Just Creepy: Scary Stories - The Killer Who Sat By His Campfire

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

The Killer Who Sat By His CampfireLinktree: https://linktr.ee/its_just_creepySend in your story to https://www.justcreepy.net/Music by:►'Decoherence' by Scott Buckley - released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.auBusiness inquiries:►[e-mail]#scarystories #horrorstories💀As always, thanks for watching! 💀

Tonight's story takes us into one of the most rugged and beautiful mountain ranges in the American southwest. We're heading to the Santa Rita Mountains of southern Arizona, a place known for its sky island wilderness, its world-famous bird watching, and its archery deer hunts that draw experienced bow hunters from across the country. But the Santa Ritas have another reputation too. They sit roughly 15 miles north of the Mexican border, and the canyons that wind through them have been used as, smuggling corridors for decades. People disappear in those mountains. People die in those mountains. Some die from dehydration in the high country. Some die from exposure on cold October nights. And every once in a while, though it's rare, somebody is murdered. The case we're covering tonight involves a 53-year-old father of three, a devoted husband, a respected member of his community,

and one of the most experienced bow hunters in the region. He drove into the into those mountains on a clear October morning for what was supposed to be an ordinary five-day hunting trip, the same trip he'd been making, almost every year, for more than three decades. He never came home. What investigators eventually found at his campsite was so disturbing that it changed how the Pima County Sheriff's Office approaches remote area investigations to this day. And even now, more than a decade later, the case remains open. The men responsible, and there were were almost certainly two of them, have never been caught. If you enjoy long-form true-crime narration and slow burn wilderness mysteries, please click that follow button and turn on notifications

because we release new stories three times a week. If this is your first time on the podcast, welcome. Let's get into it. His name was Mark Sutherland, and if you grew up in Green Valley, Arizona, in the 1990s or the early 2000s, there's a decent chance you knew him. Mark was one of those guys who seemed to know everybody. He coached youth baseball at the community park for 14 years running. He volunteered with the local fire department. He ran an electrical contracting business out of his garage on Camino and Canto. And if your power went out on a Sunday night, Mark was the guy you called.

He was a big man, six foot two, broad through the shoulders. He had the kind of forearms you get from 40 years of hauling conduit and pulling wire through new construction. He had a salt and pepper beard that he kept trimmed close, and he wore the same beat-up Arizona Diamondbacks cap everywhere he went. By all accounts, he was patient, easygoing, slow to anger, and quick to laugh. He was the guy who'd loan you his truck for the weekend without asking why you needed it. He was the guy who'd show up at your house at 11 o'clock at night with a wire stripper and a bag of breakers, because your kid had a school project do in the morning. Mark had been married to his wife Karen for 28 years.

They'd met in high school in Green Valley, gotten married a year after graduation, and built their entire adult life within a 20-mile stretch of Southern Arizona. They had three kids together, two boys and a girl. The oldest, Mark Jr., was 26, married with a three-year-old daughter of his own. Tyler was 21, in his last year at the University of Arizona, studying environmental science. And the youngest, Hannah, was 18, just starting her freshman year at Pima Community College. By every measure that mattered, Mark Sutherland was a happy man. He had a marriage that worked. He had kids who loved him. He had a business that was paying the bills and then some. And he had his hunting. Hunting was Mark's thing. It had been his thing since he was about 10 years old

when his own father first put a youth bow in his hands and walked him through the basics out in the backyard. By the time Mark was 15, he was hunting javelina with his dad in the foothills outside Tucson. By 20, he was killing cow's white-tailed deer with his bow, which, if you know anything about archery hunting in the desert, is no small accomplishment. Cow's deer are small. They're nervous. They live in some of the most rugged country in the lower 48 states, and they have eyesight that puts most other deer species to shame. Getting close enough to a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a buck to make a clean shot with a bow takes patience, skill, and a deep understanding of the terrain. Mark had all three. For more than 30 years, Mark had been making an annual solo

hunting trip to the Santa Rita Mountains. He'd been doing it since before he had kids. He'd kept doing it after he had kids. And once his kids were old enough, sometimes they'd come along, but mostly, Mark went alone. It was his time. Karen understood, the kids understood. Once a year, for about a week, Mark Sutherland would load up his gear, drive south into the Coronado National Forest, and disappear into the canyons with his bow and his backpack. He knew those mountains better than most park rangers. He had favorite glassing knobs that he'd been using for two decades. He had a hand-drawn topographic map covered in pencil notes about water holes, game trails, and bedding areas. He kept a small leather journal in which he recorded every trip. The weather, the deep, the

the deer he saw, the deer he passed on, the deer he killed. The journal went back to the early 1990s. Forty-some entries, one for each year, written in Mark's careful block lettering. According to Karen, it was the most precious thing he owned. He kept it in a locked drawer in his garage. In October of 2012, Mark started planning his annual trip the way he always did. He spent the first two weeks of the month going through his gear in the garage. gear in the garage, sharpening broadheads, restringing his bow, packing and repacking his backpack.

