The summer air in Ashland, Kentucky, clung to the skin. It was thick with humidity, sweet with honeysuckle, and carried the faint metallic smell that drifted in from the Ohio River. In late July 1987, the town sat in an uneasy in-between—small enough that everyone knew one another, but restless enough to feel the pull of something beyond its borders.
For four boys, that summer would be their last together, though no one yet understood how final it would be. The story would come to haunt Ashland for generations.
Tommy Hensley was the oldest at 13, fearless and magnetic, the kind of boy who proposed dares others hesitated to refuse. Jake Porter, 12, followed him closely, quieter and more thoughtful, but fiercely loyal. Mark Dalton was the steady one, good-natured and practical in ways the others were not. Ricky Cole, just 11, was the youngest and their shadow, always trailing a few steps behind, smiling as though simply being included was an honor.
That summer carried the feeling of endings. Tommy’s father had been laid off from the steel mill, and the family was preparing to move to Lexington. Mark’s father had accepted a job in Ohio. For the boys, it meant this was their last real summer together in Ashland—their final stretch of shared freedom with bikes, woods, creeks, and each other.
They called it their one last adventure. On the morning of July 23, neighbors later recalled seeing the boys in the Hensley driveway loading small backpacks. They packed snack cakes, a flashlight, and a compass borrowed from a father’s fishing kit. By noon, they were seen pedaling down Route 3, sweat glistening on their necks, heat shimmering off the asphalt.
The last confirmed sighting came around 5:00 p.m. near the old Colton Fire Tower trailhead. A man walking his dog remembered waving to them. The boys waved back. It was an ordinary moment, the kind that only gains meaning when everything afterward goes wrong.
When dusk fell and the boys were still not home, their parents assumed they had camped near the creek, something they had done before. By midnight, unease began to settle in. Phone calls were made. Flashlights appeared on porches. By 2:00 a.m., people were driving back roads, calling the boys’ names into the dark.
The woods, once familiar and safe, suddenly felt vast. By sunrise, police were notified. Search teams moved into the area around Black Run Creek, following narrow deer paths the boys were known to explore. Small footprints were found clustered together, leading downhill toward the water. Then they disappeared into mud.
Dogs were brought in. Helicopters cut across the treetops. Hundreds of volunteers scoured hollows and ridges. The search stretched into days. Every snapped branch and trickle of water raised hearts, but nothing emerged. When a full week passed without a sign, desperation turned into dread.
Families camped at the trailhead. Mothers clung to one another, pale and sleepless. Fathers stood staring into the trees. Inside the sheriff’s office, a map marked every cleared section and every lead that had gone nowhere. One handler reported something unsettling: search dogs would bark aggressively near an old gully by the creek, then abruptly fall silent, refusing to go farther.
The gully became the focus of the search, but even there nothing turned up—no bikes, no clothing, only churned mud and a faint smell of rot locals said came from the creek bed. By the tenth day, theories divided the town. Some believed the boys had gotten lost and succumbed to the heat. Others whispered about a hermit rumored to live deep in the hills. Darker suspicions surfaced, suggesting one boy had led the others somewhere dangerous.
Ashland held its breath. Parents kept children indoors. Woods that had once been playgrounds became forbidden. People half-jokingly called it the Colton Woods curse, because it wasn’t only that four boys had vanished—it was how completely they were gone, as if the earth itself had swallowed them.
By the end of August, the official search was called off. The creek had flooded twice, erasing what little evidence might have remained. Reporters left. Volunteers returned home. Missing posters curled and bleached on gas pumps and telephone poles.
For the families, it never ended. Tommy’s mother, Linda, refused to take down his room. Jake’s parents left his bike leaning against the porch for months, as though he might ride home at any moment. Years later, people said they still saw Linda walking the ridgeline at night, flashlight in hand, calling Tommy’s name into the trees.
The case became less an investigation than a wound Ashland learned to live with. Every generation grew up knowing the boys’ names and knowing the fire tower trail was off limits after dark. It had been meant as one last ride, one last summer, one last adventure. Instead, it became a question without an answer for nearly three decades.
In the days immediately after the disappearance, no one in Ashland believed the boys were truly gone. The idea felt impossible—four children vanishing within miles of their own homes. At first there was noise everywhere: radios crackling, trucks rumbling, helicopter blades slicing the humid air.
The Boyd County Sheriff’s Office turned the Colton Fire Tower trail into the center of a massive operation. Deputies worked alongside firefighters, state police, volunteers, and even the National Guard. It was the largest search the county had ever seen.
Each morning began with roll call at dawn. Over coffee and cigarette smoke, teams received briefings before fanning out shoulder to shoulder through wet soil. The woods smelled of pine and decay. Every few minutes someone shouted a name, and for a moment the forest went still. The echo always came back empty.
