She was found in a scarecrow.

Two years after she disappeared, her bones, intertwined with rotten straw, stood on a wooden cross in the middle of a vast cornfield in Virginia.

This story is not about the wild nature of the Appalachian Trail and its dangers.

It’s about a monster who lived in plain sight, waving at passing cars and staring every day at his horrific creation, which he called a scarecrow.

It all began in the summer of 2005.

For 24-year-old Sarah Jenkins of Columbus, Ohio, it was supposed to be the summer of her life.

She had just graduated from college with a degree in journalism and before diving into adult life with an office job and a mortgage, decided to fulfill her lifelong dream of hiking a significant portion of the Appalachian Trail alone.

Sarah was not a professional hiker, but she was wellprepared.

She spent months researching roots, reading blogs and books by experienced hikers, and buying equipment.

She was strong, independent, and full of optimism.

Her parents were worried, of course, but they were proud of their daughter’s determination.

To them, she was their bright, brave child who always got what she wanted.

Sarah ran a small but popular travel blog called Sarah Sees the World, where she planned to document every step of her adventure with writing and photos.

In early June 2005, she said goodbye to her family and flew to Georgia, the starting point of her journey.

The first weeks of the hike were exactly as she had dreamed.

She walked north, passing through dense forests, climbing picturesque peaks, and meeting fellow travelers along the way.

Her blog was updated regularly.

She wrote about the beauty of nature, the difficulties of long journeys, and the kindness of strangers, the angels of the trail who helped tourists with food and shelter.

Her photos conveyed the grandeur of the mountains and her own sense of freedom and happiness.

She regularly called her parents from the small towns where she stopped to restock her supplies.

The last time they spoke to her was at the end of July.

She was in Virginia, had already walked more than 1,000 km, and was feeling great.

She was full of enthusiasm and said that the next section of the trail was excellent, albeit quite secluded.

The last entry in her blog was dated July 28th, 2005.

It was posted from an internet cafe in the small town of Daleville, Virginia.

In it, Sarah humorously described her struggle with blisters and her dreams of a real cheeseburger.

She wrote that she was entering one of the wildest parts of the trail and that her next opportunity to get in touch would probably be in a week or 10 days.

She ended the post with the words, “The mountains are calling and I have to go.

Don’t lose me.

” Those were her last published words.

When 10 days passed and there was no word from Sarah, her parents began to worry.

When two weeks passed, they sounded the alarm.

They contacted the Appalachian Trail Association and local police.

A search operation began immediately.

Dozens of rangers, police officers, and volunteers, many of them experienced hikers, began combing the section of the trail where Sarah was believed to have gone missing.

The search was arduous.

This area of the Appalachian is hundreds of square miles of dense forest, rocky cliffs, and deep gorgees.

The trail is just a thin thread in this vast wilderness.

Searchers checked every cabin and shelter along the way.

In the log book of one of the shelters, they found her last entry apparently made on July 29th or 30.

A short note about the weather and the signature Sarah J.

After that, her trail went cold.

The police questioned other tourists who might have been in the area at the same time.

Some remembered a lone girl who looked like Sarah, but no one could say anything definite.

There are many people on the trail, and faces are quickly forgotten.

Days turned into weeks.

Search parties combed every inch of the official route and the surrounding area.

Helicopters surveyed the area from the air, but nothing was found.

Not her bright red backpack, not her tent, not her camera.

There were no signs of a struggle, no signs that she had left the trail.

It was as if an experienced and well-trained girl had vanished on a well-marked route.

All possibilities were considered.

An accident, but in that case, they would most likely have found a body or equipment.

An attack by a wild animal? Highly unlikely in this area, and again, there would have been traces.

Kidnapping.

This version seemed the most frightening and the most realistic.

Someone could have tracked down a lone girl and taken her off the trail.

A month passed, then another.

The large-scale search operation was officially called off.

Sarah’s parents, distraught with grief, spent all their savings on private investigators, but even they couldn’t find any leads.

Sarah Jenkins’s story made national news for a while.

Still then, as always, it was replaced by other, more recent tragedies.

To the world, her story became just another unsolved mystery of the Appalachian Trail, a cautionary tale that tourists sometimes told each other around the campfire.

But for her family and friends, the pain never went away.

The emptiness left behind after her disappearance was unbearable.

For 2 years, they lived in agonizing uncertainty.

And none of them could have imagined that the answer to their questions had been there all along.

