Hi, I'm Holly and I'm Haley. Welcome to Mountain Mysteries Tales from Apple Atcha. Alright, welcome back. Hello.
It's been a while. Yes, I have. It's a few minutes for you guys. Yeah, just several minutes.
If that, you know, maybe you're like, jump right in. It just automatically your Apple podcast app to start a plane the next one and you're like, is this an old one? And then you're like, oh no, it's fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh. Okay, so we are going to talk about this week an update on the Summerwells case.
I do. The little girl in the Tootsie. Yes, that was very highly rated for us. Yes, that's what we're interested in it.
So I, every once in a while, kind of check for updates to see, you know, if they found anything else or maybe found her or, you know, anything. And it hasn't really been much, but there was quite a bit of information that came out on the one year, around the one year anniversary of interesting. So we'll give a little bit of a recap on the case and then kind of go into any of the new information that's out there. There's not much, but you know, there's, there's a little bit.
Okay, I'm ready. All right, so kind of what happened here ago. On June 15th, 2021, five year old Summerwells disappeared from her home in Rogersville, Tennessee. There's just a quick recap.
Summer was last seen around 630 p.m. at her home in Hawkins County, Tennessee. Her mother, Candace Blywells, stated that they had come home, they've been out in town or something that day. They come home and that she, her mother and Summer went outside to plant some flowers after finishing the planting.
The three went into Summer's grandmother's camper that was on the property. So I think they're the main, there was a main house where the family lived and then her mother lived in kind of a like R.B. camper situation on the property, which is not really that uncommon. Right.
So I go into the camper and Summer got a piece of candy and said that she wanted to go back to the house to play with her brothers. She's had three brothers. Candace says that she, you know, walks on her halfway to the house and watched her go in the door, you know, which isn't really that weird to me. I mean, it would be like, I'm assuming it was probably the distance from like the house I grew up in my grandmother's house, which is like an eye shot.
Right. You can just, I mean, honestly, my parent could have stood outside the garage and like watched me walk. Yeah. And she says, go in.
Yep. So I go in the house. Candace then said, you know, I probably should go and tell her brothers like keep an eye on her sister. So she walks the rest of the way over there and tells her brothers, you know, keep an eye on Summer.
She has to go back to her mother's camper to fix her mom's knee brace, to get it situated for the evening. So she goes to do that. When she came back to the house, what she says was just, you know, a few minutes later, and asked where Summer was, the boys said, you know, she's gone downstairs to like the basement area, but they had like a playroom in to go play with toys. So Candace calls out for Summer and when she doesn't respond, which is weird, because Summer, she says Summer always would, you know, yell back up like, you know, yes, or, you know, what do you mean?
What do you mean? What do you mean? Play with always leave me alone. But she didn't do that though.
Candace, you went downstairs to look for her and couldn't find her. She wasn't downstairs. So, so Candace, you know, search the rest of the house, thinking, you know, maybe she didn't go downstairs, maybe she was somewhere else in the house. Search the house.
She goes outside, you know, maybe she went back outside after she went into the camper again. Did Sierra go out yelling for Summer? I can't find her. She calls her husband Don, who told her, you know, go ahead and call the police if she's missing.
You need to call the cops. So she does. Candace then goes down to the neighbor's house to ask them for help. She sent her sons down to the creek to search there.
She went out in her mother's truck and drove up and down the road and then down into a holler, but saw no signs of Summer or anyone else. It was like, she just vanished in the air. The police came out and they immediately started searching as well and called in authorities from several different agencies to assist in the search, but nothing was found. Which I remember when the searches were going on, like they had people from, you know, the Tennessee Bureau investigation.
They had people from everywhere. They were doing aerial and on foot searches. I was here for a beat. I mean, they sent in like a specialized unit.
I mean, there were all kinds of crazy agencies out here trying to do these searches. Yeah, looking for her, but nothing found absolutely weird. Since then, the TBI, the Tennessee Bureau investigation has interviewed around 170 witnesses. They've done continuous searches of the property as well as the surrounding area by both doing land searches and air searches.
They've also used divers to search in any of the bodies of water that are in the area and nothing. The TBI states that Summer's case is still active and ongoing. It's definitely not a cold case, they say. In June of 2022, authorities returned to Hawkins County to conduct searches of previously identified areas of interest.
And they do have agents and detectives that continue to follow up on leads as they come in. So here's where some of the updates kind of come in. It's not, it's mostly just about the family. Summer's father, Don, has been actually serving time in jail since this all happened for the UI.
And he released a few updates from prisons and wrote a letter to her, you know, potential kidnappers like wrote an open letter. How long are you in jail for a DUI? So here's the thing. He is serving time in jail for that DUI because at the time of the DUI, he was actually at the time when Summer went missing, he had been previously arrested for being in possession of a handgun while intoxicated was on probation.
So then he gets this DUI. And now he has to serve up to a year in jail. There was one article I read that said they were reviewing his case and we're hoping that he would be released, you know, pretty soon. But another one I read said that he was sentenced to like 11 months.
Like the rest of his probation time. I think it usually have a works. It's like your own probation and then like if you mess up, you have to go serve time, serve the rest of your time. Please know that I'm not trying to make a suggestion here with what I'm saying.
