re: "Ben Bilemy" Deceased Hiker Might Have Ties to New York and Louisiana

quote:

---

---

This is a really odd image.

Not saying he should have died over it, but odd.

The OP’s timing is not great, calling Baton Rouge PD at this point probably won’t result in much information in the next week.

quote:

---

Mostly Harmless checked into Top of Georgia Hostel & Hiking Center under the name “Ben Bilemy”, which was more than likely an alias since hikers were not allowed to check in under their trail names.

---

He more than likely shared some personal info with some of his fellow hikers, but it sounds like this guy was trying his best not to be found.

That's the very beginning of the Florida Trail. How did he get there? Where was he before?
Most people would hike from the southern end to northern, but if he was found in June that would be no time to start the FL Trail.

Someone had to drop him off in that general area.

quote:

---

Someone had to drop him off in that general area

---

He had hike the Appalachian trail southbound and continued down the Pinhoti in Alabama and just kept going to connect to the Florida trail somehow. The pictures are from Appalachian trail hikers that saw him I believe.

quote:

---

I just think it's strange not a single person had come forward looking for him until he was found dead.


Did he have no friends or family? No former coworkers he kept in contact with?


Why was no one curious about his disappearance? And now that he's been found dead, why is there not a soul stepping forward to ID him?

Kind of strange in modern america with fingerprints and DNA. Also, no id or money? No cellphone? No serial number from an electronic purchase that could track where he purchased the electronic and with what payment?

---

I think homeless people are more common than you think and often don’t have much of a footprint. Outside of not being in the system for finger prints none of those are terribly surprising.

quote:

---

I don't want to hog up the forum too much today.

---

Thanks to the hurricane thread, we are closing in on the allotted number of postings on the OT for today.

Starvation/anorexia

I watched an episode of North Woods Laws where a 68 year old female hiker disappeared somewhere along the Appalachian Trail in Maine. Her trail name was Inchworm because she didn’t move very fast on the trail. Her real name was Geraldine, can’t remember her last name right off hand.

Anyway, her husband was doing a “support hike” where he would meet her at places where the trail crossed highways and roads and resupply her. He reported her missing when she failed to meet him for resupply.

There are shelters, like the ones pictured in some of the photos, all along the trail that have log books. The log books are used as a sort of an unofficial way of tracking the hikers in case they get lost. In other words, if you logged in at one shelter, but not the next, they sort of have an idea of where you might have left the trail.

Long story short, they tracked Inchworm for weeks. Never found her. Her body was eventually found, months later, on some US Military land by soldiers on a training mission. Lived for weeks, lost, wrote everything down in a journal. Same fate as this Denim guy, starvation.

Has anyone considered Denim, his trail name, may refer to his hometown of Denham Springs?

It is strange to me that he was on a trail within the sound of the highway and no one else on the trail didn't find him before he died of starvation.

Not a well traveled trail? Having no ID with quite a bundle of cash does sound as if he was carrying drugs to distribute.

What else other than a stroke incapacitating him could cause him to just lie there and starve to death? Would a stroke show up in an autopsy quite a while past death?