2 Wives, 1 Shed, And a KILLER Who Vanished Into The Woods

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In the summer of 2017, a sheriff's deputy pulled up to a small farmhouse in Idaho to do a welfare check. It was in the middle of a heat wave, so he was taking it slow. And really, there was no sense of urgency. This was nothing out of the ordinary for him. Calls like this almost always end the same way, with somebody sleepily coming to the door to explain that they'd just been too busy and forgot to call their mom back. So the deputy starts walking the property. The house looks fine. Nothing's undisturbed. But then he gets hit with the smell. That thick, undeniable smell of rotting flesh. And that told him instantly that this was anything but one of those ordinary people. He calls. Hey guys, it's Andrew. Welcome to Everytown. Where today, we've got a story with two possible endings. Either our killer is a man who lost his mind out of nowhere and is lying dead somewhere in the middle of the woods. Or he's someone who planned every last detail down to the letter and walked away scot-free. So, let's head over to Idaho now. And check out one secret, three dead, the case of Mike Bollinger. Gerald Michael Bollinger, who just went by Mike, was 60 years old back in the summer of 2017. And by then, he'd already lived a pretty full life. He'd spent years up in Stillwater County, Montana, a big sky country, before heading to Utah in the early 2000s. And the life he built, well, it was about as All-American rugged as it gets. He was a pilot, and he was an outfitter, the guy who would take people out into the backcountry to hunt, fish, and camp. He was definitely self-sufficient, and he knew how to live off the land. He flew for an outfit called Classic Aviation Service out in Utah before picking up contract work that slowly drew him toward Idaho. He also flew for an outfit called Classic Aviation Service out in Utah before picking up contract work that slowly drew him toward Idaho. Six-foot-one, 240 pounds, he was a big and capable guy who looked like he could handle himself just about anywhere you dropped him. And by all appearances, well, that's exactly what he was, a regular, capable guy and a good husband. And for this story, it's important to remember what Mike did for a living because, well, it's sort of the whole story. Flying and outfitting, those aren't the kind of jobs you can fake your way through. They demand a very specific set of skills, being able to read the weather before it turns on you, navigating open country with no landmarks to go by, and surviving out in the middle of nowhere for days on next to nothing. In other words, this was a man who was genuinely comfortable being alone in the wild, in places most of us would only last an afternoon. Just tuck that away in the back of your mind because all that's going to matter a whole lot. All that's going to matter a whole lot more once this case takes the turn it eventually does. Mike married a woman named Cheryl Baker back in 2010, which put them a solid seven years into their marriage by that summer. It wasn't Mike's first go-around, but for Cheryl, it was. And she waited until 50 years old to find the right man, and she thought she had got it. By 2017, Baker was 57. And she was just about to retire from teaching art over at Greenwood Charter School in Harrisville, Utah. Everybody who knew her seemed to like her. She was described by colleagues as steady and generous. She was a good teacher, so somebody who had spent an entire career caring about other people's kids. And by May of 2017, Cheryl had got everything a person could want at that stage of life. A happy marriage, a career she's about to close out her life with. And a plan for what comes next. Because that's the month she and Mike bought themselves a little farmhouse out in Canyon County, Idaho. A quiet rural stretch just outside Caldwell, with plans to turn it into their retirement home. You can picture what that must have felt like for her. This was the reward at the end of a long working life. A nice piece of property with a little bit of land. And a fresh start, just the two of them. At least, that's what Cheryl thought it was, because here's where it all starts to get complicated. At the exact same time Mike Bollinger was buying that retirement home with his wife, he was quietly running a second, completely separate life two states away. A whole other world, and Cheryl didn't have the faintest idea it existed. But she didn't want to give up on her dream. She didn't want to give up on her dream. DocDoc makes the whole thing easy. matters and taking care of yourself shouldn't be complicated, find and book the right doctor with ZocDoc. Head to ZocDoc.com slash Everytown to get started and check that appointment off your to-do list. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C dot com slash Everytown. In May of 2017, Naja and Peyton packed up their lives in Ogden, Utah and moved to Idaho to be with Bollinger on what he told them was his new ranch. As far as Naja knew, Bollinger was divorced. As far as Peyton knew, she was moving in with the man who had been like a second father to her for the past several years. For a few weeks that spring, it apparently worked. Bollinger split his time between the two households, playing devoted husband to his art teacher wife and doting boyfriend, practically stepfather to a woman and teenager who trusted him completely. Though every single day that passed by, the closer these two women were getting to meeting one another. Mike was the only one who knew it was coming. Cheryl was already packing her things ready to head to Idaho, with no clue she was going to walk into a house already occupied with her husband's new family. Or maybe she did know, at least down in her gut. And there, something told her not everything was right in the world. She just wasn't sure what it was exactly. Because around June 11th, in the middle of the move, Cheryl sent a text message to a close friend back in Utah. It didn't say much, except, "Take care of my dogs. I don't know if I'm coming back." And nobody who read it at the time understood what it meant. Cheryl's brother Byron only shared it with reporters after everything else had already come to light. And by then, it read less like an odd throwaway line, more like Cheryl knew she might be walking into an ambush of sorts. As it turned out, she was right, because that was one of the last things she ever managed to tell anyone. The first flag raised started with