Cold Case Files: US Forest workers located his body six weeks after his wife saw him in their Needmore home

On a Monday in early November 2014, a U.S. Forest Service crew working south of Waldron came upon human remains in thick timber of the Ouachita National Forest, in the stretch of woods lying between Hightop Road and Upper Buffalo Road. It was about noon on November 3.

The site sat in the same rugged corridor where searchers had already spent days looking for a local man who had vanished six weeks earlier. Dental records soon confirmed what the sheriff’s office already feared. The remains belonged to Mark Nix, 39.

Nix lived with his wife south of town in the Needmore and Winfield country, a place of hills, creeks, and national forest that locals treat as backyard. He stood about six feet tall and weighed around 215 pounds, with brown hair and blue eyes.

People who knew the family described him as an avid hunter, someone who understood the woods and could stay out in them for days if he chose. A neighbor who knew his parents said being in the timber was ordinary around Waldron. His wife told deputies it was not unusual for her not to know his exact whereabouts at any given moment. The family asked at first that his name be kept out of the papers.

The last time his wife saw him in person was Friday, September 19. They spoke by phone Saturday evening, September 20. Friends also reported seeing him that Saturday. On Sunday afternoon, September 21, horseback riders met a man they believed was Nix several miles down Hightop Road.

Monday morning, September 22, his pickup turned up in the woods off Ray Lovett Road near his home, in the Needmore area and not far from Truman Baker Park. The cell phone was inside the truck. The keys were gone. The engine was not running. The family reported him missing that same Monday.

Scott County deputies and a growing list of helpers treated the case as a missing person investigation from the start. They said they had no reason to suspect foul play. The family believed he was all right.

For four days, from September 22 through September 25, searchers from at least eight counties and several agencies walked, rode, and flew the country west of U.S. 71 between Hightop Road and Ray Lovett Road. Estimates ran from 45 people covering a few hundred acres to more than 80 people covering about six square miles.

They used tracking dogs, horses, ATVs, ground teams, and a state police helicopter. The ground is steep, brushy, and easy to hide in. On Thursday, they stopped, saying they had covered the ground as thoroughly as the terrain allowed. The family later posted a five-thousand-dollar reward for information that would lead them to him.

Six weeks later the Forest Service crew found him in that same belt of woods. Sheriff Amie Carpenter said the state medical examiner would determine the cause of death. No later public report announced a ruling of homicide, suicide, accident, or undetermined.

The case never shifted into a criminal investigation in the newspapers. No Arkansas court records or news accounts from that period tie this Mark Nix of Scott County to a prior criminal history.

The roads he last traveled, Hightop and Upper Buffalo and Ray Lovett, still run through the same forest south of Waldron. The country has not changed much.

What remains is a man who knew those woods, a truck left with a phone inside and the keys gone, a possible sighting on a Sunday afternoon, and a body found weeks later in the timber where the search had already passed.