The Mysterious Prophet: The Death of Don Kemp

Thirty-five-year-old Don Kemp disappeared while on a trip to Wyoming. On Nov. 16, 1982, his Chevrolet Blazer was found along Interstate 80 in the middle of the desolate Wyoming prairie. Its doors were open, the engine was running, the radio was on and clothes were strewn all over the highway. Don was nowhere in sight. Three years later, his body was found just a few miles away. The local sheriff, C. W. Ogburn, concluded that Don froze to death in a blizzard three days after he was lost. Don's family is not convinced. His mother, Mary Kemp, believed he was murdered.

On Nov. 16, 1982, Wyoming Highway Patrolman Randy Teeters came upon an eerie sight in the small town of Elk Mountain. Parked along an Interstate 80 off-ramp was a 1979 Chevrolet Blazer. The vehicle's motor was running, its doors were open, the radio was playing and clothing items from inside the Blazer were strewn across the ground.

The vehicle was parked as if heading in a westward direction toward the city of Rawlins.

The Wagonhound Rest Area, an interstate rest stop, was half a mile away from the abandoned Blazer. Teeters and his partner came across the vehicle at 10 a.m. as they were driving nearby. It would later be revealed that a truck driver passing through the area had spotted the car in the same condition as early as 7 a.m. that morning.

So, where was the Blazer's driver?

Carbon County is made up of desolate and rough terrain. It is filled with caves, cliffs, lakes, flatland and hills. To the unfamiliar and the initiated alike, it can be an extremely dangerous place. However, Teeters and his partner had never seen anything even remotely similar to the scene they came upon.

"Neither of us had seen anything like this," he later said. "The vehicle was left 40 miles from any town, on an off-ramp, running, stuff strung out of it, the doors open, a relatively new vehicle, not one that someone would just leave."

Upon analyzing the scene, Teeters noticed several things. First, there was no room for anyone other than the driver in the vehicle — it was packed with so many personal belongings that another human couldn't possibly have fit inside. Second, there was a single set of footprints on the snow-covered ground leading away from the vehicle and into the surrounding, barren landscape.

"I have no idea what would inspire anybody to walk out through that prairie in the middle of winter," he later recalled. "We considered possibly someone under medication that didn't know what they were doing due to the medication, or being out of the medication, possibly that would affect him to the point of where they would just walk out into the middle of nowhere."

The Blazer belonged to 35-year-old Don Kemp, a businessman from New York City. He was on a two-month sightseeing trip from Maryland to his destination in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It was Jackson Hole where Don planned to finish the manuscript for a book he was writing about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the alleged involvement of Mary Surratt. Surratt, the first woman in American history to be hanged, was the owner of the establishment where the plot to kill Lincoln is believed to have been hatched. Don was two days away from Jackson Hole when his vehicle was discovered.

Don Kemp

The Carbon County Sheriff's Office launched a ground and air search for the driver. Deputy Rod Johnson, a pilot, flew over the area for two hours. He could see for miles over the open terrain, but he did not spot anyone stranded in the wilderness.

"I felt the guy was disorientated, and I felt that he didn't want to be found," Johnson said of the air search. "If he would've wanted to be found, he would have heard the aircraft, could have waved his arms, got our attention, gone up to a ridge, anywhere, and been sighted."

Later that day, Johnson and two other deputies decided to follow the set of footprints that Teeters had noticed after discovering Don's vehicle. A duffel bag containing laundry soap, clothes and a teapot was found along the trail, one mile from the vehicle. Ongoing snowfall was beginning to cover up the tracks, making it difficult for investigators to know exactly where the driver might have gone. Searchers managed to follow the increasingly faint footprints to an incline, where they disappeared.

At 6:30 p.m., the Wyoming Highway Patrol contacted Don's mother Mary, inquiring about the Blazer registered to her address in Salisbury, Maryland.

"That's my son. What happened?" Mary asked the operator. But the operator had the same question for Mary.

Mary Kemp

On the second day of the search, deputies found more footprints in the search area. The tracks led to an abandoned barn six miles from the vehicle. Inside, the deputies discovered a pile of sticks arranged as if to start a fire and three of Don's socks. However, there was no sign of Don himself, even though the tracks stopped at the barn. This further fueled their belief that Don was hiding form the searchers.

