In a quiet mining town in the Colorado Rockies, a man and his dog walked into the mountains and never returned.

Less than a year later, another man working in the same exact location took interest in the disappearance from the year before.

Soon he would follow the same trail, and he too would vanish one mountain, two men, countless theories.

I'm Danielle, I'm Megan, and this is off the trails.

One of my biggest podcasting fears is that, well, I guess it's twofold.

My biggest fear is that somehow, even though I always utilize so many sources for an episode, I have this fear that I just picked like a fake story somehow, that like it's all made up.

I don't know.

How that would even be possible, but that that is like a deep fear.

I have that even though I'm reading a news article from the town it happened, and I'm like, well, what if.

This is fake?

Did you think this one is fake?

No?

So that leads me into my second concern is that I'm going to recover a case that we've already covered and I just forget.

I get nervous about that too, especially the more episodes.

We do, so whenever I come across a story, I always search keywords from it into our drive because we save all of our documents on the Google Drive.

And so if I don't find anything there, I'm like, Okay.

Good, I did that three times.

But I will explain why a piece of the story felt so familiar when we get there.

Okay, And then you can tell me I'm crazy or not, or you can tell me that now you probably.

Know already you're not crazy, all right.

Originally a silver mining camp, silver Plume is a small town in the Rocky Mountains about an hour ish west of Denver, and back in the late eighteen no nineteen eighties.

Those one hundred years makes a big difference, just a bit.

So the eighteen eighties the population was somewhere around one hundred and fifty people, and even today stats don't show that that record is even breaking two hundred.

So a very.

Sparsely populated location.

You know.

The town has some old mining buildings, a general store, some homes.

It's pretty pretty low key.

I think it also looks frozen in time, very much like an old Western ghost town, and I guess it kind of is.

It's the same setting.

Just there are some people that live there.

Oh, that sounds incredible.

I would move there in a heartbeat.

You could be there two hundredth resident.

I am tempted a place like that.

You wouldn't expect somewhere seemingly quiet and small to draw much attention, and I think most of the time that is accurate.

However, in the late eighties, two disappearances not even a year apart, made Silver Plume the focus of documentary filmmakers and online conversations and armchair detectives now for decades now that it ever Redy started, we didn't have any podcast business who wanted to discuss right, No.

I don't think we did.

Perfect carry on.

In nineteen eighty seven, a man named Tom Young vanished.

He was somewhere between forty seven and forty nine.

Sources varied, and some source information just said unknown for his year of birth, which is interesting because it's like it's that long ago.

No, it's pretty modern.

We should probably be able to confirm that fairly he's right, but either way I could not be confirmed.

But he had previously been a police officer prior to moving to Silver Plume, and once he arrived there he was running a second hand bookstore, which I love.

But it does not feel profitable.

It sure doesn't, but it sounds lovely m hm.

He was living with his Golden Retriever mix named Gus, in a little apartment.

Behind the shop.

People who knew him described Tom as eccentric, but he was very kind, He was soft spoken, and he was someone.

Who valued his alone time.

He was probably an introvert and just was totally happy.

Being on his own with his dog.

And just a quick warning to all of us, don't get attached to the dog too late.

Sorry.

One day September, both Tom and Gus were just gone.

The shop was locked.

There was no note, no indication anything was wrong, but Tom was not there, and at first people assumed he maybe was taking a sick day or had gone out of town.

Apparently he had mentioned to a few friends that he was planning or at least thinking about a trip to Europe, though nobody had any specifics.

Like he didn't say, oh I'm going here in September, or this is where I want to go.

It was very very vague.

I'd like to go to Europe, Well wouldn't most of us?

Well that and even if he had just gone on this sort of spontaneous trip to Europe.

He would have needed someone local, I assume to watch Gus because I don't think Gus is joining him in Europe.

That's true, and his family knew nothing about any of these planned vacation ideas.

So to your point, the police ended up contacting the kennel that Tom would typically use if he was going out of town for Gus, and they found out that Tom hadn't been in touch, he hadn't made any arrangements, so they were not expecting to see Gus.

