AR AR - Malvern, WhtMale 1415UMAR, 25-35, hitchhiker in submerged car, p/u Louisville, Oct'84

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sk716 said:
I don't have anything to offer as far as possible matches, but I am intimately familiar with central Arkansas. Something bothered me and would bother anyone who knew the area. In 1984, there was really only one place to get breakfast in Benton, Brown's Country Store. It was (COVID killed Brown's) right on I-30 south bound, very clearly marked for miles ahead. So if they stopped for breakfast "near" Benton it would have been Brown's. I think there were two Waffle Houses in Benton but only one was easily accessible from I-30. It's not that much further than the Brown's. I've gone through all of this to say that Malvern is only about 30 minutes down the highway from Benton.

How did he get too tired to drive in 15 minutes? There were only about five exits between where they would have gotten back on I-30 and Malvern. I'm not 100% that one of them was there in 1984.

I made a map. Google Maps

The northern most dot is Brown's. The second dot is the location of the Waffle House I mentioned, the whole complex burned a few years back but it was a motel and a Chinese place in an old Waffle House for decades.

The third dot is the last Benton exit and the first easy place to hop off the freeway and switch drivers.
The fourth dot is a truck stop, the exit was there but the truck stop was not. There wouldn't have been any markings indicating it was a place to pull in and switch drivers.

The end point is the Quachita River bridge. During the spring a couple of those creeks can get high, but not in the fall so the Quachita is the only one deep enough to partially submerge a car (I lived in Hot Springs for 11 years).
View attachment 324210

Am I the only one that has a whole lot of questions about how the UID guy ended up in the drivers seat and the other guy fell that deeply asleep in such a short amount of time?
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I have always thought the UID somehow wanted to "end it" and it was no accident.
 
Suicide has been suggested before. Apart from the fact the UID died (after 2 days in the hospital), there's no evidence that was indeed his intent. Why potentially take down a stranger along with you? Why decide to do that halfway across the country?

My thinking is they drove all night from Kentucky with an agreement to drive straight through and share driving shifts. After breakfast near Benton, the vehicle owner decided to nap, leaving the UID to drive his shift. It was suggested they were in a pickup truck in some accounts, but even that detail seems unclear. As @sk716 suggested, they probably ended up in the Ouachita River. This may have required going over a guard rail or concrete barrier at that time. Looking at historical imagery it looks like they could also have drifted off the side of the road and into the Prairie Bayou a bit farther south along I-30, as there was construction along the shoulder there before 1990. Not sure if the water there was deep enough to become submerged. At any rate the driver/UID had trouble with (pick one: staying awake, driving a truck/manual shift/manual steering/4WD, etc) and they went off the road. MOO
 
Is his NamUs down or am I just incompetent with computers?

ETA: NVM, I figured it out. His NamUs is still up.
 
None of the area newspapers have digital archives from the 80s. At the moment, I'm not even sure there are microfiche archives. I'm thinking if I can turn up an issue of the Malvern Daily Record or the Hot Springs Sentinel-Record from that week we might get a little more info. It's the kind of thing that would have made the front page in small town Malvern, unless something really big happened at the brick yard.

I'm actually really disappointed, the State and universities have invested a crapload of money into digitizing historical archives but somehow not the newspapers.
 
sk716 said:
None of the area newspapers have digital archives from the 80s. At the moment, I'm not even sure there are microfiche archives. I'm thinking if I can turn up an issue of the Malvern Daily Record or the Hot Springs Sentinel-Record from that week we might get a little more info. It's the kind of thing that would have made the front page in small town Malvern, unless something really big happened at the brick yard.

I'm actually really disappointed, the State and universities have invested a crapload of money into digitizing historical archives but somehow not the newspapers.
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I'm wondering too, would a police accident report be available through FOIA?
 
Okay gang, my wife went to the main branch of CALS (Central Arkansas Library System) for other research but popped over to the microfiche to see if she could find anything from Malvern.

She's found two articles. She didn't print any of this bit but there was a huge nasty storm rolling across the state the two days before. Something like 14 tornado touchdowns from the system across multiple states.

So they went into Ten Mile Creek just south of Benton and she was flooded and raging. Apparently there was just bedlam all across the state so not a lot of time an attention placed on a car accident. Saline County arrived on the scene at 03:31 am, so they didn't stop at Browns, the only places open 24 hours along I-30 back then was Waffle House. The breakfast stop is not listed. The survivor is never mentioned.

I'll get a map marker up in a little bit.

These should be pretty easy to read as is, I'll try to get them transcribed later.

20211202_143612Sized.jpg
Arkansas Democrat 10/20/1984 1C
20211202_143717Sized.jpg
Arkansas Democrat 10/19/1984 - 1B
 
Ten Mile Creek GPS 34.47242622814702, -92.73802095849915

The first two stops are where the Waffle House's were then. I can't think of any other 24 hr place in between that existed in 1984.

ScreenHunter 1192.png

Google Maps
 
sk716 said:
Okay gang, my wife went to the main branch of CALS (Central Arkansas Library System) for other research but popped over to the microfiche to see if she could find anything from Malvern.

She's found two articles. She didn't print any of this bit but there was a huge nasty storm rolling across the state the two days before. Something like 14 tornado touchdowns from the system across multiple states.

