At approximately four o’clock on the morning of August 23rd, 1987, the crew of a Union Pacific freight train passing through Alexander, Arkansas on the way to the capital city of Little Rock spotted what appeared to be two human beings lying across the railroad tracks ahead. The engineer blew the horn and attempted to halt the locomotive prior to hitting the prone bodies, but neither of the individuals moved from the tracks, and the crew was unable to stop before the train rolled mercilessly over them.
When police arrived forty minutes later, they were able to identify the two victims as sixteen-year-old Don Henry and seventeen-year-old Kevin Ives, who had left their nearby homes at about midnight to go out hunting. A flashlight and a .22 caliber rifle, presumably belonging to the teenagers, were found nearby.
Initially, authorities believed the boys’ deaths were just an unfortunate accident, and surmised that Don and Kevin had smoked a great deal of marijuana over the course of the night, after which they fell into a deep sleep on the railroad tracks. The first autopsy suggested that both boys had an extremely high amount of THC in their blood, supposedly the equivalent of twenty joints.
The victims’ families didn’t buy this explanation, however, and demanded a second autopsy. This time around, the amount of THC was discovered to be much less, more like one or two cigarettes, and even more alarmingly, the examination also found evidence that Don had likely been stabbed in the back, and Kevin had had his skull crushed with the butt of the shotgun, prior to the train running them over. It was beginning to look as though the teenagers’ deaths weren’t accidental at all, and in 1988, a grand jury ruled the case a probable homicide.
The most prevalent theory about the motive behind the murders of Don Henry and Kevin Ives is that the teenagers possibly witnessed a drug drop in the woods and were killed by traffickers, who then laid their bodies on the train tracks to make their deaths look like accidents. Other than this hypothesis, police seem just as baffled about the strange case as they were when it first occurred, and the crime remains tragically unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 