But sometimes police, if they have a suspicion, they will get people on stupid charges just to be able to keep them under house. You know, I please know I am not accusing anyone of anything. It is just something that popped into my head. Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking like, obviously he's distraught.
His daughter's missing. Of course, he's probably drinking. If there's something he's filled with in the past and maybe just not making wise choices. Not making good decisions.
Don't drink a drive, though. Okay, so the letter that Don wrote was released. He wrote this kind of open letter to her, her potential abductors or whatever you want to call it. And it reads, I'll read it here, as it's pretty sad.
It says, to the person or person's responsible for kidnapping summer, not only have you broken summer's heart and taken her away from her mother and father who loved her very much, but you ruined her chances to become educated, ruining her life. You have also broke the hearts of her father and her mother and brothers. And in the midst of all the commotion, you ruined our lives. You see, the public blames us.
I now don't know if we'll ever find employment again. Nobody will hire my wife and I've been fired from a job I've had for 13 years. We may end up losing everything. When you took our little girl, you took our very lives.
Why don't you give our little girl back before God's wrath sins on you? You've broken many hearts and more, especially in innocent five-year-old girls' heart. One day God will hold you accountable for this crime unless you do something to make this right. Please do the right thing and turn our daughter over to the authorities.
We're begging you with all of our hearts. Please do the right thing. And it was signed. Done.
Well. So unfortunately, which, I mean, I read this and it's just like a sad dad writing a letter. But some people have broken it down and said like, you know, he's like, you shouldn't have said anything about, you know, their lives being ruined because of it and everything. Which I'm like, just stop.
So if you think about it, like when, you know, they have trials, you know, and someone is accused and they're, you know, on the stand, you have family who come in and they make impact statements how this has impacted their life without their loved one. And so I think this is a normal thing. This is a normal thing that a parent would do. Yeah.
And there has been, I mean, it's almost like every other article that you read or statement that you see is saying like the family had something to do with it. And like, and we don't know. And that's the thing. Like, we don't know anything.
Exactly. The public, we have no idea. So I think it's really dangerous to start accusing the family and saying like, Oh, well, they had something to do with it because then you stop looking. Yeah.
Like people stop, you know, there's so many cases of kids being found. Well, and even cases like, you know, Jean-Beney Ramsey, where they focused so heavily on the family that they weren't spending their time looking for other subjects. And honestly, you know, now we're decades from that and we could have had the killer. Right.
So big, but they were too focused on the family. Yeah. Wow. Crazy.
So the TBI has said that they have received over 2000 tips from the public, but that most of them have come from sources involving rumor and speculation. The TBI urges people to please not call on a tip based off of something they interpreted from, you know, Don's YouTube statements. He's put several videos out or letters or any other online posts because it just wastes everyone's time. It's kind of like you're damned if you do damned if you don't.
I mean, if you don't say anything, you're guilty of something. If you do say something, you have it's at the right thing, you know. Yeah. And I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. It's all weird.
Yeah. It's all very strange. But I think that the danger of there's more of a risk of saying, oh, the family's involved and they know what happened to her and then we stopped looking for her. Right.
I don't think that that's the answer. I think you have to. I think it's easy to sit back and say, oh, they're guilty. They must be, you know, because you don't know all the facts of the case.
I think it's, you know, for the individuals on the inside who are discerning and trying to pick out of it and trying to put pieces together. So, I mean, I just hope this little girl comes home. I mean, that's the honest answer here. And I, you know, I hope that there's some kind of resolution.
I hope it's a positive one. I just, you know, I think that as time goes on, families just want to know. I know. It's cool.
I can imagine. It's been over a year and there's nothing. It'd be so scary. Anyone with info on Summer Wells can call the TBI at 100 TBI Find or then Callahawkons County Sheriff's Office.
Please do. You know anything. They said, if you see her, you do immediately call them like immediately call 911. Yeah, definitely.
Like wherever you are, you just call. Like say you see her. Because it's stranger things have happened, you know? Absolutely.
They found they've, I mean, you hear all these stories about people being found years and years later. It was a smart. Yeah. Yeah.
J.C. DuBart. Mm-hmm. Stephen Stainer.
I mean, just so many, you know. Yeah, there's, I mean, it's rare, but it does happen. It does. So I don't think we can count it out until we know for sure what happened.
Yeah. But that's my kind of sad update. There's not a whole lot of info. I'm hoping we don't have to do another one of these updates.
Well, I'm hoping we can do an update, but it's a, you know, oh my gosh, they found Summer. Yeah. I hope that's the kind of update that we've got. Right.
Well, thank you for this extra episode. Yeah. If they want to give us their feedback, how can they do that? Yeah.
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It's pretty fun. It's yeah. It's a good time. It really is.
I want to give a quick shout out to Great Falls, Montana. Oh, that sounds pretty. I know it does, doesn't it? Thank you for listening.
Thanks. All right, Haley. Until next time, next time is 100. I'm so excited.
It's you because I know what your story is going to be so I'm really excited. No pressure. All right. Have a great week, everybody.
Bye. Bye.