Two Officers Vanished From Their Patrol Car in 1993 — Clue Found in 2024 Turned the Case Upside Down | HO!!!!

Tamuk County, Oregon — On a fog-choked October night in 1993, a sheriff’s cruiser was discovered idling on the shoulder of a remote stretch of County Road 19. The headlights cut through the mist. The engine still hummed. In the back seat, a six-year-old boy, Ben Teller, lay asleep, barefoot in firetruck pajamas, wrapped in a sheriff’s department blanket. Both front doors hung open. His parents—Deputy Mark Teller and Detective Aaron Teller—were gone.

No one could explain what happened. No struggle, no blood, no radio calls for help. The dash cam’s tape was shredded, the backseat camera had been turned off. Mark’s service weapon was still holstered; Aaron’s was missing. The only witness was a child too young to remember more than a few fleeting details: his mother’s scent, his father’s voice whispering, “Don’t move. We’ll be right back,” and a shadowy figure standing in the fog behind the cruiser, watching, then gone.

For 31 years, the case haunted Tamuk County. Then, in the spring of 2024, a land survey crew stumbled onto a forgotten fallout shelter buried beneath a wooded hillside. Inside, a tarnished sheriff’s badge and a Polaroid photo of Ben, taken the very week his parents vanished, reignited one of Oregon’s most disturbing mysteries—and exposed a chilling truth, hidden for decades.

The Night That Froze a Town

October 17, 1993. The fog rolled in from the Pacific, swallowing the pines and cloaking County Road 19 in silence. When a local farmer found the cruiser, he thought it might be a trap—until he saw the sleeping boy. The sheriff arrived minutes later, peered into the car, and whispered, “What the hell were you two chasing out here?”

The investigation went nowhere. No footprints. No tire tracks. No ransom demand. The only clues: a ruined dash cam tape, a missing service weapon, and a child who remembered almost nothing—except for the feeling of being watched.

The Shelter and the Badge

In 2024, a backhoe operator named Leo Strickland was surveying runoff lines for a new property development when the ground collapsed beneath him, revealing the rusted hatch of an old fallout shelter. Deputy Mason Coyle was first on the scene. The air inside was thick with the stench of rot and rust. On a shelf, beneath layers of dust, he found the badge: “Tamuk County Sheriff 712 — M. Teller.”

Next to it, a Polaroid: Ben Teller, aged six, at his birthday party—an image never before seen by family or police. The photo had been taken the week of the disappearance, but the film was never developed until now. How did it end up in a shelter no one remembered existed?

The Son Returns

Now a criminology lecturer in Portland, Ben Teller had spent his life running from the shadows of that night. When the call came from Lieutenant Sarah Canby of the Tamuk County Sheriff’s Office, he drove south in silence, memories flooding back as the pines closed in around County Road 19.

At the shelter site, Canby showed Ben more evidence: food wrappers from the early 2000s, a child’s sneaker, and—most chilling—a journal, its cover faded, the name “Aaron Teller” pressed into the cloth. The last entry was dated 2007. Ben’s mother, it seemed, had survived for years after 1993.

A Hidden Network

The journal’s entries were cryptic. “Day 143. He won’t let me see Mark, but he lets the boy visit now. He says we’re safer down here than out there. I don’t believe him anymore.” The “boy” was not Ben. Who was he? And who was the “he” holding them captive?

A search of the woods near the original crime scene turned up more: a collapsed hunting blind, an old canteen etched with Mark Teller’s initials, and a steel shed, padlocked and hidden behind a rusted fence. Inside, officers found a corkboard covered in surveillance photos—of Ben, from childhood through adulthood, taken without his knowledge. There was also a photo album: children, some with Aaron Teller, others unknown. At the back, a note in a child’s hand: “The man in the mask says we’re not allowed to leave yet, but one day mommy said the door will open.”

The Man in the Mask

The badge found in the shelter carried a fingerprint—one that matched Curtis Lyall, a former county employee in the Civil Defense Maintenance Division, who vanished in 2002. Lyall was never a suspect in the Teller case, but he had access to every fallout shelter in the county. His trail went cold two decades ago.

But Lyall wasn’t working alone. A second, even more elusive figure emerged: Garrett Lewis KS, a master of aliases and identity theft, who had visited Lyall in a psychiatric facility in 2005. KS’s fingerprints showed up on evidence from the shelters and sheds. He had been watching Ben for years, orchestrating abductions and building a network of underground “families.”

The Truth Unravels

DNA tests shattered Ben’s world. The man he thought was his father was not his biological parent. His own identity was in question. Was he really Ben Teller, or was he “Eli”—a boy from a missing child poster, a foster child whose trail vanished in 1993? The records were too clean, too convenient, with no hospital or dental records before age six.

The woman found in the final shelter, thought to be Aaron Teller, was not his mother at all, but another missing woman, brainwashed to believe she was Aaron. KS had spent decades abducting, isolating, and reprogramming children and adults, forcing them into new identities, new “families” in a grotesque psychological experiment.

The System Exposed

Federal authorities discovered more shelters, more hidden rooms, more evidence of children raised underground, stripped of their pasts and given new names. KS’s goal was not just to abduct, but to erase and rebuild. Ben was the “proof of concept”—the child who survived, who escaped, but who never really knew who he was.

KS remained at large, always one step ahead. His network was vast, his methods chillingly effective. The case, once a local tragedy, became a national warning: the danger is not only in what is lost, but in what is rewritten and replaced.

The Unanswered Questions

As the investigation widened, Ben returned to County Road 19. He stood where the cruiser had been found, the silence as heavy as ever. He recorded a message for whoever might come next: “My name is Benjamin Elijah Teller. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe I was someone else before. A child named Eli. Subject 11. The one who got out. I don’t know anymore. But I remember enough to say this clearly: This is over. You don’t get to run the story anymore.”

The case remains open, marked “Subject Unresolved. Active Threat.” But for Ben—and for every survivor of KS’s system—the fight to reclaim their story has just begun.