In midocctober of 2011, 18-year-old Todd Stanton stepped off a bus on Route 71 and disappeared without a trace into the dense Ozark forests.

Three years later, in November of 2014, his remains were found stuck in the chimney of an abandoned cabin in the woods, 5 miles from where he disappeared.

On October 15th, 2011, on a cool Saturday evening, a quarrel took place in the Stanton family home in Fort Smith, Arkansas, which became the starting point for this tragedy.

18-year-old Todd Stanton, a high school senior, was in a state of protracted conflict with his parents.

The main reason for the tension was the pressure to go to college, a path that the family considered the only right one for his future, but which the boy himself categorically rejected, considering it imposed and alien.

According to the mother’s words recorded in the police report, at about 1930, the conversation turned into a loud scandal.

Emotions reached a peak when the father gave an ultimatum to submit the documents.

Todd, unable to withstand the pressure, shouted a phrase that his parents will remember forever.

I need peace and quiet, otherwise I’m going to explode.

After that, he went to his room.

10 minutes later, he came out holding an old dark green school backpack and a rolledup sleeping bag.

He didn’t take anything extra, just a change of clothes, some cash he had saved from his pocket money, and his phone.

He left the house, slamming the front door so hard that the windows shook.

His parents did not try to stop him.

At that moment, they decided that this was a typical teenage rebellion, and the boy just needed to let off steam.

They were sure that he would spend the night at one of his friends houses and return the next day when his emotions had calmed down.

It was a fatal mistake, the price of which became clear only later.

The night passed, then Sunday.

Todd did not return.

His phone, which his parents had called dozens of times, had been turned off since Saturday evening.

When 48 hours of silence passed, anxiety turned to panic.

And on Monday morning, the Stanton family filed a missing person’s report with the Fort Smith police.

Since Todd was an adult, the police initially considered the version of a voluntary departure from home.

But given the things left behind and the boy’s emotional state, the case was taken up.

Detectives began by checking financial activity.

On Monday afternoon, they gained access to Todd’s bank records.

The statement showed only one transaction made on the evening of October 15th, an hour after the fight.

It was the purchase of a Jefferson Lines bus ticket at the Fort Smith Central Bus Station.

Surveillance cameras at the station confirmed this fact.

Grainy footage showed Todd dressed in a blue windbreaker and jeans buying a ticket at the ticket counter and boarding a northbound bus.

Investigators quickly identified the driver who was working on the bus.

His testimony was key to understanding Todd’s route, but also added a dark mystery to the case.

The driver recalled a guy with a green backpack.

According to him, the passenger looked depressed, stared out the window the whole way, and didn’t talk to anyone.

Todd’s ticket was for the final station in Fagetville, but he did not get there.

At about 24 hours and 45 minutes, as the bus was traveling along Route 71, the man approached the driver’s cab and asked to stop.

It was a strange request.

The place Todd chose was not an equipped bus stop.

It was a simple roadside near a wooded bend near the small town of Mountainberg.

This is where the asphalt of Route 71 borders the beginning of the dense wilderness of the Ozark National Forest.

The driver said in the report that he tried to talk the boy out of getting off in the middle of the night on a highway with no lights, but Todd insisted, saying he knew where he was going.

The bus stopped, the doors opened, and Todd Stanton stepped out into the darkness toward the forest.

This was the last confirmed point of his stay in the world of the living.

After receiving this information, the police launched a search operation in the Mountainberg area.

At the same time, detectives began interviewing Todd’s social circle.

Most attention was paid to his best friend, 19-year-old Blake Wilson.

The boys had been friends since early childhood, lived on the same street, and spent almost all their free time together.

Blake seemed genuinely concerned about his friend’s disappearance.

During the interrogation, he said that Todd often complained about his parents and spoke of wanting to get away from everything.

Blake actively cooperated with the investigation.

He helped post flyers with Todd’s photo around the neighborhood, talked to volunteers, and claimed that Todd had not told him anything specific about his plans that evening.

According to Blake’s version of events, which he told the detectives, Todd probably just wanted to be alone in the wild, to have a kind of survival challenge, as they sometimes did when playing hikers.

These words sounded logical given the presence of a sleeping bag and somewhat reassured the police who hoped to find the boy in one of the campsites.

A search party consisting of police officers, foresters, and volunteers combed several square miles of forest around the area where the bus had stopped.

However, the conditions were working against them.

October in the Ozarks is the time when trees shed their leaves.

