Ten by Eighteen

I found this one the way I find most of them, which is badly. It was late, I was looking for something else, and I ended up reading about a cave in Utah that has been filled with concrete since 2009. There's a plaque at the entrance. There's a man inside it.

I read that twice before I went any further.

Thanksgiving week

John Edward Jones was twenty-six. He was a medical student, he had a thirteen-month-old daughter named Lizzie, and his wife was pregnant with their second. In November of 2009 he was home in Utah for the holiday, and two days before Thanksgiving he went caving with his brother and a group of friends.

Nutty Putty wasn't a serious expedition. It's a limestone system southwest of Salt Lake City that amateurs had been crawling through for decades, the sort of place you take people who've never been underground. Scout troops went there. It had named passages, and one of them, a tight squeeze that opens into a chamber, was called the Birth Canal. Getting through it was the point of the trip.

John went looking for it and turned into something else.

The wrong passage

About four hundred feet from the entrance he pushed into an uncharted crack. It sloped downward and narrowed as it went, and he kept going, because that's what the Birth Canal does too. By the time it was obviously wrong he was head-down in a fissure roughly ten inches wide and eighteen inches high, with his arms pinned beneath him and no room to bend.

It would be easy to write this like he did something stupid. He didn't. He was an experienced caver in a beginner's cave, doing exactly what the passage he thought he was in required. The mistake was small and completely ordinary, and the cave punished it beyond anything a reasonable person would have predicted.

He was stuck at an angle steeper than vertical. His own weight pressed down onto his chest and his heart was working uphill, pumping against gravity instead of with it. He wasn't crushed and he wasn't drowning. He was slowly being killed by his own posture.

Twenty-seven hours

Rescuers reached him within hours. Well over a hundred people came, working in a passage that let one of them near him at a time, in shifts, in the dark, in a space where a full-grown adult couldn't turn around. They drilled anchors and rigged a rope and pulley system in the rock above him, and they tried to pull him back up the way he'd come.

He was awake for almost all of it. That's the part that changes the story.

He talked to the men working on him. He apologized to them for the trouble. He asked them to tell his wife he loved her, and when someone got a phone to her, he talked to her too. Twenty-seven hours is not a moment. It's a Tuesday night, and a whole Wednesday, and a man conscious and reasonable and running out of time inside a rock, being kind to strangers.

He died at 11:56 on Wednesday night, the twenty-fifth of November. His heart gave out. He was about a hundred feet from open air and four hundred feet from the entrance, and the people trying to save him were close enough to touch him.

Still there

They couldn't get him out. Attempting a recovery meant sending more people into the same passage that had already killed one, and the rock was unstable from the drilling. His family and the landowner agreed on the only remaining option. Explosives brought down the passage above him, and every entrance to Nutty Putty was filled with concrete.

So John Jones is still in there, in the dark, in the position he died in, and he will be for as long as that hillside exists. There's a memorial plaque on the surface. Underneath it is a cave that is now a grave, and the only way anyone reaches him is if somebody decides to open a mountain.

I've read a lot of cases where a body was never found. Usually that means nobody knows where the person is. This is the opposite. We know exactly where he is, down to the inch. We know which way he's facing. And he stays there anyway.

There's no mystery here. Everything about this case is known and documented, and nobody is hiding anything. What I hadn't thought about until that night was the gap between being found and being recovered. I've thought about it a lot since.

The full version of this case is going into a future volume of The Mystery Files. My mailing list hears about new books before anyone else.

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