Officials believe pond is location of man’s body

He went missing in 2022

The Yell County sheriff’s office believes a man who went missing in October 2022 disappeared into a pond behind his residence near Arkansas 28 and Growley Road, between Ola and Plainview.

Foul play is not suspected, authorities said.

The final search for Dan Gibson, who was 68 at the time he went missing, was conducted on Friday by sheriff’s office deputies, handlers from the Quapaw Nation K-9 Search Team, representatives from the Morgan Nick Foundation, Sebastian County Search and Rescue and numerous volunteers from local fire departments, a Facebook post from the sheriff’s office said.

A large grid search was conducted using Caltopo, an app that allows searchers to be tracked in real time and also allows a search party to mark off areas that have already been searched, Lead Detective Robert Cross said Wednesday morning.

“We extensively covered the woods,” he said, adding that approximately 55 acres were searched.

The detective also said that the terrain of the nearby woods changed as the search party continued further into the area. “Our inability to travel through it [the woods] made us feel that a man of his age and his condition would not have been able to traverse that terrain,” Cross said.

“Multiple independently trained K-9s — meaning they were trained independently of each other — kept coming back to the same pond behind Mr. Gibson’s house that we had originally thought that he had disappeared from and in,” he said.

“He had dementia and was despondent, so we just feel like he went to the place that he always went, which was his pond,” the detective said.

A Tuesday Facebook post from the Yell County sheriff’s office read, “Certain environmental conditions prevent the recovery of those remains. It is the family’s wish for him to remain at peace in a place that he loved.”

The pond is around two to three acres large and difficult to get to, Cross said.

Due to the amount of silt and sludge as well as wildlife activity in the pond, the detective said authorities were confident that there were not enough remains to recover.

“We feel with an absolute degree of certainty that [the pond] is where Mr. Gibson is,” he said. “Based on the totality of the evidence and the circumstances, that’s why we feel that’s where he is. We feel we successfully eliminated anywhere else he could have been.”

When asked if it was legal to leave Gibson “at peace” in the pond, Cross responded that it was.

“It is our belief that there are no remains at this point,” he said. “It would be different if we felt like we could go in and recover a body and give it a resting place, but based on sonar scans and not finding enough to be able to pinpoint a body in such a large body of water, we don’t feel like there are enough remains to recover.”

Cross said he understood the unease surrounding the circumstances.

“It’s a very unusual situation, and it’s not something as an investigator that I’m not happy leaving where it is at, but we’ve exhausted what we can do at this point,” he said. “I have full confidence that’s where Mr. Gibson’s resting place is but I don’t feel great leaving it as it is either. We feel like we can close the case, we have enough evidence to do so. But, I sure would have liked to have a body.”

The department’s Facebook post also expressed condolences toward the Gibson and Hemberger Families as well as those who assisted in the search and investigation.

“I feel bad for Mr. Gibson and the condition he was in, and we’re just happy that he’s at peace,” Cross said.

According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, Gibson was last contacted on Oct. 17, 2022.

“The neighbor came over and brought him some food the previous week, and when they came back over on October 19th, they couldn’t make contact,” the report stated. “They contacted law enforcement on October 27th and law enforcement couldn’t make contact. Both his vehicles and cell phone were located at the residence.”

Several other searches for Gibson had been organized since 2022, the Facebook post said.

“I could not give you an accurate number of searches right off the top of my head,” Cross said. He said he personally went on three organized searches, and sometimes searched the area by himself.