A Father and Son Boarded a Flight on Christmas Eve — 26 Years Later, a Wall Exposed the Truth | HO

PART 1 – The Flight That Landed Without Them

On Christmas Eve 1998, Seattle–Tacoma International Airport looked like every postcard version of holiday travel gone wrong.

Snow hammered the runways. Inside Terminal B, families dragged suitcases wrapped in tinsel ribbons, kids clutched stuffed animals, and gate agents shouted over carols leaking from tinny ceiling speakers. To most people there, it was chaos with a purpose: get home, get somewhere warm, get Christmas over the finish line.

For Clare Brennan, standing at gate B7, it was the last time she would ever see her husband and son alive.

She remembered tiny details with terrifying clarity even twenty-six years later: the way her husband, Richard, had to shift his overnight bag from his right shoulder to his left because it always dug into the same sore spot. The way their 12-year-old son, Owen, had pressed his face to the jetway’s narrow window, leaving a foggy circle on the glass as he waved back at her.

“Three days,” Richard had promised. “We’ll be back on the 27th. You won’t even have time to miss us.”

He was wrong.

Clare stayed behind in Washington. Her father was dying in hospice in Tacoma, and she couldn’t bring herself to leave his bedside for Christmas, not even for family in Boston. The compromise had seemed rational, almost mundane: Richard and Owen would fly east, spend the holiday with Richard’s sister, Helen, and be back before New Year’s.

Their boarding passes for Flight 2547 scanned without incident. Records would later show them assigned to seats 14A and 14B.

At 6:47 p.m. Pacific time, Flight 2547 touched down at Logan International in Boston after an uneventful cross-country journey. The aircraft taxied to the gate. The seatbelt sign pinged off. Overhead bins burst open as passengers clawed for bags and stepped into the jetway’s stale airport air.

Helen Moss stood at the arrival gate with a hand-lettered sign and a camera ready for the reunion she’d been looking forward to all month.

Passengers streamed past her—the usual mix of irritability, fatigue, and holiday relief. The crowd thinned. First the families, then the solo business travelers, then the stragglers who’d had to wrestle their belongings out of overhead compartments.

Then…nothing.

No Richard. No Owen.

“I thought maybe they’d gotten stuck in the line off the plane,” Helen would later tell investigators. “Or maybe Richard had stopped to let Owen see the cockpit. But the stream just stopped.”

The jetway door eventually closed. Ground crew prepared the gate for the next departure. The aircraft’s manifest was cleared.

On paper, Flight 2547 had landed with every passenger accounted for.

But two seats—14A and 14B—were empty.

A Case That Never Made Sense

Airport security did what airport security does in such cases: they checked and rechecked.

Boarding passes. Check.
Assigned seats. Check.
Baggage records. Check.

Flight attendants insisted that all passengers had been in place during the safety demonstration and early beverage service. No in-flight disturbances. No medical emergencies. No diversion. No unscheduled landing.

Somewhere between Seattle and Boston, a father and son had simply stopped being there.

The case immediately drew federal attention. Two U.S. citizens missing under suspicious circumstances during interstate air travel placed it squarely on the FBI’s radar. For weeks, agents combed through the Brennans’ finances, work history, and personal life.

They found nothing.

No secret accounts. No hidden debts. No purchases suggesting a planned disappearance. Richard was a successful architect specializing in transportation infrastructure—airports and train stations, the kind of work that never makes headlines unless something goes catastrophically wrong. He had no criminal record, no known enemies, no history of instability.

“His file read like a model citizen,” retired FBI Special Agent David Park recalls. “Paid his taxes. No traffic violations. PTA volunteer. If you were looking for a man to disappear on purpose, he’s the last one you’d pick.”

Clare, meanwhile, refused to accept the theory quietly floated in certain circles: that her husband had chosen to vanish with their son, leaving her behind.

“Richard loved me and he adored Owen,” she told agents in 1999, her grief barely contained. “Whatever happened to them, it wasn’t his choice. And it wasn’t his fault.”

