Solving the Appalachian Walker Mystery “Mostly Harmless”

It is believed that he started walking the Appalachian Trail around April 2017. From a state park in New York, he walked south and, about 1,000 miles and 10 months later, crossed to Florida.

“I saw a man walking by the side of the road,” said Kelly Fairbanks, a so-called “trail angel”, offering help to tired hikers. “What caught my attention most was his beard. Besides, his trekking poles. His trekking poles let me know that he was a climber.”

Nicholas Thompson of Atlantic Magazine asked, “Why did he impress you?”

“He had a very kind aura about him, and he was playing and laughing with me. He had a beautiful smile. And he had beautiful eyes – unlike any other walker.”

“Looks like you thought he was kind of cute?”

“Yes. Most women do,” she laughed.

Fairbanks took some pictures of him. Other hikers too. Some caught it on video. When asked for his name, the walker introduced himself as “Almost Harmless”. That’s what he called himself when he was on the trail and off the grid.

“He said, ‘I’m not using a cell phone,'” recalls Fairbanks. “And I said, ‘What do you mean you’re not using a cell phone?’ And he said, ‘You know, sometimes people just want to disconnect.’ ”

Six months later, in South Florida, hikers made a terrible discovery in the Big Cypress National Reserve, Florida’s Alligator Alley: a corpse was found curled up in a yellow tent at a camp.

David Hurm, a detective from the Collier County Sheriff’s Office in Naples, Florida, said. “We had a white man, we had no electronics, no identification, no wallet, no personal information. There was nothing there to give us a hint at the time.

“We just don’t see people going that far. Most people are not comfortable with being completely off the grid like that.”

The Sheriff’s Office made a draft. When Kelly Fairbanks saw the photo on Facebook, she told Thompson that she “freaked out a little”.

Fairbanks was sure it was practically harmless. But his real name remained a mystery. The sheriff’s detectives searched databases using his face and fingerprints: nothing. The autopsy failed to identify the cause of death.

But over the next two years, the case gradually drew attention.

“I do a lot of hiking and stuff, and that’s part of the deal – we all know we take care of each other. You know, you don’t leave anyone behind,” said Natasha Teasley, who runs a canoe and kayak company in Carolina From north. Browsing online, she was fascinated by the Mostly Harmless case. She helped form a Facebook group to try to identify him, named after a pseudonym he sometimes used: Ben Bilemy. The group has grown to more than 6,000 members.

“My phone is packed all the time with people sending me messages like, ‘Could it be that person?’ Or, ‘Is it that person?’ “Teasley said.

She examined public records, including a government website called NamUs, a clearinghouse for cases of missing and unidentified people across the country. According to NamUs, 4,400 unidentified bodies are recovered each year.

Thompson asked, “Did you have to look at the face of every white man between 25 and 60 years of age listed as missing across the United States?”

“Yes,” replied Teasley. “And there are many. There are many people missing in our country. I didn’t know how many people were missing in our country.”

This search did not work. But a new high-tech tool has brought hope.

David Mittelman, the founder of Othram, just outside Houston, said his laboratory is the only laboratory in the United States that does advanced forensic testing internally. The test there would cost $ 5,000, money that was not in the budget of the Collier County Sheriff’s Office.

Enter the detectives online: “There was a dedicated group of people who really wanted to see this case moving forward,” said Mittelman. “And then, with financing being the only bottleneck, when we found this situation, we opened up to crowdfunding. In this specific case, you know, there was so much pent-up interest in the case that we funded it collectively, in the true sense of the word, in about , I think, eight days, which was very fast. “

Othram received part of Mostly Harmless’ DNA from the sheriff’s department and started work. “What we do is capture tens of thousands of markers to hundreds of thousands of markers,” said Mittelman. “And we do more of a relationship research instead of an exact match. Some people call it genealogical research.”

The results showed that Mostly Harmless was probably from Assumption Parish, Louisiana. The articles appeared online, including one that Thompson wrote for Wired Magazine, which was read by 1.5 million people. Still, months went by without any positive identification.

Finally, Randall Godso, from Louisiana, saw a post.

“As soon as I saw the photos, I knew immediately – it was like, ‘Oh, this is Vance!'” Said Godso. “A tingle ran through my spine.”

It was his college roommate.

Two and a half years after his body was found, the climber had a name: Vance Rodriguez.

The thousands of people who followed the case soon discovered that Rodriguez was complicated. In fact, he grew up in Louisiana and moved to New York at age 30. He was a brilliant computer programmer whose notebooks, found in the tent where he died, were full of computer codes.

Rodriguez was estranged from his family; had troubled, even abusive, romantic relationships; and he would sometimes disappear into his friends. Still, why did it take so long to identify him? Partly because he had erased his tracks, and partly because no one was looking for him.

It was not entirely the answer that the people working on his case wanted to hear.

Thompson asked Godso, “Everyone who met him on the trail describes them as friendly, kind, easy to talk to, while everyone else who met him in real life, describes him as a little distant, a little lonely. the difference? How did it happen? “

“It is not really a difference; it’s a difference when you’re talking to him, ”he replied. “When he was in a good mood, it was very easy to talk to him. He was very friendly. But he also hung up and was in a bad mood, and people never saw it, because if he decided he wasn’t going to talk to anyone, he literally just wouldn’t talk to anyone. And so, no one would remember him [that way], I’m sure.”

Natasha Teasley said, “For me, like, being imperfect has always been a possibility. We are all human and we all have a very complicated past. I don’t think that changes the value of what we did as a community, you know, as if we came together. out of human kindness. “

And then, Teasley started The Kindness Project. The idea is to take advantage of the online energy that helped identify Vance Rodriguez and use it to identify the thousands of others who remain missing and unidentified. It is a postscript for the strange story of Mostly Harmless: an effort to name anonymous names.

Teasley said, “My hope is that it doesn’t end here, that every person who has been impacted by the story in some way, at least carries with them the knowledge of, like, cares about them. Care about who these people are and what they have friends and family.

“Even if you gave up that they have friends and family, they have friends and family.”

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Story produced by Alan Golds. Editor: Emanuele Secci.