USA TODAY International Edition
MISSING IN THE SMOKIES
Dennis Martin’s disappearance still haunts park 50 years later
The failed search provided textbook training for first responders worldwide. But not a trace of the boy has surfaced.
CADES COVE, Tenn.
The day before Dennis Martin would have turned 7, his father shouted his name from the sky in a desperate plea to bring him home. ❚ Maybe Dennis heard. Maybe he tried to answer. ❚ Maybe the wind that wailed across Spence Field drowned out the words of father and son alike. ❚ Or maybe the boy who sparked the largest search in the history of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was past saving.
‘One of the enduring mysteries’
June 14 marks 50 years since a grinning Dennis darted out of sight during a Father’s Day weekend camping trip. He never came home. Nearly 1,500 searchers combed a stretch of 50-plus square miles in the nation’s most-visited park and walked away empty-handed. Lessons learned in the failed search became textbook training for first responders worldwide. But not a trace of the boy has surfaced. “I think it is virtually impossible that we will ever know what happened to Dennis Martin . ... It’s become one of the enduring mysteries of the Smokies,” said Clay Jordan, deputy park superintendent.
A game gone wrong
Bill Martin didn’t see a cloud in the sky that Saturday afternoon of June 14, 1969.
Martin, an architect in nearby Knoxville, came to Spence Field with his father and two sons – Doug, 9, and Dennis, 6 – for a weekend of hiking and camping.
Dennis was small but strong, about 4 feet tall and 55 pounds with dark brown eyes and wavy brown hair, easy to pick out that day in a red T-shirt, green shorts and oxford shoes.
He’d never camped away from home before but knew how to handle himself in the woods. He often led the way on trails at a pace some adults couldn’t match.
Spence Field runs east and west along the Appalachian Trail on the Tennessee-North Carolina line, about 4,800 feet above sea level. Views on a clear day span miles.
Steep slopes, jagged ravines and tangled hells of laurel and rhododendron vines teeming with copperheads and rattlesnakes lie below. Bears and bobcats mark their territory on trees, beside furrows dug by wild hogs scrounging for roots.
Just before 4:30 p.m., Dennis, Doug and two other boys in the meadow huddled to whisper, then scattered as the adults watched. Three boys burst from behind the grown-ups, shrieking and laughing.
Then came the question: Where’s
Dennis?
A breeze swept across the field. Distant thunder rumbled.
The storm broke with sudden fury, dumping nearly 3 inches of rain throughout the night.
High winds drowned out calls for Dennis.
Temperatures dropped into the low 50s, chilling campers to the bone.
More than 240 people converged on Spence Field the next day, including Dennis’s mother, Violet.
“I have a feeling we’re going to find him,” she said. “Maybe God sent this ordeal to us so we could appreciate things more.”
A swarm of searchers
“Something should have been found. But you have to know what to look for.”
Dwight McCarter Retired Smokies ranger and tracker
“Something should have been found,” said Dwight McCarter, a retired Smokies ranger and veteran tracker. “But you have to know what to look for.”
Park officials later acknowledged bungling the search with too many overeager volunteers, inexperienced eyes and careless feet.
Green Berets on a training exercise showed up to help. The ranks of searchers peaked the seventh day at more than 1,400 people.
“Today, we would not have anywhere near that number,” Jordan said.
Bill Martin called for his son from a helicopter. Searchers questioned whether he could even be heard.
On the fourth day, hikers spotted a faint set of child-size tracks about a mile below Spence Field. Park officials dismissed the prints as left by Boy Scouts from a search party.
McCarter wondered.
“They didn’t find tracks from a bunch of kids,” he said. “They found tracks from one kid.”
‘Nothing to go on’
Dennis would have turned 7 that Friday, June 20. Park officials suspended major search operations June 29.
The Martins offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to Dennis. Bill Martin suggested a kidnapping.
“I’ve got nothing to go on, no evidence,” the father said. “But it’s a possibility, and the only one we have that the boy is still alive.”
Martin died in 2014, never knowing what became of his son. The family hasn’t discussed the case publicly since the search ended and didn’t want to talk for this story.
In 1985, a ginseng hunter told McCarter of finding a child-size skeleton below Spence Field near an uprooted tree. A search found nothing.
Answers remain elusive
Rescue workers across the globe still study the case. Searchers in the Smokies have failed to find only four missing people since.
Spence Field barely looks like the meadow of a half-century ago.
Trees cover ground that was once open. Forest debris coats the earth, deep and pillow-soft.
“For every year, nature layers up about an inch,” McCarter said. “And it’s been a lot of years.”
And the winds still blow across
Spence Field.