The strange death of Josh Maddux, the Boy in the Chimney
Joshua Vernon Maddux, disappeared May 8, 2008, Woodland Park, Colorado. Body Found August 7, 2015.
Revised June 2024
On May 8, 2008, Joshua “Josh” Maddux, 18, left his parent’s house for a short walk, something the nature-loving teenager did routinely. But this time, he never returned.
Seven years later, in August 2015, less than a mile from Josh’s home, property developer Chuck Murphy was demolishing an old wood cabin to make way for thirty-two new family homes. The cabin hadn’t been used in years, and the inside was dirty, damp, filled with rotten timbers and strewn with garbage. As the demolition team began tearing down the chimney, they made a horrifying discovery: crammed inside the brickwork was a mummified body, later confirmed to be Josh. He was naked except for a thin shirt, and his clothes were found neatly stacked inside the cabin.
What happened to Josh? Did he climb into the chimney voluntarily, or was he forced in by someone? The unsettling mystery of Josh Maddux's fate continues to haunt and intrigue, stirring intense debate among armchair detectives.
Who was Joshua Maddux?
Joshua and Ruth Maddox
Joshua Maddux was born on March 9, 1990, and lived in Woodland Park, a town of around eight thousand people, in the Pike National Forest, Teller County, Colorado. His parents were divorced, and Josh lived with his father, Mike and two sisters, Kate and Ruth.
He had long blond hair, was 6 feet tall and weighed around 150 pounds. He had a carefree attitude to life, loved music, and spent much of his free time writing or playing the guitar. At school, he was a bright student and was seemingly well-liked.
Two years before Josh’s disappearance, on June 1, 2006, a week before his high school graduation, his older brother, Zachary, 18, committed suicide after suffering from severe depression. Mike Maddux said, “I buried his older brother two years before, and it was so difficult on Josh. When his brother died, it pushed him over the edge. It was a big shock for the family and a big shock for Josh. He thought highly of his older brother.”
Despite this, Josh had been doing well and was now happy with his life.
The disappearance of Josh Maddux
On May 8, 2008, Josh left the house, telling his sister Kate he was going for a walk. He often went hiking alone, so when his sister saw him at the home before he left, she thought little of it. But when he failed to return later that evening, the family became worried. On May 13, 5 days after he disappeared, his father, Mike, called the police to report Josh missing.
Mike said, “I got up one morning, and Josh was there, then he never came home. The next day, he still didn’t come home. I called his friends, but nobody had seen him. Nobody knows where he is.”
The search for Josh
The authorities, friends, and family scoured the neighborhood and nearby parkland where Josh may have decided to go walking. After months of searching, nothing had been uncovered, and hopes faded. Josh’s sister Kate hoped he had left town to play music or start a different life.
She wrote of her brother’s disappearance: “Since Josh was 18, it has been reasonable to assume he may have decided to leave town to start a new life. As one of his two older sisters, I have always believed this was the case. I have expected Josh to return home to my father’s house at any time with a wife and small children so that they can meet their grandparents and two aunts. Josh has always been known for his musical and literary talent, so maybe we would find him playing music with a band on tour or catch him writing successful novels under a pen name so that he could keep his preferred lifestyle of solitude in the woods.”
The police had no reason to suspect any foul play and so listed him as a missing person.
The body in the chimney
Chuck Murphy’s Cabin where Josh Maddux’s corpse was discovered in August 2015
In 2015, Chuck Murphy, 80, a builder from Colorado Springs, was demolishing his old wood cabin on Meadowlark Lane, a large area surrounded by tall pines.
Chuck had initially purchased the cabin in the 1950s. It was formerly the Homestead of Thunderhead Ranch on Rampart Range Road on Woodland Park’s north side. It was an infamous dining, drinking, and gambling complex owned by “Big Bert” Bergstrom in the 1930s-1950s. He had come to America from Sweden in 1912 and run the Thunderhead Inn as a dining and drinking establishment after the end of prohibition. He also used the ranch as an illegal gambling and prostitution den, and the FBI arrested him. In the subsequent trial, the jury found him not guilty.
The cabin hadn’t been used for a decade and had fallen into disrepair. Chuck decided to demolish it to make way for property development, and in August 2015, demolition work started. Chuck’s brother had lived in the cabin until 2005, but since moving out, it had become a storage facility and was rarely visited.
Animals had been a problem, and there was a noticeable stench when Chuck came to the cabin on August 7.
