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On the evening of Wednesday, June 7, 2017, 19-year-old Tanner Ward left his Trenton, Missouri home as his mom was getting dinner ready. He asked her to leave a plate out for him, saying that he was quickly going to see a friend named Jeremiah & he would be back in about 30 minutes.
Sadly, this didn’t happen. After he kissed his baby daughter goodbye & headed out the door, Tanner never came back. For six agonizing months, no one had a clue as to what had become of him. It wasn’t until a cold December morning when the news did come & it was just as confusing as it was devastating.
Although Tanner’s family are convinced that he was murdered, authorities have concluded that he died by suicide. Nearly ten years have passed since his death & his family hasn’t stopped fighting for answers to questions that still remain. Sadly, the only person who truly knows what happened is Tanner & he’s no longer here to speak for himself.
Tanner Scott Ward was born on September 7, 1997 in the small town of Trenton, Missouri in the central northern portion of the state to parents Curtis & Lisa Ward. He had two sisters, Katie & Kelsey & a brother, Tyler.
As a teen, he had his struggles & run-ins with the law & had been known to dabble in drugs, but moving forward to 2017, at 19-years-old, Tanner was getting his life in order. He was a doting father to his baby daughter Sophia, he was madly in love with his fiance Megan & he was doing all that he could to provide stability in their lives.
According to his sister, Kelsey Ward, Tanner was a happy person who loved his baby, his fiance, his family & he had been actively making plans for his future.
At about 5 pm on Wednesday evening, June 7, 2017, Lisa Ward told her son that she was getting ready to grill some chicken & make a salad. When she asked him if he wanted some, he told her that he was going to head over to a friend’s house for about 30 minutes, so he asked her to save some food for him. When Lisa asked him which friend he was going to see, he told her, Jeremiah.
Tanner gave his daughter a kiss goodbye & left the house on foot wearing a gray American Eagle t-shirt with a logo on it, dark skinny jeans, black Vans & a blue KC (Kansas City) hat. He left empty-handed, heading in an unknown direction, carrying no cash, no credit card & no cell phone. This was tragically the last time Lisa ever saw her son alive.
The Ward family wasn’t really familiar with Jeremiah, if at all, since he was a new friend of Tanner’s. According to Kelsey, although she knew basically everyone in their small town, she had never so much as heard of Jeremiah in her life.
Lisa made up a plate for her son as she said she would, but thirty minutes stretched into hours & Tanner still hadn’t come home. Although he may not have had a cell phone, it was very much out of the ordinary for Tanner to go without communication since he was extremely dedicated to Megan & Sophia. Since they didn’t know where Jeremiah lived & Tanner had no cell phone or car, it made it that much more challenging to track him down.
When Tanner still wasn’t home by the next day, Kelsey made it her mission to figure out who Jeremiah was & where he lived. As she asked around town, she finally got an address for him. When she knocked on his door & no one answered, she tried the door & realized it was unlocked. Thinking that Jeremiah & possibly Tanner could be inside sleeping, she went in & was stunned by what she saw.
The entire apartment was absolutely trashed with furniture overturned & a large hole in the wall while the back door to the apartment stood wide open. Something among the wreckage made Kelsey’s breath catch in her chest; she spotted her brother’s beloved baseball hat that he never went anywhere without.
Not only was her brother missing, but he’d specifically told their mom that he was going to Jeremiah’s house & now Kelsey was finding his hat in the midst of a destroyed apartment. The scene painted the picture of a violent struggle occurring beore someone fled through the back door, leaving it wide open.
When Kelsey took the hat to the Trenton Police Department, they promised to look into it while they urged her not to panic. At 19-years-old, Tanner was an adult who had every right to come & go as he pleased & they made the assumption that he was likely a runaway, possibly blowing off steam with a girl.
His family felt that this was a ridiculous idea since Tanner would do anything & everything for Megan & their daughter. They felt frustrated & dismissed as they began their own investigation, searching around town for any sign Tanner.
