He was trying to escape someone who wanted to hurt him. But this one seemed real. The thru hiker, who went by trail names "Denim" and "Mostly Harmless,” interacted with others along the Appalachian and Florida trails. Marie recognized the face and she knew all about the scar. When this man asked someone else “Who’s that guy?”, the reply was “He’s mostly harmless” or along those lines, so Mostly Harmless kept the trail name. We stand in the vastness of nature, remember how small we are, and everything slows down. It was the same person who had first sent the tip in August. The mysterious disappearance of Esther Dingley in the Pyrenees Mountains. We know his name. My correspondent told a moving story of befriending the man in a Newport News bowling alley and hearing that Daryl had terminal cancer and planned to hike to his death. “I had pretty bad PTSD to which he hated caring for me, even kept a dated log of every time I needed help, to the point where he left me outside in the dark—knowing that at that time I couldn't be outside alone or be in the dark without panicking,” she recalls, before adding, “and this is only the light stuff.”. Wired may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The hiker appeared to have starved to death, five miles from a major highway, with money and food next to him. We hear one part of a story and add another part that we hope might be true. I asked her if she was disappointed that Rodriguez had such a dark side. He told Kelly that he had started in New York and was heading down to Key West. Unidentified Hiker Mostly Harmless. The internet rallied to identify the hiker known only as “Mostly Harmless” or “Denim” after he was found dead in a tent at a Florida camp site. McKenzie had just four Facebook friends and his only posts were photos of the wilderness. He and K went out maybe once a month, she recalls. In July 2020, it was announced that the Collier County Sheriff's Office was working with Othram Inc. to identify the decedent through forensic genealogy. Ad Choices, The Unsettling Truth About the ‘Mostly Harmless’ Hiker. “I don't think I was committed to Vance as a human. ‍♀️ Want the best tools to get healthy? He was friendly and said he worked in tech. Launched in 2018, Othram is a relatively new lab whose goal has been to partner with law enforcement agencies to solve cold case crimes and unidentified persons cases. When asked his name, the hiker introduced himself as “Mostly Harmless… CCSO reached an agreement with Othram to potentially discover a relative for the hiker and close the case following widespread public interest. You know it is going to be lit, but over the top.”, He wasn’t particularly collaborative, but he would sit down, put on his headphones—listening to Temple of the Dog and Rage Against the Machine—and solve problems. Read New Story. He left his apartment in anger. CCSO detectives first sent samples of Mostly Harmless’ DNA to the University of North Texas. Everyone liked him. Why Humans Can’t Run Cheetah Speeds (70mph) and How We Could, Why is it that cheetahs can run so fast? It will take about 12 weeks to sequence Mostly Harmless’ DNA – a process much different than that done by the University of North Texas – before a genealogist will use the sequence to build out a family tree using a public database. He texted two new photographs that looked just like Mostly Harmless. I and others worked to confirm his identity, with the first press story about Rodriguez appearing in late December in Adventure Journal. Gill is a former Naples Daily News reporter and current media relations specialist for the Collier County Sheriff's office. Our phones don’t ring and our screens don’t beckon us. December 4, 2017 – Blue Ridge, GA. A comment on the Mountain Crossings post said that Mostly Harmless had made it to Springer. Godso remembers his roommate playing games for 18 hours a day and shutting everything else out. We know where he’s been. “Hi, this is a crazy note to be sending but I believe I know who the hiker was.” My correspondent had gone to high school with someone who looked like the hiker and whose name was something like Bilemy. “I think he could be a space alien,” one reader wrote to me. “A kind of astral Tocqueville taking a long, long trip to get a sense of the people and the planet, and when he was done, he wasted away and went back to Alpha Centauri. He told Gormley he was headed toward Key West with a 50-pound pack on his back in Florida's mounting heat, and the Trail Angel became concerned. The ears. She is a trail angel- someone who helps thru-hikers by offering them showers and meals, or anything else they can for hikers. Kelly said she was worried about Mostly Harmless because he seemed new to hiking, not having a phone and carrying an unnecessarily enormous tent were “rookie mistakes”. giardiasis? I wrote to his parents and sister in early January, two weeks after they heard the news. I’m sketching in details in the half light. He raised his hand weakly and a passing truck saw him and pulled over. Was he struck down by a trail illness e.g. I told my editor, who got obsessed too, and she found a Facebook page for a Daryl McKenzie that hadn’t been active since 2017, the year Mostly Harmless started his trek. The deceased weighed just 83 pounds, with signs of profound starvation. Marie, who works in IT, told me, “He was a crazy good coder. The authorities in Collier County, Florida, where his body was found, were stumped, but they were certain he had died of natural causes. Had he become a different person? The effort eventually reached a former colleague, who recognized a local called Vance Rodriguez and reached out to the Collier County Sheriff’s Office. