On September 14, 2012, Curtis Penny and Gabriella Hart drove a rented car into the remote canyons of Kansas and disappeared without a trace.

The situation changed only when a volunteer combing a remote sector saw two motionless silhouettes above the cornfields.

At first, he took them for ordinary scarecrows to scare away birds.

But when he drove closer, he realized the horrifying truth.

They were the missing girls.

They had been tied to poles with construction ties and lined up in a row right in the path of the combine harvester that was to come out to harvest the next morning..

On September 14, 2012, the state of Kansas greeted two travelers with dry winds and a cloudless sky that seems unnaturally high here in the center of the Great Plains.

Curtis Penny and Gabriella Hart didn’t come here for the typical tourist routes.

Their goal was the so-called bedlands, remote almost Martian landscapes of chalk formations and deep canyons that cut across the plane.

The girls chose a black Toyota RAV 4 SUV rented from the Witchita airport to get around.

According to the case file, they seemed completely calm that morning.

At 10:00 and 15 minutes in the morning, surveillance cameras at a gas station near the highway exit recorded them for the last time.

The grainy video shows Gabriella laughing as she looks at the souvenir stand while Curtis pays for two bottles of water and a detailed paper map of the county at the cash register.

This detail would later attract the attention of investigators.

The girls apparently realized they were traveling to an area where mobile communications and GPS navigators often lose signal and prepared for complete autonomy.

They got into the car and the black SUV disappeared into the haze of hot asphalt heading west.

The alarm was not immediately raised.

Kansas is a place where time flows differently and distances between farms are measured in tens of miles.

According to the rental agreement, Curtis and Gabriella were supposed to return the car to the airport rental on September 16th at 12:00 sharp.

When the clock crossed that mark and the car didn’t show up, the company’s manager tried to contact the clients.

The phones were silent.

A check of the transactions showed that not a single scent had been charged to their bank cards since they bought water at the gas station.

This meant complete silence on the air for 48 hours.

At 14 hours and 30 minutes, the manager, acting according to protocol, passed the information about the missing car to the patrol police.

The search began with a standard check of tourist outlets.

The patrol officer serving the state park area did not find their black RAV 4 until the evening of September 16th.

The vehicle was parked in a gravel parking lot near the beginning of the Horse Thief Canyon Hiking Trail.

This place is known for its bizarre rocks and isolation.

There were no other cars around.

The officer told the dispatcher that the car was locked with no signs of forced entry or struggle from the outside.

However, when he shown his flashlight into the interior through the tinted glass, he saw something that made him immediately call for backup.

Two cell phones on the center console next to an unopened bottle of water.

No experienced hiker would go into the canyons without a means of communication, even if there is no network.

This indicated that the girls were planning to leave the car for just a few minutes, or they were forced to leave their belongings behind.

The sun was already setting over the horizon, painting the chalk cliffs an alarming red when the investigative team and a dog handler with a dog named Bark arrived at the scene.

He was an experienced dog trained to find people in rough terrain.

The police hoped that the dog would pick up the trail from the driver’s door and lead the group deeper into the canyon where the girls could have gotten lost or injured.

But Bark behaved strangely.

Instead of going down to the hiking trail, the dog started circling the car, nervously sucking in air.

He ignored the entrance to the gorge.

Instead, Bark pulled on the leash and confidently pulled the dog in the opposite direction toward the parking lot exit where the asphalt turned into an old broken maintenance road that led north along the park’s boundary.

The officers followed the dog.

After 300 m on the side of the road where the tall dry grass came close to the gravel, Bark stopped and sat down, marking the find.

In the light of powerful police lights, something glistened in the dust.

A gloved forensic scientist carefully picked up the object.

It was a professional polarizing light filter for a camera lens, an expensive item that photographers keep as the apple of their eye.

Curtis Penny was a professional photographer and according to her family, never parted with her equipment.

The find looked intact, but a closer look revealed deep, fresh scratches on the metal rim.

The nature of the damage indicated that the filter had not simply fallen out of a pocket or bag.

It had been torn off by force, a sudden movement, perhaps during a struggle when it was wrapped around the lens or when someone tried to wrestle the camera from their hands.

This detail instantly changed the status of the operation.

The version of an accident in the canyon was no longer possible.

The trail did not break off among the rocks, but near a road that could be used by vehicles.

The darkness around them grew thicker.

Now the police were looking for crime victims, not lost tourists.

The search area shifted from forested slopes to endless fields stretching along the highways where the only witnesses were the wind and a high wall of corn.

