Bobby Jamison, 44, his wife Sherilynn, 40, and their daughter Madyson, 6, had moved from the Oklahoma City area to Eufaula, a lake town in eastern Oklahoma. Both parents were disabled and did not work. In the autumn of 2009 they were thinking of buying a 40-acre plot of wooded land near Red Oak, by the Sans Bois Mountains in Latimer County, about 30 miles away.
What happened
Home security cameras recorded the family preparing to leave on the day they set off. The footage shows the couple carrying things out to their pickup over and over in a manner some viewers called trancelike, and Sherilynn putting a brown briefcase into the vehicle. A landowner in the Red Oak area was the last person known to have seen them, on October 8, 2009.
On October 17 hunters came across the Jamisons’ pickup parked at a remote well site near the land the family had been viewing. Inside were their wallets, a purse, ID cards, cell phones, a GPS unit and about $32,000 in cash, along with Madyson’s dog, alive but starving. Officials found no signs of foul play at the truck and said it looked as if the family had meant to come back. The briefcase and a handgun belonging to Sherilynn were never found.
The investigation
More than 300 volunteers and dozens of officers searched the steep, wooded country around the truck. Heavy rain had fallen in the days after the family vanished, though the sheriff at the time, Israel Beauchamp, did not think the local creek was strong enough to have swept away two adults. Leads dried up and the search was called off.
The family’s background gave investigators several things to look at. Bobby had been in a bitter legal dispute with his father, whom he accused of threats and of striking him with a vehicle in 2008. Police said they did not believe the father was involved. The family’s pastor said the couple told him they had seen spirits in their home, and the amount of cash in the truck prompted speculation about drugs. None of this pointed to a specific explanation.
On November 16, 2013 deer hunters found human bones in rugged terrain near Kinta, about 2.7 miles northwest of where the truck had been. The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, the county sheriff and the state medical examiner examined the area, and the medical examiner received the skeletal remains of two adults and a child. On July 3, 2014 the office confirmed they were Bobby, Sherilynn and Madyson Jamison. It said the cause and manner of their deaths were unknown. More than four years outdoors had left too little to determine either.
The explanations
Before the remains were found, theories ranged from a staged disappearance or witness protection to murder or a group suicide. The discovery ruled out the first two. What is left falls into two groups. The family may have walked away from the truck, perhaps confused, unwell or distressed, and died of exposure in difficult country, which would fit the untouched cash and the dog left behind. Or someone may have killed them and moved or hidden them, which would explain the missing briefcase and gun but has no direct evidence behind it.
Claims about cults or the occult rest on the couple’s reported remarks and the strange home video, not on anything found at the scene. Bobby’s uncle, Jack Jamison, said the 2013 discovery brought some closure, but the family has never had an explanation.
Where it stands
The family is confirmed dead, but how and why they died remains unknown and their deaths are listed as under investigation. The disappearance and the discovery of their remains are documented. Every explanation of what happened in between is unproven.