this was definitely not impulsive.
Seventeen stab wounds, so that doesn't jibe either. I think
(50:35):
there's a lot of missing information here. And again when
I mentioned earlier, the idea of a psychological autopsy would
be something very important in this case if we really
want to understand what happened, trying to understand a person's
frame of mind at the time of the incident, and
was from gathering all that data and all that information,
was he in a frame of mind where he could
(50:55):
have carried out taking his own life. And if we
don't see that, then again, just because the wounds aren't
consistent with what you normally see in a homicide doesn't
mean a homicide did not occur.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
Of course, there is one other theory, if you can
call it that more like a tidbit of information, and
you can do with it what you will. When I
had finished asking Sergeant garthright my list of questions, I
asked if there was anything else he wanted to cover.
Here's what he said.
Speaker 6 (51:30):
This particular hunt happens every year, and for several years,
there's been a death on this hunt. So whether it
be a heart attack or you know, this situation here.
So it was a few years there that this hunt
was a kind of strange.
Speaker 2 (51:44):
Really, So on this WMA, on this particular hunt, this
early rifle hunt, people passed away for how many years
in a row? Do you think?
Speaker 6 (51:55):
I want to say three?
Speaker 2 (51:57):
And were the others also suspicions are mysterious or you
mentioned a heart attack.
Speaker 6 (52:02):
They were just there were natural health issues like a
heart attack.
Speaker 2 (52:06):
Yeah, that must have been weird for you to be
called out there again several years, like what's going on
with this hunt?
Speaker 6 (52:12):
That's that's exactly what we were thinking, what's up with
this hunt? I kind of nickname him to death hunt.
But for the last couple of years now we hadn't
had any issues.
Speaker 2 (52:21):
It stopped.
Speaker 6 (52:22):
But yeah, there was just a couple of years there
that you know, somebody dragging a deer out got have
a heart attack or or going to a stand and
you know, had a heart attack.
Speaker 2 (52:31):
Yeah, that's that's very strange. That's very strange. Part six,
No good answers Asian Goodman almost didn't talk to me
about this case. He believes without question that Jeff committed suicide,
(52:51):
and he doesn't want to cause the geb Hearts more
pain and confusion by casting doubt on that conclusion, something
true crime podcast are pretty much always going to do.
Speaker 8 (53:03):
You know, always still think about them. I think about
the time that I met with his father, and being
a father myself, I could only you know, begin to
imagine what that's like having to deal with. So I
would just want it to be said, you know, I
always still think about the family, and you know, I
always want to be respectful anytime you know, I've spoken
(53:25):
about this to their feelings on the situation.
Speaker 2 (53:29):
I share that priority. But the fact is this isn't
a case that's ever going to feel closed It's possible
the GBI missed something or is hiding something, but that's
not really what I'm talking about. Even if we acknowledge
that Jeff stabbed himself eighteen times, we still don't know why.
We can speculate, but we'll never know for sure. And
(53:51):
that's really the grit that gets stuck in the craw
of this story. It's hard enough to explain why a
young man would kill himself. It's another thing entirely to
explain why he would do it with a pocket knife
on a hunt, after calling his friend for help, and
without showing any signs of depression. There's something we don't
(54:12):
understand about this case, and right now we don't have
any good answers.
Speaker 8 (54:18):
You opening theness of it. It can be a little anticlimactic,
and you never did that direct answer aside from physical
evidence and physical evidence isn't a talking person or the
words of the person. And I think everybody just wants
some form of resolve, and in these types of cases,
you don't always get it.
Speaker 9 (54:38):
Like you said, it's all speculative. And one of the
things we say in the report isn't the only person
who really knows the answers is the one person who
can't answer them.
Speaker 2 (54:53):
Thanks for listening to this episode of Blood Trails. I
want to encourage you, like we said at the top,
to get help if you're feeling to pray or having
thoughts of suicide. Hundreds and anglers are often loaners. We're
independent and self sufficient, but that sometimes means we don't
like asking for help. Don't let the fear of embarrassment
or vulnerability keep you from reaching out. You can call
(55:15):
the Mental Health Crisis Hotline at nine eight eight to
speak with a counselor. It's free and confidential, and they're
trained to talk about whatever you might be facing. As always,
you can visit the meateater dot com slash blood trails
to check out images related to this case. You can
also send us an email at blood Trails at the
meateater dot com if you have feedback on this episode
(55:37):
or know about another case you think we should cover.
Big Thanks to Special Agent Wendell Goodman, Charlotte Purdue, Russell Cornell,
and doctor Jeff Kalshewsky. See you next time. Stay safe
out there,
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Two Guys (Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers). Five Rings (you know, from the Olympics logo). One essential podcast for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. Bowen Yang (SNL, Wicked) and Matt Rogers (Palm Royale, No Good Deed) of Las Culturistas are back for a second season of Two Guys, Five Rings, a collaboration with NBC Sports and iHeartRadio. In this 15-episode event, Bowen and Matt discuss the top storylines, obsess over Italian culture, and find out what really goes on in the Olympic Village.
iHeartOlympics: The Latest
Listen to the latest news from the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Milan Cortina Winter Olympics
The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina are here and have everyone talking. iHeartPodcasts is buzzing with content in honor of the XXV Winter Olympics We’re bringing you episodes from a variety of iHeartPodcast shows to help you keep up with the action. Follow Milan Cortina Winter Olympics so you don’t miss any coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics, and if you like what you hear, be sure to follow each Podcast in the feed for more great content from iHeartPodcasts.