The ground was covered with a thick layer of dry, rustling carpet that hid any tracks.

Dog handlers with dogs tried to pick up the scent from the roadside, but the smell was lost after a few hundred yards, scattered by the wind and interrupted by the smell of rotting leaves.

The search lasted more than a week.

Helicopters with thermal imagers scanned the forest, but the dense crowns of oaks and pines created a natural screen.

Nothing was found.

No traces of a campfire, no lost garbage, no place to spend the night.

Todd Stanton seemed to vanish into thin air the moment the bus door closed behind him.

His parents were left with a used bus ticket, a silent phone, and the endless silence that had taken over their home instead of their son.

The Ozark forest took him away, leaving no hint of where he went or what happened to him that cold autumn night.

November of 2014 brought early frosts and winds to Arkansas, finally tearing the leaves off the trees in the Ozark forests.

Exactly three years had passed since 18-year-old Todd Stanton stepped off a bus on Interstate 71 and disappeared into the darkness.

For the local police and volunteers, this case has long since become a cold case.

Active searches were suspended back in 2012 and the files with the investigation materials were moved to archival storage.

The search flyers that once hung on every gas station and light pole from Fort Smith to Fagatville have long since faded in the sun or been torn off by the rains, leaving only scraps of tape and paper behind.

On Saturday, November 15th, the silence of the forest was broken by a group of three high school students who came here from Fagatville.

Their goal was not tourism in the usual sense.

The boys were running an amateur YouTube channel dedicated to so-called urban exploration, exploring abandoned farms, factories, and places that were the subject of dark local legends.

One of them, while studying old topographical maps of Franklin County from the midentth century, noticed the mark of a single building deep in the woods at the foot of White Rock Mountain.

Judging by the maps, there were no official roads leading to this place, only old, long, overgrown logging tracks.

Reaching the area in the afternoon, when the sun was already starting to set, the teenagers left their pickup on a gravel road and went deeper into the forest.

They had to walk for almost an hour through dense brush and fallen trees.

Eventually, in a small clearing that the forest had almost reclaimed, they found what they were looking for.

It was a dilapidated wooden hut that looked like the skeleton of a former home.

The roof of the building had partially collapsed under the weight of time and snow.

The wooden porch was rotten through, and the window frames gaped with black empty holes resembling the eye sockets of a skull.

The guys turned on their cameras and powerful flashlights, commenting on their every move for the future video.

They joked and pushed the door, which was hinged on a single rusty hinge, trying to hide their growing nervousness behind their laughter.

Inside, there was a heavy, suffocating smell of dampness, rotten leaves, and old wood.

The floor was covered with a thick layer of garbage, pieces of furniture, and dirt windb blown over decades of neglect.

The main surviving part of the interior was a massive fireplace made of rough local stone that occupied the center of the wall.

One of the teenagers, trying to make a spectacular shot for their blog, decided to film the inside of the chimney.

He approached the fireplace, turned on the lantern at full power, and stuck his hand with the camera into the dark opening of the firebox, turning the lens upward toward the chimney lumen.

He looked at the small viewfinder screen, expecting to see spiderw webs or bird nests.

What he saw on the digital screen made him scream.

In the narrow lumen of the stone pipe sandwiched between the masonry walls, he could clearly see the rubber soles of a pair of muddy sneakers.

They hung motionless, blocking the passage of light.

In a panic, the men dropped some of their equipment and ran out of the hut, barely making their way through the thicket to get to the cell phone coverage area.

The first crew of Franklin County Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the scene at dusk.

Inspection of the fireplace with professional flashlights confirmed the words of the frightened teenagers.

There was indeed a person in the chimney.

The body was stuck in an upright position, feet down, about 4 feet from the base of the firebox.

A visual inspection showed that it was impossible to pull him out from below.

The space was too narrow and the body was locked tight.

Attempting to retrieve him from above through the roof also carried the risk of damaging the remains or completely collapsing the emergency pipe.

Investigators decided to call a specialized rescue team with heavy hydraulic tools.

A temporary path had to be made to the hut for the equipment and generators.

As the work required powerful lighting as night fell, the recovery operation turned into a complex engineering process.

Rescuers were forced to dismantle the chimney’s outer masonry stone by stone, working with jeweler’s precision to avoid compromising the integrity of the evidence.

The work lasted until late at night with generators humming and spotlights cutting through the forest darkness.

Around 2:00 in the morning, when the rescuers had removed enough stones at the second floor level, the forensic team was presented with a gruesome picture.