He bought a new pair of boots, broke them in on the back roads near his house, and then bought a second pair of socks to match. He bought extra dehydrated meals. He had care and drive him out to the storage unit so he could grab his old wool sleeping bag, the one he'd been using since the late 1980s, the one he refused to replace even though it was patched in three places and had a busted zipper. his trip was scheduled to begin on Sunday, October 21st. He planned to leave Green Valley at about 4 in the morning, drive south on State Route 83 for about 30 minutes, and then take Forest Road 62 into the Box Canyon area on the east side of the Santa Rita's. He was going to set up a base camp in a spot he'd been using for 14 years, and he was going to hunt for five days. His plan was to

come home on Friday, October 26th. The night before he left, The whole family came over for dinner. Karen made his favorite, green chili pork stew with homemade tortillas. Mark Jr. came with his wife and their three-year-old daughter, Sophie. Tyler drove down from Tucson. Hannah came home from her dorm. They sat around the dinner table for almost two hours, talking and laughing and giving Mark a hard time about all his gear,

which was already loaded in the back of his truck. At some point during dessert, Sophie, Mark's granddad. daughter, climbed into his lap and asked him. With the kind of seriousness only a three-year-old can muster. Whether he was going to bring her back a deer, Mark told her he'd try. He said maybe this year he'd get the big one, the buck he'd been seeing on his trail cameras for three years running, a buck with antlers wide enough, in his own words, that any taxidermist in southern Arizona would be proud to mount it. Sophie didn't really understand what he was talking about, But she nodded along, very serious, and told him she'd be waiting.

After dinner, Mark walked everyone out to their cars. He hugged Mark Jr. He shook Tyler's hand. He kissed Hannah on the forehead. He picked Sophie up and held her for a long time before handing her back to her mother. Then he went back inside, sat on the couch with Karen, and watched the last 20 minutes of a Sunday night football game. At about 10 o'clock, he went to bed.

He kissed Karen on the cheat. before he turned out the light. He told her he loved her. He told her he'd be back Friday. Those were the last words he ever spoke to her in their home. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and Game Sense remind you to play responsibly.

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The next morning, Karen heard Mark moving around the house at 3.30 in the morning. She heard him in the kitchen making coffee. She heard the front door open and close as he loaded the last of his gear. She heard his truck start up out in the driveway. And then she heard him pull away down Camino and Canto, heading south towards State Route 83. She rolled over and went back to sleep. She had no reason to worry. He'd done this trip 32 times before.

He knew those mountains. He knew what he was doing. And as far as she knew, the weather forecast for the week was perfect. Sunny days, cold nights, no rain expected, no wind. Mark drove south on State Route 83, the same route he always took. It's a beautiful drive in the early morning. The road climbs out of the Santa Cruz Valley and winds through rolling. grassland country, with the Santa Rita Mountains rising up to the west, and the wetstone mountains

visible in the distance to the east. As Mark drove, the sky started to turn pink. He'd told Karen once that this drive was his favorite part of the whole trip. There was something about heading out into the wild before the sun came up. Something about being alone on that road with the dawn breaking around him. He'd kept that part of the trip private for 30 years, just him, the road, and mountains. He pulled off State Route 83 at the turnoff for Forest Road 62 at about 4.45 in the morning. He stopped at a small pullout to air down his tires, a habit he'd developed for the rough forest roads, and he sent a quick text message to Karen. The text read, exactly, made it to the turnoff, beautiful morning, love you, talk soon. Karen would get that text when she woke up at six.

She'd reply with a heart emoji and tell him to be safe. She would never hear from him again. From the turnoff at State Route 83, Forest Road 62, winds west into the foothills of the Santa Ritas. It's not a road for sedans. It's a rough, rocky, washboarded track that requires high clearance, and after about eight miles, it gets steep enough that most vehicles need four-wheel drive. Mark's truck was a 2004 Ford F-250, with 33. inch tires and a custom lift kit. He'd built it himself over the course of about three years.

It could drive over anything Mark would find in those mountains. Mark's base camp was located in a small clearing about 12 miles up Forest Road 62, off a spur road that wasn't on most maps. He'd discovered the spot in 1998 when he was looking for a place to set up out of sight of the main forest road. He didn't want to be bothered by other hunters. He didn't want to be chivalred by other hunters. He didn't want to be checked on by border patrol agents who sometimes drove the main forest roads at night looking for smugglers. He just wanted a quiet place where he could be alone. The spur road dead ended at a flat patch of ground about a hundred feet across, ringed by oak trees and mesquite, with a clear view to the east. He could pull his truck in, set up his tent, hang his food bag

from a sturdy branch, and have a comfortable camp that almost nobody would ever stumble across by accident. In 14 years of using that spot, he'd never once seen another camper there, not once. Mark arrived at his camp at about 6.15 in the morning. The sun was just coming up over the wetstones to the east. The temperature was in the high 40s. The air was still. He spent the next hour setting up his tent, organizing his gear, and getting ready for an afternoon hunt. At 7.30, he sent Karen one more text message. This one said, camp's up, going to glass the south slope this afternoon, saw fresh tracks on the way in, feeling good. That was the last time anyone heard from Mark Sutherland. Now here's where

I have to take a step back, because the next several days of Mark's trip are largely unaccounted for. Investigators have pieced together some of what Mark probably did between Sunday morning and Tuesday evening, but a lot of it is guesswork based on his gear, his journal entries, and the way his camp was set up when it was eventually discovered. What we do know is this. Mark's hunting journal, which was found undisturbed in the small lockbox he kept in his tent, has entries for Sunday afternoon, Sunday evening, Monday morning, Monday afternoon, and Monday evening. Those entries described the weather, the wildlife he saw, the terrain he covered, and his impressions of the area. He noted a herd of about seven doze feeding in a draw on Sunday afternoon. He noted hearing

a mountain lion calling somewhere up on the high slopes after dark on Sunday night. He noted seeing fresh black bear scat on Monday morning. He noted a young eight-point buck on Monday afternoon that he chose not to shoot because he was holding out for the bigger one he'd been seeing on his trail cameras for three years. The Monday evening entry is the last one Mark Sutherland ever wrote. It reads in full. Cold tonight. Wind picking up out of the north. Saw the big one this evening just for a second,

crossing the ridge above the saddle. He's still here. Tomorrow I'll get up before light and try to be on that ridge by shooting time. If everything works out, I might be packing him out by Tuesday afternoon. That entry is signed and dated in Mark's careful handwriting.

