Oklahoma 2009 Cold Case – Family Tormented by Demons Vanished Deep in the Woods

 Oklahoma, October 2009. 15 years ago, in a small Oklahoma town on the edge of a lake, a family of three got into a truck on an October morning and drove toward the mountains. They were not running from anything, not officially, not on paper. They were going to look at a piece of land they wanted to buy, 40 acres in the Sans Bois Mountains, 30 miles away.

 A fresh start, a quieter life. A place where the things that had been closing in on them might finally stop. They brought their dog. They brought their phones. They brought $32,000 in cash hidden under the driver’s seat. And they drove into a wilderness so remote and so unforgiving that it would hold its secret for 4 years.

 Bobby Jamison was 44 years old. Sherilyn was 40. Their daughter Madison was 6, brown eyes, a little girl smile, and a dog she took everywhere because that is what 6-year-olds [snorts] do. They love their animals with the kind of total, uncomplicated devotion that the rest of us spend our whole lives trying to get back to.

 15 years later, we still do not know what happened to them, not the sheriff, not the medical examiner, not the investigators who spent years walking those hills, not the families who are still carrying the weight of a question that has never had an answer. When they were finally found, 4 years after they drove away, they were lying face down in the dirt, side by side, all three of them, together at the end, the way they had been in life.

This is the story of Bobby, Sherilyn, and Madison Jamison. It is not just a mystery. It is a story about a family that was already disappearing long before they ever drove into those mountains. And it is one of the most haunting, most unresolved, most devastating cases I have ever had to sit with. Before we go any further, my name is Joe, and if you are new here, welcome to Vanished Women and Children.

This channel exists because stories like the Jamesons deserve to be told with the full weight of who these people actually were. Not just a mystery, not just a cold case, people. A father, a mother, and a 6-year-old girl who loved her dog. If that means something to you, subscribe right now and ring that notification bell.

 We are a brand new channel and every subscriber helps us keep telling these stories. Hit subscribe. And let us go back to Oklahoma. Bobby Dale Jameson was born on August 4th, 1965 in Oklahoma. He grew up in the shadow of a difficult father, Bob Dean Jameson, a man described by those who knew him as someone you did not want to cross.

The relationship between Bobby and his father would ultimately become one of the darkest threads in this entire story. But in 2002, none of that had reached its worst point yet. Bobby was a wiry man, quiet, sharp-eyed, someone his wife’s best friend described as a gentleman. A good person who really did not want to do anything wrong.

 He was always working on something, always trying to figure out the next step. Sherilyn Leigh Ann Jameson was born on November 5th, 1968. She was a woman with a restless streak and a bone-deep conviction. Her best friend, Nikki Shernold, described her as someone who stood up for what she believed in. If she believed in something, she believed in it with her whole heart.

 She used to tell Nikki that everybody should stand for something. That was Sherilyn. All the way no matter what she had decided was true. They met in the summer of 2002. Sherilyn knew immediately, Nikki said, she decided right then and there that Bobby was the one. Two years later, in July of 2004, they married.

 And on August 1st, 2003, the year before they made it official, Maddison Stormy Star Jamison was born. Family members said that Maddison was the most important thing in both of their lives. They did everything they could for her, Maddison Stormy Star. That name tells you something about who her parents were. Not conventional. Not plain. People who looked at a newborn daughter and gave her a name that sounded like weather and wide Oklahoma sky, and something just beyond the ordinary world. She was theirs.

 She was everything. The family settled in Eufaula, Oklahoma, a small town of fewer than 3,000 people built on the edge of Lake Eufaula, a massive reservoir created in the 1960s when a dam was built across the Canadian River. It is the kind of place where everybody knows everybody, where the quiet is real rather than cultivated, where a lakeside home feels like a modest piece of luck.

The Jamisons had that lakeside home. They also had timeshares in the United States and Mexico. They lived by appearances above the modest income their disability checks provided. Bobby had been in a serious car accident in 2003, the same year Maddison was born, and had suffered chronic back pain that never fully healed.

He was on disability. Sherilyn, who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was not consistently taking her medication, was also on disability. She had a son from a previous relationship named Colton who had been living with them all till custody arrangements shifted him back to his father in July of 2009.

His departure hit the family hard, both emotionally because Sherilyn loved him, and financially because the child support payments stopped. The accumulation of all of it, the chronic pain, the untreated mental illness, the financial pressure, the grief of losing Colton from the household had been building quietly for years.

And in 2009, it reached a kind of threshold that the people around this family could feel but could not fully name. The signs were there, but the Jamesons were private people, particular about their inner world, and the full picture only emerged later, in fragments after they were gone. The haunting began sometime before 2009.

