00:00:00 Speaker 1: The plan was simple a week of elk hunting in Montana's backcountry, but somewhere between the trailhead into the Crazy Mountains and the first snowfall, Aaron Hedges vanished. His friend said he'd gone off on his own, and searchers later found his boots neatly placed beside a firing. What happened next would baffle investigators and fuel a decade of theories about how and why Aaron died within a quarter mile of being rescued. That's next on Blood Trails. There are many strange things about the disappearance of Aaron Hedges, but one of the strangest is why he took off his boots. Hedges and two of his friends went elk hunting in the Crazy Mountains of western Montana in September of twenty fourteen. Those two friends came back, Aaron did not. A search and rescue team was dispatched to try to find the missing hunter. About a week into those efforts, the team found what they hoped would lead them to Aerin. 00:01:04 Speaker 2: We go back and. 00:01:05 Speaker 3: We researched that area on the bench and find two points where he tries to make fire. He was actually successful on one. I don't think he was as successful at another one. And then that's when we found the booths. 00:01:22 Speaker 1: That Sweetgrass County Sheriff Alan Roneberg, he helped lead the search efforts, and he told me that even a week after Aaron had gone missing, they were still hopeful they might find him alive, and those size ten wolverine hunting boots told them he was close. After all, what kind of hunter takes off his boots beside a fire and then keeps walking. But the rescue team, along with two deputies from the Park County Sheriff's office, searched the area for over three hours and didn't turn up anything else besides a camelback water bladder, a water filter and some trash. Aaron had vanished. It was like he'd been sucked out of his boots and into the ether. Here's Park County Detective Brian Green speaking in twenty fifteen. 00:02:07 Speaker 4: What was found and where it was found and the condition that was found in is very odd, and what wasn't found is very odd. 00:02:16 Speaker 5: There's just something about it that's very unsettling. 00:02:19 Speaker 1: After two weeks, the search team gave up. They'd done everything they could think of, but Aaron Hedges was nowhere to be found. In the years that followed, the internet had a field day. 00:02:29 Speaker 3: All theories you're out there, you know, everything from murder to UFOs to Bigfoot. A lot of us thought he walked out and he caught himself a ride, and he just left the country. He's out sipping mintizing the Bahamas, you know, all that kind of thing. 00:02:46 Speaker 1: Others thought maybe Aaron had been raptured, you know, taken by God into heaven where he wouldn't need hunting boots. This was the subject of a self published book on Amazon titled Aaron Hedges, A Case Study in the Rapture and the End of Life as we know it. Believe it or not, it's on the first page of Google when you search for Aaron's name. Internet sleuse and true crime podcasters got some answers when in August of twenty sixteen, almost two years after he went missing, Erin's remains were found, but the questions didn't stop. Why did Aaron leave his friends and travel so far from their base camp. Why did those friends not look for him even with a snowstorm bearing down? What killed Erin in those mountains? Why did he die within a quarter mile of a road? And what made him take off his boots and walk six more miles in the freezing cold. These and other questions have perplexed professional and amateur detectives for nearly a decade. Some of them may never be answered, but for anyone who hunted elk in the Rocky Mountain West, Aaron's story is a warning. You never know what might happen up in those mountains, and you'd better be prepared. I'm Jordan Sillers, and this is Blood Trails, What Happened to Aaron Hedges, Part one? A series of unfortunate events. Almost everything we know about Aaron's story comes from the two men who hunted with him, Joe Depew and Greg Latner. Joe and Greg both declined to be interviewed for this episode, and we'll talk about why in a few minutes, but I was able to obtain a recorded interview between Greg and two Park County detectives. As far as I'm aware, this is the first time this interview has ever been made public. I also have the complete incident report from the Park County Attorney's Office, which includes descriptions of interviews between Joe and detectives. Between those interviews and documents. We have a pretty good idea what the pair of hunters told law enforcement in the days after Aaron went missing. Here's a portion of that incident report that describes what the three hunters planned to do during the six days they were in the Crazy Mountains. 00:05:00 Speaker 6: Stated that they had arrived in this vehicle and that all three parties had done a hunting pack trip the year prior in the same area. Depew stated that the hunting group then started in the direction of Trespass Creek, with a destination of going to Campfire Lake, then to Moose Lake, and then up Middle Fork Creek trail to go up North Fork Creek, with a final destination being at the lower Lakes in the area of Sunlight Lake. 00:05:24 Speaker 1: Their plan was to pack a horse and a mule into the Custer Gallatin National Forest just north of Livingston, Montana. They went in at the Ibex trailhead on September fifth, twenty fourteen, and as you heard, they hoped to arrow an elk in the area around Campfire Lake, Moose Lake, and Sunlight Lake. If you've never been there, this is a gorgeous patch of country and the weather was perfect with highs in the fifties and sixties and lows just below freezing. 00:05:50 Speaker 7: Beautiful mountain range. First of all, right, very visible from I ninety corridor as you drive in east and west, kind of stand out almost like an island mountain chain. 00:06:00 Speaker 1: That's me eaters Giannis Prutellis. Yanni has backpacked with his wife and kids in the Crazy Mountains on three separate occasions, and he recently finished a one hundred mile trail race on some of the same paths that Greg, Joe, and Aaron traveled on their hunt. Yanni explained that the Crazies are a popular place for Bozeman residents to take a weekend hike because they're accessible and not too intimidating. 00:06:21 Speaker 7: The Crazies actually aren't a huge mountain range. When you're on a lot of the bigger peaks or passes, you can see the flats or the val the major valleys to the east and west right, you're not like deep in and you can't see out like you can always see one way or the other. 00:06:38 Speaker 1: It's not a huge mountain range, but there are still plenty of opportunities for hunters. Joe, Greg and Aaron wanted to make it up to Campfire Lake on their first day, a seven mile hike up Trespass Creek trail. But the trip got off to a rocky start. Here's Greg speaking to detectives. 00:06:55 Speaker 5: We got all loaded up and from the old Bucks to pack south off once and right of the trailhead, just because she was scared of Aaron, you know, and we got that all. We got that all situated, and now we're running way behind. It's already like afternoon, and so we decided we're we'll make it a couple of miles up the trail and make camp. And so we get a couple of miles up the trail, Aaron tries to walk up ahead of us, and the mule sees Aaron coming through her perfield vision and flips out again and fucks everything off of her back again. And you know, Aaron gets gets pissed and starts trying to hit the mule and this and that. Joe and I just stop to it, hey man, knock it off, like she's scared of you for a reason, like get away from her, you know, like and we're getting really irritated, but you know, we've kind of kind of already started on the trip now, and I kind of had a bad feeling at that point that you know, Aaron just should not be there. But it's almost past the point of I mean, I get it. Or maybe it wasn't, but it felt like it was at the time. 00:08:06 Speaker 1: This wasn't the only time they had trouble with the mule. As they tried to summit the pass the next day, the mule took off again, but this time the consequences were much worse. 00:08:15 Speaker 5: Again, Aaron walked up and stooped to the mule, and the mule took off, bucking and that if you're familiar with that valley on the west side of Camps Campfire Pass, that basin. The mule took off, just running all over that valley, bucking our gear all over the place. So we spent all afternoon picking up that stuff that the mule lost, Aaron's sleeping bag. We eventually found every single thing that the mule had bucked off, except Aaron's sleeping bag. Never ever did find it. 00:08:49 Speaker 1: They admitted that none of them knew much about dealing with pack animals, and later in the trip, Joe and Greg spent three hours trying to catch the mule that had escaped overnight, but they couldn't corral it. They eventually get up and went back to camp, and the mule followed. This detail is actually more important than it sounds. That mule accident when Aaron lost his gear, was the catalyst that sparked the series of events that eventually led to his disappearance. Joe, Greg and Aaron had hunted together for the past five or six years, and Joe had known Aarin even longer. We'll hear more about Aaron's personal history soon, but for now, let's get back to the hunt. Joe told law enforcement that they looked for a couple hours for the sleeping bag, and then went back to the truck and retrieved some additional items, including blankets and a tarp, which, strangely, Joe claims that Aaron refused to use. And while Greg says they found all of Erin's gear except his sleeping bag, Sheriff Roni Berg says the search and rescue team recovered more than just a sleeping bag. 00:09:48 Speaker 3: It would have spent some time, but they could have got it because it was recovered by the search and rescue people. When they first got up the trail, they noticed all this stuff scattered all over the trail and they started picking up they picked it up. Why they didn't, I don't know. They wanted to get into camp. I guess I'm not really sure. 00:10:10 Speaker 1: Whatever the status of Aaron's gear, the delay forced them to camp on the trail that night, which didn't do much to improve company morale. 