Welcome back to the Pathway Chili for this month's bonus Patreon minisode I'm Robin, I'm Jules.
And I'm Ashley. Let's dive into this month's case.
July twenty second, nineteen eighty five, Nolansville, Tennessee. After failing to pick up his wife from the bus station, seventy nine year old George Owens and his car are discovered to be missing from his home. One week later, George's abandoned vehicle is found on a hilltop in a rural wooded area over one hundred miles away, and piles of
kindling are found outside and in the back seat. Eyewitnesses report having seen George in the area looking disoriented, leading to speculation that he wandered off into the woods, but a search effort fails to turn up any trace of him.
After that, the path went Chile. So this month we're going to be exploring an unsolved missing person's case involving an elderly victim, the nineteen eighty five disappearance of George Owens. If you're an unsolved mysteries fan, you're probably familiar with this story, which is often ranked as one of the
saddest most heartbreaking segments ever featured on the show. George was a very well liked and well respected minister from a small town in Tennessee, who lived an ordinary life with his wife, Aileen, and seemed to be an unlikely candidate to find himself at the center of an unsolved mystery. But everything changed when Aleen left town to visit a family member and George failed to pick her up a
schedule from the bus station. Everyone became completely perplexed when George's abandoned car was found on a rural hill top over one hundred miles away, as George had no known connection to the area. However, based on reports from a number of eyewitnesses who were called seeing George, it became apparent that he may have suffered some sort of medical issue and become disoriented, which is why you wound up so far from home. But if that's the case, what
actually happened to George. Did he abandon his car and dive exposure after walking into the woods, or did he cross paths with the wrong person and become the victim of foul play? Frustratingly, even though the case is still unsolved to this day, the unsolved mystery segment is currently not available for viewing on their own film Rise channel on Amazon Prime or YouTube. So I thought that would be an ideal time to revisit it. On the path went Chile.
Okay, I can tell this is already going to be a heartbreaking case because poor George, he's seventy nine years old and he's going to pick up his wife and he never shows up. Then we find his car in a very unusual place. It's far away, he doesn't have a connection there, and so everyone starts wonder what happened? Did he meet foul play? Did something happen to him?
Like you said, medically, you know, it's seventy nine. Common things that don't really have a profound physical effect on people our age or young young ends can have really really critical mental health effects on elderly people. For example, something as easy as like a UTI. My dad recently was experiencing one of those after a surgery, or many of those after his surgery, and it literally made him hallucinate. He couldn't he couldn't really tell where he was, and
the doctor said, oh yeah. And elderly people when they get a urinary track infection, it has significant cognitive issues.
With it.
So it's possible that something like that happened to George, where no one saw signs of any kind of mental distress or any kind of physical distress, and then within days, maybe George suffered something that took him out of his element.
Yeah, that's the thing, because in this case, him suffering from some sort of medical issue which caused him to become disoriented and go to a strange place. It's pretty plausible from what I've heard. No one saw any warning signs. There didn't seem to be any medical issues with them prior to when he went missing. So if that's what happened, then it obviously overcame him very quickly.
So our story begins in nineteen eighty five and Nolansville, Tennessee, a small town of around fifteen hundred people located just over twenty miles southeast of Nashville. Our central figure is seventy nine year old African American man named George Owens, who lives with his seventy seven year old wife, Eline Owens. The couple were high school sweethearts and have been married
for sixty years. After retiring from his job as a custodian during the nineteen sixties, George became the associate minister at Nashville's New Hope Baptist Church. He's considered to be a very well liked and respected citizen within the community who never misses his Sunday services. On the morning of Monday, July twentie second, George was scheduled to drive from Nolan Hille to Nashville in order to pick up a Lien at the bus station as she was returning from a
trip to Ohio to visit her niece. Aleen's overnight bus ride arrived at six thirty am, but to her surprise, George was not there to meet her, and he never showed up. The couple had spoken on the phone at around three pm the previous afternoon, where George joked quote, well, I'll meet you if I don't oversleep. Indeed, Eileen hoped that George had simply overslept, but after waiting for an hour, she finally decided to call George's brother, Alfred and asked
him to come pick her up. Alfred attempted to call George but received no answer, so we went to meet Alean at the bus station and drove her home. When they discovered that both George and his green nineteen seventy two Dodge Start were missing.
Two place settings with a couple Sunday dinnerware were on the dining room table, and the only clothing which appeared to be missing was one of George's black suits. One month earlier, Alien had given George a black hat for his birthday, and even though George had worn it every single day since then, it was left behind. The couple's dog was also wandering around the house and appeared to have not been recently fed. Alfred became concerned enough that
he immediately contacted the police and reported George missing. Neighbors would say that they last saw George leaving the house on the afternoon of July to twenty first, driving his Dodge Dart on Nolansville Road towards Nashville, which they found unusual since George was not scheduled to pick up a lean until the following morning.