Time was working against them, and the first 48 hours, the most important for finding survivors, had already passed.

On September 16th, 2012, the search party changed tactics.

The discovery of a light filter on the side of an old gravel road crossed out the version of an accident in the canyon.

Now, the police worked according to the kidnapping protocol.

The search radius was expanded by dozens of miles, covering the giant areas of private farmland surrounding the park.

It was an area of total agricultural silence.

Thousands of acres of tall, dry corn that had just reached maturity and was waiting to be harvested.

The farmers of Ellsworth County granted permission to inspect their property without any questions.

However, it was physically impossible to comb such an area on foot.

Local volunteers with off-road vehicles and ATVs were involved in the operation.

One of these volunteers was a local resident who knew the network of dirt roads near the town of Jenniso.

He chose to inspect a remote sector north of the highway, a Massie that bordered the same gravel road where the sniffer dog had led the police several hours earlier.

According to the volunteers interrogation report, he was moving slowly, maneuvering between rows of corn.

The stalks in this part of the state were 7 ft high, creating the effect of a closed yellow tunnel.

Visibility was limited to a few meters.

The monotonous noise of the ATV engine drowned out any sounds, but visually the volunteer controlled the space ahead.

Around 18:00 in the evening, when low clouds began to cover the sun, he noticed a disturbance in the geometry of the rose in the depths of the field 50 m from the edge of the landing.

In the middle of the monotonous wall of plants, two vertical figures stood out.

At first glance, they looked like classic farm scarecrows set up to scare away birds.

Shapeless clothes, tilted heads, unnaturally straight postures.

This detail struck the volunteer as anomalous.

As he later explained to the detectives, in September, the corn had already hardened, the grain turned to stone, and the birds no longer posed a threat to the harvest.

There was no point in putting up scarecrows at this stage of the agricultural cycle.

The man drove the ATV deep into the rose, breaking dry stalks with the bumper.

When he was less than 10 yard away from the figures, he breaked sharply.

What looked like straw sacks from a distance turned out to be people.

They were Curtis Penny and Gabriella Hart.

The picture that opened up to the rescuer was horrifying in its methodical nature.

The girls were tied to wooden poles dug into the ground.

The attacker used thick white construction ties, plastic clamps used for cable installation.

The victim’s hands were tied behind their backs and their bodies were pulled to the bars at chest and waist level.

The girls heads hung helplessly on their chests.

They did not respond to the sound of approaching vehicles.

The volunteer immediately transmitted the coordinates by radio.

20 minutes later, the silence over the field was broken by the sound of sirens.

Patrol policemen and paramedics were the first to arrive.

The examination showed that both tourists were alive, but in critical condition due to dehydration, heat stroke, and severe pain shock.

Their clothes were covered with a layer of dust, and their lips were chapped to the point of bleeding.

Cutting off the ties, doctors noted that the plastic had cut into the skin to the meat.

The girls probably tried to free themselves in the first hours, but these attempts only worsened their injuries.

The location of the victims attracted special attention of the forensic experts.

The pillars were dug in exactly on the same line, perpendicular to the direction of the crops.

The faces of Curtis and Gabriella were turned exactly to the east.

It looked like a ritualistic placement, but the explanation was much more pragmatic and terrifying.

While the doctors were loading the semi-conscious girls into an ambulance, a representative of the agricultural holding that owned the field arrived at the field.

When he saw the crime scene, he turned pale.

During a conversation with a senior investigator, the aronomist revealed a detail that changed the case’s qualification from kidnapping to attempted murder with particular cruelty.

According to the approved harvesting schedule, which was known to all local workers and posted on the town’s bulletin board, heavy machinery was to enter this particular field the next morning, September 17th.

The start of work was scheduled for 6:00 in the morning.

The giant combines with wide rotary headers were to move across this particular square moving from east to west against the sun.

The design of a modern combine harvesters header is such that the driver sitting high in the cab cannot see what is entering the mechanism at the level of the stalks, especially in a dust storm that the machinery kicks up.

The girls were tied at such a height that their heads and torsos were exactly in the line of the cutting knives.

They were set up as targets.

If the search team had stayed at least overnight, or if a volunteer had decided to check the neighboring square, a tragedy would have occurred at 6:00 in the morning on September 17th, which would have been attributed to a terrible industrial accident.

The police realized that the criminal had not just left them to die of thirst.

He had prepared them for execution using an industrial machine as a murder weapon.

He had calculated the time to the nearest hour.

The search operation preceded the death by less than 12 hours.