The lack of footprints leading away from the barn prompted one deputy to contact Mary Kemp and ask if her son had been picked up by helicopter.

"My son doesn't know anyone out there," she replied.

Carbon County Sheriff C. W. Ogburn spoke with an Associated Press reporter on Nov. 18, two days after Don went missing. "We've been searching for this fellow since the 16th. We found his vehicle abandoned close to Wagonhound and all of his belongings were there, as far as we know," he said. "We don't know if he caught a ride or he's still out there, but we're still looking."

Deputies kept searching the areas where the footprints were found, hoping to spot something they had missed. They possibly found more tracks both leading in and out of the barn, but the increasingly heavy snowfall made things indiscernible. At least one deputy believed that the person making the tracks walked backwards through their own footprints to confuse the searchers.

The next day, a laundry bag belonging to Don was discovered hidden in a haystack in the search area. The discovery resulted in no new tangible leads.

Just hours later, the snowfall became intolerable, and the already harsh conditions turned into a blizzard. It was Nov. 19. The search was temporarily called off due to the severe weather.

After the blizzard subsided, deputies still did not immediately resume the search. The amount of snow left in its wake was unnavigable. Everyone formally involved in the search concluded that, if Don wasn't already dead, then the blizzard certainly did the job.

In the blizzard's aftermath, Don's father Paul traveled to Carbon County to assist investigators and look for clues. He stayed in the area for several days and offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to his son. After Paul left, Mary and Don's sister Kathy traveled to the area. Don had been missing for over a week at that point. According to Greg Bean of the Casper Star-Tribune, two of Don's former lovers also spent time in the region helping to look for clues during "the early days of the search."

The search resumed a few days after the blizzard, but it was nowhere near as rigorous as before. Mary continued to believe Don was alive.

"We've got a deputy who's a pilot who has flown the area several times and all the ranchers and sheepherders and whoever is out in there have been alerted that we're looking for somebody who might be afoot," Sheriff Ogburn told an Associated Press reporter.

To Mary, that wasn't enough. She perceived there to be a lack of urgency from law enforcement, but the family complied when the Carbon County Sheriff's Office requested that the $1,000 reward for information leading to Don be withdrawn as the search continued.

It is not precisely known why the sheriff's office asked for the reward to be withdrawn, but it was most likely an attempt to prevent people with no real information about the case from calling and making up details in an attempt to obtain the money.

Kathy continued to assist her mother in looking for anyone who might have seen Don.

"We haven't found a trace of Don, but nobody's looking," Mary told an Associated Press reporter on Nov. 24. "We've got to do something." Her frustration would reach new heights the next day.

On Nov. 25, nine days after Don's disappearance, the search was officially called off.

Mary Kemp

As many as 40 people at one time had searched for Kemp on horseback, in vehicles, on foot and in the air.

As a result of the search's suspension, Don's parents offered a $2,000 reward for information leading to their son. That, they hoped, would net results.

Meanwhile, Deputy Johnson began working on the case in his spare time. Once Kathy left, Mary stayed behind, quitting her job as a manager of a Hertz Rent-A-Car office in Salisbury, and devoting her time to searching for clues about what happened to her son. Initially renting a room in Laramie, Wyoming, she moved to a hotel in Elk Mountain to be closer to where her son disappeared.

At the time, the Elk Mountain Hotel was the namesake town's only hotel. When Mary was not out looking for clues, she sat in the lobby, waiting by the telephone for any potential news regarding Don.

"The whole thing is a mystery," Mary said after the search was called off. She said there was no evidence that anything nefarious had happened to her son. "But, just walking off isn't like him either."

Despite the uncertainty, Mary Kemp remained optimistic.

Once the search ended, more focus was put on Don's past and state of mind. The 35-year-old Don had been president of his class at Woodlawn High School in Gwynn Oak, Maryland, in 1965, and he was voted most likely to succeed. He graduated from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with a bachelor's degree in history and English. While there, he served as the president and secretary of the Chi Phi fraternity.

Mary referred to Don as "a good speaker and a good writer." For 11 years, he worked as an advertising executive on Madison Avenue in New York City.

