Barbara Hall had already had the year from hell when her 26-year-old son Timmy Dees went missing in February.
Dees had grown up in southeast Missouri, not far from Fredericktown, a city of 4,000, about 90 minutes south of St. Louis. But when he turned 18, he wanted to work and found few opportunities. He moved to the St. Louis suburb of Creve Coeur, where over the course of eight years he became a rigger, setting up stages for concerts. Music was his passion, and after becoming part of the stagehands' union, it looked like he would be able to make a living working in live-event production. He was about to buy a house, intent on becoming a family man. He didn't have a girlfriend, but that would work itself out.
On June 19, 2021, Dees' older brother Michael died of an overdose. He'd long battled mental-health issues and addiction. The whole family grieved. Dees got a tattoo of a pizza roll and ranch-dressing bottle on his calf, a tribute to his brother's favorite food. He said that if he ever had a son, he'd name him Michael.
"Timmy was very upset, stayed upset," Hall says. "He told me he wished he'd stepped in and done more to help his brother, but there was nothing he could have done."
In February of this year, one of Dees' friends from Fredericktown offered to pick him up and take him back to his old stomping grounds for the weekend. Dees was eager for the change in scenery. He mentioned the planned trip to Hall during one of their almost-daily phone calls.
On Friday, February 25, Dees and his friend drove down to Fredericktown.
When Dees didn't call Hall over the weekend, she took note but didn't worry. He was out with friends. She understood. She began getting nervous on Monday when she still didn't hear from him.
Hall called her son's phone but couldn't leave a message because Dees hadn't set up his voicemail. That was nothing new. But suddenly, her text messages weren't going through either.
By Tuesday, Hall felt physically sick.
"Something felt bad. Something felt wrong," she says. On Wednesday, March 2, she reported her son missing.
The information about her son's weekend in the Fredericktown area is hazy, and even two months later, Hall doesn't fully know what happened.
A few days after she reported her son missing, she got a call from the friend who had taken Dees to Fredericktown. He had been arrested on a warrant unrelated to Dees' disappearance. He called her over the jail's video-conferencing system, and Hall recorded the call.
In the video, his hair is long and unkempt, his face stubbled.
"I'm going to do everything I can to look for him," he said. "I'm worried, Barb. I love you. I love him. I don't want you to think I'd do anything to hurt him."
The call had been made in the early days after Dees' disappearance, Hall says, when she still held out hope he might be found alive.
"Why would he say he'd never hurt him?" Hall asks. "What did he mean by that?"
Surveillance video along with police and phone records paint a partial picture of the hours leading up to Dees' disappearance.
Around 1 a.m. on the morning of Monday, February 28, Dees was seen on security-camera footage at a gas station in Fredericktown.
Dees withdrew $160 out of the gas station's ATM at 1:30 a.m. and played the video slot machines.
Fredericktown Police Chief Eric Hovis confirmed the surveillance video, saying that Dees was positively identified on it and that he looked "happy, healthy and alive."
About three hours later, at 4:40 a.m., someone made a 911 call from Dees' phone. The call went to Madison County Sheriff's Department dispatch but was not recorded. According to the dispatcher, a frantic voice on the other end said, "Someone is chasing me." Since the call wasn't recorded, no one knows for sure if the voice belonged to Dees or if someone else was calling from his phone.
"Back in December, our 911 recorder went down," dispatcher Kyle Rogers says. "And it took us about four months to get a new one replaced. I ordered it in January. It got installed in the middle of March."
After the call, Hall says deputies with the sheriff's department responded to a house on Village Creek Road in Madison County, north of Fredericktown.
There, the deputies arrested the friend Dees had traveled to Fredericktown with on an outstanding warrant. Others present at the scene said that Dees had been there earlier in the night but had already taken off.
"And now it's like he's vanished," Hall says.
Within a few days, Hall was down in Madison County searching for her son for herself. She's basically never left.
