A Nameless Hiker and the Case the Internet Can't Crack (wired.com) 93
The man on the trail went by "Mostly Harmless." He was friendly and said he worked in tech. After he died in his tent, no one could figure out who he was. Wired: It's usually easy to to put a name to a corpse. There's an ID or a credit card. There's been a missing persons report in the area. There's a DNA match. But the investigators in Collier County couldn't find a thing. Mostly Harmless' fingerprints didn't show up in any law enforcement database. He hadn't served in the military, and his fingerprints didn't match those of anyone else on file. His DNA didn't match any in the Department of Justice's missing person database or in CODIS, the national DNA database run by the FBI. A picture of his face didn't turn up anything in a facial recognition database. The body had no distinguishing tattoos.
Nor could investigators understand how or why he died. There were no indications of foul play, and he had more than $3,500 cash in the tent. He had food nearby, but he was hollowed out, weighing just 83 pounds on a 5'8" frame. Investigators put his age in the vague range between 35 and 50, and they couldn't point to any abnormalities. The only substances he tested positive for were ibuprofen and an antihistamine. His cause of death, according to the autopsy report, was "undetermined." He had, in some sense, just wasted away. But why hadn't he tried to find help? Almost immediately, people compared Mostly Harmless to Chris McCandless, whose story was the subject of Into the Wild. McCandless, though, had been stranded in the Alaska bush, trapped by a raging river as he ran out of food. He died on a school bus, starving, desperate for help, 22 miles of wilderness separating him from a road. Mostly Harmless was just 5 miles from a major highway. He left no note, and there was no evidence that he had spent his last days calling out for help.
The investigators were stumped. To find out what had happened, they needed to learn who he was. So the Florida Department of Law Enforcement drew up an image of Mostly Harmless, and the Collier County investigators shared it with the public. In the sketch, his mouth is open wide, and his eyes too. He has a gray and black beard, with a bare patch of skin right below the mouth. His teeth, as noted in the autopsy, are perfect, suggesting he had good dental care as a child. He looks startled but also oddly pleased, as if he's just seen a clown jump out from behind a curtain. The image started to circulate online along with other pictures from his campsite, including his tent and his hiking poles.
Nor could investigators understand how or why he died. There were no indications of foul play, and he had more than $3,500 cash in the tent. He had food nearby, but he was hollowed out, weighing just 83 pounds on a 5'8" frame. Investigators put his age in the vague range between 35 and 50, and they couldn't point to any abnormalities. The only substances he tested positive for were ibuprofen and an antihistamine. His cause of death, according to the autopsy report, was "undetermined." He had, in some sense, just wasted away. But why hadn't he tried to find help? Almost immediately, people compared Mostly Harmless to Chris McCandless, whose story was the subject of Into the Wild. McCandless, though, had been stranded in the Alaska bush, trapped by a raging river as he ran out of food. He died on a school bus, starving, desperate for help, 22 miles of wilderness separating him from a road. Mostly Harmless was just 5 miles from a major highway. He left no note, and there was no evidence that he had spent his last days calling out for help.
The investigators were stumped. To find out what had happened, they needed to learn who he was. So the Florida Department of Law Enforcement drew up an image of Mostly Harmless, and the Collier County investigators shared it with the public. In the sketch, his mouth is open wide, and his eyes too. He has a gray and black beard, with a bare patch of skin right below the mouth. His teeth, as noted in the autopsy, are perfect, suggesting he had good dental care as a child. He looks startled but also oddly pleased, as if he's just seen a clown jump out from behind a curtain. The image started to circulate online along with other pictures from his campsite, including his tent and his hiking poles.
Uh, what is this exactly? (Score:5, Interesting)
"He looks startled but also oddly pleased, as if he's just seen a clown jump out from behind a curtain."
I can't be the only one whose first thought was "WTF?" when reading this.