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. More than one and a half million people read the story and looked at photos that other hikers had posted. His jokes were usually obscure,” says a colleague named Keith Parent. Vance John "Vaejor" Rodriguez, previously known as "Mostly Harmless", Denim, and Ben Bilemy was an American hiker whose body was found on July 23, 2018 in Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida, then remained unidentified for two years. It inspired a group that has committed itself to trying to solve other cold cases. He said that they were … “We enlisted the help of the Lafayette Parish County Sheriff’s Office, which made contact with his family. And so a group focused on digital forensics went through the accounts of every possible user who had been on Screeps up until April 2017, the date Mostly Harmless had given other hikers for when he’d begun his journey. Additional images from Getty and Alamy He had a long scar on his abdomen and readers diagnosed potential illnesses. Horton said that “His body was kind of twisted. His family wasn’t in touch. His eyes were wide open and he was looking right at me.” The hikers quickly called 911. And, of course, people thought they knew who he was. Before I saw the pictures the autopsy seemed very basic to me. 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. I was elated to some degree. Maybe he did become someone different. The people on the trail didn't spend years with him to see how he handled ups and downs. The mystery of the hiker known only by his trail name, "Mostly Harmless," has finally been solved - and he's connected to Lafayette. Maybe his inexperience caught up to him and he was outmatched by the bugs, the snakes, and the humidity. How can humans get to be that fast? There is some speculation that his knees may have given out on him effectively trapping him and causing him to starve, He was known to wear braces on both knees and carry an excessively heavy pack. The company’s codebase is still filled with notations of “VR,” for code that Rodriguez wrote. We just don’t know where he was from or who he really was. BROOKLYN, NEW YORK – Florida police followed every possible lead to try and identify "Mostly Harmless," a mysterious trail hiker who died of starvation with about $3,600 in cash in his kit. He was smiling. Cheetah x-rays courtesy of Cheetah.org: https://cheetah.org/ Some caught him on video. Before he left, he bought that 2-person tent he was found in. Like Rodriguez, Cody had struggled in his twenties and thirties. He was wearing, a beige shirt with green shorts and black Salomon hiking boots. The mystery of the identity of Mostly Harmless was finally solved in January 2021, thanks to a combination of DNA testing, crowdfunding, and public outreach. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. Maybe that’s what he’d been seeking. Investigators say the mystery hiker was identified on the trail by the aliases “Denim” and “Mostly Harmless” and shared photos of a person they believe is the same as the man who was found dead. In January 2017, Rodriguez wrote, in a Slack channel for Screeps users, “I'm mostly harmless (for now).” In mid-April, he posted his last message in the Screeps Slack and headed into the woods. In the middle of December, photographs of Mostly Harmless found their way to a group of friends in Baton Rouge, one of whom called the Collier County Sheriff’s Office. He’d go for a year without smiling or being nice to people,” Godso recalls. The hiker said that he was looking thin, but nowhere near 83 pounds. Authorities did not consider that the campers cause of death was suspicious. Vance John Rodriguez was a man who was found deceased in Florida in 2018. He told trail angels and other hikers that he was coming from Brooklyn and that he spent a decade in the tech industry and was working on a hikers’ app. Rodriguez spent the next 15 months hiking south and shedding all remnants of the man he’d been. When she asked him if he was using the Florida Trail (FT) Guide app, he said no because he didn’t have a phone since he was wanting to disconnect. According to friends who saw the photographs of him on the trail, he looked healthier than ever. Everyone knew that he had started walking south on the Appalachian Trail from New York a year and a half before. That wasn't the only time he locked me out.”, On a Saturday night in September 2016, K was injured when a terrorist set off a bomb on West 23rd Street in Manhattan. He left no trace. He carried cash and couldn’t be tracked by credit card receipts. I want him to have a redemptive story, like Jesse Cody’s, because I like happy endings and because it better justifies all the time I spent researching bowling alleys in Newport News. https://soundcloud.com/ccso-media-relations. Another hiker met Mostly Harmless, who he knew as Denim, at a shelter at Springer Mountain. Updated February 2021 - Vance Rodriguez identified as Mostly Harmless. When he was about 15, according to friends, Rodriguez headed off into a field with a gun, intending to kill himself. I published an article about Mostly Harmless the day before the presidential election. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. His ex-girlfriend was afraid of him. “I think it made him even more lonely to be in a place with so many people and no one to connect to,” K recalls. The handwriting was familiar, and the coding style too. The strange death of Elisa Lam in the LA Cecil Hotel, The mysterious disappearance of Texas State student Jason Landry, The shocking story of Australia’s vanishing bushwalkers, The strange disappearance of Lauren Colvin Thompson near Rockhill in Texas, The mysterious disappearance of the hunter Fritz Drumm in Saratoga, The strange disappearance and deaths of the Jamison Family in the Sans Bois mountains, The mysterious death of Alan Jeal on Cornwall’s Perranporth Beach, The strange disappearance and death of Stella Wong in the Don River, The baffling disappearance of the anthropologist Sam Dubal on Mt. We'd all been telling ourselves stories about his life. There were no signs of drugs or excessive alcohol use. I had just spent three days hiking on and off the Appalachian Trail with my 12-year-old son, and I was pulled in. Rainier, The Yosemite National Park missing persons mysteries 1909-2017, The puzzling disappearance of Ruthanne Robert in Yosemite National Park, The mysterious disappearance of James J. Arthur at Iron Lakes, The mysterious disappearance of Ruth Wilson on Box Hill, The strange disappearance and death of the jogger Michael Kenney. It brought some new attention to a cutting-edge type of genealogical analysis. So he had enough cash to buy supplies if needed. Who was Ben Bilemy/Mostly Harmless/Denim? 'Mostly Harmless' is seen in a photo taken by a fellow hiker before his mysterious death +7 The hiker was discovered dead inside this yellow tent at a campsite in Florida. Known on different sections of the trails as “Denim” and “Mostly Harmless,” Rodriguez stayed in shelters and hostels, hiked alongside other backpackers, and even had his photo … “Outside was between the car and the building.”, According to Godso, Rodriguez didn’t graduate. Also includes a photo of the man they believe was Mostly Harmless… They became off-and-on roommates for the next five years. He had spent his life in Louisiana and welcomed the change. February 24, 2018 – Pine Log State Forest, FL. At 17, with the consent of his parents, Rodriguez was emancipated by a Lafayette, Louisiana, court. A more thorough autopsy with a conclusive cause of death would have stopped a lot of unneeded speculation about MH. … When it was over, the woman he had dated wrote on her Facebook page, “Apartment 950 a month / bills 300 a month / Standing up to the monster that beat you up emotionally and physically for 5 years? The surgeries that followed were the cause of the scar that had so intrigued the Facebook group. It was only 4 months before he would be discovered deceased. A Nameless Hiker and the Case the Internet Can’t Crack The man on the trail went by “Mostly Harmless." They all knew his trail name, but no one could figure out his real one. He told people he was from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and that he worked in tech in New York. “If you’re asking me if he is the guy who shows up at the party in a clown suit blasting things out of a cannon, that’s not him,” says a former colleague named Corey Tisdale. The family then agreed to provide a DNA sample for comparison.”. “He was always very introverted, kept to himself. Marie, who lived with him as a friend for several years in his twenties, says he was angry that his parents had institutionalized him after the near suicide. “He’s got to be missed. Meanwhile, the dedicated Facebook hunters kept going. "I'll give you a reason not to like me,” Rodriguez had written on Slack, describing a kind of move in Screeps, two months before he went into the woods. Cheetah anatomy illustrations courtesy of Jun Huang and Jun's Anatomy: https://www.junsanatomy.com/ He met hundreds of people on the trail, and seemed to charm them all. He was quiet but not, to his coworkers, perversely so. Think about it.”. As of July 22, 2020, the identity of Mostly Harmless is still unknown. The mysterious Utah monolith - dropped by Aliens or just art. The founder of the company, David Mittelman, went on Facebook to talk about the case. He previously hiked from New York along the Appalachian Trail (AT). I’d written about his story and posted it online. “But I needed a roommate and we got along OK.” Godso adds that he doesn’t remember Rodriguez ever showing any interest in spending time in the wild. No mention is made of a terminal illness in the autopsy. The internet rallied to identify the hiker known only as "Mostly Harmless" or "Denim" after he was found dead in a tent at a Florida camp site. His fingerprints weren’t in any database and his image didn’t turn up any results when run through facial recognition software. No, she said. “I could be quiet around him,” she wrote, “and it never felt awkward.”, Godso and Rodriguez were both computer nerds, with Rodriguez taking it to the extreme. Vance John Rodriguez, a k a Vaejor, was born in February 1976 near Baton Rouge. I felt awful. What really happened to Malaysia Airlines MH370 in 2014? People sent me theories about who he could have been or what he might have been doing. He may be the last person to have seen Mostly Harmless alive. While in Damascus, he went out to eat at Damascus Pizza Co Bar & Grill on the 7th with several other hikers. In December 2020, with the consent of his parents, Rodriguez headed off into field... 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