Without a crime scene, without bodies, and with no ransom, no credible threats, and no clear motive, the investigation slowly calcified. Leads dried up. The 24-hour news cycle moved on.

The case didn’t close. It just went cold.

The Wall in Terminal B

In late 2024, the north wing of Terminal B at Seattle–Tacoma Airport was a relic.

Newer concourses had been built. Airlines had shifted gates. The old B7 jetway where Clare had watched her family disappear into the aircraft had been sealed off since 2009, its corridor hidden behind drywall and construction barriers, the physical memory of the Brennan case quietly erased by airport expansion.

That changed when a renovation project ordered the complete gutting of the aging north wing.

“Most of the structure was sound,” says Marcus Webb, the airport’s assistant maintenance director, who has worked at Sea-Tac for more than 30 years. “But there were sections that needed a full teardown. We thought it would be routine.”

It wasn’t.

Three days before Christmas 2024, Webb’s crew opened up a wall near the old B7 access corridor and discovered something no one expected: a deliberately constructed void.

“It wasn’t just dead space in the wall,” Webb explains. “Someone had built a false wall—about two feet deep, running 20 feet down the corridor. It was concealed, intentional. As soon as we saw it, we called security.”

Inside that hidden cavity, construction lights revealed a scene that would rip a 26-year-old cold case wide open.

Two bodies, seated side by side against the back wall.

An adult male. A child.

Time and the dry, sealed environment had mummified the remains. Their winter clothing—flannel, jeans, a heavy ski jacket—dated them roughly to the 1990s. Near them lay two carry-on bags and scattered personal items.

In one bag, investigators found a wallet containing a Washington State driver’s license.

Name: Richard Brennan.

On the child’s wrist was a watch. On the back, faint but still legible, was an engraving:

To Owen — Love Mom & Dad.

After twenty-six years of speculation, rumors, and unanswered questions, Richard and Owen Brennan had been found not in a remote forest, not in another country, not at the bottom of the ocean—but inside the same airport where they had boarded Flight 2547.

Behind a wall roughly 50 feet from gate B7.

PART 2 – The Detective Who Wouldn’t Let It Go

Detective Sarah Chen remembers exactly where she was when she got the call from maintenance director Marcus Webb.

“At first I thought it was some kind of grim joke,” she admits. “You don’t expect a cold case like that to suddenly explode back into your life.”

In 1998, Chen had been a rookie patrol officer assigned to airport detail, watching the Brennan disappearance unfold from the periphery. By 2024, she headed the Port of Seattle Police Department’s cold-case unit—and the Brennan file had shadowed her entire career.

“I kept requesting it every few years,” she says. “Partly because it haunted me. Partly because aviation cases should never just vanish into a filing cabinet.”

The file was embarrassingly thin for a case that had captivated local media for months. A stack of missing persons reports. Witness interviews that led nowhere. Federal memos. Old diagrams of Terminal B. No bodies. No confirmed crime scene. Just questions.

Now, suddenly, there were bodies.

When Chen arrived at the exposed wall space near the sealed-off B7 corridor, crime-scene techs were already working. The cavity was no bigger than a walk-in closet, yet whoever had constructed it had done so with professional precision. Studs aligned. Drywall seams smoothly finished. Paint matched to surrounding surfaces.

It looked like a piece of the original building.

It wasn’t.

What stopped Chen cold wasn’t only the positioning of the bodies—seated upright, backs to the wall, as if arranged or posed. It was the floor around them.

Someone had drawn intricate geometric symbols on the concrete in what appeared to be chalk or faded paint—a series of overlapping circles, straight lines, and interlocking angles radiating outward from the seated figures like a macabre mandala.

“They weren’t random doodles,” Chen says. “It looked deliberate. Almost ritualistic.”

A member of the maintenance crew, a former religious studies major, offered an unsettling observation: the designs resembled old protection sigils—symbols used in rituals meant to contain or ward off something.

For Chen, the discovery reframed everything.