And even though it was definitely a weird situation, there was no evidence of foul play, and there really just wasn't a whole lot that investigators could do because as we know, it's.

Not a crime to.

Relocate for whatever reason if you're an adult, So everybody kind of just had to accept no answers at this time.

Weeks passed, then months, and there was no sign up Tom.

It wasn't until July of nineteen eighty eight that hikers or hunters depending on the sores, were on a steep, narrow trail above the town when they spotted skeletal remains beneath some like pine trees.

Authorities soon confirmed that they belonged to a man and dog.

Both had been killed by a gunshot, and there was a gun on the scene, like right next to them.

Two investigators, the weapon being on the scene was a pretty clear point towards a murder suicide.

It was later discovered that Tom had purchased the gun like shortly before he vanished within the weak prior, so very soon before, and without any evidence suggesting otherwise, the corner rolled at a suicide, and officially the case was closed.

But for people who knew him, the suicide explanation didn't feel right.

It didn't feel like it made sense.

They said Tom didn't seem depressed.

They said he'd been upbeat, even optimistic about how things were going and his future.

And for a lot of people, the idea that Tom would harm Gus, who was his constant companion, and anyone who saw them together very easily could tell that he loved this dog.

So many people.

Were like, that doesn't make sense that he would do that to Gus.

But nothing at the scene contradicted the official ruling.

But still for some locals and people who knew him, the story just didn't really fit.

I think as we've talked about in plenty of other cases, spotting depression or mental health issues is not always easy, and a lot of times there aren't signs, or the signs get missed until you're looking at it in hindsight unfortunately.

Yeah, that's such a tricky one because of course your loved ones would like to think that they'd be able to tell if something was off to such an extreme where that's something you're considering doing.

But so many people who struggle, you know, with mental health, and ones who do find themselves in a place where they are considering that as an option, there's not always that outward facing indicators of that for other people to pick up on.

A few weeks before Tom's remains were discovered, a sportswriter from Algonquin, Illinois named Keith Reinhard arrived in town.

Keith was kind of.

Looking to just get a change in scenery, maybe a little life reset, a chance to get out of the city, breathe some fresh air and work.

On a novel.

At this time, he was fifty, married.

With kids, and he was taking a three months sabbatical from his job at the newspaper.

He'd been there more than two decades, and it sounds like he just needed a break.

His plan was to open a small shop and just be able to write as much as possible.

His wife, Carolyn wasn't thrilled with him just leaving for three months, but ultimately she did support him doing that, and Keith hoped that if things worked out and the shop was succeeding and he got his book written, that maybe the family would relocate there permanently.

Keith ended up renting the same storefront where Tommy Young's bookstore.

Had been stop.

I was going to say that, I was gonna say, how weird if he just took over that shop and he did.

You know, maybe it was coincidence, Maybe it was the only available space I don't know, or maybe it was I don't know, fate or some sort of it was supposed to be that way, I don't know.

Yeah, So whatever the reason, Keith set up a shop that according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigations cold case file, he was selling matted photographs.

Other sources that he was selling antiques.

I think both are interesting business choices in a town with barely two hundred people, Like, how many printed photos are you going to be able to sell people.

Right, how much demand could you realistically have right for that?

I mean it's cool, but like unless you're fulfilling online orders, which they were not in nineteen y eight, so like audience size is pretty small.

That summer, he was able to explore the really pretty rugged terrain around Silver Plume.

He had told friends that he'd wanted to finally conquer his fear of heights by hiking all of these steep trails around the town.

He was also struggling with writer's block, and he wasn't really making the progress on his novel that he had hoped to, so he kind of took to hiking and going on walks and just getting out in hopes to reset his brain or I don't know.

Sometimes I take parking lot loops at work when I'm just like, I'm not functioning appropriately, and sometimes.

It does work.

Oh, it definitely works.

Also, I typically know when you're doing your parking lot loops.

Because because I'm angry texting that.

And sometimes my watch will tell me, hmm, there we go.

And typically I know, I'm like, oh, I think I think she's doing a little a little walk about at work right now.

Yep.

Yeah, if you're getting texts, it's because I'm angry.

