Editor’s note: In Adventure Journal 17, summer 2020, we published a story called “The Ghost in the Tent,” by journalist Jason Nark, who had been trying to decipher the mystery of a man known only by his trail name, Mostly Harmless, whose emaciated body was found in a tent by day hikers in Florida. Harmless had hiked from New York to Florida and there was food and money in his tent, but no identification, and neither Collier County detectives nor amateur web sleuths could figure out his real name, find his family, or uncover friends.
We can now confirm that Mostly Harmless was Vance Rodriguez, a technology worker originally from Louisiana but in recent years based in Brooklyn, New York. After our print story was published, Nark continued his reporting and on December 16 he connected with Rodriguez’s former roommate, who is certain that the hiker known as Mostly Harmless is Rodriguez. Three other friends of Rodriguez also confirmed to Adventure Journal that the hiker in the photos is the man they knew as Vance Rodriguez. A former girlfriend said she is “100 percent sure” Harmless is Rodriguez. A previous DNA test conducted by an outside lab showed that Harmless has Cajun ancestry. In response to our request for comment, a representative of Collier County emailed, “We have no updates to release at this time.”
Below is our original story (“Part 1”), the first of our print stories we’ve put online, followed by Nark’s updated reporting (“Part 2”) on how he found Rodriguez—and who this mystery man was.
Part 1: The Ghost In The Tent
He thru-hiked from New York to Florida. He met dozens along the way. But two years after he died in his tent, no one knows who this mystery man was
Sometimes I imagine him falling through space, drifting like dust from dead stars in the vast nowhere above us. I see him take shape in the soft light of a forest before dawn. First a fog, then ephemeral form, then living flesh. This kind of thinking is where my mind goes at night, when half my head is in a dream and I ponder him fancifully, unmoored from the hard facts that make his case so frustrating. Whoever he was, he walked into the woods in New York in the spring of 2017 and hiked south for nearly fourteen hundred miles, down the Appalachian, Pinhoti, and Florida trails. On July 23, 2018, two day-hikers from Fort Lauderdale found his yellow two-person tent in Nobles Camp, among the saw palmettos and alligators in Big Cypress National Preserve about one hundred miles west of Miami. His boots were parked outside. When the hikers called out and no one answered, one of them peered into the tent and saw the man sitting upright, his body twisted. His eyes were wide open, but he wasn’t alive. “Uh, we just found a dead body,” one of the hikers, Nick Horton, told the 911 dispatcher.
Investigators from the Collier County sheriff’s department catalogued the man’s belongings. They included a beige shirt, gray shorts, underwear, Salomon hiking boots, flip-flops, a tent and sleeping bag, hiking poles, some food, a pack, and a baseball hat. There were two notebooks full of computer code and almost four thousand dollars in cash in a plastic baggie. What they didn’t find were a wallet, driver’s license, credit cards, cell phone, or ID of any kind. Two days later, the District 20 medical examiner’s office performed an autopsy. The man was five feet, eight inches tall and “markedly cachectic,” meaning his muscle had all but wasted away. Many later assumed that his weight, listed as eighty-three pounds, was a typo. It wasn’t. The man’s stomach was empty and the only chemicals found in his blood were ibuprofen and antihistamines. The medical examiner didn’t believe he’d been dead very long, as his body was remarkably intact despite the oppressive South Florida heat. He had no tattoos, no distinctive scars, no dental work at all. His fingerprints didn’t match any others in police databases, and investigators estimated his age as anywhere between thirty and fifty. The man was a cipher.
But when the sheriff’s department posted a sketch of his thin, bearded face on its Facebook page, the case suddenly came to life. “As soon as I seen it, I knew who it was,” said Kelly Fairbanks, a trail angel who met the man in Florida. Hikers, church members, and outfitters reported meeting him in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and atop Springer Mountain in Georgia. People knew him first as Denim, a trail name he was given for hiking in jeans, and later as Mostly Harmless. They’d eaten meals with him, slept beside him in shelters, and shared confidences before parting ways. They took dozens of photos of him, many of which now circulate online. In some he stares directly into the camera, smiling slightly. His beard is sometimes closely clipped, more often a ragged patch of salt-and-pepper weeds. The photos show his gear, too: His clothes and boots, his odd habit of keeping the rain cover over his pack at all times. The last known photo of Mostly Harmless was taken on April 15, 2018, less than ten miles from the swamp where he wasted away, alone, and where his body was found more than three months later.
Media in Florida and New York picked up the story in 2018, but it gained the most traction on Facebook, Reddit, and Websleuths, an online forum dedicated to unsolved cases. I learned about Mostly Harmless in February 2019, when the Collier County sheriff’s department released Sworn Statement, its three-part podcast about the case. Kristine Gill, a former newspaper reporter who works in media relations for Collier County, hosts the podcast. “Let’s say you wanted to disappear tomorrow. What would you want to do?” Gill asks as the first episode opens.
Beavers are known to react to the sound of running water by building dams. The urge is so ingrained that they’ll pile wood atop a speaker if it sounds like a stream. And that’s pretty much how humans react to unsolved mysteries like that of Mostly Harmless. Online detectives have pursued the case compulsively, mailing out fliers and contacting storage facilities where they suspect Mostly Harmless may have left his belongings. I’m one of them, a newspaper reporter who used the tools of my trade—public record searches, the Freedom of Information Act, dozens of interviews—to dig ever deeper into the mystery, and also to mask the depth of my obsession as professional interest. For more than a year, I told myself to stop investigating Mostly Harmless and start writing, that my role is to tell a story, not solve the case. But like a beaver, I hear the water running. I’ve posted queries in hundreds of Facebook groups, trying to break out of the echo chamber of unsolved mystery and hiking forums. I plastered his face in Dr. Who fan clubs, Turkish language groups, dozens of tech, coding, and gaming forums, even a Baton Rouge vegetarian group. I scanned through high school yearbooks until my eyes hurt. I’ve gone down rabbit holes, into MySpace pages, blogs of hikers who had brain cancer, even the Twelve Tribes, an alleged cult that’s into hiking and building cozy coffee houses all over the country.
The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System at the University of North Texas had thirteen thousand, one-hundred eighty-nine open unidentified remains cases as of spring 2020. About nine hundred of those are in Florida. Many consist of a single bone or a foot that washed ashore in a shoe. Often, bodies are so badly decomposed that police wouldn’t dare release a photo. The program’s director, B.J. Spamer, told me it is “uncommon” to have as many photographs of an unidentified body as there are of Mostly Harmless—in his case, there’s even a video. Today, he is a skeleton, stored in a medical examiner’s office in Naples, five miles from the Gulf of Mexico, and despite all the pictures and posthumous fame, he remains unidentified.
In the absence of answers, people who never met Mostly Harmless have made him a proxy, a canvas on which they paint a portrait of the man they want him to be. They see his blue-gray eyes in photos and decide they were kind, or lonely. They see a stranger’s face as somehow familiar. They cast him as a wanted fugitive, ex-military, or former cult member, either chronically ill or mentally unstable. Some believe he chose to die this way, a long suicide by starvation.
In my own portrait, Mostly Harmless is a mystic who left the material world behind, a transcendentalist who shed smaller, inconsequential truths for a larger one. I see him as the ideal of William Hazlitt’s 1821 essay “On Living to One’s Self.”
“He reads the clouds, he looks at the stars, he watches the return of the seasons, the falling leaves of autumn, the perfumed breath of spring, starts with delight at the note of the thrush in a copse near him, sits by the fire, listens to the moaning of the wind, pores upon a book, or discourses the freezing hours away, or melts down hours to minutes in pleasing thought. All this while he is taken up with other things, forgetting himself.”
In all their time together, neither asked the other’s real name. That’s not unusual in the thru-hiking community.
The truth is that Mostly Harmless’s life will be mundane when it finally comes out, I tell myself. He’ll be from Milwaukee or Brooklyn, as he told other hikers, not the ether. He’ll turn out to be the guy from IT who helped connect our laptops to the office printer. Police will release a name and say he was an only child with no parents left alive to report him missing. Perhaps we’ll learn what he was seeking on the trail. Maybe then we’ll know how he could have such a profound impact on so many people, without ever revealing his identity.
“I just really hope he’s who I thought he was,” Jennifer “Obsidian” Vickers told me. Vickers knew him as Denim and spent more time on the trail with him than anyone. They hiked southbound together on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia for about a hundred miles, starting at Blackburn Trail Center. She laughed often when we spoke, recalling their unlikely partnership. She was a black woman in her late sixties, he a white man she pegged to be about forty. Both had bad knees and hiked slowly. She taught him how to make a fire. He gobbled M&Ms, obsessed over distances between destinations, and longed to see a bear. Some hikers give off bad vibes, she said, but Denim made her feel safe.
When he signed in at hostels, he printed out the alias “Ben Bilemy.” That name doesn’t exist in the United States, as far as I can tell, and no hiker recalls hearing him say it aloud. He told Obsidian he was from Louisiana, but she heard him tell others he was from New York. In all their time together, neither asked the other’s real name. That’s not unusual in the thru-hiking community, said Warren Doyle, who has hiked the AT nine times and helps other hikers prepare for the “philosophical and psychological” aspects of the trail. He knows people who never got driver’s licenses, who only worked for cash their whole lives. “The best way to understand yourself in the real world,” he said, “is to remove yourself from it, so you can look back in.”
Mostly Harmless told other hikers he worked in information technology and based on his notebooks that seems likely. I obtained the forty pages of notebooks from Collier County through the Freedom of Information Act. Numbers and computer code in small, neat print cram most of them. Harmless wrote out nutritional formulas for a line of trail wafers and plans for a role-playing game with descriptions of miners, warriors, and a “nanite guild.” The notebooks reference Screeps, a computer game for programmers in which players control their “colony” by writing JavaScript A coder who reviewed the notebook said it was “very coherent and lucid,” not the sign of a deteriorating mind. The notebook, he surmised, was where Mostly Harmless simply jotted down ideas. Obsidian said she never saw him write anything, not even in the guest registers in hostels, though he did like to read them.
I longed to find some deeper meaning in the words, and found none. The notebooks never get personal. There are no trail life musings, no recollections of people he met or left behind. Nothing explains what led him to nature. There’s no “goodbye.”
Mostly Harmless told one hiker he was a big Dr. Who fan with hard drives full of his favorite television shows and movies. His supposed interest in science fiction led many to guess the trail name Mostly Harmless is a reference to the title of the final book in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Others say the trail name was descriptive: Someone said he was “mostly harmless,” and it stuck.
The most popular theory of his demise is a romantic one, which I also wanted to believe. In that scenario, he receives a terminal diagnosis, puts his affairs in order, and packs up his identity. He forgoes machines and radiation to die on his own terms, in nature. When I received a copy of the autopsy in January 2020, though, it revealed no such illness. His organs were small but otherwise normal, including his brain. He had no tumors or wounds. An investigator described his teeth as perfect, though the autopsy found the edges of his upper teeth had been ground down. The cause and manner of death were listed as “undetermined.” The chief findings of the autopsy were his weight loss, the “pronounced cachexia,” and a faint scar on his abdomen. The mark suggested a prior surgery, but when I reached out to the medical examiner he wouldn’t speculate. Baffled, I sent the report to Dr. Cyril Wecht, a pathologist. He read it and found nothing revealing, besides the obvious cachexia. “There’s no evidence of cancer. There’s no evidence of an infectious process, no evidence of anything at all,” Wecht told me. “People don’t often kill themselves by starving. That’s pretty painful.”