00:10:19 Speaker 5: Aaron had nothing, even though we told him that he needed a bivvy sack and he needed this and that. We got up there and realized that once he lost his sleeping bag, he literally had no gear at all. Nothing. 00:10:32 Speaker 1: Greg and Joe tried to help Aaron stay warm that night, but he refused and he'd. 00:10:37 Speaker 5: Being real hard headed. I'm just and I knew it was going to get down to you know, fifteen twenty degrees that night, and just look at Aaron. You can't just sleep on the ground's let's figure this out. There's a lot of options. A resourceful guy would have gotten the pads off of the horses, would have built a big fire, stocked up on firewood. Any person in the right mind, I mean halfway survivalists would have gotten all the gear that they could to stay warm. He's so hard ahead and I don't need any of that shit, which is like you do need it, you know. We eventually just gets so mad, fine, you know whatever, Like I can't make you put all this stuff on. 00:11:21 Speaker 1: They proceeded the next day, Saturday, September sixth, to what would become their base camp, but Aaron's mood had deteriorated after a night without his sleeping bag. In fact, Joe told investigators that Aaron was acting agitated and confrontational almost from the moment they arrived at the trailhead. According to the incident report. 00:11:40 Speaker 6: Depeugh said Hedges was pissed off of the mule and the whole situation, and was generally uncooperative that first night. Depeugh said Hedges remained pissed off the entire next day. After arriving at Campfire Lake on the second. 00:11:52 Speaker 1: Afternoon, things didn't get much better. 00:11:54 Speaker 8: When they set up camp. 00:11:56 Speaker 3: Greg gut really irritated with you and actually almost into a fifth flight at one night, to the point, you know, Erin and Greg were going to have at it. It was a heck of an argument. 00:12:08 Speaker 1: I should point out here that none of the incident reports I received from Park County mentioned anything about a fight. There was obviously tension in camp, but in these reports. Neither Greg nor Joe reported any kind of physical altercation, and they didn't respond to the question when I emailed it to them, and they're telling of it, it's hard to blame the pair of hunters for being exasperated. They say Aarin was acting listless and uninterested, almost like he didn't want to be there. Greg said that Aaron had put a new site on his bow, but didn't bother to site it in before the trip. According to Greg, Aaron spent part of the time at camp blowing up his arrows by firing them into rocks, and he never actually got it sited in. Greg said Aaron wouldn't have been able to hit a hay bale from ten yards away. 00:12:52 Speaker 5: I take it very seriously. I my whole year is devoted to bow hunting. I had to shoot my bow every day I run. It's very serious. And so I showed up to the parking lot at Joe's out back and Aaron pulled in and he just looked like shit. His face was pickled, he hadn't had a haircut and forever. 00:13:13 Speaker 1: Greg claims that Aaron had been drinking, and that suspicion appeared to be confirmed When Greg and Joe took a walk up the mountain and looked back at camp through their binoculars. 00:13:23 Speaker 5: Right by where our camp was, there was a big black bear walking in that big open bw right by where the camp was. Aaron's sitting there and just kind of looking at it. We're watching thro our binoculars and we're just thinking like, oh, is he gonna get his bow go try and shoot that thing? Is he do drunk? What's what's he doing? And so we're watching and he grabs his he grabs his bow, and he's like stumbling. We were trying to figure out what he's doing. Oh, he's looking for his slippers. So he goes and he puts his slippers on, and he gets his bow and he starts stumbling across the meadow right towards the bear, and that, you know, not like how he would put a stock on an animal. He just starts walking right towards it. I was surprised he got as close as he did. He probably got forty or fifty yards away, which could have been theoretically in shooting distance, but he never even attempted to draw his bow. He just kept walking at it, and the bear eventually turn around and ran. But that gave us an idea right there that he was gonna stay at camp or he get on out by himself, Like I'm not, you know, we put too much work into this. Like that was the most pathetic excuse for a stock on an animal I've ever seen. 00:14:42 Speaker 1: When Greg and Joe walked back into camp, they could tell the horse and mule were nervous about something lurking in the darkness beyond the firelight. Aaron wasn't concerned, but Greg said he knew something was wrong. He walked where the animals were looking and found another bear standing just about twenty yards away. If I were two shots from his pistol to scare the bear away and return to camp. 00:15:04 Speaker 5: But then after that, I was just I rate with Aaron's so mad. I'm just like, what are you doing? Are you kidding me? So this bear right there in camp harassing the horses? You're laying here drunk, you know, like what, It's just like, how good are you? 00:15:20 Speaker 3: You know? 00:15:21 Speaker 5: Just just stay in camp? Like I was so angry at him, and just it was just so pathetic because we take it so seriously, and he just wasn't. 00:15:32 Speaker 1: With that kind of resentment in the air. It probably came as a relief when Aaron told them he planned to leave. 00:15:38 Speaker 5: After that second night at the base of Campfire Pass, after he stayed up all night cussing and building the fire, He said he was going to walk to the cash at Sunlight Camp. 00:15:50 Speaker 1: The previous fall, the group had stashed some gear near Sunlight Lake, including a wal tent, stove, sleeping bags, and freeze dried food. Rather than spend another in the cold without his sleeping bag, Aaron said he wanted to make the nine mile hike up to Sunlight Lake and retrieve what they'd stashed. The group agreed to use their Garmin Rhino Won twenty GPS radios to contact each other at noon and at four pm every day until they reunited. Aaron said that if they didn't walk up to where he was, he'd walk back to them on Monday or Tuesday. Since they planned to leave on Wednesday, Greg and Joe got up early to look for Elk on Sunday, September seventh. They said that when they looked back at camp, they could still see Aaron milling around, and as far as we know, that's the last time anyone saw Aaron Alive Part two Aerin. Like so many things about this story, Aaron Hedges himself is a bit of a mystery. We know he was married and had one young son at the time of his disappearance. We know he was thirty eight years old. He was six one, one hundred and ninety pounds and had blonde hair and blue eyes. We know he liked to hunt elk and he lived in the Livingston Bozeman area, but we don't know much else. The friends and family we contacted about this episode, including his wife Christine, either didn't get back to us or refused to speak to us. We do know, as you may have already guessed, that Aaron was an alcoholic. Greg told investigators that Aaron would regularly drink a bottle of Jack Daniels a day, and he brought several with him on that trip. 00:17:32 Speaker 8: Both Joe and. 00:17:32 Speaker 1: Greg implied that this may have explained Aaron's strange behavior. 00:17:37 Speaker 5: We get off the main road and we're driving up the up the dirt road to the trailhead and Aaron pulls out like this bottle of twisted tea or something and starts drinking it just fucking you know. 00:17:49 Speaker 9: We're getting ready to you know, penetrate ten miles deep into the crazy mountains, and he's busting out a twisted tea and he's already just loopy is hell from whatever the medication he was taking is. 00:18:02 Speaker 5: And I'm just like, what are you doing them? Like? He's like, Oh, it's just these twisted teas. It's not a big deal. It's not Jack Daniels. I'll be fine. 00:18:12 Speaker 1: Greg said that Aaron seemed drunk on that ride to the trailhead, but he wasn't sure whether that was from the alcohol or the medication Aaron had been prescribed to help him curb his alcohol addiction. He didn't know what the medication was called, but investigators later confirmed with Aaron's doctor that he'd been prescribed a drug called chlor diaz epoxide. 00:18:33 Speaker 8: The brand name of this drug. 00:18:34 Speaker 1: Is Librium, and it's prescribed to patients to treat anxiety disorders and symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. Aaron's doctor confirmed that he'd been given a prescription of this medication in the weeks prior to the hunt. Christine told investigators that she believed this medication had made Aaron quote agitated and unstable on his feet. 00:18:54 Speaker 6: Kstine stated that because of the negative side effects she had seen in her husband, Aaron, which included short temper and physical unbalanced, she didn't want him to go on the hunting trip. The trip was a spur of the moment trip for Erin. She also stated that if it wasn't for the medication side effects, she would not be worried about her husband. 