My dad killed himself back in 2006. I was too young at the time to really understand why he had done this, but after 15+ years of having grown up and lived my life without ever really knowing him I kinda developed a new interest in his life after my aunt showed me some of the investigative journalism work he had done back in the 90s.
A few hours ago I was able to brute force the password to an old laptop he had, and view his files, and I read over his digital journal that he had kept, which mostly consisted of some drafts of articles and reports he had been working on. Most were pretty interesting actually, involving local corruption in my home state and an unreleased report about some environmental protection violations from a large oil company.
I read thru most of the drafts he had, and eventually I stumbled upon a document about an old missing person’s case that I hadn’t heard before. I’m not really even gonna begin to try to explain or narrate the things that I read, so it’s probably best if I just paste the text here.
On October 17th, 1998, Kayla Lawrence, aged 7 and her father, Scott Lawrence, were seen alive for the last time.
They had left their home in Lincoln, Nebraska at 9:00 AM to visit the Calvin Lake recreation area to hike a trail in the surrounding woods and take pictures with a FujiFilm MX-700 Scott had purchased the day prior. When they had not returned by 5:00 PM, several hours after Scott had said they would be home, his wife Kimberly Lawrence called the police.
By 6 PM police had arrived at the recreation area, and search teams were not far behind. The first ground search covered the southern half of the forest without luck over the course of the night of October 17th, and early in the morning of October 18th they began scouring the northern half. At 4:00 AM a member of the search party discovered a pink shoe identified as having had belonged to Kayla Lawrence laying in a gully, and a few minutes later they found the coat Scott had been wearing when he had left home, ripped into tatters and hanging from a tree branch. The investigation was immediately expanded as there was now evidence of foul play, and when nothing further had been found by 7 AM, the FBI was contacted for forensic analysis.
Over the course of the next few weeks, there was nothing. No leads, no explanation, and no answers. Detectives first interviewed the hysterical Mrs. Lawrence only to be told that Scott had been a loving husband and father, a claim backed up by the testimony of friends and relatives. He had no history of mental illness and no debts, and the possibility of Scott having been responsible for their disappearance was quickly ruled out due to the fact that their car had been left at the recreation area parking lot with his wallet in the glove box, and the coat found in the forest. Civilians who had been in the area between the hours of 9 to 6 PM were questioned, and none reported any abnormality, except for a single man.
A fisherman who had been on the eastern shore of Calvin Lake around noon had reported that he had heard peculiar metallic scraping sounds coming from the woods, and a few minutes later, a deep rumble that he estimated to have come from a half mile within the woods. He said that after the rumbling noise had stopped he experienced a wave of nausea and lightheadedness that was accompanied by an abnormal pulse sensation in his chest. Convinced he was experiencing a stroke, he retreated back to the parking lot to call 911, only for the nausea and lightheadedness to instantly vanish as soon as he stepped onto the asphalt. The perplexed detectives kept the recording of his statement but did not take it seriously at the time.
The investigation had so far been completely stagnant, and the hope of finding Kayla and Scott gradually dwindled as the weeks turned with indifference, and by December the team of detectives was cut down sharply, as zero progress had been made in locating them. It was seen as incredibly unlikely that either would be found, even less likely that they might be alive somewhere, until something finally happened on December 4th that got the ball rolling.
At 2 AM during the early morning of December 4th, a known drug addict by the name of Randall Wilkes was hospitalized after he crashed into a telephone pole in front of an apartment complex in Lincoln. A witness standing a block away when the crash occurred reported to police that he had hit the pole going at least 90 MPH, and after he had totaled his car, he kicked out the crumpled door, and limped away from the wreck before collapsing on the side of the street. Randall regained consciousness at the hospital and had to be sedated after he ripped his IV out of his arm and gouged out his left eye with it. He was restrained, and his blood was tested for any abnormalities that might explain his behavior only for his results to come back completely clean. When he woke up he began deliriously swinging between screaming nonsense and crying profusely whilst begging for mercy to something unknown. During one of his begging fits, he whimpered that he had put something in the backseat of the car that he needed to “return”, which was deemed to be of interest to police due to his current mental state. An officer was sent to the tow yard that held the remains of Randall’s car, and in the floorboard of the backseat he found the filthy, mud-stained clothes that Kayla Lawrence had been wearing when she disappeared. Randall was immediately placed under arrest at the hospital for suspicion of kidnapping Kayla and Scott Lawrence, and an officer was sent to guard him at the hospital.
Randall’s house was immediately searched by a team of detectives. Whilst scouring through the filthy, half rotting trailer one detective discovered that the master bedroom furthest from the entrance was boarded up, and he used a crowbar to pry the boards off and enter. The room, in stark contrast to the knee deep garbage piles and stained walls in the rest of the house, was completely empty, spotless and clean. There was a single window, also boarded shut, but otherwise there was nothing of note. The detectives found this out of place cleanliness incredibly strange, and made note of it within their police reports, and one detective included a small note scribbled in the margins that stated that he swore he had heard soft whispering noises coming from the walls.