Mostly Harmless in Damascus, Virginia, October 2017
I don’t believe Mostly Harmless intended to die on the trail. At least, I don’t want to believe that. People who fill notebooks with ideas are thinking of a future with themselves still in it. Suicidal people, from my experience, can’t imagine one. The writer Andrew Solomon once said the opposite of depression is vitality; a long, drawn-out suicide over a thousand-mile journey sounds like fiction. Still, dark feelings can move like thunderstorms through a person’s life.
Mike Usher hiked with Mostly Harmless in Pennsylvania in the summer of 2017. Mostly Harmless told him he’d started hiking around Harriman State Park in New York because he was “depressed with his life and needed a complete change.” He told Usher that he began hiking the AT because he was nervous about getting caught camping illegally at Harriman. Once on the trail, though, Mostly Harmless told Usher he experienced a “new sense of happiness.”
I did my best to reconstruct his journey. Some online posts suggest he started from Bear Mountain State Park in New York, around April 2017. Others place his starting point at Harriman State Park. Both parks are less than fifty miles north of Brooklyn and popular with New York City residents. I requested records for illegal camping violations and impounded cars at both parks. When they arrived, personal information was redacted in deep black lines and mostly useless. None of the cited campers matched Harmless’s age range or height, from what I could see. Was the 1998 Ford with the bowling ball and cat food in the trunk his? What about the Honda Accord with two cell phones and a debit card locked inside? Disappointed, I forwarded them all to Collier County.
Investigators have ruled out dozens of missing persons cases, many sent by amateur sleuths whose confirmation bias helps them disregard clear discrepancies, such as eye color and height. I spent weeks investigating one potential match, a man named “Steve” who possibly went missing in Boulder, Colorado. In early 2020, he sent me a message: “Hey, I’m not dead.” At times, my heart leapt, like the moment Obsidian told me Mostly Harmless purchased hiking boots with a credit card. When I contacted Rockfish Gap Outfitters, they confirmed they sold one pair of boots that day, Salomons in size eleven—but that the customer had paid cash. Later, the medical examiner told me Mostly Harmless’s feet were a size seven. When I followed up, thinking that was a mistake, he said “that is his exact foot measurements into shoe size.”
Frustrated, I sat down with a copy of Mostly Harmless to see if the novel held any more clues than the impenetrable notebooks. One scene, in which the protagonist seeks out an oracle for advice, felt apropos, as if Mostly Harmless himself were talking to everyone trying to crack his case. “You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know.”
Nearly two years after his death, the timeline of Mostly Harmless’s last fourteen months is still full of unknowns. No one reported seeing him in Tennessee or North Carolina and only a few people remember him on the Pinto Trail in Alabama. He told a hiker in Florida that he’d skipped the Alabama Roadwalk section of the trail, choosing to ride to the beginning of the Florida Trail in Pensacola with “some girls.” He told this man, like many others, that he intended to end his trip in Key West. Mostly Harmless was photographed a few hundred miles north of Nobles Camp on March 17, 2018. He looks thin, his beard wild, but nowhere near eighty-three pounds. “He was in good spirits, seemed to be enjoying his hike,” the photographer said.
Mike “Water Boy” Gormley took two photos of Mostly Harmless on April 15, 2018, on the side of a road a few miles north of Nobles Camp. He may be the last person to have seen Mostly Harmless alive. In Gormley’s photos, Mostly Harmless is not smiling, as he was in many other photos. His face is tan, his beard short again. It was well over eighty degrees that day, and Mostly Harmless was carrying a pack that weighed more than fifty pounds. He told Gormley he was still carrying his winter clothes.
“I offered to send them back home for him and he declined,” said Gormley, who remembers Mostly Harmless as “a quiet, polite guy” who asked for nothing but readily accepted bottles of Gatorade and frozen water. Gormley estimated his weight to be about one hundred and fifty pounds.
Ninety-nine days later and ten miles away, the hikers found him dead in his tent.
No one knows whether Mostly Harmless made it to Key West and was returning north when something went wrong or if he got sick in Nobles Camp and hunkered down, too weak to move. Despite his extreme weight loss, he had food with him when he died. He may have had a mental breakdown. He may have chosen to stay there, in that tent, to die of “inanition,” a term I hadn’t heard until Warren Doyle said it. It means the quality of being empty, in this case losing the will to live.
Obsidian told me she asked Mostly Harmless to take her to Mardi Gras someday, but she couldn’t recall if he answered. She last saw him in Buena Vista, south of Afton Mountain, in Virginia. They fist-bumped and she watched him walk off in the rain, assuming they would cross paths again.
“We were just hiking,” she said. “I don’t know why people hike but you meet a lot of really good people on the trail. He was one of those people.”
Part 2: Identifying Mostly Harmless
December 2020
The rent for the small, one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn had gone unpaid for more than half a year. When the building’s owner finally got a warrant to get inside in late January 2018, it looked as if his tenant had simply stepped out for a moment.
Computers and monitors and “video game things” were everywhere. Food was in the cabinets, clothes still in the bedroom. The tenant had left behind his wallet, credit cards, a passport, a New York State ID, and a driver’s license. It was from Louisiana, from a life he’d long since left behind.
They all carried the same name: Vance Rodriguez.
“We had no idea what happened to him,” Gary Hoffman, the building’s owner, told me. “It was like he had just disappeared.”
Disappear is exactly what Rodriguez, who would be 44, had done, likely on purpose, and few who knew him found that at all unusual. Friends and former co-workers are convinced Rodriguez is the thru-hiker known variously as Denim, Ben Bilemy, and Mostly Harmless, a mystery man who was found dead inside a tent in Big Cypress National Preserve in the summer of 2018. Mostly Harmless remained unidentified for nearly two and half years, despite the best efforts of detectives in Collier County, Florida, where he was found, and a community of online investigators that eventually spanned the globe.
“I am 100 percent sure,” a former longtime girlfriend of Rodriguez in Louisiana said Tuesday night after viewing trail photos of Harmless for the first time. “I want to help put his identity and who he was to rest,” wrote the woman, who asked to be identified by her nickname, Tuggy.
Last week, several of Rodriguez’s friends reached out to the Collier County Sheriff’s Office to tell investigators that the mystery hiker whose identity had stymied them for so long was Rodriguez. A spokeswoman for the department who produced a podcast about the case in 2019 had no comment. The podcast was part of the department’s years-long effort to identify the hiker, but seemed initially only to deepen the mystery. I wrote about Mostly Harmless in Adventure Journal 17, collecting bits and pieces of his story from people he met while hiking 1,400 miles from New York to Florida, where he died. A later story in Wired brought an explosion of interest in the case. The unsolved mystery stumped detectives and prompted thousands of internet detectives and journalists like me to scour the web for clues.
Images of a young Rodriguez supplied by a Louisiana friend. Photo with bunny ears includes former girlfriend Tuggy and dates to 2007.
Natasha Teasley is the administrator of a Facebook group dedicated to finding Mostly Harmless, which swelled to nearly 7,000 members worldwide. The group, called “Unidentified male hiker Ben Bilemy 2018,” is one of several that was dedicated to discovering Mostly Harmless’s identity, including Reddit pages and online sleuthing forums. (Disclosure: I became a moderator in Teasley’s group earlier this year.)
Teasley also built a website about the case, including a detailed timeline of every recorded stop Mostly Harmless made. She helped organize a fundraising effort that brought Othram, a Texas-based DNA lab, into the case. I donated to that cause. That lab was making progress on the case, recently finding Cajun ancestry in Mostly Harmless’s DNA.
Then last week, friends of Rodriguez saw his photos online and came forward. Several of Rodriguez’s family members have joined the Facebook group in recent days. Teasley said they have not liked or comment on any of the hundreds of posts or photos.
Despite the identification, some mysteries surrounding the case have deepened. Rodriguez’s parents are alive, along with his twin sister and older brother. He is included in his grandfather’s obituary from this past summer. His family has not responded to requests for comment. A woman Rodriguez once lived with in that Brooklyn apartment said my efforts to identify Mostly Harmless were “misguided.”
“There’s a reason no one reported him missing,” said a former roommate in Baton Rouge, who asked to be identified by his first name, Randall.
Interviews with former friends like Randall and co-workers from Louisiana paint a picture of Rodriguez as an intelligent and troubled man who often struggled with personal relationships, particularly with his family. Rodriguez was “hot and cold,” said a female friend from Baton Rouge who asked to be identified as Marie, noting that he periodically went through what she described as “outages,” depressive episodes where he could be hurtful and shut people out. Mostly Harmless told at least one hiker in Pennsylvania that he’d gone into the woods “depressed with his life and needed a complete change.”
“He was deeply kind and caring and a bit of a dick,” Marie said of Rodriguez.
One of those “outages” may be the reason he died, alone and nearly skeletal inside his tent in the Florida swamp with notebooks full of computer code, nearly $4,000 in cash, and no identification. Mostly Harmless weighed just 83 pounds.
While friends said Rodriguez liked to travel and go for walks, none recalled him ever talking about long-distance hiking. Nature seemed to work on him, though, and his quick trip to Harriman State Park turned into an epic journey that lasted more than a year. Randall said photos of Mostly Harmless’s time on the trail stood out. He looked healthy, Randall thought, more muscular than he’d been when they were roommates back in Louisiana. Randall couldn’t remember him smiling so much as he did in photos taken on the trail.
“It did not surprise me to hear that he left everything behind, though I lost touch with him after we parted ways,” Tuggy wrote.
By the time Hoffman, the landlord, got into his Brooklyn apartment, Rodriguez was likely somewhere in the Deep South. Mostly Harmless was seen at a trailhead in Alabama earlier that month. He’d long since found his trail footing, upgrading gear along the way, spending nights in tents, shelters, and hostels. Other hikers knew him as Denim, the trail name he acquired early in his trip, while still hiking in jeans, and Mostly Harmless, a trail name he may have given himself because of a lifelong love of science fiction and the one that stuck. Mostly Harmless was first seen in the woods in the spring of 2017, around New York’s Harriman State Park and he continued southbound, down the AT, Pinhoti, and Florida trails. He met and interacted with dozens of hikers. Many took his picture. He told them he worked in Brooklyn, which turned out to be true. His company, V-Tech, was based out of the apartment he’d abandoned.
Mostly Harmless told at least one hiker he was from Baton Rouge, and Rodriguez both lived and worked there for many years. Randall met Rodriguez at the University of Southwest Louisiana, now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, in 1994. The two played multi-user dungeon games and Randall said Rodriguez was most confident when he was on a keyboard. Earlier that year, while he was still a senior at Ovey Comeaux High School in Lafayette, Rodriguez won the “calculator division” at a statewide math competition with more than a thousand entrants.
“We were both in computer science and we didn’t have a lot of friends,” Randall said. “We spent a lot of time in the computer lab.”
Between semesters, Rodriguez would move back home and Randall went over to visit him once, bringing his computer along to play games. He doesn’t recall meeting Rodriguez’s parents. Eventually, the two became roommates in Baton Rouge, though Rodriguez also moved in and out with girlfriends. Randall said Rodriguez often came to his house for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
“He never wanted to talk about his family,” he said. “Ever.”
Tuggy, Rodriguez’s former girlfriend in Louisiana, said they dated for more than four years. She described Rodriguez as “kind, quiet and intelligent” but believes his “quiet and reclusive” nature contributed to him going so long without being identified.
“Even after we parted ways, and even today, I still love him very much,” Tuggy wrote.
Corey Tisdale was a former boss of Rodriguez’s at a Baton Rouge company called BBQguys, known then as ShoppersChoice.com. Tisdale told me Rodriguez was “wicked smart” and worked as the company’s senior architect and developer for about three years. He said Rodriguez wanted challenges at work, preferring complicated fixes over easy ones. Rodriguez “was very nice to people,” Tisdale said, but often had to be cajoled to attend company get-togethers.