“This was no longer an open-ended disappearance,” she says. “We suddenly had a double homicide in a concealed, professionally constructed chamber, with occult-style markings around the bodies. Somebody built that space. Somebody placed them there. Somebody took steps to make sure they weren’t found.”

Facing the Mother

Procedure demanded that next of kin be notified before any public announcement. That task fell to Chen.

Finding Clare Brennan wasn’t difficult. She was now 68, living in a nursing home in Olympia, an hour south of Seattle. The facility director warned that Clare had “good days and bad days,” but confirmed she was lucid enough to receive difficult news.

Clare did not wait for a formal introduction.

“You’re here about Richard and Owen,” she said as soon as Chen entered the small visiting room, her voice still strong despite the frailty of her body.

It wasn’t a question.

Clare had grown smaller over the decades, diminished by grief and time. Gone was the vibrant 40-something from the original case photos. But her eyes—sharp, dark, assessing—remained unchanged.

Chen delivered the news with clinical clarity: two bodies found in a concealed wall near gate B7, identification pointing to Richard and Owen, remains in the custody of the medical examiner, additional forensic work underway.

Clare listened without interrupting.

“Are they dead?” she asked when Chen paused.

“Yes,” Chen replied. “I’m very sorry.”

Clare nodded as if acknowledging something she had always known but had never been allowed to officially say.

“I knew they never made it to Boston,” she said. “Everyone told me I was in denial. The police. Richard’s family. My own sister. They said he ran away, that he took Owen and started a new life. But I knew.”

“Did you ever believe that was possible?” Chen asked.

Clare’s response was immediate and sharp.

“Never. Whatever else you think about my husband, detective, understand this: he would not leave without a word, and he would never take our son from me.”

For the next hour, Chen walked her back through the weeks before Christmas 1998. Grief has a way of scrambling memory, but time sometimes sifts out what’s important. A small detail surfaced that had been buried in early interviews.

“Two days before they left, he took a phone call,” Clare recalled, frowning. “He stepped outside to answer it. That wasn’t like him.”

When he returned, Richard seemed shaken. He told her it was “someone from his past”—someone asking for money. He said he refused. He did not say a name.

Twenty-six years earlier, investigators had pulled Richard’s phone records and chased down everything they could. In the age of payphones and less rigorous retention of metadata, not every number was traceable. The call Clare mentioned had been noted but never tied to anything concrete.

Back then, it was a loose thread in a case with too many loose threads.

Now, that thread dangled in front of a detective who had just found her first hard evidence.

Then Clare mentioned something else—something that caused the entire Brennan case to tilt in a new direction.

“Richard was an architect,” she reminded Chen. “Airports were his specialty. That airport was his favorite. He knew it inside and out.”

He hadn’t just worked at airports. He had worked on that airport.

Specifically, Clare said, he’d been involved in renovations to the older sections of Terminal B in the early 1990s. He used to talk about the building’s “spaces within spaces,” concealed structural volumes and clever design tricks that excited him as a professional.

“He said the original designers did something special with that building,” Clare recalled. “He admired their ingenuity.”

For Chen, it was a chilling revelation.

The man who vanished from Sea-Tac in 1998—in a case that now clearly involved a hidden architectural chamber inside the airport—had helped design that wing of the terminal.

“He knew where to hide bodies,” Chen says. “Or he knew the people who did.”

The Federal Memory

When a case crosses state lines, memories move into federal storage. In this one, those memories had a name: David Park.

Park had led the FBI’s original Brennan investigation. Now retired from frontline fieldwork, he consults on cold cases, his decades of institutional memory sometimes providing the missing link that databases and digitized records cannot.

“I still remember the call from Sarah,” Park says. “She told me they’d found the Brennans in a wall. I thought my hearing had finally gone.”

In a windowless conference room in the Seattle FBI field office, Park hauled out a battered cardboard box filled with original files.

“We looked at Richard from every angle,” Park explains. “Finances, travel history, personal life. The guy was almost suspiciously clean.”