By June 13, 2017, six days after Tanner vanished, police issued an endangered person alert for him. A public statement was also made in terms of what was being done within the investigation. Chief of the Trenton Police, Thomas Wright, indicated that they were trying to backtrack in order to establish timelines & get in contact with as many potential witnesses as they could.
Because Tanner had no bank account, no credit cards, no cell phone or car, tracking him was that much more difficult.
Kelsey began hanging fliers with her brother’s information all around town, which is when she spotted Jeremiah sitting in his truck. As he stepped out, this was the first time she ever met him face-to-face & she was shocked to see that he was wearing a plain gray American Eagle t-shirt that matched the one her brother was last seen wearing. Even more concerning, she saw what looked like four cigarette burn holes on it that Jeremiah tried to pass off as stains.
It’s unclear what Jeremiah said to her about the t-shirt, whether or not it belonged to him, but Kelsey told him that she was contacting the police about it & he told her he would meet her at the station.
When Chief Wright told Jeremiah that he wanted to do a forensic test on the shirt, Kelsey sensed his reluctance, but he did hand it over.
According to Chief Wright, there were a couple of anomalies on the shirt that he couldn’t say for sure if it was blood, but he planned to have it forensically tested. Even after forensic testing, they couldn’t determine what those anomalies were.
A voice stress analysis (VSA) was conducted with Jeremiah, which is a software program that’s designed to measure changes in voice patterns caused by stress or the physical effort of trying to hide deceptive responses.
However, it can be noted that according to a recent study funded by the National Institute of Justice, two of the most popular VSA programs in use by police departments across the country were no better than flipping a coin when it came to detecting deception when questioning 300 arrestees about recent drug use.
With that said, Jeremiah’s test did indicate some level of deception. This led police officers to Jeremiah’s dad’s rural property in Edinburg, six miles west of Trenton, where he spent a lot of his time. It was here that cadaver dogs alerted to a burn pit positioned close to the backdoor that was about six feet wide by ten feet long.
After digging down to the compacted earth & then another foot deeper using equipment, investigators found a significant amount of small bones. Although cadaver dogs are specifically trained to detect the scent of human decomposition, they can sometimes alert to dead animals which is what happened in this case as an anthropologist determined that the bones belonged to an animal.
The investigation was back at square one & each lead police followed brought them down a dead end.
Since Tanner didn’t have a cell phone, there was no digital trail to follow. Investigators also indicated that Tanner’s circle of friends were reluctant to talk to the police as they were afraid of being implicated in other activities.
Five weeks after Tanner vanished, a warrant was issued for his arrest after he missed a check-in with his probation officer. One year earlier in 2016, Tanner was placed on felony probation for a home invasion in which he & his older brother Tyler went into a home with weapons.
This incident involved an angry teenage dispute over a drug deal that led Tanner & Tyler to show up to this home with a gun & prevent the people inside from leaving. After he pleaded guilty to unlawful use of a weapon, he was placed on five years’ probation.
His family did not believe that he was hiding out from his probation officer, instead, they believed that he didn’t check-in because he couldn’t.
Six months after he kissed his daughter goodbye & asked his mom to save dinner for him, everything changed on a cold, windy December morning.
At about 7:30 am on Monday, December 4, 2017, Tanner’s childhood friend & his girlfriend were walking to Trenton High School where they were students. As they made their way through a wooded area between the train tracks & Shanklin Avenue, less than three blocks from Tanner’s home, a creaking noise coming from a nearby tree caused them to look up. As they did, they noticed something hanging from the tree amongst a tangle of branches. As they looked more closely, they realized that it was a human body hanging from the neck, dangling in the branches about 20 feet above.
When authorities responded to the scene, it was clear that the body was badly decomposed which made an immediate identification impossible. The victim’s fingers were mummified while their feet were missing. Some clothing was present at the scene, some that was on the body while other pieces were lying at the base of the tree.
According to Chief Wright, based on the condition & stiffness of these items of clothing, it was clear they had been there for a while.
Although Chief Wright wasn’t able to identify Tanner due to the state of decomposition, because Tanner was missing & the tree was so close to his family’s home, he called Tanner’s father to the scene. If it truly was Curtis Ward’s son, he didn’t want the family to learn the information from anyone else.