00:19:12 Speaker 1: It's true that the side effects of librium include dizziness, changes in mood or behavior, and confusion, but the medication is also prescribed as a treatment for anxiety, so the doctor told investigators that Aaron should have had quote a very stable mindset while taking the medication. She also said that if Aaron had been taking the pills per the instructions, he should have been done with them well before the trip began. In other words, while both alcohol and librium may have explained Aaron's strange behavior, we don't know exactly what or how much was in his system on the day he disappeared. It's also worth noting again that we have to rely on Greg and Joe's word that Aarin was acting strangely at all. Whatever the truth is, Aaron's drinking wasn't just messing with his archery. 00:19:59 Speaker 8: Skills. 00:19:59 Speaker 1: His his initial interview with investigators, Joe said he'd known Erin for ten years. 00:20:04 Speaker 6: But he was under the impression that Hedges had a wonderful wife and was screwing up by drinking so much. 00:20:10 Speaker 1: Aaron's drinking was clearly a problem, and Greg mentioned that he switched from hard tea to whiskey after that first night. 00:20:18 Speaker 5: He would drink it and secret because we were giving him a hard time about it, because you know, he knew if he was taking those pills and we didn't want him drinking anyways. I mean, if you're, you know, getting done hunting at the end of the day and you want you want to have a couple pulls off the bottle by the fire, that's one thing. You know, Drinking a whole leader of whiskey over the course of the day while you're on an Elkhana is another sink like which just weren't okay with it. 00:20:44 Speaker 1: Getting drunk in the back country might not be wise. But the question remains is that what killed Erin. Did the side effects of the medication or another bottle of Jack Daniels or not having another bottle of Jack Daniels cause him to lose his way? And eventually his life. It's possible, but that's not where this story ends. 00:21:11 Speaker 8: Part three. 00:21:13 Speaker 1: Lost Aaron's behavior didn't stop Greg and Joe from their primary mission on that trip. After they looked back and saw Erin still in camp, they forged ahead into the hills and valleys around Campfire Lake in search of elk. They were successful. In the afternoon of Sunday, September seventh, the first day they went hunting, Greg arrowed a nice six by six bowl. They told investigators that they shot the animal near dead Horse Lake, which is about two miles northeast of Campfire Lake. 00:21:42 Speaker 8: As the crow flies, We're working. 00:21:45 Speaker 5: Our way east toward sunlight drainage right at the top of the timber, and I'm just letting out cow calls. Turn to see if I can give those two other bulls we saw, and sure enough, both of them came just came running right out of me on a string, and one of them hung up at about eighty yards and the other one just walked right up on top of me. I was able to draw my bow back, and he walked up to about ten fifteen yards and drilled them right between the chest. 00:22:17 Speaker 1: If you've ever been hunting, with a group. You know that when someone shoots an animal, the rest of the group tries to come help with the packout. Dead Horse Lake is actually pretty close to Sunlight Lake, and so the pair of hunters radioed Aaron to come back and help them break down the bull. 00:22:31 Speaker 5: We get out the radio because Aaron had that radio, and we're thinking, like, Aaron's gotta be on the trail right below us, Like, let's get him on the radio and let's tell him not to go to the camp. You know, we need his help. 00:22:43 Speaker 1: Aaron answered their radio call, but he didn't seem excited to hear about their success on the mountain. 00:22:49 Speaker 5: He immediately answered, He's like yeah, just sort of drunk, angry voice, and I'm just like, dude, we had a bull down, where are you? And he's just like not excited at all. He's just like, I. 00:23:04 Speaker 3: Find now you don't know, excuseuld you walk the same trail we did? 00:23:09 Speaker 5: Like have you gotten to the turnoff the Sunlight Trilia? I don't know. I'd don't hike it for seven miles. 00:23:17 Speaker 1: Greg thinks Aarin was exaggerating about how far he walked, but if he was even close to correct, he would have missed the turnoff he was supposed to take up to Sunlight Lake. 00:23:27 Speaker 3: He went right past the fork to go to Sunlight and went straight down to the sweet Grass. So he was headed for sweet Grass counting the last time they. 00:23:38 Speaker 2: Heard from me. 00:23:42 Speaker 1: To understand what's happening here, it helps to look at a map I used on X to map Erin's last known locations and to get a sense of who was where and when. We posted a version of that map on the case file for this episode, which you can check out over at the meaeater. 00:23:57 Speaker 8: Dot com slash Blood Trails. 00:24:00 Speaker 1: To walk from Campfire Lake to Sunlight Lake, Aaron would have had to walk northwest about five and a half miles along a well defined trail. At that point, he would have had to hang a left and go north along another trail up to Sunlight That's where, according to Greg and Joe, Aaron started to lose his way. This is an important part of the story because it explains why Aarin never found the gear cash and why he was so ill prepared to survive a drop in temperature. I haven't seen this trail or the turnoff myself, but Yanni has. 00:24:31 Speaker 7: I've been on that trail both daylight hours and nighttime hours, it was not hard to find that turnoff. 00:24:39 Speaker 1: Yanni explained that the trail in that area is in thick timber and gets a lot of human and horse traffic, So if you're on the trail, you probably wouldn't miss the turn, especially in daylight and even if you were slightly intoxicated. But there's also a crete crossing prior to the turnoff, So if Aaron had moved off the trail to get across the water or because he was hunting el it's possible he could have missed it easily. 00:25:03 Speaker 7: Easily because if you're on the trail, yeah, it's like right there, you could probably walk it with your eyes closed because you could feel when you go off the trail. But being he was elk hunting, maybe he was walking the trail at first. But I would imagine that he didn't elk hunt an entire day and stay on a trail the entire day. 00:25:24 Speaker 8: That would be hard to do. 00:25:26 Speaker 1: Of course, even if Aaron had missed the trail, he could have just turned around and retraced his steps. That's what Greg and Joe told him to do. But for reasons that remain a mystery, he refused. 00:25:38 Speaker 5: Which just like, Aaron, turn around and walk back the way you came. If you haven't switched trails. 00:25:44 Speaker 8: All you have to do is turn around and start walking back. 00:25:47 Speaker 5: We'll meet you on the trail. 00:25:48 Speaker 2: Joe here, talk to Aaron. 00:25:50 Speaker 5: Joe's just like, what the fuck, man, you don't know where you are? And He's like, I don't know. 00:25:55 Speaker 3: We'll turn around. 00:25:56 Speaker 5: I'm coming right back up here. And at that point only the signal was kind of fading out a little bit, like getting a little bit scratchy, and we're just like, turn around and come back up. Okay, we're gonna come down to the trail and meet you. Just turn around, don't go any further. Well, I that's not sure where I am. And Joe's like just getting pissed, like what do you mean, dude? Just turn around, and Aaron says, I don't think I'm gonna make it back tonight. Last words he ever spoke. Couldn't get him on the radio after that. It was almost like maybe he got maybe mad or turning off the radio. I don't think that we lost the signal that abruptly, but he just said I don't think I'm gonna make it back tonight, and that was the last thing he said. 00:26:50 Speaker 3: And they made more attempts to contact him, but then at that time Aaron wouldn't respond or didn't respond. 00:27:00 Speaker 1: The group had planned to leave on Wednesday, and they shot the elk on Sunday, so they had three full days to quarter the elk and pack it out. In the reports, Joe and Greg don't mention whether Joe had an elk tag, but it doesn't sound like they hunted anymore after that. Instead, they spent about two hours breaking down the animal and hanging the meat. Then they walked back down to their base camp on Campfire Lake. The next morning, they broke camp and headed up to Moose Lake to retrieve the elk and make another camp up there. Then on Tuesday, they hiked back down to Campfire Lake in the hope that they'd run into Erin as he made his way back to the trucks, but he didn't show and on Wednesday, September tenth, twenty fourteen, they hiked down to the trailhead and drove away. And all that time they never heard from or saw Erin again. 