all the calls that didn't get returned. Down in Utah, a close friend of Najah's, a woman who had known her for years, hadn't heard a word from her. No texts, no callbacks, nothing from her going back weeks. And that had never happened before. And it wasn't just her friend. Her own family couldn't reach her either. Her late husband's brother, a guy named Mark Medley, and Peyton's grandmother all hadn't heard from Najah or Peyton in a little while. And Cheryl's side was feeling the same thing. Her brother Byron hadn't heard from her. The last anyone had, as he found out, was that text sent to a friend about taking care of her dogs because she didn't think she was coming back. So eventually, somebody made the call. And a relative phoned a Canyon County Sheriff's Office and asked them to send someone out to the property. Just go check and make sure everybody's okay. That's the welfare check. And that's what sent a single deputy driving out to 216 South KCID Road on Monday, June 19th. He's headed to this little isolated farmhouse tucked into the woods, smack in the middle of an Idaho summer as the temperatures were climbing. He pulls up, sees no activity whatsoever other than bugs flying around. The moment that deputy stepped out of his vehicle, before he even knocked on a single door, had a chance to look through a window. He knew something was wrong because he got hit with that smell. On a hot day out there, it was pungent. And so he started looking for the source. It didn't take long before he zeroed in on the shed. Deputies discovered three bodies covered in a shed outside a residence on KCID Road east of Caldwell after family members requested a welfare check at the home. All three bodies were badly decomposed because they had been out there a while. One, maybe two weeks, the coroner would later estimate. And each one of them, they had been killed the exact same way. It was a single gunshot wound to the head, execution style. Nothing about it appeared prolonged. Just one shot each, then three bodies hidden together in a place they'd obviously get discovered. All this on a piece of property that the owner had held for a grand total of about six weeks. As it turns out, it wasn't only the women, either. Scattered around that same property were animals. Dead dogs and dead birds. Family pets. Investigators couldn't even say for sure how they died, whether they'd been shot too or simply left to starve once there was no one left to feed them. There were some survivors, though. Barely. A number of survivors, though, were left to die. A few of them were taken to a hospital in Caldwell, New York. Some of them died, including a snake, a rat, some rabbits. All pulled out alive during the investigation. But the picture that deputy walked into was a place where nearly every living thing had been snuffed out and left to rot in the sun. The one person who should have been there, the common thread between everyone, well, he was gone. Mike Bollinger wasn't in the house and he certainly wasn't answering his phone. As it turns out, he'd last been seen back in Ogden, Utah on June 11th, the same rough window as that final text from Cheryl. Which means by the time that deputy had found the bodies on the 19th, Bollinger had somewhere around a week's head start on anyone and everyone. But for a man who flew planes and guided people through the woods for a living, a week is a mighty long time. Bollinger is considered armed and dangerous. He may be driving a white 2007 Ford Focus with Utah license plates. He's described as 60 years old, 6'1", 240 pounds with gray hair and brown eyes. Missing from that property in Caldwell, was a 2007 Ford Focus. That's the car Mike used to get away. And for a few weeks, that vehicle was the only trace of him anybody had. Then on July 12th, almost a full month after the killings, well, the Focus, it turned up. It had been abandoned and was sitting at a remote campground deep inside Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming, out near a little place called Moran, not far from Grand Teton. Now that's roughly 400 miles away from where he left those bodies. And the thing about where he left it is that it's about as far as a car can physically take you before the road stops, and you're on foot from there. In front of you, you'd be staring into more than three million acres of forest and mountains and rivers. The kind of place that would kill you if you didn't know what you were doing. Also, the kind of place where if you do know how to handle yourself, well, you go into and no one will be able to track you down. The search zeroed in on a stretch called the Pacific Creek Drainage. And a Teton County search coordinator later described that county as thick with wolves, coyotes, and grizzly bears. In other words, a place where nature alone can finish the job a manhunt can't. And they found footage from CCTV cameras that showed the manhunt. They found footage from CCTV cameras that showed the manhunt. near the entrance station at Moran. As it turns out, Mike had rolled up there on June 17th, so he had a 25-day head start this time. They still threw everything they had at it. Search teams moved in with police dogs and helicopters. Infrared cameras swept the trees at night, hunting for a heat signature. A body, a campfire, really anything warm and alive down there, but nothing ever lit up. About a week after they found the car, deputies in a neighboring county got a call about a man matching Bollinger's description. They chased that down, but it turns out it wasn't him. And that right there is where the entire trail of this man ends. It's a car parked in a national forest and then nothing. There's never been one confirmed sighting, not one verified bit of contact, not in the weeks after, or in the years since. Now for most people, you could almost certainly count on the fact that no matter how hard they tried, they were never going to make it out of there alive. But Mike isn't some office guy who wandered off in the woods. He's a man who spent his whole life learning exactly how to survive out in country like this. And who, if he wanted to, knew precisely how to disappear into it. And he's a man who didn't even know how to survive out in country like this. He didn't even know how to drive. A year later in 2018, search and rescue teams went back into that same stretch of forest. This time though, they brought in cadaver dogs specifically trained to locate human remains. They were working with the theory that Bollinger might have died somewhere out