The three-story red-brick Madison County Courthouse sits in the heart of Fredericktown. An impressive bell tower rises one story above the rest of the structure, making the courthouse easy to mistake for a church from a distance. It's encircled by a roundabout where Fredericktown's East, West, North and South Main streets all converge. These days, it's impossible to walk more than a few feet on any of the four streets and not see a photo of Timmy Dees. His mother has blanketed the town with them.
On a sunny April afternoon, Hall arrives and begins her usual routine: Using bungee cords, she attaches large posters of her son to the light poles dotting the roundabout. "Help Bring Me Home," the posters read. Hall and her boyfriend, Jimmy Moyers, retrieve two camping chairs from the back of their car and set them out in the grass in front of the courthouse. They sit for the rest of the day passing out fliers advertising a $10,000 reward to anyone who can help find Dees. Hall has been at the courthouse every day for the past six weeks, except Sundays and days when it rains.
For the most part, everyone in town already has a flier. Almost every business has one in its front window.
A week prior, Hall went to around 20 houses in the area near where her son was last reported to be and got those homeowners to sign documents giving volunteers permission to search their properties. She organized a search, followed by another with trained dogs. Her effort to close her son's case is nothing short of heroic.
"I'm not going away," she says. "I can tell you that. I don't believe my son's alive anymore, and he's all I had left. At this point, what are they going to do, kill me? That would be putting me out of my misery because getting up every day living this stuff is a nightmare."
Her presence is simultaneously a vigil and a protest.
A vigil because, after 10 weeks, Hall has conceded the grim reality of her situation. "I carried each of my sons for nine months," she says. "But I lost them both in eight."
A protest because Hall feels law enforcement in general, and Madison County Sheriff Katy McCutcheon in particular, have dragged their feet on the investigation.
"I couldn't get that Madison County sheriff to do anything for me," Hall says. She points to the sheriff's patrol SUV, parked by the courthouse. "She just pulled up and walked inside and didn't even look in my direction."
McCutcheon calls the lack of closure on the Dees case a "black eye" for her department, but she is adamant that "every lead that came through, we've addressed it as far as we can. We're working with the [Missouri State] Highway Patrol on the investigation."
In the past 10 weeks, the Dees case has received some media coverage, including a segment on KMOV.
But Dees has become a bona fide cause célèbre among a dedicated group of vloggers and others online.
"The police are doing nothing. There's a whole bunch of cover-ups in that town," one vlogger said in a video covering the Dees case.
McCutcheon says that the interest has turned into an avalanche of "threats and harassment" directed towards her and her deputies online. In October, the department deleted its Facebook page.
"I'm hiding absolutely nothing. We're not covering up anything. All the Facebook warriors are getting on Facebook, saying how we've got all these suspicious deaths in the county. Yes, people come here, they shoot themselves, they die. I can tell you that every death we have, if it is somewhat suspicious, we call the highway patrol. They have more experience. They have more education. They deal with murders every day. We deal with a murder every three or four or five or six years."
The anger against the sheriff's office isn't just online.
As Hall puts it: "People pull over all the time when they take a flier from me, and they say, 'Man, I hope you find out something. This whole town is corrupt. We hope we get some answers and something changes in this town.'"
McCutcheon isn't the only person in Fredericktown people want answers from. There's also James Wade.
There's a house along Highway Z just outside Fredericktown that is fairly isolated, partially surrounded by trees. It once belonged to James Wade, a middle-aged man with gray eyes and a salt-and-pepper goatee. While he owned it, two young men died there.
On the morning of Halloween in 2014, Wade walked into the Madison County Sheriff's Department. (This was before McCutcheon's tenure as sheriff.) According to police reports, "Wade was pacing around waving his arms about. He moved in a jerky motion moving his head about his eyes wide open. He stated he wanted to report a missing person." Wade said that 20-year-old Nick Lowrey — who was involved with one of Wade's daughters, Brooklynn — had gone missing. A deputy gave Wade paperwork that Wade took home but didn't fill out and never returned.