So it is possible that George was confused on the date, and that would signify that he was having some kind of mintal distress or some kind of cognitive issue that was going on. It's also really odd that it sounds like the dog would have been taken care of in a different manner, maybe put in a in a crate, maybe in a little room, maybe would have been you know, just had more food and water put out, and in this little hat that's kind of his safety blanket now
that his wife gave him. It's kind of his love letter from her. He leaves it and he's been wearing it every single day. So he's changing a lot of his just normal routine behaviors and God bless him. They even had the Sunday dinnerware set on the dining room table waiting basically waiting for her to come home, and he was going to spend the evening with her and it never happens.
Well, it strikes me is that he set two places with the Sunday dinnerware even though Aileen was not scheduled to come home until Monday morning. So I take that as a sign that he may become confused and thought that Aileen, he was supposed to pick her up on Sunday and then we'd be back home in time for dinner. And for all we know, maybe he showed up to the bus station and when she didn't show up, he was just left completely confused.
And at that time. We didn't have cell phones or anything like that where he could be calling and keeping in touch with her. This is a seventy nine year old man who's picking up his seventy seven year old wife.
I definitely think it feels like something was off and he was confused, and then, like you said, when plans aren't working out the way, he thought that could also lead to further distress and kind of fear, because that's what happens when you don't remember where you are or what day it is, or those kinds of things that leads to a sense of fear and panic.
My grandmother had to mention dementia in the last years of her life, and before she was moved into like a home, like a residence where they would care for them, she was in this really huge house all by herself on this property, and she would go to church on like a day at like five point thirty in the morning when there was no church service, and she would show up somewhere completely different and she'd be like knocking on somebody's house, being like I'm here for church, and
it would be like five am in the morning. So it is incredibly scary when somebody gets to that point. I mean not to say that he had dementia, but there could be any number of cognitive issues that could cause him to be very disoriented or confused. And that is such a scary position for the person who's confused and for the people around them who maybe don't know how to help them.
And what about if George was he was alone, like
his wife wasn't there. He's seventy nine. What if he had tripped and fallen and it wasn't really a significant fall where he felt a need to tell anybody, but he had accidentally hit his head, something had happened like that, like my mom has some stability issues now caring for my dad, where she's fallen and hit her head, hit her face, things like that, and she'll be like I'm fine, I'm fine, and my brother and I keep saying like yeah, but you don't know if you're fine or not right,
like you hurt yourself. And so if someone wasn't there telling him, like dad, like maybe you should go get checked out, and he just thinks he's fine, it's possible something minor like that happened too.
Oh, totally, It's very possible that at his age he could have had a slip and fall, and just hitting your head and maybe being mildly concussed could cause them like confusion or rapid cognitive decline without some kind of medical intervention. For six days, there would be no sign of George until his family was notified that his abandoned car had been discovered on a remote hilltop overlooking the Tennis River in a rural wooded area in Perry County.
The keys were still in the ignition, the battery was dead, the driver's side window was down, the back door was open, and George's cane was resting against the car. There was also a box of matches on the dashboard, even though
George had quit smoking a long time ago. The strangest detail was that there were piles of tree branches and brushed surrounding the vehicle, as if someone had been planning to start a fire, and a pile of kindling was stacked up in the back seat next to George's suit jacket. According to George's family, it was a common habit for him to go around his house, pick up wood and place it in piles. The only access to the hilltop was a very rough and rocky logging road, which would
have been difficult for George to navigate. While there were no obvious signs of struggle or foul play. A search and rescue operation was launched in the surrounding wooded area, but they could find no trace of George. Since this location was over a hundred miles away from George's home, no one could figure out what his car would have been doing there.
This would be very concerning for law n versement and the family. Like, Okay, I have this seventy nine year old man who's missing. Then we go and we discover his car. It's in a bizarre area, like a very rocky logging road. It's not something that you know seventy nine year old man's would be like, Oh that's fun,
let's go right up this hilltop. But if he was confused and he kept driving up this this rough road, what if let's say he did meet like a fallen tree branch, or he met something he couldn't kind of navigate around, or he was driving over things that made him feel uncomfortable. He gets out, he doesn't know where he is, and one of the things that is normal for him or comforting for him is that routine stacking of the wood. It's interesting that the family when they
heard that, weren't immediately like concerned. They said, well, my dad did do that, or George did do that? Right, this was normal for him to want to go gather wood. Now where he puts it would be very bizarre because he's not at his home, and maybe he is placing it in the back seat around the car. But to me, this seventy nine year old man, if he was super confused, how far could he have gotten from his car. That's the only part of me that says, Oh, my god,
did someone meet him there? It was also an African American man in Tennessee. It's twenty twenty three. In racism still a big deal, especially in the South. So did he meet somebody who was wanting to hurt somebody? I'm praying that he was not met with something else and that, you know, because God, that's just even more horrifying for him. So I don't know, this is sad. My heart hurts. I think maybe George was confused, it was trying to do something that made him feel in control and at home.