If you're getting a watch notification, it's just I'm out there enjoying my walk.

So eventually he shifted to a new idea for his book.

It was going to be a story about a man who just walked away from his life and disappeared into the wilderness.

What did he He had to have been told about.

What was his name?

John?

Or Tom?

Tom?

Tom?

He must have known about Tom, right.

Yes, So the character's name was Guy, a gypsum, and Guy was based on Tom Young.

Oh, okay, so he was really leaning into this story.

Did his character have a dog?

I don't know.

Actually there's no mention of a dog in the sources, but I would be curious.

That might have been just too much for him.

He's like, no, you know, this is already.

This is already kind of, you know, a heavy material.

I don't know.

I can't add a dog to this too.

That's true, And he quickly, if he wasn't already, quickly became fascinated with Tom's disappearance.

And Keith had been in town when Tom's remains were discovered, so he had already been there for part of the summer.

Probably knew the story because I would think in a small town like that or really a lot of locations where people do not go missing.

When someone went missing last summer and it is still missing, that is a topic of conversation.

Oh definitely, And especially in like a small town, right setting.

I mean something, a story like that will get your attention anyway, even in like a bigger area, but especially in like a place like that where that's probably a fairly small community.

They all know each other pretty well, so that would have been a pretty big deal to happen.

Yeah, I agree, is life?

Is life about to imitate art a little bit?

Yeah?

Or did art imitate life?

That's what I was gonna say, But I don't know if that works.

Keith was already interested in the story, and then when Thom's remains were discovered, that really just amped up the intrigue for him.

He ended up visiting the location on the mountain where Tom's remains had been found.

He was interviewing people in the town, people who knew him, and he was just trying to dig into whatever he could find about Tom.

He's fixated, fixated, Yes.

And friends later said that he had become a little, they said, obsessed with the case.

Fixated feels more, feels less judgmental than obsessed.

Yeah, and I mean I obsessed does give it kind of a different sort of connotation as to how he was behaving behaving with it, But you know, I cannot honestly see kind of that intrigue and that interest in that case and for it to have happened right where I mean, he's retracing some of Tom's steps, and you know, you can kind of blur those lines from a story that you've read about or heard about it to actually immersing yourself in the setting that it took place.

And you know, I kind of get how that started happening.

Oh absolutely.

I mean when we do these episodes, we get really in depth with these cases, and.

I think if it.

Happened where I lived, I would be going on scene checking things out or drive by the location.

So it sounds obsessive, but when you take a step back a little bit, it's like, Okay, you two do that every single week.

Exactly, and when you add that element of being in the place flare a case like this happened, Yeah, sorry, I'd I'd be totally immersing myself in it.

Too.

Oh.

Yeah, Keith was also starting to ask what if it wasn't suicide, what if something else had happened up there?

And obviously other people had questioned that as well, but Keith was really kind of going down that road of an alternative theory.

I don't know if he had a specific theory that, if it wasn't suicide, what had happened, or if he was just kind of exploring any options.

On the afternoon of August seventh of nineteen eighty eight, Keith closed his shop, had lunch with friends, he visited a neighbor, and had announced he was going for a hike up Pendleton Mountain Mountain end quotes, And by then it was already pretty late in the day to start a hike like that.

It was four thirty or five o'clock, So, yeah, the sun doesn't set until much later in August, but that's still pretty late to be starting anything more than like a neighborhood walk.

For sure.

As soon as you said that he had had lunch with friends, I'm like, he's not hiking after this.

Please don't tell me he's hiking after this.

Oh, but he was.

A friend questioned the timing.

They probably said exactly what you said, Like, we just had lunch and you're now going to go for a hike.

That doesn't make sense.

But Keith was like, yeah, if I'm not back by ten o'clock, you can call for help.

And he told several people that he was going for a hike, but everybody he told kind of assumed he was joking.

They figure, at least on the lateness in the day, it didn't make sense.

He had a pretty serious fear of heights, and it's one thing to hike some trails that are on the flatter side than to summit a mountain, especially because he had previously attempted to hike that mountain with a group, but he had to turn back because he started getting vertigo.

