On the morning of November 10, 1982, 54-year-old Mary Kemp received a phone call from her 35-year-old son, Don Kemp, who was on a cross-country trip researching a book about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. He told her he was in Wyoming and planned to visit an Old West museum in a few days. Before hanging up, he promised to call again soon.
Six days later, on November 16, a Wyoming highway patrolman discovered an abandoned SUV idling on an exit ramp in Carbon County. Its doors were open, clothes were scattered nearby, and it carried Maryland license plates. Fresh footprints led away from the vehicle into the snow-covered wilderness.
Deputies followed the tracks for six miles to a red barn. The footprints ended at the barn door, but no one was inside. A closer inspection revealed the prints had been stepped in twice, suggesting whoever made them had walked backward in the same footprints all the way back toward the SUV, leaving no separate trail. Despite retracing the route, investigators found no sign of the missing person.
The SUV was registered to Don Kemp. Mary confirmed he was traveling through Wyoming and said his disappearance made no sense. He had no history of mental illness or behavior that would explain abandoning his vehicle.
An extensive search by deputies, aircraft, and horseback found nothing. Three days later, a blizzard forced authorities to end the search, and Don’s case soon went cold.
Five months later, Don’s former coworker Judy Ayello in New York received a voicemail she immediately recognized as Don’s voice saying, “I’d like to speak to you again. Call me,” followed by a phone number.
When Judy called back, another man answered. He briefly claimed Don was there before changing his story, took Judy’s number, and promised to pass along the message. Judy knew the call couldn’t be a prank because her unlisted phone number was known only to people who knew her personally.
Police traced the calls to a trailer in Wyoming owned by Mark Dennis, about two hours from where Don’s SUV had been found. Dennis denied knowing Don and initially agreed to take a polygraph, but after hiring a lawyer, he refused further cooperation.
Mary believed Dennis was connected to her son’s disappearance, but police found no evidence to pursue him further.
Frustrated, Mary traveled to Wyoming and reviewed the case files herself. She discovered damage to Don’s SUV that investigators had never emphasized: a broken side mirror, torn door gasket, and a bent ignition key, suggesting the vehicle may have been forced off the road. She also learned investigators had never dusted the SUV for fingerprints or preserved the footprints in the snow, eliminating crucial forensic evidence.
Determined to find answers, Mary conducted her own investigation. She questioned Mark Dennis, interviewed museum employees, hired a private investigator, distributed reward posters, and even consulted a psychic. None of it produced results.
Her only significant lead came from two reported sightings of a man matching Don’s description in Casper around the time of the mysterious phone calls. One witness was a bartender; another saw him at an Abraham Lincoln exhibit, fitting Don’s research. But by the time Mary learned of the sightings, they were already weeks old, and no further trace of him was found.
Nearly three years later, on October 4, 1985, hunters discovered a human skeleton in Carbon County. A wallet identified the remains as Don Kemp.
An autopsy concluded he had died of exposure, with no evidence of foul play. Authorities determined he had suffered a mental breakdown, wandered into the wilderness, and likely died during the blizzard.
However, that explanation left major unanswered questions. Don’s body was found only four miles from where his SUV had been abandoned—an area that had been searched repeatedly. It also failed to explain the phone calls from Mark Dennis’s trailer five months later, the reported sightings of Don afterward, or the unexplained damage to his vehicle.
The mystery was never solved. When Mary Kemp died in 2014, she still did not know what had really happened to her son.