The field, which rustled softly with dry leaves in the wind, was in fact a tuned time bomb, and only an accident stopped at a moment before it was set off.

On September 17th, 2012, the intensive care unit of the regional medical center in Selena resembled a fortress.

Police posts were set up not only at the entrance to the ward, but also on the floor.

Curtis Penny and Gabriella Hart were in what doctors characterized as physically stable, but psychologically critical condition.

Severe dehydration, numerous bruises from plastic ties, and the effects of heat stroke were treated with drips.

However, what was happening in the girl’s minds required a completely different intervention.

They were silent.

It was not just a reaction to stress, but a deep catatonic stuper caused by the expectation of imminent death.

Gabriella Hart was the first to make contact.

Around 2:00 in the afternoon, after being sedated, she agreed to speak with the county senior detective.

Her testimony recorded on a dictapone became the first and most important document that provided a glimpse into the mechanics of the crime.

Gabriella spoke quietly, often stopping to take a sip of water, but her memory captured the events with frightening photographic clarity.

According to the victim, it all started in the same parking lot near the canyon.

They were packing up their things when a man approached the car.

She noted that his appearance was perfectly sterile for the area.

He didn’t look suspicious, rather like thousands of other laborers working in the fields under the scorching sun.

He wore a wide canvas Panama hat with the brim down.

His eyes were hidden behind large mirrored glasses, and his lower face and neck were covered by a thick cloth bandana buff stretched to the bridge of his nose.

Not a single centimeter of skin, not a single special mark.

Only dust on his clothes and a deaf voice.

He addressed them with a request that automatically evokes empathy.

The man said that his dog, an old terrier, had chased a rabbit and got stuck in a hole in a ravine 50 m away.

He asked me to hold the lantern while he tried to get the dog out.

It was so ordinary and human that the girls did not hesitate for a second.

They left their phones in the car because they expected to be back in 2 minutes.

But as soon as the group moved away from the parking lot, going down into a shallow gully, the stranger’s behavior changed instantly.

Gabriella recalled this moment as turning off the lights.

The man stopped, turned around, and pulled out a gun without a word.

It was not a threat, but a statement of fact.

The most frightening thing was that he did not shout, make demands, or show aggression.

He acted like a robot following a program.

The interrogation report records a key detail.

The kidnapper forced the girls to put thick, opaque cloth bags over their heads before he took them to his vehicle.

He did not want them to see the color of the van or the road.

They spent the entire trip to the field about a 40-minute drive in complete darkness, lying on the metal floor of the cargo compartment.

Inside, they smelled of grease, old tires, and something sweet like rotten hay.

When the truck stopped and they were taken out, the bags were not removed from their heads.

Gabriella felt her arms being pulled down roughly but professionally with plastic cuffs behind her back.

She was forced to her knees, then forced to stand up and pressed against a wooden post.

She could hear Curtis breathing next to her, hear the rustling of dry corn.

But the most terrifying sound was another.

The sound of a construction tape measure.

Gabriella told detectives that she heard the distinctive metallic crackle of the tape being pulled out of the case, followed by a sharp click of the lock.

The man approached them one by one.

She could feel the cold edge of the metal ruler touching her shoulder, neck, and chin.

He was measuring them.

In complete silence, interrupted only by the rustling of leaves, he measured the height of their bodies relative to the ground.

The victim recalled that he kept muttering numbers under his breath.

These were not curses or threats.

It was dry math.

48 in 52 in tilt correction.

At that moment, the girl did not understand the meaning of these actions.

She thought he was preparing some kind of sophisticated torture.

It was only later when investigators compared these testimonies with the technical parameters of the John Deere combine that the puzzle was put together in a terrifying picture.

The kidnapper didn’t just tie them up.

He measured the height of the heads to the nearest inch.

He knew the height at which the combine’s header would be set when harvesting this particular variety of stunted corn.

He adjusted the position of their bodies to the parameters of the cutting mechanism so that the impact of the metal blades would be instantaneous and fatal.

It was an engineering preparation for murder.

Gabriella also noted that after he finished the editing, he did not say a word to them goodbye.

He didn’t laugh.

He didn’t mock.

He just wound up the tape measure, checked the tension of the ties, got in the car, and drove away, leaving them in the darkness of the bags to wait for the sun to rise.

This cold mechanical indifference, the absence of any rage or sadism in his voice, scared her more than the weapon itself.

They were not dealing with a maniac in the usual sense, but with someone for whom they were simply objects that needed to be placed in the right place in space to perform a certain function.

