In a small US town, four cyclists disappear without a trace. Then a passer-by finds four bodies in a river. Now investigators confirm: The human remains are the missing men.
Police in a small Oklahoma town found four bodies in a river on Friday, three days after four men, all described as friends, were reported missing. This is reported by the “New York Times”. Police have now said the bodies are the missing men in Okmulgee, a town about 40 miles south of Tulsa. Authorities suspect the men were on their way to a crime that then went awry.
According to the Okmulgee Police Department, a passer-by noticed something suspicious in the Deep Fork River on Friday and informed the police. Investigators later found human remains floating in the water. Authorities earlier this week identified the missing men as Mark Chastain, Billy Chastain, Mike Sparks, and Alex Stevens, all from Okmulgee. The men were between 29 and 32 years old.
Police said all four left Billy Chastain’s west Okmulgee home on bicycles around 8 p.m. on Oct. 9. Two of the men were believed to have cellphones with them, but calls to them went straight to voicemail, police said. Investigators said they tried to locate the men using GPS after the missing person report. The police chief said investigators searched 25 hectares on foot and with search dogs of the area where the men were suspected to be, and found “nothing of note”.
Local residents previously reported seeing some of the men in town, police wrote on Facebook. “We’ve had many, many, many reports of sightings,” Police Chief Joe Prentice said on Friday. “We have not been able to confirm any of these. I had one in Monroe, Louisiana today” – about 400 miles away.
(This article was first published on Tuesday, October 18, 2022.)