Some disappearances make a kind of grim sense once you know the details — a lonely road at night, a person already struggling, warning signs in hindsight. This isn't one of those. Christopher Thompkins vanished in the middle of the afternoon, surrounded by three other men, in a stretch of woods you could practically still hear traffic from. And he's never been seen again.
A Normal Friday, Until It Wasn't
On the morning of January 25, 2002, 20-year-old Christopher Thompkins kissed his mother, Martha McKenzie, goodbye around 8:10 and headed off to work. By most accounts he was doing well — recently became a Christian, active at his church, well-liked by people who knew him. His grandmother had helped him buy a new car just two weeks earlier. Nothing about that morning suggested anything was wrong.
Christopher worked for a small surveying company in Harris County, Georgia, near Ellerslie. His mother, as it happened, worked for the same family as their babysitter — a detail that would matter later, and not in a good way.
That day, he was out with a four-man crew surveying a lightly wooded stretch of land off County Line Road, near Georgia Highway 85. The men walked in a line, spaced roughly 50 feet apart from one another — close enough to call out, far enough that nobody was watching anybody constantly.
Around 1:30 in the afternoon, not long after they'd come back from lunch, one of his co-workers turned away for a moment to handle something. When he looked back toward Christopher's position, he was simply gone.
No Sound, No Struggle, Just Gone
At first, the co-worker figured Christopher had wandered off to use the woods as a bathroom. He called out a few times. No answer. Eventually he got the rest of the crew together, and they walked over to where Christopher had been working.
What they found was strange enough to set off alarm bells immediately: his tools were sitting right there, untouched, like he'd just stepped away mid-task. One of his work boots was hanging off a nearby barbed wire fence. A small piece of fabric, torn from his pants, was caught on the same fence. No footprints leading anywhere useful. No sign of a struggle. No Christopher.
They called it in.
A Frustrating, Disjointed Response
Here's where things start to feel less like an investigation and more like a series of missed opportunities. One of the crew members called his own wife around 1:00 p.m. to say Christopher had gone missing. Martha — his mother, remember, who worked for the very same family — wasn't told until almost 5:00 that evening. "I was shocked that it had happened that morning, and they hadn't said anything to me," she'd later say. By her own estimate, the disappearance had happened around lunchtime, hours before anyone thought to call her.
And because Christopher was a legal adult, police wouldn't open a formal search until 24 hours had passed. So Christopher's family didn't wait. That evening and into the next morning, they gathered everyone they could — family, friends, anyone willing to walk the woods — and searched the area themselves. They didn't find Christopher. They did find loose change scattered near the barbed wire fence where his boot had been hanging.
When investigators finally did get involved, Harris County Sheriff Mike Jolley says they took it seriously — cadaver dogs, searches of nearby ponds, the works. But the department had limited resources, and the case was eventually handed up to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Five months later, in July, a local property owner found Christopher's other boot. Not nearby, either — it turned up miles away, off I-85, far from where the crew had been working that day.
Two Theories, Neither One Clean
For years, the leading theory from law enforcement was that Christopher simply walked away. Sheriff Jolley said this lined up with what the co-worker reported — that Christopher had headed toward the interstate on foot, possibly gotten into a car, and left the area on his own.
But the more time passed without a single sighting, phone call, or sign of life, the less that theory held together for Jolley. "My biggest fear," he said later, "is that when he came up missing in 2002, he went to a large city. Right after he came up missing, he might have overdosed or something else might have happened to him, and because he had no identification on him, that city went ahead and disposed of him."
Christopher's mother has never accepted the walked-away theory, not for a second. His aunt, Roselyn Mathis, has been just as blunt about it: "I don't believe that Chris walked away. I don't believe he disappeared with one shoe. Who's going to walk around with one boot on in the cold weather on a rural road? I just don't believe that happened. They know what happened to Chris; they're just not telling."
There's also a detail that complicates the picture further — Sheriff Jolley has said Christopher's mother acknowledged he'd used drugs in the week before he disappeared, and that his boss reported he'd been acting strangely in the days leading up to it. None of that explains how a person vanishes without a sound from the middle of an open survey line, but it's part of the full record, and a responsible accounting of the case has to include it.
None of Christopher's co-workers were ever officially named a suspect. For what it's worth, at least two of them reportedly had criminal histories, and one ended up going to prison not long after for an unrelated violent crime. Whether any of that connects to what happened to Christopher has never been established one way or the other.
Still Open, Still Unanswered
For most of two decades, this stayed a quiet, mostly local story — the kind of case that doesn't get much traction without a body, a confession, or a viral moment. That started to shift in 2023, when the Georgia Bureau of Investigation formed a dedicated cold case unit and gave Christopher's file a fresh look. His family has said that alone gives them some hope, even if it's taken far longer than they think it should have. "It's about time," his aunt said, "because it took a long time — it doesn't seem like they was really actually trying to find out what happened to Chris."
More than two decades on, that's still where things stand. No remains. No confirmed sighting. No resolution — just two boots, a torn scrap of fabric, and a family that's never stopped asking questions.
If you have any information about what happened to Christopher Thompkins, you're encouraged to contact the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Sources
Missing Persons: Christopher Thompkins — Georgia Bureau of Investigation https://gbi.georgia.gov/cases/missing-persons/christopher-thompkins
Christopher Carlton Thompkins — The Charley Project https://charleyproject.org/case/christopher-carlton-thompkins
20 Years Later: Family, officials continue to search for answers on disappearance of Harris Co. man — WTVM https://www.wtvm.com/2023/07/19/20-years-later-family-officials-continue-search-answers-disappearance-harris-co-man/
Christopher Thompkins: Gone Without a Sound Into the Forest — Southern Strange https://southernstrange.com/2024/09/30/christopher-thompkins-gone-without-a-sound/
He Vanished In The Middle Of Surveying A Wooded Property, And His Boots Were Some Of The Only Clues Left Behind — Chip Chick https://www.chipchick.com/2025/01/he-vanished-in-the-middle-of-surveying-a-wooded-property-and-his-boots-were-some-of-the-only-clues-left-behind