So so where he's just going to do this, take it on by himself in the evening or afternoon or what have you.

Right, And he wasn't dressed for a hike.

He was wearing jeans, just like a T shirt, sneakers, no backpack, no flashlight, no gear.

So when he told people this, they're like, oh, okay, sure, Like like if I told you I was gonna start going to the gym, you'd be like, yeah, okay, sure, you're not.

You're not, you're not, but okay, that's cute.

So he told wunch people that he was going on a hike, and everybody was like, but you're not.

But it sounds like he did.

Semaccounts say he did have his camera over his shoulder when he left.

He was into photography, and that's why back to the what was he selling in the shop?

I don't know.

Was he selling matted photos of things he'd taken?

It didn't say, But you know, I get hung up on these little details, and I'm.

Like, what was he selling in that store?

I need to know.

You need to go to that store and find out.

It should go back in time.

Yeah, But other sources indicated that when his wife was asked about this situation, she said that she thought it was weird that he didn't take his camera.

Completely contradictory information.

So maybe he had his camera, maybe he didn't.

But basically, what witnesses knew for sure, and what was consistent in all the sources was that he didn't have anything that we would consider to be hiking essentials.

I also think it should be pretty easy to confirm if his camera was with him or not.

It should be as easy as saying like did she have her phone on her.

Or had she left it at home?

But you know, when we researched these cases, things that are like, wow, that should be easy to confirm or not, we can't.

We cannot confirm.

Keith did not return the next morning.

His friends notified authorities, and the search for Keith quickly became one of the largest in Colorado's history.

I think at the time it was the largest search.

Obviously there have been larger searches in the last forty years or however.

Long it's been.

Okay, I that feels like a personal attack if you start trying to tell me that the eighties.

It was almost forty years ago.

I mean, eighteen eighties was forty years ago.

I was just having this conversation yesterday with someone and we were talking about how our brains are stuck in time to where we still think it's like just two thousands.

So we're like, yeah, the eighties were like you know, ten fifteen years ago.

No, no, ma'am, they were not yet.

It's such a discouraging feeling when you say, oh, that wasn't that long ago, and then you look it up you're like, wow, that was twenty four years ago.

Oh that's the you just check your age.

You're like, yeah, you know what, come to think of it, the eighties.

It was not just fifteen years ago.

I'm not fifteen years old.

Correct, correct?

Yeah.

I can never trust myself less than.

When I'm having a discussion with somebody and I was like, oh, yeah, that just happened three months ago or how over long I think it happened.

And then with the magic of technology, I can look in my email or check a text message, and then I'm like, oh, wow, actually it wasn't three weeks ago like I swore that it was.

It was actually last year.

So never mind.

It hits hard, Like, wow, I can't even trust myself.

Yeah, So dozens of ground teams started to search the area.

They were just canvassing up the mountain.

Helicopters flew over the ridges, and they brought in search dogs to get into the trickier areas and places that happen more heavy vegetation.

Pendleton Mountain is pretty steep and a lot of the terrain is a lot of like loose rock, so it can be pretty unforgiving if you make a wrong step, especially where it has over three thousand feet of elevation gain.

A wrong step could be catastrophic.

Several days into the search, tragedy struck on August eleventh, a Civil Air patrol Sessna that was assisting with aerial searches crashed into the mountain, killing the pilot.

Oh my god, that's not where I thought that was going.

Didn't you cover a case where a helicopter or a plane crashed during the search?

Yes, yes, yes, but not this one.

Okay, But like this spot.

I was like, I swear you've already covered a case where this happened, and I couldn't remember any of the other details around that case, but this, and I was like, am I just gonna do a do over of an episode?

She's already done well.

To be fair, sometimes we will have actually written and recorded an episode, but sometimes we just talk about a case that's happened that we haven't officially covered.

So a detail like that could have been in conversation or could have come up in a previous episode.

Right, That's true.

It's really tricky because I'll look at a lot of cases and maybe not pick that one to cover, and I come back to it and look at it again, and then I'm like, did we cover this?

Did I already do this again?

You cannot trust your own memory.