“He just kind of did his own thing,” Tisdale said. “If you told me he decided he wanted to be alone in the woods and left his phone, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Rodriguez during his Shopper’s Choice days.
In Brooklyn, Hoffman didn’t recall seeing a phone among Rodriguez’s belongings. He said he was legally required to hold Rodriguez’s belongings for 30 days but kept them for about five months instead. He said Rodriguez lived there with a woman he described as a girlfriend but that they’d had a falling out. Hoffman said the woman told him she didn’t want Rodriguez’s belongings and didn’t know how to reach him.
Eventually, Rodriguez’s belongings were placed in trash bags, put on the curb, and taken to a dump.
Teasley, the Facebook page moderator, said she always knew Mostly Harmless could turn out to be an imperfect person. Teasley said that doesn’t take away from the work done by volunteers and as a member of the group.
“The people who cared about him and even the people who felt hurt by him all deserve to have that closure,” she said. “We had often though he might have been running from something and it turns out what he might have been running from is himself.”
Last week, as Rodriguez’s name began to circulate online, a woman who used to work with him posted to Teasley’s Facebook group. Rodriguez “wouldn’t have wanted any of this,” she wrote, however well-meaning the group.
“I recognize that and acknowledge that this was done with utmost love and respect for a man that none of you knew,” wrote the woman, who asked not to be identified.
In the months before he left Brooklyn and started hiking, Rodriguez was playing the online game Screeps, where computer programmers control their “colony” by writing Javascript. Rodriguez was known as Vaejor, a user name and email handle he used for decades. He was active in message boards on the game’s Slack channel, telling users he was “usually in front of a computer” or that he’d played until 4 a.m. Notebooks found in the tent with Mostly Harmless were traced to the game.
Most of Rodriguez’s discussions in the Screeps Slack channel centered on the game but some things were personal. He talked about ordering cereal in bulk and gave advice to a user who wasn’t feeling well and had lost his voice. Rodriguez joked that no one would notice if he lost his voice.
Marie believes Rodriguez saw the trail as another game, the distance between shelters or hostels his daily missions. His trail name was similar to online user names, a world he knew so well, a place where no one cared about your real name.
While no one knows what Mostly Harmless did in those final months, whether he walked to Key West as he intended or simply stayed at Nobles Camp with the alligators and oppressive heat, Marie believes he died with intent. Tuggy thinks that was his plan from the beginning.
“I think he faced some very impossible monsters internally,” she wrote, “and his self isolation only added to that.”
Most friends, after all, knew about the scar on Rodriguez’s abdomen, and how it got there. During the autopsy at the District 20 medical examiner’s office in Naples, it was described as “indistinct” and “possibly” a scar. In the photos of Rodriguez’s remains that were released to the public this year, however, the scar is large and clearly visible. Friends said it was from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Randall said Rodriguez was open about his suicide attempt and that he always donated blood when he could because he’d once needed so much himself.
“It was one of the more charitable things I recall him doing,” Randall said.
Hikers I spoke to over the last year said Mostly Harmless hadn’t shown outward signs of mental illness. He spoke of sadness and dark times, yes, but they thought the trail had helped. I reached out to one of them, Jennifer “Obsidian” Vickers. She spent the most trail time with Rodriguez, about a hundred trail miles in Virginia. Rodriguez found a perfect hiking partner in Obsidian. She never pried. He didn’t either. She chuckled when I told her his name was Vance. She knew him only as Denim and didn’t need to know much more.
“I guess I’d like to just remember him the way I remember him,” she told me before Christmas.
In one Screeps message, at the end of January in 2017, Rodriguez made a telling remark to another user.
“I’m mostly harmless (for now),” he wrote.
By early April, he disappeared from Screeps and the Slack channel. He paid a few more months of rent, then left the remains of his life in that Brooklyn apartment, heading out to the woods to begin his final game.
“I regret that he passed alone out there,” Tuggy wrote to me, “but I hope he is at peace.”
Thanks so much, Jason. None of what you said surprises me. Actually I’m not at all appalled by his suicide attempt and that scar always fascinated me when I learned of it from the autopsy report. I was thinking of a new theory that makes sense to me. Someone on the trail who met him said he said, ‘”He fought with his father. ” And I just read that friends from his past said he never talked about his family. I believe all this point to bad stuff happening in his childhood, abuse of some kind. He turned inward. The whole introvert lifestyle and computer fascination. Depression comes and goes and the extreme deprivation and stripping away of non- necessities of life on the AT, well, this makes one introspective. And the demons you have not dealt with come back to torment you. I, like Obsidian, choose to remember him as the kind, quick witted, funny young ( to me) man who took the time to converse with me on the trail, who made me want to keep running into him and be his friend forever. May he be at peace now, and may those who loved him meet him again in whatever lies beyond.
I knew Vance was very troubled. When I went to his and my daughter’s apartment in Baton Rouge to check on her, he would not answer the door. He had been very abusive to her. I pulled the fire alarm. The manager let me in that apartment. Vance was very mad but continued to stare at his computer screen.
Beautifully written. Thank you for hunting and finding all this info out about Mostly Harmless. I do hope he is at peace, and his family recovers from this news.
His family didn’t even realize he was dead for 2 1/2 years. I doubt they will feel much has changed
He was kind, helped me passed my college math and taught my son coding.
Good stuff Jason!
Beautifully put! It’s so nice to learn his backstory after following his case for some time. I pray that his family may find peace. I do believe he did on the trail.
Incredible journalism, Jason. I know it was a delicate dance to put this story into words but you managed to pull it off beautifully.
Well done Jason. Now we know, but I think we always knew that this is who he was. ❤ Thank you for amazing investigative work and gifted writing!
“All this while he is taken up with other things, forgetting himself.” Sometimes, that’s the best we can do for ourselves.
Wonderful writing and research. Thank you, Nark!
I’m so happy he has his name back. But as I felt from the beginning, when information about him being found deceased came out, I believe he wants to be remembered as Mostly Harmless. I spent so many hours trying to find information to try to help identify him. Then for some reason I realized it was never his wish to be identified. Rest in peace MH
I love how you told his story Jason! Thank you so much!
Glad to know the rest of his story …thank you ! RIP
Thank you for your commitment and following this mystery to its conclusion. Did I miss the cause of death? Sad story, I’m sure he is at peace now.
Coroner could not find a cause of death other than muscle atrophy
Beautifully and sensitively written.
Very nicely written!
Oh, “Vaejor” makes sense now.
Why is that? What does Vaejor mean/refer to?
A contraction of his first, middle, and last names.
Something like Vance Journey??
Vaejor, he said was from Star Trek.
Well, I assumed it was from Vance John R——–
For whatever it’s worth…
In the first Star Trek movie from 1979, there was an alien force called V’Ger that was threatening Earth (USS Enterprise to the rescue…)
V’Ger turned to have as its central core one of the Voyager probes which (and this part is real) were launched by NASA in the 1970s to explore the outer solar system and then go on forever into interstellar space. Each craft carried a gold LP that contained data for locating Earth plus information about life on Earth, etc.
In the movie, this particular Voyager somehow evolved to become sentient. In the process, its name became truncated to V’Ger.
I’m not sure that the name in the movie was ever spelled out (it’s been a while), but I’ve only seen it as V’Ger.
Nah, it was from his name. I was with him when he constructed it. At a burger king late night.
I love hearing tidbits like this. Thank you for sharing Randall. Do you believe he seemed happy on the trail, just looking at the pics?
Randall…Thanks for the insight. It is really great to hear things about him from someone who was so close to him. Sorry for the loss of your friend. I’m glad he is at peace now.
i gotta say his earlier pics are starting to spook me a bit.
i feel icy, menacing glares directed right at me and the world at large.
seems like kind of a scary, angry dude before his trail days. at the very least a ‘don’t f w me’ vibe.
obviously the same guy physically. but pretty big contrast spiritually between the ‘before’ and ‘after’s …, at least it seems.
was he a good guy to you overall? i have a lifelong friend who’s always been cranky. the guy’s harmless (i think), but he’s not growing any cheerier …
you’re likely aware of all the internet outrage elsewhere than this space? do you think it’s justified? you’re likely a pretty good judge of vance’s wishes in life, at least what they might have been when you knew him well. wishes in death can certainly be different, and to my knowledge he left no wishes behind.
i’m kinda self-serving in this regard. trying to validate my own narrative. are you yourself, or aware of any of others in vance’s circle who are outraged or upset by the online reaction?
i did recently begin viewing a new youtube vid that definitely seems tacky. but the online comments i’ve read on various forums don’t seem out of line – just supportive and sympathetic in my estimation. thanks for your time!
Very beautifully written. I believe that he truly found his place and his people on the Appalachian trail. I’m glad he found some peace in his life. Rest in Peace Mostly Harmless.
Thanks so much Jason. I have seen your comments in the Facebook group, on websleuths and on reddit. You have been instrumental in getting the word out and articulating the grip this case has had on many of us. I really appreciate the work you put into letting us know who he was–to the people on the trail and in his “real life.” I am very grateful to Othram, Natasha Teasley and the admins & members of the FB group, CCSO’s relentless work, TCS for their fateful post and journalist/editor Nicholas Thompson. Also to his many trail friends along the way who answered the same questions from many of us over and over. Much appreciation for Joe King, who met him in Florida and who recounted a moving and beautiful tribute he paid to Mostly Harmless/Vance during his visit to Nobles Camp in CCSO’s last podcast.
I felt he may have been evicted or left his home in Brooklyn after a messy break-up–maybe he was even a loner who had never had a girlfriend. No way could anyone just walk away in the middle of living life–no one in good physical health, with a career, a degree and especially not the type of person who had the determination to hike nearly the entire eastern coast of the US. His willpower in that endeavor was unassailable.
I was wrong. He did walk away. And I like to believe but for those last few months, he found peace and purpose. In the end, the spiraling depression caught up to him, no matter how many miles he walked.
In Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs, love and belonging are the bridge between basic survival needs and self-fulfillment. I believe he never allowed himself, or could not bring himself to dwell on that bridge long enough to get to the other side. I cannot speculate as to the reason. Despite his reluctance for social engagements, I believe he did need other people. When he was around other hikers, he got up every day, tore down camp, hefted onto his back the pack with its familiar red cover and hiked to the next stop where he’d invariably meet other people and then do it all again. All who met him described a man who was friendly, kind and funny. He found his best self out there. In the oppressive heat of southern Florida, when large swaths of the Florida trail are often reclaimed by swamp, no one ventured out much that way at that time of year. So despite his final campsite being only 5 miles from I-75 and 100 yards off the main trail beside one of the only signs of civilization–a lone picnic table–he did not have the regular human interaction that found him in his earlier journeys. There were only the sounds of frogs, screeching of cicadas, the occasional gator splash and the singing birds. And it was here, in this beautiful and deserted place, that his trail came to an end.
Caroline,
This sentence: “and it was here, in this beautiful and deserted place, that his trail came to an end” is a hauntingly beautiful one. If you are not a writer, you should be.
honestly not trying to be obnoxious. at least you’re using paragraphs. suggest you consider inserting a blank line between ea paragraph as well. truly helps avoid the instant tl;dr reaction to longer posts.
ahh, if only i could spread this wisdom far and wide … 🙂
nothing screams ‘don’t bother’ like an endless diatribe with no paragraphs or line breaks. am i wrong?
format your thoughts people. the count of those marveling at your genius will only grow …
An antisocial loner who couldn’t get far enough away from everything. I do believe he allowed himself to waste away. He knew hiking couldn’t last forever and he didn’t want to go back to society. The world is tough on everyone, and not everyone can accept the concept of “suck it up and keep trying.”