So they went into Ten Mile Creek just south of Benton and she was flooded and raging. Apparently there was just bedlam all across the state so not a lot of time an attention placed on a car accident. Saline County arrived on the scene at 03:31 am, so they didn't stop at Browns, the only places open 24 hours along I-30 back then was Waffle House. The breakfast stop is not listed. The survivor is never mentioned.

I'll get a map marker up in a little bit.

These should be pretty easy to read as is, I'll try to get them transcribed later.

View attachment 325011
Arkansas Democrat 10/20/1984 1C
View attachment 325012
Arkansas Democrat 10/19/1984 - 1B
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Awesome sleuthing effort @sk716 ! Nice job by you and your "team". The weather situation must have led to a lot of chaos in the area as well as spotty info in reports about this incident. Just wondering though, besides the other occupant never being mentioned, this was said to have been responded to by Saline Co. rather than Hot Spring Co. Ten Mile Creek looks to be about halfway between Benton and Malvern. Maybe they changed the contact info later after they located the other survivor?

My guess is Saline Co. may also have had more emergency resources than Hot Spring Co. since it contains much of Hot Springs Village.

ETA Waffle House makes sense as whatever you eat there at 2-3am (or any other time) is pretty much a breakfast.
 
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Curious_in_NC said:
Awesome sleuthing effort @sk716 ! Nice job by you and your "team". The weather situation must have led to a lot of chaos in the area as well as spotty info in reports about this incident. Just wondering though, besides the other occupant never being mentioned, this was said to have been responded to by Saline Co. rather than Hot Spring Co. Ten Mile Creek looks to be about halfway between Benton and Malvern. Maybe they changed the contact info later after they located the other survivor?

My guess is Saline Co. may also have had more emergency resources than Hot Spring Co. since it contains much of Hot Springs Village.

ETA Waffle House makes sense as whatever you eat there at 2-3am (or any other time) is pretty much a breakfast.
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Ten mile is in Saline County but it's a zone at the time that was virtually uninhabited. There were still a couple of big farms and timberland instead of many of the gated neighborhoods south of Hot Springs. Hot Springs Village may not have broken ground yet. If it had it was still pretty new. Benton is the seat of Saline County, SCSO would have been the closest to the scene, as well. Hot Spring County is pretty small but not quite as rural as you would expect. It's hard to stay too rural when two of the larger universities in the state are a short hop down the freeway and you can generate revenue catching speeders, Texans, and drunks headed to and leaving Hot Springs (Just mind the speed limit if you ever find yourself on US 270 heading into Hot Springs.).

If it was any other paper but the Democrat, I'd say they had made the mistake. But in this case, I'm gonna say the responding officer thought he was closer to Malvern than he was. It could be an easy mistake along that stretch in the dark. Tall pines forests on either side and the median is fully wooded as well.
 
I thought the hospital transfers were interesting and someone who knows about that kind of thing might be able to fill it in. Saline Memorial was still pretty small back then, so the transfer up to Little Rock is perfectly logical. But they sent him to first to Baptist (same site as current near the I-430/I-630 junction in West LR.) before moving him to what we now call UAMS (Still at the same site, Pine/Cedar & Markham in Midtown. Just much, much bigger now.). UAMS is the public hospital so that may have been a factor in the move from Baptist.
 
HSV was established in the 1970s. I have an empty lot there. But to your point, it probably wasn't generating much tax base for Saline Co. in 1984.

I'm not sure finding the other survivor would have been newsworthy at that time, given the weather chaos, but I'm real curious when he turned up. The story about the breakfast in Benton and the New Haven connection must have been reported somewhere originally.
 
Curious_in_NC said:
HSV was established in the 1970s. I have an empty lot there. But to your point, it probably wasn't generating much tax base for Saline Co. in 1984.

I'm not sure finding the other survivor would have been newsworthy at that time, given the weather chaos, but I'm real curious when he turned up. The story about the breakfast in Benton and the New Haven connection must have been reported somewhere originally.
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The Benton Courier might have more, those should all be on microfiche at the CALS main branch. I'll be downtown next week, should have time to check.

Common sense would have sent him to Saline Memorial to get checked out, too. If his ride was in the creek he wasn't going to be able to get out of town that morning. He could have gotten on Amtrak in Malvern, that would have gotten him the rest of the way to Houston, in a round about way.

I'd like to know where the driver was coming from to get a better idea of where in Louisville their paths crossed.
 
sk716 said:
Where do I look for exclusions on this kid? I'm not seeing any.

This guy is a long shot, but I was randomly checking cities with arteries to Louisville.
Missing Person / NamUs #MP67363
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Yeah, as BrownBear said, NamUs makes you log in now to see exclusions. I logged in to check, and Timothy isn't ruled out. Here are the rule outs:
MP8386 Gary Mullinax 05/09/1976 Pulaski AR
MP7879 Lloyd Gilsdorf 07/29/1984 Escambia FL
MP3283 Keith Lalima 05/07/1981 New London CT
MP3399 Kenneth LaManna 05/16/1980 New Haven CT
MP4912 Randolph Sedlack 11/24/1983 Montgomery VA
MP2421 Mark Clarke 12/01/1983 Jackson NC
MP2035 Thomas Scott 08/23/1984 Tarrant TX
 
I went ahead and submitted our UID to the NAMUS person listed for Timothy Murphy. I don't expect that it'll come back as a match, but there is so little on Murphy that at the very least it might get someone to put up a picture of him.
 
Has Jackson Wade Orvin been excluded yet? He was last seen in Naples Florida in June of 1984 too me he’s the closet match to this Doe.
 

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