October 22nd, 9.45 p.m. We don't know what happened on Tuesday, October 23rd. We have no journal entry. We have no text messages. We have no phone activity. Mark's cell phone, recovered later from his sleeping bag, last connected to a cell tower at 517 on Tuesday morning, which would be consistent with him hiking out of camp to get into position for the morning hunt. After that, his phone never connected to a tower again. It was probably either out of range or turned off for the rest of the day. But what investigators do know is that this. Sometime on Tuesday evening, between roughly 6 and 11 p.m., Mark Sutherland was attacked at his

campsite. He didn't fight back. He didn't run. He didn't even sit up. And whoever did it spent some amount of time at the scene, before and after, that defies every rational explanation investigators have been able to come up with. We'll get to that. But first, we have to talk about how Mark was found. Because that part of the story is its own kind of awful. Mark was supposed to come home on Friday, October 26th. Karen expected him at the house by around 8 in the evening. He always made the drive home on the last day of his trip. He never camped Friday night and drove home Saturday.

Never. He liked to be home for the weekend with his family, sleeping in his own bed. By 6 o'clock on Friday evening, Karen started keeping an eye on the driveway. By 8, she was starting to wonder if he'd hit traffic. By nine, she'd tried to call him three times. By ten, she was leaving voicemails. By midnight, she was sitting on the front porch with a cup of coffee, trying to convince herself that everything was fine.

Maybe he'd gotten a deer and was taking longer to pack it out. Maybe his truck had broken down somewhere out of cell range. She didn't sleep that night. At six in the morning on Saturday, October 27th, Karen called Mark Jr. She told him his dad hadn't come home. Mark Jr. was at his parents' house within 20 minutes, still in the clothes he'd slept in. He'd grabbed his own truck keys on the way out the door because he knew, even before he got there, that the two of them were probably going to be driving south into the mountains by lunchtime.

The two of them made a decision together. They didn't want to overreact. Mark was a grown man, an experienced hunter, in country he knew. There were a hundred mundane reasons he might be late, a flat tire on the forest road. a successful hunt that was taking longer to butcher and pack out, a chance encounter with another hunter that had turned into a long evening by a campfire. Mark wasn't the kind of man you sent search and rescue after at the first sign of a delay. He'd never forgive them for embarrassing him. So they waited. They waited until 10 o'clock. And when Mark still hadn't called, hadn't texted, hadn't pulled into the driveway. Mark Jr. picked up the phone and called

the Pima County Sheriff's Office and reported his father, missing. The Sheriff's Office took the report seriously. Pima County handles a lot of missing persons cases in the desert and in the mountains. It comes with the territory. They have experienced search and rescue teams trained for exactly this kind of situation, and a deputy was dispatched to the Sutherland home within the hour to take a full statement from Karen and Mark Jr. The deputy needed to know where exactly Mark had gone, and here's where the family ran into the first real problem. Mark had been camping in that spot for 14 years. He'd never given anybody precise GPS coordinates. He'd told Karen generally that he camped off Forest Road 62, somewhere up in the Box

Canyon area. That was the extent of the location information she had. She didn't know which spur road. She didn't know which clearing. She didn't even know exactly how far up Forest Road 62 his camp was located. The deputy explained that Forest Road 62 extends for more than 20 miles into the Sanaritas, and that there are dozens of spur roads, pull-offs, and informal pull-out camping spots along the way. Without more specific information, they were going to have to search a very large area. Mark Jr., Tyler and Karen, all started trying to remember anything they could. They went through old photos Mark had texted home from previous trips,

trying to identify landmarks in the backgrounds. They opened up his hunting journals, but Mark had been careful over the years, never to write down the exact location of his camp. Even in his own private journal, he referred to it only as the spot. The closest thing to a clue was a single hand-drawn map in the front of his 1999 journal, a rough pencil sketch of Forest Road 62, with a small X marked at what looked like a spur road, about 12 miles up. That map was the best lead they had. By two in the afternoon on Saturday, search and rescue had mobilized. Two Pima County deputies, four search and rescue volunteers,

and a tracker from the Arizona Game and Fish Department, began driving up Forest Road 62. They were looking for Mark's truck. They figured that once they found the truck, they'd find the camp. And once they found the camp, they'd find Mark, or at least find out what had happened to him. The first day's search turned up nothing. The team drove the full length of Forest Road 62

and checked every spur road they could see from the main track. They didn't find the truck. They didn't find any sign of mark. They didn't find anyone. Period. The road was empty. They called the search off at sunset and resumed at first light on Sunday morning. By mid-morning Sunday, they'd expanded the search area

to include all of the spur roads in the Box Canyon area, and they'd called in a helicopter from the Department of Public Safety to do aerial reconnaissance. The helicopter started its search at the lower end of Forest Road 62 and worked its way up, flying slow, low passes over every clearing and every dry wash within a mile of the road. The helicopter spotted Mark's truck at about 1115 on Sunday morning, October 28. The truck was parked exactly where Mark had left it. At the dead end of an unmarked spur road,

about 12 miles up Forest Road 62, in a flat clearing ringed by Oaks and Mesquite. The helicopter pilot radioed the location to the ground team. A ground team was dispatched to the site immediately. They arrived at the campsite at 120 in the afternoon. What they found there is the part of this story I have to be careful with. The details are graphic. The family of Mark Sutherland still grieves him, and I want to handle this with the respect it deserves.