He was also professionally significant. Park confirms that Richard’s firm had handled the 1993 renovation of Terminal B’s north concourse. Richard Brennan was the lead architect of record.

Chen then slid across the crime-scene photographs from the hidden wall.

Park’s reaction was immediate. His face went pale as he studied the mummified figures, the chalk-like symbols on the floor.

“We never had a crime scene,” he says quietly. “Now we have one—and it was sitting inside the airport the whole time.”

The symbols unsettled him as much as the bodies.

“This isn’t some panicked disposal,” Park notes. “Somebody planned that space. Somebody believed that what they were doing had meaning beyond just hiding corpses.”

As Chen and Park dug into the old renovation personnel files, one name jumped out.

A subcontractor hired in 1993 for “specialized carpentry work”: Thomas Vern.

Contract duration: terminated early.
Date: December 15, 1993.
Notation: “See incident report.”

The report, penned by Richard himself, described an altercation on the construction site. Vern had allegedly made “disturbing statements about the nature of the work” and claimed to have discovered “sacred geometry within the building structure.”

Richard’s recommendation was blunt:

“Mr. Vern’s behavior raises serious concerns about his mental stability. Recommend permanent ban from all our projects.”

The words “sacred geometry” landed like a thunderclap.

On one side of the file: a hidden chamber containing two bodies, surrounded by complex geometric symbols.
On the other: a carpenter removed from the same building’s renovation for talking about sacred geometry in the structure.

“We needed to find out what happened to him,” Chen says. “If he was still alive, I wanted him in an interview room. If he wasn’t, I wanted to know where he’d been for the last three decades.”

What they would uncover instead was not just a suspect—but the blueprint of a serial killer whose crime scenes were literally built into the walls of American airports.

PART 3 – The Carpenter in the Woods

Finding a man who hasn’t filed taxes, changed jobs in official systems, or left a digital footprint in more than a decade is not straightforward.

It took a combination of federal databases, archival county records, and old-fashioned legwork. Eventually, a trail emerged.

Name: Thomas Edward Vern
Age: 68
Last known property: a 40-acre parcel outside the small town of Darrington, Washington, purchased in 1987.

No recorded sale of the land. No recent utility usage. No evidence of a current mailing address.

“He went off the grid,” Park says. “But he didn’t disappear. He dug in.”

The road to Vern’s property wound through dense evergreen forest, the kind of place where sound seems to get swallowed by the trees. When Chen, Park, and two FBI agents rolled up in the drizzle, the gravel drive was choked by overgrowth.

What greeted them in the clearing looked, at first glance, like a junkyard of failed carpentry projects.

Closer inspection told a darker story.

“It was like walking into a sculpture garden built by someone whose mind had snapped along geometric lines,” Chen recalls.

Dozens of wooden structures dotted the yard—some as small as birdhouses, others the size of sheds. Every surface was carved or burned with symbols: intersecting lines, spirals, circles, and angular patterns that echoed the sigils found around Richard and Owen’s bodies.

Inside the house, the chaos was somehow even more ordered.

Walls were covered floor to ceiling with pin-board style collages: airport blueprints, structural diagrams, newspaper clippings, missing persons flyers, photographs, handwritten notes. Red string connected threads of thought across decades and geography.

“It wasn’t random,” Chen says. “He wasn’t hoarding. He was building a system.”

One wall was devoted entirely to airport terminals: Sea-Tac, LAX, O’Hare, JFK, Denver, Boston, London Heathrow. Blueprints were marked up with overlays of shapes and annotations referring to angles, distances, and alignments.

Another wall displayed missing persons—men, women, and children who had vanished from airports over a thirty-year span. Each photo was neatly labeled with a name, date, and location.

In the center of that wall, larger than any other image, was the 1998 missing poster of Richard and Owen Brennan.

Someone had drawn the same sigils around their faces that now surrounded their remains back at Sea-Tac.

In a detached workshop behind the house, agents found what they would later call Vern’s “laboratory.”