The next day, Randall Wilkes was dead. He was 34 years old, and had killed himself by throwing himself out of a hospital window. During one of his screaming breakdowns he was able to dislocate his thumb and pull his hand out of the handcuffs that locked him to his gurney, and he began bashing his head and arms against the reinforced glass. The police officer stationed outside ran into the room and attempted to wrestle Randall away from the window, but he was thrown against the gurney which fell on him, breaking his legs and incapacitating him. Randall eventually broke a big enough hole in the glass to squeeze his emaciated, bleeding body out of, and he fell to his death from the fifth story. According to the police officer who had been crippled by Randall, his last words were a shriek of “You’ve never seen it”, before he pulled himself out of the window.
Randall’s death would be remembered, but not for his suspected involvement in the kidnappings. The nature of his death was picked up by tabloid publications that falsely sensationalized him as a PCP addict who had crippled a cop and broke through a window with his bare hands, only to survive the fall and run off, never to be seen again, and his story was one of the first to pop up in the late 90’s that began a widespread moral panic against these so called “zombie drugs” that would soon be infiltrating suburban communities across America. His name has been consigned to folklore since then, but to the team of detectives working on the Lawrence case, it was a huge blow to their momentum, as Randall had been unable to give the detectives any real information concerning the disappearance. Nevertheless, Randall’s relatives were interviewed, his past was scrubbed for anything that might be helpful to the investigation, and the woods behind his trailer were searched painstakingly. Nothing was found, and the only connection Randall had to the case was his unexplained possession of Kayla’s clothes. The investigation once again screeched to a halt, and the case went dormant yet again. Weeks passed. Then months. Kimberly Lawrence tragically committed suicide in late February, and seven days after her funeral, on March 3rd, a call was made to Lancaster County Sheriff’s office from Anchorage, Alaska.
Kayla Lawrence had been found.
A hunter who lived a few miles outside of Bethel, Alaska had been investigating a recent wave of incidents in which various types of wildlife in the surrounding areas of the town had been found unnaturally dismembered, and while searching the woods to the east of Bethel, he had discovered a rock alcove containing the fresh corpse of a small girl. The hunter immediately contacted authorities, and the emaciated body was sent to Anchorage for autopsy. Upon arrival, her fingerprints were taken and uploaded into the state database, and an automated program matched the fingerprints to a set of identical fingerprints that had been taken from Kayla Lawrence during a medical checkup a year prior, to the surprise of the coroner.
The body was examined soon after. Kayla’s skull had been shattered in five places, several of her teeth were missing, and her hands had been nearly torn completely off of her arms, being only attached by a few tendons. Accounting for sub-zero temperatures, her time of death was estimated to have been only around three days before having been found, and the official cause of death was listed as blunt force head trauma with an unknown implement. After the detectives in Lincoln had been contacted, documents were faxed to them, and the body was sent to Nebraska for burial whilst a search team from Bethel was organized to search for Scott. The reaction back in Nebraska was a mixture of confusion and bewilderment, to say the least.
There was something else however. A badly damaged FujiFilm MX-700 that had been found in the alcove with Kayla. Whilst the search teams scrubbed the forests around Bethel, a lone detective in Alaska spent hours attempting to recover the data from the camera thinking that he might finally uncover the truth, and after two days of tinkering, he was able to transfer pictures from the camera to his computer.
The first picture was a still shot of a tree, with nothing abnormal visible, and the next few pictures were more of the same. There was a picture taken from the woods of a man knee deep in water casting a fishing pole, several pictures of flowers and wildlife, and a picture of Kayla standing in front of a tree, smiling, with a smudge of a hand barely visible reaching from behind a tree in the background.
The next picture was a blurry mass of trees shot as if the photo had been taken while in motion, and the next was a low angled shot of a dark mass that seemed to be the leg of an adult male, with the tips of someone’s fingers reaching in from the right side, barely in frame. There were many following images, but they were all dark and blurry, and no specific objects were identifiable within them.
Except for the final image.
The picture was taken from a waist height position, at a slight tilt to the left, and there was snow blanketing the trees. Scott Lawrence was dangling a few inches off the snowy ground with his naked body pressed against a tree, and a tight black cord was tied around his neck and hanging him from a tree branch. His right leg was severed at the mid shin, and his mouth was covered in blood. An ominous crack in the lens had left a crooked line across his gaunt chest. Beside him stood a tall man dressed in a dark brown lounge suit, with a brimmed fedora held in both hands in front of him, and where his face should have been, there was nothing but a black haired head, twisted completely around, with the backsides of his ears were facing the camera.
Scott Lawrence’s body was never found.