So I'm going to walk you through what investigators saw, but I'm going to keep some of the more disturbing specifics general. If you've ever lost somebody close to you, you'll understand why I'm doing it this way. The clearing was quiet when the ground team arrived. There was no wind. The sun was high and warm, but the air had that particular dry chill that the Santa Rita's get in late October. When the days are pleasant, but the nights drop below freezing. The temperature was probably in the low 60s. The first thing the deputies noticed was Mark's truck.

It was parked exactly where he'd left it almost a week earlier. Nothing about the truck looked disturbed. The doors were locked. The windows were intact. There were no visible signs of forced entry. The deputies later confirmed that nothing inside the cab appeared to have been taken. Mark's wallet, his sunglasses, a paperback novel, a small cooler, and his 1999 journal with the hand-drawn map were all still inside.

Even the spare key he kept under the floor mat was still there. Whoever had been at this camp wasn't here for the truck. The second thing the deputies noticed was Mark's tent. The tent was a four-person dome tent that Mark had owned for about six years. It was set up on the east side of the clearing, in the exact spot where he'd always pitched it. The rainfly was on, the stakes were in the ground, and the tent looked from a distance completely undisturbed.

But as the deputies got closer, they could see something wrong with the front of the tent. The front zipper had been cut open. A long, clean, vertical slice ran from the top of the door all the way down to the bottom. It hadn't been ripped. It hadn't been torn. It had been cut, carefully and slowly,

by someone using a very sharp blade. One of the deputies, a man with about 15 years of experience working in the Santa Rita's, drew his sidearm and called out Mark's name. There was no answer. He called out again, still nothing. He approached the tent slowly, gave one more verbal warning, and then carefully pulled back the cut flap and looked inside. Mark Sutherland was inside the tent. He was wrapped in his old wool sleeping bag, the one with the patches and the busted zipper. He was lying on his right side. His head was on his small camping pillow. His head was hands were tucked up under his chin. He was, by all appearances, deceased. He had been deceased for

some time. I'm going to stop here for a second because I want you to picture the position Mark was in when he was found. He wasn't sitting up. He wasn't reaching for a weapon. He wasn't crouched in a defensive posture. He was in his sleeping bag. His hands were tucked under his chin. There was no sign that he had been moving when he died. Mark Sutherland had been killed in his sleep. But, And this is the part that didn't add up at first. There was evidence outside the tent that suggested the killer or killers had spent time in the camp before going for Mark. The campfire had been recently used. The ashes were old, but they showed multiple distinct burnings.

Fires built up over the course of an evening, not a single fire that had burned out hours before. There was a half-empty bottle of cheap whiskey sitting on a log near the fire ring, a brand of whiskey that Mark, by his family's account, had never drunk in his life. There was a folding camp chair set up on the opposite side of the fire from Mark's chair, the chair he always brought with him, a beat-up green canvas chair that Karen had bought him for Christmas in 2003. The chair on the opposite side wasn't Mark's. It was a different chair entirely, smaller, with red fabric in a metal frame. And on the ground next to that chair was a freshly opened can of beans,

Half eaten, with a spoon still resting in it. The 2006 Chevrolete Equinox awarded the most dependable compact SUV in the U.S. by J.D. Power. It's designed for your everyday. And with available all-wheel drive, you can handle your to-do list with total confidence. Start your build at Chevrolet.ca. Details at J.D.Power.com. Off to the side, the deputies found three cigarette butts pressed into the dirt. Somebody had been at Mark's camp. Somebody had sat by his fire.

somebody had eaten food and drunk whiskey and smoked cigarettes. And then, at some point, that somebody had walked over to Mark's tent, cut the door open with a knife, and killed him while he was asleep. The deputies backed out of the camp. They didn't touch anything. They radioed in what they'd found and requested a full crime scene response. Within two hours, the campsite was being processed by detectives from the Pima County Sheriff's Office homicide unit. By late afternoon, Mark's body was being prepared for transport to the medical examiner's office in Tucson.

