I was headed to dinner when I got the call.
My buddy Hunter’s name appeared on the screen, giving me pause. He usually only calls when we’re hunting in the morning or if someone killed a deer. But it was late February, and the only thing to do was shed hunt. I picked up.
“Hey, I’m sorry to bother you on a Saturday night,” Hunter said. The apology was genuine. “I’m trying to reach your dad but I can’t get a hold of him. Do you know where he’s at?”
I didn’t, but offered to help track him down. “What’s up? Everything okay?”
“Well, you’re not gonna believe this,” he replied, “but Cassey and I were at your all’s place looking for sheds this evening and we found a body. The cops are here. And they want to talk to the landowner.”
The White Rock
Our farm sits on a hill at the end of a lonely gravel road in a rural Missouri county, not far from the Missouri River. It’s timber and leased fields and old cattle pasture. My dad and I hunt there with Hunter and his dad — the real caretakers of the place. Their food plots and habitat work have coaxed back the turkeys and deer.
That’s how Hunter and his wife, Cassey, and a few buddies happened to be combing the farm for sheds the afternoon of Feb. 21. They’d found a few, including a matched set. Eventually they all piled into the side-by-side and drove down to the farthest edge of the property, where the creek loops past a big ag field and carves the steep bluffs of our farm. When Hunter drove across, something in the creek bed caught Cassey’s eye.
“I saw what looked like a weird-shaped rock, but I didn’t say anything at the time,” says Cassey, 25. On the drive back, however, she couldn’t resist. “It was super bright compared to everything around it and had a very circular shape to it. It really stood out. I have a weird thing for rocks, so I wanted to go see it. I was like, ‘Oo I’m going to take that home with me.’”
Their buddies — Spencer, Brady, and Shae — were walking behind so the Ranger could ford the creek without swamping. They’d also spotted the odd rock and reached it at the same time. It was a brilliant white orb half buried in mud and dead leaves.
“We’re looking at it, and one of the guys was like, ‘That just doesn’t look right.’”
Then they noticed sun-bleached bones scattered around the rock and realized what they had actually found.
“Oh my gosh,” someone said. “That’s a human skull.”
The four instinctively backed up.
“I really didn’t see it at first,” Cassey says. “I was like, ‘Nuh uh, no it’s not.’ I was just expecting it to be — I don’t know, a coyote skull or an old cow head that had broken off and looked weird. So I grabbed a stick.”
Carefully, she poked the soil underneath and, with some effort, levered the bone free. It rolled just enough that the facial features, now tipped clear to the sky, were unmistakable. Everyone backed up, farther this time, and stood staring at the human skull in the dirt.
“It was very odd,” says Hunter, who had been fielding a work call and didn’t initially believe Cassey when she called him over. “I wouldn’t say anyone was freaked out. If it’s got hair and skin and a stab wound in the side, our reaction would probably have been different, like, ‘Oh shit there’s somebody out here.’ But this scenario was just — odd. Shocking.”
They weren’t exactly sure what to do. No one touched anything with their hands. Hunter, who had a chew in, started spitting in an empty can he found in the side-by-side. He didn’t want his DNA anywhere near the remains. No one took photos, either.
“We all just mutually agreed without talking about it that we wouldn’t take photos,” Cassey says. “It felt wrong. Like, that was a person.”
After a few minutes, Hunter pulled out his phone. It was 5:13 p.m., and the sun was starting to dip below the trees.
“Nine one one, what’s your emergency?”
“Well,” Hunter began, “It’s not an emergency, exactly.”
A Missing Person’s Investigation
Two sheriff’s deputies arrived on the scene in 20 minutes anyway, according to emergency dispatch records — about as fast as possible for such a big county and a remote address. The officers were skeptical they’d found human remains, Hunter says, and the group was questioned closely while dispatch ran background checks on each of them.
Detective Sergeant Will Thomas told me later that the Moniteau County Sheriff’s Department gets false reports of human remains — mostly from shed and mushroom hunters — maybe once a year. They’re almost always cow bones.
But as soon as Hunter and his buddies escorted the officers through the heart of the farm and down to the creek, the mood shifted. Official protocol took over. The deputies taped off the area, sent Hunter, Cassey, and the others to wait in our farmhouse, and called for backup.
It wasn’t long before a dozen pickups and law enforcement vehicles — including one trailering its own side-by-side and the coroner’s trailer — pulled into the gravel driveway. The sheriff himself showed up at one point. The whole county, it seemed, had arrived.