00:27:46 Speaker 3: No contact from him. He's nowhere to be found. They looked for him and they knew or were aware that there was weather coming in, and they decided to take off. 00:27:58 Speaker 1: They called Erin's wife when they returned cell service, and Christine called the Park County sheriff to report that her husband was missing. That call launched what would become one of the largest search and rescue efforts Park and Sweetgrass Counties had ever seen. After the break, we dig deeper into the search for Aaron and the investigation into Greg and Joe. Why didn't they call search and rescue earlier? Why did they defy law enforcement and return to the gear cash, and how does Greg try to explain their actions to detectives? Wondering whether something isn't quite right about their story? All that and more as next Right after this part four, the search Sheriff Alan Roneberg told me his career has been fined by the search for Aaron Hedges. No one wants to be remembered for a single tragic circumstance, but the search for Aarin was enormous. Those search efforts were frustrated almost from the first moment that night. 00:29:14 Speaker 3: I mean, it flip and snowed, the temp dropped, I don't know, probably forty degrees. I would imagine it went from fifty to like ten in eight to ten hours, and it in the crazies. 00:29:28 Speaker 2: It snowed eighteen to twenty four inches of snow in one storm. 00:29:34 Speaker 1: Janni says, this kind of sudden snowstorm isn't unusual and the three Hunters should have been prepared for something like this to happen. 00:29:41 Speaker 7: Nope, not out of the ordinary. I would even say it's closer to normal than not normal. Even when I did that raise at the end of July, Like, you have a kit that you have to carry with you that will basically save your butt if that happens at the end of July, Like you could see temperatures well into the eighties maybe higher. You know, if you saw snowflakes, you wouldn't go, oh my god, I died and went to Hell or something like. It's known to have some crazy weather, and I think a storm can come in and just hit those high mountain peaks, Thames drop moisture drops, and the next thing you know, Yeah, it can be September, August, July and it's snowing on you. Not out of the ordinary. 00:30:23 Speaker 1: The trio of Hunters had gone into the mountains in Park County. So in those first few days, the Park County Sheriff's office took the lead on the search efforts and the subsequent investigation. But they knew from what Joe and Greg told them that Aaron was headed east into sweet Grass County when they lost contact with him. So Sheriff Ronenberg figured they should send a team on four wheelers to a place called Eagle Park, which is where Aaron may have emerged if he had kept walking. 00:30:48 Speaker 3: It was like ten o'clock at night, tin to midnight. 00:30:51 Speaker 2: They stayed there. 00:30:51 Speaker 3: They honked their horns, yelled, form, whistle form everything they could to attract him. 00:30:56 Speaker 2: Were there for two hours. 00:30:58 Speaker 3: Nothing was there. It was just flat dump and snow, and so they took off out of there. 00:31:05 Speaker 1: The snowstorm kept searchers indoors until the next morning, when Park County launched their efforts at seven am. 00:31:11 Speaker 3: Park County launched a really good search between their search for rescue team, the abtro search dogs, National Guard, Rocky Mountain roaders all kind of got into the area. 00:31:24 Speaker 1: But even though the storm had stopped, conditions were still incredibly dangerous. Two horse teams were deployed to search Campfire Lake and Sunlight lake. They stayed out all day, but one to two feet of snow and sub zero temperatures kept them from searching the entirety of the trails to either lake. They found no sign of air and on the portions of the trail they were able to search. They also sent in two military helicopters to fly over the entire area. Low clouds and poor visibility hampered their efforts at first, but conditions improved as a day wore on. They kept searching until nearly midnight using night vision technology, but they still found no sign of it. But something else happened that day that to this day has yet to be explained. Two search and rescue crew members went up in a separate helicopter to the gear cash, following GPS coordinates provided by Joe, but either Joe made a mistake or the crew went to the wrong place because they weren't able to find the stash of gear. 00:32:19 Speaker 6: In fact, on arrival to the area, we were advised by team members that the GPS coordinates provided were as much as ten miles away from the Sunlight Lake area. Pilot Mark Taylor landed in an area similar to that described by Joe Depew and Todd and Picklow commenced a short search for the cash, but were unable to locate it. 00:32:40 Speaker 1: The next day, Friday, September twelfth, two dog teams were dispatched to be a helicopter, one of which scoured the area around Sunlight Lake. The team found the cash, along with a bunch of boot prints in the snow. These boot prints, investigators learned, were made by Greg and Joe the evening before. Greg and Joe had gone back to the Light Lake trailhead and spoken with the two deputies station there. 00:33:03 Speaker 6: They told deputies that they were going to Sunlight Lake, where they had a cash that they left the previous year while they were hunting the area. Deputy Nelson told me that he tried to discourage Depew and Enlightener from going, as he did not want them to complicate the search effort and also due to inclement weather. I would like to note that Corporal Todd had spoken to Depew earlier in the day and requested they stay out of the search area, but. 00:33:27 Speaker 8: Greg and Joe went anyway. 00:33:30 Speaker 5: So we made it up there, and it was it was the hell making it over that pass. We did it. We got down, we walked right to where our cash was. It had not been touched. Aaron never made it there without a doubt. 00:33:44 Speaker 1: They set up camp and spent the night, and Greg reports he didn't get much sleep thanks to the army helicopter hovering overhead. He also said Joe was sick with pneumonia to the point where he was coughing up blood. 00:33:56 Speaker 5: It's probably the most eerie experience I've ever had in my life. I mean, I'm sitting there, you know, looking for my buddy's that's missing, my other buddies, laying here coughing up blood, just sick as hell. It's just this like Arctic tundra at this point, and I've got this chopper all night long, just ton to to do, just right over the ten. 00:34:18 Speaker 1: Greg looked for tracks that evening, and he found some, but he said they were smaller than Aaron's footprint would have been. He followed them for an unstated distance, but he was worried about Joe's health, so he went back to camp and the pair hiked out the next morning. Deputies confirmed that they got back to the trailhead about eleven forty five am. This is how the dog team was able to locate the cash. The next day, they found Greg and Joe's tracks and just followed them to the gear. The reports don't mention that Greg and Joe took anything, but they couldn't help disturbing the scene. The search teams also didn't find any sign of Aaron, so they photographed the contents of the cash and kept looking. A few days later, on Sunday, September fourteenth, another dog team found the first clue as to Aaron's real whereabouts. The report says they located an arrow that matched the description of the arrows Aaron was using, but they found it in an unlikely place along the trail to Sunlight Lake. Remember, according to Greg and Joe, Aaron said he'd missed the turn to Sunlight Lake and had kept walking. But if this arrow was actually Erin's, it would mean he didn't miss the turn and was at one point headed toward the cash of gear. But that clue didn't lead to anything further, and it wasn't until the search turned east into Sweetgrass County that the searchers began to piece together what had happened. 00:35:39 Speaker 3: Third or fourth day, we kind of figured, well, he's not in Park County, He's in sweet Grass County. By that time, there was still a little bit of snow on the ground, so we went ahead up from our side up to Eagle Park and beyond Well, right against the trail is a pretty good fire pit that has been used by the local dude range, a great, big, nice place to camp out, and that's next to the falls. 00:36:05 Speaker 2: Well. 00:36:05 Speaker 3: We found a hip belt that had been cut off of a pack inside the fire pit, kind of partially burned maybe, but still in really good shape. 00:36:17 Speaker 1: Ronneberg and his team didn't know why Aaron had cut off his hip belt and burned it, but they thought it might be his. That hunch was confirmed when on Wednesday, September seventeenth, they found the boots and the water bladder, along with two places Aaron had made a fire. I asked the sheriff whether at this point they're just looking for a body, or if they thought Aaron might still be alive. 00:36:37 Speaker 3: No, at that time, we're still looking for him. I don't really think he has to come to anything or as we go along, you know, we're doing tight circles around that area trying to pick up any kind of trace that he was there, and we didn't come up with anything. 00:36:55 Speaker 1: They found the water bladder near a waterfall, and so they thought maybe he'd gone down to re fill it and had slipped in and drowned. That would also explain why he disappeared without his boots. 00:37:06 Speaker 3: We spent a day trying to dredge the falls, so we kind of wonder if he didn't slip and go into the water and drowned and has not come out. You know. We kind of got fixated on that for a little while. 