In the chimney niche was a completely skeletonized corpse.

He was wearing the remains of his clothes, a blue synthetic windbreaker and jeans, which had been covered with a layer of soot and dust for 3 years.

The body’s posture indicated a terrible trap.

The victim’s arms were tightly pinned to his torso, making it impossible for him to pull himself up or push himself away.

His head was unnaturally tilted back, resting against the back wall of the pipe.

The space was so tight that the chest was squeezed by the chimney walls.

Experts on the scene immediately noted that the position of the body indicated that the person had gone down the chimney voluntarily, feet first, but had underestimated the narrowing of the channel closer to the bottom.

The forensic experts carefully removed the remains from the stone trap.

During the initial examination of his clothes, an old leather wallet was found in the back pocket of his jeans.

The leather was hardened and deformed by moisture and time, but the contents were preserved.

Inside, among several bills and old receipts, was a plastic Arkansas driver’s license.

The photo on it was a little faded, but the name was clear.

Todd Stanton.

This finding instantly connected the discovery in the abandoned cabin to the events of 3 years ago.

The boy who was searched for by hundreds of people, featured in the newspapers, and whose disappearance became the biggest mystery in the county, was less than 5 miles from where the bus driver last saw him alive.

He did not go far into the mountains, did not get lost in the canyons.

He found his death within the walls that were supposed to serve as a shelter, a prisoner of a stone pipe that no one knew about.

Todd Stanton’s body was placed in a bag for transportation.

And only then did the forest silence return to the ruins of the hut.

But now this silence was filled with the heavy realization that the search had ended in the worst possible scenario.

In early December 2014, specialized transport delivered Todd Stanton’s remains to the state crime laboratory in Little Rock.

What remained of the 18-year-old boy after 3 years in a stone trap became the object of careful study by the state’s leading pathologists.

The expectations of the family and investigators were tense.

Everyone hoped to get an answer to the main question, whether the death was instantaneous or whether the boy suffered.

The autopsy results, which arrived on Detective Roy Moran’s desk a week later, dispelled any hope for a quick and painless end.

It was a document whose every sentence added horror to an already tragic picture.

The forensic examination categorically rejected the version that Todd had fallen into the pipe already dead or unconscious.

There were no signs of fractures on his bones typical of a fall from a height or skull injuries that could indicate a blunt force trauma before death.

Instead, the pathologist’s conclusion was different.

The cause of death was positional compression asphixxia.

Todd was going down the chimney with his feet forward voluntarily and in a controlled manner, but he got stuck in a place where the chimney structure narrowed sharply before entering the fireplace.

The report described in detail the mechanics of this horrific death.

His chest was caught in a vicel-like grip of the masonry.

His arms were pinned to his torso along the seams, making it impossible for him to pull himself back up or lean against the walls to free himself.

With each exhalation, the volume of his chest decreased, allowing his body to sink a millimeter lower under the influence of gravity.

But he could no longer take a full breath.

The stones did not allow his ribs to expand.

It was a trap that tightened by itself.

Experts noted that the guy was dying slowly, remaining fully conscious for a long time from 24 to 48 hours and possibly longer.

He heard the sounds of the forest, saw a piece of sky above his head, and gradually lost the ability to breathe.

For most officers, this conclusion looked like confirmation of a tragic accident.

a teenage roofer, an adventurer, or just a reckless boy climbed where he shouldn’t have and died because of his own negligence.

The case was being prepared for closure with the wording, “Death by accident.

” However, the lead detective on the case, Roy Moran, was in no hurry to sign the final report.

His experience told him that the story lacked logic.

Todd was not a professional digger or an extreme climber.

The idea of going down a narrow, dirty chimney in the middle of the night in an abandoned cabin seemed absurd for a guy who had just run away from home to be alone.

Moran felt that Todd was not alone there.

The detective made an unconventional decision.

He ordered to block access to the half disassembled cabin and re-examine the scene.

This time, the task was not just to inspect the premises, but to conduct a full-fledged forensic archaeology.

Moran ordered that all the debris that had accumulated on the floor directly next to the fireplace be sifted through layer by layer down to the wooden floor base.

He was looking for anything that didn’t belong to Todd that could have survived for 3 years.

The forensics team worked in respirators and protective suits.

The air inside the hut was heavy with dust and ash from the chimney dismantling.

The police were methodically sorting through years of layers of dirt, rotten leaves, mouse droppings, and plaster fragments.

The first day of work yielded no results, only rusty nails and windblown debris.

