transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] At two o'clock on a clear November afternoon, a single rifle shot cracked through the big woods of northern Maine. Shirley Smith thought her husband had just tagged a deer, but Bob Smith was gone. There was no storm, no cliff, no rushing river, just thick timber, a healthy search radius, and a man who seemed to evaporate between one gunshot and the next. 30 years later, investigators and Bob's family are still trying to piece together what happened, and none of the theories do much to ease their minds. That's next on Blood Trails. Bob Smith wasn't what you'd call a serious deer hunter, but the lifelong Maine resident still knew how to bring home venison, even if his methods were a little unorthodox.

Speaker 2:
[01:03] To go hunting wasn't something that really drove him a lot, but he liked being outdoors. Dad had told me one time he got two deers, and one of them he lucked out because he sat down on a log and fell asleep when he woke up, the deer was there. So he wasn't a big tracker and really into it, just enjoying being outside.

Speaker 1:
[01:21] That's Marge Byther, Bob's daughter. Her father's love of the outdoors was known in the family, which is why in the fall of 1997, Bob and his wife Shirley traveled to a deer camp in northern Maine. Bob had just survived a battle with lymphoma, and Shirley's brothers wanted to give the 70-year-old farmer a place to relax and recharge.

Speaker 2:
[01:42] She wanted to bring dad in after the summer with his cancer to give him a week off to get away from everything, just to enjoy the time and to have the trip together.

Speaker 1:
[01:52] But Bob and Shirley didn't just laze around camp. It was deer season, this was Maine, and Bob was by all accounts a capable woodsman. So around 1 PM on November 18th, the pair ventured into the surrounding Timber Company land in hopes of scaring up a whitetail. Here's retired Maine State game warden Dave Milligan describing what happened next.

Speaker 3:
[02:14] Shirley and Bob had gone out what they called the town line, which was a marked slash trail, pretty easy to follow. It's almost like the best path you could ever want through the woods. Story was that they went out there, probably about a half a mile, maybe a little more, stopped. And Bob was going to leave his wife on the town line so she could look down the town line and kind of make a big circle around her, you know, trying to push a deer across in front of her.

Speaker 1:
[02:43] With no snow on the ground that would allow them to track a deer through the dense forest, it wasn't a bad plan. Deer would likely be bedded up at that time of day and Shirley might get a chance at a shot if Bob was able to push one towards her. At first, it seemed like it might be working, but as Shirley later told Game Wardens, there was something off about the way her husband was acting.

Speaker 3:
[03:07] She said she saw Bob come back across the town line, but his head was down and he never acknowledged her. He never looked at her, never acknowledged her. She thought, well, maybe he's got a deer track going there or whatever, even though she hadn't seen a deer go by. And then he disappeared into the woods there.

Speaker 1:
[03:25] About 20 minutes passed when suddenly a gunshot broke the stillness of the cool November afternoon. In the years that followed, that shot became known to investigators as the two o'clock shot.

Speaker 3:
[03:39] She heard a rifle shot and she's like, oh, good, he took a shot at a deer. So she was excited, she waited for a while. Then she went up closer to where she'd seen him cross and waited and I think she probably yelled to him. If I remember right, no answer.

Speaker 1:
[03:55] Shirley ventured into the woods. She scanned the forest, yelled Bob's name, but her cries were swallowed up in the silence of the trees. As the minutes ticked by, Shirley's hope of a successful hunt or even just a relaxing day in the woods gave way to panic. Bob had vanished. Shirley returned to camp in the hope that her husband had somehow made it back unnoticed. When she still didn't find him, she and her brothers called the Maine Warden Service.

Speaker 4:
[04:29] All indications were it was fairly straightforward.

Speaker 1:
[04:32] Jim Fahey and Dave Milligan were among the first wardens on the scene. Jim told me they expected to find Bob within just a few minutes.

Speaker 4:
[04:40] An elderly person that's been recovering from cancer, physically, how far can they actually go? People can surprise you. I've learned that. A person in good physical shape, that panics, they can cover some ground. But indications were he should be right there. But he wasn't.

Speaker 1:
[04:59] The search for Bob Smith was at the time the largest ground search in the Maine Warden Service's 117-year history. 96 search teams of wardens and volunteers scoured a six-mile circle. Dog teams worked to pick up Bob's trail, and the National Guard sent helicopters equipped with infrared cameras. Officials at the time estimated that searchers spent a combined 150,000 hours looking for Bob. But as those hours stretched into days and days into weeks, game wardens began to realize that this might not be a simple case of a missing hunter. The deeper they dug, the more they wondered if something else had taken place on that quiet fall afternoon. Nearby hunters came under suspicion, and recent investigations have uncovered new information that shines an even more disturbing light on the events of that tragic day. For Jim and Dave, Bob's case still haunts them nearly 30 years later.

Speaker 3:
[06:00] Yeah, it's very hard. I mean, I'd be lying if I said it didn't bother me, and, you know, it bothered me a lot because that night when we got there, Shirley was crying, and, you know, and I made the mistake of saying, you know, don't worry, Shirley, we do this all the time. We'll have them out. Don't worry. And that was something I never said to anybody again after that.

Speaker 1:
[06:23] Marge didn't hear about what happened until the next day when her aunt visited her at work. As she remembers it, she somehow couldn't make sense of what she was hearing.

Speaker 2:
[06:32] I was annoyed because she couldn't get to the point because she kept saying that he was lost. I was like, what do you mean lost? He's dead? She says, no, no, he's lost. Like, he had a stroke in his nose, mind. What were you telling me? Because I couldn't fathom. Oh, he was lost.

Speaker 1:
[06:51] I'm Jordan Sillars, and this is Blood Trails, the search for Bob Smith.

Speaker 2:
[07:27] So dad and his brother potato farmed together throughout the years until like the early 80s.

Speaker 1:
[07:35] Shirley worked with Bob on the farm for 30 years, and after Bob retired, they opened a roadside stand called Smith's Seedlings and Vegetables.

Speaker 2:
[07:44] And when they got done farming, he still turned to working with the dirt and in the ground. My mother did a vegetable garden to sell vegetables by the road as well as some greenhouses to grow seedlings to sell.

Speaker 1:
[07:57] Bob's humble life in the woods and fields of Northern Maine shaped his personality. Marge remembers her father as a quiet man who always put others ahead of himself.

Speaker 2:
[08:07] But very gentle, very, very gentle nature. And never worry for himself. I know when he first found out he had cancer, I had gone over and I said, Gee, Dad, I'm so sorry about your news and what's going on. He says, don't feel bad for me. He says, I've lived a good life. I mean, I'm going to work on beating this, but I've lived a good life and done what I wanted to do. If you're going to feel bad for little kids who get this, he said, don't feel bad for me. He just took on, dealt with whatever came his way.

Speaker 1:
[08:41] He was a technician in Korea, a job that may not have put him on the front lines of battle, but as with any military assignment, came with a certain amount of risk. But Marge told me Bob was never one to overstate the extent of his service. You said he was in Korea. Was he fighting, I assume, during the war?

Speaker 2:
[09:00] He was like an optic repair technician. I don't know if that's the right term or not, but he was always quick to stress that he wasn't someone who was in the line of danger like a lot of the soldiers were. He kind of not lessened what he did, but he thought he didn't do quite as much.