The drive out of the Santa Rita's that afternoon was one of the longest drives those deputies ever made. They knew what waited for them back in Green Valley. They knew Karen Sutherland was sitting in her kitchen, waiting for news. They knew Mark Jr. and Tyler and Hannah were sitting with her. They knew that within the next few hours, somebody was going to have to drive up to that house, knock on that door. and tell that family that Mark wasn't coming home, that somebody was a Pima County detective named Robert Mendoza. Detective Mendoza had been with the sheriff's office for 18 years at that point,

and he'd done dozens of next-of-kin notifications over the course of his career. Years later, after he'd retired, he gave an interview to a Tucson newspaper in which he talked about the Sutherland notification. He said it was the hardest one he ever did. He said Karen Sutherland answered the door, took one look at his face and started crying before he could say a word. She knew. The moment she opened the door, she knew. In the days that followed, the Pima County Sheriff's Office launched what would become

one of the largest and longest-running homicide investigations in the department's history. Mark's body was autopsied on Monday, October 29th. The medical examiner determined that Mark had been killed by a single, deep stab wound to the throat, delivered while he was lying on his right side in his sleeping bag. The wound was caused by a large heavy-bladed knife, something on the order of a hunting knife or a bowie knife, a blade at least seven or eight inches long, with a clip point. The angle of the wound indicated that the killer had been kneeling

or crouching beside Mark's head when the blow was delivered. The wound was a single, clean strike. There were no defensive wounds on Mark's hands or arms. There was no sign of struggle inside the tent. The medical examiner concluded that Mark had been either asleep or just beginning to wake up when he was killed and that he had almost certainly been unconscious within seconds. He probably never knew what was happening to him.

That was the only mercy in any of it. The medical examiner estimated the time of death at some time between Tuesday evening, October 23rd, and Wednesday morning, October 24th. That estimate was based on the condition of the body, the temperatures recorded in the area during that period, and the contents of Mark's stomach, which suggested he'd eaten his last meal, a freeze-dried beef stroganoff packet, sometime around seven or eight in the evening on Tuesday. So we know this much. On Tuesday evening, Mark came back to camp from his afternoon hunt. He built a fire. He ate dinner. He got into his tent. He climbed into his sleeping bag. He went to sleep, and then, sometime that night, somebody walked into his camp. Investigators turned the campsite inside out for clues.

They worked the scene for three full days, mapping every footprint, photographing every piece of evidence, collecting samples of everything that might possibly carry DNA. What they found, taken together, started to paint a picture, but a strange and confusing one. First, they found footprints. The killer or killers had left clear tracks in the soft soil around the fire ring and around Mark's tent. There were two distinct sets of boot prints. One set was from a size 10 or 11 boot with a heavy, aggressive lug sole, the kind of

soul you'd find on a military-style combat boot. The other set was from a size 8 or 9 boot with a smoother, flatter tread, probably a cheap work boot or a hiking shoe. Neither set of prints matched any of Mark's boots, which were all accounted for, either in his tent or in his truck. Two killers then, probably. Second, they found cigarette butts. Three of them pressed into the dirt around the red camp chair where the second person had been sitting. The cigarettes were a Mexican brand called Farros, which is not commonly sold in the United States,

though it is available at some specialty stores in border towns, and at some of some of the smoke shops in Tucson. Third, they found a strange item at the edge of the clearing, partially buried in pine needles and oak leaves. It was a small, dirty backpack, about the size of a school backpack, made of cheap nylon, and patched in several places with duct tape. Inside the backpack, investigators found two empty plastic water bottles with Spanish labels, a folded-up Mexican newspaper from about three weeks earlier, a small pocket knife, a half-a half-and-a half- eaten package of Maria cookies, and, most interestingly, a single 9mm handgun cartridge, no gun, just the one bullet, loose in the bottom of the pack, fourth, and this is the detail

that, when investigators figured out what it meant, changed the entire direction of the case, they found a faint trail leading away from the campsite. The trail was hard to see at first. The killer or killers had clearly tried to walk on hard ground where they could, avoiding the soft dirt, that would have held their tracks. But a game and fish tracker, working with a Border Patrol agent who'd been brought in specifically because of his experience reading trails in that part of the country, was able to follow the trail. It went up and over a small ridge to the north of the campsite. It dropped down into a narrow draw, and it continued northwest, for what investigators eventually determined was about three-quarters of a mile. At the end of that trail, hidden in a small

box canyon that wasn't visible from any near. nearby ridges, investigators found something that completely transformed the way they were looking at this case. There was a fire ring. There were the remains of three or four bed rolls, made from cheap blankets and cardboard. There were several empty food cans, mostly the same Mexican brand of beans that had been left at Mark's camp. There was a stack of empty plastic water jugs, also Mexican labeled. And most importantly, there were a series of carefully concealed bundles wrapped in burlap and duct tape, hidden under a pile of branches at the back of the canyon. When investigators opened the bundles, they found marijuana.

Approximately 140 pounds of it, a drug pack, what's known in border country as a Machilero load, had been moved through the Santa Rita Mountains, and the pack train had camped within a mile of Mark Sutherland's hunting camp. This is when the investigators started putting the pieces together, and this is when the case took the turn that has defined it ever since. If you've never heard of the Santa Rita Smuggling Corridor, here's the quick version. The Santa Rita Mountains, and especially the eastern flank of the range where Mark had been camping,

sit along a well-known cross-border smuggling route. Drug packs from Mexico cross the border somewhere south of Patagonia, Arizona, or south of Nogales, Arizona. They move northward on foot through the public land, of the Coronado National Forest. Their goal is to reach pickup points along State Route 83, or further north near Interstate 10, where vehicles will be waiting to take the loads onto Tucson and beyond. The Packers, the Mochilleros, typically travel in groups of three to six men. They're usually young, they're often armed, though not always. Each man carries somewhere

between 40 and 60 pounds of marijuana on his back. They walk at night. They sleep during the day. They avoid trails. They avoid hunters. They avoid border patrol. And most of all, they avoid being seen. They don't want trouble. Trouble means losing the load. Trouble means going to federal prison. Trouble means failing the people who paid them. And the people who paid them are not people you want to fail. So why then would a pack of machileros go out of their way to kill a sleeping hunter at his own campsite? That question has been at the center of the Sutherland investigation for more than a decade. And investigators have, after years of work, developed what they believe is the most likely answer. Here's their theory. Sometime on Tuesday evening, October 23rd,