At this point.

Yeah, yeah, we've pretty much determined that.

So the pilot was killed.

They were forty year old Terry Leeden's and the spotter in the plane, Donnie.

Drop me, drope me, dro B and y Yeah, drop me, drop me.

I don't know.

I don't know where I left off, but they were seriously injured.

Because so many rescue helicopters were in the air that day, the incident commander had instructed the plane to stay above thirteen thousand feet, and for reasons unknown, the pilot ended up descending to around eleven thousand feet and conditions were not great, and just before the crash, don recalled Terry saying, I don't like the feel of this.

Just literally seconds later, there was a downdraft that hit the aircraft.

The plane clipped treetops at a really very steep angle and it came to arrest nose down after only about sixty two feet of like traveling or I guess crashing.

When they missed their scheduled radio check in, A search was launched immediately.

A news helicopter ended up spotting the record within minutes, and then an army helicopter was able to fly rescuers to the.

Site and they found Dawn.

Alive despite very serious injuries, but unfortunately Terry had been killed.

According to the National Transportation Safety Board, the crash was caused by an incorrect assessment of the weather, inadequate air speed, and flying too low for the conditions, so unfortunately it was.

Pilot error.

There wasn't anything found with the plane itself.

When search operations resumed, several rescuers who had just arrived from California the night before had to be evacuated because they had developed altitude related illnesses and symptoms.

By this point, incident command is looking at all these things.

Are now that are now going wrong.

And they felt that resources were being stretched really thin and safety was deteriorating.

They decided that they had to call a search off the next day.

No trace of Keith has been found, really, no clues, no clothing, no remains.

The unfinished draft of Keith's novel included a lot that just feels so spooky.

Guide chipped, some changed into some hiking boots, walked off towards the lush, shadowless Colorado forest above.

You know, coincidence, foreshadowing, like art imitating life situation.

I don't know.

Oh that is super eerie.

Officially, Tom and Keith's cases are unrelated, but when you put them side by side, the connections and similarities, it feels hard to say that they're not related.

Yeah, I definitely think that Keith really started to feel a connection to Tom and and the case.

You know of how Tom's death Now, whether he intentionally he did something to sort of follow suit in a sense, it is hard to hard to determine, but yeah, I definitely think Keith blurted some lines between his reality and what happened to Tom.

Right when you step back and look at it, two men disappeared within a year of each other, same location, both were connected to that same storefront, both were on the same mountain.

It's not like people disappeared who lived the same location but disappear from different locations.

It's like, Okay, they lived here, they disappeared from the same spot.

It feels weird, and.

Both circumstances seem to be out of character for them, Like for Tom and Gus to venture out somewhere and he didn't tell anyone where he was going or what he was doing.

And then of course, with the nature of their deaths and finding that gun next to them, obviously there's a lot of questions there.

Did he you know, what.

Did that happen at the hands of Tom, or did someone else do something with someone else involved and just staged it to look like that.

And then with Keith, who was not a hiker and had just randomly told his friends one day, yeah, I'm going to go for a hike now and not prepared for it, not experienced to do it, but just walked off into the woods.

Yeah, without finishing his book, which is wild.

Yeah, some people believe that Tom did die by suicide, but other people just can't accept that that's what happened, or that he would have harmed Gus.

So, you know, those people leaned toward follow play possibilities.

They think maybe Tom encountered someone out on the trail that day, and maybe there was some kind of confrontation and it turned deadly.

Maybe the unknown person then staged the scene to look like a suicide.

There's all kinds of possibilities if you want to lean into foul play being involved.

And then Keith arrived, he was renting the same space.

He started asking questions about Tom's death.

He was questioning if it was a suicide.

So if Tom had been murdered by someone in the community, perhaps when Keith became too interested that made them uncomfortable.

They worried that Keith would find the truth.

So in that scenario, did keith'suriosity put him at risk?

Could this same person have done something to silence him to keep his original crime for being discovered?

I mean possibly, Yeah.

You see that storyline and a lot of books that you know and other stories where it's like you're you're asking too many questions, You're trying to dig up too much information, like back off, or you're gonna find yourself in danger potentially too right.