Speaker 1:
[09:20] Bob was born in 1927, while Shirley was born 16 years later in 1943. Their age gap meant that rather than meeting in school or as childhood friends, their relationship needed a bit of a jumpstart. Marge doesn't remember all the details, but you can imagine Bob's mother worrying that her adult son might never get hitched. So she took matters into her own hands.

Speaker 2:
[09:43] His mother was a nurse and she was always bringing home young nurses for him to meet to try to get him to. It never worked out and my mother had a good friend who happened to be a cousin to my father. This friend kept saying, you have to meet Bob, you have to meet Bob and mom got sick of it, saying, I'm so tired of hearing about this man. But eventually, however, they got together somehow.

Speaker 1:
[10:08] How Bob convinced his future bride to tie the knot, we may never know. But we do know that their courtship included at least one run in with a game warden. Here's Marge being interviewed alongside a warden named Cale O'Leary, who you'll hear more from later in this episode.

Speaker 2:
[10:23] I probably shouldn't tell this story, but they can't sass me. They were out one night in the car, off on a back road. And I think it was the game warden that came up to him and shined the flashlight in and says, well, can you show me some ID? Do you have a license on you? I guess dad was fishing in his wallet quite a bit. And finally the warden said, well, you know, hunting license will do. It doesn't have to be a driver's license. You have anything on you. Just so that became a story of theirs from their courting days.

Speaker 1:
[10:50] Yeah, right, right. Caught by the game warden. I'm sure if it was Cale, he would be understanding and merciful, right?

Speaker 2:
[10:58] I think so, yes, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[11:01] In the years that followed, Marge says Bob and Shirley's relationship remains strong. They did everything together, raising Marge and her brother in the same community where Bob grew up. They had their share of difficulties, but Marge remembers her father as a steady presence, always willing to do whatever was needed to help keep his family afloat.

Speaker 2:
[11:20] He was very hardworking, very quiet, very even keel, low-key, had a sense of humor. If anything had to be done, he would just do what had to be done. He didn't stress out about, when we got done farming, it was bankruptcy, so it was a little bit of what's going to happen next. And as a kid, you don't appreciate the hard work he went into, but he started his ceilings and doing whatever he had to do to take care of the family and to get a job at a local factory. Just quietly did what needed to be done. Very content with his world and his family around him and didn't have a lot, but very happy with his world, very happy with his life.

Speaker 1:
[12:04] Bob's disappearance threatened to shatter that happy stability, and it wasn't just that he disappeared, it was how he went missing. He didn't get lost in a snowstorm or violently abducted, scenarios that while no less traumatic are at least something you can wrap your head around. Bob Smith disappeared on a beautiful sunny day, apparently within a matter of just a few minutes. His cancer had weakened him, but he was still capable of calling for help or firing his gun to indicate his position. But Shirley hadn't been able to find any trace of him. It was like the woods had swallowed him up, gun, orange vest and all.

Speaker 2:
[12:44] She was, I think having a hard time to hold it together and she was trying to offer as much information as she could. And I remember there were some reporters that had come to the house to talk to us. And in hindsight right now I'm thinking, well there, any information we would talk to them would be good, but none of us were in the mood to go talk to them.

Speaker 1:
[13:07] It's no wonder she declined to be interviewed when reporters came knocking. Even if she felt up to talking, what was she supposed to say?

Speaker 2:
[13:14] It was tough and then Thanksgiving was right afterwards and I remember having her and my brother over and it was just really tough.

Speaker 1:
[13:29] Part two, The Fall Search. As you already heard, Dave Milligan and Jim Fahey were the first game wardens on the scene. They were both fairly new to the Maine Warden Service, but that doesn't mean they were inexperienced. Game wardens conduct most search and rescue operations in Maine, and hunting season was an especially busy time. Here's Dave.

Speaker 3:
[13:50] Back then, we did a lot of search and rescues during hunting season, almost every night, before GPS came out and all that. But even though we're young, we've done that a lot of the night, but quite often.

Speaker 4:
[14:06] I got there after Dave, but we were the first ones to initiate formal search outside of what the family had already done. On the surface of it, we were there to save a life, to find someone, that's what we do.

Speaker 1:
[14:21] The Warden Service is really good at finding people. Stories like this and the Luger Belanger case we covered last season get a lot of attention because they're out of the ordinary. As Dave told me, most searches are over within a matter of hours, if not minutes.

Speaker 3:
[14:36] Yeah, most normally we found the place last seen and we went there, we had a, you know, if you're lucky you had another warden with you and you split up a little bit and then you fired three shots, waited for them to return the shot, the compass bearing and when they didn't got them, it was pretty simple most of the time, but not always.

Speaker 1:
[14:55] Hunters were trained to listen for those shots and then fire their own guns in response. Jim told me that sometimes hunters wouldn't fire back because they didn't want to waste ammunition, which knowing how much hunters prized their guns and ammo, I wasn't surprised to hear. But that would have been out of character for Bob. And after learning of his bout with cancer, they were confident he was still within earshot of a firearm. Jim and Dave arrived around 6 o'clock that evening and walked down to the place Shirley had seen Bob enter the woods. They were joined in the search by one of Shirley's brothers, a man named Freeman and one of her nephews, a teenager named Millage.

Speaker 3:
[15:32] We got to the place last seen and I remember Jimbo, when I say Jimbo, that's Fahey. He's like, everybody plug your ears. That's what we did. Plug your ears. He ripped off three shots with his Magnum.357. And we all listened and, you know, crickets, we didn't hear anything.

Speaker 1:
[15:52] Bob had been carrying a 30.6 bolt action rifle along with four cartridges. If Bob was the one who fired the two o'clock shot, he should have had three cartridges left. The fact that Bob didn't return fire meant that either he wasn't close enough to hear Jim's 357, which seemed unlikely, or he was somehow incapacitated. With temperatures dropping, they knew they had to act quickly. Millage, the teenager, went with Dave, and Freeman went with Jim. They searched as quickly and as carefully as they could, expecting to find Bob's prone body at any moment. They hoped he was still conscious and hadn't been injured too badly, but at that point, they still fully expected to find him. But they didn't. Instead, two things happened that first evening that left searchers with more questions than answers. As Dave and Millage worked their way out from where Bob was last seen, they reached the point where Dave estimates surely had heard the two o'clock shot. That's when they stumbled upon a body, but not the kind they were looking for.

Speaker 3:
[16:54] I'm searching along with this kid and I walk right on to a dead, stinking moose, big bull, and it was fresh. Somebody shot that that day, and it was just left there. Nobody attempted to field dress it or anything. It was just a pretty big old moose dead there. And I remember turning around to Millett and saying, what's up with this? And this isn't very far from their camp. I immediately thought somebody had killed the moose. I mean, but then over the radio, I let my sergeant know and he's like, yeah, just flag the moose, leave it, and let's get on with the search. And so we did.

Speaker 1:
[17:31] Shirley never reported hearing any other shots besides the one she thought had been fired by her husband. It's possible that whoever had killed that moose had shot it that morning. But as far as I know, no one from Bob and Shirley's camp reported having shot a moose. Bob may have shot it, but if that was the case, why wasn't he still with it? With no sign of Bob and no obvious clues in the area, Dave noted the moose's location and continued his search.

