Teens Vanished on a Hiking Trip—Three Years Later, a Chilling Discovery Beneath a Fallen Tree

In June 2002, three teenagers from Randolph County, West Virginia—Connor Bailey, Maya Reeves, and Alicia Rodriguez—set out on a school camping trip in the Monongahela National Forest. It was supposed to be a routine three-day adventure, a chance to learn basic survival skills and explore the wilderness with their classmates and two instructors. No one imagined this trip would spark a mystery that would haunt their families and the entire community for seven agonizing years.

Connor, the oldest at 18, was a star athlete with dreams of a college scholarship. Maya, 17, was a budding photographer, always with her father’s old camera in hand. Alicia, 16, was quiet and studious, helping her parents run a small family restaurant. The three were inseparable since childhood, and their disappearance would freeze their families in time.

The first day of the trip went smoothly. The students pitched tents, built a campfire, and listened to stories from their vocational teacher, Elliot Warren—a reserved man, liked but not loved, who lived alone on the outskirts of town. On the second day, the group split for orienteering practice. Connor, Maya, and Alicia set off with four others, a map, compass, and a radio. By lunchtime, everyone except their group had returned.

At first, no one panicked. Maybe they’d lost their way or lingered at a checkpoint. But when hours passed and attempts to contact them by radio failed, worry set in. By nightfall, Warren returned alone from a search, exhausted and dirty, claiming he’d found only Connor’s backpack and no sign of the teens. The next morning, a rescue team was summoned. For a week, searchers combed the forest with dogs and helicopters, but found only scattered items—a chocolate wrapper, a water bottle, a piece of rope. The teens had vanished.

The official explanation was heartbreakingly simple: the teens got lost, succumbed to the elements, and their bodies were never found. The case was closed. Life in Randolph County slowly returned to normal, but for the families of the missing, time stopped. Maya’s mother stopped taking photos; Connor’s father quit coaching; Alicia’s parents closed their restaurant. Every June, Connor’s father walked the forest trails, searching for answers.

Elliot Warren returned to teaching, a changed but unremarkable man. In the years that followed, whispers of discomfort surfaced—students feeling uneasy around him, anonymous complaints about his attention to girls. Investigations found nothing concrete, and Warren continued quietly, blending into the background of small-town life.

Then, in the fall of 2009, a violent storm swept through the forest, toppling ancient trees and exposing secrets long buried. Two weeks after the storm, a forester named David Portman, marking fallen trees, noticed something odd beneath the roots of a massive oak: a torn black plastic bag. He called the police, and soon, three bags were unearthed, each sewn shut with industrial thread.

Inside the bags, forensic experts found the skeletal remains of three young people, alongside fragments of personal items—a student ID, a pendant, a bracelet. DNA confirmed what the families had feared for years: Connor, Maya, and Alicia had finally been found.

The investigation was reopened as a homicide. The thread used to sew the bags matched supplies purchased for Warren’s labor classroom. Microscopic fibers found on the bodies matched work clothes from the same classroom. Most damning, partial fingerprints on the thread matched Warren’s own, taken during a previous school investigation.

But the most critical clue came from Maya’s friend, who revealed a secret kept for seven years: before the trip, Maya confided that Warren was acting strangely, touching her hand and asking her to stay after class. Maya, Connor, and Alicia had planned to report him after the trip. Warren, fearing exposure and disgrace, had a motive—and the opportunity.

Piecing together the evidence, investigators concluded that Warren confronted the teens in the forest, tried to silence them, and when they refused, killed them with brutal force. He then used his skills and supplies to hide the bodies, sewing them into bags and burying them under the roots of a giant oak, staging the scene to look like an accident.

For seven years, Warren lived with the secret, believing it buried forever. But nature had other plans. The storm exposed his crime, and forensic science did the rest.

In December 2009, Warren was arrested and charged with triple murder, kidnapping, and abuse of authority. The trial in June 2010 was packed with grieving families and a stunned community. The evidence was overwhelming: the thread, the bags, the fingerprints, the blood stains, the notebook with cryptic entries (“Problem solved. No one else will find out.”). The jury found Warren guilty on all counts. He was sentenced to three life sentences without parole.

Justice, at last, but not solace. The parents finally had answers, but their children would never come home. The case forced a reckoning in Randolph County—school officials resigned, safety procedures were overhauled, and the community was left grappling with the horror that the trusted teacher was a predator hiding in plain sight.

Today, the memory of Connor, Maya, and Alicia endures—not as a cautionary tale about the wilderness, but as a reminder that sometimes, the greatest dangers wear familiar faces. Their families visit their graves, and the town carries the scars. But their story, unearthed beneath a fallen tree, will never be forgotten.

If this story moved you, share it. Let their voices echo, so that trust is earned, not assumed—and no family ever waits seven years for the truth again.