Appalachia Unsolved: Greatest Mysteries from the Mountains

Appalachia Unsolved: Greatest Mysteries from the Mountains

Coming up, we investigate some of the most mysterious disappearances to ever take place in the Appalachian Mountains, where do they go and will they ever be found? This is Appalachia Unsolved. Our first story takes us to the mighty Smoky Mountains on the East Tennessee and North Carolina line for the mystery of Trenny Gibson, a field trip that goes terribly wrong and suddenly the entire nation is asking the question, just where did Trenny go? A 16-year-old girl disappears into thin air while on a school field trip.

The FBI investigation unveiled disturbing events that led up to her mysterious disappearance and the events that happened in the days after only left more baffling questions with no answers. As a search team of 200 people desperately searched Klingmans Dome in the Great Smoky Mountains, did this teenage girl get lost, was she attacked by an animal, or was it something more sinister? By all accounts, Trenny Gibson was living a good life in the scruffy city of Knoxville, Tennessee.

Her father was a traveling salesman for a large chemical company, and he had moved the family there just eight years earlier as part of his job. It seemed like the perfect place to raise a family; after all, it was one of the most scenic places in America with a nearby Smoky Mountains National Park, and the area boasted low crime and good churches and schools. It was here that Trenny and her three teenage siblings grew up.

Her 18-year-old brother had just gone off to boot camp for the Navy in Florida, and she was a junior at Bearden High School. Everyone who knew Trenny talked about how much she loved music, especially the rock band Jethro Tull. They also talked about how focused and how disciplined she was. She had spent the previous summer working at Morrison’s Cafeteria, where she earned nearly two thousand dollars.

She put one thousand in a savings account and she treated herself to a six-hundred-dollar blue sapphire and diamond ring, and kept the other two hundred in her purse. Her father was so impressed by her work ethic that he promised her he’d buy her a car for Christmas if she only kept her great grades up in school. Several boys had a crush on her, but Trenny hadn’t shown much interest in return.

Nonetheless, she was a popular girl with lots of friends and a straight-A student who was dreaming of studying landscape architecture at the University of Tennessee. One of Trenny’s favorite classes was her horticulture class taught by Mr. Dunlap. Now, Mr. Dunlap was a favorite among students for his energetic and spontaneous teaching style, and when he told the students that he was taking them on a surprise field trip the very next day, he assured them that although he wouldn’t reveal exactly where he was taking them, they would have a wonderful time learning about plants and trees.

Now, that last statement probably seems a bit odd to most listeners; what, a teacher taking a class on a field trip without telling them where they’re going? Well, folks, it was the 1970s, and the rules and regulations that we take for granted in public schools nowadays just weren’t in place back then. When Trenny came home and told her father about the field trip, Mr. Gibson was confident that they were probably going on a hiking trip, perhaps in the Smoky Mountains.

And because Mr. Gibson was a former Eagle Scout and troop leader, he discussed safety precautions with Trenny. They discussed how to determine north by looking at moss on a tree and even which plants or mosses were edible in case of an emergency. But the truth be told, both Trenny and Mr. Gibson were confident that the trip would be cancelled because the weather forecast for the next day was calling for dreary conditions.

The very next day was Friday, and when Trenny looked out her window, she saw that it was already raining, and she just knew the field trip would be cancelled. So she put on her favorite blue jeans, a blue striped sweater, her blue Adidas shoes, and her blue sapphire ring. And as Trenny’s mother drove her to school, they were both surprised when they pulled into the parking lot to see a bus parked in front of the school waiting to take the students on the mystery field trip.

And sure enough, by nine in the morning, an announcement was made for Trenny and thirty-seven of her horticultural classmates to begin loading the bus for a field trip bound for Klingmans Dome in the Great Smoky Mountains. Trenny spent the ninety-minute bus ride seated next to a friend of hers, Robert Simpson, who liked to listen to the same type of music as Trenny. The bus was full of teenage laughter and conversation as the students were looking to make the best of the trip despite the less-than-ideal weather conditions.

By twelve in the afternoon, the group arrived at Klingmans Dome, and the bus parked in a large parking area where Mr. Dunlap quickly outlined the goals of the trip, which was to make the two-mile hike each way to the top of Andrews Bald, observing the types of plants and trees at the different elevations, and for each student to be prepared to write a paper over the weekend discussing their findings back in class on Monday. Everyone was instructed to be back at the bus by three-thirty in the afternoon.

