The Prevailing Theory #022: The Vermont Five (DEEP DIVE: 11 MIN READ, 13 MIN AUDIO)
This week we dive into the Bennington Triangle and it's five most notable victims!
Hello everyone!
Welcome to this week’s issue of The Prevailing Theory. We’re in for a bit of a spooky one this week as we use our FIT method to investigate the Bennington Triangle and the disappearances that have happened there over the years.
If you’re reading this newsletter for the first time, the FIT Method stands for Facts, Investigation, and Theories.
Let’s jump in!
Facts
The Bennington Triangle is a term coined by author, Joe Citro in 1992 and focuses on a southwestern corridor of Vermont where five people went missing in consecutive years between 1945 and 1950. The Triangle reportedly centers on Glastenbury Mountain, and fully envelops the nearby towns of Bennington, Somerset, and Woodford.
The five disappearances we’ll be investigating this week are Middie Rivers (1945), Paula Jean Welden (1946), James Tedford (1949), Paul Jepson (1950), and Frieda Langer (1950). Of the five people listed here, only Frieda Langer’s body was ever recovered.
Middie Rivers was a 74-year old outdoor enthusiast who went missing on a hunting trip with his son-in-law and some friends. Rivers and his son-in-law split up, with Rivers agreeing to meet back at the camp for lunch, but when 3PM rolled around, the group started to worry. Despite a search by the hunting party and local authorities, the only thing that was recovered was a single rifle cartridge that matched the same kind Rivers was known to carry.
The most exceptional part of this disappearance is that even though his friends were worried, they also were confident in Rivers’ survival abilities. His son-in-law even mentioned that they thought they’d find Middie months after the fact living on the land. His body was never recovered.
The second disappearance, and perhaps the most high-profile, was that of Paula Welden in 1946. She was a sophomore at Bennington College, at the time an all-girls school, and disappeared while on a hike near Long Trail Rd.
Highly visible in her bright red windbreaker, Welden was seen by several people leading up to and including her time on the trail. The primary witnesses were an older couple who had taken up the same trail but about 100 yards behind Welden. While on her walk, the temperature dropped from around 50 degrees Fahrenheit to just 9. The older couple remembered specifically that although they saw Welden round a corner in the trail, when they got the same corner, she was nowhere to be seen. Her body was never recovered.
In 1949, James Tedford went missing while visiting family in the area. He was seen by quite a few people, and was accompanied by family to the bus station where he would ride back to Bennington, but at some point between the next to last stop and his destination, Tedford disappeared. His luggage was still on the bus, as well as a bus timetable. It seemed as though he had vanished into thin air.
The fall of 1950 saw the disappearance of two people in the Bennington Triangle. The first of which was Paul Jepson, a special needs child. A bloodhound tracked his scent from the car he was sitting in while his mom fed some pigs to a stream nearby, and even though a search party spent several days searching for him, he was never found or recovered.
The last person that went missing was Frieda Langer, and she disappeared just sixteen days after Paul Jepson went missing. She was out hiking with her cousin and fell into a small stream. She went back to the campsite she’d made with her cousin to change clothes and promised to rejoin him on the trail. But after a while, her cousin went back to the campsite and learned that Langer had never returned to change clothes. Her body was recovered nine months later over three miles from her campsite. No cause of death was determined due to the state of her remains.
Now that we know a little about each disappearance, let’s move into what my investigation turned up!
Investigation
When I started to investigate these disappearances, I was immediately struck by oddities surrounding three of the five cases. Specifically, the disappearances of Middie Rivers, Paula Welden, and James Tedford.
The disappearances of Paul Jepson and Frieda Langer make a bit more sense to me. Jepson was a special needs child that a bloodhound was able to track from the car to the woods, before losing his scent. He was eight years old, so while tragic, there was never a real chance he’d survive in the woods. The bigger mystery there is why did he leave the cab of the car to begin with? We’ll leave that thread unpicked for today.
Frieda Langer also adds up to some extent. Many people point to Frieda Langer’s age but she’s by no means “old” at just 53, and she could have very easily been turned around when travelling back to the campsite and ended up lost. Her disappearance, again, tragic, but by no means without explanation.
With that in mind, I wanted to take a close look at the other three disappearances.
What didn’t add up about Rivers’ disappearance is that he was familiar with the woods of that area. However, when I did a deeper investigation, the newspaper article described Rivers as being unfamiliar with the the ridgeline known as Bickford Hollow, which would have been near where he went missing. A popular theory I saw online about Rivers was that he had a heart attack and fell down the ridge, but the paper specifically mentioned that he’d had a checkup with his doctor a few months prior to disappearing and was found to be in good condition. The article also mentions tracks being found, but they weren’t conclusively Rivers’ tracks. It is likely that Rivers fell down the ridgeline, heart attack or no, and is simply lost to the woods of Vermont. Subsequent articles mention the search for Rivers spanned about eight days and used volunteers, fire fighters, and soldiers . They ended up quitting the search when the omnipresent rain began to turn into snow.