Sherilyn started telling neighbors she believed they had poisoned her cat. She told those same neighbors she was a witch and that they should stay away from her. Bobby and Sherilyn began talking about spirit spirits, two, sometimes three or four of them, that they believed were living on the roof of their home.

They told their pastor in Eufaula, a man named Gary Brandon, that they were experiencing what they called spiritual warfare. They believed dark entities had invaded their house. Madison, who was 6 years old, had developed an imaginary friend she called Emily. Sherilyn became convinced that Emily was not imaginary at all.

 She believed Emily was an evil spirit that had attached itself to her daughter. She told Pastor Brandon she asked whether an exorcism might be needed. And Bobby, quiet, gentle Bobby, the man his wife’s best friend, called a gentleman who did not want to do anything wrong, called Pastor Brandon separately and asked off whether the pastor knew anywhere he could purchase special bullets.

 Not ordinary bullets, special ones. Bobby told him he needed them to shoot the spirits he believed were living on the roof of his family’s home. Sit with that image for a moment. A father trying to protect his family in the only way he could think of. From something he was absolutely certain was real.

 Something no lock could keep out, no door could close against. He was trying to protect Madison. In his mind, in whatever territory his mind had entered by then, that is what he was doing. Pastor Brandon also told authorities that Bobby had confessed to reading from the Satanic Bible. A book described by some as a witches Bible was found in the Jameson home.

 Sherilyn’s best friend Nikki later said Sherilyn had bought it as a joke. But the pastor heard what he heard. And the picture forming around this family, the paranoia, the spiritual obsession, the mounting fear of invisible enemies, was not a picture of a joke. It was a picture of a family that was terrified and the threat was not only supernatural.

 In 2008 and 2009, Bobby had filed a protective order against his own father, Bob Dean Jameson. In the petition, Bobby wrote that his father had threatened to kill his entire family on two separate occasions. Once in November of 2008 and again in April of 2009. He wrote that on November 1st, 2008, his father had deliberately hit him with a vehicle.

 He described his father as a very dangerous man who thinks he is above the law. He wrote, “My entire family is severely scared for their lives. I am in fear at all times.” The judge dismissed the protective order on May 18th, 2009. Five months later, the Jamesons family drove into the mountains and never came back. Bobby had also been actively suing his father at the time of the disappearance.

Bob Dean Jamesons died in December of 2009, just two months after the family vanished, at the age of 64. He died without ever being charged with anything. He died taking whatever he knew or did not know with him. In September of 2009, one month before the disappearance, Sherilyn was hospitalized following a suicide attempt.

 She came home, the family continued. They kept making their plan, buy the land, move the shipping container that was sitting in their front yard in Eufaula, live off the grid in the mountains, away from the neighbors they feared and the spirits they believed surrounded them, away from everything that had made their life in Eufaula feel so unbearable.

 That was the plan. A large metal shipping container, 40 acres, a new start. It must have felt, from inside that darkening world, like the only possible way forward. On the morning of October 8th, 2009, the security cameras at the Jameson home captured the last images anyone would have of Bobby and Sherilyn alive.

 In the footage, the two of them moved back and forth between the house and the truck, again and again, 20 trips by some counts, loading, unloading, stopping in the middle of the path between the house and the truck, with expressions the Latimer County Sheriff later described as trance-like. They do not speak to each other.

They do not appear to communicate. They stop sometimes and simply stand there, vacant, as if they have forgotten what they were doing or why. Sometimes they are carrying things. Sometimes they are carrying nothing at all. Both of them in the footage look gaunt, unusually thin, unwell. Sheriff Israel Beauchamp, who reviewed that footage, said it was unlike anything he had seen in an investigation.

Normally, he told reporters, “You can go through an investigation and one by one start to eliminate certain scenarios. We haven’t been able to do that in this case.” At around 10:00 that morning, the truck pulled out of the driveway. Bobby, Sherilyn and Madyson, their dog Maisie. They drove toward the Sans Bois Mountains, 30 miles away, to look at a 40-acre plot of land that Bobby had found online.

Their cell phones were with them. Their wallets were with them. $32,690 in cash was with them in a bank bag under the seat. Sherilyn’s .22 caliber pistol was presumably with them, too. It was never found. A man who lived in the mountains later told authorities that he had seen the Jamison family in the area that day.

He was the only witness. He said he saw them and he saw no one else nearby. He could not say more than that. That truck parked on a remote dirt road in Latimer County was the last fixed point in the world where the Jamison family existed as a known quantity. Eight days passed. Eight days during which the family’s house sat exactly as they had left it.

Dishes in the sink, television off, clothes in the closet, the shipping container still waiting in the front yard. Eight days during which their absence went unreported because the Jamisons were private people and because not hearing from them for eight or nine days was not to the people who knew them unusual enough to trigger alarm.