The families never left. They pitched tents near the tower, clinging to the hope the boys might wander out of the woods. Mothers sat gripping thermoses of untouched coffee. Fathers paced, avoiding one another’s eyes. Churches delivered meals. Restaurants donated food. For a time, the entire region seemed to breathe together, driven by fragile hope.
That hope cracked by the end of the first week. Dogs grew exhausted. Volunteers limped. A heavy rain arrived on a Thursday, flooding creeks and turning trails into rivers of mud. Search grids were erased overnight. Helicopters were grounded by low clouds. Footprints and disturbed brush vanished.
Deputy Harold Vickers, one of the most experienced officers on the team, later said the forest felt wrong afterward, quieter, as if the boys had never been there. Searchers reported strange sensations—laughter that faded before it could be traced, movement at the edge of vision. Most blamed exhaustion, but something about the place unsettled them.
Three days later, a volunteer found a torn piece of nylon near Black Run Creek, likely a backpack strap. Nearby was a faint shoe print too small to belong to an adult and a rusted flashlight wedged between rocks. The items were bagged and sent to the state lab in Frankfort. The results were inconclusive.
Rumors surged. Sightings were reported miles away. Deputies chased tips through fields and abandoned mining shafts, always returning empty-handed. Media from Louisville and Lexington descended on Ashland. Letters poured in with theories and condolences. Beneath it all, the town began to fracture. Some accused law enforcement of incompetence. Others blamed the parents.
Stories about a hermit living deep in the woods spread again. Vickers personally hiked overgrown mining roads and collapsed shafts, lowering cameras into openings that smelled of wet earth. Nothing surfaced. After three weeks, exhaustion won. Volunteers left. Donations slowed. By late August, only families and a handful of deputies remained when the sheriff announced the search would be scaled back.
The official theory became lost hikers. Not everyone accepted it. Locals spoke of strange lights in the hills and campsites with burned bones. Families who had once shared meals stopped speaking. Children were warned away from the woods. The trail quietly closed.
Years passed. The case files were boxed and stored. But Harold Vickers could not let it go. Retired, he spent weekends hiking south of the original search area, convinced the boys had gone farther than anyone realized. His garage filled with marked maps and notes. He believed the search had stopped too soon.
By the mid-2000s, the Colton Woods were fenced off as restricted land. Then in 2008, a college student bought a box of surplus items at an online auction. Inside was a weathered backpack. Carved faintly into the strap were the initials T.H. When the buyer posted it online, someone recognized the evidence tag as belonging to the Hensley case.
The backpack had been logged in 1987 and somehow misplaced. Its rediscovery reignited attention. The bag yielded no usable DNA, but for Linda Hensley it was proof her son had existed beyond memory. For Vickers, it confirmed there were still answers buried in the woods.
Interest faded again. The case returned to storage. Ashland slipped back into uneasy quiet.
Then, in August 2015, nearly 28 years after the boys disappeared, a hiker named Daniel Merritt parked his truck near an unmarked ridge west of town. Exploring a limestone cut, he noticed a section of rock that had recently collapsed. Inside a hollow was a rusted tin containing a waterlogged notebook and a faded Polaroid.
The photo showed four boys standing beneath a sign that read “End of Trail.”
Police secured the site within hours. The notebook’s pages were fragile but legible. One message stopped everyone cold: they had gone down the wrong ridge, Mark was hurt, the sun was gone. If anyone found the note, they were asked to tell their mothers they had stayed together.
Authentication confirmed the items dated to the 1980s. Excavation began. Bone fragments and personal items emerged. DNA testing identified Tommy Hensley and Jake Porter. Later searches recovered Ricky Cole. Mark Dalton remained missing, but investigators were confident he lay nearby.
Reanalysis of outdated 1987 maps revealed the truth. The boys had followed a nonexistent southern spur into a treacherous basin prone to landslides. Storms in late June 1987 triggered a collapse that buried the trail and the boys beneath tons of debris.
Forensic evidence showed no foul play. They had died together within days, injured by falling rock and exposure. In late 2015, Mark Dalton’s remains were finally located, completing the recovery.
The conclusion was devastating but certain. The boys had not been taken. They had not run away. They had become lost and stayed together until the end.
In October 2015, Ashland gathered as the boys were buried side by side. The notebook was placed on display at the Boyd County Heritage Museum, open to the page bearing their final message. The fire tower trail reopened under a new name, the Four Pines Path.
For nearly 3 decades, the forest had held their story. Now it was finally told. The town remembered them not as boys who vanished, but as four friends who stayed together.
