Joshua Maddux

In the summer of 2015, a crew of contractors was hired to tear down an old cabin in the mountain town of Woodland Park, Colorado.

The cabin sat in the woods, about a mile from the center of town, in the pine-covered hills west of Colorado Springs. It had been abandoned for more than a decade. Its owner had decided to have it demolished. The workers went through it room by room, pulling apart walls and fixtures.

When they began taking apart the chimney, they found human remains inside it.

The remains were wedged in the narrow flue, partway down, where the chimney passed through the structure toward the fireplace. They had been there a long time.

A few weeks later, the Teller County coroner announced who it was: Joshua Maddux, a local teenager who had walked out of his family’s home seven years earlier and never come back.

Josh

Joshua Vernon Maddux was eighteen years old in May 2008. He lived with his family in Woodland Park, a small town of a few thousand people nestled in the mountains at more than eight thousand feet, with Pikes Peak rising to the south. He was bright and did well in school. His family later described him as a good kid, quiet and thoughtful, who loved being outdoors and exploring the woods.

One morning in May 2008, he was there. And then he wasn’t.

“I got up one morning and he was there,” his father, Michel Maddux, said years later. “Then he just never came home.”

The Search

His family reported him missing. Police investigated. There was no sign of foul play, and Josh was an adult, so at first his disappearance was treated as a case of a young man who might have chosen to leave. But his family didn’t believe that. He hadn’t packed anything. He hadn’t taken money. He’d given no hint that he wanted to go anywhere.

They searched for him for years. They put up posters. They followed every tip and rumor. His father described it as “grieving on hold” — the agony of not knowing whether your son is alive or dead, whether he will walk through the door tomorrow or never.

All that time, Josh was less than a mile from home.

The Cabin

The cabin where his remains were found belonged to a man who later told reporters that it had been empty for many years. He said that every so often there would be a bad smell in the building, but that wasn’t unusual; mice and chipmunks sometimes got inside and died. The fireplace, he said, was hidden behind a large piece of furniture that had been placed in front of it, so there had never been any reason to look inside.

The coroner examined the remains and identified them through dental records. He found no evidence of trauma — no broken bones, no signs that anyone had hurt Josh. He ruled the death accidental.

The most likely explanation, the coroner said, was that Josh had climbed onto the roof of the cabin, perhaps intending to break in, and tried to shimmy down the chimney to get inside. Partway down, he got stuck. The flue was too narrow. He couldn’t climb up, and he couldn’t get down. And no one could hear him.

“There are going to be some questions out there that are unanswerable,” the coroner said.

The Questions

That’s true. Many questions remain.

Why would a young man with a home a mile away try to climb into an abandoned cabin through its chimney? Was he looking for a place to be alone? Was he curious? Was he cold, or lost, or in some kind of trouble? Had he been there before? Some have wondered whether anyone else was with him.

There’s no evidence that anyone else was involved. The coroner’s ruling stands.

But it’s impossible not to think about how it must have ended for him — trapped in the dark, in the narrow chimney of an empty house, calling for help that never came, a short walk from his own bed.

The Hidden Places

Josh’s story is one of the strangest in this book, and one of the saddest. It doesn’t have a ghost or a monster or a killer. It has something worse: a simple accident, compounded by silence, isolation, and a piece of furniture placed in front of a fireplace.

It’s also a reminder of something searchers say often about missing people. Sometimes, they are much closer than anyone imagines. They are not on the other side of the country, living under new names. They are in the woods behind the house, at the bottom of a ravine half a mile away, or in a place no one ever thought to look.

In Josh’s case, the answer was in the chimney of a cabin down the road. It just took seven years for someone to look inside.