In 1976, while in New York, Don became severely disabled in a car accident. His two-year period of recuperation changed his outlook on life, according to his family. Feelings of restlessness grew over the following years, and, in September 1982, he abandoned his life in the city.

Don went on sabbatical, broke off his engagement with his fiancée and decided he would follow the Lincoln Heritage Trail across the country. He wanted to finish his manuscript in Jackson Hole, where he felt he would be most at peace in a serene environment.

"He had become disillusioned a bit with materialism," his sister Kathy later said of his desire to leave the city for Jackson Hole. "Don loved the good life and New York was the epitome of that. And I think he wanted a simpler time and a quieter time, and I think that's what drew him to that area."

He sold almost everything he owned, bought a 1979 Chevrolet Blazer in Maryland and began the long drive West.

However, Don was clearly unwell.

Don Kemp

He kept in touch with family and friends while making his way across the country. According to them, nothing seemed to be amiss, at least during the early stages of his trip. But it would later be discovered that in his final days, when Don stayed at motels on his way to Jackson Hole, he watched films with themes of disappearances. There were also some indications that Don had a serious mental illness.

In the years preceding his doomed trip, Don expressed the belief that he was a religious prophet and made references to starting a cult involving the Abraham Lincoln assassination in Wyoming.

He had a bizarre fascination with Mary Surratt and claimed to have communicated with her spirit. In fact, he said his book would exonerate her of any complicity in Lincoln's murder.

Don told friends that his book would combine elements of Lincoln, spiritualism and "the Truth."

"I have the Truth," he told them. "The Truth will come through me ... I am attuned to a high spiritual plane ... I am a messenger of God."

Don's final communications with his loved ones may have been warning signs that something was terribly wrong.

In the days leading up to Nov. 16, a friend of Don's reportedly received a call from him in which Don was "sobbing and near hysterical."

Mary last spoke with Don on Nov. 10 in a telephone conversation, six days before he vanished.

"He said everything was fine," Mary recalled. "But he said one thing I remember later thinking sounded a little strange. He said, 'Mom, I really love you.'"

She received her last postcard from Don on Nov. 12, when he was in North Platte, Nebraska.

Don tried to call his mother on Nov. 15, the day before his disappearance, but she did not pick up. That day, he also called a friend in New York from Cheyenne.

Records indicate Don was booked to stay at a Cheyenne hotel on Nov. 15. It is unclear if he actually spent the night there, but there is evidence that he at least checked in.

On Nov. 15, Don visited the Old West Museum in Cheyenne. Eyewitnesses said he did not speak to a single person as he silently strolled the galleries for two hours.

Nearly an hour after he left the museum, Don called to ask if he left his briefcase there. He had in fact done so. In it were his glasses needed for driving, traveler's checks, diaries and his address book.

"Is my attaché there?" Don asked when he called. The museum employee told him that it was. "I'll be in for it right away," Don replied. However, he never came to retrieve it.

The last known sighting of Don's Blazer was at a Lincoln monument in Laramie, nearly an hour away from the museum. It is not known what happened to Don from that point on. His abandoned vehicle was spotted at 7 a.m. by the truck driver the following day near the Wagonhound Rest Area.

The car was found abandoned in the middle of nowhere.

Mary contacted numerous officials regarding her son's disappearance, including Wyoming Gov. Edgar Herschler. They were cooperative, according to Mary, but there was not much they could do other than offer their sympathies. She also contacted the FBI, but they informed her that the bureau would only get involved in cases involving kidnapping or extortion.

She also contacted the National Organization for Victim Assistance in Washington, D.C., and a national search organization based in Washington state.

Initially, Mary didn't think anything nefarious had happened to Don, although she couldn't come up with a solid explanation as to what happened to him.

"I only have two options, stay here or go home," she said during her time in Elk Mountain. "I don't want to go home yet, I want to stay until I feel in my heart that I've done all I can. I would feel it if he had met with foul play, but I don't feel that he has. I'm worried."

She believed he could have survived in the wilderness despite the blizzard.

"God wouldn't let anything happen to a young man with this much to offer," she said.