On the second day, in the late afternoon, one of the forensic experts worked in the corner to the right of the fireplace masonry.

While clearing away a blockage of rotten boards that had fallen from the ceiling, he noticed an unnaturally bright blue glow among the gray ash.

Carefully using tweezers, he pulled out a small plastic object.

It was a ventilin asthma inhaler.

It looked old, covered with a layer of sticky dirt and cobwebs, but the sturdy plastic case protected the can inside.

The discovery was immediately recorded in the protocol.

It was a foreign object.

Todd’s parents, who were contacted by phone, confirmed that their son had never suffered from asthma, had no breathing problems, and had never used such medical devices.

None of his close relatives had such a diagnosis either.

The inhaler belonged to someone else, a person who was in this remote hut where a random tourist had not set foot for years.

The item was immediately sent to the laboratory.

The main task was to identify the owner.

The paper sticker on the metal can had partially decomposed due to moisture and temperature changes, and the text was blurred and unreadable to the naked eye.

However, under a powerful digital microscope, and using special filters, the experts managed to restore the print fragments.

Among the mold spots, they could see the digital batch codes and most importantly, the last four digits of the prescription number and the partially preserved name of the pharmacy chain.

Detective Moran sent formal requests to all major pharmacy chains in Arkansas, providing the recovered data fragments.

It was a painstaking database search that lasted almost a week.

Investigators checked thousands of records trying to find a match between the prescription number and the date of issue which according to the batch code was in the summer or fall of 2011.

The answer came from the office of the Walgreens pharmacy chain.

The system found a complete match.

This particular inhaler had been issued on a doctor’s prescription in August 2011.

The place of dispensing was a pharmacy in Van Burren, a town near Fort Smith.

The patients name on the prescription made Detective Moran freeze over the piece of paper.

It was Blake Wilson, Todd’s best friend.

This fact instantly changed everything.

3 years ago, during the first interrogation, Blake Wilson had stated on the record that he had been seriously ill the entire week Todd disappeared and had not left the house.

He said he had not seen his friend and knew nothing about his plans.

This alibi was not thoroughly checked because the boy was considered a witness, not a suspect.

But now his inhaler was in evidence, found a meter away from the very chimney where Todd was slowly dying.

The medical device could not have gotten there on its own.

Blake Wilson was there.

He was standing in that room breathing the same air and likely heard every sound coming from the stone chimney.

The accident theory crumbled to dust, giving way to cold certainty in the presence of a witness who had been silent for three long years.

January 2015 was the month when detective Roy Moran changed the vector of the investigation.

If earlier he had been looking for an answer to the question, “What happened to Todd Stanton?” Now he was faced with a much more difficult task to understand who Blake Wilson really was.

The physical evidence, an inhaler found in the ashes, tied Blake to the scene of his friend’s death.

But the prosecutors needed a motive to build a strong case.

Why would a guy who claimed to be the victim’s best friend leave him to die in a stone trap and keep quiet about it for 3 years? To find the answer, Moran dug into the archives of social services and police reports from the city of Van Beern for the period from 2000 to 2011.

The documents the detective lifted from the dusty boxes of the archives painted a depressing picture of the Wilson family’s life.

It was a story of chronic poverty, neglect, and domestic violence.

Blake’s father was in the system as an unemployed man with a severe alcohol addiction.

Patrol crews regularly visited their residence, an old trailer park on the outskirts of the city.

Neighbors complained about nightly screams, fights, and the sound of broken dishes.

Reports from the guardianship service indicated that basic food was often missing from the house, and the electricity was cut off for non-payment several times a year.

Blake grew up in an environment where survival was a daily task, not a guarantee.

School characteristics complimented this portrait.

Teachers described Blake as a withdrawn student with a low social status among his peers.

A psychologist who evaluated students in middle school left a note.

The boy has a pronounced dependence on the opinions of others, is looking for a stronger role model, and is prone to repressed aggression.

Todd Stanton became this strong figure for him.

The contrast between their lives was stark.

Todd had a stable family, his own car, pocket money, and a clearly defined future.

Blake had nothing.

To get a firstirhand account of the dynamics of the relationship between the boys, Detective Moran tracked down the Wilson’s former neighbor, Mrs.

Gable.

The woman who still lived in the same trailer park remembered both teenagers well.

Her testimony recorded during an official interview became the basis for understanding the psychological gap between the friends.

Mrs.

Gable said that Todd spent more time at Blake’s trailer than in his own home.

But their friendship had a specific character.