00:37:21 Speaker 1: But the water didn't give them the answers they were looking for either. The boots and campfires were about two miles beyond the turnoff to Sunlight Lake and about seven miles from the base camp at Campfire Lake. During one of those last radio conversations, Joe said, Aaron reported having hiked about seven miles, which means he could have been in this area during that radio call. But that call happened on Sunday evening, a full three days before the snow hit. Was Aaron hanging out in this area that entire time or did he move on? The search teams were confident that they'd found Aaron's camp, and so they focused their efforts on the surrounding area In the days that followed. The mission lasted an other five days until Monday, September twenty second. 00:38:03 Speaker 3: I gathered up all my guys that were there, and they'd been there most of the two weeks, and I said, all right, is there anything else we can do? Do you guys have any ideas of where we can search, what we can do to try and find this guy? Is there anything else we could do? And everybody said, I can't think of a damn thing. 00:38:25 Speaker 1: It's hard to fault Sheriff Ronenberg and the other search and rescue leaders from making this call. They'd been scouring the mountains every day for twelve days straight. They deployed horse teams, dog teams, helicopters, and ATVs. They'd done hasty searches to cover lots of ground and slow, grueling grid searches to find even the smallest clue. They'd gotten help from search and rescue personnel and law enforcement agents, many of whom were pulling double duty, and they hadn't come up with anything. The case was still open, but the concentrated search efforts were over. Hindsight is twenty twenty. But as the sheriff looks back on that decision, he can't help. But wonder if he made the right call. 00:39:06 Speaker 3: If I had been listening to my training, which I should have been, I would have said, you know what, let's start searching further east. Let's keep going, you know, because he's hunting. I didn't put two and two together, and he's off chasing something or you know, he just decided this was the way better way out. You know, he didn't want to go back, He didn't want to stay in place. He just wanted to keep going. Like the last person, behavior says, they'll do. 00:39:40 Speaker 1: Part five the investigation. While the search and rescue teams were looking for Aaron in the mountains, the Park County Sheriff's Office was working to piece together why Aaron disappeared in the first place. Their efforts were hampered initially because, for reasons that have only been partially explained, Joe and Greg didn't to report their friend missing. 00:40:02 Speaker 6: On nine ten, fourteen, at approximately eighteen twenty three hours, Dispatch received a complaint of a missing person in the Crazy Mountains area in Park County. The complainant, Christine Hedges, stated that her husband never came home from a hunting trip, and his friends had called to tell her that her husband was missing. 00:40:21 Speaker 1: Christine first called Sweetgrass County, but the dispatcher's there referred her to Park County. When Sheriff Roneberg heard about what happened, he found a number for Joe and Greg and called them himself. 00:40:31 Speaker 3: But I said, well, where are you now? He said, We're on the Bozeman Hill. I said, what the hell are you doing on the Bolzman Hill? You need to turn around and you need to go to the Park County Sharris's office right now. They tried to put it off and do this. We've got to take care of our animals, that stuff like that. I told him I don't really give her at You better get your ass down to the sharsofice a report your friend missing. 00:40:57 Speaker 1: Greg might dispute this characterization. In his interview with law enforcement. He said that Joe contacted the Park County sheriff as soon as they got off the mountain. But the reports I received from the county attorney clearly state that Christine, not Greg or Joe, was the person who called to report Aaron missing. I don't know if Joe's call wasn't recorded, or if something else can explain that discrepancy, but whatever the truth is, the pairaf hunters did eventually make it to the Park County Sheriff's office at seven point fifteen that evening. Deputies took their initial statements, and detectives interviewed both of them multiple times over the next few weeks. They wanted to know what happened in those mountains where Aaron may have gone, and most importantly, why they'd left him up there. What they heard from the two elk hunters was not reassuring. 00:41:44 Speaker 3: Almost everything they talked was a line they were trying to hide what they were doing up there. Joe and Greg were interviewed extensively, I believe three times because there was a pretty good thing theory that they had done Aaron in and probably had buried him in a rock slide up by the lake where their base camp was. That was a very prominent theory. 00:42:12 Speaker 1: Early on, Joe and Greg would be suspected no matter what they said. Three men went up into the mountains and only two of them came back. Investigators had to wonder whether anything the farious had happened. But according to Sheriff Ronneberg, Joe and Greg said and did things that made investigators extremely suspicious. The first is what you already heard. Rather than calling search and rescue. As soon as they got back to service, they called Christine. 00:42:37 Speaker 3: If it was one of my friends that was out there missing, I'd be right out front, going, Hey, we need to find this guy. I want to help every way we can. I want to be out there with you. 00:42:49 Speaker 2: We had to go find Joe and Greg. 00:42:52 Speaker 3: We had to go find them guys to get more information out of them. They didn't want to have anything to do with this, and that just through all kinds of red flags all the way through the front end of this. 00:43:05 Speaker 1: They did eventually give statements, but those statements also raised troubling questions. 00:43:10 Speaker 6: It should be noted that neither Depew nor Lightner indicated they looked for hedges at all while they were in the area. Depew stated that they attempted to make contact with hedges every hour, and even attempted to go places where the radio reception might be better. He said he thought they would bump into him sometime on Monday. 00:43:29 Speaker 1: Greg reiterated this timeline in his interview with law enforcement. 00:43:32 Speaker 5: I'm just like, when are you going to be back? I mean, you don't We didn't know where we need to at least to know the day you're going to be back, so we can you come and look for you. And he was like, wow, I don't know. That doesn't work for me. Tell me when you're going to be back. And I think he said he was going to be back either Monday or Tuesday, like he was just going to go up there and spend the night and check on things. 00:44:01 Speaker 1: But they didn't bump into him on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday. In fact, over seventy two hours passed between the time they lost contact with their friend and when they finally called Christine to ask whether Aaron had come home. 00:44:15 Speaker 6: He asked why they did not go to sunlight, and Depew stated he was second guessing himself and thought maybe he should have gone to sunlight, but also thought Hedges may have already gone back out the way they came and be out ahead of them. Depew became teary eyed and emotional while we talked about this, and stated he felt he made a mistake. 00:44:36 Speaker 1: Yanni agrees. Yani's been hunting all over North America in groups both large and small. He told me he would have called the authorities if a member of his party had been missing for twelve hours let alone seventy two, and that would be especially true if, as was the case with Aaron, he'd missed a pre established check in time. It's honestly, it's unfathomable, it really is that you would go into the mountain as a group and that you would have a member of your party not check in even at like because they had set check times, and so once they had missed the check time by even just a few hours, someone should be getting worried. Once it's been twelve hours, It's like the worry should have changed to real concern and been thinking about what the plan is to alleviate that problem, that situation. But then the fact that they would have literally just left him behind and came out and then told his wife that to me, where I really start to wonder, Like, what don't we know about the story? 00:45:41 Speaker 2: I don't know. 00:45:41 Speaker 7: I think you could survey one thousand people that spend time in the outdoors, hunters or not, and they would tell you the same thing I'm saying, Like they would not do that. 00:45:51 Speaker 1: Greg no doubt anticipated this criticism, and he tried to explain their reasoning. When Aaron still hadn't made it back to Campfirelake, by Tuesday night, they decided it would be better to leave their friend. 00:46:02 Speaker 8: On the mountain. 