Yeah, exactly, Like I know that search efforts will often miss people's remains if they're looking through a wooded area, but the detail about George leaving behind his cane means that he wouldn't have been able to make it very far, so that does lend Creeden's to the idea that maybe this isn't just a case of someone walking and dying of exposure, and that he may have crossed passed with the wrong person and was the victim of foul play.
A local television station aired a missing person's bulletin with George's photograph, and it wasn't long before a number of people came forward who claimed to have recognized him. One of these witnesses was Larry Potts, the owner of Our Garage in the town of Santa Fe, who claimed that sometime between nine and ten am on the morning of July to twenty second, George stopped at his establishment to
get a flat tire repaired. This was around three hours after he had been scheduled to pick up a lean at the bus station, and it was unclear what George was doing in Santa Fe to begin with, since it was nearly fifty miles southwest of Nashville. However, Plots thought that George looked a bit confused and said he wandered around with his cane for thirty minutes while the tire
was being replaced before George paid him in cash. He also recorded George asking him for directions to Nolansville before he left and turned north on Highway seven.
So he went there after he was supposed to pick up Alien, which means he left a day early and then was getting his tired changed late after he was supposed to pick her up. Where she's calling her brother saying like, hey, George isn't here. Do you think this is a mistaken identity? Larry seems to have really known who George was. Do you think he could have missed what day it was? Like maybe it was the day before.
Well, that's the thing is that he was last leaving his house on Sunday afternoon, and this was the following morning. So like I could see George leaving on Monday morning and possibly becoming confused and driving in the wrong direction when he was supposed to be picking up his wife at the bus station. But it makes me wonder if he left the previous afternoon, where was he during that window of around twelve to sixteen hours before he wound
up at this gas station in Santa Fe. I mean, I think the sighting from the gas station attendant is pretty convincing because George is are pretty distinct people. There couldn't have been that many elderly black people in rural Tennessee who had gone missing during that time period. And as we're going to talk about, there's another eye witness who's going to come forward who tells a very similar story to the one that Larry Potts told, which makes me think that his sighting is believable.
Mary Joe Phoebus, a clerk at the Lobelville Market, claimed that a man matching George's description walked into the establishment and purchased some ice cream before walking back outside to his car. However, a few minutes later, George re entered the store to purchase some cigars, and he was also given a box of matches. But afterwards, George started talking about how he couldn't find his wife and went on about how they used to love dancing together, which gave
Phoebus the impression that he may have been disoriented. She decided to call the local clinic to see if George's wife might be there, but there were no patients matching her description. George then left the market, and this was the last time that he was confirmed to be alive. However, there would be one more sighting of George's Dodge start
later that afternoon. The remote hilltop with the view was discovered was about twelve miles from the market, and a local resident who lived near the site remembered seeing the dart drive uphill on the logging road towards the spot. But interestingly enough, the witness also said there was a pickup truck following George's car uphill on the same road before they saw the truck re emerge and drive downhill
about fifteen to twenty minutes later. This led to speculation that the person driving the truck may have had an encounter with George on the hilltop, but neither the truck nor its driver werever identified.
Oh that's heartbreaking. It does make it very concerning that. Okay, I saw this distinct car going up this logging road. It doesn't really fit there, and then all of a sudden there's a truck right behind it and it comes down about fifteen to twenty minutes later. I wonder if this person had seen him and had noticed that he was not stable and thought, Okay, this is a very
easy target. Not only is the elderly, but he's clearly struggling with is you know, cognitive ability, And so maybe they saw him as somebody they could attack or steal from or take his car. I don't know. It seems like obviously he's a prime candidate to be somebody that would be hurt by another person. But why what did George have? He was seventy nine, Like, unless he was talking about money and jewelry and things like that he had, what would someone want from him?
I mean that would make sense, Like under different circumstances. I might think that the presence of the pickup truck is just a coincidence. But there was this was a
very remote logging road. So what are the odds that this truck would be following George's car around the exact same time, unless you, like you said, someone saw George in town, Bobby looked vulnerable and decided to follow him, and when George stopped at this remote spot, the driver of the truck then decided to take advantage of the situation.
Or you have someone who's a coward and says this is an old man, an old black man, who's weak and things like that, And I'm going to take out my you know, bias season and racism and hatred on this man because he won't even know what's going on, do you know what I mean? Like, I don't know, I don't know. Now I feel like someone hurt him.
