Cold Case Files: The man who never was left a child and a decades long mystery lingering from 1870's Madison County

In the winter of 1888, on a ridge above Greasy Creek in southwest Madison County, Nancy Paralee Hill gave birth to a boy she named George Washington Redmond.

She was twenty-seven, unmarried, and living in a log house with her widowed mother, Lucinda. The census eight years earlier had listed Nancy as single, no husband, no sweetheart, no stranger sleeping in the loft.

Yet when the midwife asked for the father’s name, Nancy spoke it without hesitation: Redmond.Then the man vanished as completely as morning mist off the Boston Mountains

.The stories started almost immediately.

The older folks said he was Irish, tall, with a lawman’s stare and a farmer’s hands. They claimed he rode for Judge Parker’s court in Fort Smith, carrying warrants into the Indian Territory and coming home only when the moonshine wars quieted down.

Some insisted he kept a second family over in Washington County. Others swore he simply saddled his horse one January morning, kissed Nancy once, and rode south, never to be seen again in Arkansas.

No one ever found a body. No one ever found a grave. No one ever found a marriage license, a death certificate, or even a payroll stub from the federal court at Fort Smith that carried the name Redmond, Redmon, Redmon, or anything close.

By 1890 Nancy had married Moses Gibson, a quiet widower who raised George as his own. The boy grew up plowing the same red-clay fields his mother had worked, enlisted in 1918 under the Gibson name, and came home from France to farm and raise a family.

When he died in 1970 at the age of eighty-two, he took whatever he knew, or didn’t know, about his real father to the grave with him. .The paper trail is mercilessly clean.

Madison County courthouse records show no marriage between Nancy Hill and any Redmond. Washington County shows nothing. Sebastian County, home of the federal marshals, shows nothing.

The great ledgers of deputy marshals who rode for Judge Parker, men who faced Cheorkee Bill and the Rufus Buck Gang—list no Irishman named Redmond who disappeared between 1885 and 1890

.Yet the name was real enough for Nancy to give it to her son, real enough for George to write it on his marriage license when he wed in 1916.

Real enough that, more than a century later, his great-grandchildren still open Ancestry DNA kits hoping a match will finally cough up a first name, a hometown, a reason.

In a place where every moonshiner killing and barn burning made the Fayetteville Democrat by the next Thursday, the silence around this one man is louder than gunfire.

Was he murdered and rolled into a sinkhole full of cedar limbs?

Did he ride west to the Cherokee Nation and become someone else?

Or did something quieter and uglier happen on that isolated farm while the nearest neighbor was five miles away through the laurel hells?

Lucinda Tucker Hill filed for her Confederate widow’s pension in 1891 and never once mentioned a son-in-law who had vanished. Nancy herself lived to be seventy-five, bore eight more children with Moses Gibson, and was laid to rest in the red dirt she never left. She never changed her story, and she never added to it.

Tonight, if you walk the old road from Pettigrew down toward the Washington County line, the ridges still look the same with thick cedar stand, creeks loud after rain, and hoot-owls asking the same question descendants have asked for six generations:

Who was Redmond,and why did the mountains swallow him whole?