Not in the remote forest, not in the mountain gorge, but just a couple of miles from the trail on an old farm where an ugly scarecrow stood in the middle of a cornfield, staring with empty button eyes at the hikers passing by.

Two years passed.

It was August 2007.

Summer in the Shannondoa Valley was coming to an end, painting the hills in deep shades of green and gold.

The corn in the field stood tall and thick, waiting to be harvested.

Life in this rural part of Virginia flowed as slowly as it always had.

The story of the hiker who disappeared on the trail became a local legend, a sad reminder that the wilderness, which stretched out nearby, did not forgive mistakes.

Farmers worked their land and one of them was Silas Blackwood, a 70-year-old man whose farm bordered the national forest.

He was a local.

His family had owned the land for generations.

Neighbors who lived a mile away knew him as a quiet and unsociable widowerower.

His wife had died 20 years ago, and his only daughter had long since moved to the other side of the country and rarely visited her father.

Silas was one of those people who seemed to have grown into the land.

He seldom went to town, hardly spoke to anyone and spent his days on his farm.

People considered him a harmless eccentric.

Every spring he would place a scarecrow in the center of his primary field, and there was nothing unusual about that.

But for the past 2 years, his scarecrow had been strange.

It was disproportionately large, somehow misshapen and dense.

Its clothing was also unusual.

Not old farmer’s overalls, but faded women’s pants that looked like hiking pants and a well-worn synthetic jacket.

But no one paid any attention to it.

Who knows what kind of junk an older man would put on a wooden cross.

The denum came in the last week of August.

A powerful summer storm hit the region.

It rained heavily for several hours, and the wind seemed to be trying to uproot the ancient oak trees.

The next morning, when the storm subsided, the entire valley looked ravaged.

Broken branches littered the roads and the corn fields were flattened.

One of Silas’s neighbors, Jim, was driving his pickup truck to assess the damage to his crops.

His route took him past the Blackwood farm.

As he drove past the cornfield, he noticed that the older man’s famous scarecrow had not survived the storm.

It was broken at the base and lay on the ground in a muddy puddle.

One of the arms had broken off and the whole structure had collapsed.

But that wasn’t what caught Jim’s attention.

Something white and smooth, not at all like straw, was sticking out of the torn burlap that served as the scarecrow’s body.

Jim stopped the pickup on the side of the road.

Curiosity overcame his desire to get on with his business.

He got out of the car and climbing over a low fence, walked across the field toward the fallen scarecrow.

As he got closer, he smelled a faint but sickening Swedish odor.

He bent down and pushed aside the wet, rotting straw.

What he saw made him recoil and scream.

A human skull stared back at him from the rags.

Other bones lay nearby, mixed with mud and scraps of clothing.

Jim, forgetting about his crops, rushed back to his car.

His hands were shaking so severely that he could barely dial 911.

20 minutes later, sheriff’s cars pulled up to Silus Blackwood’s farm.

The older man met them on the porch of his dilapidated house, holding a mug of coffee in his hands.

He looked calm, even slightly annoyed that his morning solitude had been disturbed.

While the group cordoned off the field and the sight of the gruesome discovery, the sheriff began talking to Blackwood.

The older man answered questions about the scarecrow slowly and calmly.

Yes, it scared him.

The storm broke it.

It happens.

What’s inside? He shrugged.

Straw, old rags, whatever I could find.

He said it with such indifference that a chill ran down the experienced sheriff’s spine.

He realized that this man was either the best actor in the world or a complete psychopath.

While this conversation was going on, forensic experts were already working in the field.

The site was gruesome.

The scarecrow was indeed stuffed with human remains.

The bones were broken and mixed with straw to give the structure volume and shape.

Among the bones, experts found remnants of fabric, the same synthetic jacket that had been on the scarecrow.

And in the mud under the broken torso, they saw what would become one of the key pieces of evidence, a heavy hiking boot laced onto the remains of a human ankle.

The case immediately became a priority for the county police.

It didn’t take the sheriff long to remember an unsolved case from 2 years earlier.

The missing tourist was Sarah Jenkins.

She had disappeared on the section of the trail that ran just a couple of miles from Blackwood’s farm through the woods.

adjacent to his property.

The likelihood that this was a mere coincidence was zero.

The two-year-old cold case suddenly became the most high-profile case in the history of their county.

Silus Blackwood was arrested that same day as a person of interest.

He didn’t resist.

He silently allowed himself to be handcuffed and got into the patrol car.