 It was on October 17th, 2009 that hunters on dirt bikes came across the white Ford F-150 pickup truck parked on a remote dirt road in Latimer County, northwest of Red Oak. The truck was locked. At first, investigators assumed it had been stolen. By that same afternoon, the same hunter called back to confirm the truck had clearly been abandoned for several days.

What investigators found inside deepened everything. Bobby’s wallet, Sherilyn’s purse, both of their cell phones, their GPS device, their coats and jackets, meaning that wherever they had gone, they had walked into October mountain air without their outer clothing. $32,690 in cash in a bank bag tucked under the driver’s seat, untouched.

And an 11-page handwritten letter from Sherilyn to Bobby, described by those who reviewed it as angry, full of grievances, calling him among other things a hermit. Evidence of the pain and fracture that existed inside this marriage even as they drove together toward what they hoped would be a new beginning.

 And locked in the back of that truck, barely alive after days without food or water, Maisie, the dog. Madyson’s dog, whom her grandmother Connie later told the Daily Mail that Madyson loved and never went anywhere without. That dog is the detail that stops me completely every time. Because Madyson Jameson would not have left Maisie, not willingly.

 Not without a reason so urgent and so far outside her control that she had no say in it. A 6-year-old girl who loved that animal did not walk away from it by choice. Whatever happened when that truck door opened and the family stepped out into those hills, it was not something any of them had planned. Investigators used the GPS data from the family’s cell phones to reconstruct their last movements.

 The data showed they had gone up a nearby hillside after parking the truck. Footprints were found on that hill leading away from the road and into the trees. And then nothing. The trail dissolved into terrain so dense and remote that search teams with dogs and helicopters could not follow where it led. More than 300 volunteers and dozens of law enforcement officials searched those mountains.

They searched through October, through November, into the brutal Oklahoma winter. They found nothing. The Jamison family had vanished as completely as if the mountains had opened and swallowed them whole. Four years passed. Four years during which Sherilyn’s mother, Connie, made her belief known to anyone who would listen.

 Her daughter and her family had been killed. “There’s just no way,” she said, “that Bobby and Sherilyn would ever let anything happen to Madison unless something had been done to them.” Four years of searches and tips and theories and silence. Then on November 16th, 2013, two deer hunters were moving through a remote area of Latimer County, less than 3 miles from where the truck had been found four years earlier, when they came upon skeletal remains.

Two adults, one child, lying face down in the dirt side by side together. The Oklahoma medical examiner worked to identify the remains. In July of 2014, the confirmation came. Bobby Dale Jamison, aged 44. Sherilyn Leah Jamison, aged 40. Madison Stormy Star Jamison, aged 6. They had been less than 3 miles from their truck the entire time.

 In 4 years of searching those mountains, no one had found them. Medical examiner Dr. Joshua Lanter examined what remained of the three people who had walked up that hillside in October of 2009. After 4 years in a rugged Oklahoma wilderness, exposed to weather, to animals, to the relentless work of time on human bone, there was not enough left to say definitively how any of them had died.

There was no evidence of trauma that could be confirmed beyond doubt. There was a small hole in the back of Bobby’s skull that drew investigators’ attention. A defect that could have come from a bullet, but that could equally have been the result of animal activity or 4 years of environmental exposure. No bullets were recovered that could be conclusively linked to their deaths.

No gun was found near the remains. Sherilyn’s .22 caliber pistol was never recovered. Cause of death unknown. Manner of death undetermined. After 4 years of searching, after the longest wait a family can endure, after two hunters in the hills stumbled upon what the mountains had been keeping all along, unknown.

Undetermined. Let us sit with every theory because this case demands it. Because the answer to what happened to this family determines whether a 6-year-old girl’s death was a crime, an accident, or something the human mind resists putting a clean name on. The first theory is murder. Bobby had filed legal documents stating that his own father had threatened to kill the entire family twice.

He described his father as a very dangerous man. The protective order was dismissed. Bob Dean Jamison died in December of 2009, just 2 months after the family vanished, at 64 years old, without ever being questioned as a suspect in any public record. Beyond Bobby’s father, investigators noted that the mountains of eastern Oklahoma were known for drug activity and criminal operations in remote areas.

Sheriff Beau Shock himself said publicly that he believed the family was forced to stop and got out of the truck to meet someone they recognized. And that they left willingly or by force. The facedown position of all three bodies lying together in the dirt, far from the truck, is consistent with people who were brought to that spot, not people who wandered there.

The second theory is exposure and disorientation. The San Bois Mountains are not forgiving terrain. The hills fold into each other in ways that confuse even experienced hikers. Without their coats in early October when nights in southeastern Oklahoma can turn dangerously cold, a family that lost its bearings could have died of hypothermia.

