On May 8 2008, Joshua Maddux (18) told his family he was going for a walk, but never returned. He was found 7 years later, dead inside an abandoned property. His body was inside the chimney, folded in half. This shocking discovery turned a simple case of disappearance into something more unsettling.
A walk that took forever
Joshua Maddux grew up in Woodland Park, Colorado. True to its name, the county is nestled amidst the 1 million-acre Pike National Forest. Little Josh graduated from toddler to young man surrounded by wilderness. Naturally, he grew to love it. His sister Ruth said in a statement, “He loved animals and the outdoors: hiking, fishing, and camping with his friends.”
Despite the time spent outdoors, Joshua was a brilliant student. He had a high IQ and was highly creative, too. He’d spend hours developing a comic strip called Stickman and Smiley.
“He spent most of his time writing fictional stories and playing music. He had an interesting and unique sense of style. People in his high school class knew him for being that ‘awesome kid’ who wore a top hat and brought a briefcase to school instead of a backpack. There was this subtle sophistication about him that made him interesting and a standout.” His sister Kate said in an interview.
It wasn’t always hunky dory, though. The Maddux family had their share of hardships. Two years before Joshua’s disappearance, his older brother, Zachary Maddux, committed suicide. Also known as Xaq to his loved ones, he was just as talented as his younger brother, if not more so. He worked as an apprentice chef in a major restaurant, had insane skateboarding skills and was an expert fly fisherman.
Naturally, Joshua looked up to his elder brother. The death must have deeply affected him. The official obituary says, ‘After years of struggle, Zachary succumbed to an unreasoning depression, against which he had no defence. Josh’s father said he was shattered by the death of his brother.
Did this have anything to do with his disappearance? No one knows.
In the early hours of May 8th, 2008, Josh told his family he was going for a walk. Although they were worried, they didn’t think anything drastic had happened. It was a chilly morning (50.5 °F/10.3°C) but pleasant nonetheless. And morning walks were a staple in Joshua’s day. So his family didn’t think much of it. Later that day, his mother came home and, when she didn’t find him, reported him missing.
“Josh was a free spirit, and he always told us that he was going to have a great adventure and he may not talk to us for a while,” said Kate, his older sister, in an interview. “When he said a while, we thought maybe a few years.”
The search for Josh proved to be much longer than Kate expected. Mike, his father, searched homeless shelters and camp grounds in the area. In parallel, authorities issued an alert describing his physical attributes: 6 feet tall, skinny, weighing 150 pounds. But no substantial lead came up.
Days turned into weeks, months turned into years. The family still held on to the hope that Joshua would someday come home and that all would be okay.
One day, the family did find an answer. But with it came more questions.
Down the rabbit hole
A mile away from the Maddux home, there was an abandoned wooden cabin. The Murphy family had bought it 60 years ago. Its current owner, Chuck Murphy, was a Colorado Springs builder. He had converted the cabin into a rental. His brother lived there until 2005. It had since been used for storage.
“The place was damp. It smelled like hell, and there was raccoon poop all over the place.” Except for the occasional break-ins, the property remained unused for almost a decade.
In the late summer of 2015, Chuck gave the order to tear it down to make way for a new property development.
The day was August 7th. For the construction workers, it was like any other day. The job was straightforward. They started demolishing the property with an earth mover. On reaching the chimney, they found it was blocked by a breakfast bar table. When they removed the obstruction, they found something that shook their bones.
A body was wedged into the chimney in a foetal position, with the feet facing down and a hand covering its face. As per a report, the body was covered in a ribbed thermal shirt, while the rest of the clothes were found outside the fireplace. The appearance hadn’t been preserved. Most soft tissues had decayed, leaving behind only skeletal remains. The legs were folded above the head and had become dislodged from the torso.
From dental records, the body was identified as Joshua Maddux. The missing fingertip of the right index finger doubly confirmed his identity. Joshua had lost a fingertip in a childhood accident.
No one understood how or why Joshua ventured into the cabin, or even if he did so of his own accord. Officials and the Maddux family expected the autopsy to narrow things down – but the findings opened up a whole bunch of theories that remain unsolved to this day.
Country coroner Al Born stated that there were no signs of physical injury (broken bones, knife marks, gunshot wounds or bullet holes). He ruled that the death was likely accidental due to unknown causes. He personally believed the teenager climbed down the chimney, got stuck and perished from a lack of water/food.
Over the years, a number of theories have come up. The lack of cause in the coroner’s report spurred netizens and web-sleuths down a rabbit hole of possibilities. And that rabbit hole never closed up. Here are the major theories that caught the internet’s attention:
Accidental death
Coroner Al Born believed Joshua slid into the chimney and got stuck. It’s unclear how many days Josh was alive. His screams were likely muffled by the chimney, unheard by the cars whizzing past on the nearby road. A person can survive for several weeks without food, but the limiting factor is water intake. Josh probably succumbed much sooner to dehydration, passing away in three days.
Since Joshua’s remains were mostly skeletal, the evidence was very limited. As of now, the accidental death theory is the one most supported, with the little evidence available. But as they say, absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence. There may have been another person involved. Perhaps Joshua getting into the chimney wasn’t accidental at all.
Chuck Murphy’s testimony blew a significant hole into this theory. Twenty years before the discovery, he had installed a wire mesh at the top of the chimney to stop animals and debris from getting in. “There’s no way that guy crawled inside that chimney with that steel webbing,” Chuck insisted in an interview. “He didn’t come down the chimney.”