The thirty-eight students quickly spread into smaller groups based on their walking speeds as they set out on the trail along Forney Ridge. The weather was in the low forties and it was drizzling as they traveled down the narrow trail, and Robert could see that Trenny was cold, so he gave her his jacket. By one-thirty, the group had reached the summit of Andrews Bald and started back towards the bus.

Trenny and Robert had walked together for the entire time up until now, when suddenly he strangely told Trenny that he was going to go back and look for some bears, and he left her walking by herself. Now, you have to keep in mind that the trail they were traveling on was narrow and wet due to the weather, with steep drop-offs on both sides, and the group was traveling in a long single file line. Trenny was positioned in the middle of the group, and it would have been impossible for her to leave the trail without all her classmates taking notice.

Once the group was about three-quarters of a mile from the bus, several of Trenny’s friends said that they saw Trenny bend over to take a look at something on the ground on the right side of the trail, and when they looked up again, Trenny wasn’t there anymore. Now, they didn’t think too much of it at the time, but little did they know this would be the last time anyone ever saw Trenny again, and what happens next has remained one of the greatest mysteries to ever occur in the Smoky Mountains to this very day.

Today’s video is sponsored by the Appalachian Storyteller Candles, handcrafted the old-fashioned way one at a time in the mountains of East Tennessee. Get yours today by clicking the link below. Welcome back to Appalachia Unsolved as we investigate what happened to Trenny Gibson on the morning of Friday, October 8th, 1976.

Thirty-eight high school students from Knoxville, Tennessee set out on a hiking trip in the Great Smoky Mountains, yet only thirty-seven students returned to the bus that afternoon; Trenny Gibson was missing. Frantically, Mr. Dunlap took a small group of the last kids back to the spot where Trenny was last seen, then they backtracked the entire trail calling her name the entire time, yet they couldn’t find her. About four-thirty in the afternoon, Mr. Dunlap contacted the park rangers and informed them that Trenny was missing, as the school bus headed back to Knoxville without Trenny or her teacher, who stayed behind to help look for her.

By seven-thirty, word had spread by CB radio, and a small group of nineteen park rangers and volunteers set out into the wind and the rain and the fog, desperately calling for Trenny using loudspeakers and whistles. But other than the sound of the falling rain, they were met with silence, and then nightfall. The search would have to resume in the morning as the temperatures fell into the low thirties and heavy wind and rain blew all through the night.

By five in the morning, Trenny’s father arrived on the scene with a pair of shoes that Trenny had recently worn to help the dogs track her scent. The road across Newfound Gap was closed, and a search team of over two hundred men with six teams of bloodhounds and German Shepherds scoured every inch of the ground, working in half-mile grids all the way out to a twenty-five-mile radius. Every creek, every cliff, every trail, and every bottom was searched.

Meanwhile, by air, two Army helicopters from Fort Campbell, Kentucky and several National Guard helicopters from North Carolina and Tennessee searched the sky. Yet fall was in full swing, and a canopy of changing and fallen leaves combined with the rugged fir and the heavy brier undergrowth made the search from the air futile. It seemed it would be up to the bloodhounds to find any trace of Trenny, and within hours they did just that.

Three teams of dogs followed Trenny from where she was last seen down the trail where it appeared she made a wrong turn and was now on the Appalachian Trail, where she continued until she circled the concrete base of the Klingmans Dome observation tower. Down the Appalachian Trail she went until the trail suddenly went cold where it neared Highway 441. The search went on for three solid weeks in near-freezing temperatures, and by now there was a full-scale FBI investigation as the twenty-five-mile square area was combed over and over and over again.

There were no items of clothing, no shoes, nothing; Trenny Gibson had vanished. It was then that the FBI and the park rangers announced publicly that they didn’t believe she was ever going to be found in the mountains; in fact, they believe that she might have been abducted. Every camping permit was tracked down, and the FBI investigated every person who was known to have been in the area at the time, including folks from all over America.

And that’s when Trenny’s father told the police that he believed another student might be responsible for her disappearance. It turns out that Trenny had been involved in a disturbing event that had taken place just two years earlier when another student from Bearden High School named Kelvin Bowman was stalking her. He was so obsessed with Trenny that he had even broken into the Gibson home, where Trenny’s mother had shot him in the foot.

