Ep. 7: Lost in the Dark

00:00:00
Speaker 1: 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.

00:00:21
Speaker 2: 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 trying to explain exactly what happened to the healthy, thirty five year old hunter. All have failed.

00:00:50
Speaker 3: Do you have any knowledge of his death or how he died?

00:00:55
Speaker 4: 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.

00:01:12
Speaker 2: 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.

00:01:31
Speaker 4: 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. And that’s when I called nine to one one.

00:01:54
Speaker 5: You told me earlier today that he sounded very not scared, but he dressed out and you were hysterical.

00:02:03
Speaker 2: 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.

00:02:21
Speaker 6: 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.

00:02:40
Speaker 2: 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.

00:03:02
Speaker 7: Let me throw on something to you very quick.

00:03:04
Speaker 5: 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.

00:03:24
Speaker 2: 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.

00:03:38
Speaker 3: 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.

00:03:49
Speaker 4: 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.

00:04:10
Speaker 2: 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 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. Dave and Jeff had met about two years prior at Chambers Slaughterhouse, where they both worked in Blairsville, Georgia.

00:05:00
Speaker 4: 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.

00:05:21
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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.

00:06:13
Speaker 6: 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.

00:06:28
Speaker 2: 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. 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.

00:07:08
Speaker 4: Friday, not when he got thrown around he shot.

00:07:12
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:07:53
Speaker 4: 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.

00:08:14
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 back country.

00:09:22
Speaker 8: Do you buy anything?

00:09:23
Speaker 4: Uh? We bought some thermoussail refills, and we went across the road to the sausage place and bought some sausage.

00:09:31
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:09:32
Speaker 2: 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 their errands around lunchtime. Whatever the reason, they returned to their campsite and went back out at four on Saturday, September twenty second.

00:10:03
Speaker 4: 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.

00:10:14
Speaker 2: 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.

00:10:24
Speaker 4: 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.

00:10:39
Speaker 2: 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.

00:10:47
Speaker 4: 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.

00:11:05
Speaker 2: 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.

00:11:19
Speaker 4: 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.

00:11:36
Speaker 2: 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.

00:11:49
Speaker 4: He said, he was in tall grass, and I thought he was saying something about a fence, and then he said something about mud.

00:11:57
Speaker 2: 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 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 Department of Natural Resources. The second officer was Sergeant Matt Garthwright.

00:12:44
Speaker 6: 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. 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.

00:13:15
Speaker 2: They requested air support from the Georgia State Patrol, which sent a helicopter to search the area. Within about twenty minutes, they found Jeff.

00:13:24
Speaker 6: 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.

00:13:45
Speaker 2: Hunting accidents and heart attacks are the first things that come to mind in this situation like this.

00:13:50
Speaker 6: 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.

00:14:06
Speaker 2: However, it quickly became clear that they were dealing with something far more sinister.

00:14:11
Speaker 6: 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 added up. We knew something was off.

00:14:37
Speaker 2: 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.

00:14:44
Speaker 6: 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 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.

00:15:16
Speaker 2: 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. Here’s Special Agent Wendell Goodman with the GBI speaking to Dave the day after Jeff died.

00:15:44
Speaker 3: 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.

00:16:04
Speaker 2: 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, 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. Here’s Agent Goodman, who took the lead on the investigation for the GBI.

00:16:54
Speaker 8: 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.

00:17:14
Speaker 2: 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.

00:17:24
Speaker 3: 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, 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.

00:17:56
Speaker 4: 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.

00:18:04
Speaker 2: 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 found under his body, and they were keen to find out who that knife belonged to.

00:18:31
Speaker 7: Does that look for me?

00:18:33
Speaker 4: I really couldn’t say.

00:18:35
Speaker 7: Have you ever seen this though?

00:18:36
Speaker 4: No, I’ve never saw that novel, because I do remember the one he had last year. I as surrated blade on the.

00:18:43
Speaker 7: Okay, this looks like a straight edge. Do you have any folding knives?

00:18:48
Speaker 4: To folding knife everything I have or fixed flame?

00:18:52
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:19:30
Speaker 7: This wasn’t a random killing.

00:19:33
Speaker 5: 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, and I think you know what happened.

