On Friday, October 16, 1988, a clear, cool morning in Knoxville, Tennessee, 20-year-old University of Tennessee botany student Caroline Foster set out for a day hike in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a place she knew well from frequent sample-collecting trips and photography outings. She told her parents, David and Sarah, she would walk only part of the Alum Cave Trail and be home for dinner by 7:00 p.m.
Leaving around 7:30 a.m. in her dark green 1992 Honda Civic, she entered the park at about 9:00 a.m. and phoned her mother at 9:15 from the trailhead lot to say she’d arrived safely and was starting out. After that, her phone went silent. When she failed to return by evening, her parents called the park service at 9:00 p.m. A ranger checked the Alum Cave parking area at 10:30 p.m. and found her locked car. Through the window, he saw her backpack on the passenger seat and her phone next to it—an alarming detail for an experienced hiker who would never head out without water, food, a map, and basic gear.
At dawn on Saturday, October 17, an intensive search began, involving more than 100 people—rangers, Sevier County deputies, volunteers, K-9 teams, and a helicopter. Crews gridded the trail, ravines, streams, and caves; the dogs caught a brief scent from the car and a short distance along the trail, then lost it. No clothing, footprints, or dropped items turned up. After two weeks, with no trace, the active search wound down. Caroline was declared missing, the case went cold, and for 19 months her parents kept looking on their own while her accounts and Social Security number showed no activity.
On May 20, 2000, three amateur cavers—Marcus Thorne, Daniel Reed, and Jessica Alvarez—surveying a remote, rugged section of the park near an abandoned 19th-century copper mine, roughly five kilometers northeast of Alum Cave and far from official routes, spotted a strange clearing in a damp ravine: an artificial platform supporting what looked like an altar. Four roughly hewn logs formed a base beneath a heavy gray slate slab about two meters by one meter, unnaturally smooth on top. Upon it lay a human figure entirely encased in a hard, translucent amber-brown substance, a resinous cocoon built up in uneven layers over time.
Through it, they could make out a young woman in dark hiking pants and a shirt, hands folded over her chest, head turned slightly right. Three carved-bone candlesticks—likely deer bone—sat at the base. The cavers photographed the scene from a distance, recorded GPS coordinates, hiked out for hours, and called authorities at 6:00 p.m. A task force of investigators, forensic specialists, and rangers reached the area by nightfall, secured a perimeter, and waited for daylight.
At first light on May 21, they documented the scene, noting hand-sawn logs, a slab likely quarried nearby and moved by levers or manpower, wax residues inside the candlesticks, and seven tree carvings within 50 meters: circles with an inscribed cross, like a sun cross or crosshair. No cigarette butts, prints, casings, or camp debris appeared—whoever worked there kept it meticulously clean. Because the resin had fused the body to the stone, the team extracted the entire slab as a single artifact, a 300-kilogram haul winched up the ravine and transported to the regional forensic center in Knoxville by evening.
On May 22, chief pathologist Dr. Alistair Reed led an unprecedented examination. X-rays and CT scans showed an intact skeleton, no limb or pelvic fractures, and no bullets or blades. The resin, a heterogeneous mix that was brittle outside and viscous near the body, required painstaking mechanical and chemical removal. With assistance from university chemists and a museum conservator, technicians worked around the clock, starting at the head; by May 23, dental records matched Caroline Foster 100 percent, later confirmed by DNA. Palynology and chemical analysis identified hand-collected pine and fir resins applied in many layers; pollen trapped within established a timeline: late-autumn 1988 in the deepest layers, winter–spring 1999 in mid-layers, and spring 2000 at the surface, proving the body was coated repeatedly over at least 19 months.
Once fully freed, Caroline showed classic signs of homicidal strangulation: a narrow ligature groove, microscopic processed-leather fibers in neck folds, and a fractured hyoid bone. She wore socks but no shoes. Detectives announced her identification and murder while withholding ritual details to avoid panic. Theories shifted from a lost hiker to abduction—either from the parking lot before she took her gear or during a brief meeting with someone she trusted. An FBI profile described a likely local white male, 30–50 in 1988, a skilled woodsman and loner with strong territorial beliefs.
Bone candlesticks were hand-tooled; tree symbols matched no known sect. A deep dive into Smokies folklore surfaced legends of syncretic forest rituals preserving bodies with evergreen sap to bind a soul to place. In September 2000, a retired ranger recalled a taciturn illegal hermit in the early 1990s who carved similar symbols and roamed the Porter Creek area. A covert search found his long-abandoned dugout hut camouflaged below a rock face: the same carved symbols etched inside, a rusted hand saw, antler-handled carving knives, hand-molded pots containing hardened pine resin, dried herbs, and a nearby sap-collection setup on old pines. Hair from the cot yielded a full male DNA profile with no CODIS match.
Toolmark comparisons showed strong compatibility with the altar logs and bone work but not a unique signature. An archivist then traced a family forcibly evicted when the park was created; a grandson’s DNA showed a great-uncle relationship to the unknown male, a man born in 1928 who vanished from records after 1950 and was obsessed with “stolen land.” Investigators concluded the hermit likely strangled Caroline as a territorial act and returned seasonally for 19 months to enshrine her in resin as a pagan guardian of “his” forest. By 2002, with the suspect presumed dead and no body or second hideout found, the case was closed as solved in exceptional circumstances—answers, if not courtroom justice, and a chilling artifact left to haunt the Smokies.
