A Fourth of July or A Halloween Story?
as told to Wanda Badger
Early on the morning of Wednesday, the Fourth of July, Rob, His wife Annette, their six children, and a son in law, set off for a four day vacation in a remote area outside of Yellowstone Park. Camping, hiking, and just spending time in the wilderness being their favorite activity, it didn’t alarm them to find that the cabins they had rented for the first two days and nights were in a very secluded, heavily wooded, non-inhabited, far distant place up 10 miles of a dirt road.
Annette had found this place online and was excited because part of the deal included breakfast and dinner being cooked and served to them by the cabin owners, a man and his wife.
They also weren’t alarmed when the owners told them a couple from Germany had rented a cabin, but when they arrived earlier that day they thought it was too lonely there so they left. Annette thought this was another plus, because she and Rob could then have use of the deluxe cabin which had previously been rented to the German couple.
At dinner on Wednesday there appeared a teenage boy that the owners said was a grandson of a friend of theirs, who had been dropped off by their friend. The proprietor put him alone at a table in the corner, and then the owner himself crowded in at Rob’s table instead of eating with the boy, which everyone thought was strange.
The next morning at breakfast Rob asked where the young man was and he was told that he had walked down into Yellowstone Park to wander around for several days. He would be back by Tuesday.
Thursday night Robbie, Zeke, and Katie had been out wandering around with a flashlight after dark and returned with an unusual tale, which the family didn’t take serious right at the time. They said they found this kind of oval ball about the size of a head, wrapped heavily in duct tape, and they pulled off the end of it and something popped out like part of a spinal cord. They stuck a stick into the cavity and thick gooey red stuff came out.
Early Friday morning Rob and his family had breakfast, and then planned to leave. They told the owners what Robbie and the others had found, and where, and suggested the owners check it out.
As the family traveled out of there they kept remembering unusual things the owners had done and said- talking a lot about all the murders and rapes in Yellowstone- talking about orphan boys they invited up there- and about people who come there to practice a weird religion, and they remembered that the woman was always evasive when they asked her questions. Also, no one had signed the guest book for over a year. These were things the family joked about, but now they were becoming apprehensive about what was going on there.
When they returned home Saturday evening they phoned the couple and asked if they had checked out the “head.” The people said they just now had gotten around to it, but hadn’t taken the duct tape off. Rob asked them point blank if it looked like a spinal cord attached to possibly a head, and they said yes. After hanging up Rob tried to phone them back several times and they wouldn’t answer the phone. He left a message for them to please call him, and hadn’t heard from them by Sunday.
Rob thought “if someone told you there was possibly a head wrapped in duct tape on your property, would you wait 2 days to check it out?” In my mind I wondered why Rob hadn’t checked it out himself before he left, but if Rob had retrieved the item Thursday night and confronted the couple with it would something terrible have happened to his family? No one was within miles to hear or see anything. When I mentioned this to Rob, he said “his not investigating it was so totally out of character” for him, that he felt he must have somehow been kept from doing it. Scary, huh!
Rob had his son who had found the head make a replica of the size and shape it was, and also of the spinal cord, and both fit what could be part of a human body. Possible the person’s head had been taped up and then cut off, then buried in a different place than the body parts. A wild animal probably dug the head up.
Sunday Rob went to the police in Salt Lake. They were intrigued with his story and told him to call the police in Gardiner City, Montana- the nearest town to this area.
This he did. The policeman said he was a good friend of this couple and said they were upstanding people. (Rob figured that might be the case and that’s why he didn’t contact them before.) They told the police officer that it was just trash, and it was heavy and took two people to carry. Robbie said he didn’t pick it up, but rolled it over and it wasn’t heavy. And who would wrap trash heavily in duct tape? Also they had admitted to Rob that it looked like a head and a spinal cord.
What happened to the boy who was there one day and gone the next? Could the German’s have met with foul play? Again, if Rob had retrieved the item Thursday night and confronted the couple with it would they have done away with the whole family? They may never know the answers to these questions!