Kelvin was convicted and spent time in juvenile detention where he made several threats that he would kill Trenny once he got out. The most astonishing part of this was that the Knox County Public School System put Kelvin right back in the same school with Trenny when he was released. This definitely seemed worth investigating, yet attendance records indicated that he had been at school all day on the day that Trenny went missing.

Just like that, investigators were back at square one, and no one could answer where Trenny Gibson was. She had vanished into thin air. Had she gotten lost and succumbed to the elements? Did she slip and die in a fall, falling into a creek bed? Was she attacked by wild animals? Perhaps she ran into a stranger on the Appalachian Trail and foul play was involved; after all, two teenage girls’ remains had been found buried in this area during the 1970s.

Did she run into a serial killer? Was she picked up on the road and kidnapped? Did the classroom teacher actually call the roll back at school after all? Many times teachers don’t. Did Kelvin Bowman follow the school bus to the Smoky Mountains and follow through on his threats, or did Trenny simply want to disappear and start a new life? And if so, why did she leave all her money at home? She even left her purse in the car with her mother that morning.

Over the past forty-eight years, countless searches have been organized looking for Trenny, including one that was ordered by President Carter in 1981, yet no trace of Trenny Gibson has ever been found. Trenny’s disappearance continues to baffle investigators to this very day. Why would Robert suddenly leave Trenny on the trail just a few moments before she disappeared? And what about the stalker? Had he followed them and hidden in the woods and waited for the group to return? And finally, what about the teacher who refused to tell the students exactly where they were going on this mysterious field trip?

Indeed, these are just a few questions that need answers. What about you? What do you think happened to Trenny? Our next story takes place in the small town of Corbin, Kentucky, where a faithful husband and a loving mother suddenly mysteriously vanish without a trace. Just what exactly happened to Claude and Sue Sheldon?

A young couple vanishes without a trace, leaving behind three small children sleeping in their beds. The clues that remain only raise more questions with no answers as the police search the rivers, the mountains, and the lakes of Eastern Kentucky. Did these loving parents drive away during the night and abandon their children, or were they involved in a tragic accident, or was it something more sinister?

Corbin was your typical small rural town in Eastern Kentucky with a population of barely more than seven thousand people. It was the type of place where everybody knew everyone. It was here that Claude and Sue Sheldon raised their young family. The upstart family lived in a small trailer park. Sue was a twenty-seven-year-old homemaker who spent her days tending to her three small children.

Claude was a hardworking blue-collar type fellow. He had always loved cars and grown up turning wrenches on them, so it was only natural when he became the head mechanic at the local muffler and tire shop in Corbin. Folks who knew Claude described him as a family man and a perfectionist who was quiet-spoken; indeed, he was steady and dependable.

He had worked at the same shop for the past ten years, five days a week like clockwork, and whenever he wasn’t busy working on customers’ cars, he could always be found tinkering or shining on his pride and joy, his 1967 two-door Ford Galaxie 500. By all appearances, by May of 1971, Claude and Sue were living a good, simple life, and things were looking up for them. They only owed one more payment on their trailer, and they were dreaming of buying a bigger home for their growing family.

And with only one week left in school for the children, the fun days of summer were in the air. In many ways, it was the perfect life, yet what happened next was so shocking and mysterious that no one in Corbin, Kentucky would have ever believed it, and more than fifty years later, local folks still wonder exactly what happened to Claude and Sue Sheldon. The morning of May 21st, 1971 started just like any other day at the Sheldon household.

Being Friday, there was a bit more excitement than usual in the air with the weekend coming up, and the weather outlook was perfect. By six in the morning, Claude had finished his coffee and his breakfast before making the short drive to the muffler shop for work. Sue spent the morning getting the three kids dressed for school and making them breakfast before seeing them off at the bus stop.

Back at the muffler shop, it was a slow day, and being the perfect day for a drive, Claude asked for the afternoon off after promising his boss that he would work half a day on Saturday to make up the time. And by the time the children were home from school, Claude and Sue had packed the Ford up and decided to make the scenic drive up to Claude’s mother’s house about twenty miles away in Williamsburg. Now, this area of Kentucky is majestic to drive through with the nearby Cumberland Falls State Park and the Daniel Boone National Forest and the beautiful Laurel River Lake, where a new dam was being constructed.