They were found less than 3 miles from the truck. Close enough to suggest they were not walking with purpose, but with confusion. The third theory involves what was happening inside Bobby and Sherilyn’s minds in the months before they disappeared. Experts who have reviewed the case have used the clinical term folie à deux, a shared delusional disorder that can develop between two people in close isolation, particularly when one has an underlying psychiatric condition and the other is under extreme stress.

If Bobby and Sherilyn had entered a shared break from reality. If the spirits felt so immediate, the threats so real, the world so closed in around them, is it possible they went up that hill believing they were doing the only thing that made sense? No one can answer that, and Madison was six. She went where her parents went.

The fourth theory centers on the $32,000. The Jamesons were on disability. That amount of cash, over $32,000 hidden under a seat, is not the life savings of a couple living above their means on government checks. Some investigators believed it was connected to drug activity in the area. Others believed it was cash the family had scraped together to buy the land and begin their new life.

But if money was the motive for a crime, why was it left untouched in the truck? Every theory collapses against the evidence that does not fit it. Every answer opens a new question. This is the particular cruelty of the Jameson case. Not just that a family died, but that the manner of their dying remains, 15 years later, completely open, completely dark.

There is a photograph that will not leave me alone. On one of the family’s cell phones, investigators found a picture of Madison taken on the day they disappeared. She is wearing a red hooded jacket. She is not smiling. She is not the bright, curious, little girl smile child described by everyone who knew her.

 Something in her face, the face of a six-year-old in what appeared to be the last hours before she was lost to the world, shows something that cannot be fully named, but cannot be unseen. She was not wearing the red jacket when the family was last seen near the truck. Where did the jacket go? Where did the road go from that photograph to the hillside less than 3 miles away where hunters would find her bones 4 years later? These are the questions that follow you out of this story and into the quiet of your own home.

Bobby Jameson tried to protect his family in every way he knew how. He filed legal paperwork against a father who frightened him. He called a pastor to ask for help with forces he was absolutely certain were real. He drove his wife and daughter toward a piece of land he believed would give them a fresh start, a safer life, a way out of a world that had become too heavy to keep standing in.

Sherilyn believed in things with her whole heart. She stood for things. She wanted something better for her family even when better meant a shipping container in the mountains and leaving everything behind. She wrote 11 pages to her husband because she was a woman who did not swallow what she carried even when carrying it was breaking her.

She loved Bobby. She loved Medison. She was a mother who would not have let anything happen to her daughter unless something had first been done to her. Her mother said that. She said it from the beginning and she has never stopped saying it. And Medison, Medison Stormy Star Jameson born on August 1st, 2003, 6 years old, brown eyes and a little girl smile and a dog she took everywhere.

She did not choose any of this. She was in the backseat. She was going to see a piece of land with her parents on an October morning. She was a child in the care of the two people responsible for her safety. She was 6 years old. She deserved to grow up. She deserved to find out who she was going to become.

 She deserved someone to know definitively and completely what happened to her in those mountains. 15 years later, we still do not know. The Jamison case remains officially open with the Latimer County Sheriff’s Office. No one has ever been charged. No one has ever been named as a suspect in any official capacity. The medical examiner’s ruling of undetermined cause of death means that investigators cannot even say with legal certainty that a crime occurred.

If you have any information about what happened to Bobby, Sherilyn, and Madyson Jamison, contact the Latimer County Sheriff’s Office at 918-465-2161. The case is still open. The family is still waiting for someone to finally give them an answer. Bobby Jamison, Sherilyn Jamison, Madyson Stormy Star Jamison. A father who stood up for his family in every way he knew.

A mother who believed with her whole heart in everything she held onto. A little girl with a name as wide as Oklahoma sky and a dog she would never have left behind by choice. They were found face down, side by side, together. However, it ended. Whatever walked into those hills beside them or waited for them there, they were together when it did.

And they have been buried together. And their names belong together, said in the same breath, remembered as a family and not just as a mystery because they were not a mystery first, they were a family first. Bobby, Sherilyn, Madyson. May they rest in the peace that this life never gave them enough of. I need to hear from you on this one.

Where are you watching from? Drop it in the comments right now. And tell me what you believe. Tell me which detail stopped you coldest. The surveillance tape, the dog locked in the truck for 8 days, the $32,000 left untouched, the 11-page letter, the photograph of Madison in the red jacket she was not wearing when they disappeared, or the three bodies lying face down and side by side in the dirt less than 3 miles from where they parked.

 Tell me what you think walked into those mountains with this family, or what was already waiting there. Tell me what you are still sitting with after hearing this. Every comment gets read. Every single one. And if Vanished Women and Children is not yet part of your regular viewing, now is the moment.