Tashi Coleman

Thin Air podcast

Episode 2: THE BIG WOODS

NARRATOR: The first spot I wanted to visit in Tibbehah County was the old Hawkins place. This is where Sheriff Hamp Beckett found Brandon’s ’55 Chevy Apache the day after he disappeared, although Brandon’s body wouldn’t be found for nearly a week. The windows were open, seats covered in rainwater, according to an account in the Tupelo Daily Journal. His gun rack was empty, only his backpack and a few scattered CDs lay in the passenger seat. One of them was Garth Brooks, Fresh Horses. I’d thought about that album a lot when I first started looking into Brandon’s death, the song “Beaches of Cheyenne” particularly staying on my mind. They packed up all his buckles and shipped his saddle to his dad, the song goes, about a rodeo rider who gets killed riding a bull. His girlfriend takes the news pretty rough.

The land is in the far northeast corner of Tibbehah County, a five-hundred-acre spread that had recently been divided up into four sections after Joe and Lorna Hawkins died in the late 1970s. Their kids moved to other states and rarely checked on the property. According to the same news story, one of the children had offered hunting rights to Tim Taylor and Taylor, in turn, let Brandon use it.

My producer Jessica and I decided to drive out to the land on our very first day in Mississippi. The cattle gate was still up, chained to a rotting post, and covered in thick kudzu. It’s an eerie stretch of dirt road to the old house, much of it overgrown by weeds and partially blocked by downed trees. The house had fallen in on itself, windows boarded up with rotting plywood and the front steps broken and decayed. Brandon’s mother told us about a deer stand sitting a quarter mile down a path from the old home.

[BIRDS CHIRP. CICADAS TICK. REPORTERS’ STEPS SHUFFLE ON PINE NEEDLES.]

We followed the same path, pushing through the vines, spiderwebs, and tree branches. It was August, almost oppressively hot, but there was a soft stillness as we walked on the rust-colored pine needles, following the trail Brandon Taylor had gone down many times. Even twenty years later, it doesn’t seem like the kind of path you’d get easily lost on. We found the deer stand in about ten minutes and crawled up its old wooden ladder to see what was left. Inside, we discovered a stack of waterlogged Penthouse magazines, some empty tins of smokeless tobacco, several crushed soda cans, and two condoms.

[SHUFFLING OF DEBRIS IN DEER STAND.]

JESSICA: Brandon was here.

TASHI: Looking out on this very same field. Maybe this was his Mountain Dew? Or can of Skoal. Did Brandon use that stuff?

JESSICA: I’ll ask Shaina.

NARRATOR: The view opened up into a slice of land that had at one time been clear, now filled with small trees and wild vines.

According to what the sheriff’s office said at the time, Brandon, a kid who’d been hunting these same woods since he was eight, simply got turned around that night and stumbled into the Big Woods, a twenty-thousand-acre stretch of national forest populated by oak and loblolly pine, with creeks, a river, and thick undergrowth.

Brandon’s body would be found nearly twelve miles away from where he’d parked his truck in a completely different part of the county. Was he really lost? Did he purposefully wander into the Big Woods to kill himself?

The location of the body wasn’t our only question. The idea Brandon somehow got turned around and wandered away on purpose could make sense. We do know he carried a Remington .308 on a shoulder sling, a high-powered deer rifle, the gun always cited as the weapon used in his suicide.

But what we’d later learn is the bullet found in Brandon’s skull wasn’t from a Remington .308 at all. A copy of Brandon’s first autopsy released to us by his sister says the bullet that killed Brandon was a .38 caliber, bullets most commonly used in revolvers, sometimes in semiautomatic pistols. Officials would tell the Taylor family for years it was simply a typo. A zero missing in the report.

But with all other files lost, and no evidence related to the case in storage, we couldn’t be so sure. That hot night in August, Jessica and I stayed up in the deer stand until it turned dark, listening to old Garth Brooks on our iPhones, drinking a few cheap beers, and thinking about how this fifteen-year-old boy ended up almost another county away. There was something mysterious and ominous about being so close to those Big Woods, which seem to spread out forever from the old Hawkins land.

TASHI: It’s getting so dark.

JESSICA: No streetlamps or ambient light. I hope we can find our way back.

TASHI: Brandon always had a flashlight. So do we.

NARRATOR: The only thing we could imagine driving us further into the unknown was if we’d been followed.