The young family enjoyed the cruise in the father’s prized automobile with the perfect seventy-degree weather and the windows rolled down. Upon arriving at Claude’s mother’s house, they spent the entire afternoon and evening there eating supper and enjoying catching up with one another. In fact, time seemed to pass so fast that Claude didn’t realize that it was suddenly past midnight and he had to be at work at six in the morning the next morning down at the shop.

With that in mind, Claude and Sue loaded up the kids and drove home, arriving between one and two in the morning and immediately putting the kids to bed. Now, what happens next still baffles investigators to this very day, and here are the facts concerning the next events of the early hours. According to the oldest child, who was eleven at the time, her younger siblings were fast asleep once they were put to bed, yet she was still awake and could easily hear her parents talking in the room through the paper-thin trailer walls.

And they were talking about going to get a late-night snack and coffee from the truck stop that was five miles down the road. “Come on, it’s time to go if you’re going with me, let’s go,” she heard her pa say, and just like that, the couple left their three children in the bed as they drove off into the night at two-thirty in the morning. Welcome back to Appalachia Unsolved as we investigate what happened to Claude and Sue Sheldon.

By the next morning, the children woke up and saw that their parents weren’t in the bed and their car wasn’t in the driveway. After eating breakfast on their own, the children called one of Sue’s friends to see if they knew where their parents were, but they too had no clue. And by seven in the morning, Claude’s boss knocked on the door, wanting to know where he was and why he didn’t show up to work.

None of this made any sense. By all accounts, Claude and Sue Sheldon loved their children, and Claude had been steadily employed for ten years, and they had a good family life. There on the kitchen counter was a savings jar containing six hundred dollars cash, and beside that was Sue’s purse, which was left behind. And today was payday at work, and Claude didn’t even pick up his paycheck.

Police were immediately contacted, and an investigation was launched right away. Detectives began interviewing the employees of the local gas station, which was the only business in town that was open at the time of the disappearance and was thought to have been their destination. Yet the employees stated that they had never seen them; in fact, no one had been at the gas station at all between the hours of one and three-thirty in the morning.

In this sleepy little town, this concerned officials; it was unthinkable that well-respected parents would simply abandon their children. Perhaps an accident had taken place, so over the next three days, the Kentucky State Police scoured the entire state, interviewing everyone in Whitley County. News stations ran the story repeatedly, yet there were no leads, and soon the Civil Air Patrol and four rescue squads from nearby towns were searching the woods and the lakes for nearly a week.

But there were no clues; Claude and Sue Sheldon had vanished without a trace. The Shelton children spent the final week of school staying at a family friend’s house, yet once school was out, investigators still didn’t have a clue what had happened. So at that point, the children went to stay with Sue’s mother in Knoxville, Tennessee for what everyone thought was a short visit.

However, more than fifty years later, Claude and Sue Sheldon never reappeared. What happened to them? Why did they leave their children and all their money at home at two-thirty in the morning? It seems unthinkable that they would have simply abandoned their three young children. Everybody who knew them said they always had their children with them, and they were good parents.

Now, during the time of the Shelton’s disappearance, nearby Laurel Lake dam was under construction, and over the years, police and diver teams have searched several areas of the lake looking for Claude’s 1967 Ford Galaxie 500. Yet Laurel River Lake is massive, with over two hundred and six miles of shoreline and is nearly two hundred and eighty feet deep. Perhaps the only possible clue that was ever found in this case was provided by an eighteen-wheeler driver who passed through Corbin at one in the morning on the night of the disappearance.

He seemed to remember that a car was on the side of the road with its hood up. Is it possible that Claude saw the stranded vehicle on the side of the road and offered assistance due to his mechanical skills, and is it possible that the couple fell prey to foul play because of this? In 2009, a glimmer of hope came when the Sheldon children entered their DNA into the unsolved crimes database.

It was thought that it might lead to a positive identification in other unsolved cases and perhaps to bring closure to this mystery, yet no matches were found anywhere in the United States. More than fifty years later, Claude and Sue Sheldon and their 1967 Ford have never been seen again. This case remains open and unsolved with the Kentucky State Police.

Why did Claude and Sue leave their children at home and leave in the middle of the night, and why did they leave all their money at home? And what about that truck driver, what he saw on the side of the road? Is it possible that Claude stopped to offer help only to meet with foul play? And what about that large lake, does the secret of Claude and Sue Sheldon lay underneath its deep waters? What about you? What do you think happened?

