Hiker's disappearance from Great Smoky Mountains park remains mystery 10 years later

For 10 years, Derek Lueking's mother maintained a steadfast presence on a Facebook page dedicated to finding her son, a young man declared missing from Great Smoky Mountains National Park on March 17, 2012.

The tone of the Find Derek Lueking page inevitably morphed over time from initial pleas for Derek to reach out to heart-felt memories as birthdays and anniversaries ticked by, year after year.

"My biggest fear is not that Derek is gone, but that if he should ever look at this page and think he was forgotten," Sheila Lueking wrote more than five years ago. "That's the reason I continue to post."

She's not alone in her heartache. Derek Lueking is one of people who have vanished from the rugged, mountainous park on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina.

'Don't Look For Me'

Derek Lueking was 24 when his roommate, concerned that he didn't show up for his job at Louisville's Peninsula Hospital, reported him missing on March 15, 2012.

Over the next few days, Derek Lueking purchased more than $1,000 in camping supplies and stayed in several motels. Security camera footage showed him leaving the Microtel Hotel in Cherokee, North Carolina, at 4 a.m. March 17. That was the last sighting of Derek Lueking.

His sister, Kim Jackson, told Knox News the family found his vehicle at Newfound Gap about 8:30 a.m. that day and alerted park authorities that Lueking was missing.

He had purchased a sleeping bag and tent, as well as park maps, but left those behind. Also left behind was a cryptic note stating only “Don’t Look For Me,” along with his wallet and car key.

But Lueking, described by his family as a fan of survivalist Bear Grylls' TV show, did take supplies he could have used to live in the woods for a period of time. In a release issued by his family after his disappearance, they said he took items including a daypack, a Bear Grylls survival tool pack, an ax, several pages of a military survival manual, a head lamp and even some granola bars.

In the days after Lueking disappeared, park spokeswoman Molly Schroer told Knox News he might have "wanted to get lost" and live off the land but "got in over his head."

The official search in that first week included more than 60 people, plus tracking dogs and helicopter spotters. Those search parties initially concentrated on the off-trail areas surrounding the parking lot.

Adding to the confusion and sparking concerns of foul play was a second man going missing in the park — Michael Giovanni Cocchini, 23, of Nashville. No evidence was ever found the two men shared any connection, and Cocchini's remains were subsequently found that August.

By March 26, the National Park Service announced it was calling off its search, with park spokesman Bob Miller telling Knox News, "We don't want to give up, but we've pretty much exhausted what we can do."

Lueking's friends and family continued the search on their own, distributing thousands of fliers in the park and surrounding areas to no avail.

Missing persons cases in the park go back to 1969

Given the size of Great Smoky Mountains National Park — 522,419 acres — and its status as the most visited national park in the United States with 14.1 million visitors in 2021, you might think more people would have gone missing there in the years since the park was established in 1934.

But as is true with most parks, searches for missing hikers are launched far less frequently than rescues.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park averages 103 search and rescue missions annually, with 118 in 2021, said park Emergency Manager Liz Hall.

"Based on data from 2016 to Search Assets 2020, 80 percent of those searches were for injured people, 6 percent are for missing people, and 14 percent are recoveries or fall outside of those parameters," Hall said.

In all, five people remain on the list of people who went missing in the park and were never found, going back to 6-year-old Dennis Martin, who vanished on a camping trip with family on June 14, 1969.

Trenny Lynn Gibson, 16, went missing on Oct. 8, 1976, while on a field trip with Bearden High School. She was hiking with classmates near Andrews Bald and Clingmans Dome but disappeared some time after 3 p.m. that day.

Thelma Pauline Melton, 58, was hiking near Deep Creek Campground with two friends when she went out ahead of them and disappeared on Sept. 25, 1981.

Christopher Lee Cessna, 35, was reported missing and possibly suicidal April 27, 2011. Park officials later discovered his 2009 Audi at the Newfound Gap parking area.

Keeping track of the missing

The National Parks Service Cold Cases webpage lists a total of 28 people who went missing from national parks and who have never been found, nearly half from Yosemite (a much less visited park with 3.2 million visitors in 2021). Rocky Mountain National Park is listed as having five cold missing persons cases, while Great Smoky Mountains is in third place with four (Cessna is not on the list, perhaps because he is considered a suicide).

An astonishing number of people — more than 600,000 — go missing in the United States every year, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. Many of those are quickly found alive and well, but tens of thousands of people remain missing for more than a year.

The National Crime Information Center listed nearly 522,000 missing persons reports made in 2021, most of which were "purged" due to the cases being resolved. According to the center's database, 93,718 missing persons cases remained active as of the end of the year.

So who goes missing, perhaps forever? The vast majority, 61 percent, are juveniles who do not fall under the category of involuntarily missing (kidnapped) or believed to be in danger. Nearly 73 percent of the juveniles reported missing were coded as runaways, the data shows. Of those who remain missing, persons younger than 21 account for 42 percent.

In 2021, nearly 42,000 people were reported as missing under circumstances that indicated their physical safety was in question, while 13,621 were reported to be involuntarily missing, meaning abduction or kidnapping. Almost 30,000 were reported to have a mental or physical disability that could have put them in danger.

And nearly 23 percent of those reported missing simply fell into the "other" category, meaning they were missing adults where there was a reasonable concern for their safety.

Lueking, it seems, falls into that category, one that provides few answers when the missing person cannot be found.

As the anniversary of Derek's disappearance approached this year, Sheila Lueking declined to speak to Knox News, explaining she had no new information to provide. She subsequently made one last post on the Find Derek Lueking Facebook page, announcing her decision to close it down.

"Until we KNOW, we HOPE," she wrote to the page's nearly 3,000 followers. "If we have news, I will reopen and share. Thank you ALL for your continuous support, love, and prayers through the years."

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Great Smoky Mountains National Park disappearance remains a mystery