Monday, August 21, 2023

In Which Polly Melton Takes a Hike

"Charlotte Observer," November 20, 1981, via Newspapers.com



With some missing-persons cases, it is clear that they were victims of an abduction.  With others, it seems likely that they disappeared voluntarily, either to start a new life or commit suicide.  Sometimes, especially when they were last seen in the wilderness, it is easy to guess that they suffered some sort of catastrophic accident.  What makes the following disappearance intriguing is that there are a number of clues suggesting that any of those scenarios may be correct.

Thelma Pauline “Polly” Melton was born in 1923.  In 1975 the twice-widowed woman married 72-year-old Bob Melton.  Polly had no children of her own, but Bob had two adult sons from a previous union.  Although their home was in Jacksonville, Florida, every summer the Meltons lived a nomadic existence in their Airstream trailer.  During their travels, they usually stayed at the Deep Creek Campground, located next to North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  Due to health issues (she took medications for high blood pressure and regular bouts of nausea) Polly did not drive.  Polly’s mother died in 1978.  The loss sent her into a deep depression, but of late she seemed to finally regain her normally high spirits.  Polly had no job, but every year when the Meltons stayed at the campground, she did volunteer work every morning at the Presbyterian Nutritional Center.

During their months at the campground, Polly loved to hike every day the weather permitted it.  Because of her fragile health, she never walked alone, and always stuck to the easier trails.

At about 3 p.m. on Friday, September 25, 1981, Polly and two friends, Trula Gudger and Red Cannon, set out on the Deep Creek Trail.  For most of the hike, Polly lagged behind the others, which they mildly teased her about.  An hour later, the trio started back from the campground.  After a short time, Polly suddenly accelerated her pace.  She dashed past her friends, rounded a bend in the trail, and disappeared from their view.

When Trula and Red reached Polly's trailer, they found that Bob was still alone.  He hadn’t seen Polly since she left for her hike, and had no idea where she might have gone.

The three of them, along with two other friends, went back down the trail looking for Polly.  None of the hikers they met along the way had seen her.  After two hours of fruitless searching, they contacted park rangers, who brought in the police.  Officers were able to track Polly’s footprints for a while (the sole of one of her shoes had a distinctive crack across it,) but before long they were lost among the prints of other hikers.  All they could say was that there was no evidence she left the trail.

The trail was immediately closed to the public while some 150 volunteers and nine search dogs scoured the area.  The dogs picked up Polly’s scent at the site where she was last seen, but nowhere else.  Polly’s sister Kit Postell commented, “When the dogs got to the place where Polly disappeared, they howled and turned ‘round and ‘round, but they wouldn’t go left or right.  It was eerie.”  Four days of hunting failed to find any sign of Polly.  The official search ended on October 2.

To date, Polly Melton has never been seen again, and her fate remains an utter mystery.  Those who have studied this case have developed several different theories:

Did she willingly leave her old life, in order to start a new one?  After she vanished, Polly’s minister revealed that he suspected that she was having an extramarital affair, and was feeling deeply guilty about it.  None of Polly’s friends had any idea she might have been seeing another man, and his identity--if he did indeed exist--remains unknown.  Did she run off with a lover?  

Another possible clue that Polly left voluntarily is that on the day she disappeared, she did not do her usual work at the Nutritional Center.  The practice at the Center was for the workers to leave a written notice if they would be coming in the following day.  On Thursday, the 24th, Polly did not leave this notice, suggesting that she knew she would not be working on Friday.

Polly’s supervisor said that in the four years Mrs. Melton had worked at the Center, she had never once used their telephone.  However, on the day before she disappeared, Polly called someone--no one knows whom--on the Center’s phone.  

And then there was Polly’s odd behavior on the trail.  Did she speed past her friends at the end of the hike in order to meet her alleged “mystery man?”  (It is perhaps significant that there was a parking lot near the Melton trailer.)  However, Polly left her needed medications and ID behind, and her bank account was never touched after her disappearance, all of which would seem to refute the “left willingly” scenario.  For what it’s worth, Polly’s friends and family vehemently rejected the idea that she would have abandoned her husband, particularly since Bob was suffering from heart trouble.

It is possible that a stranger abducted Polly along the trail, but her friends and nearby hikers saw or heard nothing that would suggest such a thing.  Also, Polly was a formidable-looking woman--she was nearly six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds.  In other words, she was not an easy person to kidnap.  Authorities found the “kidnapping” theory highly unlikely, although not impossible.  On the other hand, some of Polly’s relatives were of the opinion that someone attacked her in order to steal the three expensive diamond rings she was wearing.