a machoero pack, probably four to six men, moved into the small box canyon north of Mark's campsite. They set up a temporary camp, probably planning to rest there for several hours before moving on after midnight. They didn't know that Mark Sutherland was camped less than a mile away. They had no reason to know. Mark's camp was in a spot that wasn't on any official map, down a spur road that wasn't on any map either. But at some point during the evening, two of the men in the pack, probably the security element, the scouts whose job it was to check the surrounding area for danger, walked south over the ridge to do their job. They walked down into the clearing, and there in the middle of the clearing, they saw Mark's camp. They probably watched it for a while

from the trees. They saw a truck. They saw a tent. They saw a man sitting by a fire, eating dinner alone. They saw a hunter, a man who, by definition, was the kind of person who paid attention to his surroundings, who knew. the land, who would notice unusual sign, who might conceivably report something to the authorities if he saw something that didn't fit, and then, instead of doing what they should have done, which was to back away, return to their pack, and rout around Mark's camp without ever being seen, they did something else. This is the part of the case that's still debated, even by the investigators who've worked it longest. Why did they kill him? Mark hadn't seen them. He had

He had no idea they were there. He was sitting by his fire eating beef stroganov. He was going to crawl into his tent, go to sleep, and wake up the next morning with no knowledge whatsoever of the men in the canyon to his north. They could have walked right past his camp at 3 in the morning, 20 feet from his tent, and he would have never known. The leading theory, and this is the theory that Pima County investigators, working with the DEA and with Border Patrol intelligence, eventually came to believe, is that the two men who killed Mark weren't ordinary moteleros. They were the security element of the pack. Each pack train usually has one or two men whose job is not to carry drugs but to protect the load.

These men are armed. They're often more experienced than the packers. They're often more violent. And they're often the ones who handle problems that come up along the way. The theory goes that the security elements saw Mark's camp, recognized the truck, recognized that this was an experienced hunter who knew the country, and decided that it wasn't worth the risk of leaving him alive. The pack was carrying about 140 pounds of marijuana.

At the street prices of 2012, that load was worth somewhere between $60,000 and $100,000. The penalty for getting caught with it was a long federal prison sentence. The penalty for leaving even a sleeping witness alive was, in their calculation, just too high. So they made a decision. They walked into Mark's camp. They sat by his fire and waited. They waited until Mark got into his tent. They waited until they were sure he was asleep. And then, at some point in the late evening or the early morning hours, they walked over to Mark's tent, cut open the door, and killed him. After he was dead, they left. They didn't take anything. They didn't ransack the camp. They didn't take the truck.

They didn't take his bow or his wallet or his journal or his phone. They left Mark in his sleeping bag, zipped the cut flap of the tent back as best they could, and walked back up over the ridge. They rejoined their pack. They probably moved out of the canyon within an hour. By Wednesday morning, the pack was probably 10 or 12 miles further north, on its way to whatever drop point had been arranged out near the highway. The marijuana cache that investigators found in the Box Canyon was probably an abasement. abandoned load, investigators believe that something spooked the pack between Wednesday morning and Saturday, possibly the presence of Border Patrol agents in the area, possibly internal conflict

within the pack about what had happened at Mark's camp, possibly something else entirely. Whatever it was, the men left the load behind and never came back for it. The bundles had been sitting in that canyon for at least three or four days when they were found. In the months that followed, the Pima County Sheriff's Office, working with the FBI, the DEA, the Border Patrol, and law enforcement agencies in Mexico, conducted an enormous investigation aimed at identifying the men who killed Mark Sutherland. DNA was recovered from the cigarette butts and from the half-eaten can of beans at the campsite. Fingerprints were lifted from the whiskey bottle, from the can, and from the spoon. The boot prints were photographed, measured, and compared against databases of known smuggling crews.

The backpack, the cheap nylon school bag found at the edge of the clearing, was traced as far as possible. It turned out to be a brand sold at thousands of small markets and bus stations throughout northern Mexico. Untraceable. For a brief period in late 2012, investigators thought they had a real lead. The DNA from one of the cigarette butts came back as a partial mess. match to a man in a federal database. I'm not going to give his name on this channel, for reasons that will become clear in a moment. But this man was a known low-level associate of the Sinaloa cartel. He had a criminal record in the United States for a marijuana smuggling conviction in 2007.

He'd served 18 months in federal prison, been deported back to Mexico, and was believed in 2012 to be living somewhere in Northern Sonora, working as a courier and occasional pack guide for cross-border drug shipments. Detectives traveled to Mexico. They coordinated with Mexican federal police. Together, they identified an address in the city of Magdalena where the man was believed to be staying with relatives.

