The mysterious disappearance of Trenny Lynn Gibson from Clingmans Dome in the Smokies
Teresa "Trenny" Lynn Gibson, Disappeared October 8, 1976, Forney Ridge Trail, Clingmans dome, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee
Revised January 2024
On Friday, October 8th, 1976, 16-year-old Teresa, known as Trenny, Lynn Gibson, went with 35-40 of her classmates from Bearden High School in Knoxville, Tennessee, on a field trip to Clingmans Dome in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
The students were hiking around 1.8 miles to Andrews Bald from Clingmans Dome and then back on the Forney Ridge Trail.
That day in the Smokies, Trenny vanished, never to be seen again.
Who was Trenny Gibson?
Trenny lived with her mother, Hope, and father, Robert Sr., older brother Robert Jr. and sister Tina, at 1427 Whitower Drive in Knoxville, Tennessee. She worked at a cafeteria in the local mall, carefully saving her earnings. She had green eyes with long brown hair and was 5’3 and 115 pounds.
Trenny was part of a horticulture class at Bearden High School in Knoxville, Tennessee, taught by Mr. Wayne Dunlap. She was very interested in plants, trees, and other living things, hoping to attend the University of Tennessee and study landscape architecture later.
The Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Great Smoky Mountains National Park is 522,419 acres in size and straddles the ridgeline of the Great Smoky Mountains, part of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The border between Tennessee and North Carolina runs northeast to southwest through the center of the park.
It was chartered by the United States Congress in 1934 and officially dedicated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940.
The park contains some of the highest mountains in the east, including Clingmans Dome, Mount Guyot, and Mount Le Conte. The Appalachian Trail passes through it on its route from Georgia to Maine. With 12.5 million visitors in 2019, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most visited national park in the United States.
The trip to Clingmans Dome
When Trenny arrived at the school that morning, driven by her mother, Hope, she asked a fellow student passing by if the field trip was still on, assuming the poor weather had called it off. When it was confirmed that they were going on the field trip, she took her bagged lunch but left her purse and books in the car.
She wore a blue blouse, a blue and white striped sweater, a borrowed brown plaid heavy jacket, blue jeans, blue Adidas shoes and an expensive diamond and star sapphire ring.
The students got on the bus and were told by their teacher, Mr Dunlap, only once seated, that they were all headed to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Clingmans Dome. They were pleased with this unexpected news, and Trenny shared a seat in the back of the bus with a friend, Robert Simpson. He was a senior and a close friend of Trenny’s brother Bob, who had graduated the previous May and was in the Navy. Bob had just come home on leave, and he had asked Robert to keep an eye on Trenny that day as she hadn’t been away from her family for an entire day before.
The bus arrived at the Park around noon and parked in the Clingman’s Dome lot. October 8, 1976, was a chilly, rainy day at Clingmans Dome, the highest point in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Mr. Dunlap told them they were to hike to Andrew’s Bald and return to the bus meeting at 3.30 pm, observing the plants, trees, and flowers along the way. They were also told not to go further than Andrew’s Bald, take any side trails, and warned not to interfere with the plant life. The students had to raise their hands to confirm they understood everything, and then they set off.
The bus driver stayed in the parking lot at Clingmans while the students walked towards Andrew’s Bald.
The Bearden High School students separated into small groups when they arrived at the trail, depending on how fast they could walk. Even though there were many students, only one teacher was supervising, in addition to the bus driver, who had stayed in the parking lot.
Having a good time, they socialized and ate their lunches. Robert had loaned Trenny his brown and orange plaid wool jacket, as she was only dressed in jeans, a blouse, and a sweater. He and Trenny hiked together on the way to Andrew’s Bald.
The disappearance of Trenny Gibson
When Trenny and Robert reached Andrew’s Bald, they sat down and had lunch. Then Trenny said she wanted to start the hike back to the bus, but Robert wanted to stay at the Bald a little longer. So Trenny set off on her own, still wearing Robert’s jacket, walking down a moderately steep trail with sharp drop-offs and dense undergrowth on both sides.