During his first interrogation, he behaved in the same way, silent and staring at a single point, occasionally repeating his version of events that he had found the bones in the woods and decided to dispose of them so that no one would see them.

He claimed that he was scared and didn’t know what to do.

But his story was full of holes.

No one believed a word he said.

While he was denying everything in the interrogation room, a full-scale search began on his farm to uncover what other secrets this quiet, secluded corner of rural America was hiding.

The investigators were confident that they would find answers to all their questions there.

While forensic experts were picking apart the gruesome contents of the scarecrow on Blackwood’s farm, Silas himself sat in a sterile interrogation room in the sheriff’s office.

He looked like a stone.

Hour after hour, detectives tried to break through his wall of silence, but he just repeated his absurd story.

I found it in the woods.

I was scared.

I hid it.

He said it monotonously without emotion, staring at his callous, age-potted hands.

His calmness was unnatural and frightening.

He didn’t act like a frightened older man who had stumbled into trouble.

He behaved like a man who had a plan for this situation and was methodically following it.

The detectives realized that without solid evidence, they would not be able to get him to talk.

All their hopes rested on the team conducting the search of his farm.

Blackwood’s farm was a time capsule.

The house where he was born and raised seemed unchanged for the last 50 years.

Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust, and the air was filled with the musty smell of age and loneliness.

The police methodically combed through this repository of a life long gone.

Room by room, they pried up floors, checked walls, and went through the contents of every drawer.

Most of what they found was just junk, old newspapers, broken tools, his late wife’s clothes neatly folded in trunks.

Several hours of searching yielded no results relevant to the case.

But the investigators knew that murderers often keep trophies, items that belong to their victims, and they were sure that Silas was no exception.

The breakthrough came in an old dilapidated barn where Blackwood kept his farm equipment.

In the far corner, under a pile of rusty chains and old tires, one of the officers stumbled upon an old army box locked with a large padlock.

The lock was quickly sawed off.

When the lid of the box was opened, everyone realized that the search was over.

Inside, neatly wrapped in burlap, lay a bright red hiking backpack.

It was dirty, but otherwise intact.

With trembling hands, the forensic expert began to remove the contents.

There was a sleeping bag, a small notebook that had served as Sarah’s diary, a map of the Appalachian Trail with notes written in her hand, and most importantly, a digital camera in a protective case.

It was her camera, the very one she had used to take pictures for her blog.

The find was immediately taken to the station.

While the experts were examining the camera, the sheriff ordered Sarah’s diary to be brought to the interrogation room.

He placed it on the table in front of Silas.

Does this look familiar to you, Mr.

Blackwood? The older man glanced at the notebook and stared at the table again without saying a word, but the detectives noticed a muscle twitch on his cheek for a second.

Meanwhile, forensic experts in the lab confirmed what was already obvious.

Comparing Sarah Jenkins dental records sent from Ohio with the structure of the jaw found in the scarecrow, they gave a 100% conclusion.

The remains belonged to her.

The missing person case was officially closed and a murder investigation was opened.

But the real blow for Silus Blackwood came from the memory card in Sarah’s camera.

Experts had no trouble retrieving all the files from it.

There were several hundred photos on the card.

The first ones were taken in Georgia and Tennessee.

Picturesque landscapes, selfies of a smiling Sarah against the backdrop of mountains, and pictures of other tourists she had met along the way.

Looking through them, the detectives felt as if they were retracing her last journey, seeing the world through her eyes.

The closer they got to the end, the more photos of Virginia’s forests there were.

Here were the last peaceful shots.

a stream flowing through rocks, a deer stepping onto a trail, her own tent pitched at sunset, and then came the last five photos.

These five frames were different from all the others.

They were blurred, taken in a panic from close range.

The first showed a man’s plaid shirt.

The second was a blurry shot of the ground and someone’s boots.

The last three were the most terrifying.

It was a face, the face of a man contorted with rage, staring straight into the camera.

Despite the poor quality and the shaking of the camera, the photos clearly showed Silus Blackwood, a little younger than he was now, but it was him.

In the last moments of her life, in a desperate struggle, Sarah did what she did best.

She documented the truth.

She photographed her killer.

The sheriff entered the interrogation room holding large printed photographs in his hands.

He sat down silently opposite Silas and placed the first photograph on the table.

It was Blackwood’s face taken by Sarah.

The older man looked at the photo and his body tensed for the first time during the entire interrogation.

The sheriff placed the second photo next to it, then the third.

He said nothing, just stared at Silus.

The older man’s stony expression began to crack.

