Chapter 1: Secrets in the Hills

At the end of the 1990s, something happened here that made folks question everything they thought they knew about right and wrong.

It was the kind of story that still made people hush up in diners and hardware stores years later—something that wormed its way into daily life and never let go.

In a quiet town tucked deep in the hills, a whole family was wiped out in one night.

The town itself, hidden somewhere in the folds of Appalachia, wore its remoteness like a badge. People left their doors unlocked, figuring the woods would keep out trouble better than any lock could.

The parents, both in their fifties, and their nearly thirty-year-old son all died tragically at home.

They’d been the backbone of their farm: old Harold and Martha Mitchell—hardworking, churchgoing folks—and Jason, their eldest, who never once left town and spent his days working the fields.

After we started digging, all signs pointed to the family’s would-be daughter-in-law.

Folks started saying her name like it might bring on bad luck—nobody wanted to believe it, but nobody could ignore it either.

But that didn’t mean we could just close the book on it.

Everyone knew this story had roots that ran deep. You could see it in the way people stayed on their porches after dark, eyes drifting to the treeline, waiting for something else to happen.

If anything, what happened to the Mitchells cracked open something darker and meaner in these hills—where family secrets festered and kin ties could choke you.

And in those hills, some secrets won’t stay buried.

Not just because the would-be daughter-in-law had disappeared, but—more than that…

She was a college student. And she’d been forced.

In a place where college students were as rare as four-leaf clovers, the idea that one of them might be mixed up in something this bad hit the town like a punch to the gut.