Carpentry tools were arranged with meticulous care. On a worktable sat a partially completed wooden frame—approximately six feet wide and eight feet tall—identical in proportions and joinery style to the false wall discovered at Terminal B.

“It was a mock-up,” Park says. “This is where he tested designs before building the real thing inside airports.”

Along a back shelf, another horror waited.

Neatly arranged personal items—shoes, watches, glasses, wallets—each tagged with labels.

Names.
Dates.
Cities.

“Patricia Holmes — 2003, Denver.”
“Michael Chen — 1991, Chicago.”
“Sarah Martinez — 1995, Los Angeles.”

There were dozens.

“Once we saw that shelf,” Chen says, “we knew we weren’t dealing with just the Brennan case anymore. We were standing in the archive of a serial killer.”

The Theology of Concrete and Steel

What drove a carpenter to carve tombs into airport walls?

The answer lay in stacks of notebooks found in the workshop and the house.

Page after page, dense handwriting documented an intricate belief system. Vern saw airports not as mere transportation hubs but as “convergence points”—places where physical, spiritual, and mathematical lines crossed.

He believed that terminal layouts reflected hidden “sacred geometry” encoded by original designers—angles and alignments that could form spiritual gateways. He became convinced that those gateways had to be “sealed” with blood sacrifices, their victims arranged in architecturally precise chambers.

The sigils around the bodies? In his mind, they were protective seals, not decorations.

“He had what forensic psychologists call systematized delusions,” Chen explains. “It wasn’t random madness. He built a coherent, deeply detailed belief system that explained everything to him. The problem is that his explanation required killing people.”

One passage in his notebooks referenced Sea-Tac specifically:

“Terminal B was built on sacred ground. Original builders encoded the geometry in the foundation. Brennan sees some of it. He resists the rest.”

The juxtaposition of Brennan’s name with Vern’s delusions was sickening.

“It suggested a relationship that went beyond one disciplinary report in 1993,” Park says.

Did Richard Brennan know that a killer was using his building as a ritual site? Did he help build the space that would become his own tomb? Or had Vern simply misinterpreted professional feedback through the lens of his illness?

Those questions would haunt investigators.

What mattered in the moment was that Vern appeared to still be active.

The sawdust in the workshop was fresh. A battery-powered lantern still held a strong charge. Notebooks contained references to airport renovation projects with dates and notes marking “threat windows”—periods when demolition might expose his hidden work.

Among the more recent entries, one note stood out:

“Sea-Tac – Terminal A baggage claim remodel. Void compromised? Seal re-affirmation required.”

For Chen, that line read like an alarm bell.

“If he thought a renovation was going to expose his tombs,” she says, “he might go back to ‘fix’ it—or build new ones.”

She called Marcus Webb at the airport.

“Any active renovations besides Terminal B?” she asked.

Webb flipped through his project list and found one.

“The old Terminal A baggage claim is being gutted,” he said. “Demolition started two weeks ago. Why? What’s going on?”

“Stop the work,” Chen told him. “Do not let anyone touch another wall until I get there.”

When Chen and Webb stood inside the sealed-off baggage claim hours later, the past met the present with sickening clarity.

Workers had already torn away sections of drywall, exposing structural framing. In one area, though, the dimensions were…wrong. The depth between studs seemed too great. A void where no void should be.

With a crowbar and a flashlight, Chen opened the space.

Two more mummified bodies sat inside, positioned just like the Brennans had been: upright, backs against the wall, surrounded by chalked sigils.

An adult woman. A teenage girl.

The woman’s purse lay beside her. Inside, a wallet revealed a long-expired Colorado driver’s license.

Name: Patricia Holmes.

It matched one of the trophies on Vern’s shelf in Darrington.

“Now we had a pattern,” Chen says. “He wasn’t just killing people in one airport. He was building tombs into terminals across the country.”

The Architect in Seat 14A

Back at Vern’s property, new notebooks surfaced—more recent and more focused. They mentioned an ominous phrase: “final completion” to be achieved at the winter solstice.