Speaker 3:
[17:58] Milledge and I were going through some really thick spot where you're part in the trees and everything, and we heard a shot way, way off. I turned right around and, you know, took a notice of where I thought the shot came from, and I asked the kid which way he thought, and it was the same.

Speaker 1:
[18:15] This was long after Jim had fired his revolver, so those shots didn't appear to be responding to Jim. But it was also well after dark, which means it wasn't a legal hunter. There are a million reasons someone might fire a gun at night, but Dave wondered if it was Bob signaling for help.

Speaker 3:
[18:32] I took the bearing and just started walking the straight lines through as I could. And I ran that out all the way back to the Lynch Road, which would probably be a mile or two, I'm not sure. But anyway, I didn't come up with anything.

Speaker 1:
[18:47] They continued the search throughout the night, but there was still no sign of the missing hunter. The next morning, more game wardens arrived, along with volunteers from the local community.

Speaker 4:
[18:58] The next day, it was more of the same. I mean, he's gotta be here, gotta be here. And you start to presume maybe he's down with a medical emergency, you know, alive, but in need of rescue, unable to be verbal or to, you know, handle a firearm.

Speaker 1:
[19:10] Time was of the essence. If Bob was still alive, he was almost certainly hypothermic. He was a large man standing about 6'2 and weighing 220 pounds. But the cancer had weakened him, and if he was sick or injured, he might not last much longer than the next 24 hours. If you look at this area on OnX, which you can do by visiting the meateater.com/bloodtrails and clicking on the Case File for this episode, you'll see that the area is mostly flat. There aren't any mountains or cliffs, and other than a few small streams, there are relatively few natural features. There are some clearings, but most of the landscape at the time was blanketed with Maine's famous big woods.

Speaker 4:
[19:50] It was very thick, and I've talked to hunters that come from other parts of the country, whether it's out west where they do some spotting stocks at a great distance. Even some of the hunters from the Eastern Seaboard that are in hardwood ridge country, they always come to Maine and they feel stifled sometimes, just overwhelmed by how thick the woods can be in places where you have to get down on your hands and knees.

Speaker 1:
[20:14] Hunters know that after you shoot an animal, you don't just wander through the woods in hopes of finding it. You find a blood trail and patiently follow it because even a big animal can hide in a small amount of brush. If Bob was unconscious, searchers knew that they'd have to comb every square inch of those woods, which is exactly what they did.

Speaker 4:
[20:33] Your teams are only as good as your weakest link. You know, if there's a blowdown, a tangle of growth, if someone doesn't persevere and push through and clear that, then that becomes a dead spot. And so we've learned sometimes if you reverse the direction of the search, what is a hazard or an obstruction going one way, if you do it 180 degrees differently later that day or the following day, it gives a whole different view. So we did that and we used different teams, we used different canine teams. It wasn't, there was no single point of failure as far as one team not being up to par. We covered it with multiple resources and then it expands from there.

Speaker 1:
[21:11] In the days that followed, hundreds of people and dogs searched in a grid pattern that extended well beyond where Bob could have realistically traveled. Marge was in her late 20s when her dad went missing, so she remembers clearly waiting at the farmhouse where the search and rescue teams had set up a makeshift headquarters.

Speaker 2:
[21:28] I just remember spending a lot of days there and just watching out the window and hoping for some news and you'd see everyone showing up in the morning to go out and search and early in the morning, very energetic, they're ready to go and everyone seemed very serious. And then at the end of the day, they'd come back to the vehicles and they'd been in the woods all day long and they were tired. And you just want to go out and say thank you. But you could just see they just felt, it seemed like they just felt bad that they didn't accomplish what they had set out that morning to do.

Speaker 1:
[22:04] I asked Marge what was going through her mind as those searchers returned empty-handed day after day.

Speaker 2:
[22:11] Well, they were wanting to give up hope. And I just remember it kind of put me into a little bit of a blank numb stage, if that makes sense. And I remember even when I didn't want to drive, I was so, just shook up, I didn't want to drive. So finally, someone said they'd bring me in. I remember saying, well, the best thing would be they'll find him and maybe he needs a little medical help. I said, and then they'll find him and he's going to be passed away. Or what if they never find him? I didn't think it would go that far, but I remember thinking those three scenarios. And now, didn't think that that would be the outcome. To be honest with you, I thought they would find him, either alive or at least find him after he died. I thought he would be found.

Speaker 1:
[23:18] Part Three, Clues. The search hadn't progressed like Jim and Dave had hoped, but that doesn't mean they came up empty-handed. In fact, the day after Bob went missing, one of the dogs appeared to pick up his scent.

Speaker 3:
[23:33] I went in with a K9 unit. We went to the place last seen, and the dog seemed to hit on what we thought was Bob's trail, where he took him to the woods. I don't remember exactly, it's two, three, 400 yards. And it got to a place where the dog just lost his track. I mean, the K9 handler is like, no, he doesn't know where to go. This is it, which is kind of weird.

Speaker 1:
[23:59] And that wasn't the only suggestive, but still mysterious thing searchers found over the course of their time in the woods.

Speaker 4:
[24:05] There's three different clues, you could say, that were uncovered or discovered that in and of themselves, each one might have merit, but one person couldn't have done all three because of the distance involved, if you follow me.

Speaker 1:
[24:20] The first was discovered by the owner of a nearby hunting camp, who Jim described as an experienced woodsman.

Speaker 4:
[24:26] He found what he thought was where someone had crossed Carey Brook and hefted themselves up on the far bank by bunching up the swale grass and kind of lifting themselves off the ice. But the thing that made it more interesting is there was a logging job where they were harvesting wood, and if you've been around those operations, they're very noisy. And so Bob was basically tone deaf, but on the farm, he was a potato farm, they said he could hear equipment at distances.

Speaker 1:
[24:52] The workers on that logging job were interviewed, and they said they stopped work around four o'clock the afternoon Bob went missing.

Speaker 4:
[24:58] So if you can picture yourself, you're using that to guide your way, then the equipment goes quiet, then where are you?

Speaker 1:
[25:06] Carey Brook is located about a mile to the west of where Bob was last seen. If he'd gotten lost around two o'clock, it's conceivable that he would have been able to hear the logging work and use that as a point of reference to try to find his way out of the woods. If he lost that point of reference when that work stopped, he may have become even more disoriented in the growing darkness. Unfortunately, that bunched up swale grass was the only indication that anyone had been in the area. Anyone trying to cross the brook could have made the same sign, so it's impossible to say that Bob had gone in that direction. Speaking of direction, Jim says searchers found another clue that had them wondering if Bob was trying to communicate with them.

Speaker 4:
[25:46] Another one that was on the surface of it seemed like a really good lead. Our supervisor, Dave Allen, found a place on a Twitch trail, Tote Road, a place where they would have dragged logs out of the woods years ago. They turn into footpaths and game trails. He found where arrows had been constructed, indicating one's direction of travel.

Speaker 3:
[26:05] I remember him saying, it's like caribou, the old potato farmers, that's how they did stuff. They'd take their heel and draw an arrow in the dirt, which would have been leaves, kind of indicating which way it went.

Speaker 1:
[26:19] Maybe Bob had gotten lost, and knowing he didn't have much time before hypothermia set in, he'd set off to try to find help. But since he knew searchers would be looking for him, he left them a sign as to his whereabouts. This clue seemed more promising than the swalegrass, but it had a major flaw. Whoever had left those arrows had been within 35 yards of a camp driveway.