Later in the day, Brooklynn Evans came into the sheriff's office and said that Lowrey "said he couldn't take it anymore. He had a gun that his grandfather had left to him, and he had only one bullet for the gun. The gun had no clip. Nick said he was going to kill himself. He took the gun and walked into the woods."
The next day, Lowrey's body was found in the woods on Wade's property with a gunshot wound to the head. The coroner ruled the death a suicide.
The police report about Lowrey's death states that Lowrey's father, Matt, came to the Madison County Sheriff's Department and spoke with deputies about the investigation. The report says Matt "stated that he has been informed by Nicholas [Lowrey's] half-brother Brian in the past that James Wade has made threatening statements toward his son, Nicholas Lowrey."
However, upon further questioning of Wade, and after the coroner's ruling, deputies found no cause to further the investigation.
Lowrey's death wasn't talked about outside the area at the time, but it took on new significance in the wake of what happened on the property 6 1/2 years later.
Derontae Martin was a defensive lineman for Park Hills Central High School in the Fredericktown area. The school mascot is the Rebel, a mustachioed white man in a red outfit — a romanticized depiction of someone who fought for the revisionist Lost Cause. After graduating, Martin's SAT scores weren't high enough to go to college, so he got a job at a restaurant, but lost it during the pandemic. But things were looking up when his family moved to Ferguson, where Martin got his own room for the first time. His mom used her stimulus check to buy him some new clothes. A few weeks later, on April 23, 2021, a friend from his high school picked him up to take him to a party back in Madison County. It was an 18th birthday party for Lani Wade, James Wade's daughter.
Martin's mother, Ericka Lotts, tells the RFT that on Saturday, April 24, her son arrived at the house of 47-year-old James Wade for the party.
Martin was Black, and Wade is known for displaying a large Confederate flag and posting extremely racist content on social media. A photo of a Black man in shackles superimposed with the text "My great great great grandfather's tractor" was a typical post of his. A 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Madison County, which is 94 percent white, was met with a large, hostile counter-protest and, as one business owner put it, a "huge militia with an AR15 every half a block."
In the early hours of Sunday morning, Madison County received a 911 call from a surprisingly calm Wade saying that someone at his home was dead and that, no, he didn't need to perform CPR. During the call, a woman in the background shouts, "I hate this." The victim is 19-year-old Martin, who died by a gunshot wound to the head in Wade's attic.
Witnesses at the party told police that Martin, who had methamphetamine in his system according to a toxicology report, was acting paranoid. A 31-year-old partygoer gave Martin a gun. According to a police report, when the man was asked why he gave Martin the gun he said because "Derontae was feeling uncomfortable, so [I] gave him his gun to make him feel more comfortable."
Martin's initial autopsy ruled his death a suicide, but Martin's family requested a second examination be done by a private doctor. The second autopsy determined the gunshot to have been fired from too far away to have been self-inflicted and that Martin died "by violence."
The initial autopsy done on Martin was thrown into further question when it was revealed that the same medical examiner who had performed it also performed the autopsy on MiKayla Jones, an 18 year old who had just finished high school and died with meth in her system. The medical examiner ruled it a suicide despite Jones having no history of drug use or depression.
Martin's death made international news. His case and Dees' are vastly different in their particulars, but their broad outlines have a haunting resonance with each other.
In both, young men had roots in the Fredericktown area, but their families moved to the suburbs of St. Louis for better opportunities. Both young men returned to hang out and have a good time with friends and were met with horrible fates. In both cases, the stories would have likely received little to no attention if not for extraordinary efforts on the part of the bereft mothers.
Dees. Martin. Lowrey. Jones. "Something is going on in Madison County" is a common refrain in Facebook post after Facebook post, vlog after vlog.
Over the summer, a coroner's inquest was held, and a six-person jury determined that Martin's death was not a suicide. Despite this, no charges were filed against Wade or anyone at the party.