As the workers dismantled the chimney, one of the two in the cabin, using an excavator, and reached the interior, Chuck made the horrific discovery of the body of a young man, cramped into a fetal position with his legs above his head. He called the police, who arrived with the County Coroner, who later, with the help of dental records, positively identified the body to be that of the missing man, Joshua Maddux.
The Maddux family was shocked by the news of the discovery of Josh’s body. His sister Kate said: “The situation doesn’t make any sense at all. We were really expecting him to be anywhere else in the world, and he was actually very close. The only thing we can figure is he was being an 18-year-old kid, checking out a cabin — it had already been abandoned for a long time — and a horrible accident happened.”
The cabin was only two blocks from the Maddux family home, yet the searches for Josh had overlooked the building. There was no sign of life or reason to check a chimney there. Chuck Murphy, the cabin owner himself, had rarely visited. However, on the occasions he had to check in, he had not noticed anything unusual about the property, like the smell of a decaying corpse.
Since the cabin stood centrally in a large plot of land, surrounded by tall pines, around 50 feet from the road, Police suggested that with no adjacent homes, if Josh had cried for help, no one would have been able to hear him regardless.
Further investigation into Josh’s death
The Teller County coroner, Al Born, did an autopsy and found no evidence of any drugs in Josh’s remains. He said, “The hard tissue showed no signs of trauma. There were no broken bones, no knife marks. There were no bullet holes. There is so far no answers to a number of things. It is very confusing. It was not instant death. How he died is only a matter of speculation, but we know he did not starve to death because that takes many weeks. So then you go down the chain, and you have dehydration, which can take just a few days, and the other thing would be hypothermia, which could take a day or two. We have no evidence to say which one came first.”
On September 28, 2015, Born made a ruling of “Accidental Death”. He speculated that Josh had climbed into the chimney and became stuck in the brickwork. Born stated that Josh’s position in the chimney “appeared to have been a voluntary act to gain access”. He concluded the most likely cause of death was hypothermia, as the temperature around the time of his disappearance between May 8 and 10, 2008, had dropped to the high 20s (-6.7°C).
Discrepancies in the Coroner’s report
Many locals, including the family, had issues with the coroner’s report. Chuck questioned the Coroner’s conclusion of accidental death as the chimney had been built twenty years before. During its construction, it was fitted with a thick wire mesh hung from steel hooks to keep animals and debris from becoming lodged inside the chimney or entering the cabin.
Murphy said, “It was a heavy wire grate, a wire mesh. I installed it across the chimney, about one row of bricks from the top. We didn’t want trouble with raccoons and things getting into the chimney.” Born thought the grate could have been rusted or corroded and stated, “Nobody saw the metal mesh; we didn’t see it in any of our photos. It may have disappeared.”
Murphy responded that all metalwork had been collected and taken for scrap during the demolition. This explained why the coroner did not identify the mesh, as it wasn’t anywhere near the chimney. “They were just gathering up all the steel, angle iron and things as part of the demolition,” Murphy said, “They had no idea the mesh had any significance.”
Conceding to Murphy, Born reopened the case three days after his initial conclusion. It was not only the rebar that caused doubt about the original autopsy. For example, a large wooden breakfast bar that had been torn from a wall in the kitchen and dragged over to block the Chimney from inside the cabin raised further suspicions. If the breakfast bar had been torn from the wall, then who had done it and why?
Josh’s body had also been found in a fetal position, with his legs above his head and disjointed from his torso. He must have entered the chimney head first to get into such a position. This was a somewhat unusual position, and Born had earlier commented that he thought it would have taken two people to position him in such a fashion.
What was even stranger was that when Josh’s body had been found, he was wearing only a thin thermal shirt, and his clothes had actually been found inside the cabin, folded up next to the fireplace. Born said of this evidence, “This one really taxed our brains. We found his clothing just outside the firebox. He only had on a thermal T-shirt. 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.”
The revised autopsy report said that the cause of death was accidental death, murder, or undetermined causes. Born said, “We’ve come up with the most plausible explanation, and it will remain an accident. He did come down the chimney; that’s our conclusion.”
Murphy said, “There’s no way that guy crawled inside that chimney with that steel webbing. He didn’t come down the chimney.” and he remained convinced that Josh’s death had been no accident. Adding, “He was only wearing his thermal shirt. No pants. No shoes or socks.” Murphy said it was ridiculous to think the teen stripped down to just his shirt, climbed up on the roof and then the chimney, and slid down, knowing he’d be trapped.
Theories on the Josh Maddux death and the Andy Newman link
The police received several anonymous tip-offs suggesting leads and naming suspects that had bragged of killing Josh.