I don’t think he could have ever gone back into society either. After the beautiful experiences he had hiking the trail, he would have had to sit behind a computer screen again for hours on end to make his living. That was not a life. I am glad he had a life however brief in the scope of things.
i would like to state that i coded for a few years in the late 1980s. we coded in MS-BASIC before MS-BASIC was cool, if indeed it ever was. we just liked the expression. i was but a tad too young and market naive to have sunk $5 or $10k into the company whose programming language we used, a little firm by the name of Microsoft.
this was when the very first version of Windows (cough – apple rip-off) was still brand-new. i’m quite satisfied with how life has turned out, but that $5 or $10k would literally have been worth millions in pretty short order, while i was still quite a young man.
i also learned fortran in college. then eventually earned an MS in Information Systems from the University of Maryland School of Business.
i’m nattering on because i’m no stranger to coding, and have spent many an hour of my life working from computers on coding, network functions, testing, design, database implementation, what have you.
i’ve also flown airplanes professionally, owned and operated a new car dealership, invested in commercial real estate, managed stock portfolios, a wide range of activities.
i’ve led a pretty interesting life so far, and would respectfully gauge myself to be blessed with a significantly higher life satisfaction level than vance seemed to enjoy for certain stretches.
writing computer code is one of the most satisfying jobs i’ve ever had, and i include my college coding hours in the mix as well. i absolutely loved designing software. it was one of the few jobs i’ve ever had where i could just sit there 8 hours per day, day after day doing the job, writing the code and loving life. it was just me against the machine, logic was my weapon and it was a total blast. of course i’d have a lot of catching up to do, but i’d go back to software design tomorrow if it were needed.
of course it’s entirely possible that others may hate coding and/or computer work in general, and for vance to have been in that camp.
i am without a doubt guessing, and perhaps randall can confirm or deny, but my strong hunch would be that vance likely loved coding as much as i did, and for the same reasons.
the independence. the total control. it was logical, predictable. it all made sense, and it all compiled once correct. little requirement for extroversion. a reliable oasis in an unreliable, unpredictable world. it paid well.
i’d place my bet that vance loved coding and computer work in general. yes i’m speculating, and yes i could be wrong.
i have no idea if vance chose death or if death found vance. whether he chose where to die, and if so why.
but i do challenge any speculation that asserts vance could not or would not return to computer work. i do not believe it’s likely that were so. perhaps it was society at large to which he could not return, i don’t know.
i’m still guessing like everyone else. but in this case i believe it to be a well informed guess. i find it much more likely than not that vance enjoyed the relatively solitary pursuit of computer work, and an inability or unwillingness to return to that type of work played no factor in his demise.
He was depressed with his life and wanted a change.
In the late 1980s, I too became a huge computing fan due to MS-Basic, dBase, Lotus etc. It was so enjoyable creating programs that streamlined the work of the engineering department in which I was working.
Like Vance, I suffered from major depressive episodes beginning in my early teens, treated people like crap and was only interested in computing and building computers. I lived alone so, it wasn’t difficult to ignore people outside work, sleeping too much never was a problem, though.
After reaching my late 30s, I finally found medication that alleviated the depression. Unfortunately, a few years ago I suffered a traumatic brain injury that requires me to take amphetamines to function. When I don’t take them, I will sleep for days or weeks, and only get up to use the bathroom sometimes. My family calls them my coma-sleep periods. From what Vance’s friends said, and how he died, it seems that he just decided to stop functioning, go into his own coma-sleep. He didn’t want to go back to the real world because he knew what was in store for him, major depressive cycles and no way to ask for help. He stopped his torment the way he always did in the past, but this time there was no one around to save him from himself.
you gotta have massive willpower and a commitment to your cause to be able to literally starve yourself to death. an unpublicized hunger strike of sorts. it’s not like he left kids or a wife behind. so in this case i’d give MH a courage merit badge. no joke. strength of will and purpose, for sure.
we’ll never know for sure. it could’ve been an illness made worse by depression. or just untreated mental illness, finally run amok.
sure doesn’t seem like a ‘quick and easy’ life departure under any scenario. he looks so friggin’ self-assured and content in those trail pics. i celebrate that!
His hiking journey was probably the highlight of his life, his swansong. He was so open to the new experience. He was smiling, socializing with other hikers, eating meals with them, sitting by the campfire, sleeping next to them, probably having a degree of comfort. But when he gets down to hot sweltering Florida, the trail is a lonely one. Seems like his whole face changed as well as his thin frame. His hiking poles appear to be supporting him like an elderly person with a walker. I think he has made his decision to die at this point.
This was an excellent article ! The fact that ” He paid a few more months of rent ” is telling…. He paid a few months of rent – in advance ? That reminds me of when I worked in the office – before COVID 19 . Every Friday afternoon I would think to myself that I needed to come in Saturday to finish something up. But by the time I got home on Fri evening I couldn’t even remember what it was that I needed to finish up. This seems like that to me. He left his apt to go away by himself for a few months and the farther he got from home the less he remembered why he would ever need to go back. I don’t think he set out to do himself in. The only question I really have is if he shot himself in the stomach and they opened him up to repair the damage wouldn’t that show up in the autopsy ? I get that things heal themselves – but without a single trace to show what was repaired ?
Wonderful story. Could not stop reading. Glad to know the whole story. The way you wrote this piece is so intriguing. Thank you for spending so much time with “Mostly Harmless”.
Beautifully written, with kindness and insight. Vance finally found the peace he has searched for all of his life. A sad life…searching for answers and battling depression.
I have followed this story for a very long time and you answered a lot of questions that I’ve always wondered about. Thank you for some fantastic journalism and for finding out the truth to Mostly Harmless. May He Rest In Peace.
I enjoyed reading this, good job. May Mostly Harmless RIP.
I’ve followed this story for a long time, although it’s sad, at least there is closure. Something about his eyes told me he was a reflective and kind person. Thank you for the update and a very written part 2.
May he Rest in Peace. ❤️️
Collier County should link to this! Well done, clean storytelling.
When you are done with this world you have nothing to loose. Fascinating and tragic all at the same time. A+ writings!
Beautiful eulogy to a man that went to the wood to find peace. I think that in his own way, he found it. May his spirit watch over all of us that hike to forget…and remember
Thanks Jason, Rest in peace Vance Rodriguez.
Congratulations Natasha and all admins of the “Unidentified Male Hike Ben Bilemy 2018” group. You did EXACTLY what you said you wouldn’t do. Hypocrites.
What did they do? (Just curious) The posts have sorta lost my readership: too much lovey-dovey stuff, poems, emotional verbiage. It’s hard to find any substantial discussion. Their FB site has its rabid fans, however, and have my respect for expanding the search & paying for Othram.
Had a fit about anyone mentioning Vance’s name before the sheriff’s office officially released a statement; kicked people out of the group for posting pictures of Vance; then they turn around and give quotes for this article .. AND their own moderator wrote the article. Unbelievable.
Jason is no longer a mod of the group
So what? He WAS a moderator.
To all who wil read this. I am almost ashamed to be part of the groups I was once in. I am ashamed of the police, the groups admins, and Othram. Why? Well here it goes. God forbid that I am scolded for having these thoughts, but deep down inside I know you all have them but for whatever reason most want to be high and mighty and not admit to them.
So where do I start? The police. The police/sheriffs office did a poor job handling this mans ending. Why? Because it is him. Yes, I understand that for whatever legal reason they are waiting for confirmation but I am sure by now they have reached out to the family, they have reached out to friends, they have several pictures and they have probably already made arrangements to deliver his final items to the family. I am sure they are too busy to make a comment like any other sheriffs office in the nation would. They are too busy writing and taping their final episode of the podcast so they can claim that MH has been found. The groups admins, what are you all doing? You are allowing the poems, the songs, video dedications and write ups about how “handsome” or how sad everyone is. And yet you are not allowing anyone to say his name? why? Is that because you want to write it up first, you want to type it? Is it the right thing to do? Yes it is in a case where we are not sure if its him in the tent but by now we have seen friends post about him, we have seen family members post about how troubled he was, we have seen more than enough pictures to assure us that Mostly Harmless is Vance.
As far as Jason goes, leave him and his family alone. Why? Because I would like to inform all of you that he is a journalist, and first and foremost let me tell you what they do, they get stories, they get scoops, they are the ones that are first to them. If he took quotes and quoted Natasha and his friends, why haven’t we seen an uproar about how he was writing falsehoods, did they, they meaning his friends and the admins or landlord for that matter claim that what they were saying was on deep background? If you don’t know what that is, look it up. I am sure they spilled the beans, why haven’t we seen any professionalism by the police or the groups to get ahead the story and control the narrative by saying, “yes MH has been found, he has a name and we believe his name is this…but we ask you to leave the friends and family alone and give them space to griev” he was Id’d right before Christmas. And no matter if he had a troubled past or if he didn’t mean to take his own life accidentally or however and what happened, it’s a sad story, he is no longer in this world. His friends have commented, family have joined groups. Why haven’t we heard about his past, why hasn’t any of them shared a moment about how he dressed up as wolf for several years at dragon con, why haven’t they talked about how silly he was when he took a year off to play video games? Either way, Mostly harmless, you are going home, you found a home on the trail and you did the trail proud and I am sorry you had some demons, whether you meant to leave this world, you will be missed by all of those who met you and knew you. Its not too late to share light, and love and let your friends and family know that you are ok and that you love them. This goes for all that read this. RIP – Mostly Harmless, Denim, Vance. (sorry for typos, and grammatical errors, I might come back and clean it up but want to post before I don’t)
I love what you said here!
bravo! extremely well put.
one of the main benefits of social media and online communities is to peacefully wrest the control of information from the chosen few, instead bestowing informational rights to the many.
of course there can be situations where controls must remain or be put in place, but those exceptions are few, and this case is not one of them.
those seeking to gatekeep this information and it’s flow were not successful, an outcome we should celebrate.
I have to agree – I was shocked to have this article pop up on a google search when, as a member of Natasha’s FB page, we were warned multiple times NOT to even post his name let alone these intimate details of his life. I really think we are owed an explanation from both Natasha Teasley and the author. Very inappropriate to me the way this went down.
Natasha did not provide quotes for this specific article. They were taken from the FB page out of context. Nark may be a good writer, but ethically, he should have spoken to the family and waited for LE confirmation.
Yes because no journalist has ever put out a story that the police or others didn’t want out there Nark hasn’t claimed credit, nor did he promise anyone he would wait to publish his story. People who spoke to him knew who they were speaking to. He didn’t trick anyone into talking to him. Theres only a small handful of people trying to control the narrative under the guise of respect. None of them family. Ask yourself why that is.
just curious. if i’out’ this well-spoken ‘J’ character as the author (strong hunch), what level of backlash should i expect?
weighing my options in this highly charged environment … 🙂
I’m sorry Donna but that’s just not true.
