Teenage Couple Vanished During Camping, Months Later Strange Evidence Found at Abandoned Tent… | HO

NORTHEAST KINGDOM, VT — In the heart of Vermont’s most remote wilderness, a battered yellow tent stood half-buried in snow, its canvas sagging under the weight of months of silence. Inside, searchers found a scene frozen in time: two damp sleeping bags, a half-empty backpack, and a single crumpled candy wrapper that would ignite more questions than it answered.

For the families of Rhett Connincaid and Odessa Vance, this discovery was both a breakthrough and a new torment—a chilling clue in a mystery that began as a simple camping trip and ended with two teenagers vanishing without a trace.

A Weekend Plan, a Disappearing Act

It was mid-September, the last warm gasp before Vermont’s forests turned gold and red. Seventeen-year-old Rhett and his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Odessa told their parents they were headed for a popular Green Mountain National Forest campground—a weekend of hiking, campfires, and late summer air.

The plan was a compromise, the result of Odessa’s mother Jacqueline’s strict rules and the teenagers’ desire for freedom. “It sounded safe,” Jacqueline later recalled. “Public campground, families everywhere, park rangers on patrol.”

But by Sunday evening, that sense of safety had evaporated. Sharon Connincaid, Rhett’s mother, stood at her kitchen window, phone in hand, eyes darting to the clock. Rhett wasn’t the type to disappear without a word. Neither was Odessa. Sharon called Rhett’s phone—straight to voicemail. Odessa’s, too. Maybe it was bad reception, she thought. But by 6:00 p.m., her gut told her something was wrong.

She grabbed her keys and headed toward the campground, the winding mountain road slick with rain, headlights cutting through heavy mist. When she arrived, a park ranger flipped through the weekend’s check-in logs. “They never checked in,” he said. That was the moment Sharon’s fear hardened into cold, focused determination.

She drove every loop of the campground—nothing. No blue Jeep, no camp chairs, no tent. Just empty sites and the damp scent of pine. In her car, Sharon opened their last text exchange. A selfie Rhett had sent Friday afternoon: his arm around Odessa, behind them rough stone walls and the shadowed mouth of a cave. The caption read, “Heading out now, see you Sunday.” It wasn’t the campground.

By 9:00 p.m., both families were at the police station. That’s when the truth came out: Rhett and Odessa had lied about their destination. Their real plan was unknown.

The Search Begins

The search started immediately. Helicopters swept low over tree canopies. K-9 units sniffed through damp undergrowth. Volunteers waded through knee-deep mud and thorn thickets. But there were no signs—no Jeep, no tent, no dropped belongings. Their phones had pinged only once after leaving home; both signals went dead within an hour of each other. It was as if the forest had swallowed them whole.

Then came a quiet, almost overlooked clue. Rhett’s uncle Barry mentioned that just days before the trip, Rhett had borrowed his handheld GPS. Investigators pulled the data from Barry’s computer. The saved route didn’t lead to the Green Mountains. It led far north, into Vermont’s most remote territory—the Northeast Kingdom.

It’s a place that lives up to its name: endless forest, glacial ponds, abandoned logging roads, and swaths of land where you can go days without seeing another soul. If you wanted to disappear—or make someone disappear—this was the place.

The search shifted north. But this was different terrain: brutal, isolating. Helicopter teams reported almost no clearings, just miles and miles of green. Weeks passed. Leaves turned to flame, then dropped. Deer season brought more boots in the woods, more chances that evidence might be trampled or carried off without anyone realizing it. By early December, snow dusted the higher elevations. The official search scaled back. For the families, the silence was suffocating.

The Tent in the Snow

Then, in January, a state contractor named Wyatt Pendergast was surveying a dense stretch of undergrowth when he spotted something unnatural among the snow-covered leaves: a tent, faded yellow, collapsed and half-buried. Inside, damp sleeping bags, a half-empty backpack, a small camping stove. Everything looked as if its owners had stepped away for a moment and never returned.