However, she also admitted that the circumstances surrounding the disappearance were curious.

"It doesn't add up, doesn't make sense," she said.

Mary may have had some indication that Don was not mentally sound. She at least seemed to know he was very religious, if not an aspiring cult leader.

"Paul knew this country was in a mess, and there have been times when he told me there was something he had to do with regard to his writing," she said in late November 1982. "It's possible he's taken on a soul searching trip without telling anyone, but if he has, and I get hold of him...."

On Dec. 1, 1982, a woman called Mary and said she had information concerning Don's whereabouts.

She told Mary that Don was staying in Jackson Hole with a man named Bob Knapp. However, the Teton County Sheriff's Office — where Jackson Hole is located — was unable to find anyone by that name there. Sheriff Ogburn speculated the call may have been prompted by the $2,000 reward offered by Don's parents. Ogburn said similar calls were being made to his office almost daily since the reward was offered, but that none of the tips ever panned out.

Around this time, Ogburn began expressing his belief that Don was alive, despite most of the people involved in the search for Don believing he had perished in the blizzard. Ogburn said Don would probably not be located until he "decides to call in."

He said Don was "nowhere in the area where we've searched," and that he based him being alive on tape recordings found in the abandoned Blazer. Don used a tape recorder to take notes for his book. The contents of the tapes have never been publicly revealed.

It was also in December 1982 that a man went missing just three miles from where Don's Blazer was found. In Medicine Bow, 47-year-old William Lindholm and 60-year-old Harvey Sitzherbert were traveling to Cheyenne when their truck became stuck in snow. They decided to leave the vehicle behind and look for assistance, separating in the process. Both became lost. Sitzherbert was rescued after being spotted by a helicopter pilot working for the Minerals Management Service in Casper.

However, Lindholm stayed missing until his skeletal remains were found in 1994. He died of exposure.

The overlap between that case and Don's has resulted in speculation that Lindholm and Kemp were both victims of a serial killer, but there is no evidence to support this claim.

Five months after Don disappeared, two separate people called authorities and reported having seen Don 150 miles away in Casper. He was allegedly seen at a traveling exhibit of Abraham Lincoln memorabilia. The second person allegedly spotted him at a local tavern in Cheyenne.

Mary spoke to a bartender at the tavern. The bartender said he distinctly remembered serving Don.

These sightings are easy to dismiss as misidentifications or hoaxes, or even a ruse to get the $2,000 in reward money. However, the most mysterious aspect of the Don Kemp case, which is much harder to explain, is a series of telephone calls from Casper made to one of Don's friends in New York.

Judy Aiello lived in New York City and had worked with Don for 10 years. She was on vacation in Europe when Don went missing and was unaware of his disappearance when she came home. There were at least five messages on her answering machine upon her return, all of them from Casper.

Two of the messages were recorded on her telephone answering machine Feb. 27, 1983, two more were recorded on April 5, and another was recorded on April 10.

According to Judy, the caller spoke in a strained, urgent voice. Most of the messages were difficult to understand as a result.

"I must talk to you," the clearest message said. The caller provided a phone number where they could be reached.

Another message: "I'd like to speak to you again, call me," followed by the same provided number to call.

What makes this so intriguing is that Judy swears the caller was Don, although he did not leave a name.

"I'm absolutely certain that it was his voice," Judy said of the calls.

In yet another twist, Judy's phone number was unlisted. It would seem that whoever called Judy had to have personally known her phone number.

When Judy dialed the number that the caller provided, a man picked up.

"Hello?" the man answered.

"Hi. May I speak with Don Kemp, please? Is he there? I am returning his call," Judy said.

"Yes," the man responded, before quickly saying, "No."

"Well, could you give him a message that I returned his call?" asked Aiello.

"Yeah, fine," the man said before hanging up.

Judy called again the next day.

"Hi. May I speak with Don Kemp? He called me from this number," she said.

"I do not know Don Kemp," the man replied before ending the call.

Once Judy learned that Don was missing, she informed Mary of the strange calls. Mary subsequently informed law enforcement in Casper, who took the development seriously. They were able to trace the location of the calls to the trailer home of a man named Mark Dennis in Casper.

