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Geocaching Duo Find Dead Body In S.carolina


travisl

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AIKEN - Two USC-Aiken students walked into Hitchcock Woods early Saturday morning on a high-tech treasure hunt and stumbled into a real mystery.

 

Tim Meesseman and Carl Williams, both 20, were using a global positioning system to find hidden items in an adventure game known as geocaching.

 

Instead they found the remains of a skeleton.

 

The rest of the article is on the Augusta Chronicle's web site.

 

If I'm guessing the right area, the cachers haven't logged their find yet, since, as of this moment, the most recent logs are 5 and 6 days old.

 

Patrick King, of Aiken, a regular on the geocache circuit, said he'd heard of unusual finds during hunts, but nothing like this.

 

"I've heard of people finding strange things like underwear, but I don't think I've ever heard of anyone finding a body."  :D

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Here's my prediction on this.

Once the body is identifyied, and if it is determined foul play, the sheriff will go to the family for answers, then if none are found there, they will Subpoena Geocaching.com for the real names of the people entered in the log book and online at the log your visit part of the cache. They will then ask each person if they saw or smelled something or heard anything unusual. I bet the killer, that is if it was foul play is thinking, "What are the chances I hid a body near a hidden treasure that everyone is trying to find in that geocache sport"? The body has been there a while if it is a skeleton and it is still winter, I bet.

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My guess is the body will turn out to be another Geocacher who was just trying to avoid having to log a DNF.

This was one thing I did not think of. It is embarrasing to log a Did not find.

And it makes you just want to crawl under a rock and die or brush pile as in this incident. :D

Edited by RockyRiver
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Hmm...

 

This cache is starting off with the following items, including two travel bugs.

 

"Boda Dee" (one of three triplets)

"June Bug" (Wants to see Europe)

 

car camping book

bean bag tic-tac-toe game

chinese checkers

fm scan radio

parachuter

mini road atlas (2)

Cinga baseball bat pen

Human Body CD

 

Edited by OurWoods
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You know, making these jokes is all well and good, but remember that they are investigating a potential homicide, and I would guess that Geocachers are gonna be high on the suspect list.

 

They can determine how old a body is (within reason) based on the amount of decomposition. The fact that it was mostly skeletonized won't help much though, but it might at least indicate that the body was there before the cache was placed, which would simplify their investigation a bit. Otherwise, you're all suspects.

 

I would think they'll at least contact the owner of the cache (I hope he doesn't talk the way he writes, or they'll haul him in on suspicion of drug use). :ph34r:

 

This isn't the first time that cachers have found human remains though, is it?

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Otherwise, you're all suspects.

Ok. Let's be real. If a geocacher was going to hide a body would he or she be dumb enough to hide it near a cache or along the trail? I'm sure most of us have found better dumping spots for bodies in our travels where even a casual search wouldn't have revealed much. Being a geocacher does NOT make you a supect just because a geocacher found the body.

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Otherwise, you're all suspects.

Ok. Let's be real. If a geocacher was going to hide a body would he or she be dumb enough to hide it near a cache or along the trail? I'm sure most of us have found better dumping spots for bodies in our travels where even a casual search wouldn't have revealed much. Being a geocacher does NOT make you a supect just because a geocacher found the body.

It would seem like a great way to contaminate a crime scene. But, from the sound of it, the body has been there way longer than the cache.

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How long, do you think, will it take for this particular mystery end up on one of the CSI shows?

When it does, are you going to make a cameo appearance? I'll let you borrow the wet cat, and you can do a "James Bond Bad Guy With the Cat" scene! :ph34r: Maybe they'll paint you as the Kingpin of Geokilling, and we'll all be your geominions!!!

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What I find creepy about this is that obviously, this person has been in the woods for a while. Read the logs from the cache page and see how many people went out there and found the cache and never found the body. Talk about tunnel vision! :ph34r:

 

And I seriously doubt that geocachers are going to be prime suspects...unless this town is very very tiny and a homicide/suicide only comes along once every 5 years or so (if this is the case, they might 'over-investigate' things).

 

We've had several people find bodies in fields. etc. in my town. I work for the police here and the reports usually just contain the persons name and contact info in case detectives have questions. But the finder is not usually a prime suspect. In most cases (in my town anyway), the finder was just someone that happened to be out hiking/jogging or checking on their farmland way out east and, unfortunately, came across the body of a complete stranger.

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Otherwise, you're all suspects.