No, Too Wired, I’m actually a woman who first loved Nark’s article, then got pissed that he wrote it because I was told over & over he had been claiming “credit” for this & “credit” for that but then nobody could provide proof of that. Not one post, one comment, one message where he claimed that he alone solved the case. Those same people started acting like gate keepers, meanwhile Nark was pretty blunt about the fact that this is his job. He didn’t sneak into groups or talk to MH’s acquaintances under some cloak of secrecy, at least not that I’m aware of. It bothers me seeing people buy into that bullshit & not see that it went way beyond “respecting the family. I may not of loved the timing of the article but I have enough sense to know that a story was going to come out & I for one preferred to see Nark be the one to write it. Beyond that I have a certain respect (perhaps misguided) for the fact that he didn’t fold under pressure from that handful of people & instead did his job.
jason, if i might ask you directly, to what do you attribute the petty squabbling?
at the moment i’m perceiving some who knew VR well may be making a subtle reach for the spotlight, which may be understandable.
i’m not looking to be a simp as the young kids say, but i’ve really enjoyed your writing and i believe you’ve acted perfectly ethically and responsibly as both a participant and a journalist.
so why the outrage? of course there’s a bit of speculation. too many people think they know exactly what killed vance, what his choices were, his wishes, etc.
i just haven’t seen a single example from the community of behavior that a reasonable person would find objectionable.
do you have any insight into the outrage contingent? do they just wander through life seeking things to be offended by? do they see themselves as vance and so develop an attachment that brings them a false sense of ownership and control? is some of it simple petty jealousy?
for the accusations made, i’ve yet to see anyone back one up. i mean what’s the deal? why are people pissed off? why are a certain group of folks bent on making accusations against others? i truly don’t get it. the identification of vance appears to have been a huge success long in the making, and a cooperative one at that. so what’s the damn problem?
i would also like to raise an issue of which you are likely aware. we have a small number of people who actually knew vance joining in here, which of course we should welcome and celebrate.
however one individual who clearly knew vance quite well has named vance as an abuser. personally i’m not comfortable with this. unless there’s some sort of public record or multi-sourced account of serious malfeasance, i don’t feel that this forum is the proper place to publicly air that type of grievance.
absent truly persuasive proof of egregious behavior, i feel that engaging in this level of scrutiny within this forum is where we really start crossing lines that perhaps should not be crossed. this is not driven by an overly intrusive community, but rather by someone from vance’s set of family, friends, associates and loved ones.
i’m wondering about your thoughts on the matter,? do you believe the forum admins might bear some responsibility to vet allegations that could arise about vance – before allowing them to be posted or to remain so?
at times i repeat myself, but i would suggest that before the forum becomes a de-facto tool for the airing of dirty laundry, that much care and thought need be given to the matter.
it bears repeating that vance is not in a position to defend his good name against public allegations which could be made by the living.
is this the proper place to raise and debate such issues, or is that best left to other venues? how deeply into the private life of this deceased individual do we want to insert ourselves, irrespective of who might take us there? what lines are we indeed crossing if we continue to publicly investigate this man’s life? are we justified in doing so? if so, how so?
thank you for your time. i’m very interested in any thoughts you’d like to provide. thank you for level of professionalism you’ve maintained throughout these developments.
julei! oh i absolutely agree with absolutely everything you say here. perhaps you have noticed i’ve been railing against all the same hypocrisy rather loudly and forcefully 🙂
i’ve come to a pretty strong conclusion that of the outrage is just pure bullshit.
it’s the attempted gatekeeping of the information that i find so pointless and diminishing.
MH’s name was everywhere really quick. social media was hatched as an empowerment against gatekeeping.
i don’t think the author erred in anyway, in either article. independent sources verified vance’s identity directly to the author if i’m not mistaken. i see him as a legitimate journalist with history and skin in the game. i see no reason he should have bowed to self-interested bureaucratic dictate.
dna is not the only means of positive identification. get real. i don’t mean disrespect to the family, but under the circumstances there were no traumatized nail-biters..i doubt they learned of his passing from this article. if they’d been googling with enough knowledge to find this article they’d certainly have recognized his pictures earlier.
let’s leave any outrage to the small circle who actually knew the guy. and if that outrage exists it’s not necessarily the determinative factor. lots of interests to be weighed given these circumstances it seems.
Haha! Yes. I saw you speaking my mind on fb several times lmao!
Also, I suspect that at some point, albeit probably years down the road, his family will hold dear Jason’s articles. He gives us the facts yes, but he also shows us how human MH was. There is something about the way he wrote part two that is enduring & allows us each to see little pieces of ourselves in him. MH is the mosaic & we are the tiles. That may sound a little flaky but in my mind thats what I see each time I read Jason’s words. I see some of each of us in MH. I really want to get this in print. I haven’t ever ordered Adventure Journal but I want part 1 & 2 in print. Its such an elegant magazine from what I’ve seen online.
Thank you. So now I know … sorta.
Thank you for your respectful and beautiful summary of this fascinating case, that now has a name and a family that we should respect and leave alone with their memories. This was a lovely tribute.
What a great write up. Thank you. I have another theory to throw in the ring, though I suppose we will never know.
I have an very rare autoimmune muscle wasting disease called inflammatory myopathy (aka polymyositis). For many of us, it hits hard and fast. By that I mean, playing basketball on day, the next day wake up unable is to walk, lift our arms or swallow. Sometimes intubation is required because the muscles are too weak to breathe.
In those severe cases it’s not surprising to lose 30-40 lbs of muscle in a week. It is difficult to diagnose, most non-specialists barely know what it is, and I would be shocked if an autopsy tested for it.
Just an idea.
Marynne,
I also wondered about the muscle loss- perhaps something akin to Chronic Wasting Disease that certain animal types get. Perhaps it was from something he ate? The autopsy report stated that he had ibuprofen and antihistamines in his blood. That seems to me like he was trying to deal with some kind of illness. Maybe something he ate, or a tick bite, or other environmental factor rendered him unable to keep food down? The original article said the hikers found him sitting up, with his body twisted, and eyes open. That does sound like symptoms of a gastric disturbance. I wonder about how the coroner minimized the scar in his report, when those who saw it said it was clearly visible, and another commenter pointed out that if he had been injured to the point of needing blood transfusions there should have been some kind of evidence of past scaring internally as well. Did something happen to an organ? What if it was appendicitis? Another curiosity is the cash. The other hikers indicated that he worked for some funds here and there at hostels and the like… so where did he get $4,000? Why was he going to Key West? Was there someone or something there that he was meeting up with? If so, who and why? If he made it there and was heading back home, as some have speculated, did he have something that he sold while he was there- such as an idea for a new computer program or game? Was the code in the found notebooks his preliminary work for the thing he sold? I am grateful to have the information that Jason has provided, but it seems that there are still a lot of unanswered questions…
I’m not sure why everyone keeps speculating about his cause of death. Bites, poisonous food, etc etc. MH clearly had mental disease(s) and/or personality disorder(s) that ended up with anorexia nervosa/body dysmorphic disorder. The evidence from his history to his state at death is blatant. And that is not an insult by any means – the stigma of mental disease is strong still unfortunately. If only he had had the benefit of counseling and perhaps medication. Ibuprofen for someone who had painful knees is a no brainer, and antihistamines when in a mosquito-infested area isn’t odd either. Some people use them to facilitate sleep. Why make things complicated? This man’s plight should be shouting out for people to take heed when a friend seems troubled or is behaving in an odd manner – help them seek counseling! This should be the moral of the story and the lesson MH leaves behind to help someone else avoid death! I’m floored no one else has mentioned this valuable lesson MH can teach us, albeit unintentionally. I feel very sad for his many years of suffering with no help.
You’re not sure why people are speculating yet that’s what you’re doing also. No offense meant but to me your theory is not as likely as some of the others for many reasons. The truth is we will never know. And THAT’S why people speculate.
how does one ‘like’ a comment here?
your analysis is spot-on pam. no offense intended towards CN, but it’s a fairly prevalent social media ‘thing’ to display exactly the behavior one decries within the very same posting of objection.
‘why, how dare you speculate? especially when my speculation is clearly the correct speculation. i’m outraged!’
smh 🙂
Cynthia
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I do wonder though what your background and training are that qualifies you to diagnose this man’s condition as “mental disease(s) and/or personality disorder(s) that ended up with anorexia nervosa/body dysmorphic disorder”. Mental health issues do seem to be very prevalent in this day and time. How do you know that he never sought out “conventional” treatments such as counseling and medication? Another commenter has said that in 2016 he met Mostly Harmless at a meditation training, so it does seem that he took various steps to overcome the issues that affected him. It seems that the evidence from his life and death is not as blatant as you supposed.
Vance’s family tried to get him professional help. Vance wanted no parts of it as is often the case of people suffering with mental illness. He is not the first person to refuse his medication. The long term care facilities I worked in were filled with mentally ill people who had refused to take care of themselves on the outside and take their medicine.
Great writing. Mostly Harmless left his mark on a lot of us. And I’m sorry but I’ll never believe he intentionally died there. I think he could have picked up something that made him sick and then couldn’t recover.
Also at least one of his family members has liked a couple posts.
Pam,
After reading all that has been published here about him I agree completely. It is true that he seemed to have depression and possibly other issues that troubled him that he may or may not have gotten resolved while on the trail. Would mental health counseling and medications have helped him? Possibly. Maybe he had already tried that route at some point in his life? Nature has ways of helping people that no amount of drugs can. I also have to agree with another commenter who said that they thought he intended to go back to his apartment after a short absence but may have changed his mind while on the trail. It is possible that the lure of the AT and the challenge that it presented was more appealing and presented a possibility for accomplishment that he had not been able to find otherwise. Perhaps someone, somewhere knows what really happened but has been reticent about coming forward. Perhaps not. We may never know for sure. But, if I was a betting person I would put my money on his death being unintentional. I truly hope that he was able to find peace.
The coroner reported that Vance’s stomach was empty but his bowels were full. When people get impacted from immobility or disease process, they get sick. They have no appetite. They may get a fever or throw up. They can’t move their bowels. If no one intervenes, they die.
Whatever Mostly Harmless’ story is, it will always be told by third parties, regardless how close they were to him. His reasons for dying alone of starvation in the Florida Everglades will be buried with him. His friends and acquaintances (I haven’t heard anything from his relatives yet) paint a picture of a quixotic individual, at turns attentive and loving then aloof and hurtful. He sounds so very human.
I always thought that MH’s story will be how ordinary he was. He loved people and then hurt them. He created close relationships then cut the ribbon letting them drift away. He was intelligent and inventive. He took risks. He did was most humans only dream about: he impacted thousands of lives around the globe. That is no mean feat, alive or dead. RIP, MH.
This is hands down the best comment / response in this entire group of replies to the article.
Very well said. Very respectful. Very real.
It is so very human to live, and living is so often… messy. And beautiful. And painful. And joyous. And awful.
He was a man, a human being, just like the rest of us.
He just took a different path in (and ultimately out of) life.
If my passing is ever enshrouded by mystery, I’d hope that the people who heard the more sordid details of my life and my choices and character, wouldn’t hold those things against me in eternal judgment.
VR was just like any other person on this planet- perfectly & profoundly f*cked up.
Not one of us could or would ever escape the same summation of the whole of our lives.
It’s just part of the human condition.
Hello everyone, friends, family, fellow adventures and fellow hikers. I’m at Vance in early 2016 and a 10 day Vipassana Meditation retreat. Vipassana is essentially Theravada Buddhism for householders. That is to say it teaches what is believed to be the form of meditation taught by Siddhartha Gotama. Terabyte Buddhist monks actually walk the forest as part of awake walking meditation. The biggest Theravada monastery in Thailand is in the middle of a forest and the monks are known to walk the paths and create new ones all the time spending days if not weeks at a time in the forests. It’s also not something you flaunt or share with others for their input or influence. So my common sense is telling me Vance went into a deep state of meditation (possible while sitting or laying down) and simply could not return to awake consciousness. It makes the most sense to me and this just submitted as a suggestion—maybe he found enlightenment and simply chose to stay in the presence of the divine energy that is the source of everything, in western culture we call it God.