Mark Dennis cooperated with the Natrona County Sheriff's Office, where Casper is located. He said he spoke with Judy when she inquired about Don, but he denied knowing Don Kemp. He also denied making the phone calls, telling investigators the phone company must have made a mistake or that someone entered his trailer without his knowledge to call Judy.

Dennis agreed to a polygraph test. However, before it could be administered, Dennis lawyered up and refused to talk with investigators.

"He told us on all occasions, in all interviews, that he had no knowledge of the phone calls and that he had not made the phone calls," Natrona County Sheriff's Office Capt. Mark Benton said. "I had an occasion to show him a picture of Donald Kemp and he said that he did not know Donald Kemp, had never seen Donald Kemp, and knew nothing of his whereabouts."

Mary called Dennis herself looking for answers.

"What do you know about my son?" she asked Dennis.

"I know nothing about Don Kemp," he replied.

"What about the phone calls?" she retorted.

"I just pay those (phone) bills, I don't look at them."

"You know what happened to my son," Mary insisted.

Dennis ended the call.

Mary traveled to Casper to try and speak with Dennis in May 1983. She sat on the steps of his trailer, waiting for him. "But he never showed up," said Mary.

Three weeks after he was questioned by authorities, Dennis moved out of the trailer and left Casper.

Benton said that put up a "brick wall" in their investigation of Dennis. Still, Benton said he didn't have any reason to believe Dennis was lying to them.

"In all three times that I spoke with him, he was always very cooperative," said Benton. "And I have no reason to feel that the individual here in Casper had any knowledge of this man even being in Wyoming, other than these phone calls, and I don't have an explanation for it and neither did he."

"Who made the phone calls? That's the big question, who it was," Mary said of the calls. "It had to have been my son."

Despite these developments, Deputy Johnson and Mary hiked the foothills of the Snowy Range looking for any clues as to what happened to Don.

"He's alive until proven dead," Johnson said of Kemp.

Mary argued that the authorities botched the investigation. She cited the fact that investigators did not look for fingerprints on the Blazer and did not take casts of the footprints leading away from it.

However, Johnson said they did all they could.

"We covered from Elk Mountain to Hanna Junction to the Albany County line," he said. "We went from Interstate 80 to Highway 30, air and ground. From now on, it will be just volunteers unless we come up with a lead. You can't send people out in no man's land."

Around this time, the skeletal remains of at least seven people were found in Sweetwater County, which neighbors Carbon County. None of them were Don's, and it was determined that the individuals had not all perished at the same time and foul play wasn't suspected. In fact, some of the remains, which consisted of fragments, appeared to be very old. The bones had likely been collected by an animal. It was a false alarm.

By the spring of 1984, Mary had hired a private investigator, Ted Kersting. A former Laramie police chief, Kersting was there to counsel Mary whenever rare leads emerged.

In the meantime, the reward money continued to attract people who most likely had no information. For instance, in March 1984, a friend of Kemp's in Clinton, Maryland, received a phone call from a stranger.

"Is this the number for the reward (mentioned on posters distributed in Wyoming) and is it a good one?"

"Yes," the friend replied. The inquirer ended the call.

Despite such occurrences, Mary held out hope that someone would call in and break the case wide open. Although she felt he was alive, her mind sometimes got the better of her.

"I always knew where my son was," she said.

The increasingly desperate search for Don was consuming her life.

"You just try anything. ... You'll go anywhere. Do anything," said Mary.

Don wrote down his history of gas purchases in one of his diaries. After Mary reviewed that diary, she came to the conclusion that Don did not drive his Blazer to Laramie, where it was last spotted.

According to Mary, the condition of Don's Blazer indicated foul play.

She claimed that when the vehicle was found, a key for it was discovered "bent almost double," a mirror on the passenger side was broken and a gasket around the passenger side door was ripped.

Sheriff Ogburn said there was no evidence of foul play in Don's disappearance. He continued to believe Don was alive, although he said, "I haven't ruled out anything until he is located."

To Ogburn, the most likely explanation was that Don wanted to go missing. Missing people are a common occurrence in Carbon County, according to Ogburn.

