On a cold February day in 1939, 25-year-old Eliza Darnell disappeared without a trace from Lee County, Virginia. She was a Lee County schoolteacher, educated at Big Stone Gap High School, and the daughter of a wealthy merchant and landowner in Keokee. Eliza’s disappearance wasn’t just local gossip, it gripped the region.
She left with a $106 check in hand. Her father offered a $500 reward for information but wasn’t hopeful. He believed Eliza had simply run away. She had made it known she disliked the area and wanted to move to eastern Virginia to teach. For a young woman in 1939, that feeling of suffocation in a small town might have been enough to walk away without looking back.
Weeks turned into months. On April 7, 1939, a bizarre twist arrived in the mail: a letter from Thelma Clinkscale, a cook and “seer” in Knoxville, Tennessee. She claimed to have had a vision revealing the location of Eliza’s body and predicted a tall, blond man would confess to her murder. She asked for $250 in exchange for the exact location. Authorities investigated and ultimately dismissed her claim as a cash grab. Clinkscale was cleared of any involvement.
That same day, Sheriff R.F. Giles publicly announced that officers believed Eliza had wandered into the nearby rugged mountains and died from exposure. Searches of old mine shafts and trails turned up nothing.
Then, months later, on September 4, 1939, her body was finally found on the Kentucky side of Black Mountain by a man named McKinley Clark, who was out squirrel hunting. There were no signs of violence. No tall blond man. Just a young woman, alone on the mountain, frozen to death.