The coroner later admitted, “We don’t know why he took his clothes off, took his shoes and socks off, and why he went outside, climbed on the roof and went down the chimney. It was not linear thinking.”
Drug-induced behaviour
Irrational thought can always be explained by drugs. The coroner did attempt to test for substance use, but found it difficult to get any insightful readings. Joshua’s body was too decomposed for any substantial signs of drug abuse.
The toxicology reports had come out negative.
But there are some limitations to these reports:
- Certain substances may degrade.
- Certain tests may not be possible depending on what tissues remain,
- The person could have been intoxicated earlier and metabolised it.
A negative report doesn’t completely rule out drug use. But the Maddux family firmly maintained that their boy did not use illegal drugs. The one factor still undiscussed is alcohol. The legal age for drinking in Colorado is 21. Minors in possession are often fined $100-250 for the first conviction.
Further convictions can lead to a $500 fine, mandatory treatment and 36 hours of community service. That being said, it is common for teenagers to use false IDs and or procure alcohol from older friends. For a teenager with such good academic standing and lovable personality to take such risks is unlikely, but hasn’t been ruled out.
The body usually fully processes alcohol within 10-12 hours. In forensic labs, alcohol in the hair can be detected for up to 90 days. Joshua’s body was in the chimney for 7 whole years. It’s quite probable that the alcohol had long been metabolised naturally.
There’s one more theory doing the rounds. It involves another key aspect of being an 18-year-old.
Teen curiosity
It is possible that the entry into the chimney was intentional. Finding an abandoned cabin in the woods might have sparked Joshua’s curiosity, prompting him to take a closer look.
“Josh was a free spirit, and he always told us he was going to have a great adventure”, Kate, his sister, told a news outlet. This speaks volumes about the teenager’s adventurous spirit. It isn’t a huge leap to imagine that Joshua decided to take a peek into the mysterious cabin.
There are other sub-theories under this umbrella. Joshua could have been trying to take shelter from the weather. According to historical weather records for May 8th 2008, it was a cold day. The max temperature at noon was 63°F, steadily declining to 37°F(near freezing) at night.
A notable finding is that around 3:30 pm that day, 0.01 inches of precipitation fell. That could mean a light, short-lived shower (2-5 minutes) or a light drizzle for a couple of hours. Gusts of wind up to 25mph were recorded as well. That could have made the outdoors uncomfortably cold and wet. Joshua could have escaped this weather in the cabin.
But why did he try to climb down through the chimney? Breaking and entering, although illegal, was a much more practical solution. His clothes, kept folded outside the fireplace, indicated that he had already entered the cabin. Why then would he climb up the chimney? Even if he did, on his own accord, he couldn’t have gotten the breakfast bar table to block the fireplace. Unless there was another person involved. The whole scenario reeks of possible malicious intent.
Last seen with Andy
A Reddit post in 2015 by someone in Joshua’s circles gave more fuel to the homicide angle. In the post, the anonymous user by the handle Gentamangina elaborated, “I went to high school with this skinny dorky hippy named Andy who played guitar in a band. I was never good friends with him or anything, but a year or so after I graduated, one of my good friends, Josh, started hanging out with him and then went missing. Last I heard, Andy was telling another friend, “Yeah, me and Josh have been spending a lot of time together, we’re planning a trip to New Mexico!”
The user didn’t find it concerning until reports surfaced about Andy’s activities in New Mexico.
In 2009, 21-year-old Andrew Richard Newman (Andy) was arrested in connection with a stabbing death on May 2nd. He also claimed he murdered a woman and stuffed her body in a barrel. The modus operandi does have striking similarities with how Joshua’s body was found. According to rumours circulating in town, Andy was even bragging about putting Josh in a hole.
As per a popular podcast-cum-blog, several people in Joshua’s circle reported this connection to the authorities when he was still missing. Far from investigating this, the police never returned their calls. Once, the police had even accidentally cancelled the missing bulletin. It is an accepted practice in the American justice system: when a person is serving time in prison, charges in a separate state aren’t usually pursued.
Andrew was arrested and released many times from 2009 to 2019. One judge had even ruled him to be mentally unsound and to be treated in a mental hospital. During this time, he was reported to be frequently out and spotted back in Woodland Park. It is unclear whether time in the mental hospital helped Andrew’s state of mind.
Semblance of closure
The case was closed in October 2015. The cabin where Joshua was found was completely demolished soon after. The young man’s body was laid to rest in Woodland Park, the town where he spent his childhood. His belongings that could have served as evidence were either cremated or retained by the state. This diminishes the possibility of finding any new evidence.
Still searching for answers, the Maddux Family decided to hold a service for their boy. The ceremony would at least bring them some closure. On October 17th, the memorial service was held in Woodland Park Community Church. It was titled a ‘Celebration of Life’ with the family choosing to focus on the happier side of the teenager’s life.
His official obituary mentions, “He was a gifted, intelligent young man and placed high in scholastic testing. A great sense of humour and wit, writer, and artist, he had many close friends. He invented a comic strip, which he called Stickman and Smiley and spent many hours developing the strips and sharing them. Also nicknamed Dwa by his sisters, Josh had a thoughtful, kind, and loving personality. “
Joshua Maddux lives in memory
While the Maddux family laid the matter to rest, netizens never gave up. Theories still circulate, blogs and podcasts still talk about Joshua, and many documentary episodes revisit the mysterious circumstances of his death. There is a tiny sliver of hope that, if groundbreaking evidence is found, the case may reopen. Joshua might yet get the justice he deserves.