Ok. Let's be real. If a geocacher was going to hide a body would he or she be dumb enough to hide it near a cache or along the trail? I'm sure most of us have found better dumping spots for bodies in our travels where even a casual search wouldn't have revealed much. Being a geocacher does NOT make you a supect just because a geocacher found the body.

I know, I'm just being silly. Still, the police probably wouldn't mind speaking to anyone caching in that area, as they might have uncovered something: "Well, come to think of it, my dog was trying to get me to play fetch with a femur."

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How long, do you think, will it take for this particular mystery end up on one of the CSI shows?

How about this,

 

Murderer kills show extra

Cuts up body into smaller chunks

Puts each chunk into a plastic tupperware (not glass so that nobody gets hurt)

Hides the containers

Makes a puzzle multi-cache out of the hides

Lists it on the geocaching site and sends link to cops

Martman makes a gruesome 2am FTF discovery

 

© 2004 by Criminal

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Well, when I went to find this cache, I first searched the around the cliffs figuring the GPS was off by about 40 feet or so. After that failed, I climbed on top of the cliff where I saw a path that lead to the cache. From the article the body was in a dense thicket to the right. I did notice the sound of what sounded like a small mammal in the thicket they are referring to. Kind of errry because after I found the cache, I spent 15 minutes sitting right next to it reading a book that was in the cache.

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I think we are missing something fairly obvious here. What if the body is that of a Geocacher.

 

Before you go, "yeah, you're crazy" think about it. There are those individuals who cache alone, live alone, and have no one to report them missing if they're gone for along while. Even then, if someone at their workplace or elsewhere did report them as a missing person, who would know or think of them being off hunting for caches, and where would they look???

 

A lone, elderly Geocacher, hunting in the thicket for the cache, thinking that is a likely place for it to be, has a sudden heart attack and dies? Not out of the question if you ask me. Tragic, but plausible, and perhaps, inevitable.

 

Just food for thought. We saw several bodies yesterday along the Texas coast down near BB-35 4X4, so it's a weird mooooooood. Yes, they were cows.....

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I think we are missing something fairly obvious here. What if the body is that of a Geocacher.

 

Before you go, "yeah, you're crazy" think about it. There are those individuals who cache alone, live alone, and have no one to report them missing if they're gone for along while. Even then, if someone at their workplace or elsewhere did report them as a missing person, who would know or think of them being off hunting for caches, and where would they look???

 

A lone, elderly Geocacher, hunting in the thicket for the cache, thinking that is a likely place for it to be, has a sudden heart attack and dies? Not out of the question if you ask me. Tragic, but plausible, and perhaps, inevitable.

 

Just food for thought. We saw several bodies yesterday along the Texas coast down near BB-35 4X4, so it's a weird mooooooood. Yes, they were cows.....

Point well taken. When I was younger, I used to go off for days at a time without anyone knowing where I was....and I was usually far away from the beaten path...if anything had happened to me, it could have been months and, in some places, years before anyone found my remains.....now I have my wife and family to keep track of me, and always let someone know where I'm going......

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Aiken is small, but not real small. It is one of the higher priced areas to live at. They have things like the Aiken Steeplechase and polo. Many of the people that live there that have lived there a long time come from "old money". Aiken is about 20 miles or so from Edgefield, home of Strom Thurmond. It's also about 25-30 miles outside of Augusta, Georgia, (my hometown) home of the Masters Golf Tournament and Georgia's second largest city. Many people that do live there work at SRP, which is Savannah River Plant. A nuclear bomb plant. Many horse racers from the north have winter homes in Aiken. If you go to downtown, you will find huge homes off of dirt side roads. It's weir, you are driving down the road seeing million dollar homes and they are on dirt roads. They never paved them because of the hormse farms there, yes in town! The crime rate is pretty low there.

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Aiken itself does have rich houses. But also the areas nearby Hitchcock Woods like Warrenville, Bath, Langley are very POOR areas of the county where plenty of trailers and section 8 apartments are located. This is just so weird, I was reading a book out of the cache right by a dead skelton. From the description read by the founder of the body, it appears to have been there for years. I'll post updates to this story if I get them.

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This doesn't have to do with caching, but I was on a local river in my friend's boat. In an industrial area, I joked with my friend wouldn't it be weird if we found a dead body. A few days later about 500 feet from where I said it, a dead body was found laying under a tree at the bank. He had been there several months and it looked like suicide or natural causes.

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