Our next story is a parent’s worst nightmare: a six-year-old boy disappears while playing in his own front yard. Just what happened to Kelly Holland? A six-year-old boy disappears in his front yard, and the events that happen in the hours after only left more baffling questions with no answers as police searched desperately in the remote mountains of Kentucky. Was this little boy kidnapped, did he get lost in the woods, or was it something more sinister?

To better understand the circumstances of Kelly’s case, it’s best to start with some background. Kelly’s mother was named Judy Moore, a young Kentucky girl who had dropped out of school by the time she was fourteen and quickly married a man named Bobby Holland. Within a couple of years, Judy had given birth to a son and a daughter, yet times were hard due to the fact that neither Judy nor Bobby had a job.

It was only a matter of time before the Department of Children’s Services stepped in and declared both of them unfit parents, and the judge issued a court order granting custody of both their children to Judy’s parents, who lived an hour away in Jackson. However, within a few months, on November 17th, 1975, Kelly was born and was the only child living at home with Judy and Bobby. For some reason, his birth went unnoticed by the state of Kentucky and it didn’t result in any action from Child Protective Services.

Yet even with a new baby, it wasn’t enough to keep the parents together. They quickly divorced, and Bobby moved off to Florida. And as you might imagine, Kelly was born into a world that was far from a fairy tale. After losing custody of her two oldest children and her husband, Kelly became his mother’s reason for living, and according to her, he was the only thing that she had left.

That is until 1981, when both Judy and Kelly moved into a rental house with her new boyfriend, Kurt Campbell, who lived in Pine Tree Holler, which was located in Knott County, Kentucky. This place was your typical holler with only about fifty souls calling this place home. It was the type of place where everyone knew everybody, and many of them were family. They knew your car anytime you left home, what time you came back, and those watchful eyes didn’t miss anything.

By 1982, Kelly was six years old, and it was here that he would grow up. The young boy had been born with a cleft palate and severe asthma, and he had recently been in the hospital several times that left him with a scar on the left side of his mouth. But besides that, Kelly was a typical child of the mountains. He loved to play outside with his friends and down at the creek or exploring the endless forest that surrounded his home, and he had also just enrolled in Jones Fork Elementary School as a kindergartener.

And in many ways, school was an escape for the young boy because his home life was still full of poverty and lacking many luxuries like color television or a phone. The disappearance of Kelly took place on Friday, February 12th, 1982. Now keep in mind that the only person at home when Kelly mysteriously vanished was his mother, and all of the details that follow are what she later told police.

The night before, a heavy winter storm blew through, and by Friday morning, Pine Tree Holler was a blanket of thick snow and subfreezing temperatures, so much so that it was impossible for school buses to pick up children on the twisting mountain roads, and school was canceled for the day. This was a young boy’s dream: no school, making it a three-day weekend to build snowmen and have snowball fights in the fresh snow. Kelly slept in late that morning before getting up and asking his mother if he could go outside and play.

According to Judy, she originally told the boy he couldn’t because of his asthma, but eventually she gave in about eleven in the morning and let him play in the front yard. And with that, Kelly slipped on his snow boots and put on his blue coat and set out to the yard. For the next five hours, Kelly played outside with a young mother glancing out of the window at him from time to time to make sure he was okay.

According to Judy, lunch came and went, but Kelly never came in to eat. By four in the afternoon, Kelly was still playing in the freezing temperatures with nothing on but a pair of jeans and a light jacket. At this time, Judy needed to make a phone call to her sister, which meant she would need to walk to a neighbor’s house to use their phone. She told Kelly she would be right back, and then she set out to the neighbors.

Yet when she returned an hour later, Kelly wasn’t in the yard anymore or in the house. But Judy just figured he was at a friend’s house to watch The Dukes of Hazzard; she thought nothing of it. And strangely, at six in the evening, she made herself supper and ate alone without her six-year-old son. She said she just thought he was still playing, which seems a bit odd considering the young boy hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

By seven in the evening, Judy decided to walk over to her neighbor’s house and make Kelly come home, yet it turned out that none of the neighbors had seen him at all that whole day. Panic immediately set in, and Judy decided to call the police, so she walked over to her boyfriend’s grandparents’ house to use their phone. Once the frightened young mother told the grandparents that Kelly was missing, astonishingly, Judy said that they told her she couldn’t use her phone to dial 911 until after midnight because the call would be cheaper.