A raid was planned. A coordinated takedown was being prepared for early 2013. But before the raid could happen, the man was found dead in a ditch outside. Magdalena with three gunshot wounds to the head. The killing was attributed to internal cartel violence. He'd apparently fallen out of favor with someone above him, and someone above him had ordered him removed. Whatever he knew about Mark Sutherland's death, he took with him into that ditch. The second set of DNA, the DNA from the can of beans, which investigators believed had been left

by the second killer, never matched anybody in any law enforcement database. The man who'd sat by Mark's fire and eaten Mark's food has, as far as investigators know, never been formally identified. He's almost certainly the man who actually killed Mark, the one who cut open the tent and made the final fatal move. He's almost certainly still alive somewhere south of the border, and he's almost certainly still working in some capacity for one of the cartels in northern Mexico. Or, and this is the haunting possibility that investigators have wrestled with for years,

He might be dead too. The men who carry packs and protect loads for the cartels don't tend to live long lives. There's a real chance that the man who killed Mark Sutherland was killed himself, sometime in the years that followed, in some cartel-related shootout in Sonora or Sinolaoa or Chihuahua. His body might be in an unmarked grave. His DNA profile might be sitting in the FBI's database forever, waiting for a match that's never going to come, because the man it belongs to has been. been in the dirt for a decade, we may never know. In the years between 2012 and today, the Pima County Sheriff's Office has chased down dozens of leads on the Sutherland case. None of them have panned out. In 2015, an informant working in Tucson told investigators he'd heard a rumor about a Sutherland-style killing being talked about by a former Machilero who'd been arrested in Phoenix on a different drug charge. The informant didn't have a name. He had a story, a story about a hunter who'd been

killed in his sleep in the mountains south of Tucson. The informant said the former Mochillero had been bragging about it at a party. By the time investigators tracked the man down, the former Mochellero had been transferred to a federal facility and refused to talk. The lead went cold. In 2018, a man arrested in Nogales on a separate trafficking charge, told investigators he had information about the Sutherland case. He wanted a sentencing deal. When detectives interviewed him, his information turned out to be a fabrication.

He'd seen news coverage of the case and had made up a story to use as leverage. He got no deal. Another dead end. In 2021, a journalist working on a podcast about cold cases in the Southwest, contacted the sheriff's office with information she'd developed from sources inside Mexico.

she'd heard a name being mentioned in connection with the Sutherland killing, a name that had come up in conversations among former cartel members. The sheriff's office took her information seriously. They investigated the name. They found that it belonged to a man who'd been dead in Mexico for nearly seven years, shot in a parking lot outside a bar in Hermosio in 2015. Another dead end. And so the case sits.

The evidence is in storage in. Tucson. The file is on a detective's desk at the Pima County Sheriff's Office. The DNA profile of the unknown killer, the man who sat by Mark Sutherland's fire and waited for him to fall asleep, is in the national database, where it has been for more than a decade. It's checked against every new sample that comes in. So far, no hits. That doesn't mean it'll never happen. Cold cases get solved every day. Family members of perpetrators submit their DNA to ancestry web sites. Long-buried evidence gets reprocessed with new technology. Confessions come in from prisons. Informants come forward. The case is still active. The case is still open. The case is still alive.

Whoever killed Mark Sutherland is still out there. And every day that passes is one more day they have to spend looking over their own shoulder, knowing that the case has not been forgotten, and knowing that the men who are looking for them have not stopped looking. In the years since Mark's death, the Sutherland family has done what every family in their situation eventually has to do. They've gone on. They've kept living. They've raised the kids, run the business, paid the bills, gotten on with the long, slow work of being alive after somebody you loved has been taken from you. Karen is still living in the house on Camino and Canto. She kept the truck in the garage for two years after the funeral, untouched, with Mark's old hunting jacket still hanging from a hook in the cab. In 2014,

she finally sold it to a young man from Tucson who'd just gotten his first full-time job. She used the money to take her kids and her granddaughter on a trip to Yellowstone, somewhere Mark had always wanted to go, but had never gotten around to. Mark Jr. runs the electrical contracting business his father started. He kept the same name, the same logo, the same phone number. He kept the same handwritten ledger book that Mark had used since the 1990s. He hired an apprentice and then another. and the business has actually grown.

There are four trucks now, where there used to be one. Some of Mark's old customers still call up and ask for Big Mark, and Mark Jr. still answers the phone the way his dad used to answer it. Sutherland Electric, this is Mark. It's the closest thing they have to keeping him around. Tyler graduated from the University of Arizona, and now works as a high school science teacher in Sawarita. He teaches biology, and he takes his student.

students on field trips into the desert and the foothills. Some of the kids he teaches were born after his father died. Some of them have heard the story. Most of them have not. Tyler hasn't decided yet whether he wants to tell them. Hannah finished her degree at the University of Arizona and is married now with two children of her own. Her oldest, a boy, is named Mark. Sophie, Mark's granddaughter, the one who'd asked him to bring her back a deer, is now a

teenager. She has a photograph of her grandfather on her bedroom dresser. In the photograph, Mark is wearing his beat-up Diamondback's cap. He's holding a small Coos white tail, smiling at the camera. The photograph was taken in the Santa Rita Mountains in 2010 by a friend of his, who'd come along on the trip that year. Sophie has had the photograph in a frame since she was old enough to understand who the man in it was. She talks about him sometimes. She's heard the story. Every year on October 23rd, the whole family gathers at Mark's grave at the cemetery in Green Valley. They bring flowers. They share memories. They tell the same stories they tell every year. About the time Mark fell off the roof putting up Christmas lights. About the time he got lost in