Curtis called Tanner’s mom at work with the news, but they had to wait for dental records to definitively confirm that sadly, it was their son’s body hanging in that tree.
The full autopsy was completed by Dr. Erik Mitchell of Frontier Forensics Midwest in Kansas City, Kansas. He determined that Tanner Ward had committed suicide by hanging himself in the tree. According to the report, there was no suspension of his body by anyone other than himself. The bark on the tree had not been disturbed with no evidence of a sawing or sliding action of the cord across the bark.
It also indicated that the cord from which the body was hanging had been wrapped around the branch multiple times & Tanner’s body was hanging well above grade over an area of branches, brush & other debris.
A t-shirt remained attached to Tanner’s torso while his dark skinny jeans were detached from his body & lying on the ground below. As were his empty black Van shoes & a single sock. It’s unclear how no one had previously noticed the clothing lying on the ground, but these items were a match to what Tanner was last seen wearing.
Since Tanner was wearing a gray shirt when he was found, this would indicate that the shirt Kelsey saw Jeremiah wearing in town, was not her brother’s.
Dr. Mitchell found no injuries to the body other than what was consistent with a fall from the tree with a rope around the neck area. He determined that Tanner had hung himself from the tree where his body remained for six months until it was discovered.
However, the tree wasn’t in the middle of nowhere. It’s located along the main strip of town near a business that’s open from Monday through Saturday. Because Tanner went missing during the summer months, there would have been leaves on the tree that could have potentially concealed his body, but when the leaves began to fall in autumn, this would no longer have been the case.
Since Tanner went missing in the summer when the weather was hot, one would assume that someone would have surely detected the distinct odor of decomposition.
A construction worker contacted Lisa whose work storage building was only 25 feet away from the tree. He told her he had been working only ten feet away multiple times that year, saying, I can assure you he was not in that tree at that time. He also said that because he was out there during the hottest times of the summer, he would have absolutely smelled something.
According to Tanner’s friend who found his body, he’d walked by the tree two or three times before the day he discovered his body. Although he & his girlfriend had been very close to the tree during those times, neither of them had seen anything. He feels that had Tanner’s body been there, he’s sure he wouldn’t have missed seeing it.
Kelsey’s friend Veronica had gotten even closer to the tree less than a week earlier & she didn’t notice anything at all although she’s sure she would have, had he been there.
However, Chief Wright believes that when people are out walking, they’re usually not looking up, rather, we’re usually looking straight ahead or down at our phones.
The police indicated that evidence suggests that Tanner had been in the tree for quite some time, not only just due to the level of decomposition, but also by the way his body was positioned on the branch & how the brush had grown around it.
However, Curtis Ward was there when his son’s mummified body was taken down from the tree. The area where they live in north-central Missouri has very humid & moist weather from June-September which, to Lisa, is another piece of evidence to prove that her son’s body had not been there for six months. In order for a body to mummify, dry, hot hair & direct sunlight or extreme cold is usually needed.
However, according to Crime Watch Daily expert Dr. Bill Smock, who has been a police surgeon with the Louisville Metro PD for more than two decades, during the summer in Missouri, a body can mummify in humid conditions within three months.
He also feels that based on the indentation on the tree branch where the rope was, Tanner’s body had been there for a long time. He also believes that the smell of decomposition may not have been detected due to the wind while the foliage could have obscured the view of his body from the path below during the summer months.
However, some have wondered if the indentation in the branch could have been caused by someone throwing the rope over the tree & using the branch as leverage to pull his body up.
Dr. Smock also admits that because the body was mummified, forensic evidence was lost. During mummification, a body loses 60-70% of its weight while the internal organs shrink in size & often eventually disappear altogether. This leaves only bones & possibly some markings on the external tissue while bruising or injuries would be gone.
Dr. Smock feels that Tanner’s death could be a suicide, but it could also be a homicide that was simply set up to look like a suicide. Although, based on the photos he saw of Tanner’s body, he had been hanging for an extended period of time due to the elongation that he saw. Since gravity pulls the body down, over time, it stretches.