Speaker 4:
[26:41] And so how do you make it that far and not stumble onto the driveway? Now, the driveway was just a one track deep rutted road, someone not thinking clearly in the dark. You could stagger over that, but then there was a triangular shaped piece of land there that had some containment. There was a waterway, there was a main road, there was the camp driveway, and of course we searched that side.

Speaker 1:
[27:02] Whoever had left those arrows, they didn't lead searchers to Bob or provide any indication that he had been in the area. But that wasn't true of the final clue. About two miles to the northeast of where Bob was last seen, a game warden named Alvin Terrio found a set of footprints that looked like they had been left by someone stumbling through the dark.

Speaker 4:
[27:22] Terrio had located some footprints in moss that he deemed were consistent with someone that was either in the dark without a light or confused or hypothermic. And this pattern of tracks just didn't match with someone that was actually searching through that area or someone that was just hunting through.

Speaker 1:
[27:42] Alvin, Jim told me, was savvy. He knew that snow was in the forecast, but he didn't have the tools to make an impression that could be matched to Bob's boots. So he covered those boot prints with plastic and returned after the snow had fallen.

Speaker 4:
[27:55] And we went back the next day after about a 16-inch snowfall and removed the plastic, and we had a pair of Bob's extra pair of boots that were the same as what he was wearing the day that he got lost, and they fit into that mossy impression just perfectly.

Speaker 1:
[28:10] Bob was wearing a pair of size 11 LL. Bean boots, a popular model in Maine even to this day. What are the odds even in a forest full of hunters, someone would be stumbling around in the same size boots just a few miles from where Bob went missing? Investigators, Dave says, were thinking the same thing.

Speaker 3:
[28:30] So for a while that place was just, it was searched pretty thoroughly. At the time, they were pretty hot on that.

Speaker 1:
[28:37] Unfortunately, like the previous two clues, this one failed to produce the result they were looking for. Even worse, further investigation revealed counter-evidence pointing to someone other than Bob.

Speaker 3:
[28:49] We went back in the springtime, and we got into that very spot. We flagged it all off. And what we did find, we found some of those tracks, we also found, I think it's like three or four cigarette butts. Bob didn't smoke, and we also found a dead buck deer. So the theory was that those tracks, because the tracks looked like they were, guy was lost, going this way, going that way. We kind of came to the conclusion that the guy had wounded his buck in there and had the same size shoe boot print.

Speaker 1:
[29:16] None of the clues that fall panned out, but as you just heard Dave mention, they didn't give up. After winter began to release its grip on the woods of Northern Maine, Game Wardens returned to the search area, hopeful the melting snow would reveal something they'd missed the previous fall. It did, but not in the way that anyone had hoped. Part 4, The Spring Search.

Speaker 5:
[29:43] My involvement with the Bob Smith search started in the spring of 98.

Speaker 1:
[29:49] That's Roger Gay, a veteran game warden who was tasked with reviewing the search that had been done the previous year, and creating a game plan for the spring. That game plan centered around the canine units, and he was confident they'd find something to give the Smith family the closure they were so desperately searching for.

Speaker 5:
[30:06] And we were hoping, you know, that in theory, that would have been fairly easy to do because of the conditions that who have the body at that time would really produce a motor, and we would be able to find it, find them pretty quick.

Speaker 1:
[30:23] Six different canine teams helped in the search, but Roger's dog was especially experienced. You might think that when it comes to search and rescue, a dog is a dog. But Roger explained that just like people, a veteran canine can be trusted to avoid rookie mistakes.

Speaker 5:
[30:39] The dog that I used on the Bob Smith search, she was a chocolate lab, her name was Reba, and she helped solve over 12 homicides and multiple search and rescues, fines, and among over $300,000 worth of fish and wildlife convictions under her belt, she was just a taut, taut canine.

Speaker 1:
[31:01] Reba was trained on tracking, search and rescue, and cadaver recovery. If it was out in the woods, she could find it.

Speaker 5:
[31:08] She could find crime scene evidence, anything with human scent, gunpowder, or something made of brass. You know, we tried to not leave a single stone unturned. You know, the thing is with dog teams, using the wind, the air currents, you know, we can search a much bigger area than a ground team would, right? I mean, a quarter mile is nothing for a dog to pick up scent and go into where the source comes from. I mean, you know, that's what we were relying on with dogs.

Speaker 1:
[31:42] As terrible and macabre as it is to consider, the scent of a decomposing body is much stronger in the spring than in the fall. The spring also has another gruesome advantage for finding a body in northern Maine.

Speaker 5:
[31:55] There were a lot of bears in that country. We saw a lot of bear signs. Bears don't eat humans in the fall for whatever reason. I guess we don't taste good in the fall, but in the spring, they're hungry. And I've seen this personally multiple times. They will feed on human remains in the spring, where they will consume the body, but they're going to tear that clothing all over the place, right? There will be signs. I had a case up near Baxter Park where the dogs were learning on coyote scat and bear scat because there were fragments of human bone, and we could actually see wolf from the person's sweater and stuff. Yeah, the dogs were hitting on it.

Speaker 1:
[32:42] Roger explained that if Bob had fallen in a spot the searchers had missed the previous fall, the bears would almost certainly have found it when they emerged from hibernation. When they did, they would have predated on his remains and then spread those remains around the woods, which would have increased the odds of being detected by a dog's powerful nose.

Speaker 5:
[33:01] Working in the spring with dogs, I mean, they worked phenomenally. We had pretty decent conditions and we just couldn't turn up a thing.

Speaker 1:
[33:13] Just like the previous November, dog teams crisscrossed the search area without picking up the scent of Bob's remains, his clothing or any of the things he was carrying that day. I asked Roger about what Dave had told me that just a few days after Bob went missing, one of the dogs seemed to be following his trail from the point where he was last seen. Roger explained that while it could have been Bob's trail, it's impossible to say for sure. Unless the dog started the search in a place where only Bob's scent was present, it could have been following the scent of a family member, one of the searchers or just nothing at all.

Speaker 5:
[33:47] A lot of times the dog will go a distance trying to find the track that you gave him a scent article from and they can't find it. So they just basically stalk. They stalk and that's a signal to you saying that he doesn't have it.

Speaker 1:
[34:04] A dog's nose is incredibly powerful but even the most experienced canines would have trouble smelling Bob if his body was underwater. There aren't any large fast moving rivers in the area but there are a number of streams dotted with beaver dams.

Speaker 5:
[34:19] In that country is kind of the headwaters for four or five brooks go in different directions and all of those little brooks no matter how big they were had beaver activity. It was had been cold enough there was ice, enough ice that maybe if you were turned around and you're trying to hear or get a reference, you might walk out into the open bog, ice covered bog to see if you can get your bearings.

Speaker 1:
[34:46] The easiest way for searchers to inspect those beaver ponds is to remove the dams and allow the water to drain away. So that's exactly what they did.

Speaker 5:
[34:55] So we had National Guard teams come up and blow the beaver dams. And I didn't get a Christmas card from the beavers up there that year. They're pretty mad at me.

Speaker 1:
[35:08] They inspected those drainages with searchers and dog teams and even flew helicopters to peer down from the air.