Paula Welden disappeared while out on a hike. It was reported that she turned a corner and simply vanished, but when I investigated her disappearance more, the elderly couple that was depicted previously as having been walking behind her, actually lived nearby and weren’t walking at all. They just observed that they saw her on the trail. Because this case was so much more popular than the others, there is a lot of speculation surrounding what occurred, but what we know is that Welden arrived on the Long Trail at 4PM. This was at a time of year (December) when night would usually start at 5PM. From there, it is not hard to think she underestimated exactly how dark it gets at that time of year in the woods. I even did a bit more research and determined that the moon was actually in waxing crescent the night that Welden disappeared (12/1/1946), making travelling at night in the woods difficult. Also, note that the weather dropped from 50 degrees to just 9 in the span of an evening, rendering Welden’s light jacket woefully inadequate.
The last person I wanted to look at more closely was James Tedford. He was on a bus from St. Albans to Bennington and disappeared at some point in the trip, leaving behind his luggage, bus ticket, and an open bus timetable. Several of the reports I found online mention that he was a veteran of WWII, but at 68 years old at the time of his disappearance, I was suspicious and actually able to confirm that he was a veteran of WWI. Furthermore, though he disappeared on December 1st, Tedford wasn’t reported missing until December 7th, which means the investigation was a week late in getting started. Authorities were able to get a timeline established where Tedford was dropped off at the bus terminal by relatives at 1PM, and was also seen by bus terminal employees at 6PM at the last stop before boarding the bus to go to Bennington. There was significantly less written about Tedford’s disappearance, and I suspect it is because the disappearance was reported so far after the fact that the authorities had a hard time digging anything up.
So what are our theories?
Theories
Theory #1: There was a serial killer in the area that was active between 1945 and 1950.
The term “serial killer” was coined in 1974, but that doesn’t mean serial killers didn’t exist before this time. In fact, it means they may have been more dangerous than ever, since the infrastructure in catching them that exists today didn’t exist at the time.
In 1945, police were lucky to have a collection of fingerprints they could reference for any prints they managed to lift from a crime scene. Let alone a central database that encompasses the work of every police department and national agency in the country.
The timeline fits a serial killer pattern. Five deaths over five years, and there’s even a double event. In serial homicides, there is almost always a “double event” where the killer breaks their previous pattern and commits two murders in quick succession. In our five missing people, assuming they were all victims, the two I’m referencing are the last two; Paul Jepson and Frieda Langer, who disappeared just sixteen days apart.
The big knock against this theory is that there is little to no pattern in the victims. Serial killers almost always have a pattern they follow for an ideal victim. Or they have a similar MO for each murder they commit. However, there are none in our five victims. They range in age, sex, social status, and circumstances of their disappearance. Lastly, we actually don’t have any bodies either to say that there is or isn’t a pattern in how death occurred and even though the deaths occurred one per year on average, they actually have a three year break between Paula Welden and James Tedford’s disappearances.
Theory #2: The Multiverse
This theory is unfalsifiable - meaning it can’t be proved or disproved. But imagine that there are infinite universes, wherein lie infinite possibilities. This is often referred to as the Multiverse, and some people argue that these infinite universes are actually connected in some way.
In fact, some people argue that the lines are so thin between like-universes that you could be in one universe one minute, and the other the next. Remember how Paula Welden turned the corner on that trail and disappeared? Maybe she just disappeared in our universe and there’s another universe where she finished her hike and went on to live a normal, quiet life.
Instead of James Tedford seemingly disappearing off a moving bus, there is a world where he gets off the bus and spends the rest of his days at the Bennington Soldiers’ Home eating steak and drinking whiskey.
But, these theories are just speculation. Nobody’s ever actually been known to move from one universe to the next and back. But then again, how would they know?
Theory #3: Random Chance
It is not exciting to think of random chance being responsible for these disappearances. But think about it.
Five people with no connection other than the part of the country they live in go missing in the woods or near it. Only one of their bodies is ever recovered but not because of maliciousness. That part of Vermont is one of the most heavily wooded parts of the country, so it would be hard to find anyone, even if you knew where to look.
It is entirely possible, in fact, I would say it’s even likely that the Bennington Triangle is a figment of local lore that gained national popularity because the occurrences are weird. Why did the disappearances start in 1945? More importantly, why did they stop in 1950?
People go missing all the time. In fact, in 2022 alone, there were 546,568 people reported missing. That means that there is more than one person going missing every single minute of the year (don’t fret. 97% of these people are found alive and well within 48 hours). But the fact still remains. That leaves 3% (or 16,400) that could be found outside of that timeframe, or never found at all. And that’s in 2022, when we have so much technology at our fingertips to discover missing people. Things they wouldn’t have had in 1945 or even 1985.
Conclusion
So which theory do I support?
Theory 3 is probably the most likely. There was no pattern to the disappearances because there is no pattern to find. It is a heavily wooded area of the US and four of the five disappeared in the woods. A little over 1000 people are reported missing in National Parks every year, so the sad fact is, this could just be the result of an accident.
But what an intriguing thought experiment to imagine an infinite number of worlds with an infinite number of possibilities? Maybe there’s even a world where these disappearances are the work of a serial killer who was caught. But in this universe? It is far more likely these people simply met random, unfortunate accidents.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bennington_Triangle
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/bennington-triangle-vermont/
https://www.vermonter.com/vermonts-bennington-triangle/
https://geodata.vermont.gov/datasets/84a286c51ece48488273710e1f49834e/explore