Near the fire pit, half-hidden in leaves and ash, was a candy wrapper—not just any wrapper, but Stony Patch, a brand of high-potency cannabis edibles. When police told the families, the reaction split. Jacqueline was furious, painting Rhett as reckless and possibly dangerous under the influence. Sharon pushed back: “The scene didn’t look like kids who got high and wandered off. It looked like they’d been interrupted.”

There was more. About 150 yards from the tent, down a steep ravine, searchers found Rhett’s glasses—bent, lenses cracked. Half a mile away, on an overgrown logging road, investigators spotted tire tracks. Not from Rhett’s Jeep. These were wider, deeper—a heavy-duty truck or SUV.

Theories and Leads

Two competing theories emerged. One: the teens experimented with edibles, got disoriented, and succumbed to exposure in the freezing night. Two: they were victims of foul play. Someone had found them out there—or maybe they had arranged to meet someone, and that meeting turned deadly.

Investigators followed the drug lead first. The Stony Patch edibles were traced to a small-time dealer in a nearby town. He admitted selling them to Rhett days before the trip and told police something chilling: Rhett had mentioned wanting extreme seclusion for the weekend. Not just to camp alone, but because they were meeting someone.

This was the pivot point. Who were they meeting? Why in one of the most isolated parts of Vermont? And why hadn’t that person come forward?

Forensic teams pulled everything from the teens’ social media accounts—posts, even deleted messages. They found a series of private exchanges with an older male who had been sharing survival tips and remote camping locations. The account vanished days after Rhett and Odessa went missing. It was almost certainly a fake profile, but no one could tie it to a real identity.

The Jeep still hadn’t been found. Search teams dragged ponds, scoured quarries, and walked miles of forgotten logging tracks. A few hunters recalled seeing a vehicle deep in the woods around that time. But by the time police got there, snow had erased the trail.

Unending Questions

Spring brought snowmelt and new dread. Cadaver dogs were brought back in, searching for remains that winter may have preserved, but weeks passed with no discovery. For the families, it was torture. Sharon still believed her son might be alive, possibly being held somewhere. Jacqueline believed the opposite: that they had been lured into a trap and were never coming home.

In the small Vermont town, rumors ran rampant. Some pointed to the drugs, others whispered about the older man online. Some thought the Jeep was hidden in a barn or buried in an old logging pit. But beneath all the speculation was one uncheckable truth: Rhett and Odessa had gone into the wilderness with a plan—a plan that involved someone else. And that someone has never been found.

So here’s where the mystery stands. Two teenagers vanish without a trace. An abandoned tent, a crumpled edible wrapper, a pair of broken glasses, tire tracks from a vehicle no one can identify, and a social media ghost who disappears right after they do.

A Community Haunted

For the families, the pain is unending. Sharon still drives the back roads, scanning for any sign of her son’s faded blue Jeep. Jacqueline keeps Odessa’s room exactly as it was, a shrine to a life interrupted. Both mothers attend every search briefing, every community meeting, clinging to hope or closure, whichever comes first.

Law enforcement is still listening. “We’re not giving up,” said Detective Mark O’Donnell, who took over the case last spring. “Someone knows what happened out there. Someone saw something, heard something, or helped cover it up. Until the day someone talks, this is a story with no ending.”

The Lesson of the Wilderness

The Northeast Kingdom’s forests keep their secrets well. In the absence of answers, the community holds onto memory. Every autumn, as the leaves turn and the air sharpens, Sharon and Jacqueline organize a candlelight vigil at the edge of the woods. They light lanterns and read letters, hoping the glow will reach wherever Rhett and Odessa might be.

The tent, the wrapper, the broken glasses—these are fragments of a story that refuses to resolve. For now, the wilderness is both grave and witness, a place where two teenagers vanished and where strange evidence hints at a truth just out of reach.

If you know who that person is, or if you think you’ve seen Rhett’s faded blue Jeep in a place it shouldn’t be, law enforcement is still listening. Because until the day someone talks, this is a story with no ending.