Could she have suffered a fatal accident?  It was pointed out that the area where she was last seen was unfamiliar to her.  It took her past several small side trails that she could conceivably have taken by mistake.  Trula Grudger speculated that--perhaps after a small, disorienting stroke--Polly accidentally took the wrong path and just kept walking, lost and bewildered, until she dropped.  It is frighteningly easy to disappear in the woods.

Suicide?  Did her mother’s death three years earlier leave her even more shattered than anyone had thought?  One of the many curious aspects about this case is that Bob’s prescription bottle of Valium mysteriously vanished the same day that Polly did.  Although a Valium overdose is a difficult way to kill yourself, some have tried, and a few, sadly, have succeeded.

Polly's disappearance--under whatever circumstances--had a tragic sequel.  When Bob Melton learned his wife was missing, the shock caused him to suffer a stroke, and he spent the short remaining period of his life in a nursing home.

[Note: A couple of accounts of this case state that in April 1982, a check in Polly’s name was cashed in Birmingham, Alabama, and that the signature appeared to be genuine.  Polly’s only known bank account was in Jacksonville, but she was born in Alabama and still had relatives there.

I don’t know the original source for this claim, and it’s lacking in details.  There was no mention of this alleged cashed check in any of the numerous newspaper reports I found about Polly’s disappearance.  A 1991 story commemorating the 10th anniversary of her vanishing quoted her surviving relatives--who had recently put up a memorial gravestone for her in an Alabama cemetery--and they all seemed genuinely convinced that she died soon after she was last seen.  If this cashed check had indeed turned up, I assume that would have been addressed.

I'm unsure if this check story is true, or one of those erroneous details that often creep into true-crime cases.  Or perhaps the check was for another Pauline Melton.]

6 comments:

  1. Very interesting. The simplest explanations are usually the ones to go with, but they don't hold up here, in my opinion. If Polly Melton were attacked for her jewelry, what happened to her body? Would a robber, even one intent on killing to get what he wanted, carry off a 180 pound body? And how far did he expect to get with it? A theory of suicide has problems, too. Why would she kill herself on holiday? She would had to have left the trail to do it; why go on a hike at all if her plans were to kill herself? And remember that the dogs couldn't follow a scent off the trail, which is unlikely if Mrs Melton had left it by force. The other clues suggest that she intended to do something unusual the next day. If she had gone off with someone, it might have been suggested to her that she use something to throw search-dogs off her trail. That's far-fetched, but why else would they not follow her trail? Perplexing, to say the least.

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    1. This is one of those cases where it's hard to make all the puzzle pieces fit together. I think the "attack of illness which caused her to get lost in the woods" is the most likely scenario, but even that has its problems.

      I'm pretty convinced she didn't leave voluntarily, though. I suspect her minister just misinterpreted something she said.

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  2. The dogs had a good scent on her and then just nothing. Almost like she vanished on the spot.

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  3. Well, an "alien abduction" would certainly explain the sudden end of the scent trail...as would "The Rapture." These both sound silly, but the other possibilities come up short too.

    "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." -Sherlock Holmes.

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  4. As an avid hiker, my theory is: she had to go to the bathroom, suddenly and very badly. Maybe she wasn't comfortable doing that in the woods (I'll pee in the woods but would do anything to avoid a bowel movement in nature) so she sped up and passed her friends trying to make it to an actual toilet before it was too late and she had an embarrassing accident. At some point after she passed her friends, she realized she had to go NOW and stepped a few feet off trail, just far enough to get lost. (It's so easy to get lost in dense overgrowth in the woods. A woman hiking the Appalachian Trail starved to death very close to the trail after getting lost.) Maybe she had a medical emergency while going and died - two of my relatives died in their 60s while on the toilet - or just wandered farther and farther from a trail once she realized she was lost.

    Search dogs are not always reliable, a lot depends on the handler and training, so them not finding anything isn't really proof that there wasn't a trail to follow.

    If she wandered, she may have been out of the search area by the time a search was launched. But honestly, again, the undergrowth would have been so thick in that park in late September, and missing people have eventually been found in areas that were thoroughly searched before. Even sound can be muffled tremendously.

    I think her remains never left those woods, although they are probably long scattered by now.

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