"It happens all the time," he said. Hunters often get lost and are eventually located or find their own way to back to civilization. Meanwhile, poor weather and snowstorms frequently hamper searches.

The only difference in Don's case, according to Ogburn, was that Don wanted to disappear.

"There was no foul play? They're crazy," Mary said.

Thinking of the truck driver who spotted the Blazer at 7 a.m., Mary doubted Don was driving around so early in the morning.

"My son does not get up. No way. The whole scenario is wrong ... nothing adds up. I don't believe my son was driving that Blazer. ... It was made to look like he walked out there."

Mary's explanations for Don's vanishing became increasingly elaborate. She came to believe that someone had planted Don's belongings that searchers found along the solitary set of footprints leading away from the Blazer, despite the fact there was only one set of tracks in the snow and some of the items were found the same day he disappeared.

Mary began looking for answers elsewhere. She turned to psychics. Of the four she contacted, two told her that Don was alive, while the other two said Don was dead. This alienated Mary.

A farmer called Mary, encouraging her to return Don's Blazer to where it was parked along the off-ramp. Don had been abducted by aliens, the man said, and they would return Don if the Blazer was in the proper place. The farmer also told Mary that some of his cattle had recently been mutilated.

Perhaps the most probable theory of Mary's, however unlikely, is that someone mistook Mark Dennis for Don. The two share a striking resemblance.

Mary said she did not feel bad about confronting Dennis.

"You end up on the defensive. I've had to defend my son's reputation," she explained.

As for her son's reputation, speculation was running amok that Don had intended to kill President Ronald Reagan. This was due to his seeming obsession with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Another rumor that gained traction was that Don was some kind of sexual pervert. This came about after claims were made that pornography had been found in the Blazer. The pornography in question was actually just a private nude photograph of a former lover.

Mary also denied that Don was keen on starting a cult.

"He did not go out there to start a cult," she said. "He may have made a remark like that to somebody at a party, but he was not that way." Don's diaries, filled with messianic language, suggested otherwise.

By 1984, Mary had traveled to Wyoming on three separate occasions, staying for long periods of time. She would not give up on Don despite the search overtaking her life.

"This is a horror, no one should have to be put through this. I'm not going to give up. There's no way my son is going to be swept under the rug," she said.

Although Mary rejected the idea that Don was a religious extremist or an aspiring cult leader, she did say that Don might have become lost or stuck in the wilderness after deciding to go meditate — a comment that raised some eyebrows due to the bizarre scene Don left behind.

She stressed that he was strong and smart enough to survive in New York City for over a decade, doubting that her son simply walked off into the prairie.

"He survived in New York City for 11 years and he could take care of himself. ... They say he just walked off," she said. "He had such good common sense."

She refused to believe that Don wanted to disappear either.

"My son has never disappeared before," she said. "He was just so close to us. There was just no way he would cut himself off from his family."

Not knowing what happened to Don made life miserable for Mary.

"You walk around with it. You go to bed with it. You wake up with it," she said. "There's no relief."

There were no new developments for nearly a year. Then, in October 1985, a discovery was made.

On Oct. 4, 1985, Don's skeletal remains were found.

The remains were discovered by hunters near Willow Springs Draw, about four miles from where Don's Blazer was found three years earlier.

Don's body was finally found.

"He walked away from it (the Blazer)," said Ogburn following the discovery. "As far as we know, he had some problems and he walked away from his van. Of course, that date it was pretty rough and we had a lot of snow then."

Ogburn referred to Don's belief that he was a prophet.

"It seemed he was going to Jackson to write, and he had told friends of gathering the masses and starting a cult," Ogburn said. "He told one person that he was going to start a kind of cult, that he was a prophet and a leader of man."

Autopsy results showed no evidence of foul play. Rather, exposure to the elements killed Kemp, Ogburn later revealed.

"We never did suspect foul play. He was out there, and was avoiding us, stayed away from us, and I believe on the second or third day, he was gonna try to get back to his vehicle and he didn't make it," said Ogburn.

With that, Ogburn considered the case of Don Kemp closed.

Meanwhile, the discovery of Don's remains took a toll on Mary.

"I have been racking my brain trying to figure out what really happened to Don," she said.