"They're horrible," Lotts says about the Madison County Sheriff's Department handling of her son's death. "They're not investigating. They refuse to investigate because they told me they know it was suicide because they looked at the pictures. And they're not changing their ruling, regardless of the jury in the coroner's inquest."
Many people online calling for "justice for Derontae" are, like Timmy Dees' mother, placing the blame for the unsolved crime on the sheriff.
Madison County Sheriff Katy McCutcheon, 42, is tall with brown curly hair. Despite the intense criticism, she is now serving her second term in office.
McCutcheon won her first election in 2016, running as a Democrat in a county carried easily by Donald Trump. She won reelection in 2020 with only a slightly smaller margin of victory than Trump, who took 80 percent of the Madison County vote. Despite this seeming popularity, many in town say she has not done a good job.
"We could have a better sheriff," says Bob McMillian, co-owner of Main Street Memories, a second-hand antique shop a few blocks away from the sheriff's office. (McMillian says he is also McCutcheon's cousin.) "We've been broke-in six times. And we're right across from the police station. Crime is horrible here. The thieving."
"She's a really good person, probably just lenient with things," he adds.
Another longtime resident of the Fredericktown area, who asked to only be referred to as Lana, says that law enforcement in the area in general is too hands off when it comes to drugs. The sheriff, Lana says, is of the mind that the "dopers would take care of themselves."
"That's the problem," Lana adds. "They are taking care of themselves. They're dropping like flies. And they're not flies. They're people."
McCutcheon, she says she's truly troubled by the Dees case and she feels for his family. She's also frustrated with how, no matter what her department says, it gets "eaten alive" by critics.
She's also very worried about being smeared by the media, citing specifically a KSDK segment about one of her deputies who lost a burglary victim's masonic ring that had been entered into evidence.
The department offered to compensate the man for the lost item, but he said that wasn't necessary. McCutcheon's office thought that was the end of the ordeal until a reporter came to Fredericktown and seemed to accuse McCutcheon's department of theft.
"See where my frustration is coming from?" she asks. "I can tell you the sun is bright today with a few clouds and reporters will smear it around to where I said it was dark green and black, and it's raining."
McCutcheon says she's talked to Hall several times; Hall insists they've never spoken. "She's, called, she's asked questions. I've answered her questions," McCutcheon says. "But she still blasts me on Facebook. Why would I want to go talk to somebody if I've talked to her a couple times, and I'm still getting blasted?"
However, McCutcheon's critics found validation when, in April of this year, James Wade moved from several miles outside Fredericktown city limits into the city. Now subject to a new jurisdiction, it didn't take him long to get arrested.
"He only lived here for like a week, and look what we just did," says Fredericktown Chief of Police Eric Hovis, referring to his department's arrest of Wade.
In the early hours of Thursday, April 14, Wade said he believed his daughters were with Jacob Graham or Graham's brother, and in danger. Wade left his house and drove to where he believed his daughters to be. While driving, he encountered Graham and another man in a car on North Mine LaMotte Avenue.
Wade said he pulled up behind the two men to talk. They didn't stop, so Wade "rammed them off the road."
According to a probable-cause statement, Wade says Graham then opened fire on Wade's truck. Wade tried to escape but backed up into a tree.
He then ran to the Madison County Sheriff's Office, an interesting choice, on foot.
Graham and the other man in the car also gave statements to police. They said they were driving to Wade's ex-wife's house to borrow an extension cord for a space heater when Wade "out of nowhere" was in his truck behind them on the road. He pulled in front of them, blocking them. Graham then opened fire.
A bullet grazed Wade's forehead, above his right eye.
He and Graham were arrested by the Fredericktown police and charged with assault — and are being held on $100,000 bond.
Those advocating for justice for Derontae Martin cheered Wade's arrest online, even though it was unrelated to the case.
"Most of the town's happy he's behind bars," one Fredericktown business owner says about Wade.
"The whole Derontae Martin thing is still an open case; the FBI has got it," notes dispatcher Kyle Rogers. "They're the ones that are working it."