Strange that at this moment between this very small window of time that somebody who would be capable of murdering him could have done it. But also they did a thorough search and he didn't have his cane, so how far could he have really gone? And if he was murdered, what did the perpetrator do with him?
And that's what I'm thinking, is that they didn't kill him at the scene, but could have abducted him in the pickup truck. And that's why he was seen coming down the hill only fifteen to twenty minutes later. So George, if he was murdered, his body could be at a completely different location.
It just sounds like they're really opening themselves up to great risk, right, Like once you abduct somebody, it just feels like the risk is far greater than to murder them at the scene, Like what would you possibly want with his physical body?
So Based on the reports of George's behavior at the garage and the market, it was theorized that he might have suffered a medical issue, such as a minor stroke, which caused him to become confused and drive to a remote location over one hundred miles from his home before he vanished. Sadly, Aleen Owens was left completely devastated by her husband's disappearance, stating quote, after being together all that time, I can't get used to losing him, least not the
way I lost him end quote. She eventually moved out of her house into an apartment and passed away in nineteen eighty nine. The case would be profiled on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries in August of nineteen ninety two, and it featured interviews with George's brother, Alfred, but the segment failed to generate any promising new leads. The following year, George was legally declared dead and his grandson would inherit
thirty three thousand dollars from his estate. But after thirty eight years, there's still no answers about what actually happened to George Owens. So I guess you could say the path went chilly.
As when you read about how Aileen was talking about how I just can't get used to losing him, at least not the way I lost him. It's so crazy true. These two had been high school sweethearts. Their entire world
was one another. Like people think, oh, okay, it's this person who you talk to and those kinds of things, But when you lose a spouse, it's someone that used to put their hand on your back when you were cooking, or tease you while you're brushing your teeth, or like all these little moments, even the moments that you want to kill them, right, it's those moments that you miss so badly. And I Aileen had been with him for how long, like sixty sixty some odd years, so she
doesn't know a life without him. And now she's left saying, not only did he pass away, which is part of life, it's part of loving as you lose, but you lose in natural ways or you get prepared to lose them. And here she really thought he was coming to pick her up at the bus station, and he never showed up. And she also never got to have his body to make decisions of. You know, is he going to be buried? Is he going to be cremated. Do I get his remains? Do you know? And do we get to celebrate him
in the way that he would want? Do I get to bury his body? None of those things came, which provides finality to a death right. George just disappeared. So Aileen has this idea of I lost my partner and they really might be lost, like I don't know where he is, so oh my god, my heart breaks. My heart breaks so badly for them.
Yeah, you reach a point where you get to be that age and you know that one of these days my spouse is probably going to pass away of natural causes. But this is a completely different animal when your spouse just vanishes without a trace and you have no idea what happened to them. Because it's very rare for an elderly person to just go missing and never be found.
But it's particularly sad when it involves someone who was married to his spouse for sixty years since they were teenagers, and now she has to live the rest of her life not knowing what happened to him.
And they probably wanted to be buried beside each other. Like how sad is that? Where you plan your whole life. You're married for so long and you're just kind of in the winter of your life, right You're coming close to the end, and you have the person that you love with you, and you think that when it comes my time to depart the earthly plane, I'm going to have my body beside the person that I love and we will rest eternally there. And to have that taken
away from you, it's just it's so sad. And for those other family members who remain, they don't have a grave to go to, and this case just breaks my heart.
So if you were to ask an Unsolved Mysteries fan which moments from the show put a major lump in their throat, many of them would respond by uttering these five words quote, I can't find my wife. Yes. The reenactment depicting a disorient to George Owen's reminiscing about his wife in the market and acting concerned about being unable to find her is definitely one of the most heartbreaking
scenes in the history of the show. Say what you will about the quality of the acting in some of these reenactments, but the elderly actor they found to play George was very, very good, and that scene is one of the big reasons people still remember this story all these years later. But as you can imagine, it's quite frustrating that this segment is currently not available for viewing
on the usual channels. Now. I'm sure you know that I have a particular fascination with mysteries in which someone goes missing or is found dead at a faraway location the victim had no reason to be at and while this story definitely fits that criteria, it's less mysterious when
you're dealing with an elderly victim. It seems very likely that the reason George wound up in a remote area over one hundred miles from his home was because he suffered some sort of medical issue which affected his memory, whether it be a minor stroke or an undiagnosed case
of Alzheimer's or dementia. Years before they aired this segment, unsolved mysteries that actually profiled a similar story about another elderly African American man named Rogers Kane, who vanished after leaving his home in Los Angeles, and his abandoned car was eventually found on a city street. Based on the accounts of some eyewitness who interacted with Rogers signs pointed to him having some sort of medical issue which caused him to lose his memory and forget who he was.