James,
Thank you for sharing this. It really makes sense, and could indeed be the reason he set out that day from his apartment to just take a little walk. I hope that he found true peace with God and is at rest.
So now he is in Nirvana, the place of rest.
Not unlike the monks who self-mummify through meditation – a.k.a. Sokushinbutsu. I wonder if this is what he was attempting.
You might have hit that on the head!! Did I read somewhere, that he & a friend, took a class on meditation!
That’s kind of scary to think you could get stuck meditating.
I read about his disappearance a while back, this comes to provide a closure. I was trapped to the end not only for the very same unstoppable curiosity that bit the writer but for the quality of the writing…
Pretty unusual.
May Vance rest in peace.
And now he is immortalized in the Net. Like Chris McCandless (“inspired by his desire to escape a brutal home life in which his father lashed out verbally and physically” according to his sisters) and that beautiful soul Everett Ruess and hundreds of others – if you Google “missing hiker”. They wanted to escape; to commune with Nature. They needed peace.
Hi Jason, those of us who live in the “depression world” know why Vance Rodriguez died. It was mentioned that Vance seemed depressed. Maybe this will help some understand.
Depression is something that you can’t understand until you live it. Some are born with it but most “shut off” their brain after a trauma.
In my case it was severe mental and physical abuse by a husband which is something about my life I have never made public except to 3 close friends. It’s also why women stay so long in a relationship, they shut down the part of the brain and it impairs reason severely. The body comes with a protective mechanism that you don’t know exists until you need it. It happens for sexually molested kids, kids in foster care, people who are abused by their parents, people whose parents die suddenly when they’re young. Sadly, I found it when I was 32. You can shut down a whole part of your brain to protect yourself. It’s like a safety switch. Your body just suddenly allows it when the pain gets that bad. It suddenly “appears” as an option. You choose it. Suddenly the hurt just stops. You can actually feel it go off, it’s crazy. I remember the actual moment I said “I can’t keep crying like this from this man hitting me, I need this to stop”. And it did. Not the hitting, just the hurt from it. He could hit me and I no longer cared, I couldn’t feel any emotions. The more sad part about it, it doesn’t just come back on when you’re safe. From what I understand, it requires years of therapy, which I can’t afford. And also exercise, which depression doesn’t allow me to do. I used to exercise avidly. Sometimes I have “clear patches” so I exercise then but, they suddenly go away.
What follows after the “protective shut down” is the slow deterioration of the area of the front part of the brain, the loss of “happy chemicals”. You can physically feel it. Exercise gives you boosts but you’d have to exercise daily and rapidly several times a day to keep it going to build it back up and you’d have to keep that up for life. That’s why the gym is recommended to help depression. Most depressed people don’t exercise…because they’re depressed…. it’s a double-edged sword. Anti-depressants work sometimes but they cause so much other damage that they’re not great. I was so much more suicidal while on those. Some of the damage is permanent.
The key is, and everyone in the depressed world knows this…you NEVER go anywhere alone for long periods of time. It’s a death sentence. When his depression kicked back in after the euphoria of starting the hike (moving is going to help me! – realistically it never does. At some point, we all think moving will solve our problems), he did the loner thing. He tried “girls in a car” because maybe the pleasure from the company of girls would give him a boost. That’s the MO for depressers, sex, opposite sex attention, it’s always eventually a fail unless one of the girls links to your life for a while…like a high. And then he would have needed to get back to being around people to be safe once the girls failed, he took the loner route, basically his brain told him that this was all too much, to go find a place away from the world and hide (which is what my brain tells me daily), his depression won.
Although the death is painful, when you don’t eat, it’s not as bad for depressers as one might think. Our mental state is so bad….for example, it takes us days to read one article….we do feel intense physical pain, but we don’t have the energy to fight back, so we medicate and sleep it off. At some point his body just got used to the no food and I’m sure his brain, which was already pretty diminished from clinical depression, shut down well before he died and he was unable to be rational. I can go days at a time never having a coherent thought, I usually stay in bed and call into work with a “stomach flu” when my brain goes that far. I force myself to get up and eat something and my headache makes me drink something. Sleep eventually brings me back to slightly functional and having a place to go, like work, forces me to get up.
I’m still working through the article, it’ll take me a few days to read an article. I used to read avidly before my depression, book after book. Now I have to go back to recall names and info. so that slows it down even more. Sometimes I take notes so I can follow. I read the beginning, the middle somewhat and the end. Now I’ll go back and fill in the gaps. If I don’t skip to the end, I will stress for days wanting to finish so I read out of order and then fill in the middle. The saddest part for me truly is that I can no longer read books. I used to love to read books. I used to “feel” so good. I remember, I wish I could feel it again.
It’s always amazed me that I can hide my depression so well, even keep a steady job. Just don’t ask me to read things, think on the spot, or remember what I did yesterday. As I age, it’s been harder because I can’t learn new things for the job at a fast pace. I manage to tell people “oh my computer’s not working” or “I got sidetracked”. The truth is I’m stalling for time because I call someone and say “do you know how to do this”. I always choose different people to call. If it’s failing I say “I’m sorry I really need to go to the ladies’ room” and call someone on the way to get help. A few times I’ve been stuck because no one answers and then I get caught and it’s pretty uncomfortable because my boss then has a bunch of meetings about my performance. No one has fully figured it out yet though, I don’t know how. I can only remember, and not always, what I did 10 minutes ago. Also don’t hand me anything and let me put it down, I’ll forget you gave it to me.
Interestingly, I can write fluently. I’m guessing that is why Vince wrote the code in his book, it makes your brain stop hurting for a while. Writing is such a relief. I enjoy writing because it lets me carry through thoughts completely, it must use a different part of the brain. Sadly, I won’t remember I wrote this in about a day or even necessarily in an hour. Unless someone shows it to me, then I’ll remember I wrote it.
I can still do physical tasks like organizing. I volunteer at work to do those tasks so people think I’m this great worker. They have no idea I’m hiding from other work. People think I’m “energetic” because I volunteer to organize. The truth is I’m over exhausted from not sleeping and just want to sit down. But I have to keep faking it to pay my bills. It’s a sad life.
Trauma is real. Abuse is real. Depression from trauma or abuse is real. We really should have two words for it. Depression to regular people means “feeling a bit blue”. Actual clinical depression is nothing like that.
Obsidian doesn’t know it, but she saved his life for 100 miles. He found in her the euphoria he needed to get up each morning and be “happy” that 100 miles. Sadly, they parted ways and that took away his safety net as “alone” kicked in. “Alone” is a VERY scary place. He was doomed from the second it did because he wasn’t around people anymore. Not a safe space at all when you’re clinically depressed. It’s not happy the way healthy people “feel” happy. But it’s a “happy” without feelings that lets you stay alive. It’s what you’ve been taught before the shut down and you know you’re supposed to follow it. He found a “protective connection” with a person he actually liked. That’s hard to find in the depression world as depression people are pretty negative and most people eventually dump them. She liked him enough to stay with him those 100 miles and that likely saved his life for that period of time.
Depressed connections aren’t “felt” by depressers, We don’t “feel”. That’s why suicide is no big deal to us and we’re not surprised when someone else doesn’t make it. I don’t feel sad about his suicide, I’m not capable. I feel envious. His pain is over. I’ve been in pain for 20 years and I wish each day for natural quick death. I go to bed every night saying this when I’m alone….”Maybe I’ll die of a heart attack tonight so I don’t have to be in pain tomorrow”.
I “felt” for 32 year so I sort of remember how good it was to connect to people and I’m able to mimic that a little when I find someone I like as a person. I also still have the ability to know what is right and wrong so I don’t commit suicide because I know it would hurt other people in my life. I’d be okay with it though. It’s hard sometimes to separate the two and I get close. I’ve got a plan that I think would be mostly painless.
But then I call the suicide hotline and they tell me why I’m not supposed to. I’ve got my “safety net” in place. I wouldn’t want to be in “alone” in the middle of no where in a tent by myself. I’d never be able to get up and walk out, my brain wouldn’t let me. It barely lets me get out of bed most days unless I have somewhere I have to be. I’m sure he tried to tell his brain that they had to move but the ability to reason was already gone. It’s why depressed people missed so many planned dates. Their brain doesn’t let them move.
Even taking the time to write this long comment bought me some time. I’ve been up since 3am with insomnia, which happens a lot. I’m finally tired enough to go back to sleep.
Thanks Jason for your obsession with finding Vance’s identity. It made me wonder if you too were hiding from some sort of ailment that others don’t know about you. I can tell you’re not a depresser by your unknowns about why he died. If he was depressed, I know. But you, I’m not sure what makes you obsess. In this case, it was a great thing.
PS, I liked your writing. It was refreshing to read a well-written article with proper sentence structure and punctuation. You don’t find that much these days.
Delilah, bless you. I feel and know your pain.
And thanks to the writers for the conclusion of this story.
I had a tear in my eye all the way through it.
May MH be at peace.
Dear Delilah,
That was great… it gave me insight. Insight, that I can relate to!!
Thank you, Barbie Quinter
This post also touched me. My best friend suffers from depression. Recently she is under going shock therapy which I didn’t even know they did any more….I was subscribed anti depressants to quit smoking. I was complaining to her that they made no difference at all. None at all ! She looked me square in the eye and said ” that is because you are not depressed ” ! I like to think that I suffer from depression but I really don’t. I smoke too much, drink too much and don’t exercise at all. That is not depression….. For those who have real depression let me just say I am sorry and I seriously have no clue what that feels like.
I had shock therapy at age 18. It was the last thing I could do for myself when I cried endless weeks without stopping. Don’t be afraid of this procedure. It works to get the brain out of the pits of darkness. Very few side effects. It is nothing like it’s portrayal in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Don’t let others scare you about it. It is a viable treatment when medication fails.
diane t, based on the sum of your posts in this forum, i’m unsure of your objectivity, and it seems difficult to fairly assess your credibility when making the serious allegation that vance abused your daughter.
i mean you no disrespect and it’s certainly not my place to judge the merits of your claim. personally i feel we don’t have enough sources or objectivity to establish a preponderance of the evidence.
you are openly admitting to rather serious mental health issues in your youth, for which most would agree you should be lauded.
we’re also fairly certain that vance suffered emotionally, and once attempted suicide. i don’t know if a credible diagnosis of acute mental illness has ever been made, or who may have seen it, if it exists or once did. it seems pretty clear vance was a troubled guy. and he seemed to have trouble with interpersonal relationships.
i believe it’s been established that mental health challenges can be hereditary, and that causes thereof can be passed down generationally.
so it seems plausible that your daughter could have or could be facing challenges of her own. i raise this only as a possibility, i do not suggest it to be so.
however, irrespective of how well you knew someone, and what your experience may have been, to state in a public forum that a dead person abused your loved one is a pretty serious allegation to make. which you have made more than once.
in light of the current facts available, i feel that such an allegation on your part should be subject to considerable yet sympathetic scrutiny. or failing that it should be quietly withdrawn. we are indeed publicly discussing the actions of a deceased individual who cannot defend his record.
at times i may be expressing opinions, to which others may disagree.
i’ll repeat that it’s not for me to decide, but unless you and/or your daughter feel vance’s actions rose to the level meriting public disclosure, my gut tells me perhaps the allegation might best be withdrawn. i’m simply suggesting to perhaps consider the benefit of the doubt, if that’s not inappropriate in yours or your daughter’s sole estimation.
were that not to be your perfectly acceptable choice, given that the allegation arose from you, i do believe it becomes incumbent upon you to provide further details and perhaps documentary evidence.
is your daughter by chance willing or able to give her first-hand accounts of her time with vance?