00:46:04 Speaker 5: And so at this point, we don't know if something's wrong. We don't know if he's just thinking, like a fuck those guys, this is more comfortable. I'm gonna stay up here because he thinks we're gonna be there for a few more days. I mean, you know, we told him we had an help down, like, it didn't really register with him that you're looking to get it out. So we don't know what's going through his mind. And at this point, we're also physically drained. We did not you know, we didn't have the physical ability to go hiking every trail system in the Crazy Mountains looking for Aaron. We could have hiked up to the some like camp. It would have been tough, but if he was at the Sunlight camp, he had been okay. The only way he would not have been okay is if he didn't make it to the Sunlight camp. And if he didn't make it to the Sunlight camp, the two of us that are just you know, skin and bones and you know, feet bleeding, we're not going to be able to hike every trail system. And we're thinking like, well, if he's either up there somenlight and he's okay, or he just kept hiking a trail until he came out one of the many exits. If anywhere in the crazies, if you just hike a trail, hike and hike and hike, you'll come out into a trailhead somewhere. And so we thought, well, before we go breaking our backs, you know, hiking all over these mountains, let's haul ass back to town and get a hold of Christine, his wife, and see if he's made a phone call, Like maybe he popped out one of these other trailheads and hitched a ride or called his wife, Like the last thing we wanted to do was spend days in there looking for Aaron while the elk meat rotted. If Aaron was already out and sitting at his home drinking whiskey this. 00:48:00 Speaker 1: Couch still, they could have used their radios to call for help, or even just walk back down and use their cell phones. It would have put a damper on their hunt. But since they shot the elk on the same day they lost contact with Aaron, you might also argue that they should have packed up and left to call help as soon as they could. It's easy to armchair quarterback decisions other people make, but that's what the detectives with the Park County Sheriff's Office were paid to do, and the circumstances were suspicious. There was even a rumor that Joe and Christine may have been in some kind of romantic relationship. I heard this from a former official who wanted to remain anonymous, but the rumor was prevalent enough that Sheriff Roni Berg included it in a PowerPoint presentation he made about this incident. He presents it as a case study for search and rescue training, but on the slides about possible ways Aaron died, he lists this little tidbit about Joe and Christine as a possible motive for homicide. To be clear, there isn't anything about this in the official incident reports, and it's the kind of nasty rumor that almost always circulates around an incident like this. I don't put much stock in it, but Joe didn't respond to my questions about it, so I can't say for sure. Along with leaving Aaron in the wilderness and trying to avoid investigators, Joe and Greg also lied about their whereabouts on the mountain. At least at first, one deputy spoke to a witness who claimed to have seen the hunting party on the trail. We don't know exactly what they said, but Sergeant Clay Herps wrote that the witness refuted the hunter's claims about where they camped the first night. 00:49:33 Speaker 6: He said in his report, ja Peer's Depew and Lightener are actively withholding information or giving misinformation regarding their exact whereabouts during the hunting trip. 00:49:43 Speaker 1: Herps goes on to say that the evidence found in the mountains, including two arrows that matched the description of the kind Greg was using, indicate that Greg and Joe lied about their campsites. 00:49:53 Speaker 6: Herbs writes, we have been unable to locate any of these arrows at the other alleged camps. We have also not been able to locate either of the other two camps where they stated they stayed with hedges. 00:50:05 Speaker 1: If this is true, why did investigators allow the pair to walk free? The answer goes back to the elk. 00:50:13 Speaker 6: That is. 00:50:13 Speaker 3: One reason why they were being deceptive was because they were hunting on private ground without permission. 00:50:21 Speaker 1: Meet Eater contributor Pat Durkin has famously said that big bucks make people stupid. I think the same could be said of big bulls. The area Greg and Joe were hunting as a patchwork of public and private ground. When investigators finally found the carcass of the elk Greg shot, they realized it was squarely. 00:50:38 Speaker 8: In one of those private parcels. 00:50:40 Speaker 1: I reached out to Drew Scott, the game warden who handled this case from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. He confirmed that Greg shot his elk on private ground, but citations were never issued. The landowner didn't want to press charges, and so the case was basically dropped. But Greg and Joe couldn't have known that would happen. Feared getting in trouble, and that could explain in part why they were so hesitant to approach law enforcement. 00:51:07 Speaker 3: They had the rhinals, they had the maps, They knew where they were hunting, they knew where it was for service in private crown. They didn't want people to know where they were at anyway, And when Aaron took off because they didn't want to get found out, it was almost kind of an afterthought that they ever wanted to call him in as messy. 00:51:27 Speaker 2: Yeah, they knew the elk. They had was illegal. 00:51:30 Speaker 3: That's why they wanted to take care of the creators first. 00:51:33 Speaker 1: The illegally harvested ELK helped explain why Greg and Joe had been deceptive, but by itself it wasn't enough to exonerate them. They were never arrested, But since the search and rescue teams still hadn't found Aaron's remains, investigators continue to wonder whether the pair of hunters had more than one reason to lie about what happened in the Crazy Mountains. That's next on Blood Trails, Part six, The Body without a Body, It was impossible to draw firm conclusions or even formulate any reasonable theories about what happened. As Greg told detectives a few months after Aaron went missing, the fact that they still hadn't found Aaron's remains weighed especially heavy on his family. 00:52:26 Speaker 5: I won't closure for me and Joe and you guys, and his wife Christine, and his boy Caleb, and you know, like I was just telling him, I mean, it's so sad. There hasn't been a funeral or memorial. It's you know, and little boy still thinks that his dad might come home Riley right, because he's missing. 00:52:48 Speaker 1: The status quo began to change in twenty fifteen when Sheriff Ronenberg was told that a rancher in the area had discovered a backpack the same make and model of the one Aaron was using. 00:52:58 Speaker 3: And when we went back, we found more evidence that he had been there. It was under shelter, it was under some sapling conifers. There was a lot of bear activity in the area. 00:53:10 Speaker 1: The backpack was found six miles to the east of where the boots had been found, well beyond the search area from the year before. The team searched the area in concentric circles, but still weren't able to find Aaron's body. But Sheriff Ronneberg did find one other thing. You know, I found the cup off of a thermos on a rock. And the crazy part of it is is, you know, you could see the buildings of a residence two miles in front of him from that rock. I mean it was right down the hill, just with two miles. 00:53:44 Speaker 5: Of the place. 00:53:45 Speaker 3: So it's a little little bit confusing. You think, is somebody that hypothermic that they'll stop and take a drink of something, or is he so scared of that person down there that he does not want to have anything to do with him. Where is that in relationship with his physical condition? 00:54:08 Speaker 2: You know, what's his mental condition. 00:54:10 Speaker 1: Aaron had walked six miles without boots and had come within two miles of a house he would have been able to see from the hill. It's possible he wasn't able to see it due to the snowstorm, or, as Sheriff Ronenberg suggests, was afraid to approach the landowner. 00:54:25 Speaker 2: Joe and Greg have filled erring with stories. 00:54:27 Speaker 3: You know, if you get caught trespassing up here, the landowners just going to string you up from a tree, You'll never be seen again. And just I think just scared the snot out of you. He had been over that trail before with his kids the previous summer, we ended up finding out, so he was a little bit familiar with the area. That's why we kind of think he was avoiding people as well, because he did not want to get caught in case he was on private ground. 00:54:56 Speaker 1: The reports don't mention anything about Greg and Joe talking to about landowners, and Yanni told me he's never heard any rumors about violence. But this area is a patchwork of public and private. So the sheriff might be right. It's also possible Aaron was afraid on his own without the prompting of his friends, but we don't really know for sure. Whatever the reason for Aaron's hesitation, the mountains still refused to give up his body. Conspiracy theories continued to flourish until. 00:55:25 Speaker 2: The next year. 00:55:26 Speaker 3: In August twenty sixteen, is the Dewdranch was given a ride and they went by a dead tree, and there was a skull lay in there right on the surface, and we found his lower mandible, probably thirty yards away. 00:55:46 Speaker 2: And then up above, just up above. 00:55:48 Speaker 3: There was a cowtrail, and just off the side of the cowtrail you could see some dirt had been pushed over, and that's where we found the hip And basically the rest of the balls that we found, the. 00:56:03 Speaker 1: Bones that hadn't been carried away by scavengers, were all in more or less the same place. But Aaron's clothes weren't in that pile. 00:56:12 Speaker 3: So at that point where we found this hip bone and the clothing was kind of on the trail, I went ahead and went back up and found some more clothing. I found his underwear actually, and about midway went up a little higher kind of trail, found his coat and a cell phone. 