While Rogers was never found, the best case scenario is that someone could have picked him up and taken him to a medical facility for treatment, where he lived out the remainder of his life as a John Doe because no one could identify him. But in this case, George Owens's vehicle was found in a rural, wooden area in the middle of nowhere, so the odds of him being picked up by a good Samaritan and taken somewhere for treatment are not great, no matter what you believe happened
to George. The visual from the unsawd Mystery segment of his abandoned Dodge Dart sitting on that remote hilltop with a pile of kindling in the back seat and George's cane resting against the car is incredibly eerie.
It is it's so scary when you have the idea that that truck followed him up. If you had just said that his Dodge Dart went up that road and the neighborhood seen that, that's it makes sense with the kind of cognitive issues we were talking about. But once that truck goes and comes straight back down, like, did they not see this elderly man? If they did, did they go up after him? What was what was happening? So that truck is what really turns my stomach. What
it's also interesting is that Roger Caine case. Like you said, it's this elderly man who is has left his house and possibly got picked up for a medical issue and just simply couldn't remember who he was. Have you guys seen or listened to the podcast Room twenty about the guy named sixty six Garage? No, no, oh my god, it's so good. So it was one of those I
just found on a road trip back to Florida. But it's called Room twenty, and it was about a unnamed patient that's at this facility and he's unconscious, and does it They don't know who he is, and so above his bettages says sixty six garage, which is I think the street number in this place that they found him, but no one knew who he was, And so the podcast is this reporter chasing down who this man's identity was. But I remember that whole time thinking someone is sitting
at home going where is my loved one? And what's really sad is that the person is alive. And if rog just really was taken to a hospital and treated as a John Doe, that poor family missed being able to be beside him and to be there when he passed away. In those types of things heartbreaking. We know George didn't suffer a fate like that, because George was
up on this hill. No one in that truck I doubt took him with them, because they would have been able to say this is this truck's registered to George Owen's, Like I found him, I put him in my car, I took him to the hospital, and this is where his car is. They would be able to identify George immediately.
You would hope in cases like Roger just or if that was the case that he was in a facility and they didn't know who he was or he wasn't able to communicate that, or like the one you were talking about Ash, that they would put their DNA in like ancestry dot com or something like that in those databases and hope that family members would have also put their DNA in there in the off chance that maybe
they would get a match. It seems like now there's a lot more tools for that, but back then it's just how would you ever communicate that.
You wouldn't be able to. I mean, that's a thing that's so difficult, especially for poor George. Back okay, back in eighty five. You know, God bless they. They surely weren't running DNA or anything like that. So if George had been brought in and wasn't maybe near his car when he was located by somebody who was being a good Smaritan, I don't know that they would have had technology like that, But in George's case, it seems far less likely than in the other cases we were talking about.
And they didn't even have the Internet, Like, no one was on the internet in nineteen eighty five, so spreading information was far more difficult. And what adds an extra element of tragedy to this story is that George sounded like an all around good person, and he left behind a wife, Eileen, whom he'd been with, who'd been with
him for sixty years. As you can imagine, it was not easy for Eleen to adjust to life without him, but it was extra difficult since he'd gone missing and she had no idea if he was actually dead or alive somewhere. It sounds like George and a Leen rarely spent time apart, so it was just bad luck that he may have suffered some sort of medical issue on the one day she happened to be out of town visiting relatives. If this had occurred while Eleen was at home,
she may have been able to prevent George from driving off. Now, on the basis of the unsolved mystery segment, Robin had initially theorized in his Trail Link Cold episode that George became confused well honest way to pick up a lien at the bus station in Nashville on the morning of Monday, July twenty second, which caused him to drive in the wrong direction and become lost. However, upon further research, it now seems that George may have actually left to tell
him on Sunday the twenty first. We have neighbors claiming they saw George driving away from the house that afternoon, and there were two place settings found at the table with what Aileen specifically described as their Sunday dinnerware, even though her bus was not scheduled to arrive until Monday, morning at six thirty am. So I get the impression that George had gotten it into his head that he was going to pick up his wife that day and bring her home for Sunday dinner.
That's exactly what I think happened. I think that he left the day early, He got to the bus station and thought, Okay, where is she. He's already confused, so these facts not lining up makes him even more confused. He asks for directions and he tries to follow those. If he ends up somewhere he's not familiar with, again, it's going to complicate the disposition that he's in. And you even have people saying that up through the twenty thirds.
So for two days, he's telling people he can't find his wife, he needs to go forget his wife, and he's getting further further away from his home. So it seems very probable that that was the reality of what was happening. Was this mental distress or kind of lack of knowledge of really what was happening his reality. But I think at some point it is possible that someone watched that and said, ah, what an easy target. I'm going to follow him.