Todd paid for everything.

Absolutely everything, the woman told the detective as she sat in her kitchen.

For the food they ordered, for the cigarettes they smoked behind the garages, for gas if they managed to borrow someone’s car.

Blake always wore Todd’s old jackets and wore out his shoes.

From the outside, it looked like they were brothers, that Todd was taking care of him.

But Blake was always one step behind.

He was a shadow that existed only as long as Todd was around.

The most important part of her testimony, however, was the description of an event that occurred a few days before Todd’s disappearance in October 2011.

Mrs.

Gable recalled a particular argument she heard through her open bedroom window.

The boys were sitting on the porch of the Wilson’s trailer.

It was a quiet evening, so the voices were clear.

According to the witness, Todd started the conversation.

He was irritated and complaining about his parents again.

In the interrogation report, Mrs.

Gable reproduced what she heard.

Todd was screaming that his parents were smothering him, that they were controlling his every move.

He complained that he was being forced to go to law school, that he had no freedom, that his life was a living hell.

For Todd, these were real problems that seemed catastrophic.

But for Blake, who probably didn’t have a normal lunch that day and was listening to his father’s drunken yelling behind the wall, these words became a catalyst.

A neighbor described Blake’s reaction as immediate and atypically aggressive.

She heard a sharp thud as Blake violently threw an empty can against the trailer’s siding.

Then she heard his voice full of rage.

Shut up.

You just shut up.

You don’t even know what real hell is.

You’re just bored because you have everything.

You wouldn’t survive a day in my life.

After that, there was silence.

Todd didn’t say anything.

And a few minutes later, he drove away.

For Detective Moran, this episode was the key to the motive.

This was not a planned murder for profit.

It was a deep psychological trauma mixed with years of repressed envy.

The friendship was in the balance.

Todd was the star and savior, and Blake was the eternal debter and listener.

The trip to the forest was supposed to be another adventure where Todd would play the role of leader.

But when the situation got out of hand, and Todd found himself helplessly stuck in the chimney, the balance of power changed dramatically.

Analyzing the data he collected, Moran came to the conclusion that there was more to the story than just a fight in the Ozark forest.

When Todd started begging for help, Blake felt for the first time in his life that he was in full control of the situation.

The man he envied, who had everything Blake could only dream of and who dared to call his well-fed life hell, suddenly became dependent on his will.

Blake didn’t push him into that pipe.

But at the moment when he could have reached out or dialed the emergency number, the same anger that his neighbor heard on the porch awoken him.

He decided not to help someone who, in his opinion, had already received too many undeserved benefits from life.

It was a passive murder committed not with a weapon, but with inaction, born of years of social divisions and quiet hatred.

February 2015 in Franklin County was gloomy and rainy, which only increased the tension in Detective Roy Moran’s office.

Having received the results of the inhaler’s forensic analysis and gathered testimony about the psychological climate between the boys, Moran had enough evidence to obtain an arrest warrant.

The judge signed the document without hesitation.

However, the detective decided not to send a patrol team for a standard arrest.

He wanted to look into Blake Wilson’s eyes in person before the handcuffs clicked on his wrists.

Moran wanted to see the first genuine reaction of a man who had lived with the secret of his best friend’s death for 3 years.

At the time, Blake was already 22 years old.

He continued to live in the city of Vanurren, renting a tiny apartment above an old garage on the outskirts.

His life looked gray and unremarkable.

He worked as a loader and packer at a building materials warehouse for River City Supply.

His colleagues, who were later interviewed by investigators, characterized him as an invisible man.

He was quiet, avoided company lunches, never attended company parties, and never talked about his past.

He seemed to be trying to erase his identity, to dissolve into the routine of physical labor so as not to draw any attention to himself.

Detective Moran and his partner arrived at the warehouse in the middle of the day.

Inside the hangar, there was the hum of forklifts and the smell of sawdust.

They found Blake near the loading dock taping a film to a pallet of cement.

As the officers approached, Blake looked up.

The moment of visual contact described by Moran in his report was telling.

There was no surprise or indignation in the boy’s eyes, which is what innocent people usually experience when they see the police.

His eyes showed a deep, debilitating fatigue and fear that had obviously accompanied him every day for the past 3 years.

He slowly lowered the role of film, wiped his dirty hands on his work overalls, and stood still, waiting for the first word.

Blake, we need to clarify a few details about the Todd Stanton case.

The detective began calmly but firmly not taking out the handcuffs yet.