Don's funeral was held Nov. 10, 1985, in Saint Michaels, Maryland.

The mysterious case of Don Kemp gained more attention when it was featured as the first-ever case on the long-running series Unsolved Mysteries on Jan. 20, 1987.

Mary ultimately came to believe that Mark Dennis murdered Don.

Who made the calls from the trailer?

"My son was murdered. I definitely believe this. Absolutely. He was murdered," Mary said in 1987.

Patrolman Teeters, arguably the investigator with the most direct knowledge about the case, passed away on May 7, 2004, at the age of 46, after a battle with cancer.

Mary took her belief that Dennis killed Don with her to her grave. She passed away on May 21, 2014. She was 86 years old.

So, what did happen to Don Kemp?

The most widely accepted theory is that the mentally unwell Don did in fact walk out into the prairie.

"I think poor Don was sitting on the fence of reality, and as he was driving down the highway he finally crossed over to the other side of the fence," a friend of Don's said. "I think he saw some sign in the desert and walked off."

In his final diary entry, Don proclaimed himself to be "an emancipator of men."

Some people believe that Don was silenced by mysterious powers that be after making a shocking discovery about the Abraham Lincoln assassination. Some say Dennis kidnapped Don, tortured him in his trailer and then dumped his dead body where it was found. However, in order for this to be the case, Dennis would have had to make some painstakingly thorough moves to stay off the authorities' radar.

Others have argued that Don was mistaken for Dennis by people unfriendly to the latter and was killed in a case of mistaken identity. There is no evidence to support this theory.

As for Don being found so close to his vehicle, it is an established fact that searchers sometimes fail to locate the remains of victims that are later revealed to have been right under their noses.

Map of the area where Kemp disappeared

But what about the phone calls? Did Don call Judy's unlisted New York number? If the caller wasn't Don, then who was it and how did they know the phone number?

The Old West Museum may hold the key. One of the items Don left behind at the museum in Cheyenne was his address book. It is entirely possible that someone either took it or copied down a prominently displayed number, then called Judy either as a prank or to inquire about the reward money.

The whereabouts of the address book have never been established.

It is also possible that the people who called Judy were friends of Dennis and used his phone to make the calls. If this were the case, Dennis could have been protecting his friends from inquiries into the matter. It could also be true that his friends used his phone to make the calls, and Dennis truly was unaware that they did so, and they never told him. Or, perhaps, Dennis made the calls himself.

Mark Dennis

Regardless, there is no evidence that Dennis murdered Don Kemp, or even came into contact with him.

"God knows what happened to my son in that trailer," Mary said. "It's too horrible to contemplate. I don't know. But I think I deserve an answer."

Unfortunately, there may never be an answer as to what happened to Don Kemp.

Sources

Associated Press, "Carbon County officials searching for missing man," 19 November 1982

Associated Press, "Search for man ends; $2,000 reward offered," 25 November 1982

Bean, Greg, "Mom waits by phone hoping for news about missing son," Casper Star-Tribune, 1 December 1982

Bean, Greg, "Missing man believed to be alive and well," Casper Star-Tribune, 3 December 1982

Casper Star-Tribune, "Man is found; another lost," 11 December 1982

Horsley, Lynn, "Mystery of missing man still unsolved," Associated Press, 11 April 1984

Murray, Molly, "Missing: Salisbury woman says son wasn't the vanishing type," The News Journal, 29 April 1984

Associated Press, "Body of Salisbury 'prophet,' missing since '82, recovered," 9 October 1985

Thompson, William L., "Death baffles sleuthing mother," The Evening Sun, 9 October 1985

The Star Democrat, "Paul Donald Kemp," 6 November 1985

Associated Press, "Carbon mystery may be in movie," 1 October 1986

Associated Press, "Mystery draws film crew to Rawlins," 19 October 1986

Unsolved Mysteries, "Don Kemp," 20 January 1987

Associated Press, "Remains likely those of lost Cheyenne man," 25 August 1994

Casper Star-Tribune, "Randyll L. 'Randy' Teeters," 10 May 2004

The Star Democrat, "Mary E. Kemp," 25 May 2014

Strange Company, "The Strange Exit of Donald Kemp," 15 January 2018