Alien said she last spoke to George. On the phone on the afternoon of the twenty first, and did not notice anything unusual, as George said he was going to meet her at the bus station the following morning, so it must have been a short time later that he suffered a stroke or something which caused him to become
confused and disoriented. In fact, it's possible that George even drove to the bus station to pick up Alien on the twenty first and was totally thrown off when she failed to show up, which explains why he was later seen rambling on about how he couldn't find his wife. The next confirmed sighting of George took place between nine and ten am on the morning of the twenty second, when he stopped at the garage in Santa Fe to
get his tire replaced. According to the Larry Potts, George appeared to be lost and asked for directions before he left. This might go a long way towards explaining why George wound up where he did, because it sounds like he asked for directions to Nolansville, but there may have been a misunderstanding and Potts instead gave him the directions to Lobilville, which was over fifty miles in the opposite direction, and sure enough, George was seen in Lobilville the following day.
Oh, poor thing. It is very possible that either Larry was mistaken when he heard what George asked for and or maybe George interpreted it wrong, like maybe Larry was right and George went the opposite way. Oh, it's so sad, poor Larry's going. Like, Oh man, I saw him, Like I changed his tires for him. I knew he was leaving. I feel sad for him, and I feel sad for the people that said I saw him and I could
tell you was struggling, because what do you do. You don't know somebody's disposition or what did He's at a point you need to intervene or anything to that extent.
Oh yeah, Like you can see the interview with Mary Joe Phoebus, the store clerk at the market, who clearly seems haunted by the fact that even though she did what she could to try and help George, she felt she could have done more and maybe would have prevented him from disappearing. But at that point, you just never know. You're not going to have alarm bells and feel that this person is just going to vanish without a trace.
And it's one of those things. Could you imagine being like, sir, you're not making sense, Sir, you're confused, and he's he's not. He has his faculties to him, and like that could get really awkward and confrontational pretty quick. It's hard to judge. Like I watch people with different abilities and things like that, and I always go, should I help? Should I reach for that? Should I ask them if I can get this? Or is that frustrating for them? Do you know what
I mean? Like, because they're very capable of doing it by themselves in their own way, so it's, oh, I don't know. It's very hard as an onlooker to know when to intervene and when not to. When it's someone's health, right, when someone's getting hurt, it's easy to say you should intervene, But with medical stuff or not knowing if it's medical stuff, that gets a lot harder.
It's highly individual, right, like somebody may want the help, but then you go and try to provide the exact same help to another person and they may be offended. So it is very difficult to tell if he would take kindly to this, or if he would find it really offensive that somebody is insinuating that he doesn't have his wits about him. So I can see how all of these bystanders who encountered him and tried to do
what they could feel guilty about it. But I do believe that they did everything that was kind of in their power at that time, Like what were they supposed to do? Call the police, call an ambulance and be like, this man is confused. I feel like that would have been overstepping and they would have had no way of knowing that this was going to.
Happen to George.
Now, in missing persons cases, you're always going to have sightings of the victim from eyewitnesses who were mistaken about who they saw. But given where George's car all time wound up, I think it's safe to say that the eyewitness sightings in this case are accurate, and the evidence indicates that George wound up in an unfamiliar place because
he was disoriented. The Loboville Market clerk Mary Joe Phoebus was interviewed on Unsolved Mysteries, and she was clearly haunted by the fact that, even though she made an attempt to call the local clinic to help George find his wife. She wished she would have done more to help him.
At first, people were baffled when a box of matches were found on the dashboard of George's car, since he'd given up smoking a long time ago, but Phoebus confirmed that she gave these matches to him when he purchased cigars at the market. Even if George had not smoked in a while, he may have brought the cigars instinctively because he was remembering an old habit.
He very much could have when he is sitting there and doing the cigars. Also, I think when he is stacking that wood, it's all going back to those old habits. It's okay. Things that you talk to someone like you were saying, Jules, your grandmother had Alzheimer's or dementia. They start to regress back to like a younger year. They'll think their parents are still alive. They'll think a sibling that's passed is still alive. They'll think they're living in
their childhood home, right. They start to kind of go backwards into their memories that are comforting, that are secure, and so the smoking, the stacking wood, the standing outside his car with his cane right anything that is his family was saying, Oh, he used to do that or that was normal for him when he was at his home. I could see those being the behaviors that he's doing in the midst of being completely distressed. That's his familiar comfort.