Blake tried to play the role he’d been wearing as a mask all along, that of a frustrated friend still waiting for answers.

His voice trembled as he asked, “Did you find anything new?” I I was hoping that his family would finally get some peace.

I still think about him every day.

He invited the detectives to go into a back room away from the noise of the warehouse and the curious stairs of the other workers.

In the small room with concrete walls, the air seemed electrified.

Moran took his time.

He sat down across from Blake and asked him to recount the events of that week in October 2011.

Blake, nervously fingering the edge of the table, repeated his memorized story.

He was sick.

He had a severe asthma attack.

He had been home all week and had not seen Todd before he disappeared.

The detective listened in silence, letting every word of the lie hang in the air.

When Blake fell silent, Moran slowly pulled a clear plastic evidence bag from his inside jacket pocket and placed it on the table between them.

Inside was a small, dirty blue object.

You said that you had severe asthma at that time, right? that you couldn’t leave the house?” the detective asked, looking directly into the suspect’s eyes.

“Yeah, I could barely breathe.

That’s why I didn’t go camping with him,” Blake quickly replied, still trying to hold on to his chosen line of defense, although his eyes were already on the package.

“It’s a ventilin inhaler, Blake,” Moran’s voice hardened.

We found it in the same cabin at the very bottom of the fireplace under a layer of debris and ash that hadn’t been touched in 3 years next to Todd’s remains.

Forensics recovered the markings on the spray can.

It has your prescription number issued in August 2011.

The room fell dead silent.

The color instantly drained from Blake’s face, leaving it dead pale.

He stared at the old dirtcovered inhaler as if it were a loaded weapon pointed at his head.

This small piece of plastic was the one thing he had forgotten in his panic and it was now ruining his entire life.

I I could have lost him before.

We We’ve been there before before he disappeared.

The boy tried to justify himself, but his voice broke into a whisper.

It was a last desperate attempt to save himself.

“No, Blake, that’s not possible,” the detective interrupted him, leaning forward.

“We checked they’s database.

This particular prescription was written and picked up by you just 3 days before Todd got on that bus.

You couldn’t have lost it before.

You were there with him that night.

You were in that room.

” Blake dropped his head into his hands, covering his face with his palms.

His shoulders began to shake slightly.

He didn’t scream.

He didn’t deny it.

He didn’t try to escape.

The entire burden of the lie he had built brick by brick for three long years collapsed in one minute under the weight of one indisputable fact.

In the back room, all I could hear was the hum of the ventilation and the guy’s ragged breathing.

“I didn’t want him to die,” he whispered barely audible without raising his head.

It was his first confession, words that confirmed the worst suspicions of the investigation.

Moran stood up and read Blake his rights in an official tone.

The arrest procedure took place in an atmosphere of complete obedience.

When the suspect was taken out of the warehouse, handcuffs shown on his wrists.

The work process stopped.

His colleagues saw him off with silent glances, not understanding what was happening.

Blake walked looking at his feet, not trying to make eye contact with anyone.

For him, this path to the police car was the end of his life on the outside.

But paradoxically, it was also the end of an unbearable 3-year wait for the inevitable exposure.

The secret that had been eating him up from the inside finally came out.

February of 2015, the interrogation room at the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department was saturated with the heavy, sticky silence that usually follows the fall of a suspect’s last line of defense.

Detective Roy Moran sat across from Blake, his eyes fixed on the boy hunched over in a metal chair.

Between them on the gray surface of the table lay a dirty plastic object in a transparent bag, a blue inhaler that had wiped out three years of lies.

Blake Wilson stared at it as if it were a piece of his own life that had fallen to pieces.

He was silent for almost 10 minutes, collecting his thoughts before he dared to break the silence.

I didn’t kill him with my own hands, he finally said in a horsedry voice, not looking up.

I didn’t touch him.

I just let it happen.

These words were the beginning of a detailed confession that revealed the true chronology of that night in October 2011.

According to Blake’s words recorded in the video record of the interrogation, the trip was initiated by Todd himself.

He was agitated and angry after a fight with his parents.

Blake took his mother’s old pickup truck and they drove to an abandoned cabin, a place they considered their secret base.

There they lit a fire in the fireplace, drank cheap beer that Todd had bought at a gas station, and the evening began in the usual way.

Todd paced the room, waving his arms, and began his usual story about how he was being strangled at home.

He was screaming that his father was a tyrant for forcing him to go to law school.

Blake told investigators, his voice still sounding angry 3 years later.