there not long after abandoning his car and they wanted proof. They combed the area for days and then came back with nothing. Investigators have said publicly that they've collected evidence over the years pointing toward Bollinger being dead, though they've stopped short of saying exactly what that evidence is. The sheriff himself has also been careful, even while leaning toward that theory, never to rule out the alternative entirely. Which leaves investigators and everybody who's followed this case since staring down two very different possibilities and no way to prove either one. The first is that Mike is dead. The Canyon County Sheriff has said publicly more than once that he believes this is almost certainly what happened. I share that possibility that he is deceased and that he's out in the Bridger-Teton National Forest on the Wyoming side. It's possible. It's my strong belief that that's where he's at. Whether he took his life by his own hand or perhaps died from the illness. It's hard to say. But it's the second possibility that keeps this case alive. In the true crime forums, in the Facebook groups, message boards where people have spent years trying to do what an entire tri-state manhunt couldn't. Knowing what this guy was capable of, for those who are still looking for him, it's because the question isn't at all, well could he have made it out of those woods? It's, what was his plan all along? As I mentioned from the start, really, why kill these three people? It feels pretty senseless, especially from a 60-year-old guy with no prior record. Well, some think he might have snapped that day. Something happened and things got crazy. But here's what doesn't add up about the he-just-snapped explanation. Now this was a man who had cheated before. A man who had been divorced before. And he knew better than most that he was a man who had been divorced before. And he knew better than most that getting caught with a second family didn't have to end in blood. Could have ended in a lawyer's office the way it apparently had for him in the past. So why this time did three people all have to die? Well, interestingly, a forensic psychologist who looked at the case described Bollinger as someone with a deep, brittle sensitivity to humiliation. After all, that would explain his entire alpha male persona of being a pilot. And an outdoorsman. Never would he have to feel beneath anyone in his life. He had survival skills that people admire. According to the psychologist, this was the kind of man for whom being exposed and being seen as a fraud or failure by everyone in his life all at once well, might feel totally unbearable. And so for a guy like that, this wasn't about losing Cheryl or losing Nadja. It was about the act of being. being caught and acting like an idiot. And so, he needed to protect his ego at all costs. Hence, the elimination of everyone who could confront him and then, his disappearing act. And on top of that, there's the murders themselves and what happened after. Now, these killings weren't a frenzied attack. There were no self-defense wounds on the women. It was a cold and calculated execution. And he didn't look to have panicked and fled like one would do if they lost their cool in the moment. Now, he put them under a tarp and headed to a place where he knew he wouldn't be found. When investigators opened the trunk of that Ford Focus, they didn't find a mess you'd expect from someone running blind. They found all three victims' cell phones. And they found his own phone. So every single device that could have pinged a tower and traced him somewhere had been collected and left behind with the car he knew would eventually be found. And somewhere between the farmhouse and the forest, the murder weapon, it was recovered too. While outside the state of Idaho, which tells investigators he didn't drive straight to those woods at all, he made stops. Detectives have wondered ever since whether one of those stops was to quietly gather up things a man would actually need to vanish for good. We're talking gear, supplies, and cash that couldn't be tracked the way a bank card could. Now, you put all that together and it stops looking like a breakdown and starts looking like a checklist. And the place he chose to disappear, that wasn't a random patch of wilderness either. To you or me, the end of Pacific Creek Road is a dead end. To an outfitter, well, it's a trailhead. From that exact spot, the country opens up into the Teton Wilderness and the thoroughfare, some of the most remote, least-traveled backcountry left anywhere in the lower 48. And if you pull back and look at the map, that terrain doesn't just lead nowhere. It points, more or less, back toward the country where Mike Bollinger grew up, where he still had deep family roots, Montana. So the tips keep coming, year after year. Hundreds of them into the Canyon County Sheriff's Office over time. Some are just a hiker's uneasy second glance at a stranger who looked a little too much like an old wanted poster. Others, detailed and confident enough that deputies have driven out to run them down in person. The sightings have surfaced in more than one state, but none has ever been solid enough to close this thing. But then again, none has ever been completely ruled out either. And most of the cases we cover here end somewhere. Even if it isn't totally clean, there's more or less an answer, but this one doesn't have that. The motivation, as far as anyone can tell, was one man's ego. Even though the Sheriff's Office says he's likely dead, a lot of people aren't so sure. And so somewhere out there, either in the frozen desert, or in the frozen back country of western Wyoming, or in some town where nobody's ever thought to look twice for him, is a man in his 60s who once flew planes and guided hunters through some of the wildest country in America. And whether the answer to where he is turns out to be a shallow grave the search dogs missed, or a name on a mailbox in a town nobody's checked yet, the people who love Cheryl, Naja, and Peyton are still waiting for somebody to find the truth. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Everytown. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you know anything at all about this case, the Canyon County Sheriff's Office in Idaho still wants to hear from you. If you enjoyed hanging here, then go check out another episode, and make sure to come back next week for a new scary, strange, and mysterious story. Because you never know, maybe your town will be next.