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So basically the opposite of the dead guy in "Frog Dreaming"
Re: Uh, what is this exactly? (Score:1)
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OK here's a link to an article that explains in two paragraphs. h [dailymail.co.uk]
I know how to do it. (Score:5, Funny)
Just nominate him for political office. Opposition parties will have dirt on him as far back as 3rd grade by the end of the day. LOL
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Well how much of it will be true, vs just made up.
However being dead, he won't be able to refute any statements, because once they refute a lie, then people automatically think they are lying about it.
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It's obvious from the photos that his name is D.B. Cooper, just with longer hair.
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Submit his DNA to the genealogy sites like ancestry.com and see if any of his relatives have provided a sample.
Sounds like the beginning of a good book (Score:2)
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Maybe Anonymity Was The Point. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Ibuprofen on an empty stomach will produce plenty of pain.
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Re:Maybe Anonymity Was The Point. (Score:4, Interesting)
Hunger is weird and complex, and largely unfamiliar territory for most middle-class Americans. You'd think it'd just get worse and worse, but it doesn't work that way.
I've done some short fasts (1-2 days) for body/brain hacking purposes, and it turns out hunger pangs are like an intermittent alarm bell. Every so often it rings for a bit to remind you that to look for something to eat, then shuts off. As you go longer, it rings louder and more frequently, but people who've tried longer fasts (7 days or more) say that some time around day 3 or 4 hunger just shuts off for good. It should go without saying that nobody should try a fast that long without medical supervision.
Through hikers I know report experiencing epic hunger, but they're in a different situation; they eat as often as they can, but they can't just carry enough on some stretches to satisfy their hunger.
It seems more likely to me that this guy's death might was a case of *accidental* starvation as opposed to suicide by fasting. The main reason is that he had a destination -- the Keys -- and had even gone through the trouble of asking for directions along the way.
Here's a possible scenario: he's on his way through a segment of trail where resupply isn't convenient, and decides he'll just power through it, fasting to stretch his supplies. He sets up camp for a rest, but doesn't touch the food in his pack yet because he's inadvertently fasted past the point where hunger shuts down. He's used up much of his body's energy reserves by hiking, and quickly becomes so weak he can't get to his food even if he realizes he needs it.
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I don't know if you accidentally become 83 lbs if you have thousands of dollars with you and are not far from civilization. He starved himself on purpose.
And I can tell you first hand that after 3+ days of no food the headache you get is unbelievable as your brain is screaming for nutrients. And no amount of pain killers helps. This guy killed himself and it was not a pleasant way to go.
You are 100% correct on hunger "pains". After a day I only get hungry if I think about eating.
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The wild card here is that he was through hiking, which puts extreme demands on the body. Generally it's not a good idea to mix extreme forms of physical stress.
Clearly he starved himself, although whether starvation by itself killed him is impossible to say unless you're the medical examiner. But here's why I think he didn't starve himself intentionally. Apart from his evident plans to reach the Keys, the reports say he had food "nearby", by which I assume they mean he'd hung it up away from the bears as
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After 3 days I start to suffer mental decline but no headaches. I guess it's different for everyone.
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Drinking coffee alleviates most of those "screaming brain pains." And if you've been fasting long enough, the only time you'll feel hungry/starving most times is the next day after eating something.
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... and quickly becomes so weak he can't get to his food even if he realizes he needs it.
That's not how physiology works. It takes weeks to starve to death, and there is plenty of time to realize and feel oneself becoming weaker when walking a few miles to the next food opportunity is still very well possible.
I would say voluntary starvation is still a possibility. Or something like a stroke that damaged higher brain functions too much for him to be conscious and mobile, while not killing him before dying of thirst or starvation.
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That sounds the most likely. Strokes can take anyone out at any time and dependent where in the brain, they could be left quite content to simply fade away. The notes about that game Screeps, checking the game, live online and servers, simply look for a player no longer playing about the time the individual first went walkabout, there wont be that many. The game itself further defines people as coders who like JavaScript. He wrote notes about the code for screeps look for that code on the servers.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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This would argue that his state of starvation wasn't intentional. He had food nearby, he would have eaten it if his hunger got that bad and he was able.