He said his mother controlled his every move, that he had no freedom.

He told me that to the man who ate leftover stale bread for dinner last night because my own father had drunk every last scent.

Blake admitted that at that moment he felt unbearable, burning disgust.

He looked at Todd, well-fed, wearing a new highquality jacket with a future that was given to him simply by the fact of his birth.

And a black wave of envy hit him.

Alcohol and years of accumulated resentment blew the fuses.

“I couldn’t take it anymore,” Blake continued.

I stood up and screamed in his face.

“You’re just a spoiled brat.

You play the rebel, but in reality, you’re nothing without daddy’s money.

You complain about a life I can only dream of.

You’re even afraid of the dark and you pretend to be a hero.

These words struck a chord with Todd.

He stopped.

His face reened with anger and alcohol.

He wanted to prove his toughness to show that he was not afraid of anything.

According to Blake’s testimony, Todd shouted, “I’m not afraid of anything.

I can do anything.

I’ll climb through the roof of this damn house like Santa to shut you up.

” It was a ridiculous, drunken challenge, but Todd took it seriously.

He ran outside and began to climb to the roof along the remains of the old extension.

Blake stayed downstairs in a dark room lit only by a smoldering fire.

He could hear Todd stomping on the rotten shingles above his head, cursing as he approached the chimney opening.

Then there was a short silence.

I heard the rustling of clothes against stone and then a sharp dull thud and scraping sound.

Blake’s voice trembled as he recalled the moment.

He was coming down too fast, didn’t calculate his movement.

The chimney was tapering downward, turning into a funnel.

He just got stuck.

Todd’s voice came from the depths of the fireplace.

At first, it was nervous joking, trying to turn the situation into a laugh.

He asked me to push him from below.

Blake tried to help.

He found a long stick in the corner and poked the rubber soles of his sneakers, which were visible in the gap with force.

But Todd screamed in pain.

His chest was stuck.

His arms were pinned to his torso, and every movement, every attempt to break free only tightened his grip on the stone vice.

Gravity was working against him.

Inside the hut, a cloud of centuries old dust, soot, and ash rose.

Disturbed by the fall, Blake, who had chronic breathing problems, instantly had an asthma attack.

He coughed, gasping for air, his lungs constricted in a spasm.

With trembling hands, he grabbed the blue inhaler from his pocket.

He managed to inhale the medicine, but his hands were shaking so badly that the slippery plastic can slipped from his fingers.

It hit the rocks and rolled somewhere in a pile of construction debris and rotten boards against the wall.

Blake didn’t even try to look for it.

Panic clouded his mind.

When his breathing steadied a bit, he pulled out his cell phone to call 911.

The screen lit up in the darkness with a cold blue light.

From above, from the stone trap, came not jokes, but please.

Blake, you’re hurting me.

I can’t breathe.

Todd screamed, his voice muffled and distorted by the echo of the chimney.

“Help me, please.

” Blake looked at his phone screen where the numbers were already being dialed.

Then he turned his gaze to the fireplace.

And at that moment, in his own words, something in him finally broke.

All the times Todd had condescended to pay for his lunch, throwing the money on the table, flashed through his mind.

All those looks from Todd’s parents who looked at Blake as if he were garbage stuck to their son.

All those endless complaints about the hard life in the big house.

Now, for the first time in their history, Todd depended on him completely.

Blake held his life in his hands.

It was a feeling of absolute power mixed with dark, cold resentment.

I thought, “If I call for help now and save him, tomorrow everything will be like before.

” Blake whispered during the interrogation, clenching his hands together until his knuckles were white.

He’ll be a hero again, a survivor.

It’ll be in the papers, and I’ll be his shadow again, a nameless friend.

And if I leave, he will simply disappear.

And all his problems, and my problems will disappear with him.

He slowly lowered his finger and cancelled the call.

The phone screen went off, plunging the room back into semi darkness.

Blake, are you calling? Blake, why aren’t you answering? Todd’s voice broke into a rasp, sounding like animal terror.

Blake didn’t answer.

He didn’t say another word.

He turned around, carefully, stepped over the trash on the floor where his inhaler had been left, and walked out of the cabin into the cool October night.

He got into his mother’s pickup truck, started the engine, and turned on the headlights.

He could hear his friend’s muffled screams even through the walls of the house as he turned the car around.

But he didn’t stop.

He didn’t turn around.

He just stepped on the gas, and drove home.

That night, he went into his room, got into bed, and fell asleep, leaving his best friend to die a slow, agonizing death in stone just because of envy.

that was stronger than humanity.