Sure, he was a sports writer, but I can think of half a dozen thriller plots where it's like, oh, a reporter or an investigator gets too close to some story and then they're a target.

Yeah.

On the other hand, Keith's disappearance may have been nothing more than an accident.

He was pretty inexperienced in the mountains.

He was unfamiliar with the terrain.

I mean, he'd been there a couple months, but that doesn't mean you know what you're doing necessarily, and he started a pretty difficult hike late in the day with no equipment.

It's very plausible he could have slipped into a ravine or a crevice and was just in a spot, whether it's deep in a crevice or hidden by brush, places that search teams really can't get into safely.

So it is plausible that it was a simple accident.

Yeah.

Whenever we talk about someone going missing and seemingly like just vanishing into thin air and questioning how come they couldn't find anything, like no sign of this person ever being there, I always go back to the Geraldine Largay case that you covered, where they had a starting point and they had a section of the of the trail that they knew, you know, she should be somewhere along this section, so that already kind of hones in their search area and even branching out from there, fanning out from there and trying to find her.

They were not successful in doing so, and then years later it was where her remains were actually found by accident when they were filming Northwoods Law.

Right, But she only ended up being like a mile from the trail or something.

Yeah, she wasn't very far from the trail.

Right, So, and that was that was within what you know, would be a realistic search area for where she went missing.

And they were really thorough, but that forest area, those woods were so dense that they missed her tent.

And so when someone just walks out into the woods or walks up a mountain or you know wherever, especially out west, it is so vast out there that they could truly end up anywhere.

Right, And I remember investigators in Geraldine Large's case, they even said even after the location had been discovered, they said that walking up to it, until you were.

Right on it, you couldn't say it.

Yeah, so it does always feel crazy when nothing is found.

But I think we underestimate the vastness of a location or just like the world in general.

Oh definitely.

But then people kind of go back to his fixation on Tom.

He was doing interviews, he hiked to the location where Tom was found.

His novel was focusing on a story about a man who walked into the woods and vanished.

So some people wonder if Keith may have stepped into that character by choice.

You know, maybe this character was part Tom Young, part Keith, And some people theorize that maybe he did go out there with the intention to disappear temporarily.

You know, maybe he was trying to almost do an experiment and kind of get a feel.

For what it would be like to be out.

In the woods unprepared.

I don't need to do that experiment to know that it wouldn't be good.

But maybe he wanted to write from a place of experience, and if he did, good effort on him, but obviously something uncalculated went wrong.

Yeah, there's also the possibility that his disappearance was a setup and he intentionally disappeared to start a new life.

I always think that that's a really hard thing to pull off.

But even aside from that, it doesn't seem like there was a good reason that Keith would want to just ditch his life and start over.

He definitely was feeling like he was in like a work funk.

I think he had been with the same paper for twenty two years, so I can definitely see you needing a break from that change his scenery, and he was taking the summer off to work on those things, And I think that would be a great way to get out of your funk if that's what was going on.

Yeah, Plus the week prior to his disappearance, he had actually been in touch with people at work about what he was going to do when he returned.

So for everybody he was in communication with, he was giving the impression that he was going to return home and return to work.

And some people lean towards their being like a supernatural or something more eerie to this situation.

Maybe they somehow were like pulled into this same like psychological unraveling somehow, or even that there's something on the mountain itself, maybe a weird energy or I don't know, something more on the lines of like the super natural.

Yeah, because people do.

Say that Pendualty Mountain has like a weight orly a heaviness to it that.

Not every location that does.

So I think that always does feel, especially when someone has died or disappeared, and you're like, well, this place already felt weird before that, so it does kind of make you question, is there something here that's weird.

Yeah, But none of these theories really stand out as being most likely or clearly explaining everything that happened.

Maybe Tom died by suicide and Keith had an accident.

Maybe someone harmed Tom and then Keith unknowingly stirred up, you know, something that caused him to be at risk.

And then some people are like, I don't know, it's just a coincidence, that's it.

Which coincidences do happen, But I don't know if I can chalk this all up to just coincidence in this case.