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Just curious why you are trying this fast? I tried to fast for just one day, only drinking water, and it was amazingly hard. At night I actually had to eat something, I was ravenous.
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Toting a backpack in the mountains
The mountains in Florida? IIRC the highest point in the state is Mount Trashmore, the Miami city dump.
You're completely correct about everything else, of course.
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The highest point in Florida is Disney's Space Mountain. That doesn't mean Florida doesn't present its own unique challenges. The Big Cypress reserve is immense, swampy and tropical. Temperatures that time of year are brutally hot. If you're not eating enough, you could well end up with water intoxication due to electrolyte losses.
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It takes something on the order of a month for a healthy person to starve to death. If he had bulimia or some other eating disorder, maybe.
Re: Maybe Anonymity Was The Point. (Score:2)
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I think the autopsy would of mentioned if he had taken enough Ibuprofen for that. Normal doses just take the edge off very minor irritants. They gave me some injectable Ibuprofen when I had fallen 5 feet onto a metal post, and it did wonders, so I know enough of the stuff can make quite a difference, but other than a headache going away within half an hour I cannot tell that the over the counter dose of Ibuprofen does anything at all. It does not seem to numb the pain in my experience.
Kyle Eppler The Missing Lely Student. (Score:1)
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No tattoos
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The article actually said "no distinguishing tattoos".
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Kyle AC Eppler? Doubtful. I'm pretty sure I see this guy posting on slashdot all the time.
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Didn't you read the article? The link you provided clearly states that Kyle Andrew Carl Eppler was 160 pounds.
Geez.
Easy (Score:4, Funny)
Curious thing is... (Score:2)
... if he wasted away to nothing, he was still drinking water. But not eating food. He would have died much faster if he were not drinking water. So that rules out, say, something that left him paralyzed.
That said, it's not unusual for people to starve to death, still having food on them, as they try to ration it. Nor is it unusual for people to get lost right near a populated place without realizing how close they were to a potential rescue.
I wonder exactly how much food he had left?
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I expect he was overly rationing his food. Say buring 5000 kcals a day while only eating 500 kcals a day. As he gotten use to eating less food, he probably wasn't feeling so hungry, so he just let himself slowly starve to death.
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I've seen friends training so hard that they were not only skin and bone, their blood vessels became so fragile that they could pop at any time. And you know what they say. Once you pop, you can't stop.
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That is all true if you have actually lose the trail. His tent was at a known camp along the trail though. Where people get in trouble like you describe is when they leave the trail for some reason and can't locate it again. Without a compass or reference points high enough to sight with it, its very difficult to avoid walking in circles in dense woods because simply staying on a course is impossible due to the terrain.
I have done lots of hiking on the US east coast and provided you are on a trail
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Likely Irrelevant, but... (Score:1)
There may well be other associations with other books, stories, games or similar.
Mentioning this because adopting the name "Mostly Harmless" without the context of that actually harmless reference could sound borderline sinister (which leads me t
Re:Likely Irrelevant, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Much older than the games, "Mostly Harmless" is how Earth is referred to in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. If he did work in tech, HHGG is most likely where we picked that moniker up.
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More likely a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In fact, the references in Elite to "Mostly Harmless" are themselves references to the Hitchhiker's Guide.
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Don't be mean, the kid is trying.
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Oh, it's better than that.
He now gets to enjoy the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy for the first time.
Just upload DNA results to GEDMatch (Score:2)
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That's pretty much the only viable approach. Asking people to identify him is going to produce too much noise, because he looks too much like too many other people. In one of the photos, he could have been the identical twin of one of my former coworkers from twenty years ago, but we're connected on social media, and he has been active as recently as June, so short of him paying somebody to pose as him on social media... ooh, this gives me an idea for a bizarre sci-fi short story.
Already been done. (Score:2)
... he could have been the identical twin of one of my former coworkers from twenty years ago, but we're connected on social media, and he has been active as recently as June, so short of him paying somebody to pose as him on social media... ooh, this gives me an idea for a bizarre sci-fi short story.
