What Happened to Polly Melton?
Melton split her time between Jacksonville, Fla., and the North Carolina side of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She and her husband, Bob, spent their summers living in an Airstream in a trailer park just outside the entrance to the park’s Deep Creek Campground.
Melton had been widowed twice before marrying Bob, and she had no children. She smoked, had high blood pressure and was overweight—so her two female hiking companions were a bit surprised when she started walking quickly as the trio made their way back along the Deep Creek Trail. Soon, she was hiking so fast that they could no longer see her.
Roughly 30 minutes later, when they got back to the trailer park, Melton wasn’t there—and Bob hadn’t seen her either. The group found a park ranger and reported Melton missing.
Park personnel mounted a search, starting with a smaller offshoot of the main trail. When that turned up empty, they brought in search dogs and sent groups of roughly 15 people to scour the area in grids.
“When the dogs got to the place where Polly disappeared, they howled and turned ‘round and ‘round, but they wouldn’t go left or right,” Kit Postell, Melton’s sister, told the Charlotte Observer. “It was eerie.”
Why Did Polly Melton Go Missing?
After days without a breakthrough, the National Park Service called off its official search for Melton, though rangers promised to keep an eye out for her during routine patrols.
Investigators, friends and family, meanwhile, remained baffled by her disappearance. The Deep Creek Trail was considered an easy hike, and it was one that Melton knew well. She had walked the trail many times during the roughly 20 years that she had been visiting the area.
Even more puzzling, Melton wasn’t carrying anything with her when she disappeared—no purse, no jacket, no cigarettes, no identification, no money. She had been wearing casual clothing, including a pink striped shirt, tan slacks and walking shoes.
Could she have been kidnapped? Melton was known to wear a substantial amount of jewelry, raising the possibility that she was targeted by someone trying to rob her. When she disappeared, Melton was likely wearing a diamond wristwatch, as well as three diamond rings.
“Somebody could’ve grabbed her for those rings,” Velma McAllister, Melton’s stepmother told the Charlotte Observer. “She had on her wedding band with, I guess… eight diamonds on it. And her engagement ring—that was a diamond cluster, and then another diamond cluster Bob gave her for Christmas, on her right hand.”
However, investigators found nothing to suggest that Melton had been taken against her will.
“There was no indication anywhere that she was abducted,” Dick Moore, the park’s chief ranger at the time, told the Charlotte Observer. “She is listed as a missing person.”
Trula Gudger, who was hiking with Melton when she disappeared, also did not believe her friend had been kidnapped. She wondered instead if Melton might have suffered some sort of debilitating medical emergency.
“I think she is still in those woods,” Gudger told the Charlotte Observer. “I don’t think she walked out of there. What I really think is that something just popped in her head, she had an aneurysm or something, and she walked off the trail and they just never found her.”
Another possibility is more sinister. Juanitta Baldwin, the co-author of Unsolved Disappearances in the Great Smoky Mountains, wondered if Melton disappeared deliberately. Her husband, Bob, had been ill with a heart condition, and perhaps Melton was simply fed up.
Maybe Melton had “arranged to be met at a crossroad there in the park and be picked up,” Baldwin told WBIR-TV. “She was tired of the stress with her sick husband and she just decided to make a new life.”
National Park Cold Cases
Melton’s disappearance is one of more than two dozen cold cases under investigation by the National Park Service’s Investigative Services Branch, most involving people who went missing and were never found.
People go missing in national parks for a variety of reasons, from injuries and falls to suicide, animal attacks and severe weather events such as storms, floods and avalanches, Stacy Kemp Ferrari, the founder and managing partner at Kemp Law Group, tells A&E Crime + Investigation.
But disappearances happen in all kinds of places, she notes. What sets national park cases apart is the setting. Vast, rugged and often remote, these sprawling public lands leave plenty of room for the unknown—and the imagination—to take over.
“If someone is lost in a city, people would read about it and call it a day,” she says. “But when they are missing from a national park, it triggers questions such as, ‘Is there someone taking them?’ ‘Is Bigfoot involved?’ ‘Are there serial killers living in those parks?’”
National park disappearances also tend to attract attention because the searches can stretch on for days or even weeks, often involving volunteers, police dogs, helicopters, heat-sensing cameras and other specialized equipment.
“All of those things make headline news and trigger so much curiosity in the minds of viewers,” she says.
Will Polly Melton Ever Be Found?
Melton was declared legally dead seven years after she went missing. However, her father, Fred McAllister, never gave up hope that she might be found and refused to allow a memorial service.
After McAllister died in December 1990 at the age of 98, however, Melton’s siblings decided to honor her memory with a service and a headstone in their hometown of Leeds, Ala.
“There may not be a body in the ground, but at least we feel like we’ll have done something for Polly,” Postell told the Charlotte Observer in 1991, a few months before the 10th anniversary of Melton’s disappearance.
Can the case ever be solved? It’s possible, Michael Wetter, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. But after more than four decades, the types of evidence capable of helping investigators solve it become increasingly limited.
He says that a breakthrough would probably need to come from “something concrete,” such as the discovery and identification of remains or previously overlooked physical evidence.
“Modern forensic methods provide opportunities that simply did not exist in 1981,” he says. “We have seen decades-old cases resolved because biological material was retested or unidentified remains were finally connected to a missing person. So I would never say that a case this old is incapable of being solved. I would say that the pathway to solving it becomes narrower.”