Speaker 5:
[35:15] It was as thorough as you could get. Yeah, and again, you're dealing with mud up to your eyeballs and things, but visually you could see everything and certainly you would see the color and the orange. It may be faded or dirty, but you would still have the visual on it.

Speaker 1:
[35:36] Still nothing. If you're getting tired of that refrain in this episode, imagine how the searchers felt. Roger told me the search teams had left so much flagging in the woods to mark the areas that had been searched, it was impossible to untangle it all. They even brought in a GPS device to make absolutely certain they'd covered every square foot of forest. This was the first time GPS had been used in a search and rescue operation in Maine, but it didn't help. Bob Smith was nowhere to be found.

Speaker 5:
[36:06] It was like, why aren't we finding this guy? This shouldn't be this hard, it shouldn't be this complicated. After being involved like three days searching, and starting to realize that boy, there's something wrong here. Nothing is coming up, not a glove, not a hat, nothing. It's starting to shift your thought process to, okay, this is not necessarily a normal lost hunter. Something unusual has happened here. So now we're starting to look at, okay, what are possible scenarios that would get him out of the area completely? We were trying to cover all the bases, the trout brook area and the sound and light attractors and everything, now we're thinking, well, maybe this could involve some foul play.

Speaker 1:
[37:08] Part Five, Foul Play. Game wardens at the time had their suspicions, but as Jim Fahey explained, those suspicions didn't start snowballing until well after Bob had vanished. By that time, collecting evidence and finding witnesses was exponentially more difficult.

Speaker 4:
[37:27] Again, we weren't looking at it in the moment. That's the important thing. In the moment, we weren't looking at it like there was a possible crime scene or evidentiary value of that type of thing. I mean, we're trying to find a guy before he dies that could be hypothermic and down with a medical emergency.

Speaker 1:
[37:46] But difficult isn't the same as impossible. The Bob Smith case is open and Warden Kale O'Leary believes it can still be solved.

Speaker 6:
[37:54] I learned about this case when I was a brand new game warden from Dave. We were working together one day and Dave had like 20 years on when I came on, and we were out actually at the spot where Bob went missing, Dave first told me the story and it just always stuck with me.

Speaker 1:
[38:08] The information we have today comes from wardens who were there like Jim, Dave and Roger along with what investigators recorded in the case file.

Speaker 6:
[38:16] They said, where's the folder, the binder on Bob Smith? And everybody was like, I have no idea. So I actually went out into our garage and I sifted through like layers of dust and dead flies and I find this. It was like the Holy Grail. I pulled it out. It was this massive binder with all the search masks. I was like, oh my God, I just found the Bob Smith file.

Speaker 1:
[38:36] That file backed up what Kale had already been told. The search for Bob Smith was incredibly thorough and time has only increased the odds that Bob isn't in those woods.

Speaker 6:
[38:46] I think it's easier now going down the file play angle. I think I really only hope because the search area itself is what it is. If he hasn't been found, that gun hasn't been found by loggers and deer hunters in that area by now, I'm not going to find it. I'm not naive to think that I'm going to find Bob's remains there somewhere.

Speaker 1:
[39:07] If Bob didn't lose his way in the forest, if someone else was involved in his disappearance, the first scenario investigators considered is that he was killed by another hunter.

Speaker 4:
[39:17] I'm not sure if something could have happened where there was lack of attention to detail, fate to identify one's target, maybe a sound shot. With the advent of hunter safety, those types of scenarios thankfully are less and less, but there was a time in our history probably in other states too where there was some hunting conduct that just wasn't safe and acceptable.

Speaker 1:
[39:40] Hunters are accidentally shot and killed every year even to this day. It's conceivable that the two o'clock shot wasn't Bob firing at a deer, but was instead the shot that killed him. But there's a pretty big problem with this scenario.

Speaker 4:
[39:54] If someone had shot him outright, how do you effectively remove him? We're talking about woodsmen that make their living, whether they're a guide or a game board, and discerning tracks and track evidence and drag marks and trajectories, scarf marks on clip twigs and bark and bullet paths. It's hard to fool. You might be able to fool Jim and Dave, I guess, but are you gonna fool all these guys that were brought in? It just doesn't seem likely.

Speaker 1:
[40:23] In other words, even if someone had killed Bob and run away, searchers still would have found Bob's body. Not only did they fail to find Bob's remains, they failed to find any trace of him. No boots, no gun, no jacket, no gear. As you heard earlier, a dog can detect the scent of a person's clothes after those garments have been through the digestive tract of another animal. If Bob was murdered, investigators were baffled by the fact that none of his possessions were ever found. Someone may have killed Bob and dragged him away, but even in this scenario, some trace of him would surely have been left behind. A shell casing, a hat, glasses or a glove accidentally dropped as the body was moved. What's more, a single individual would never have been able to move Bob's 200-pound frame without leaving a trace. But what if Bob was killed and moved by multiple people? And what if these people were not only capable woodsmen, but had knowledge of the best ways to hide evidence?

Speaker 3:
[41:23] Jim acquired some information that just in that 10-6 country, just where this all happened, there were these three hunters. And I thought they were from Pennsylvania, but I talked to Jim and he said, no, they were from New Jersey or New York, we weren't sure. But they were law enforcement guys, and they were staying at a sporting camp off the reality road. And they had been hunting in there that day.

Speaker 1:
[41:50] The day after Bob went missing, Jim ran into three out-of-staters who said they'd been hunting in the same area. Jim wasn't suspicious of them at the time because, again, foul play wasn't on anyone's mind that early in the search. But he does remember that they mentioned being law enforcement officers from a state somewhere in the Northeast.

Speaker 4:
[42:08] They showed up there and they saw that they weren't going to be able to, I don't know why they showed up. If they thought they were going to hunt, the area had all sorts of searchers. But when they mentioned to me that they'd been in that area the day before, I told one of our investigators, because I thought it deserved some follow-up, you know. Just anybody that might have heard or seen something that should be captured, you know, when it's timely.

Speaker 1:
[42:33] But at least according to the case file Kale found in that dusty file room, no one ever followed up. That's likely because those hunters had already left the area.

Speaker 4:
[42:43] Those hunters left, I think November 18th, I think it was a Thursday, and those hunters just left town the next day. And it would seem as though if you had booked some vacation time and booked a cabin, three and a half million acres in that North Maine wood system, you'd think you'd maybe go find another place to hunt. So I don't know if they know something and didn't want to come forward, if whether it was whether they came across a local and they felt intimidated or whether they it was part of their own group.

Speaker 1:
[43:12] Jim doesn't remember much about what they looked like or where they were from, and hindsight having the perfect vision it does, he wishes he jotted down a few notes. But their stated profession has piqued the interest of investigators today because it might explain how Bob's body was removed from the woods almost like he'd never been there in the first place.

Speaker 3:
[43:32] Police officers from New Jersey, what do they know how to do? They know what evidence is, they know how to get rid of evidence. Back in those days, and maybe not as much now, but back in those days, everybody carried one of those tin foil, not called tin foil, but the survival blankets, you know, the wound blankets. How was your survival? Wrap somebody up in that? I don't know, and maybe they were wrapping him up in him, so not so much to keep the scent off, but because he was still alive, and to rescue him. There's a lot of times retired military people take a job as a police officer, but he said, those guys know how to get people out of the woods in a hurry if they have to. You know, wounded people, they know how to carry them, they know how to do it. You know, I hate to say anything bad about anyone in law enforcement, but you know, they were there and then they, if anybody could have pulled it off, it would have been three guys that, you know, they're in law enforcement.