The TV show "Major Crimes" already did that as a murder mystery / fictional police procedural.
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The TV show "Major Crimes" already did that as a murder mystery / fictional police procedural.
Good to know, but I was thinking of it more along the lines of questioning what it means to be alive.
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Was coming here to suggest something like this. Have the police search Ancestry or 23andMe or something similar.
That alias is odd. (Score:1)
"Ben Bilemy" as an alias just seems odd. Could be a clue.
A concatenation of nicknames?
Ben = Benjamin
Bil = Bill or William
Emy = Emily
Friends? Siblings? Family?
One... (Score:1)
Its Jimmy Hoffa (Score:2)
Appalachian Trail (Score:5, Interesting)
The AT passes within miles of where I live, pretty close to the midpoint of the 2,000+ mile trail. Last year, in our county, an AT hiker attacked another pair of hikers he did not know, and murdered one of them with a knife. The other hiker played dead and eventually found help and survived.
A non-trivial number (a minority to be sure) of AT hikers are not just out on that trail for the sake of nature and hiking. They often have mental issues of some kind. You have to have a very strong anti-social chord to decide to isolate yourself in that way for almost a year. This particularly applies to a segment of the "thru-hikers", who are the ones hiking the whole thing at one go, and not the section hikers who, over time, collectively hike the whole trail in pieces.
Several years back I met a thru-hiker that was staying the night in the shelter. I asked him if he was hiking alone, and he said no. He started with a friend but hadn't seen him in months. His friend was a day ahead of him at that point, and he saw their entries in the log books along the way. To hike that far, for that long, while being that isolated, can cause you to withdraw even more into yourself. You stop appreciating trees, views of the Appalachian ridges, the terrain, and the peace and quiet, and eventually it's just about putting one foot in front of the other (no matter how you feel or how lousy the weather is) and trying to cover those miles.
So the fact that someone was found languishing on the trail like Mostly Harmless is not a surprise. The trail draws individuals that want to escape society and isolate. I'm actually surprised this doesn't happen more often.
Now to clarify, that is not the AT experience for all thru-hikers. However I did want to point out that it does tend to draw individuals with anti-social type leanings.
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My thought is that this is a fellow with nothing to go back to, or only negative things to go back to. The lack of phone and cards likely means he cashed out what he could, taking cash advances on all his cards for example and cut what few ties he had, perhaps leaving behind debts, a lawsuit, a divorce, or some other onerous comeuppance. Facing the end of his trip might have been bringing the reality back, and returning to society after such a long escape from it might have been to harsh mentally to deal
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asocial, not antisocial
that are two very different things
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Did anyone ask 4chan? (Score:3)
Seriously ask that group. Weaponized autism is amazing to watch.
How has no one suggested this yet? (Score:2)
It's my uncle Joe (Score:2)
Next question?
If he ever owned a car . . . (Score:2)
If he ever owned a car, he will be contacted eventually about his extended warranty. Mystery solved.
Useless (Score:2)
Asking 'the Internets' for help is mostly useless. You will get a lot of wannabe online detective stating stupid questions like 'can we use Molecular spectroscopy to see when did he by the ibuprofen?' or 'if his alias was mostly harmless was his shoe size 42?'. The only ways this can help is by keeping people interested in the case until a match comes up in some DNA database.
Terminal illness? (Score:3)
I suppose one possibility is that the hiker was terminally ill, and this is how he wanted to spend his last days. It would explain why he wasted away to #83 despite having access to food.
Of course, the terminal illness would have to be something that did not show up on an autopsy.
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The long lost agent Phillip Jeffries (Score:2)
OMG. It was all true.
I'm going to guess severe depression (Score:2)
He ended up starving himself to death. The hike may have been his intentional farewell journey
Yoga? (Score:2)
Photoshopped (Score:1)
"Mostly Harmless"? (Score:2)
That sounds like the name you would give to a crazy irrational homeless man prone to random bouts of violence.
Days later the most obvious answer occurs to me; (Score:1)
Here lies Satoshi Nakamoto.