00:20:00
Speaker 4: No, sir, I sure do not know what happened.

00:20:02
Speaker 2: 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.

00:20:15
Speaker 3: You guys haven’t had any type of disagreements.

00:20:18
Speaker 4: 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.

00:20:30
Speaker 7: People see, the kind of guy to pick a fight if you made him.

00:20:33
Speaker 5: Man.

00:20:34
Speaker 4: Yes, well let you guys, ever getting like we never got.

00:20:38
Speaker 7: You know, you could have y’all could have.

00:20:39
Speaker 5: 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.

00:20:50
Speaker 7: I never saw him.

00:20:52
Speaker 4: All I did was talked to him on the phone.

00:21:00
Speaker 2: Dave denied killing Jeff in anger or self defense, but there are many reasons for murder sex. For example, have you ever known.

00:21:08
Speaker 7: Any women that he dated, who knows.

00:21:11
Speaker 4: 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.

00:21:26
Speaker 2: 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 inquiry related to matters of the heart.

00:21:51
Speaker 3: Now, I know you said earlier that a guy had picked up Jeff and they went to the showers, and as Jeff involved.

00:21:59
Speaker 4: In all of that guy, not that I don’t worry he was.

00:22:03
Speaker 7: See where I’m going, Yeah, it was.

00:22:06
Speaker 3: You haven’t had any type of relationship type of moments which have agents.

00:22:12
Speaker 2: 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.

00:22:35
Speaker 7: So I don’t keep me straight up with it. He’s gay.

00:22:38
Speaker 4: 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.

00:22:45
Speaker 7: So I don’t know.

00:22:46
Speaker 4: He’s never talked about being another another guy.

00:22:49
Speaker 7: 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?

00:22:58
Speaker 4: No, sir, I’m no. I’m not gonna judge somebody for doing it.

00:23:03
Speaker 3: And have you ever been physically involved with Jeff?

00:23:07
Speaker 4: No? I have never been physically involved with the guy.

00:23:12
Speaker 2: 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.

00:23:27
Speaker 5: 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.

00:23:45
Speaker 2: 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.

00:23:55
Speaker 5: 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.

00:24:09
Speaker 4: Do something like that? And see, I have no idea.

00:24:11
Speaker 5: I’m the person that killed him, knew him, Isn’t that right?

00:24:17
Speaker 7: And that person is you?

00:24:18
Speaker 4: No, sir, I didn’t like kill him, do not know anything about it.

00:24:22
Speaker 2: 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. They had to take a hard look to make sure he was telling the truth.

00:24:48
Speaker 8: 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 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 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.

00:25:47
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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.

00:26:42
Speaker 9: It defied forensic sense.

00:26:45
Speaker 2: 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.

00:27:05
Speaker 9: 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.

00:27:19
Speaker 2: 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.

00:27:30
Speaker 8: 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 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.

00:28:00
Speaker 2: The only blood at the crime scene was pooled directly under Jeff’s torso, but even this gave investigators pause.

00:28:08
Speaker 9: 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.

00:28:25
Speaker 2: 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.

00:28:35
Speaker 8: 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 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 that I would really categorize, especially based on the overall scene as a defensive wound.

00:29:25
Speaker 2: 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.

00:29:49
Speaker 9: 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.

00:30:08
Speaker 2: 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. 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 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.

00:31:07
Speaker 9: 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.

00:31:22
Speaker 2: 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.

00:31:36
Speaker 8: 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 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.

00:32:14
Speaker 2: 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 his body from the front.

00:32:38
Speaker 9: 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.

00:32:47
Speaker 2: 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.

00:32:56
Speaker 9: 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.

00:33:11
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:33:46
Speaker 9: 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.

00:33:55
Speaker 2: 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 can imagine the reaction from the general public. Not to mention Jeff’s family.

00:34:24
Speaker 10: I don’t believe it was suicide in any way, shape or form.

00:34:28
Speaker 2: 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.

00:34:37
Speaker 10: 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.

00:34:48
Speaker 2: 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 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. So if anything, Charla would have a bias against what the GBI determined, but she largely agrees, and she has one potential explanation.

00:35:40
Speaker 9: 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.