One recurring concept: “the architect’s return.”

Vern wrote of a “living seal” and referenced Terminal B at Sea-Tac repeatedly. In his mind, the Brennan deaths had been foundational—the “first seal.” Something about that original act had to be echoed or finished.

It didn’t take long for investigators to realize there was a new architect attached to the current Terminal B renovation: Angela Reeves, a mid-career project lead who had taken over modernization designs six months earlier.

When Chen arrived at Reeves’s Belltown apartment in the early hours of December 22, the unit was dark, but not empty.

Reeves’ phone sat on the kitchen counter, still plugged into a charger. Her purse—with wallet and keys—was neatly placed by the door. Clothes were missing from the bedroom closet, and a dust ring on the shelf showed where a suitcase had recently been.

On a still-open laptop, Chen found a browser tab that made her stomach drop: a ticket confirmation for a red-eye flight from Seattle to Boston, departing the night before.

Flight number: 2547.
Seat assignment: 14A—the same seat Richard Brennan had been assigned in 1998.

“When I saw that, it stopped being historical,” Chen says. “Whatever Vern believed about ‘completion’—it was happening now.”

Airport records confirmed that Reeves’s boarding pass for Flight 2547 had been scanned at 11:32 p.m. the night before.

Half an hour later, the flight stopped responding to routine radio calls.

For law enforcement teams in three states, the Brennan case, the Vern investigation, and a live aviation emergency were suddenly part of the same story.

PART 4 – The Plane That Wasn’t Supposed to Land

As Flight 2547 approached Portland in the early morning darkness, it was no longer just another red-eye skimming along the busy west-coast corridor. It was a potential mass-casualty crime scene in motion.

Pilots had reported escalating mechanical issues. Control surfaces were sluggish. Instruments behaved erratically. Most troubling, the landing gear warning indicators told an inconsistent story—sometimes showing all systems normal, sometimes flagging failure.

Portland International Airport prepared for the worst.

Emergency vehicles lined the runway. Fire crews stood by. FBI agents and airport police converged on the operations center to coordinate an unprecedented response: treating a malfunctioning passenger jet not just as an aviation emergency, but as a crime scene involving a suspected serial killer.

Detective Sarah Chen barely made it in time, having driven straight from Seattle at high speed. Special Agent David Park met her in the operations center, both of them staring through glass at the streaks of light outside.

The aircraft came in harder than anyone liked, but it stayed upright. Tires screeched, smoke plumed from the landing gear, engines screamed in reverse thrust, and then—against Stark odds—it stopped on the runway.

“Sometimes planes don’t crash when they’re supposed to,” Chen would later say, echoing a line she would read in one of Vern’s final notes.

Passengers evacuated via emergency slides into floodlit chaos. Fire crews scanned for smoke or fuel leaks. Medics triaged minor injuries from the rough landing and evacuation. FBI agents began funneling passengers and crew to a secure holding area for identification and interviews.

The manifest listed 83 passengers and six crew.

One person was missing: Angela Reeves.

“Her boarding pass had been scanned in Seattle,” Agent Rodriguez, one of the lead FBI responders, told Chen. “She should’ve been on that plane. But we don’t have her in our count on the ground.”

Inside the aircraft, soot smeared the walls, luggage littered the aisle, and the air carried the acrid tang of overheated systems. Chen and Park walked row by row, confirming that seat 14A was empty.

A flight attendant recalled that it had been empty from the start.

“I assumed she missed the door closure,” the attendant said. “It happens more than you’d think.”

Then Park noticed something off about a panel near the rear lavatories. The seam between two interior sections wasn’t standard. A structural engineer on scene confirmed that it appeared to be a modified mounting.

Using tools on board, they removed the panel carefully.

Behind it, in a space no larger than a shipping trunk, lay Angela Reeves.

She was bound, gagged, and unconscious—but alive.

Beside her was a backpack filled with fresh notebooks, printed diagrams, and a small digital recorder.

