Season 4 of The Unforgotten is here!
Was Christopher Whiteley really the first fatal victim of a mountain lion attack in Texas history, or something even darker?
Hey there!
It’s Wes. I hope the holiday season is off to a merry start for you. My wife, Laura, and I spent Thanksgiving week in the Piney Woods, where I’m from.
The two most “East Texas” things I did was to carve a Greenberg smoked turkey for our family dinner and to help my college-age nephew skin a squirrel, something I hadn’t done in fifteen years.
Back in 2010, I was writing my first book, Running the River, when I went so broke that I ended up subsisting on feral hogs, wood ducks, catfish and more than a handful of squirrels, plus vegetables from a big garden.
A decade later, in December of 2020, I was working at Texas Monthly when a perplexing story crossed my desk. A 28-year-old man named Christopher Whiteley had been found dead in the woods near the tiny town of Lipan, Texas—and the local sheriff’s office said he’d been killed by a mountain lion.
If sheriff’s investigators were right about that, Christopher had entered the history books, unfortunately, as the first person to ever die by a mountain lion attack in Texas that we know of. Sure, it could have happened in ancient times, but not in the last few hundred years.
This was a huge deal. It made international news.
Game wardens, wildlife biologists and a veteran mountain lion trapper all rushed in to track down the killer cat. They looked at all the kill site and other evidence and quickly reached an entirely different conclusion. They said the sheriff’s office had it all wrong. Their worry: Was some person about to get away with murder?
Given the conflicting opinions about the case, and the lack of evidence pointing toward a mountain lion, a lot of people—myself included—were stunned when the sheriff’s office stuck by their original theory and closed the case.
Five years later, we still don’t really know what happened to Christopher. We do know that he led a very complicated life and was in trouble that day—he even called his dad and said he was having some kind of emergency involving people who have never been named. Before he could tell his dad more, the phone disconnected.
I didn’t get to write about Christopher for Texas Monthly. I was working on another article at the time—one I’ve completely forgotten about—but I’ve always wanted to revisit the mystery of his death. This is the story we’re telling in Season 4 of The Unforgotten: Kill Site.
Listen to Episode 1: Just Do It wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple, Spotify and YouTube.
Helping me dig into the case is our Season 2 host Charlie Scudder, who investigated Christopher’s death for The Dallas Morning News. This season is being produced in association with The Dallas Morning News, which is a huge honor for an indie podcast team like ours.
As always, thank you for reading, thank you for listening, and thank you for your support of The Unforgotten. — Wes Ferguson
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