Although Tanner’s shoes were found at the base of the tree, his feet were missing & have never been recovered. The Trenton Police Department as well as medical examiners believe the separation was a result of natural decomposition paired with animal scavenging. After his feet detached, the heavy denim jeans, shoes & socks he wore, slid to the ground below.
Tanner’s family completely reject this notion, pointing out that had his feet naturally detached from decomposition, his feet should have remained trapped inside the socks or shoes. They believe someone intentionally removed his feet before placing his body in the tree.
Kelsey feels that her brother’s body wasn’t decomposed enough & there were no signs that insects or birds had interacted with his body. They feel that according to the evidence, Tanner’s body was kept elsewhere & strung up in the tree on the day that he was discovered.
Although Tanner told his family that he was stopping by Jeremiah’s house before he vanished, because his death was determined to be a suicide, law enforcement never treated the apartment as an active crime scene or Jeremiah as a suspect. Which means he was also never forced to explain why his apartment was in such a chaotic state & why Tanner’s hat was there.
After Tanner’s body was found, the Wards have gotten many messages from total strangers saying that he had been murdered. These texts went on to say that he had been held & tortured for about four months until he was beaten to death with a baseball bat & then placed in a freezer. They’ve gotten photos of a baseball bat in the back of an abandoned car, which Kelsey believes supports their theory that her brother was kidnapped, beaten & tortured.
Some of these messages also said that he was hung in either a well or a fruit cellar before he was transferred to the tree.
According to Chief Wright, throughout the investigation, nine people were said to have been involved in Tanner’s death while there have been four different methodologies, none of which were proven by the autopsy. He’s heard that Tanner was shot in the head & stabbed in the back, neither of which happened.
Text messages sent to Lisa Ward also say that the drug deal incident her sons were involved in in 2016 set off a violent war of retribution that involved Tanner’s friend Jeremiah & his upstairs neighbor, Stephanie Miller. One of the people allegedly held hostage was Stephanie’s daughter whose name was not listed in any police report surrounding the home invasion. Stephanie has never been charged, named a suspect or a person of interest in Tanner’s death.
Kelsey believes that these people retaliated against her brother, never intending to kill him, only meaning to beat him up. She thinks that when Tanner fought back, things escalated.
After the Ward family paid for a second, independent autopsy in 2018, it also concluded that Tanner’s injuries were consistent with a suicide while his family stand firm in their belief that this wasn’t the case.
Lisa Ward indicates that there isn’t a fiber in her body that believes her son ended his own life. He didn’t leave a note behind, he had no suicidal tendencies, he hadn’t been suicidal, he adored his fiance & his daughter & he’d been making plan for the future.
Since his dad was coming home from deployment eleven days after he vanished, Tanner was making plans for Father’s day. He was also working through his legal troubles & focusing on his young daughter to provide her with a more stable life.
When 19-year-old Tanner Ward walked out of his family’s home on June 7, 2017, he told his mom he’d be gone for only about 30 minutes. Instead, his family waited six long months until his body was eventually found less than three blocks from home.
Although authorities have confirmed that Tanner died by suicide, a conclusion that it supported by two autopsies, for his family, this ruling hasn’t answered all of the questions surrounding his disappearance & his death.
Whatever happened during the final moments of Tanner’s life, his family deserves to feel confident that every reasonable question has been asked & every credible possibility has been explored. Until then, his loved ones will continue to ask the same question they’ve been asking for nearly a decade: What really happened to Tanner Ward?
References:
- NIJ: Voice stress analysis: Only about 15% of lies about drug use detected in field test
- True Crime News: Mystery in Missouri: What happened to Tanner Ward?
- Medium: Suicide or something more in small-town Missouri?
- ScienceDirect: Mummification
- Trenton Republican-Times: Ward’s death is ruled a suicide
- Facebook: Danelle Hallan: What happened to Tanner Ward?
- YouTube: Brooke Makenna: What really happened to Tanner Ward?
- Resthaven Mortuary: Tanner Scott Ward
- Taylor & Francis: Mummification – a forensic case series
- Zoorithm: Do cadaver dogs hit on dead animals?