The Martin case is often mentioned in Facebook posts along with Dees, Lowrey and MiKayla Jones. Those four cases are often connected to the case of John Paul "J.P." Parton, a 19-year-old who went missing in May of last year. J.P.'s sister Angelique says that her brother, who'd been staying in Cape Girardeau, is technically listed as missing from Jefferson County but had previously lived around Fredericktown and may have actually gone missing from Madison County.
"I know that my brother knew Derontae, and they knew mutual people," she says.
A lot of people are adamant that something is going on in or around Madison County. But it's not entirely clear what.
Lana, the longtime Madison County resident, doesn't claim to know exactly what's going on, though she's pretty sure whatever it is has to do with a new type of meth.
Lana says that today, meth is a whole different animal than what she used for decades while still managing to function and hold down a job.
"Now they're using what they call ice," she says. "It's like a fungus grown in a cooler. One of the ingredients is glue. It's making people crazy, like instantly crazy."
Martin had meth in his system and had almost certainly been around people who were using it the night he died. The friend who drove Dees down to Fredericktown has a host of drug charges. People in Fredericktown said that the frantic 911 call from Dees' phone was made from a known drug house.
McMillian and another store owner, Jim Fox, both say the meth problem has gotten much worse in the last few years.
In one of the robberies in which McMillian was a victim, he says burglars stole $5,000 worth of tools from a storage shed.
"They probably sold it all for a few hundred bucks," he says.
Fox, owner of Tom's Western Wear a few blocks from the courthouse, says that his business has been robbed multiple times, too. He's certain drugs played a role. "That's pretty much what we're known for," he says, more than a little resignation in his voice.
Another source says that meth has always caused psychosis, but previously that only came after prolonged use. Now, today's meth can cause users to lose their mind the very first time they ingest it.
"I look at people, and they're not the same people," Lana says. "I've seen a girl walking around on the street saying, 'I don't know where I'm at.' Another girl, a beautiful girl ... thought she could punch a code into her arm, like a computer."
When asked why so many kids are using meth even after seeing friends lose their minds on it, she says, "Their parents did it. They don't understand that it's different. There's nothing to do down here so people experiment with things."
Through a private detective, Hall learned that there were two other men in addition to Dees and his friend at the house on Village Creek Drive where someone called 911 from Dees' phone. One of those men has a long criminal record, including charges for manufacturing meth.
After getting this information, Hall organized a fourth search with volunteers on horseback, so they could cover more ground. Again, nothing turned up.
Hall keeps up her protest/vigil outside the courthouse. She's temporarily moved in with a friend who lives closer to the area, so she doesn't have to commute all the way from St. Louis. One day in early May, she got sunburned and had to take the next couple days off. Afterward, a local woman she didn't know dropped off a few shade umbrellas.
"There are a lot of good people in this town," she says.
One day, as Hall sat outside the courthouse holding her sign, the friend who took Dees to Fredericktown approached her. He was wearing new clothes and had a haircut, a far cry from the disheveled man who called her on a jailhouse video phone in the early days of her son's disappearance.
Hall says their conversation was brief. She asked him point blank what happened to her son, and he said that Timmy had run off, adopted a new identity and started a new life elsewhere. Hall asked why her son would do such a thing. The friend suggested Timmy was depressed.
Hall didn't buy any of it.
On Mother's Day, Fredericktown had its annual Azalea Festival, a town-wide party that includes a carnival, live music and a parade.
Hall says that she marched in the parade with some of her supporters, holding their "Help Bring Me Home" signs. Her place in the parade was right behind the man running to be city prosecutor.
"That's how I spent my Mother's Day," Hall says.
Last Mother's Day she went fishing with Michael.
Dees had to work that Sunday and couldn't join. He came over to Hall's house the next day and surprised her with flowers. 0x006E
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated that Dees was last seen on surveillance video on Sunday February 27. He was last seen in the early hours of Monday February 28.