One such suspect was now incarcerated in a Texas jail and had previously spent time in Seattle and Portland prisons. He had a long history of violent crime. One tip-off had informed the Police that this man had been seen with Josh. When speaking of the man, Al Born said, “They can’t give me times and specifics, and we can’t generate stuff that goes back seven years.” Born also doubted that the man would have been able to put Josh in the chimney alone.
In 2015, a post on Reddit in 2015 gave a name to the suspect just mentioned. The post said, “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. Turns out that in addition to becoming a lot scarier looking, Andy had indeed headed down to New Mexico, where he found himself shooting the shit with the caretaker of a disabled guy and got invited over to their apartment. Caretaker gets in the shower, and when he comes back out, the disabled guy is stabbed to death and Andy’s gone. When Andy got arrested, he also claimed to have killed a woman in Taos and stuffed her body in a barrel.
The cops had indeed found a woman stuffed in a barrel in Taos, but already had somebody in custody for it and decided to stick with that guy instead. Years later, I found out that the caretaker had died in a bar fight, and without him the cops didn’t have much in the way of evidence somehow, so that case against Andy was dropped, too.
Several of us went to the cops saying “Yo, Josh Who Went Missing was last seen with Andy Who’s A Murderer, maybe you should check that out?” Despite a fair amount of pestering, nothing ever really came of it, and by nothing, I mean that the police mostly didn’t even return our calls, and once accidentally canceled the bulletin on Josh because “He’s alive and well and living in the next town over!” (he wasn’t)
He was actually in the chimney of an abandoned cabin like two blocks from his parents’ house. The coroner said the body had been there for about seven years, and ruled the death accidental, concluding that Josh had probably climbed down the chimney in an attempt to break into the house and gotten stuck. Which, given the age of the corpse, doesn’t seem overly ridiculous.
Except for the fact that in addition to Josh having last been seen with Andy-immediately-before-his-stabbing-spree, people called in to report having heard rumors that Andy was bragging about having “put Josh in a hole.”
Somebody had ripped a heavy bar off the wall in the kitchen and propped it against the fireplace. Or the fact that Josh’s stuff was already inside the cabin, meaning (a) he’d already broken in and would have had to lock himself out to have to go for the chimney, and (b) he might have noticed that either the flu or the big bar would have prevented him from getting in through the fireplace. Or the fact that when he was found, Josh’s knees were above his head, which sounds to me like he would have had to go in head-first (disclaimer: not an expert at fucking all). Or maybe the fact that Josh was barefoot and naked from the waist down.
This is just my opinion, but I don’t care who you are: you don’t try to climb head first into a chimney via a hole rusted through a metal grate with your dick hanging out.
As far as I can tell, nobody even bothered to call Andy to ask if he knew anything. (By the way, from what I hear, Andy’s still out and about doing his thing when he’s not in the mental hospital).
All I’m saying is: I wish they had done some police shit. Open an investigation. Try to track down some leads. Interview some of the folks who’ve been calling in tips for the last seven years. Maybe check for some semen or something. I don’t know. Don’t just say “accidental”, dust off your hands, and call it a day.”
Andy’s full name was Andrew Richard Newman. He was arrested on suspicion of a fatal stabbing in New Mexico and is currently serving time.
Andrew Richard Newman
Conclusions on the case
Chuck Murphy, the cabin owner, said, “It’s a real conundrum. A tragic, terrible story. All I know is he did not go down that chimney. He got in the fireplace and went up. But why? I think it will remain a mystery. One of those sad stories.”
The case is bizarre and perplexing. Several questions come to mind:
The rebar in the chimney would have prevented anyone's entry unless it was removed before the demolition or rusted away, as suggested by the coroner.
Why would Josh remove his clothes and leave them by the fireplace and his boots?
Why was the breakfast bar dragged to cover the fireplace entrance inside the cabin?
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Sources
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3255121/Body-18-year-old-missing-7-years-chimney.html
https://www.denverpost.com/2015/10/19/chimney-discovery-ends-mystery-over-young-mans-disappearance-but-questions-remain/
https://www.darkhistories.com/josh-maddux-the-boy-in-the-chimney/
https://medium.com/true-crime-by-cat-leigh/teens-body-found-in-chimney-93104ecc932
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/5x4k3q/18_year_old_joshua_maddux_missing_since_2008_is/
https://web.archive.org/web/20151008194122/http://pikespeakcourier.net/stories/Mystery-of-chimney-death-deepens,199356
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