Now, that statement boggles most logical thinkers’ minds. Her child was missing; why not just force her away and make that call, or how about going back to the other neighbor’s house where she had borrowed the phone earlier in the afternoon? Most parents would have at least done that, yet Judy decided to wait until midnight to call the authorities. But by now word had gotten out amongst the locals, and most neighbors were busy looking for Kelly.

Yet strangely, none of them called the police either. It was dark, and footsteps in the snow were already being covered up and disappearing due to another snowstorm. Finally, the fateful call to police came at twelve in the morning, eight hours after Kelly had last been seen by his mother. Then Judy called her own parents to let them know.

Curiously, her parents were reported to have told Judy on the phone, “I told you, I told you we should have taken him too.” It was now two in the morning before the deputy sheriffs arrived on the scene, and after searching the immediate area, they quickly realized that they needed more help to search the vast surrounding mountains. By three in the morning, the State Highway Patrol arrived on the scene, but the intense snow and total darkness made the search futile, so the decision was made to resume the search in the morning.

Everyone on the scene knew Kelly’s life hung in the balance, but the question remained: what happened to him and where did he go? Welcome back to Appalachia Unsolved as we continue the investigation of Kelly Holland. Before long, questions and rumors began swirling. Had Kelly gotten lost in the woods and froze to death? Had someone abducted him? That didn’t seem likely given the remote location and the number of eyes that would have surely recognized an unfamiliar car on the dead-end road.

Had something more sinister happened? After all, police investigators had discovered that there were several residents living in the holler that had criminal records. And most disturbing, why had Judy waited eleven hours after Kelly was last seen to call the police? Now, I got to tell you, as a parent that makes no sense to me; maybe you have a theory about why she did it, let me know in the comments below.

Anyways, after sixteen days, the search for Kelly was called off, yet the investigation continued. One by one, every person who lived in the area was carefully examined and then ruled out. It had become obvious that only one person had any information about the timeline of that day, and that was Kelly’s mother. And police needed more answers from Judy Moore, so they interviewed her several more times, and inconsistencies in her story began to raise suspicions.

All of a sudden, she made claims that she had seen a strange green car in the area that day and that possibly Kelly’s father, who lived in Florida, had abducted him. But that too turned out to be a dead end for authorities. By March 3rd, despite the lack of any physical evidence, a grand jury subpoenaed Judy Moore to testify in court as to her son’s disappearance, but in the end no charges were filed against her.

Kelly Jr. Holland’s disappearance became a cold case file as the months slowly turned into years. Psychics were called in, and Judy was given a lie detector test, which she passed. Anonymous tips came in about a shallow grave that was discovered; another time a tip came in about a grave that was buried underneath a concrete porch that had been poured around the time of Kelly’s disappearance. Police exhausted every tip and every lead, and they nearly dug up that entire holler, but in the end no trace of Kelly was found.

It’s been forty-two years since Kelly vanished without a trace. It was long rumored by locals that Judy’s sister once made a statement that both of them had killed Kelly and buried his body, yet Judy and her sister both denied that fact even though they no longer had contact with one another. And in 2010, Judy’s sister died, and it was rumored that she had wrote one last letter that was only to be opened after her death, yet no one knows what happened to that letter because if it exists it has never surfaced.

Kelly’s mother Judy has never been charged and still maintains her innocence to this very day. Why would a mother leave her six-year-old child playing in the snow without a jacket all day, and why in the world would she let him go without lunch? Why did the neighbors refuse to call 911? These are just a few questions surrounding the disappearance of Kelly.

Police have released this sketch of what Kelly would look like today. Is it possible that he’s out there somewhere today? Let me know what you think in the comments below. Gladys Kidd was your typical grandmother, well, at least that’s what everyone thought, yet things aren’t always what they seem to be. Buckle up for the mysterious story of Gladys Kidd, a seventy-one-year-old grandmother who vanishes into thin air, a secret relationship, a mysterious letter, and the missing eighty thousand dollars cash.

The events that led up in the days and the weeks after only left more baffling questions with no answers as detectives searched desperately in the mountains of Kentucky. Was Gladys Kidd kidnapped? Did she disappear and start a new life, or was it something more sinister? Morehead, Kentucky was your typical small town in Eastern Kentucky, a beautiful fertile valley nestled along Triplett Creek and surrounded by the Appalachian Mountains. Less than eight thousand people lived in this picturesque community.