Gabriella Hart’s testimony provided the police with a psychological portrait, but not a facial description.

However, one phrase she dropped at the end of the interrogation made the detectives shudder.

She said, “He didn’t smell like a criminal.

He smelled like earth and diesel fuel.

He was at home here.

On September 18, 2012, while Curtis and Gabriella were under the care of doctors, the epicenter of events shifted back to the cornfield near Jenniso.

Now this place was officially considered a crime zone.

The perimeter was fenced off with yellow tape that fluttered in the step wind, creating a surreal contrast to the endless agricultural landscape.

A group of forensic scientists and trace evidence experts started working.

Their task was not just to record the footprints, but to answer one illogical question.

Why this particular point? The field was huge, hundreds of acres of monotonous rows.

However, the attacker chose a specific sector that had no visual landmarks.

The detectives were concerned about the technical side of the execution.

The soil in Kansas in late summer resembles concrete.

Due to the long absence of rain, the top layer of the earth hardens into a hard crust.

To dig a hole at least 2 ft deep to install the pole, a grown man would need at least 30 minutes of hard work with a shovel or a loud gasoline drill.

How could the kidnapper have done this at night? quietly, quickly, and according to the girl’s testimony, without exerting excessive physical effort.

The answer came when they tried to dismantle the structures.

A technician officer wrapping his arms around a wooden pole prepared to loosen it to pull it out of the ground, but the pole gave way surprisingly easily.

It was not covered with earth.

It simply slipped upward with a barely audible vacuum sound.

When the forensic team cleared the base with brushes, they saw what turned a chaotic attack into a planned engineering operation.

The wooden bar had not been in contact with the ground.

It had been inserted into a pre-existing plastic sleeve, a 4-in diameter piece of thickwalled polyvinyl chloride pipe.

The top edge of this pipe was buried flush with the ground and covered with a thin layer of dry leaves and dust.

It was a perfect outlet for death.

The examination showed that these shell casings had been in the ground for at least several months and possibly years.

The plastic on the outside had fused with the roots of weeds and a characteristic sediment had accumulated inside.

The scheme became clear.

The criminal did not need to dig holes on the night of the abduction.

He simply brought the victims to a pre-prepared site, found the hidden markers, removed the plugs, and inserted the poles into the finished holes.

This explained the speed Gabriella described and the absence of digging sounds.

But the real horror lay deeper.

The senior forensic scientist ordered to expand the excavation area around the found shell casings.

They began removing the soil layer by layer, sifting through each handful of earth.

Less than 1 ft away from the active shell casings, the shovel hit something hard.

It was another plastic fragment.

But unlike the first, this one looked old, tarnished, and brittle.

It was the same kind of pipe casing, but long abandoned.

Its edges were torn.

The plastic cracked from soil pressure, and the interior was filled with fossilized dirt.

Continuing to dig, the group found a whole system of such dead shell casings.

They were arranged with geometric precision, forming a perfect line perpendicular to the movement of the combine.

The most important evidence was found inside one of these old pipes.

Carefully cleaning out the dirt with tweezers, the expert pulled out a piece of wood about 3 in long.

The wood was black with moisture and decay, almost turning into pete, but the grain structure was preserved.

The lower edge of the fragment was smooth, as if it had been saw off, but the upper edge had a characteristic ragged cut at an acute angle.

The trace evidence expert immediately recognized this trace.

It wasn’t a wind or kick mark.

It was the result of contact with a high-powered rotating cutting mechanism.

The wood was cut instantly, splitting the fibers along the axis of impact.

The laboratory’s findings, which came later, confirmed the detectives guesses at the scene.

The fragment found was the remnant of a pine beam identical in diameter to the ones to which Curtis and Gabriella were tied.

This meant only one thing.

There were already scarecrows in this field at this very spot.

The discovery completely changed the scope of the investigation.

The attacker was not improvising.

He had been using this field as a training ground for years.

Old shell casings showed that he regularly updated the infrastructure.

When the old pipes became unusable or clogged with earth, he simply dug new ones nearby, maintaining the perfect geometry of the trap.

A cut piece of wood was a mute witness that the previous structures had fulfilled their purpose.

Someone or something was tied to them in the past harvest seasons.

And when the heavy machinery came to the field, it did its job, grinding the evidence into pieces that would simply rot along with the remains of the cornstalks.

The field hid the full cycle, from preparation to disposal, and only a fluke prevented Curtis and Gabriella from becoming another cut off obstacle in this endless agricultural conveyor belt.

