Missing Teenager Discovered Inside Chimney After Seven Years, Leaving Investigators Baffled
Josh was known for his love of nature. With his long blond hair and a deep passion for music, he often hiked alone through the vast Pike National Forest that surrounded their small town of only eight thousand residents.
That day, he told his sister Kate he was heading out, and she thought nothing unusual about it. But tragically, Josh never returned home again.
Five days later, with no answers, Mike officially filed a missing person report. Police began their investigation, joined by friends and neighbors who wanted to help.
Search teams combed through the neighborhood and nearby forests where Josh often walked. Despite their best efforts, days turned into weeks, and weeks stretched into years, but there was never a trace of the teenager.
His sister Kate pictured him eventually coming back one day, walking through the door with a partner and maybe even kids, ready to reintroduce himself to their family.
But Josh’s disappearance came at an already painful time for the Maddux family. Just two years earlier, his older brother Zachary had tragically died by suicide just before graduating high school, leaving everyone devastated.
Even so, friends and loved ones insisted that Josh seemed to be doing well before he vanished. They said he was happy, optimistic, and enjoying life despite the tragedy.
It wasn’t until seven years later, in August 2015, that the mystery finally unraveled. Construction workers tearing down an old cabin stumbled upon something that would reveal what happened to Josh, according to MailOnline.
The wooden cabin on Meadowlark Lane had stood abandoned for more than a decade, left to rot among tall pine trees. Inside, the timbers were decaying and the space had become cluttered with debris.
Murphy’s brother had lived there until 2005, but after that it was used only for storage and slowly fell into disrepair.
Police were called immediately to the scene, and dental records later confirmed what everyone had dreaded: the remains belonged to Joshua Maddux, reported by Strange Outdoors.
Even more haunting was how close he had been all along. The cabin stood less than a mile from the Maddux family’s home—just two blocks away. Despite all the search efforts back in 2008, no one had thought to check the abandoned property.
Adding to the mystery, investigators noticed that a heavy wooden breakfast bar had been torn from the kitchen wall and dragged over to block the fireplace opening inside the cabin.
Born’s initial ruling was that Josh’s death was accidental. He theorized that Josh may have tried to climb into the chimney, become trapped, and died from hypothermia as the cold nights dropped into the twenties Fahrenheit.
But Chuck Murphy, the cabin’s owner, openly rejected this explanation, insisting that it didn’t make sense with what he knew about the chimney’s design.
“There’s no way that guy crawled inside that chimney with that steel webbing,” Murphy said firmly. “He didn’t come down the chimney.”
Born countered by saying the mesh wasn’t visible in photos because it had been collected with other scrap metal during the demolition, before anyone realized its importance.
Investigators were especially troubled by how Josh’s body was positioned. He appeared to have gone in headfirst, a position that Born said would likely have required help from more than one person.
“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.”
To make things even stranger, police received tips suggesting that someone had bragged about putting Josh “in a hole.”
Chuck Murphy, who occasionally checked on the abandoned cabin during those years, recalled noticing a foul odor at times. But he had assumed it was just rodents that had died inside, never suspecting it could have been Josh.
For Josh’s family, the discovery closed the painful chapter of not knowing, but it brought little comfort. Kate expressed that the whole situation made no sense to them—they had pictured Josh anywhere else in the world, but not lying so close to home all along.