Speaker 1:
[44:27] This theory was supported by another piece of, if not evidence, then let's call it a game warden's intuition. Remember the owner of the hunting camp that claimed to have found some bunched up swale grass where it looked like someone had hoisted themselves out of a stream? Turns out that's the hunting camp where these three law enforcement officers were staying.

Speaker 4:
[44:49] If you want to talk a little conspiracy theory, was that fabricated to get us a long ways from where there was something of value to be found? Because it was a long ways on the other side of the end. That particular person, when this was all said and done within a couple of years, left the state for a number of years, he returned. But if you want to dwell on it, you could say, well, he left to see if there's going to be any fallout.

Speaker 1:
[45:12] Dave also mentioned having the feeling that this camp owner might have known more than he was letting on.

Speaker 3:
[45:17] Just being suspicious, nothing against anybody, but we kind of had a feeling that he might know something that was going on. He was at the way he acted, the way he kept telling us. And he's an old woodsman, very knowledgeable there. He kept telling us to go to Cary Brook, which would have been the opposite way of where he was and where it made any sense for him to go. And we all often sometimes felt like, why is he trying to get us to go over there?

Speaker 1:
[45:43] Both Jim and Dave are quick to say that they don't have any evidence beyond what you just heard. This camp owner has also unfortunately passed away, so neither I nor anyone else is able to pose these questions to him directly. Still, finding those three hunters has become one of Cale's top priorities in this investigation. Of course, this isn't the only theory about what happened to Bob. Several years after the hunter went missing, Roger got a call from the Maine State Police.

Speaker 5:
[46:10] One of the Caribou police officer's son was hanging out with this young fella, and this young fella told him a story about accidentally shooting an old man and getting him to his vehicle, and he died, and he panicked, and drove down a different woods road and buried him, which really that story fits all the parameters.

Speaker 1:
[46:37] Roger set out to find this young man and interview him, and he eventually did.

Speaker 5:
[46:42] He was incarcerated at the time that this bubbled out, that we get wind of it, and we interviewed him in jail. Really not cooperative at all, but during our research, we found out that he was incarcerated during the week that the timeframe that Bob Smith disappeared. So why would a kid come up with that?

Speaker 1:
[47:06] This guy refused to give officers any additional information. He wouldn't even acknowledge that he said anything about Bob Smith in the first place. But Roger thinks that maybe he heard the story from someone else, the real killer, and then repeated it as his own.

Speaker 5:
[47:21] You know, it's odd, but I always in the back of my mind wondered if he borrowed somebody else's story that he heard, you know, why would he dream that up?

Speaker 1:
[47:32] Whatever the reason, this man's story gave officers another potential scenario to consider.

Speaker 5:
[47:38] If a young fellow wounded this guy, wounded an elderly man like that, and he wasn't deceased and he was mobile but bleeding severely, obviously, you get him to your vehicle and you start out of the woods to get to the hospital and he dies. And you're a teenager, he's dead in your front seat or in the back of your truck. Could a young teenager panic with that?

Speaker 1:
[48:05] Whether it was a young hunter or a group of hunters, if this theory is correct, finding Bob's remains will be next to impossible unless the guilty party comes forward.

Speaker 6:
[48:14] That could be potentially anywhere from just miles and miles of roads before they dump Bob somewhere like Nugget Shallow Grieve. We very likely could be looking 40 miles in the wrong area.

Speaker 1:
[48:28] Even with such a monumental task in front of them, Jim and Dave pulled up a map and tried to find likely spots to bury a body on the way to the hospital.

Speaker 3:
[48:37] We didn't do a thorough thorough search, but we did all the walk around. See, is there anything here? I mean, if these guys were law enforcement officers, they are a little smarter than that. That wasn't anything special. That's just something that we did.

Speaker 1:
[49:03] Bob may have been killed by those three out-of-state hunters or some other unrelated person, but the fact is, in any death investigation, detectives always have to look closely at the family. Remember, Bob and Shirley were staying at a hunting camp owned by Shirley's brothers. Those family members were interviewed by game wardens and participated in the search efforts, and one of them, a man named Tom, was remarkably close to Bob when he disappeared. In fact, he actually met Shirley along the town line as she was looking for her husband.

Speaker 3:
[49:35] If I remember right, at some point, Tom, her brother, came out of the woods up there where Bob had went in. He appeared there somewhere on the trail. I don't remember all the details, but I remember talking to somebody about this, that they'd gone back to camp at that time to see if he'd come back.

Speaker 1:
[49:54] Tom's proximity to Bob and Shirley might be suspicious, but there was never any real evidence that any of the brothers had been involved in Bob's disappearance. However, after Cale reopened this investigation, Marge gave him her mother's diary. Shirley passed away in 2008, but she'd written extensively about the day her husband went missing. Investigators at the time hadn't had access to these notes, and this is the first time their contents are being made public.

Speaker 6:
[50:21] The initial shock that she hears, the two o'clock shot jumped there, it startled her, and she thought that it never crossed her mind that it could possibly be anything other than Bob. So the direction that he was heading, the shot was in that direction. So her initial thought for that first 10 minutes as she's waiting there and hasn't heard anything else is, geez, Bob got a deer, then it starts to turn into anic. Was Bob signaling me because he got turned around in there? So I think just going off, all we have is what Shirley thought in her emotion, but she thought that it was without a doubt Bob, it was the direction he was heading, it was close enough that it had to have been, not necessarily Bob now looking back, but Bob's direct location of where he had been heading.

Speaker 1:
[51:02] She bumped into Tom a short time later and the pair continued searching. Tom suggested they returned to camp, but not before, according to Shirley, they had an interaction that might be nothing or it might be everything.

Speaker 6:
[51:15] While she was standing there with Tom, they heard a rustling noise and then she said, geez, what's that noise? And Tom told her that he thought it might be a moose, but he just dismisses her, don't know, that's probably just a moose, that sounds like a moose walking.

Speaker 1:
[51:29] A short time later, Tom suggested they returned to camp.

Speaker 6:
[51:32] For me, it just appears like it was a diversion technique, like Shirley, let's go back to camp and see if you made it. Why would you do that? You just heard the shot, you know the woods really well.

Speaker 1:
[51:41] It's hard to imagine how Tom could have been so confident that the rustling in the woods was a moose and not a man. Even if the two sounds are different enough for a practiced ear to distinguish, it seems like you have to at least check it out. But it's even more inexplicable in light of the other observation Shirley made in her diary.

Speaker 6:
[52:01] The other weird thing is that in her journal, she describes Bob how he's shuffling his feet, he can't lift his feet throughout the day as sounding like a moose.

Speaker 1:
[52:09] She describes him as sounding like a moose.

Speaker 6:
[52:12] She does, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[52:13] Even before anything happened, she wasn't theorizing, well, maybe someone shot him because he sounds like a moose. This was an observation she made apart from theorizing what happened to Bob.

Speaker 6:
[52:24] Correct, yeah. I don't think it's until years later, at least from what I collect from her journal, that she started thinking foul play as well.