00:56:36 Speaker 2: It was a straight shot up the hill from where the backpack was. 00:56:40 Speaker 1: Aaron's body had been buried under a pile of dirt, and his clothes had been strewn around his body. Scavengers were likely responsible for some of that, but vultures and coyotes can't explain all of it. Jariff Roniberg thinks he knows what happened. 00:56:54 Speaker 3: You've heard of the shedding of clothes during hypothermia. That's what he's doing as he's going down, coming down the hill. He's shedding his clothes, shedding all his stuff. And I think, you know, something might have happened to him to where he just can't go no more. Maybe his energy is totally exhausted. He just is on the ground, can't get up, can't recover, and passes away. After he passes away. 00:57:22 Speaker 2: There's a whole lot of bear out there. 00:57:25 Speaker 3: Either a bear comes in and buries him, pushes the bank over to the top of him, or maybe predates him a little bit. And kyle'ser there. You know, there's all kinds of stuff that'll noa on you. That probably happened. I think a bear probably covered him for a while, and that's where he sat for two years. 00:57:47 Speaker 1: The medical examiner looked at what remained of Aaron's body and used dental records to confirm his identity. Park County detectives used that information, along with their previous investigation, to officially rule out foul play, and Aaron's were released to his family on September fifteenth, twenty sixteen. Of course, even with Aaron's body in front of them, investigators were limited in what they could conclude. They couldn't do a toxicology report, so we don't know what was in the Hunter's system at the time he died. We also don't know when he died. Sheriff Roniberg thinks, based on Aaron's gear and the weather, he likely passed away within seventy two hours of Christine reporting him missing, but it's possible he survived longer than that. We don't even really know what killed him. It could have been hypothermia or some kind of accident or something else. 00:58:36 Speaker 3: You know, we thought maybe he killed himself. There's a possibility of suicide in there too. The skull didn't show any defect you known men will probably take a firearm to commit suicide. He actually did have a pistol with him that had not been discharged, and the skull was fully intact. 00:59:00 Speaker 1: However, Aaron died. He was frustratingly tragically close to finding help. 00:59:06 Speaker 2: When he died. 00:59:07 Speaker 3: He was actually probably within a quarter mile of the road. As you go downhill at the bottom of the hill, there's a road going up to the du Dranch that connects you with the due Dranch and the ranch house down below, and he would have hit that within a quarter mile. 00:59:30 Speaker 1: Part Seven Unanswered Questions. I reached out to quite a few people to report this story, including all the detectives who worked on the case for Park County. All of them either didn't respond to multiple calls and messages. 00:59:44 Speaker 8: Or declined to be interviewed on the record. 00:59:47 Speaker 1: This is an old case that's been officially closed, so I get it they don't have much to gain from talking to me, and some told me explicitly that they're tired of rehashing questions that just don't have good answers. We still don't know, for instance, why Aaron took off his boots and kept walking. Greg proposed one theory before they discovered Aaron's remains, and it's an idea I've heard from others as well. 01:00:11 Speaker 5: I wonder if maybe he got to that spot and maybe his socks were wet, because he told me that he had fallen in the creek or gotten his feet wet. So maybe he got to that spot it was getting dark, and he decided that he wanted to maybe just make camp there for the night and build a fire, and then you know, maybe he was had a little fire going and took off his shoes to dry off his shoes and socks, and then started getting you know, all drunk on those pills or who knows what, and stumbled off the canyon and the dark. 01:00:44 Speaker 1: We now know Aaron didn't stumble into a canyon, and it would be strange to leave his boots to dry and then never return to them. Triff Roneberg has another theory. He thinks Aaron was more interested in hunting elk than Greg and Joe are letting on, and that might explain why he'd walk so many miles without his boots. 01:01:02 Speaker 3: The ant theory when when I take a look back and kind of hypothesize on what might have went on, I just bet you he was sitting there and some elk ran by him and he decided to go start stalking elk. So he changes out of his boots, which are for you know, trail boots are good solid, stiff soled boots and put on a pair of tennis shoes to go make a stock on some elk. 01:01:29 Speaker 2: And I think that's why he left the boots. 01:01:31 Speaker 1: If he left camp to chase elk on Wednesday, he would have gotten caught in the storm. 01:01:36 Speaker 2: When he took off after the elk. 01:01:38 Speaker 3: I think that's when the snow storm started, or maybe you know, it was at dusk when the elk came by, and he just took off after the elk, and that's when the snow storm started, and he was hot after them elk. And I think by the time he quit, the temperature dumps, and he doesn't have his normal. 01:02:00 Speaker 2: Gear that he carries. He's in like clothes. 01:02:03 Speaker 3: He hasn't prepared for a change of weather. He's getting more hypothermic, more hypothermic. He find shelter is unable to light a fire. Whether he goes out from shelter that night or out the very next morning, he either sees the yard light or he sees the red roofs of the house. He says, I gotta get my ass out of here. I'm probably in trouble. And he starts running downhill and it's just past the point of no return. 01:02:35 Speaker 5: Now. 01:02:36 Speaker 1: He shuts his clothes as he runs and is soon too exhausted to keep going. Maybe he trips and falls and just doesn't get back up. Giannis thinks the sheriff's theory is plausible, though he has some questions about the timeline. 01:02:50 Speaker 7: It seems like there's like there's more to this story, and I think we can all agree to that, right, Like that maybe is how that started. But like six miles to chase Elk in one direction and one day, I think it's a little bit long. He got those boots wet and was like, ah, heavy leather boots. I don't want to pack these around. You know, I've got these tennis shoes, frounning shoes that have worked as fine. It certainly is a tactic that people do. You're very fast and light on your feet in running shoes. They're quieter than boots for sneaking up on game. So that's not implausible that he would have like purposely done that to get closer to Elk. And yeah, maybe like he could have chased them one day for a couple three miles, and then he camped there and then continued on the next day, like I said, and he was just sort of following to herd. 01:03:43 Speaker 1: The other unanswered question is what role Joe and Greg played in this story. When I reached Greg via email, he at first said he was willing to be interviewed. He told me that no one from the media had ever reached out to him, but he said he didn't feel comfortable speaking on the record until he talked to Christine, who he said had become close friends with both him and Joe. Four days later, Greg got back to me with Joe c seed. He said that after talking with Christine, they felt it would be too painful to. 01:04:10 Speaker 8: Rehash what happened. 01:04:12 Speaker 1: He said that people would believe false conspiracy theories no matter what they said, and he encouraged me to follow my quote journalism ethics and not include any quote false or misleading information or statements about this tragedy or which placed Joe and me in a false light. Joe and Greg were cleared of suspicion by investigators, and that decision appears to have been confirmed by the location of Aaron's remains. Sheriff Roneberg wasn't involved in that investigation directly, but he thinks it's unlikely that Parro did anything nefarious to Erin. 01:04:44 Speaker 3: Why would they take him nine miles away from their base camp when there are perfectly good shale slides right above their base camp. 01:04:52 Speaker 2: You know, that's what the Indians used to. 01:04:54 Speaker 3: Do, how they buried their dead was they would lay them out on the shale field and push the bank over room. And you know there's still skeletons that have never been found for two hundred years. If they would have done him in, I think they would have done him in at the base camp when they had motive and opportunity, and would have buried him within reasonable distance from their base camp, not dragging his dead body nine miles. 01:05:23 Speaker 1: The sheriff says nine miles, but it was actually more like fourteen. And we're not talking about a smooth level path. 01:05:29 Speaker 8: That's a long way to drag a body. 01:05:32 Speaker 1: What's more, once Greg and Joe finally agreed to share the photos they'd taken on the hunt, investigators were able to determine that they had remained in the mountains for all six days after Greg's final interview with law enforcement detective Brian Green wrote. 01:05:46 Speaker 6: History and timeline were consistent with the available time slash date stamped photographs. Based on that consistency, it would have been almost impossible for them to have left the mountains at any time prior to their documented departure. 