His lips trembled.

He was looking at his own face, captured at the moment he committed a monstrous crime.

The silence in the room became deafening.

And then, after several minutes of this silent standoff, Silas Blackwood looked up at the sheriff.

The wall came crashing down.

In a voice as quiet and creaky as an unlubricated door, he uttered his first truthful words in two years.

It was hot that day.

Very hot.

With these words, Silas Blackwood’s confession began.

And the more he spoke in his quiet, colorless voice, the more terrifying the picture of that July day in 2005 became.

He made no attempt to justify himself and showed no remorse.

He stated the facts as if he were talking about planting corn or repairing a fence.

That day, as usual, he was working at the far end of his property, which bordered the forest.

He often saw tourists walking along the trail, bright spots against the green backdrop.

He despised them.

To him, they were strangers, intruders into his secluded world, happy and carefree people from a life that had long since ended for him.

When he saw Sarah, she had left the main trail and was walking along an old overgrown path that led to a stream on his land.

She probably wanted to get some water or wash her face.

He said there was something about her that drove him crazy.

Her youth, her confidence, her bright red backpack.

In his sick, loneliness poisoned mind.

She became a symbol of everything he had lost and hated.

It wasn’t a planned action.

It was a pure predatory impulse.

He waited for her, hiding behind the trees.

When she bent down to the stream, he attacked.

He told her about her desperate resistance.

She was strong and fought fiercely for her life.

It was at that moment, as he tried to wrestle the camera from her neck, that she took the pictures.

It was chaos, screams that no one could hear, and the clicking of the camera shutter.

He raped her.

And then when he realized that she had seen his face and would be able to identify him, he strangled her.

He recounted all of this with a frightening detachment.

After the murder, he dragged her body into thick blackberry bushes on his land, knowing that search parties would never enter private property.

He took the backpack with him and hid it in a shed.

He returned home, washed himself, and worked in the fields for the rest of the day as if nothing had happened.

The most gruesome part of his confession concerned the scarecrow.

He said that the idea didn’t come to him right away.

Sarah’s body lay in the bushes all winter, hidden under the snow.

In the spring, when it was time to prepare the field for planting, he decided that he didn’t want to bury the bones.

That seemed too simple and boring to him.

He wanted, in his words, to keep her close.

It was his twisted way of maintaining control, his terrible secret, which was both hidden and on display for all to see.

At night, he gathered what was left of Sarah into a bag.

Then, by moonlight in his barn, he built a new scarecrow.

He mixed her bones with straw, stretched burlap over a wooden cross, and dressed his creation in her traveling clothes.

For him, it was the ultimate act of humiliation and power.

Every day for almost two years, he looked out the window at this scarecrow.

He saw other tourists waving at him from afar, mistaking him for an ordinary farmer.

And none of them knew that they were greeting not only a murderer, but also his victim.

The trial of Silas Blackwood was quick.

Given his full confession backed up by material evidence, Sarah’s diary and camera, as well as DNA test results, the defense had almost no chance.

The lawyers tried to prove his insanity, citing scenile dementia and the effects of long social isolation.

But the prosecutor presented his confession to the court, a cold, methodical, and detailed account that could not have come from a man unaware of his actions.

And when the jury was shown the last photos taken by Sarah, a heavy silence fell over the courtroom.

These blurry, panicked images were the most substantial evidence for the prosecution.

It was Sarah herself speaking from beyond the grave, pointing to her killer.

Silas Blackwood was found guilty on all counts, including first-degree murder, kidnapping, and rape.

The judge reading the sentence called his actions an act of absolute evil beyond human comprehension.

He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

For Sarah’s parents, the verdict was the end of a long nightmare, but it brought no relief.

They knew the truth, but that truth was unbearable.

At the trial, her father said that they would always be proud of their daughter’s last act.

Even in the face of death, she remained a journalist and did everything she could to ensure that her killer was found.

The news that the quiet farmer Blackwood was a monster shocked the local community.

People had lived next to him for years and had no idea of the darkness that lurked behind his silent facade.

Silas Blackwood died in a maximum security prison 7 years later of a heart attack.

His farm was sold and his old house and barns were torn down.

The new owner plowed the cornfield, erasing all traces of this terrible story from the face of the earth.

But it remained.

Sarah Jenkins set out on a hike to tell the world about the beauty of the Appalachian Trail.

In the end, at the cost of her life, she said a completely different, terrifying story.

A story about a scarecrow that was not just a scarecrow.