Yeah, I don't know if this one would I would consider strictly coincidental.

I do think that although Tom's, you know, his case is definitely a bit puzzling as to what happened.

I think Keith really dove into what happened to Tom, and you know that may have potentially had something to do with what ended up happening to him.

Yeah.

So I could not confirm this piece of information with any like these sources.

I saw it mentioned in.

Reddit comments and some comments on the show until mysteries, because they did cover this case in Oh they did I think eighteen nine days, so like two years ago.

Yeah, exactly.

So.

The piece of information was that two hikers in September of twenty twenty one, who were shooting some footage for some kind of college project on the mountain, found Keith's wallet.

But I could not find a news report or anything of that.

I would have thought that that would be like at least local news.

I hate that because that is a big deal.

That is a key development if that actually happened.

Right, So, it was just a very weird thing where I saw it in a couple of places, but it was like someone on Reddit said it, somebody in this like other forum set it.

It wasn't said by any officials.

So I'm honestly unsure if that really happened or not.

But in that college project ended up becoming a full documentary.

Not that I want to.

Say that like the while it was staged or didn't happen, but it's also like convenient that you were out, you know, working on this disappearance and you happen to.

Find the wallet.

Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, maybe I'm just being cynical, but regardless, I think even if a wallet was found, all of the same questions remain, and even without foul play or supernatural explanations.

I think it's just very eerie the connection and the parallel that this case has.

Yeah, I agree.

So there was one thing I found very interesting, and then I went down the weird research.

Rabbit hole and.

I saw the theory in the comments on on Solve Mysteries.

And there's no physical evidence to support this theory, but I did find it really compelling, and the theory basically does give an explanation for there being so many coincidences in Tom's death and Keith's disappearance without foul play being involved.

So the theory is that both men were exposed to a low level of carbon monoxide poisoning in the Okay and it just built up over time.

So it wasn't a high level where you would experience severe symptoms or death, which is common, but just low enough that if you were in there several days of the week for a good chunk of the day, that it would start to build up and potentially cause symptoms mimicking depression or altering you know, your psychological state.

Then, you know, if that were were true, that would explain why people who knew that and were like suicide doesn't make sense because maybe it normally it wouldn't, but they were exposed to something that physically changed the chemistry in their brain.

Yeah, but other symptoms related to carbon monoxide exposure, especially at low levels, can be things like headache or fatigue or just kind of feeling like run down, which I think we all go through spurts of time or not feeling awesome, and we don't really think too much about it.

It's like, Oh, i'dn't drink enough water, or I've been sitting at my computer for too.

Long, or whatever the thing is.

Don't worry about it, because most times it is something benign.

You didn't get enough sleep, you're whatever.

I don't know, Yeah, that's a weird one.

I would think that if they'd been exposed enough to have their mind altered to the point of self harm, that they would be experiencing more significant physical symptoms.

But I don't know.

It's still very interesting and I kind of got into the researching that and I did find and apparently there have been lawsuits against Ford because some of their vehicles were found to have essentially have an exhaust leak inside the vehicle.

And I think several police departments actually suit the company because they had the Ford Explorers or whatever the standard police vehicle was for a long time that a lot of those vehicles had that leak, and people were either they had a car accident or they had you know, other physical injuries basically from this exposure, and I tried so hard to find this information, but in that original comment, the person had said that.

There was.

Evidence that a lot of these officers that had been exposed had a higher rate of suicide than even the general police population.

I could not find anything to support that piece of the story at all, but just really interesting that maybe maybe it is a possibility, even unlikely, but.

Yeah, it's an interesting take.

Yeah, that's the idea that something in the environment caused some kind of altered mental status is really interesting, just because they were physically in that same location.

Yeah, any thoughts or theories that you have.

Not outside of what we've already kind of bounced around.

All right, Well, if listeners, if you have any theories about what happened to Keith or if Tom's death was related anyway, we'd love to hear your theories.

So until next week, go check your carbon monoxide detectors.

They didn't have them in the eighties.

Oh we have them now, go check them.

Always tell someone where you're going, and stay safe.

Until next week.