01:05:59 Speaker 1: In other words, the photos proved that the pair were in the locations where they eventually admitted to being. The Elk carcass proved they were in Park County near dead Horse Lake, and subsequent photographs proved they didn't kill Aaron and dump his body in the next county. When asked point blank by Detective Brian Green whether Greg had anything to do with Aaron's death, he denied it. 01:06:21 Speaker 4: Did you have anything to do with Aaron's death? 01:06:24 Speaker 5: No other than being on the hunting trip with him. I didn't know anything to do with his death. I feel like I could have done more to to go look for him afterwards, but not sure it didn't have anything to do with his death. 01:06:37 Speaker 4: One of the theories is is you know, you guys were out hunting and for whatever reason, neglected your friend, and all of a sudden he's dead, and you know, maybe you realize that he had an accident or whatever, and you don't want to go home and tell his wife that you know your husband died on our watch. Did you guys do anything to cover up his death, to hide him, to try to you know, hy the fact that you know where he is and you're not telling us or anything like that. 01:07:05 Speaker 5: Negatives. No. 01:07:07 Speaker 1: Greg and Joe might not have been directly or even indirectly responsible for Aaron's death, but it's clear they were still struggling with a huge amount of guilt. Joe had known Erin for a long time, He knew about aaron struggles with alcohol, and he, like Christine, second guests his decision to let Erin accompany them on the trip. In one of their initial interviews, Sergeant Herp says Joe began to cry as he thought of his friend possibly dead, lost and alone in the mountains. He told the sergeant he felt responsible for Hedges, as he knew he should not have taken him on the trip. In Greg's final interview with law enforcement, he reiterated Joe's sentiment. 01:07:46 Speaker 5: You know, we had been planning this trip all year long, physically training for it. Joe and I Aaron his heart never really seemed to be in it that he kept saying he wanted to go. And we've we've been hunt together for years and years, as was our seventh or eighth year hunting together, and you yeah, okay. And so I wasn't just gonna tell him that, you know, if you're not gonna get in shape, you're not gonna go. I wanted to I didn't do that. I knew that he had been drinking a lot. Joe told me that he'd been drinking a lot, and he showed up and he clearly just did not look that well. And right then and there, I wanted to be like, dude, you're not coming with us, but I just I didn't have the I didn't have the heart to do it. And I'd give anything to go back and tell him that you're not going. But we didn't do that. And I figured, you know, well he'll learn his lesson. You know, we're gonna run his ass into the ground and he's gonna be dragging ass, and next time maybe he'll take it more seriously. I figured that he'd make it to camp and he'd be so beat that he'd just lay in camp and wouldn't actually hunt. And I'm also thinking, well, good. You can just stay in camp and be a drunk and watch after the horse and the mule, and we'll go on elk and maybe that works out better. 01:09:07 Speaker 1: Anyways, this I think is enough to explain Greg and Joe's behavior, even putting the elk aside. They knew Aaron shouldn't have been allowed within ten miles of the back country. When they had their disagreement and Aaron left. They knew they shouldn't have allowed him to strike out on his own. They knew they should have done more to look for him in the subsequent days, and they admitted to investigators that Aaron wasn't prepared, either mentally or physically to survive the snowstorm. 01:09:33 Speaker 5: Although he wasn't in good condition, I felt like he could walk a trail system to where he knew the cash was. And you think doable, even somebody possibly incapacitated with alcohol, trail doable, doable only day at the time, I thought that, I mean, and retrospect, I think it was obviously too much. 01:10:01 Speaker 1: With this regret and guilt nagging at their hearts, it was easier for them to let Christine call law enforcement. They didn't want to be blamed for their friend's death and it was heartbreaking to look at their actions full in the face. That's my theory anyway. I don't know if it's true, and it doesn't make this story any less tragic. In fact, Greg said something in that last interview that makes the story, if possible, even more devastating. Greg said he noticed that the amount of alcohol Aaron brought with him was less than he would normally consume in five to seven days. He theorized that Aarin intended to use that trip to quote dry out and attempt to get his life together. He believed it was Aaron's intention all along to go to the gear Cash on his own. 01:10:43 Speaker 8: And work through the withdrawal process alone. 01:10:47 Speaker 5: Now, my theory is that I think that Aaron was about to go through severe withdrawals. I know for a fact that he was running out of alcohol, and I feel like he was abusing those pills and taking way more than he should have. I can't prove that, but that's what I feel like, and I think that he probably didn't want us to see it. I think he was probably going to be real sick for a few days, and we thought maybe that was best. 01:11:21 Speaker 9: Like he told his. 01:11:23 Speaker 5: Wife that he was coming up here to clear his head and get healthy, and in my mind, that would mean go through detox, come out off the alcohol, and hopefully try and stay off of it. I think that in his mind, I think he was going to go up there and he was going to spend a week in that canvas tent with the fire, and he was just gonna drink the rest of the alcohol that he had and then just let it get out of the system and hopefully, you know, he wouldn't have to go through an embarrassing detox because he had employees and he you know, he wouldn't want anybody to to see that. And I don't think he ever thought he was going to shoot an elk. I think he wanted to kind of go camping and clear his body of all that stuff. 01:12:08 Speaker 1: This is the first time this theory has been mentioned, but it does help explain why Greg and Joe didn't do more to look for Erin. If they thought he wanted to be alone, they may have decided it would be better to give him space. And if Aarin was going through alcohol withdrawal, it would also explain why he didn't do more to get help or get out. 01:12:29 Speaker 5: On his own. 01:12:31 Speaker 1: But While that helps explain the strange and confounding circumstances that surround this story, it also casts yet another shadow on Aaron's death. If Greg is right, Aarin's attempt to recover himself, to restore his relationships with his family and friends, and get his life and his marriage back on track, is, in a weird way what killed him. Rather than emerge from the mountains a new and better man, he didn't emerge at all. Christine knew this trip was the wrong way for her husband to kick his alcohol addiction, but she couldn't convince him to stay home. 01:13:12 Speaker 5: She probably, if she was to be honest with herself, would not be shocked that this happened. She begged him not to go. She even bought him in a gift card to the spot website so that he could go and get a spot to bring with him. That he wouldn't do it just because he's so hardheaded. She probably knew that it was coming at some point. If it wasn't this, it was going to be a motorcycle wrapped the next day or the next week, or it was it was going to be something. 01:13:42 Speaker 1: Of course, Christine wasn't out in the mountains with erin. Greg and Joe were and Greg can't help but wonder if this story would have had a different ending if he'd left his elk to look for his friend. 01:13:54 Speaker 5: You know, looking back that you know that that really really haunts me a lot, you know, right then, should have left that elk and gone down there and looked for his ass. You know, we just we thought he was gonna make it to that Sunlight camp. So in our minds, we thought that he was probably having a hard time. But it was early in the day, so we thought that I thought he was gonna make it up there. And it was only Sunday, and he said he'd be back Monday or Tuesday, and so we're in, we're you know, we got this this elk and now you know, not that that Aaron's not a priority, but my priority is, Okay, I got I got meat down. I need to take care of it right now. 01:14:50 Speaker 1: In the months and years that followed, Aaron's family and friends were left to pick up the pieces. 01:14:56 Speaker 5: How's the boy doing? Uh, he's I haven't actually spoken to him. I've just spoken to Joe, who talks to him. Basically, he's just confused because you know, Dad, he's not dead. Daddy's missing, but we don't know if he's coming back. Type of a thing, all right. 01:15:19 Speaker 10: At this point, she may have told him, she may have just told him he's dead. I don't know what she's told him, but he's just like any young boy would be. That's dad just disappeared off the face of the earth. 01:15:38 Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this episode of Blood Trails. If you'd like to see images from this case, head over to the meeater dot com slash blood Trails and click on the case file. For this episode, we've posted photos of Greg, Aaron, and Joe, along with a map of Aaron's route and some other official documents. A big thanks to Sheriff Ronneberg, Jannis Boutellis, Park County under Sheriff Dykstra, and Paul Hoyt, who was the voice of the police reports. If you have a tip about this case or another case you think we should cover, send us an email at blood Trails at themeeater dot com. That's a B l O O D T R A I L S at the meeater dot com. See you next time, and stay safe out there.