And he also when he mentioned in the mark about how he and his wife used to go dancing together, So it's almost like he's bringing up this happy memory of him in a leen to deal with the stress of not being able to find her. Given that it takes just over an hour to drive from Santa Fe to Lobelville and these separate sightings took place over twenty four hours apart, this begs the question what was George
doing during that period of time. In fact, if he actually left his home in Nolansville on the twenty first, what were his whereabouts before he turned up in Santa Fe on the morning of the twenty second. It's incredibly sad to think that George may have been driving around aimlessly looking for his wife for nearly two straight days, and you have to wonder if he spent these nights sleeping inside his car. It's still not clear how George's car wound up on that remote hilltop twelve miles outside
of Lobosville. But he may have simply gotten lost and became very confused when he arrived at the location, since there was only one road in or out of there. On the surface, the detail about the piles of kidling being found inside and around the car might seem pretty baffling, but like we said, it just makes more sense after you learned that George had a habit of collecting wood and assembling piles at his house, so once again it seems like he may have instinctively been doing something which
was a familiar habit. I know that Aileen expressed her belief that George would not have placed that kidling in the back seat because he always went out of his way to keep his car spotless. But if he was disoriented, he would have been capable of anything. It's possible George did this because he was planning to spend the night at that location. But of course the big mystery is what ultimately happened to him.
And how far could he have gotten. Like you said, Robin, his cane was there, and if he needed a cane, then he couldn't sit there and walk down this rugged logging road. This wasn't, you know, a park, This wasn't a nature preserve or something like that. They were describing this as a pretty rough logging road that you typically wouldn't drive up unless you had a purpose of driving
up there. So when you also look at the wood in the back seat, I think, with all of his faculties, no, of course, no one's going to be putting wood in their car. But for all we know, he thought that that was the back of a truck he was supposed to be loading the firewood into, or he was trying to prepare for you know, the winter or something, and he's kind of hoarding the wood in the car. We don't know what George was going through at that point to say he wouldn't have put the wood in there.
He very well might have not been thinking that this is my car. He could have been cognitively thinking he was somewhere else while he was doing that. I find it really disturbing that George's body still has not been found, that there's been no remains around that area that are linked to George. Did someone put him in that truck and take him somewhere else?
Well, of course, the obvious explanation would be that George wandered away from his car into the woods and died of exposure. Even though an extensive search and rescue operation was launched and they failed to find George's body, He'd already been missing for a week by that point, so any number of things could have happened to his remains, such as them being torn apart and spread around by animals.
There are numerous documented cases where an individual has gone missing in a remote wilderness area and a search effort failed to turn up anything, but then years later someone just happens to stumble across the victim's remains, as they had been completely missed during the original search. I guess what different this case from many others is that George left his cane behind, and you have to wonder how
far he would have been able to walk without it. Theoretically, if he did succumb to exposure, this would have occurred only a short distance from his vehicle, making him easier to find. But as it's been proven time and time again, even the best search and rescue operations can miss human remains. However, the one detail which might lend credence to the idea
of George being a victim of foul play. Is the eyewitness sighting of the pickup truck, which appeared to be following George's dodge start on the logging road towards the hilltop where the vehicle was found. That same truck was then seen heading back down the road in the opposite direction, and the driver has never been identified. Now, this occurred in Perry County, which is the least densely populated county
in the state of Tennessee. So what are the odds of two strangers driving separate vehicles on that very remote logging road so close together.
It's interesting too, with such a remote place, you'd think that the neighbor, if this was kind of a common truck that was going up and down that logging road, that they'd be like, oh yeah, like that's you know, we see that truck every Monday through Friday or whatever.
But it is a truck on a logging road. So I wonder if it was someone just simply passing by and simply you know, like went and buy a car that had no one there, or George's out there and he's fine, he appears fine, he's talking to him, and passes by or you might mind your own dang business
on a logging road and just keep going. But he came back so quickly as what's bizarre, Like if you were driving up this logging road for work, for a purpose, I feel like whatever you were doing up there would take more than fifteen minutes.
And we do know that the driver this pickup truck never did come forwards to confirm and say that, Oh yeah, I went up that logging road and I saw an old man standing outside his car, but he looked completely fine. But then again, you also have to remember it's nineteen eighty five. Information doesn't travel as quickly this is world tennesseee.
So even if the driver of the pickup truck is innocent, maybe he just never even heard about George's disappearance and that's why he never came forward and provided any information. But then you also have to ask yourself why would they be driving up there to begin with? Since it sounds like this road was the only way to reach the hilltop. You'd have to think that even if the pickup truck driver was a completely innocent bystander, they would have at least seen George up there and might have
had some useful information to offer. But on the other hand, if the driver harmed or abducted George, perhaps they drove away from the location with his body inside their truck, which would explain why he was never found. I guess it's possible that someone could have seen George acting confused and disoriented in lobile Bille, and because of his age, they decided to take advantage of the situation and followed
him to this remote location. George was wearing a gold watch and a ruby ring at the time he went missing, and neither of these items were found, so this could have made him the potential target for a robbery. And given that he was an African American man and this the rural Deep South, perhaps he was targeted for some
sort of hate crime by a racist local. Of course, these theories are nothing more than speculation, and without the sighting of the pickup truck, there probably would be any reason at all to suspect that George was the victim of foul play. The eyewitness also said that the truck was only out of sight for about fifteen to twenty minutes before it drove back down the logging road, which
doesn't sound like nearly enough time. To dispose of George's body unless they took George with them when they left the sea, But given the remoteness of the location, why would they bother to do that? So in the end, I do think the most logical explanation is that George simply wandered off into the woods and died of exposure and they just simply never found his body. But unless they uncover any evidence someday, we'll probably never know for certain.
