Cold Case Files: A Faulkner County man made the drive from Conway to Mt. Magazine and disappeared in 2025

The black 2020 Dodge Ram 2500 was already sitting there when the search began.

On March 10, 2025, Larry Thompson’s truck was found parked at a campsite pull-off on Rich Mountain Road Byway n

ear Paris, in the Ozark National Forest under Mount Magazine, empty and locked, with no sign of the Conway man who had driven it up from Faulkner County.

The Logan County Sheriff’s Office later said Thompson, of Conway, was believed to have gone missing on that byway on March 8. Family notices placed the truck at the same pull-off a day earlier, on March 9, and said he had been wearing blue jeans and running shoes.

Either way, the vehicle was the first and still the only fixed point in the case.

Rich Mountain Road Byway is not a city street. It climbs through national forest on the slopes of Mount Magazine, the highest point in Arkansas, past campsite turnouts where trucks sit for a night or a weekend and then leave. A black heavy-duty Ram at one of those pull-offs would not, by itself, have looked wrong.

People park there to walk the woods. What made this truck different was that it stayed, and its driver did not come back to it.

Logan County took the ground search. On March 16, 2025, the sheriff’s office said its deputies, the Logan County All Hazards Team, the Office of Emergency Management, the Van Buren Search and Rescue Team, family, and friends had already been through the area around the byway and found nothing. The public appeal that day asked anyone who had seen Thompson, or the truck before it was reported, to call the Logan County Sheriff’s Office at (479) 963-3271.

Early descriptions put him at 54 years old, 6 feet 3 inches, and 225 pounds.

The work did not stop with that first sweep. On April 14, 2025, nearly 50 volunteers gathered out by Mount Magazine, joined by law enforcement, emergency management, and trained search teams that came in from other parts of the state.

Searchers worked through briars and spring pollen and still came off the mountain without him. Two days later, on April 16, the sheriff’s office said another volunteer search in the Rich Mountain area of the national forest had also found nothing, and asked hunters using those woods to watch the ground as the season went on.

That is the shape of the Logan County investigation as it has been described in public. The truck fixed a place and a narrow window. It did not fix a direction. A locked pickup at a campsite pull-off can mean a man walked into the timber and did not walk out, or that he left the vehicle with someone else, or that the byway was only the last place the Ram was left.

None of those readings has been settled by what searchers recovered, because what they recovered was the absence of him. No clothing matching the jeans and running shoes was publicly tied to a trail. No second vehicle was named. No confirmed sighting after the truck was found has been released.

A Faulkner County Sheriff’s Office missing-person record lists him as Larry Thompson, alias Larry Wayne Thompson, case 25-0302338, date missing March 6, 2025, reported by the Faulkner County Sheriff. That listing, current as carried by the family materials supplied with this account, describes a white man, now 56, 6 feet 2 inches, 230 pounds, brown eyes, brown hair. T

By the fall of 2025 the family had moved into probate court in Faulkner County. A petition in the matter of Larry Wayne Thompson, case 23PR-25-515, asked that he be declared deceased, with a hearing noticed for January 26, 2026, before Judge David Clark in Conway.

A later docket note indicated that hearing was cancelled, and the filing does not by itself mean a body was found or that Logan County closed the search. It means the people who knew him had lived with an empty truck and a silent mountain long enough to ask a court to treat the absence as death.

Anyone with information is asked to contact the Faulkner County Sheriff’s Office at (501) 328-4160, case 25-0302338. Family can be reached at (501) 472-6395 or brendamichelleford@gmail.com. The Logan County Sheriff’s Office, which holds the mountain search, remains at (479) 963-3271.