As the county’s only detective, Thomas responds to every call involving human remains. He and his colleagues established an eight-by-eight foot perimeter around the center of the bones. They grabbed shovels, 5-gallon buckets, and sifters, and began sorting through the dirt over a tarp. They were able to dig a foot deep before hitting bedrock.
“The bones were on the surface,” Thomas says. “We found one, a rib bone, about two inches under the surface.”
As they sifted, cadaver dogs worked the creek a mile upstream and a mile downstream. No other remains were ever found.
Few Leads
Initially, Thomas thought the bones might be old — a century or more. The farm is the ancestral land of the Osage and Missouria tribes, and many landmarks in the area are named for them. I’ve stumbled across arrowheads in tilled fields and on eroding two-tracks during deer and turkey season.
That’s why Thomas spoke to one of the farm’s previous owners, a retired federal agent who knows the property and the area’s indigenous history. The detective wanted to know if there might be any burial sites nearby.
“He said the only burial site on that property was in front of the house,” says Thomas. (This detail was news to me.) “He said there had never been anything found in the back [of the farm]. And then with the anthropologist saying, ‘Well, it looks like the bones have been there between five to ten years,’ we ruled out Native American remains.”
The total forensic inventory included the bones my buddies had found: One skull, a spinal column, and rib bones. There was no jawbone attached to the skull, and the upper teeth were missing, too. There are no known missing persons reports in our county, which makes it hard to try to identify the remains. There are a couple missing persons reports in neighboring counties.
“We’re hoping that we can put closure to this, to tell somebody’s family that we found this person, but it’s a very good possibility that they may not match either one of [those missing persons].”
Thomas’s only hope for identifying the remains is if DNA can be extracted from the skull by the Boone County Medical Examiner’s Office.
“If they can pull DNA, that’s gonna be a breath of fresh air,” says Thomas, who has the State Highway Patrol Crime Laboratory on standby to run a comparison match with a broader list of missing persons. If no matches are found, the DNA would be sent to a special lab in Texas that handles forensic genealogy.
Until — and only if — usable DNA is recovered, there’s not much else to go on. That includes imprecise dating estimates.
Hunter will be the first to tell you he’s no expert, but he does collect dozens of sheds each season. His hunch is that the bones are from the last few years.
“The skull was very, very white. I would not tell you it was overly old, but that’s just my opinion. We did find a [deer] deadhead about 10 minutes before that, a deer skull. The skeleton looked identical to that. Maybe the deadhead was three to four years old.”
Our creek flooded in 2024, and Hunter imagines a body could have been swept downstream from a bridge a few miles back and piled up along the bank. He’s not sure why he didn’t spot the skull this past deer season or earlier if it had been there for a few years.
Det. Sgt. Thomas came to the same conclusion. There’s evidence of flash flooding along the creek, and he wonders if someone decided to camp along the bank and got swept away. That’s happened a few times in the past, though local authorities found victims in the days immediately following the flood.
“This could be somebody that came out from St. Louis, just put up a tent, and was camping on the creek bank and got in the middle of one of the flash floods. That water rises really quick down there and it really takes them by surprise, I guess. And it could be somebody that nobody’s even thought of.”
If the person’s family or friends didn’t know they’d decided to take a drive to mid-Missouri, says Thomas, there’s no reason a missing person’s report from St. Louis (of which there are many) would be connected to a skeleton found two hours west. Repeated flash floods could have separated the skeleton, sweeping the extremities and pelvis to another part of the creek.
“I can tell you that the skull had no holes in it that weren’t supposed to be there,” Thomas says. “There were no deformities to it, like maybe somebody hit [them] in the head. I have no reason to suspect foul play at this time at all.”
When I asked the sheriff if he’d considered appealing to the public for help identifying any missing persons, he laughed. He’d already fielded calls from concerned citizens making suggestions about who the mysterious skeleton might belong to.
“On this particular case it probably wouldn’t do much help. With this rural community, everybody knows anyway about the remains being found.”
Read Next: I Found a Human Skull While Rabbit Hunting Near Los Angeles
In the end, our family wasn’t investigated (somewhat to our surprise). And Hunter and his friends were never suspects, according to Thomas.
“They did exactly what I expect any other citizen to do if they found something that looks like human remains. We’re very glad that they called in instead of just being like, ‘Eh, that’s somebody else’s problem in the future. I ain’t getting involved in this.’ Because I do believe sometimes that happens.”
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