The notebooks detailed Vern’s “final plan”: the selection of Reeves as the “new architect,” the symbolic mirroring of the original Brennan flight, and the belief that a catastrophic failure of Flight 2547 on or near the winter solstice would “seal the gates” that he had spent thirty years constructing with blood and geometry.

The recorder contained his message to whoever would eventually find it.

In calm, almost professorial tones, Vern explained that he had “misjudged” the need for a new sacrifice. Richard’s “understanding” at the moment of death—and the death of Owen—had been sufficient, he now believed. All that remained was a closing cycle: the same flight number, the same route, a new failure over the same skies.

“When 2547 falls from the sky,” he said on the recording, “the circuit will be complete. The solstice will pass with all gates sealed, all guardians in place.”

He didn’t count on two things: a skilled flight crew…and time.

Structural analysis of the aircraft later confirmed systematic sabotage of hydraulic lines in the landing gear assembly—damage inflicted by someone who clearly knew the systems and had access before departure.

Security footage from Sea-Tac that night showed a maintenance worker in coveralls approaching the aircraft shortly before boarding. Enhanced stills revealed the face beneath the cap and safety glasses.

It was Thomas Vern, older and more gaunt than his 1993 personnel file photo, but unmistakable.

He had used forged credentials to access the aircraft, sabotaged the systems, hidden Reeves in a compartment he himself had likely helped install decades earlier while working for an aircraft refurbishment contractor—and then walked away, intending gravity to do the rest.

It didn’t.

Fourteen minutes later, an emergency landing in Portland turned his “completion” into a failure.

For someone whose entire belief system depended on perfect timing and geometry, that failure would prove fatal.

The Final Chamber

Back in Seattle, the winter sky finally brightened over Sea-Tac’s runways. As the first morning flights of the day climbed into the cold air, Detective Chen and Agent Park returned to the sealed corridor near gate B7.

Crime-scene tape still fluttered. Construction barriers still ringed the area. But one detail had changed.

The door to the old corridor was ajar.

Chen drew her weapon and advanced slowly down the shadowed hallway. It smelled of dust, old paint, and something metallic underneath—like the air in a room where someone had recently handled tools.

She reached the exposed section where the false wall had been removed days earlier.

There, seated on the floor where Richard Brennan’s body had been found, was Thomas Vern.

He was already dead.

In his lap lay an open notebook. Beside him, an empty pill bottle.

The final entry in his jagged scrawl read like a confession and an obituary in one.

“The geometries were perfect. The sacrifices were willing, though they didn’t know. But I failed to account for human resilience—for the simple fact that sometimes planes don’t crash when they’re supposed to. Sometimes rituals fail not because of flawed design, but because the universe doesn’t care about our designs.”

He wrote of Richard Brennan, claiming that he had tried to recruit the architect thirty-one years earlier, showing him “the truth encoded in the blueprints.” He claimed Brennan had called him insane, threatened to report him, and forced his hand.

“I had to make him understand,” Vern wrote. “Had to make him part of the work. But even in death, even sealed behind the wall with his son, he resisted. I could feel it. The gates aren’t sealed. They were never real. I spent my life building tombs for people who deserved to live. All because I believed in mathematics that were only ever just numbers. I’m sorry.”

For Chen, the note was both unbearable and strangely anticlimactic.

“He killed forty-seven people,” she says. “And at the end, the big realization was that he’d made it all up—that his system was just a story he told himself to justify the unjustifiable.”

Aftermath and Uneasy Closure

The aftermath of Vern’s suicide was less cinematic than the investigation that led to him—but in many ways, more grueling.

Task forces formed. Case files were reopened. Old missing-persons reports with airport connections were reevaluated in light of the trophies from Darrington and the architectural knowledge of his methods.

For months, demolition crews at airports in multiple states worked under new protocols, accompanied by forensic teams whenever walls were opened in older terminals. Some of Vern’s hidden tombs were discovered quickly. Others will likely remain sealed until future renovations.

