Blood Trails

In January 2019, retired archeologist Dr. Jon Young was found dead in the smoldering ruins of the adobe home he'd built by hand outside Taos, New Mexico. The fire marshal found evidence of accelerants in five locations. The autopsy flagged a suspicious hole in his skull. A neighbor saw unfamiliar men outside the house minutes before the blaze. And yet, no one has ever been charged — because,...

In October of 2024, Dustin Kjersem drove into the mountains south of Bozeman, Montana, to prepare for a romantic weekend of camping. He was never seen alive again. When his girlfriend finally discovered his body, she thought he'd been attacked by a bear. But the truth, it turned out, was far more disturbing. To find Dustin's killer, investigators followed a trail that led through a bloody campsite...

When Bill Roland went missing from Lake Sam Rayburn in 1997, nothing about the case made sense. Weeks later, his boat turned up hidden in a cove, shot multiple times with a shotgun in an apparent attempt to sink it. His truck was found burned. His trailer was somewhere else entirely. And Bill was nowhere to be found. Investigators were left to piece together a puzzle with missing parts: a fisherma...

Tommy Ballard refused to let his daughter’s disappearance fade away. After Crystal Rogers vanished in 2015, Ballard became the face of the search. He organized volunteers, worked with investigators, and publicly called out the man he believed was responsible. A year later, while hunting with his grandson, Ballard was shot and killed. The attack was precise. Intentional. And, to many, not a c...

On his birthday in 1971, Wisconsin game warden Neil LaFave went out to post “No Hunting” signs. He never came home. The next morning, searchers found his body buried in a shallow grave. The brutality stunned investigators: multiple gunshots, and a horrifying attempt to conceal the crime. Suspicion quickly centered on a young poacher with a history of conflict with LaFave. But proving i...

Timothy Blyth was scouting for a hunt in Florida’s St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge when a chance encounter turned deadly. What started as an argument over access and safety escalated into gunfire. Minutes later, Blyth was found dead in the road. The man he’d been arguing with was gone, along with the weapon he'd used. Witnesses described an aggressive confrontation. Evidence tied th...

Bob Smith stepped into the Maine woods on a November afternoon in 1997 and never came back. His wife heard a single gunshot. Then... nothing. What followed was the largest ground search in the history of the Maine Warden Service. Investigators found clues—a set of boot prints, a strange arrow in the dirt, even a dead moose nearby—but none of them led to Bob. As the search dragged on, r...

Mike Crites wanted to live alone in the Montana mountains. He built a cabin, managed his land for wildlife, and spent his days hunting elk and mule deer. But isolation didn’t mean peace. After years of escalating disputes with neighbors over access roads and property lines, Mike vanished in September 2011. What investigators eventually found was far worse than a missing person case—it...

Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors--and in Season 2, we're going even deeper. From the grisly killing of a mountain man in Montana to the cold-blooded murder of a deer hunter in Florida to the strange disappearance of an angler in Texas, these stories delve into the recesses of the wilderness--and the evil of the human heart. Follow the show now to get notified when Episode...

Last year, Wisconsin detectives requested that the four unidentified victims of Chicagoland serial killer John Wayne Gacy be compared to a missing 18-year-old hunter named Bob Christian. We covered Bob's story in Episode 1 of Season 1. Those DNA results have finally arrived, and we have all the details in this Case Update. Want more Blood Trails? Check out the  Case File . Follow Blood Trails...

On November 16, 2018, 68-year-old Chong Mua Yang—a Hmong immigrant, war veteran, and lifelong hunter—was found face-down in the snow, shot in the back of the head. The backpack, knife, and shotgun he'd taken on his deer hunt were missing. His footprints were the only ones leading in… but not the only ones leading out. The investigation would take six years, involve Google geofen...

In September 2012, 35-year-old Jeffrey Gebhardt vanished in the Georgia woods during an early-season deer hunt. A few hours later, search teams discovered his body on the edge of Clarks Hill Lake—hands folded neatly on his chest, gear scattered nearby, and eighteen stab wounds across his torso.  What investigators didn’t find was even more disturbing. No defensive wounds. No footp...

This story begins in the wild, unforgiving mountains of Montana. In September of 2014, 38-year-old Aaron Hedges set out with friends for a weeklong elk hunt in the Crazy Mountains. But when he left camp to retrieve supplies from a nearby cache, those friends never saw him again. But instead of searching for him, they went home--right as a snowstorm hit. Search and rescue teams were unable to locat...

On a snowy November morning in 1975, 25-year-old hunter Ludger Belanger stepped into the woods with his .30-30 and the hope of backstraps for dinner. But what started as a simple deer hunt quickly became one of Maine’s oldest—and most haunting—unsolved cases. At first, game wardens thought Ludger had lost his way. But the tracks in the snow told another story: a shot deer, a miss...

Deer hunting is a way of life in central Minnesota, but on November 7th, 2016, the shot that echoed through the forest didn’t mark the end of a deer hunt—it marked the beginning of a mystery that still haunts a family and their community. Terry Brisk, a devoted father of four and lifelong outdoorsman, set out to check his stands—and never returned. His teenage son found him lying...

Paul Hutchinson's suicide was his final act of cowardice. He saved himself the pain of facing his community, not to mention Danni’s family. Meanwhile, his actions introduced a whole new level of pain and confusion to those who knew him and cared about him. Those people have been left to grapple with questions without the opportunity to ever have them answered. In this episode, we talk to Pau...

Paul Hutchinson seemed like a regular Montanan—an ex-Marine, a fisheries biologist, a father, and a diehard turkey hunter. But behind that facade lurked a predator, hiding in plain sight. Nearly three decades after the brutal rape and murder of 15-year-old Danni Houchins, investigators uncovered the chilling truth: Hutchinson was her killer. His sudden suicide closed the case but opened a da...

It’s a mystery that’s haunted Wisconsin’s hunting community for nearly 50 years. On September 16, 1977, 18-year-old Bob Christian left home to spend the night at a friend’s house before the opening day of bow season. That night, his future looked bright. He’d just been accepted to the University of Wisconsin as a computer science major, and his friendly, easygoing per...

Blood Trails is a new investigative podcast from MeatEater, hosted by writer and journalist Jordan Sillars. Each episode digs into true crime stories from the world of hunting and fishing—cases where the woods and the water became the backdrop for violence and mystery. From missing hunters deep in public land to poachers turned killers and fishing trips gone fatally wrong, Blood Trails uncov...