leaving all mental health issues aside, many, many people find themselves swept up into passionate and tumultuous love relationships, which do not always end well. people can genuinely love each other, yet discover that they are hopelessly toxic to one another.
the spectrum of conflict and passion is so incredibly broad. not all of it is even necessarily unhealthy for either party. obviously some of it can be, or can certainly become so.
not all heated arguments and criticisms are abusive. many can become so. it’s also clear that sustained emotional and/or verbal abuse can be incredibly debilitating to the sufferer. i’m not in any way attempting to excuse or minimize abuse. it should not be tolerated.
and clearly there should be zero tolerance for physical abuse.
but given all of the above, i believe it to be quite fair to ask you for further details, and to respectfully ask that you corroborate those details to a relatively high degree of certainty. i’m no prosecutor, and i’m not attempting to persecute you.
i simply would ask, hoping most would agree, that in light of the serious allegation made, that either a good bit of clarity be provided, or the allegation be quietly withdrawn.
i don’t feel it disrespectful to request that you conference with your daughter and as objectively as possible assess all sides and all roles in the conflicts and come to your own independent conclusions as to the merits of providing further clarity to the very serious abuse allegation against the departed vance. i have absolutely no idea as to the kinds of and levels of abuse to which vance may have subjected your daughter.i would also make the exact same request were it a man claiming abuse at the hands of a deceased woman.
i do firmly feel that a public allegation of this seriousness once made must be respectfully examined in the interest of fairness, particularly when the subject has no means to defend him/herself. i hope for general consensus. i hope i have not offended you nor made you feel uncomfortable, unsafe or unfairly challenged in any manner.
i’m ultimately just some internet schmoe mouthing off. but this entire affair has been publicized since square one. it seems you knew vance quite well. if he abused your daughter i think it’s completely fair to ask you how and to what extent. and if you can make the allegation you should be willing to back it up. thanks for your consideration!
By the way, the reason for my ultimate decision to sign up for shock therapy stemmed from being raped as a teenager and my inability to deal with it and the PTSD it left me with. It says nothing about me being unable to be objective or weak in the mind Mr. Wired. Hey…let’s victimize the victim, why don’t we?
If you look at the last picture taken of Vance, to me he had a very disturbing look on his face. He had lost weight, his face was more narrow, his eyes spoke of someone in very deep thought and contemplation.
Or he could have been looking into the sun and squinting.
doug howser, howser ’bout i tip my hat to you? much respect 🙂
Thank you, Diane❣️❣️
Delilah,
Are you still with your abuser?
my god that is some real shit you laid down. i wonder how dead on you may be about MH.
i am truly sorry for what you went through and i hope some day it gets better.
i am kind of a blindly optimistic person (my self protection strategy) and i tend to ignore, internally downplay, and not engage in this subject. i don’t get a feeling that you are engaging in self pity.
i hope some how you can find healing, and that the path to that healing finds it’s way to be known to you. i’m so sorry for the abuse you suffered.
Is this the same gentleman whose sister worked at Dollar General. He left walking down the road because they wanted to test him for schizophrenia and he did not want to be tested?
I don’t think so.
He died the same way as the hiker detailed in the 2009 film “The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy.” See write up at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1439573/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl
When someone does long hikes to clear their mind, yet months later still sees nothing to return to, and does not wish to go on, passive starvation hidden in a tent in the woods is one way to end the absence of any appealing path out of the woods. It halts the pain of living. He made a brave choice.
Omg, thank you for sharing that link! I had the same thought about the stories being comparable but couldn’t remember the name…. it was driving me absolutely nuts!
Beautifully written story! May he rest in peace!
Kindly written and answers so many questions in a thoughtful, meaningful manner. Rest easy Vance, MH, for all the world cared. I’m so sorry for your troubles.
He could have done something useful when he checked out. Like filling an RV with explosives and detonating it next to a major AT&T telecom hub in Nashville. I see the same traits in both guys (both of whom were IT guys and loners).
Oh ffs
Delilah, you’re right. I don’t know true depression, but I’ve been through dark times. Glad you’re still here. Oddly, one of the things I didn’t expect, at the end, was having so much in common with Vance.
Aww the jealousy is apparent. If you miss prison so much you know how to get back.
david russell foley wow dude. equating those two individuals is quite the stretch. are you trolling? just saying patently obnoxious shit to stir the pot? i love a good troll. i love a good scam.
no bullshit, you still in custody? either way, what were you convicted of or what did you plead to?
how long a stint? you a recidivist or a one n done-er? i’m genuinely interested. people doing time in federal prisons are generally non-violent. you in for something interesting or pretty plain vanilla?
where are you or were you housed? minimum security? what’s time in federal like? pretty country clubby? i am straight up interested in your story if you’re interested in sharing. be kind brother. vance seemed a good dude. in a prison of his own, in some way for sure. or so it would seem.
haaa! some funny shit comes up on your google search! 2 years for bank fraud in 2014, you must be out now? back to scamming and jamming? shoulda guessed you’re an anti-social tech guy too! any good deals on the thumb drives? well you’re a clever one, not tryna be condescending. spoils well above 2 mil? were you able to hold on to any?
way interested now. what’s your story? how’d you learn about vance? just that tech-y loner thing? you gotta be interesting. what can you spill? c’mon man. you got tales to tell for sure. you cali?
I have been following this story for a while too, and though it feels great to finally come to a conclusion, I feel like if MH could see all these he would have hated this all.
He left the society behind, and went on a trail to be by himself and today, his pictures, his story is all over the internet. So many people are talking and inquiring about him. It may have all been done with good intentions, but his life somehow became sort of entertainment for many people.
He wanted to be unknown, thats why he never told his real name. What good it is to him that his name is identified today? Maybe he didnt want his family to know about it?
This fb groups, Reddit’s, articles are only invading his privacy. He gave up everything to be lost and remain unknown, and all the “detectives” pretty much ruined it all for him.
What makes you come to that conclusion? As far as I can tell he had no plan. At least not in the beginning. He started hiking to avoid getting caught sleeping in the park (although he had an apartment). He was in jeans and had no equipment. He used a trail name because that’s what everyone else was doing. He eventually decided to hike to the Florida Keys. He was enjoying himself, making friends among the way having good experiences. He just didn’t seem like a guy that would care what happened after he was gone. Of course I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone who would be so heartless that they’d actually want the people that cared about them in their life to never know what happened to them.
His secrecy may have been intended to hurt his family, with whom he had obviously had a falling out. He may have been thinking, “They will feel terrible when they realize that I did not want them to know what happened to me.” That sort of thing.
I agree with Pam. He went for a 2 month walk – paid his rent ahead of time – and just kept going. He had no plan – other than not wanting to get caught camping in the park Illegally . My parents were a landlord of one small ( cottage ) rental unit. One tenant was a total nut. She trashed the entire house and left my parents to clean it up. It was packed with stuff. No deposit and lots and lots of damage. Still, my mother could not bring herself to throw it all away. The women was living on a family trust fund. The rent came from the trustee every month. So I helped her sort thru the mess and my mom mailed ( at her own expense ) what she thought was of value. From Hawaii to the mainland trustee. Things like old photographs and and the family bible. It wasn’t cheap. But wow how inconsiderate is that to leave your entire apt full of stuff behind for others to sort, store and clean up ? It seems like alot of police resources were spent trying to figure out who this person was when all he needed to do was scribble his real name in one of the notebooks, have a prepaid cremation plan with a note not to contact family…..
@Pam, He is dead for 2.5 yrs and no one was looking for him. We don’t know how long he has been out of touch from his “loved ones”. Not everyone’s family, life is the same. People have different stories.
He may not have wanted to die this way, but if he had wanted his loved ones to know or for anyone to know his identity, maybe he would have left some sign.
If people cared for him, they would have tried to find him.
Thank you thank you thank you for saying exactly my thoughts about this whole affair!!!! I said basically the same thing when I first joined the FB group, asking why would we want to “send him home” or even id him WHEN HE DIDN’T WANT THAT. I believe it is horrible how he’s been treated after death. I did nothing to help ID him, just followed the group with dismay and at times shock. Maybe this will be a lesson for folks to think twice when trying to ID someone who clearly didn’t want to be identified.
You don’t know what he wanted anymore than anyone else did. You look at the facts of this and assume he didn’t want to be identified. I look at it and see the opposite. He called one of his friends a few months before he started hiking, he visited his sister between the AT and Florida trail. He contacted those he cared about when he chose to. That may seem strange to you or me but I think it was normal for him. Now that he’s gone, what could it possibly matter to him, either way? It only matters to those alive and I think it does matter, quite a bit – to his sister and his friends if no one else.
nee, what do you propose be done about it now? the dude’s dead. yet he lives on to entertain us, provoke our thoughts. it is what it is. does pronouncing judgement give you a feeling of superiority? are you considering a similar fate?
This everlasting story will help bring mental illness out of the closet. Even if my daughter had to suffer abuse at his hand, her suffering was not in vain. Vance was schizoaffective a combination of schizophrenia and manic depression/bipolar. He would not take medication. Perhaps this is why he was at odds with his family. Imagine the anguish of his parents, brother, and twin sister when he raged or isolated. Imagine how they felt when he shot himself in the stomach and they could not get through to him. When a family member has mental illness, the entire group suffers. I wish my daughter could have gotten through to him but he cast away all help from anyone.
hi diane t. you’ve made a couple of posts here. without slandering the dead and defenseless, would you be willing to provide more details as to the type and degree of abuse your daughter was subjected to? might she be available to elaborate herself?
(oh i hear the cries of outrage already. it’s a public forum. her comments have been moderated then posted.)
DT, to what extent can you be as objective as possible? were there two sides to the story? did they ‘egg each other’ on to an extent? how deep into true abuse territory did either’s actions devolve? most of us can distinguish between emotional combative lovers and intentional and wrongful abuse. was there ever physical contact? and no, i’m not excusing emotional abuse.
relax feminazi’s and sjw’s all. i can’t be minimizing something without first seeking details. let’s give all parties the benefit of the doubt before we’re drawn to where we might hesitate to go. it’s been put forth that MH suffered abuse in childhood. sadly, the abused can perpetuate abuse in later years.
since this is already out in the public forum, i’d suggest we try to keep things in perspective. he may have been a kitten-drowning serial killer for all i know. but i do know he’s not here to defend himself. so let’s seek to be kind in our judgements pending further reliable details.
what are you comfortable to share with us, diane? respectfully asked.
My trail name was Hal when I section hiked the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada and when I through hiked the AT. Based on that and my other experiences in long distance hiking, I think the commentator who said that MH had reached the end of the trail but had nowhere else to go got it right.
Long distance hiking is sufficiently mentally and physically challenging that it crowds out anything else that might be bouncing around in your mind. For some hikers, the bad stuff has gone away when you reach your personal journey’s end, and stays away; for others its still there, ready to reemerge when you stop hiking.
I’m afraid the latter applied to MH.
Eerily similar to Chris McCandless aka Alexander Super Tramp of Into the Wild. RIP Vance.
I really enjoyed this article. Thank you.
Did anyone ever do a conclusive DNA test between MH and his family?