On September 19, 2012, the investigation moved from the dusty fields to the quiet of the archives.

The discovery of old shell casings and a cut piece of wood shifted the case to a new plane.

The detectives were no longer looking for a spontaneous satist.

They were hunting for a serial killer who had been operating for years, remaining invisible.

The key to his identification lay not in criminal databases but in the accounting books and technical reports of local agricultural services.

The logic of the investigators was ironclad.

If there were similar scarecrows in this field before and they were destroyed by machinery, it could not have gone unnoticed by the machines themselves.

A combine harvester is a powerful but sensitive mechanism.

Getting a hard object, such as a 4-in diameter wooden bar or a large volume of biological mass into the rotary mechanism inevitably causes vibration, jamming, or damage to the knives.

This means stopping the machine, calling a mechanic, and drawing up a repair report.

The detective assigned to this area seized the archives of all the service companies in Ellsworth County for the past 10 years.

He was interested in specific records.

Breakdown of the Reaper, foreign object in the mechanism, emergency cleaning.

Hours of monotonous work with yellowed way bills finally paid off.

In a folder for October 2008, he found a document that made him stop.

It was an act of technical incident and unscheduled maintenance dated October 14th, 2008.

The incident occurred in a field bordering the same sector where Curtis and Gabriella were found.

The complainant was a local farmer who rented equipment.

In the column description of the problem according to the client, the dispatcher wrote in his handwriting, strong impact in the reaper during the passage of the last row, metal scraping, rotor speed dropping, suspicion of hitting construction waste, or a large animal in the tall grass.

Usually in such cases, farmers solve the problem on their own.

They stop the machine, open the hatches, pull out the remains of the deer or branches with a crowbar, and continue working.

But the situation here was different.

The notes read, “The client refused to clean it himself due to excessive biological contamination and the specific nature of the shaft blockage.

The farmer was simply unable or afraid to climb inside the mechanism which was clogged with what he thought were animal remains.

He called a mobile team.

The key point was the next page, the report on the work performed.

The machinery was not repaired in the field.

The harvester was disconnected, loaded onto a carriage, and taken to a service company’s hanger for urgent overhaul.

It was an ideal opportunity to destroy the evidence hidden behind a bureaucratic procedure.

In the column contractor was a clear sweeping signature.

Woody Bush position senior shift mechanic.

The detective began to analyze the list of work performed by Bush that night.

The record looked like a standard report, but to an experienced eye, it screamed crime.

Bush indicated the cause of the breakdown.

foreign object ingress, sandbags, tree branches, biological remains of animal origin, presumably white-tailed deer.

However, instead of replacing bent shafts or knives, 90% of the time, according to the report, was spent on a procedure coded special treatment.

The bill of lighting for the consumables included the write off of 20 gall of industrial solvent, 5 gall of acidic aluminum cleaner, and the use of a high-press heated water jet for 4 hours.

Woody Bush didn’t fix the combine.

He was washing it.

He spent 4 hours alone with the machine in a closed box, methodically scrubbing every crevice, every bolt, every inch of the cutting unit with hot water and chemicals.

He destroyed DNA, fragments of clothing, the remains of the stuffed animal, everything that could indicate that the machine had ground a human being, not a deer.

And the most cynical thing was that he officially registered it as a paid service.

The farmer paid for the murderer to destroy the evidence of his own crime, considering it maintenance.

The police pulled up Woody Bush’s personal file.

The profiles described him as a pedant, a man obsessed with the purity of technology.

Now this trait took on a sinister meaning.

He was not just a performer.

He created a vicious cycle of death.

He would set his victims in the path of the machines, allow the farmers to unknowingly pull the trigger, and then appear as a savior mechanic to wash away the blood and prepare the machine for the next season.

Investigators realized that they were dealing with a unique type of criminal, a cleaner who uses the industrial system as a murder weapon.

The report of 2008 did not name the victims, only the dry term biological remains.

But now the police had the name of the person who had turned those remains into a line item on an accounting report.

The archive of the disappeared was no longer nameless.

All the threads led to one hanger and one person who knew how to flawlessly cover his tracks under the roar of high-pressure water.

On September 20th, 2012, the focus of the investigation shifted sharply from the dusty cornfields to the sterile coolness of the server rooms.

The discovery of the hidden shell casings and the analysis of the repair of the combine in 2008 gave the detectives a clear vector.

They were no longer looking for a random maniac.

They were looking for a person who had professional access to harvest schedules, knew the technical nuances of heavy agricultural machinery, and could move freely around the farmland without arousing suspicion.

