“There’s no other clue”

Farber’s mother said she has twice visited the “skinny tree” where Farber’s sweatpants and bag were found. The tree is near the top of the coal mountain, in an area so high and steep it almost made her sick to climb it.

“It looks like the Grand Canyon,” she said. “I’m afraid of heights and I was scared to death. I cried the last time I was up there.”

Fritz said she had no sense on the mountain that her son died there. She said it didn’t even make sense that anyone would flee trouble by climbing the spindly little tree her son’s things were found in.

Nearby, she said, there was a much better tree to climb.

Fritz is skeptical that her son would wander off and, frightened by visions of coyotes, climb any tree and then run off a cliff.

She said if her son were so drugged up that night, he probably would not have been clearheaded enough to tell his girlfriend that his cellphone battery was low, as he is reported to have said.

Fritz said she doubts Farber took the sweatpants and bag into the tree and left them there.

“I’m certain they were planted there,” she said.

A Coyotes drug gang might have taken the items to that tree to throw off the investigation, she said.

She wants police to look harder for a drug gang she believes might have targeted her son. She said she wants police to re-interview everyone they’ve talked to in the case, and find out who might have wanted to kill him.

Tamaqua police appear to be interested in solving the case, she said, but the investigation has looked inactive for nearly two years. Even the pending search by WolfPack has been postponed several times, she said.

“I’ve been going through this for three years, being put off and rescheduled,” Fritz said. “I personally eat, sleep and breathe looking for my son, and the police, they’re not physically doing anything.”

Fritz set up the Jesse Lee FarberMissing Person page on Facebook to seek help from the public.

Though she lives in Chester County, she occasionally visits her mother and others in the Tamaqua area. Messages sent by way of the Facebook page are the source of the most helpful tips on what happened to her son, she said.

Woods said he understands Fritz’s frustration. The chief said he also is impatient to find out what happened to Farber, but he has no good reason yet to follow up harder on the Coyote gang rumor.

“We’ve heard of it,” he said, “but there was never solid intel of a gang called Coyotes. And if there was a gang of druggies, there’s just no way they would have found this location. It’s that remote.

“Jesse grew up in that area. He knew that trail. But there isn’t one of these druggies who has the drive inside them to go to this spot,” Woods said.

Woods said he hasn’t completely ignored the gang angle. Tamaqua police repeatedly have asked drug suspects if they know what happened to Farber, he said.

“We did a drug raid in 2016, a big one,” he said. “Twenty-some people were arrested in the raid. Our narcotics guy made an offer to them that, if they had any credible information on this case, we would drop the charges. And nobody took the bite. Nobody knew anything.”

A renewed search for Farber now is the only direction to go, he said.

“There’s no other clue out there,” he said. “We have to find the body to find if there was foul play or if he fell. We’ll never be able to prove anything unless we find him.”

Jim Wilkins, chief of the WolfPack Search team, said several search crews will get together for the hunt. The teams will include skilled rappellers to handle the rough terrain, and dogs capable of finding human remains even three years after death.

“Cadaver dogs are trained to smell different types of human remains,” he said. “They’re trained on blood. They’re trained on human tissue. And they’re trained on bone as well. The dogs are trained on a multitude of scents.”

Like Woods, Wilkins believes Farber’s body is key to the investigation.

“Until you find Jesse,” he said, “everything at this point is pure speculation.”

Before his disappearance, Farber worked at the Leiby’s Ice Cream plant in Tamaqua as a freezer maintenance man. His mother says he separated from his girlfriend and two children 10 days before he disappeared, and moved into a camper on the Valley Road property of his grandparents just outside Tamaqua, in Walker Township. His girlfriend did not return calls seeking comment.

On the day he went missing, Farber arranged to buy drugs from a dealer he planned to meet at noon at a fast-food restaurant, but he or the dealer arrived late and no deal happened, according to police.

Seven hours later, he was walking out of town on the S-curves and, after another hour and 49 minutes, phoned his girlfriend about coyotes, police said. She and her brother then ran into the hills just west of the high school looking for him.

About midnight Aug. 11, 2015, police were informed that Jesse Farber was missing.

His mother, more than anything, just wants her son found.

fwarner@mcall.com 610-820-6508