00:36:00
Speaker 2: 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 also Catholic, confirmed that the entire Gebhart family is devout, which is one of the reasons he doesn’t believe Jeff killed himself.

00:36:30
Speaker 10: 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 take your own life?

00:36:52
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:37:33
Speaker 9: Getting lost might have been an attempt or thinking he was going to but then he changed his mind for whatever reason.

00:37:41
Speaker 2: I ran this theory past Russell, and let’s just say he wasn’t impressed.

00:37:45
Speaker 10: That’s someone else’s theory, someone else’s opinion.

00:37:49
Speaker 7: I don’t think.

00:37:50
Speaker 10: I mean, I just can’t see someone doing that, Really, I can’t.

00:37:53
Speaker 2: 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.

00:38:09
Speaker 11: 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 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.

00:38:44
Speaker 7: But that’s as far.

00:38:45
Speaker 11: 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.

00:39:08
Speaker 2: 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.

00:39:17
Speaker 10: 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.

00:39:29
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:40:07
Speaker 9: 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.

00:40:28
Speaker 2: 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 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. 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 hunters who’d helped him look for his friend.

00:41:37
Speaker 8: 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 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.

00:42:10
Speaker 9: 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.

00:42:23
Speaker 2: 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.

00:42:37
Speaker 9: 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.

00:42:58
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:43:40
Speaker 9: I have not spoken to Jason since we gave our report. You know, we didn’t find the conclusion that he the family wanted.

00:43:47
Speaker 2: However the family feels these days, It’s safe to say that Russell isn’t satisfied.

00:43:52
Speaker 10: 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 and until it is solved.

00:44:14
Speaker 2: 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, 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.

00:44:53
Speaker 9: No, he didn’t have any mental health problems that we’re aware of.

00:44:57
Speaker 8: 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 being suicidal.

00:45:22
Speaker 2: Even just a few hours after the incident. Dave reiterated this in his interview with agents Goodman and Williamson.

00:45:28
Speaker 3: Do you think Jeffer won’t hurt himself?

00:45:31
Speaker 4: Not that I know if he never mentioned anything to me about hurting.

00:45:36
Speaker 7: His sale him.

00:45:38
Speaker 4: But he was the type of person that would have anybody if they needed help.

00:45:42
Speaker 7: But I don’t.

00:45:43
Speaker 4: I don’t think you’d heard hisself.

00:45:46
Speaker 3: You haven’t seen any letters, notes. If he doesn’t leave anything behind, you get the camp no sign.

00:45:53
Speaker 2: 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.

00:46:15
Speaker 9: 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 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.

00:46:57
Speaker 2: 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.

00:47:07
Speaker 11: 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.

00:47:28
Speaker 2: 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.

00:47:52
Speaker 11: 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.

00:48:11
Speaker 2: Jeff’s decision to take his life in such an inaccessible area is also inconsistent with suicide.

00:48:17
Speaker 11: 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 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.

00:48:54
Speaker 2: 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.

00:49:10
Speaker 6: 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.

00:49:26
Speaker 2: And that’s my theory. Of course.

00:49:29
Speaker 6: You know, he was lost in the thick grass area, it was dark, and that may have led to his decisions.

00:49:38
Speaker 2: 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.

00:49:58
Speaker 11: 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.

00:50:09
Speaker 10: You know.

00:50:10
Speaker 11: 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 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 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.

00:51:11
Speaker 2: 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.

00:51:30
Speaker 6: 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.

00:51:44
Speaker 2: 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?

00:51:55
Speaker 6: I want to say three?

00:51:57
Speaker 2: And were the others also suspicions are mysterious or you mentioned a heart attack.

00:52:02
Speaker 6: They were just there were natural health issues like a heart attack.

00:52:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, that must have been weird for you to be called out there again several years, like what’s going on with this hunt?

00:52:12
Speaker 6: 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.

00:52:21
Speaker 2: It stopped.

00:52:22
Speaker 6: 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.

00:52:31
Speaker 2: 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, 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.

00:53:03
Speaker 8: 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 about this to their feelings on the situation.

00:53:29
Speaker 2: 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 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 understand about this case, and right now we don’t have any good answers.

00:54:18
Speaker 8: 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.

00:54:38
Speaker 9: 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.

00:54:53
Speaker 2: 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 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 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,