Speaker 1:
[52:32] Shirley didn't have an ulterior motive for likening her husband's footsteps to a moose. But considering Dave's discovery of a freshly killed moose just a few hours later, it's nonetheless incredibly relevant to this case. As Cale told me, Tom was the only person that we know without question was in the area with a high-powered rifle. It's easy to imagine a scenario in which Bob was killed by accident in the course of someone else's moose hunt.

Speaker 3:
[52:58] One of the theories I had in my head was that either the hunters or somebody in the family had maybe shot that moose earlier in the day, wounded it and was tracking it. And in the course of tracking that moose, they misidentified Bob as a moose. You see movement in the bushes and take a shot and it's bog. Whether it be the hunters from out of state or someone in the family.

Speaker 1:
[53:27] Dave told me that game wardens later went back to the moose and retrieved a bullet, but as far as he knows, they never matched it to anyone's gun. Then just the next spring, Tom approached the wardens with what even back then was an eyebrow raising request.

Speaker 3:
[53:42] Tom actually came in to see the lieutenant here in Ashland and asked if he could have those moose handlers because the warden had taken the moose handlers out as part of the evidence and they gave it to them. They gave them the handlers, which we weren't too impressed with.

Speaker 1:
[53:56] Tom had told the wardens that anytime they wanted to search for Bob, they were welcome to use his cabin. The first spring after Bob went missing, Dave and Jim took him up on his offer.

Speaker 3:
[54:06] And it's probably nothing at all, but we were in there in the camp after and kind of got a little nosy. I opened the wood stove and there were some, there were just a little bit of remains of clothing that had been burned, which doesn't really necessarily mean anything. I mean, if you find the hide evidence, why would you do it right there? But it was a little odd, but these days or even a little bit after this time, I mean, probably would have taken that down to the crime lab, but what would it have proved? Even if it was Bob's clothes, it wouldn't have proved anything really.

Speaker 1:
[54:42] Still, much like with the owner of the other hunting camp, the Game Warden's intuition was tickling the back of his brain.

Speaker 3:
[54:49] Jim and I both thought that Tom was really cool about the whole thing. Everybody else was pretty upset, and maybe that's just the type of guy he was. Maybe he took things well, but it was almost like Tom was weird, but it's hard to put into words.

Speaker 1:
[55:12] Now, I want to be clear. We don't know what happened to Bob. Dave, Cale and Jim presented the various foul play theories as all equally plausible, and if anything, Cale seems like he's most interested in tracking down the three law enforcement hunters. Tom has passed away since Bob went missing, and his widow suffers from dementia. Cale has spoken with other family members, but he hasn't been able to collect any new information. At least, none he was willing to share with me. Cale also pointed out that even if Tom had accidentally shot Bob, he couldn't have gotten the older man's body out on his own.

Speaker 6:
[55:47] The hole in the Tom story would be, well, he stays with Shirley the whole time, so he has an alibi. How could he have gotten Bob out of that piece of wood? That's the hole in the Tom theory.

Speaker 1:
[55:58] It's possible Tom had help, maybe from some of the other members of the hunting camp. Maybe he needed to get Shirley out of the area so those co-conspirators could remove evidence. But the more people who are involved, the lower the odds that their crime would have remained a secret all these years. What's more, Jim told me Tom was the tip of the spear in looking for his brother-in-law.

Speaker 4:
[56:19] As the days went on, Tom was relentless. I mean, it wasn't like he took a day off. He was there. I was in my late 20s. He probably was in his 50s. He was in good shape and he worked right alongside us. Again, could have fooled me, you know, maybe he did. But there was a lot of Overwatch. It wasn't just Dave and Jim. Like I say, we were cogs in a wheel. There was a front line field supervisor. There was a division lieutenant. There was a search and rescue overhead team. Other people had access to observe his body language and just the way he was. He was not really on our radar screen at that time, not on mine anyway. And I don't know that he was on anybody else's, but it's easy to start to develop theories around that. You know, it wasn't like he packed up and said good luck, boys. You know, he was right there.

Speaker 1:
[57:12] Part 6, Small Town Theories. You've likely never heard of Bob Smith's disappearance, but if you lived in Northern Maine in the late 90s, you wouldn't have been able to avoid it.

Speaker 3:
[57:24] They had a posted picture of him. I still have one in my trapping shed. It's the picture of Bob, you know, dressed like he was when he got lost. And that was posted everywhere. Everyone in town knows about it. Most people in town, like anybody that would, hunters or fishermen, I mean, they were involved in search anyway. They remember it.

Speaker 1:
[57:41] We've published a copy of that poster at themeateater.com/bloodtrails. Shirley snapped the photo on their fateful afternoon hunt just a few minutes before Bob went missing. Bob is sitting on what looks like a tree stump with his knees in front and his hands folded between his legs. He's wearing an orange ball cap and an orange vest over a blue coat. He's not looking at the camera. He's looking down and to the left and his hat and sunglasses make it tough to pick out his facial features. It's really kind of unsettling, made more so by the fact that the photo was taken so soon before he went missing. Not to get melodramatic, but his expression and body language are almost resigned, like he knows what's about to happen and he's accepted his fate. This photo was part of the poster that Dave mentioned. It lists everything Bob was wearing and carrying that day, and it asks that people call the Maine State Police if they find anything that matches those descriptions. It was posted everywhere in the nearby towns, which means that when Shirley went out, she couldn't help but see her missing husband and all the people who wanted to talk to her about him.

Speaker 2:
[58:50] She would be a little frustrated sometimes. She'd go to town, let's go to the store, and people come up to her and start asking her, she'd say stupid questions and she wouldn't want to deal with them. So even she's going to shopping to go into another town nearby, and she would do her shopping there. We've had this kind of a running joke that we'd say, well, I guess I go to the grocery store, I slap on a smile and I head it out, and just to face the world.

Speaker 1:
[59:16] Some of these individuals were well-meaning. Others were just attracted to tragedy and saw an opportunity to play the hero.

Speaker 5:
[59:23] You know, when you get involved with a search that lasts like this one did, you get psychics coming in and calling, and that's a whole other aspect. But I remember one day, this was doing the search, and a guy came in with a piece of string with a washer, no, a nut, he had a bolt nut. And he set the map down and he said, see, when I hold it right over here, then the bolt circles. This is where he is. He's right here. And fortunately, it worked out because we were going there, that day anyway, that was one of the areas we were looking into.

Speaker 1:
[60:02] In case it's not obvious by now, they didn't find anything.

Speaker 5:
[60:06] I had one person tell me that they saw what they thought was a UFO flying around. Well, I know what it was. It was the Flair helicopter that was flying at night, you know, the heat-seeking helicopter. That's what they saw, but, you know, they were convinced it was a UFO flying around.

Speaker 1:
[60:23] The rumor mill didn't just revolve around the supernatural. Cale told me he's spoken to people that to this day, wonder if Bob's death was actually an insurance scam.

Speaker 6:
[60:32] Another kind of angle too, Jordan, is that potentially Bob had wanted to end his life to some fashion. Some of the people that we talked to thought that there was a component of collecting on a life insurance policy or something, and Bob knew he wasn't in good health, and he was probably never gonna really truly recover back to the quality of life that he had before cancer, so maybe he committed suicide or something out there.