May of 2015 was the time when Franklin County, Arkansas, finally heard the final chord in a tragedy that had been going on for years.

The trial of Blake Wilson, which began at the Ozark County Courthouse, lasted less than a week.

Thanks to a detailed confession recorded on video during interrogation and irrefutable physical evidence found at the crime scene, the defense had little room for maneuver.

The defendant’s lawyer chose the only possible strategy in this situation.

He tried to convince the jury to qualify Blake’s actions as negligent homicide.

The line of defense was based on the thesis that Wilson was a frightened teenager who panicked in a critical situation, did not realize the seriousness of the moment, and ran away, hoping that the problem would resolve itself.

However, the prosecutor’s office methodically destroyed this version using the dry but horrifying facts of the forensic examination.

The central and most emotionally difficult moment of the hearings was the testimony of the state’s chief pathologist.

He took the stand, holding a folder with autopsy reports, and in a calm, professional tone, explained to the jury the mechanics of Todd Stanton’s death.

His words, recorded in the court record, caused many in the room to look away.

The victim’s death was not instantaneous, as is the case with falls from a height, the expert said, showing a diagram of the body’s position in the chimney.

According to tissue analysis and the degree of dehydration, the victim remained conscious for 24 to 48 hours after the fall.

He died slowly from a combination of dehydration, hypothermia, and positional asphixia.

Every minute was a physical struggle to breathe as his chest was compressed by the stone.

This fact became a decisive argument for the prosecution.

The prosecutor used it to prove the particular cruelty and cynicism of the crime.

In his closing argument, which lasted almost an hour, he addressed the jury, pointing directly at Blake Wilson, who was sitting at the defense table with his head down.

The prosecutor recreated the chronology of those days in October 2011, hourby hour, contrasting Todd’s torment with Blake’s everyday life.

This was not a split-second decision made in a state of affect, the prosecutor emphasized, addressing the court.

The defendant went home that night.

He got into his warm bed and fell asleep.

The next morning, he woke up, had breakfast, and watched TV.

He lived a whole day, then another night, and another day.

And every one of these minutes, every second of his comfortable existence, he knew for sure that his best friend was dying in a cold stone pipe 5 miles away.

He had a thousand chances to make one anonymous call to the police.

But he consciously chose silence.

His own freedom, his fear of responsibility, and his envy meant more to him than the life of the man he called his brother.

During the announcement of the verdict, the courtroom was absolutely silent.

Blake Wilson listened to the judge’s words without looking up from the table.

He did not cry, did not apologize to the victim’s family, and did not show any emotion.

He seemed resigned to the fact that his life had effectively ended that night by the fireplace.

The court found him guilty of seconddegree murder, which according to state law is characterized as an act committed with extreme indifference to the value of human life.

The judge handed down the sentence of 25 years in a maximum security prison without the possibility of parole during the first quarter of the term.

Todd Stanton’s parents left the courtroom in silence without commenting to the press.

For them, the truth that came to light during the investigation was worse than the years of uncertainty.

They found out that their son was not killed by an accident, a wild animal, or a serial killer.

He was killed by a boy who grew up in front of their eyes, whom they had fed lunches at their table for years and considered a second son.

The friendship they had truly believed in was poisoned by quiet black envy from the start.

And this realization hurt them more than any court verdict could heal.

2 months after the trial ended in July of 2015, the US Forest Service made a decision about the fate of the crime scene.

The hut at the foot of White Rock Mountain, which became Todd’s grave, began to attract stalkers and fans of dark tourism.

To prevent the tragedy site from becoming a dubious attraction, an order was issued to completely dismantle the structure.

A team of workers with heavy machinery arrived at the site early in the morning.

They dismantled the remains of the rotten wooden walls and the massive stones from the cursed chimney were crushed and scattered in a deep ravine so that no trace of the structure remained.

The foundation was covered with earth and leveled with the level of the forest soil.

The very next spring, nature began to actively absorb this area.

Young oaks and dense shrubbery quickly covered the space where the hut once stood.

Today, there is nothing left in the Ozark forest to remind us of the events of 2011.

Tourist maps do not mark the old trails leading to that place.

However, the locals of Mountainberg and the surrounding area still avoid the area.

The story of the boy who found his death in the chimney and the friend who let it happen has become part of the dark folklore of these mountains.

The silence of the Ozark forest became still again, hiding the memory of a betrayal that cost lives under a layer of new fallen leaves.