News & Current Events
Teenager Discovered Trapped In Chimney Following 7-Year Disappearance
In a strange situation, a missing teen was discovered locked inside a chimney following a seven-year search.
Joshua Maddux, then eighteen, went on what appeared to be a normal walk on May 8, 2008, from his family’s house in Woodland Park, Colorado.
Their small town of 8,000 people was surrounded by the Pike National Forest, which the nature-loving youngster with long blond hair and a love of music frequently hiked alone.
Kate, his sister, didn’t mind at all when he told her he was going out. Josh, however, never returned home.
There was no communication from the young musician for several days. After calling friends and conducting a desperate search, Josh’s father, Mike Maddux, was unable to locate him.
Mike reported himself missing to the police five days after he vanished.
The area and the parkland where Josh may have gone for a walk were searched by the authorities, friends, and family.
Years passed with the missing adolescent still unaccounted for.
Josh’s family hoped he had just moved out of town to follow his goals.
His sister Kate thought he would be writing novels under a pen name or touring with a band, leading the lonely life he cherished. One day, she thought, he would come back with a wife and kids to meet their family.
The Maddux family had been going through a tough time when the disappearance occurred. Zachary, Josh’s older brother, had passed away from suicide two years prior, shortly before he graduated from high school.
Later, Mike thought about how Josh had been devastated by Zachary’s passing, which had pushed him over the edge emotionally.
Josh had been doing well and appeared content with his life prior to his disappearance, according to those close to him, despite this tragedy.
According to MailOnline, seven years later, in August 2015, construction workers discovered a sobering discovery that would ultimately provide a solution to the mystery surrounding Josh Maddux’s fate.
Eighty-year-old builder Chuck Murphy was tearing down an old cabin on his property to create space for thirty-two new houses.
Encircled by towering trees and piled high with decaying timbers and rubble, the ancient wooden building on Meadowlark Lane had been abandoned for more than ten years.
Up until 2005, Murphy’s brother lived there; after that, it was merely used for storage.
When workers used an excavator to demolish one of the cabin’s two chimneys, they discovered something startling: a mummified body trapped inside the brickwork, with the legs severed from the torso and the knees above the head.
Police were contacted right away, and dental records quickly verified the worst: Joshua was the deceased, according to Strange Outdoors.
The cabin was only two blocks from the Maddux family’s house, which was less than a mile away. In 2008, there were a lot of searches, but nobody had considered looking at the abandoned property.
Concerning doubts were quickly raised by the circumstances surrounding Josh’s death.
He was only wearing a light thermal shirt when his body was discovered. Inside the cabin, his other clothing—pants, shoes, and socks—was found folded neatly next to the fireplace.
A heavy wooden breakfast bar had been ripped from the kitchen wall and hauled over to obstruct the chimney from inside the cabin, which made the situation even more perplexing.
After doing an examination, Teller County Coroner Al Born discovered no evidence of trauma, fractured bones, knife marks, or gunshot wounds.
Josh didn’t have any drugs in his system. As temperatures plunged into the high twenties Fahrenheit in the nights after Josh’s absence, Born initially declared the death to be accidental and postulated that he had climbed into the chimney and become trapped, ultimately succumbing to hypothermia.
Chuck Murphy, the owner of the cabin, was adamantly opposed to this decision.
He disclosed an important detail: to keep animals and rubbish out of the chimney, he had placed a strong wire mesh grate near the top that was suspended from steel hooks while the chimney was being built twenty years prior. Entry should have been impossible due to the heavy-gauge mesh.
“There’s no way that guy crawled inside that chimney with that steel webbing,” Murphy insisted. “He didn’t come down the chimney.”
Born clarified that the mesh wasn’t seen in photos since, before its importance was recognized, it had been gathered with other scrap metal during destruction.
Murphy insisted that the metalwork had been strong, although he acknowledged that it might have rusted away over time.
Three days following his first decision, Born revisited the case due to growing inconsistencies.
Investigators were particularly concerned about Josh’s body position since it seemed like he went down the chimney head-first, which Born pointed out would have probably taken two people to do.
Although he still believed Josh had come down the chimney, the coroner changed his conclusion to include accident, murder, or unknown causes as potential causes.
“This one really taxed our brains,” Born admitted. “We don’t know why he took his clothes off, took his shoes and socks off, and why he went outside, climbed on the roof and went down the chimney. It was not linear thinking.”
Anonymous inputs led police to believe that someone boasted about placing Josh “in a hole.”
Before Josh vanished, he was reportedly spotted with a suspect who had a violent criminal past and was eventually taken into custody for a fatal stabbing in New Mexico.
Investigators, however, stated that they were unable to confirm details dating back seven years, and Born questioned whether Josh could have been placed in the chimney by a single individual.
During those seven years, Murphy had periodically visited the empty cabin and had detected a foul odor, but he had thought that rats had perished within.
Given the furniture obstructing the fireplace, he never considered checking the chimney.
Even if Josh had screamed for help, no one would have heard him because of the cabin’s isolated location—about fifty feet from the road with no other houses—according to the authorities.
The discovery ended years of doubt but provided little solace for Josh’s family. Kate admitted that it didn’t make sense because they had assumed Josh would have been somewhere else in the world rather than so close to home.
“It’s a real conundrum. A tragic, terrible story,” Murphy reflected. “All I know is he did not go down that chimney. I think it will remain a mystery. One of those sad stories.”
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