In the Seattle area alone, three more sets of remains were found in concealed structural voids—each arranged with the same eerie care, each surrounded by sigils, each representing a family that had lived on question marks for years.

Two weeks after the bodies of Richard and Owen were removed from Sea-Tac, Clare Brennan attended their funeral at a cemetery overlooking Puget Sound. She had just enough time to see her husband and son laid to rest before dying in her sleep three weeks later.

“She thanked me for giving her the truth,” Chen says. “Most of the time in this job, you don’t get that. You don’t get to close a loop that big.”

At the service, Richard’s sister Helen approached Chen.

“They were supposed to be with me for Christmas,” Helen said quietly. “I stood at that gate for hours, thinking the airline had made a mistake. I never imagined…this.”

“No one could have,” Chen replied. “That’s part of what made him so dangerous. He hid where nobody thought to look.”

Families of other victims reacted with a mixture of horror and gratitude.

“I had nightmares for twenty-one years about what might have happened to them,” says Emma Holmes, younger sister of Patricia and aunt of Jessica—the mother and teenager found in Terminal A’s wall. “Now I know. It’s awful. But at least the nightmares are over. At least I don’t have to imagine anymore.”

When asked whether she believed Vern’s talk of “gates” and “sacred geometry,” Emma shook her head.

“If there’s anything supernatural, it’s that my mother and sister weren’t found sooner,” she said. “He was just a man who chose to be a monster—and he knew how to hide.”

The Marks in the Foundation

Officially, the story of Micah Carroway, the brilliant but unstable architect who reinvented himself as carpenter Thomas Vern, is one of mental illness weaponized by specialized knowledge.

Psychological evaluations of his writings describe classic systematized delusions—false beliefs arranged in a coherent framework, strengthened, not weakened, by evidence that others would find contradictory.

He found geometry everywhere, then decided geometry was sending him messages.

He found gaps in buildings, then decided those gaps needed to be fed.

The more the world failed to confirm his theories, the more elaborate the theories became.

Detective Chen knows this. She has sat through briefings with forensic psychologists. She has read more than a thousand pages of Vern’s dense handwriting, watching as his narrative twisted itself into knots.

She knows this is a story about human beings—about a father and son who boarded a flight one snowy night and never came home; about an architect whose professional pride became the backdrop for his murder; about a young woman nearly sacrificed to the delusions of a stranger; about dozens of other lives ended in the sterile corridors of airports.

She knows, rationally, that airports are not gateways between dimensions.

And yet.

As Sea-Tac moved forward with its Terminal B renovation, crews excavating deeper into the original foundation reported something unnerving to Marcus Webb, the maintenance director.

Carved into some of the oldest concrete sections, beneath layers Vern could not physically have accessed in the 1990s, they found marks—geometric symbols not unlike the ones he had drawn.

“Could be nothing,” Webb told Chen over the phone. “Could be construction marks. Could be bored workers playing games with a trowel sixty years ago. But they’re there. And they look…familiar.”

Chen’s answer was blunt.

“They’re meaningless,” she told him. “Don’t let his delusions infect you. We can’t start seeing patterns everywhere just because he did.”

Webb agreed. Mostly.

Airports, after all, are full of lines and angles by design. Patterns are inevitable in structures defined by efficiency and flow.

People like Vern see those patterns and build religion around them. Investigators like Chen see those patterns and build timelines.

In the end, the only geometry that mattered in the Brennan case was simple: one wall, two bodies, twenty-six years of unanswered questions collapsing into a single, devastating truth.

A father and son did board a plane on Christmas Eve.
They did not vanish into thin air.
They died in a space designed by professionals and weaponized by one man’s madness—hidden in plain sight, just beyond the drywall, while millions of travelers hurried past.

For the families left behind, closure is not the same as comfort. But it is something.

And for everyone who walks through an airport concourse without a second thought, the Brennan case and the Vern investigation are a reminder of a lesson detectives know all too well:

The most terrifying secrets are rarely in far-off places.

They are often just behind the nearest wall.