Speaker 1:
[60:57] The problem is, according to Dave, there wasn't much life insurance money to collect. What's more, given the unusual circumstances of Bob's death, there was never any guarantee that it would be paid out at all. Shirley did receive payment, but not until three years after her husband went missing. Kayla's skeptical she was behind the plot, and no one else would have a motive to carry it out. She would have needed help removing Bob's body from the woods, and there would have been easier ways to scan the insurance company.

Speaker 6:
[61:25] I don't know. It's something, again, as an investigator, you have to be unbiased and just take it all, the whole story, the whole case, all the rumors, but that's always something that we've heard, I guess.

Speaker 1:
[61:35] The other prominent rumor, and it's one that always pops up when someone goes missing, is that Bob simply ran away. Setting aside the near impossibility that a frail 70-year-old cancer survivor could escape Maine's North Woods undetected, Jim says that's just not the kind of person Bob was.

Speaker 4:
[61:55] People have to say, he's on a beach in Hawaii. These folks, modest income, farming people from caribou, there was no indication that there was any opportunity and resource to go somewhere else. He wasn't going to leave his wife. I don't know how long he and Shirley were married, but it just wasn't that.

Speaker 1:
[62:18] Part 7. Playing the Odds. Unlike the Luger-Bellanger disappearance we covered last season, there are no obvious suspects in Bob Smith's case. No real evidence of foul play. Because of that, we can never really discount the possibility that searchers just missed something. Maybe an animal dragged Bob's remains into a dense thicket or Bob stepped into some kind of sinkhole and was swallowed up. Maybe, like the Aaron Hedges case from season one, he walked much farther than searchers expected and they would have found him if they had expanded the search area. I asked Jim, Dave, Cale and Roger how they estimate the odds that Bob is still somewhere in those woods.

Speaker 3:
[63:01] I'm convinced like 99.9% that he's not there.

Speaker 1:
[63:07] Part of the reason Dave is so confident is because even in a panicked or adrenaline-fueled state, Bob couldn't have made it very far. We know this in part thanks to Shirley's recently uncovered diary.

Speaker 6:
[63:19] Shirley remarked too that the day before, they went for a walk and it took over an hour to go a half a mile down this trail. It was an open trail. It's as easy as you could possibly walk in that stretch of woods, and it took him over an hour to just walk a half a mile. If Bob had a hard time lifting his legs and he's shuffling, and he has a hard time lifting his legs, he would be tripping a lot once he gets off that trail. He'd be tripping and blowdowns. He'd be tripping getting over things. He'd be dropping things out of pockets. A glove might fall off. As you start to get panicked that first night, he's getting cold. There had to have been things left.

Speaker 1:
[63:54] Jim agrees that the more time passes without any sign of the missing hunter, the less likely it is that Bob is still in there. He also told me a story that illustrates how thorough those original searches were.

Speaker 4:
[64:06] I remember leading a team one day and one of my searchers lost a glove. The next day they had me back in there with a different group going at it from a different direction. I told the searchers, I said, we may not find what we're looking for, but there's a glove here that I know was lost yesterday. We should at least find the glove and we found it.

Speaker 1:
[64:24] Roger is a little less confident. He told me that unless everyone belly crawls through the woods, you can never say with 100 percent certainty that something wasn't missed.

Speaker 5:
[64:33] Because there's always a rock or a blow down that someone's going to go around to the left versus the right. You can never get 100 percent. I don't care what resources you throw at it, unless everybody's belly crawling shoulder to shoulder, you're not going to cover every inch of it. It just isn't, you know, it's not possible. I would put it at 85 percent likelihood that he is not there.

Speaker 1:
[65:00] 85 percent is less than 99 percent, but it's still much more likely than not that Bob isn't there. That's even more true in 2026 than it was in 1997.

Speaker 5:
[65:10] A lot of hunters find deceased people that were missing, you know, a year or two earlier, that, you know, during, they find them. It's very common between hunters and the search effort and everything is just like so unlikely that, you know.

Speaker 1:
[65:30] Marge says for a long time she believed her father walked outside the search area.

Speaker 2:
[65:34] And I think that was easier for me to think that because you wouldn't want to think of anything bad happening. You don't think of anyone shooting them, whether it was intentional or not intentional. And even to this day, I don't think if that's what happened, nothing was done intentionally. So, but now I think he was shot maybe accidentally and somehow they took him out of that area. That's that's that's where I'm thinking right now.

Speaker 1:
[66:02] Marge reiterated throughout our interview that she believes whatever happened to her father was accidental. But that doesn't ease the pain of his absence or make her any less interested in learning the truth.

Speaker 2:
[66:14] I would like to know what happened to him. He deserves whatever the truth is to come out, to be known. And that would that would be a lot. So I wouldn't be looking for punishment, just the knowledge of what happened and where his remains were placed. So he's at the veteran cemetery. My mother's in the wall with his name, with dad's name with hers. So then they put together again. He was such a nice man and no one would want to be part of an accidental shooting. I can understand that. And it would be very, very scary to come forward. But just to know what happened to him would be good. If you knew something, please come forward with that information, please.

Speaker 1:
[67:04] Part of the reason Cale approached me with this case is because he believes that someone out there knows something.

Speaker 6:
[67:11] My hope of not being naïve is that somebody knows something, and guilty conscience after all these, something is going to come out. I truly believe that. I'm confident that whether it's this podcast or me just continuing to pound the ground, that at some point, someday in my career, hopefully, maybe after I'm retired or something, but something is going to come out and me and Dave and Jim will all celebrate and we'll know that we potentially brought closure to Bob's daughter and his grandkids.

Speaker 1:
[67:43] For the wardens I spoke with, and I'm sure everyone who worked on this case, Bob Smith disappearance sticks with them even three decades later.

Speaker 5:
[67:52] It just killed us to not be able to close this case. But it's one of those cases that haunts you late at night. You wake up and go, where is he? What happened? What did we do? What could we have done differently, you know? But, you know, we gave it everything we had. That was for sure.

Speaker 1:
[68:12] It's easy to say that a disappearance like this robs the family of closure. But Marge recalled a memory from some time after her father went missing that puts flesh and blood on that truism. Without a chance to say goodbye or even imagine where Bob's body lay, Marge couldn't help but wonder if he was still coming home.

Speaker 2:
[68:33] My husband, Pat, he came out and we rode home together. He was driving and we weren't really talking a lot because it was just such a big moment and all of a sudden you're going home without him. I remember saying to Pat, I said, It feels like we're going to go around a corner and he's going to be walking there, kind of tired, holding his rifle and just needing a ride. It just felt like I see that on every corner.

Speaker 1:
[69:08] Thanks for listening to this episode of Blood Trails. If you think you might know something about this case, no matter how small, get in touch with Maine State Game Warden, Kale O'Leary, at kale.olearyatmaine.gov. That's K-A-L-E-O-L-E-A-R-Y. Or give him a call at 207-532-5400. Bob disappeared on November 18th, 1997, about seven miles southeast of Ashland, Maine. Investigators are especially interested in a group of hunters from a Northeastern state who may have worked as law enforcement officers. If you'd like to see images related to this case, including photos of Bob, his missing persons poster, and a map of relevant locations, head on over to themeateater.com/bloodtrails. Huge thanks to Kale O'Leary, Jim Fahey, Dave Milligan, Roger Gay, and Marge Byther for their time and willingness to talk to me. See you next time. Stay safe out there.