The focus of the investigation was Plains Egg Services, a company headquartered in an industrial zone on the outskirts of Selena.

It was the largest contractor in the region, providing farmers with equipment for rent, maintenance, and most importantly, full harvesting logistics.

Detectives obtained a court warrant to seize the company’s servers, digital service logs, and staff duty schedules for the last 10 years.

The analysts worked for 18 hours straight, comparing terabytes of data.

The search algorithm was simple.

find an employee who worked for the company during all known incidents and had access to specific locations.

The system produced only one name which was repeated in all suspicious reports.

Woody Bush.

According to his personnel file, 45-year-old Woody Bush had been working for Planes Services since 2005 as a senior mechanic and logistics coordinator.

His personnel file looked flawless and intimidating at the same time.

His superiors described him as an exceptionally reliable, meticulous worker who tends to work alone.

In their testimonies, colleagues noted a strange detail.

In 7 years of work, Bush never took a vacation in September and October.

At the peak of the harvest season, when other mechanics were falling down from exhaustion, he took on extra night shifts, voluntarily traveling to the most remote calls.

The key piece of evidence that turned suspicion into certainty was his electronic work log.

As a logistician, Bush had access to God’s Eye, a system of precise GPS coordinates for every field in the county and an hourly schedule of equipment departures.

Investigators overlaid Bush’s movements on the crime map.

The field near Jenniso, where Curtis and Gabriella were found tied up, was entered into the company’s database under the code sector 49.

According to the approved plan, the John Deere S690 heavy harvester was to enter this square at exactly 6:00 in the morning on September 17th.

The girls might not have survived that time, but the most interesting was a recording made a week before the abduction.

In his personal schedule, Woody Bush put a note opposite this field.

Soil density test.

This was an anomaly.

Mechanics and logisticians don’t check the soil.

That’s the job of aronomists.

This note showed that Bush had traveled to the site in advance.

He was not checking the ground.

He was checking the readiness of his shell casings and calculating the trajectory of the combine to identify the victims with mathematical precision.

However, the final point was made by an archival document for October 14, 2008.

The detectives found the original invoice for the same repair of the harvester mentioned in the farmer’s report.

In the electronic database, this document had a status of closed, completed, and the executive was Woody Bush.

In the paper version of the invoice, the details of the work made the district attorney cringe.

In the parts replaced column, there was a long dash.

Not a single bearing, not a single blade, not a single shaft had been replaced.

This meant that the mechanism was technically sound.

But in the consumables column, Bush wrote in his own hand, 5 gall of acidic aluminum cleaner, 20 gall of industrial solvent, 4 hours of high-pressure cleaner.

He did not spend 4 hours on repairs, but on specialized sanitization.

The investigation made clear the horrific reality.

Woody Bush wasn’t just repairing equipment.

He was acting as a cleaner.

On that day in 2008, the combine actually hit an obstacle, which was probably a person.

Bush took the machine to a hanger, personally washed the blood and biological remains, destroying the victim’s DNA, and returned the clean machine to the farmer, blaming it on a deer.

He used the farmers as weapons and his status as a mechanic as the perfect cover to cover his tracks.

The last question remained, transportation.

Witnesses described the kidnapper in an old van or pickup truck.

The police made a request to the Department of Transportation.

No vehicles were registered in Woody Bush’s name except for a company car.

However, a deeper search revealed that he had inherited his late father’s property, which included an old 98-year-old Chevy CK 1,500 Silverado pickup truck.

The color of the car was not listed in the database due to the age of registration.

However, after interviewing the security guards at the plane’s egg services parking lot, detectives learned that Bush often arrived at work in a dirty white truck with a strange handpainted kicker.

The description matched Gabriella’s testimony about the van, which smelled of old hay and oil.

The puzzle was complete.

Woody Bush was the architect of the trap, the executive, and the cleaner.

He turned the industrial harvesting process into a death conveyor.

The warrant for Woody Bush’s arrest and search of his home was signed by the judge immediately, marked highly dangerous.

The SWAT team began preparing to leave.

The investigation had all the evidence, but no one knew where the suspect was at that moment.

On September 20, 2012, at exactly 16 hours and 30 minutes, the silence of a residential neighborhood south of the Selena Airport was broken by the sound of a door being kicked in.

The takedown team, comprised of city police officers and Ellsworth County Sheriff’s deputies, acted quickly and forcefully.

They expected armed resistance, knowing that the suspect had access to tools and possibly a firearm.

However, when the SWAT team burst into the rented house, they were greeted only by the loud echo of their own footsteps.