Sabino Canyon with the kids. About the green chili sauce he loved. Karen always brings a small bottle of that sauce and leaves it at the headstone. It's a small thing. But it's the kind of small thing you do when somebody's gone. The hunting journal Mark kept for almost 40 years sits on a shelf in the Sutherland family living room. Mark Jr. reads from it sometimes, on quiet evenings. The last entry, the one written on the night before he died, has been read so many times that the paper at the corner of the page has worn soft. Mark Jr. is careful with that page now. He doesn't read it as often. The family has, by their own admission, given up real hope that the men who killed Mark will ever be caught. But they haven't given up the fight to keep his case from being

forgotten. In 2017, on the fifth anniversary of Mark's death, Karen and Mark Jr. gave an interview to a Tucson television station. Karen sat on her front porch with the Santa Rita Mountains visible behind her in the distance. And she said something that stayed with me ever since I first read it. She said, I look at those mountains every day. I look at them in the morning when I'm making coffee. I look at them in the evening when I'm walking the dog. I look at them, and I know that whoever did this to my husband, they walked out of those mountains. They walked back across the border. They went home to their own families. They had Christmas. They had birthdays. They had children of their own, maybe. And they've been living their lives ever since while my husband has been in the

ground. I don't know how a person does that. I don't know how a person carries that. But somebody is carrying it, and I hope, before they die, they tell somebody. I hope before they die, somebody hears the truth. There's something about this case that's bothered me for a long time. I want to share it with you before we close out tonight, because I think it's the detail that separates this story from other wilderness murders that have happened along the border over the years. It's the detail about the fire.

The killers didn't ambush mark on the trail. They didn't shoot him from a distance with a rifle. They didn't catch him by surprise out in the open during the day. They came into his camp. They sat by his fire, knowing he was asleep in his tent 10 feet away. They ate his food. They drank their own whiskey. They smoked their own cigarettes.

And then they killed him. That sequence of events tells you something about the men who did it. It tells you they weren't panicked. It tells you they weren't frightened. It tells you they weren't actually. weren't acting in self-defense, or out of any kind of immediate threat, it tells you they were comfortable, comfortable enough to sit by a fire next to a sleeping man, for what was probably an hour, maybe two hours, before they killed him in cold blood and walked away into the dark.

Think about that. Think about what kind of person can do that. Think about what kind of person can sit by a campfire next to a man who's about to die at his hand, a man whose life he's about to take, for no reason other than convenience, and just sit there, quietly, eating, smoking, waiting. There's a name for men like that. There's a word for the kind of mind that can do something like that, and then go home, and then eat dinner, and then sleep, and then wake up the next day and do whatever needs to be done next. I don't think Mark Sutherland was killed by ordinary smugglers. I don't think he was killed.

by men who were scared, or panicked, or worried about getting caught. I think he was killed by men who, by that point in their lives, had already killed before. Men for whom killing a stranger in his sleep wasn't an act of survival or self-defense. It was just a chore, just something that had to be done, the kind of task you handle, and then forget about, and then move on with your night. And at least one of those men, the man whose DNA is still sitting in a database, unmatched, waiting, is, in all likelihood, still alive, somewhere, living his life. He's somebody's neighbor. He's somebody's brother. He's somebody's father, maybe. He gets up in the morning. He drinks his coffee. He goes about his day. He doesn't think about Mark Sutherland very often, probably. To him,

Mark was just another problem in another canyon on another night 10 or 12 years ago. One job out of dozens, a small thing, forgettable. But the man who killed Mark Sutherland forgot something important. He forgot that he left his DNA on a can of beans. And one of these days, maybe next year, maybe in 10 years, maybe when he's an old man and somebody in his family submits a saliva swab to one of those genealogy websites, one of these days, that DNA is going to find a match. And when it does, the men who've been looking for him will come. The Pima County Shepa, Sheriff's Office continues to investigate the murder of Mark Sutherland. Anyone with information about the case is encouraged to contact the department's homicide unit.

There is a standing reward of $15,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible. If you ever find yourself camping in the Santa Rita Mountains, and I hope you do, because they are genuinely some of the most beautiful country in the American Southwest, be careful out there. Pay attention to your surroundings. trust your gut If something feels wrong Leave don't go back Don't talk yourself out of it

Most of the people you'll meet in those mountains are good people Hunters Hikers Birdwatchers Border Patrol agents Ranchers Rangers But every once in a while

Somebody else moves through that country Somebody who isn't a good person at all And there's no way to tell From a distance Which one you're looking at Mark Sutherland was an experienced bow hunter. He knew those mountains. He'd been camping in that exact spot for 14 years without ever having a single problem.

He did everything right. He took every precaution. He was alone, but he was prepared. And one night in October of 2012, the wrong men walked over the ridge and into his camp. I want to thank you for spending this hour with me tonight. If this story moved you, please let me know in the comments. Tell me what you think happened that night. Tell me whether you think the men who killed Mark Sutherland are still alive,

somewhere out there, or whether they're long dead in some unmarked grave south of the border. Tell me whether you think this case will ever be solved. And I'd love to hear your theory. And if you're new to the podcast, if this is your first story with us, please follow and turn on notifications. We put out new long-form stories like this three times every week.

We cover real cases. wilderness mysteries, unsolved crimes, and the kind of stories that don't get told anywhere else. Leaving a review also helps us out tremendously. Mark Sutherland was 53 years old when he was killed. He left behind a wife, three children, and a granddaughter who never really got the chance to grow up knowing him. His case is open. His killers have not been found. But the men looking for them have not stopped looking.

Until next time, Stay safe out there. Watch your back when you're far from home. And always, always remember, the most dangerous predator in the woods is almost never the one with four legs.