Yes they will be doing it currently
So at this point, the answer is no . . .
the (ostensibly correct) response that testing is currently under way does not seem like a ‘no’ to me.
i’m not sure to what extent this type of testing has become ‘immediate response’, and if so at what price points.
i might not have worded my reply the same as alice did, but based on reading i’ve done it appears that seeking a genetic match to the family is definitely under way if not yet accomplished.
i’m not targeting you in general but i find it interesting the extent to which we as a society so quickly become dependent upon new technology. true, properly executed genetic testing is the only irrefutable means, but there are plenty of other ways to identify a body.
no dental work in this instance, it seems imperfect vance was blessed w perfect teeth and likely a commitment to dental hygiene.
but multiple independent sources identifying photographs as the same individual they collectively knew seems highly reliable and worthy of publication. fabrication or controversy seems unlikely wrt to MH’s identity.
thank you toowired. seems the person asking the question either doesn’t realise DNA testing isn’t instantaneous or just wants to be a smart arse (or both)
Ask a simple question . . . if I wanted a lecture, I’d get married . . .
damn! who doesn’t love a clever comeback?
well played Tony 🙂
(pssst! – don’t do it …)
🙂
The final answer on his confirmed DNA ID came out in an article in Wired on Jan 12. See link below.
https://www.wired.com/story/unsettling-truth-mostly-harmless-hiker/
1. I think you are jumping the gun by publishing this and “confirming” his identity without the official word from police.
2. If it is in fact Vance, I’m outraged that no one reported him missing. In particular the Brooklyn landlord !?
3. People seem to forget that other hikers did see his tent in June or July of 2018. He could have asked for help if sick. Stop speculating about a mystery illness, it’s very obvious he deliberately starved himself to death
1. Friends are identifying him thru photos taken on the trial. I believe them. My brother was run over by two cars and still identified by my father as his son. No DNA needed. I think he has been positively identified- just not by the police.
2. I do agree that the Landlord should have reported him as missing. I was reported missing by my mother once when I wasn’t even missing. God love her ! I lived in a house ( owned by my parents ) on a property to the rear of their house and every morning I would call out a cheery goodbye when I passed her kitchen window. One day she didn’t hear me then when I wasn’t answering my ( locked) door she called the cops. The first thing they did was call me at work and I answered. After that I went into her house every day to say good bye – face to face – to her. I think the saddest thing ( in this life ) is that you could be dead and missed by no one. He could have tripped and fallen in front of a train for all anyone knew…. The landlord should have notified the authorities that his tenant seemed to be missing.
3. I don’t think it is obvious he starved himself to death. I think a mysterious illness is more likely than he starved himself to death intentionally. That kind of death seems to be prolonged and painful. Why not just jump off a bridge if you want to end it all ?? Or take a bunch of pills ? You want people to stop speculating but you are doing it yourself. I don’t think this was a suicide by starvation. That is just speculation….
Let’s not forget the Coroner said Vance’s stomach was empty but his bowels were full. Having worked as a nurse in long term care for 25 years, when people are impacted by stool, they get very sick. They spike a temp, get very nauseated, vomit, stop eating. Without intervention they get septic and die. I have seen patients die from impaction or ‘locked bowels.’ It is a painful way to die.
oh stow your outrage. did you even know the guy? are you aware of the multiple circumstances that combined make the lack of a missing persons report understandable?
so much outrage by a vocal group. so little first-hand knowledge or factual reasoning behind it.
save one possible youtube vid, the only outrageous conduct i’ve observed first-hand is people making ill-informed or unsubstantiated allegations against or about people they don’t even know, much less those entities’ motivations.
excepting the ‘outrage contingent’ i’ve observed only respect, sympathy and attempts to better understand this man who died too soon alone and under sad if not tragic circumstances. give your outrage a rest, or do a better job of justifying your judgmental proclamations.
for all the loud and voluminous accusations i’ve yet to see a single link or example of crassness or exploitation by an individual publisher or commenter, despite repetitive requests they be provided by the accusers. seems to be more of a holier-than-thou self-elevating proclamation than any kind of demonstrable reality. those proclaimers so clearly above the rest of us unwashed gossiping simple-minded serfs ….
Does anyone know how he now exists as a skeleton waiting to be claimed in an office? Was he buried for awhile? How did he go from his condition at death to a skeleton while in the custody of the ME or coroner’s office?
It was done deliberately by the ME or whoever takes care of these things. They skelatanise the corpse as apparently even in a freezer, it will continue to decompose.
most of MH’s younger self pictures seem more like his strange twin brother – the candle burning depressed goth sabbath playing future serial killer.
obviously the physical traits line up, it’s the auras that are so different. he looked like a totally different, much happier guy in his trail pics. guy was pretty handsome towards the end there.
he was also a bit studly in the short haired bbq tech guy pic.
but wow, most of those earlier pics imply a readily apparent darkness in the soul. they seem to radiate a deep pain and unhappiness. quite a contrast.
one of the commenters mentioned his final known picture. does anyone have a link?
Vance would not have killed anyone. His hair grew very fast. When it got down to his waist, he pulled it back into a ponytail, cut it and donated it to ‘Locks of Love’s to make wigs for childhood cancer victims.
DT, another comment i wish i could ‘like’. same for BWJ’s below 🙂
Completely agree. he looks so haunted to me in the older pics
I agree TOWIRED❣️❣️
One of those early pictures, he looked very emotionally dark‼️
We know who is but we still have not learned anything about his family. Where is now? Is family going to lay him to rest? Parents? Brothers? Sisters?
Debbie,
Vance’s grandfather passed away last year. If you watch the tribute video you can see that Vance was in at least two of the photos: one around the 2:36 mark and another around the 3:36 mark. Vance appears to have belonged to a large and seemingly, at least many years ago, close knit family. It is so heartbreaking that anyone should die alone, unmissed and unloved.
https://www.tributeslides.com/tributes/show/BC8PSKQMQYSH763Q
marc, thanks so much for the timestamps. i requested them elsewhere. i salute your patience in watching the entire vid.
i have to respectfully disagree with ‘unmissed and unloved’. none of us knows that.
there could easily be former loves, work associates and family members with regrets that constitute missing and love. estrangement is not a black or white issue. i simply assert that we don’t know. we’re all guilty of assumptions to some degree. this one seems unfair to me, much more-so unfair to the deceased.
one former girlfriend seems to still love him. and i believe he visited his twin sister between hike legs.
This article has me spiraling a bit. Around midnight on December 24th, the same day this was posted, a good friend of mine disappeared. He may have drowned in the Bay or he may be out on a walk-about, but members of the running community in Oakland and SF have issued a missing persons report and spent the past 10+ days searching for Lucas Horan. A smart, adventurous guy (he has a PhD and has run 100+ mile races locally and around the world), he is missed by all of us. If anyone has some information regarding Lucas, please use the link below to get in touch with his loved ones.
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/laf/d/emeryville-missing-person-lucas-horan/7254834919.html
ryan i truly hope your friend is found, and found to be safe.
please return for an update, very hopefully with good news. what you’re going through is absolutely the stuff of nightmares.
i can’t begin to understand, but anyone can sympathize. i’m so sorry you and others are experiencing this. i really hope you get a good outcome. it’s hard to even process what his immediate family and possible SO may be enduring. wow. prayers for an emotional and joyous reunification.
thank you for your kind words toowired. Infortunately Lucas’ body was found yesterday near the Bay Bridge. Hard to comprehend, but it is also a small kindness to have certainty that he passed.
I may have lost my last comment but in the event that you think your friend killed himself I just wanted to tell you a co-worker of mine also took his own life. His wife said he went for a cup of coffee at Starbucks and never came back. What I know today is she kicked him out of her parent’s house and his Filipina girlfriend – which he was planning on moving to the Philippines to be with – broke up with him. He jumped 10 stories to his death in a very public place. I researched suicide trying to make sense of it and starving yourself to death never came up. I just don’t buy that Mostly Harmless did this to himself intentionally.
i’m so sorry ryan. i’m sorry for your loss of your friend.
I am wondering how someone could starve themselves -intentionally – but have a full bowel ? That makes no sense to me. If you aren’t taking anything in then nothing would be coming out … I appreciate the comment by someone that said people who are starving will hoard food. So maybe that is why he still had food supplies but I don’t know if I believe that. As a smoker I will smoke my last cigarette – knowing it is my last . Only after that do I go to extreme measures to get more……
TONY… love the married thing‼️ Hahaha
🙂
My mother sent me an article tonight that caught me off guard. It was a story of a mysterious hiker that set off on a journey to find himself and along the way lost his life. It’s an interesting tale of not getting trapped in your 9-5, taking time for your mental health, and living in the moment doing what makes you happy. Apparently, his death has been quiet a mystery for years.
The moment the article opened and had a photo listed at the top my jaw dropped to the floor. That’s Vance… holy shit that’s Vance. I hadn’t spoken with him in almost 8 years, but if you knew him he was unforgettable. People were often astonished when they learned that we were actually close friends. He was very shy & quite, however his insanely quick wit translated in to great comedy if you were only of the lucky few he would share the joke with. He typically dressed in all black with a long coat while I normally wore loud bright colors – we came from different worlds and were a true ‘odd couple’ pairing of friends.
As with most friends you find a common thread – despite all of our differences, we were both video game nerds that loved getting caught up until the morning hours. I’ll never forget how much I learned about computer hardware as when he helped me build a proper gaming PC. It became clear through that process that his passion was not only for technology, but more importantly to help others. No request was too foolish to ask and no complaints were made when given an impossible challenge to fix. For Vance it was just doing what he was good at.
We fell out of touch when I changed jobs, left the country, and stopped playing video games for a time. Inevitably my love of video games pulled me back in and I’d often see ‘Vaejor’ on my steam friends list. I’d always go look into the game he was playing and see if it was for me even if I didn’t reach out to him at the time. As I write this it brings me to tears that I didn’t send any of those friendly messages when he came to mind.
Recently I’ve taken up the hobby of streaming video games online. About 2 weeks ago there was a discussion in my Twitch chat on video games and I brought up a game called ‘Rift’ that inspired me to build my first real Gaming PC. I fondly thought of Vance since he introduced me to the game and we played together regularly. “You know I really should give him a call” I said to myself – “I hope he’s doing alright”. Little did I know that Vance died almost 2 years ago.
My hot take is I don’t think many gave him the time of day for long periods of his life, he didn’t want to fit into the mainstream crowd, and quite frankly the main stream crowd didn’t want him to fit in either. From my view this didn’t ever seem to bother him. He valued the people that were close and got excitement out of solving challenging problems. The idea of a ‘great escape’ to solve the ultimate challenge of finding himself makes perfect sense for his character.
I don’t know what happen along that journey and can only guess at his true intentions. I write this because I mentally lost a friend tonight. A man that didn’t want to be written into the history books, but rather study them to learn how to help others in the future. I’ll always remember the strange looks we got leaving the office together to get lunch and countless hours of epic online adventures we shared. All I hope is you solved that final puzzle you’d been working at for so long and are at peace in whatever happens after this life. They say you die twice: The first is when your body is gone from this world & the second is the last time someone ever says your name. You may have been a unsolved mystery for many people out there, but to me you were always a true friend and I’ll never forget that.
Rest in peace, Vance.
Wow. Thank you for sharing this.
That was very nice, Keith!
Thank you… sooo sorry for your loss.
With deepest sympathy,
Barb J
Keith….What a beautifully written tribute! Thanks for sharing some insight into Vance and your friendship. Very sorry for the loss of someone you clearly bonded with and had a significant impact in your life. A good reminder…..especially these days……to go ahead and send that “friendly message”. TK
keith i assume you have seen a lot of the pictures of vance from out on the trails. your story is very moving and kind of a lesson to us all. no one knows for sure but based on the trail pics and the recollections of those who met and interacted with him in the outdoors it seems that most of vance’s last couple of years were happy ones.
i’m sorry for your loss. unfortunately most of us are left with those ‘i should have just …’ regrets. i know i have them in my life. it’s sounds like in the sum of things you were a good friend. that’s what really counts.