The house was empty, but it was not the kind of emptiness that criminals usually leave behind when they flee in panic.

Inside, there was a perfect, almost surgical order.

The floor was shiny.

There was not a single dirty cup in the kitchen, and the bed was made without a single wrinkle.

The officer who conducted the initial inspection noted in his report that the room looked sterile, as if no one had lived there, or the occupant had carefully destroyed all traces of his biological existence before leaving.

Woody Bush’s cell phone was found on the living room table.

The back cover had been removed, and the battery was lying separately.

This was a clear signal.

He had not just escaped, he had cut off digital communications and gone into full autonomy.

A search warrant for a white 98-year-old Chevy Silverado pickup truck with a distinctive homemade horn was sent to all Kansas state patrols.

The airwaves were filled with tense anticipation.

The police realized that if Bush, who knew every field road within a 100 miles, got to the remote areas, it would be almost impossible to find him.

At 17 hours and 42 minutes, a patrol officer on duty at the strategic intersection of Interstate 70 and K96 reported visual contact to dispatch.

He spotted an old dirty pickup truck heading west toward the town of Ellsworth.

The driver was behaving aggressively, ignoring the speed limit and overtaking the flow of civilian vehicles, crossing into the oncoming lane through a double solid line.

The license plates were covered with mud, but the officer recognized the Kung.

As soon as the patrol car turned on its flashing lights and siren, the Chevy accelerated sharply.

The pursuit began.

Woody Bush did not respond to the request to stop, which was made through the loudspeaker.

According to the patrol car’s dash cam, the fugitive speed quickly reached 90 mph.

The heavy pickup truck, which was not adapted for such races, swayed dangerously on the narrow two-lane road.

Its suspension squeaked on bumps and clouds of gravel flew out from under the wheels as it clung to the side of the road.

Analyzing the route, the operation coordinators realized the fugitives tactics.

Woody Bush did not try to ram the police or engage in combat.

As an experienced agricultural logistician, he was trying to get to a complex road junction 5 miles ahead.

There began a dense network of dirt roads between farms, the so-called farm grid, where heavy machinery could easily get lost and patrol sedans would get bogged down in dust.

This was his plan to disappear into the landscape he considered his own.

The command of the operation decided not to go for a ram pit stop maneuver as there were still civilian cars on the road and the risk of accidental casualties was too high.

Instead, a patrol crew coming from Ellsworth blocked the road and deployed a strip of spikes stopsticks at mile marker 20 just before the turnoff to dirt roads.

At 18 hours and 5 minutes, the dash cam recorded the final chase.

Woody Bush saw the obstacle too late.

He tried to turn the wheel, but the inertia of the heavy car at 90 mph left him no chance.

The front wheels of the Chevy hit the spikes and exploded instantly with a loud sound like a gunshot.

The pickup lost control and veered to the left.

The truck, kicking up a column of dust, flew off a low embankment, turned over on its side, plowed the ground with its metal side, and crashed into the wire fence of the pasture, knocking down several wooden posts.

Silence ensued, broken only by the hiss of a punctured radiator and the whale of approaching sirens.

Officers approached the wrecked car with their weapons at the ready, shouting commands to show their hands, but there was no resistance.

Woody Bush was sitting in the overturned cab, pinned down by an airbag that had deployed.

He was not seriously injured, just a few scratches from broken glass on his face.

His hands were gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles were white, even though the car was no longer going anywhere.

He was staring at one point through the broken windshield at the field, stretching out in front of him.

His gaze was glassy, devoid of emotion.

When he was dragged out of the car and handcuffed, he did not say a word.

While the doctors were examining the detainee, the detectives searched the car.

On the passenger seat, covered with plastic fragments, was an old sports bag.

Its contents finally confirmed that this escape was not a spontaneous reaction.

Inside, they found $12,000 in cash and small bills carefully tied with rubber bands.

Next to it was an unfolded paper map of Mexico’s highways with a marker on the route.

But the most important find was a hard disc from a desktop computer.

It had been mechanically destroyed.

Someone had carefully drilled it with a drill in three places, damaging the magnetic plates.

Woody Bush took with him not only the money for a new life, but also his digital memories, which he decided not to leave to the investigation.

He tried to erase his past as methodically as he erased the tracks on a combine harvester, but this time the road ended in a wire fence in the middle of the Kansas prairie.

October 2013, Ellsworth County District Court.

The trial of Woody Bush was perhaps the quietest and at the same time the most horrific in the history of Kansas.