Trenny briskly walked along the Forney Creek trail and quickly caught up with other groups of students, staying with them for a while, then overtaking them. The last group that saw her had sat down to rest and invited Trenny to sit with them, but she had declined their offer and kept going along the trail.
Then they saw Trenny, farther down the trail, stop and crouch down. It appeared she was looking at something to the right of the trail, and then she exited it to the right downhill.
A short time later, one of the girls in the group who had just seen Trenny looked at the spot where Trenny had left the trail and discovered no place to go. Off-trail was thick shrubbery, ferns, rocks, and a small creek, with no side trail visible. She called Trenny’s name but got no response. A fellow male student came down the trail, and the girl asked him if he had seen Trenny, but he hadn’t. They carried on, assuming she would be at the bus waiting for them.
At 3.30 pm, the students returned to the bus in the Clingman’s Dome parking lot. A student asked Robert Simpson if he had seen Trenny because she wasn’t back at the bus. Robert said he had hiked to the bald with Trenny, but she had left to return to the bus, so he decided to spend some time tracking a bear. Nobody had hiked back down the Forney Creek trail with Robert, so no one could corroborate his story.
When no one could find Trenny, Wayne Dunlap and another student hiked the trail she was last seen, while the other students waited on the bus.
When they returned and determined that Trenny was indeed missing, he contacted the National Park Service and filed a report at 4.30 pm. Soon after, the bus left without Trenny and Mr. Dunlap and headed back to Knoxville. Dunlap stayed behind to assist with the search.
The school bus carrying the students arrived later than initially scheduled, and when it did, school officials had to tell the Gibsons that their daughter was missing.
Robert Gibson had just gotten in from a business trip to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but he and his wife, Hope, acted quickly, heading to the Smoky Mountains to await news of their daughter.
By 6.30 pm, 19 volunteers had gathered to look for the missing student.
The trail was popular with walkers, and her sudden disappearance was strange given that she had been with other people and there had been groups of students both in front of them and behind, as well as other hikers.
The search
What was to follow was a massive search of the Park by both ground and air. Heavy rains, wind, and fog that night made conditions difficult for searching. Hoarfrost made the ground slippery, and the fall leaves made spotting difficult.
One searcher slipped and fell, breaking several ribs. Helicopters and ground searchers were brought in. Searchers used about a half-dozen dog teams with Bloodhounds and German Shepherds to look for Trenny. Three tracking dogs picked up her scent at the intersection with the Appalachian Trail. They followed it by Clingmans Dome Tower, and some of the dogs last detected her scent along the roadside about a mile and a half from Newfound Gap, but then the dogs stopped, and the scent had disappeared.
By October 12th, four days after Trenny’s disappearance, the official search was scaled back to about 20 people. The search lasted until November 1, 1976. Another search from April 18th to May 5th, 1977, found no trace of any remains in the park.
The chief ranger told reporters he was almost sure she was not in the park. Searchers returned to the Clingmans Dome area in 1981, but again, they found nothing.
Robert Gibson said of the family dog, Mitzi, Trenny’s then seven-year-old poodle, “She gets up on the back of the couch upstairs and looks out the window for Trenny when she’s gone from home. She’s been looking for her for three days”.
What happened to Trenny?
Trenny’s purse, bank book, make-up, clothing, and cash at home were all left behind. She had over $1000 in her bank account, which was untouched.
Since the dogs led to a local road, this gave credence to the theory that she had been abducted. But would someone involved with foul play wait in the bushes on a steep slope away from the trail with so many hikers around? Some accounts tell of cigarettes and a beer can found near the road whether the sniffer dog had come to a halt.
Forney Ridge Trail.
