The Boy In The Chimney

2021-05-13 14:55:37 Written by Rober Lee

Joshua Maddux was a beautiful 18-year-old who grew in the outdoors. He was a good learner with a fascination for writing and music.

He resided with his dad and two sisters in Woodland Park, Colorado; although he had suffered the tough divorce of his parents and the heart-shattering suicide of his brother in 2006, Joshua’s maddening strength enabled him to remain as free-spirited and confident as ever. On March 8, 2008, Joshua said his father that he was going to go for one of his routine hikes. However, this time he never came back home. 

His family relentlessly searched for the teenager, calling friends and families and scoping out homeless refugees and campgrounds. But alas, nobody captured sight of the boy, and his father officially reported his disappearance a few days later. Possibly, he believed, Joshua decided to begin his life anew someplace else and follow his dreams as a writer or music artist. Or probably he was still disturbed by the death of his brother which urged his self-imposed disappearance. Or perhaps something much, much more threatening had happened to Joshua. There was no way of understanding. And as years and years slipped by without a single evidence of Joshua, the case went cold and his special ones started losing faith that they would ever see him again or, at most, discover what happened to him. 

In August 2015, a man by the name of Chuck Murphy started the procedure of destroying a cabin he had owned for a decade, just two blocks from the Maddux residence, that he hardly visited. There, a shocking finding was made during the tearing down of the chimney:

a human corpse curled in a fetal degree, with its legs above its skull, wearing zero but a thermal shirt. The body was recognized as Joshua Maddux. Chuck Murphy had visited the cabin now and then and saw a bizarre smell but thought that it was due to dead rats. The postmortem discovered no evidence of drugs in his system, nor did he endure any trauma. His death was called accidental. It was assumed that Josh probably attempted to crawl through the chimney to get inside the room, got stuck, and died there. But Chuck Murphy vehemently thought differently with this decision. First, he claimed, he had installed steel rebar on the chimney to avoid problems with animals and debris–it would have been unthinkable for him to enter the chimney from the outside. Secondly, a large breakfast bar that had been pulled from the wall was used to shut off the fireplace. And lastly, the rest of Joshua’s clothes was neatly folded beside the fireplace. 

There have been very few suspects in the trial, although authority has received plenty of advice about one special individual, a young man by the name of Andrew Richard Newman, a new friend of Joshua’s. After finishing high school, he became a traveler and had several clashes with the law including grand theft and attacking a police officer. He was also wanted in Mexico for injuring a man to death and had admitted to murdering a woman and packing her in a barrel (although the authority had arrested someone else for that case). Tipsters noted that Andrew had bragged about having ‘’put Josh in a hole’’, and despite repeated persistence to observe him, authority have rejected these claims.