There were no screams from relatives, hysterics from the defendant, or loud speeches from lawyers.

The courtroom was filled with an atmosphere of cold, dead silence broken only by the squeak of the court reporter’s pen.

The video recordings of Woody Bush’s interrogations, which the prosecutor’s office showed to the jury, were later included in classified textbooks on criminal psychology.

On the screen was a man who looked absolutely normal but said things that made experienced detectives blood run cold.

The experts characterized his emotional state as absolute zero.

He did not deny a single fact of the prosecution.

He did not try to justify himself or lie.

The only thing that caused him irritation was in his opinion the incorrect terminology of the investigators.

When the senior investigator asked him during the recording, “Why did you attempt to murder these women?” Bush calmly corrected him like a teacher of a negligent student.

It wasn’t murder, officer.

It was a disposal.

You don’t call composting grass murder.

The perpetrator’s motive was based on a distorted but internally consistent philosophy of agrarian purity.

During interrogations, he explained his worldview in detail.

All his life, he had been watching tourists who came to Kansas to see the canyons or prairies.

In his mind, these people were parasites and weeds.

They did not produce anything.

They did not sew, reap, or repair machinery.

They only consumed resources, bought plastic water bottles, trampled on the ground, and left behind garbage.

For Woody Bush, they were an ecosystem failure.

He sincerely believed that he was doing a good deed by giving their existence at least some meaning through death.

One of his quotes at the trial made the jury look away.

The land produces crops, but it requires nitrogen in return.

This land is hungry.

These girls were useless in the city.

They were garbage.

But after passing through the rotor of the combine, they would become part of the field.

They would become organic matter.

I wanted to make them useful.

I wanted to put them back into the cycle.

However, the most shocking aspect of his confession was not his philosophy, but the technical side of the case.

Investigators could not understand for a long time why he so carefully measured the height of the victim’s ties with a construction tape measure.

The prosecutor assumed that it was an element of a sadistic ritual to make the victim suffer before death.

The truth came to light only when a mechanic from the police garage was brought in for questioning.

Woody Bush became more animated only when the conversation turned to the technical characteristics of the John Deere combine.

He explained that he was not concerned about the suffering of the girls, but about the integrity of the threshing drum.

The human femur is very hard, he said casually, drawing a diagram on the back of the minutes.

If it hits the mechanism at the wrong angle, it can cause the shaft to vibrate or even bend the rotor blades.

This is an expensive repair and downtime for the equipment.

I set the level so that the blades would pass cleanly through the soft tissue and spine without hitting the pelvis.

Equipment should not suffer because of garbage disposal.

For him, this was the highest form of respect, not for human life, but for an engineering mechanism.

He was ready to kill people, but he was panicked about scratching the shaft of the combine.

The defense team tried to build a strategy on declaring Bush insane.

The lawyer insisted that such logic was evidence of a deep mental disorder.

However, the forensic psychiatric examination gave a clear conclusion.

Woody Bush is absolutely sane.

He was well aware of his actions, understood the difference between good and evil, but deliberately chose a different frame of reference.

In his mind, the moral compass was completely replaced by the instruction manual for agricultural machinery.

For him, efficiency was more important than humanity.

The trial lasted only 3 days.

The judge’s verdict was harsh and final.

two life sentences without the possibility of parole, plus an additional 40 years for kidnapping and attempted murder of two people.

When Woody Bush was taken out of the courtroom, he showed no emotion.

He only glanced at his watch as if checking to see if he was on time for a shift he would never have again.

The fates of the victims were not easy.

Curtis Penny and Gabriella Hart survived physically, but went through hell of psychological recovery.

Gabriella never picked up a camera again and moved to a big city away from open spaces and fields.

It took the Curtis’s years of therapy to be able to go outside unaccompanied again.

They try to live a normal life, but every fall reminds them of the smell of dry corn and the sound of a construction tape measure in the dark.

This case changed life in Ellsworth County forever.

Quiet farm fields lost their innocence.

Locals began to look differently at the high walls of crops along the roads.

Agri holdings and private farmers have implemented new safety protocols.

Now, before a heavy combine enters a field to harvest, the operator is required to fly a drone with a highresolution camera and fly around the entire perimeter, checking the rows for foreign objects.

In contracts and instructions, this clause is officially called the preliminary inspection protocol, but farmers call it something else among themselves.

They call it the Bush rule.

And every year when the buzz of drones rises above the golden fields of Kansas, it reminds everyone that the land can indeed require sacrifice if it is worked by someone who values machinery more than his soul.