The fellow Student, Robert Simpson, who walked with Trenny the day she vanished, was said to be a suspect at one point but never charged. Trenny had a large, thick Stanley comb that she always carried. Both Trenny and her sister had one, and it was designed especially for long hair. Trenny was never without her comb. After she disappeared, the comb was found on the dash of Robert Simpson’s car, and he had been using it to comb his hair. Robert Gibson had seen it, and when questioned, Simpson said that Trenny had given the comb to him to keep for her.
When she disappeared, Trenny had a star sapphire pendant and a ring, which were Christmas and birthday presents. They were found in the possession of a girl at Bearden High School in the sophomore class. She could not satisfactorily explain how she came to have them.
Parents Robert and Hope Gibson alerted authorities about a past incident in October 1975 in which a young man had tried to break into their home. Kelvin Bowman, also attending Bearden High, had broken into the Gibson residence one night. He was shot in the foot by Hope and was charged and sentenced to serve time in a corrections facility for juveniles. Although sentenced to two years, he only served around six months and was back at Bearden High by the time Trenny disappeared. When he was convicted, he had made threats in the courtroom to harm Trenny when he was released. From what Principal Frank Hall could determine, Kelvin Bowman was attending classes at Bearden the day Trenny disappeared.
Robert Simpson had come by the Gibson residence when Trenny’s parents were in the Park waiting for news on their daughter. He made two strange comments to Tina, Trenny’s younger sister. He said, “If Kelvin Bowman has Trenny, he will kill her. If he does not have her, I think she must have run off with some horny hitchhiker.”
One theory goes that Trenny was taken to the Clingman's Dome observation tower and held against her will or voluntarily whilst the area was being searched. The tower itself was not investigated at the time. Subsequently, when searchers left, she was taken to the roadside and left by car.
Clingmans Dome Observation tower
A classmate and friend, Kim Pouncey, said in an interview in late November 2017 (Appalachian unsolved) that she wondered if Trenny just took off from the park and that maybe she just wanted to leave, to get out, "My feeling is somebody was waiting for her (in the park). There was a parking lot very close. ... I've always felt like Trenny planned it, and that was her way out."
Cigarette butts were found, along with a partially filled can of beer, near the spot where Trenny stepped off the trail. The search dogs tracked Trenny’s scent to the base of the Clingman’s Dome observation tower and the shoulder of a paved road 1.6 miles from the Dome at Collins Gap. There is also a parking lot in this area. More cigarette butts of the same brand were found on the shoulder of this road. Several sets of dogs had the same conclusive results, as well as those brought in by Trenny’s uncles.
Aftermath
1981, during an interview, Robert Gibson expressed appreciation for all that the FBI and the searchers had done. Still, he also spoke of his disappointment that the school district had no policies to protect the students better. Based on his experience as both a scout and a scoutmaster, he thought that one adult chaperone for 40 students was at least three chaperones too few.
The Gibsons did everything they could to keep their family together after Trenny disappeared, including selling their home and moving to a new neighborhood not to have so many now painful memories. But over time, the loss continued to take its toll, and in the wake of her disappearance, Trenny’s parents divorced.
Trenny’s older brother, Robert, Jr., died in 2000 at the age of 42, and Robert, Sr., her father, died in 2004 at the age of 67. Tina, her sister, died in 2016 at the age of 54.
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Sources
https://www.findthemissing.org/en/cases/4524
http://www.wbir.com/article/news/local/appalachian-unsolved-trenny-gibson-lost-in-the-smokies/51-494178428
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT5vuH8oNGo
https://www.reddit.com/r/Missing411/comments/611xui/trenny_lynn_gibson_missing_in_great_smokey/
http://www.websleuths.com/forums/showthread.php?213960-TN-Trenny-Gibson-16-Great-Smoky-Mountains-National-Park-8-Oct-1976&p=12034203&styleid=21
https://investigationsforthemissing.org/blog/f/gone-in-the-smoky-mountains-trenny-gibsons-disappearance
https://crochetbug.medium.com/whatever-became-of-trenny-gibson-a25d6611b649
https://www.canadiangurl77.com/