All that being said, if you happen to have any information on the unsolved disappearance of George Owens, please contact the appropriate authorities. Jules Ashley, any final thoughts on this case?
So sad when you guys are talking about this case and you talk about both Aileen and George and their
love for each other. George probably was for two days frantically trying to find the love of his life, and he's talking to people about how wonderful she is and how he needs to find her, and he's worried about not finding her, and how they are so in love and used to dance, and I mean, it's just this like classic older man who's just enthralled and in love with this woman and he's scared because he can't find her. It's so sad. And then you have Aileen who said, what is life without him?
Like?
I don't know how to live without him? And even though that was going to be a possibility and reality soon for us because of our age or like it's a reality, it wasn't going to be like this. And I was going to get to say goodbye to him, whether it was as a deceased body that I'm saying goodbye to or while he's passing away, I'd get to be there with him and say goodbye, Like that's that's the logical thing that would make sense. And yet she didn't have any of that. She was left with where
is he? What happened to him? And, like we've said a million times, when you don't know the answer to that, your brain goes everywhere trying to fill in the details, and fear and sadness and just you know, hopelessness kind of takes over. I pray to God that I'm seventy nine and loving my husband just as much, and I just pray that they find a body that matches George's because it was important to know what happened to him. He was loved he was an amazing human and without
the answers, it's just sad. You were right. This is one of the saddest cases we've talked about.
Yeah, this case has really touched me. I mean, you can't really think of a sadder case like I'm looking for my wife and just to think of George's potential last moments if he met with foul play or if he was just seized shortly thereafter after that the last days of his life were found looking for a lean woman who he clearly spent so much time with and loved so much. It just breaks my heart for this
whole family. And it just seems like the percentage of chance that you would encounter somebody who would do you harm when you're an elderly man in a situation such as this, it just it doesn't seem that likely. But I lean towards there being a potential for foul play because, like we mentioned, this is like the smallest county, and this is pretty unpopulated, and this road is like rural, so the chances of two vehicles going up there only one emerging. And we have a situation where George is
missing but his caine is left behind. This isn't a man who is extremely mobile without his cain and they search the surrounding area, So you'd have to believe that he would have exhausted or would have laid down somewhere that he could have been found, whether alive or deceased, by the searchers. But as Robin mentioned, there have been plenty of cases where you do have a lot of search parties going through the area and then they find
the victims years later. Didn't that happen with the Jamison family.
Yes, Like they were missing for technically four years, and then they found the remains on a path that was only a couple miles from their abandoned vehicle, and even though there was a very extensive search effort, the remains
had just been missed that entire time. So yeah, I've always been haunted since I watched this case in Unsolved Mysteries over thirty years ago, and I stink from a production standpoint, the reenactments of George wandering disoriented in the market are some of the most heartbreaking moments on the show, because you can totally believe this is exactly what happened to George, that he was just living an ordinary day planning to pick up his wife, but then just something
snapped in him. He suffered some sort of medical issue which caused him to become confused, and when he couldn't find a lean when he thought he was supposed to pick her up, he just started driving around aimlessly until he got lost and then ultimately wound up on this remote hilltop in rural Tennessee. I mean, Okham's razor does tell me that George probably wandered into the woods and died of exposure, and they just didn't find his remains.
But like we reiterated, the two details which may pointwards something more sinister is him leaving his cane behind and also the presence of the unidentified pickup truck. And it's definitely a terrible scenario that someone would target this harmless elderly man, possibly for hate crime, possibly simply because he was black. But until we find a body or any evidence to suggest what happened, then this is going to
remain an unsolved mystery. But of course, the best case scenario is that someone did find George, wandered around dis oriented and gave him a good home, put him in a long term care facility. But because they couldn't identify him. He just lived the remainder of his days as a John Doe and then died a peaceful death inside his
own bed. I mean, the chances of that happening are very slim because he went missing from such a remote area, but this was the pre internet world of nineteen eighty five, and it would be possible for things like that to slip through the crack, and it would definitely be a best case scenario if they were able to prove that with DNA testing, But until then, this will definitely remain one of the saddest mysteries we've ever covered on our podcast. So that about brings an end to this month's bonus
Patreon minisode. Thank you so much for your support, and we'll be back again next month to provide you with another bonus minnisode.