This Twisted Case Stunned Detectives to Their Core. The Baffling Story of Erin Corwin 

A young woman left home and disappeared without a trace. It didn’t take detectives long to realize the story was far more complicated than it seemed at first, but they had no idea just how dark it was about to get or how many shocking twists were still ahead. In the end, they did uncover the truth and it stunned everyone connected to the case.

But even now, some parts of this story still refuse to let go. Erin Corwin was born on July 15th, 1994 in Tennessee. When she was just a few weeks old, she was adopted by a couple from a small town called Oak Ridge. They were deeply religious people and after having two children of their own, they decided to adopt four more.

 So, Erin grew up in a big, close-knit family. Her parents devoted all their time to raising the kids and from the very beginning, they brought them up in the church. Erin was quiet and shy by nature. She got along well with her brothers and sisters, but more than anything, she loved being around animals.

 According to her parents, she had a real gift with them. She taught her cat to follow commands and while she was still a child, she even managed to tame a wild horse. At 14, she got a part-time job at a vet clinic and for a while, she seriously considered building her future around that kind of work. But over time, Erin realized that she couldn’t be a veterinarian because she felt too sorry for the animals.

 As a teenager, she also met a boy named John. They had known each other for several years and when Erin turned 16, he asked her out after first asking her father for permission. The two of them started dating and after high school, John proposed. At that point, he was serving in the Marines. And not long after, he was transferred to a military base in California.

 It was on the other side of the country, out in the middle of the desert, and Erin went there with him. The move was a serious challenge for her. She was only 19 at the time and she had never lived away from her parents before. On top of that, it wasn’t exactly the easiest place to live. For miles and miles, there was almost nothing but desert and the temperatures were brutally high most of the time.

Even so, Erin tried to adjust to life far from home. At that point, she was still figuring out what she wanted to do with her future. There were barely any job options near the base, but she still found something that felt right for her. About half an hour away, there was a horse rescue ranch and Erin started going there regularly to help out as a volunteer.

 On top of that, she and John got two dogs and a cat. They were living in a small apartment building and they quickly got along with the neighbors. Other Marines lived there with their wives and kids, so Erin and John had no trouble finding their own little circle. Little by little, they settled into the new place and started building their own life there.

 In January 2014, Erin found out she was pregnant and she and John were overjoyed. But sometime later, she suffered a miscarriage and it hit her hard. Erin became more withdrawn, depressed, and in general started pulling away from people around her. Still, about 6 months later in late June, she got pregnant again. By the time Erin found out, she was already 3 months along.

 With that happy news, and with her 20th birthday just a few weeks away, her mother decided to fly out to California to visit her. Erin was really looking forward to it. On June 28th, a few days before her mother was supposed to arrive, Erin told John she was going to head out into the national park near the base.

 She wanted to check out a few interesting spots she might be able to show her mom. So, she got up early that morning, got in the car, and drove off. She said she’d be back around 4:00 p.m. But the hours passed, and Erin still hadn’t come home. John tried calling her, but her phone was off. He waited all night, and when she still hadn’t showed up by morning, he finally called the police.

After hearing his story, officers considered the possibility that Erin had gotten lost in the national park, or that something else had gone wrong out there. It was brutal terrain, with extreme heat and huge stretches of empty desert. So, police couldn’t rule out the idea that a young woman on her own had simply underestimated what she was dealing with.

Police ended up sending officers out to search the national park, while they stayed back and started questioning the people who knew Erin, hoping to get some extra information. One thing immediately struck them as odd. John hadn’t reported his wife missing until the next day. For a missing person, especially in a place like that, those lost hours were critical.

To the officers, it almost looked like he wasn’t all that worried about the possibility that Erin had spent the entire night out in the desert. Police spoke to the couple’s neighbors who were close with Erin and John, and pretty quickly detectives heard something interesting. A woman named Aisling, who had been friends with Erin, told them that Erin had been having an affair with her neighbor, a man named Chris.

According to her, the two of them had started secretly seeing each other earlier that year. After Erin lost the baby, things between her and John had clearly gotten worse. She had started pulling away from him, and in general became much more withdrawn and depressed. At some point, she also began spending a lot of money on online shopping, because for a while it made her feel better, but that only created more problems.

 Since Erin wasn’t working and they were living off John’s income, money was already tight, and all that spending led to serious credit card debt. In the end, John took all of Erin’s bank cards away. That left her feeling trapped and powerless in her own home, which only made their relationship worse. Meanwhile, Erin started spending more and more time with her neighbor, Chris.

He was a Marine, too, and he often went out to the horse ranch with her. Chris was married and had a daughter, but that didn’t stop him from starting an affair with Erin. For a while, they managed to keep it quiet, but Chris’s wife found out pretty quickly. And after that, so did the rest of the people around them.

 She told John, but he didn’t end the marriage. Instead, he decided to try to save it. So, naturally, police started wondering whether John may have grown bitter toward his wife and decided to get rid of her. At the same time, they were also considering another possibility, Chris’s involvement. That idea came from the fact that his version of events was very different from what everyone else had been telling them.

 When police first questioned him, Chris said he barely knew Erin and that their relationship went no further than occasionally saying hi out on the street. But now the detectives knew about the affair, that answer sounded highly suspicious. Even so, police weren’t rushing to accuse him of being involved in Erin’s disappearance.

 Chris could have simply been trying to protect his career in the Marines. An affair like that could easily have led to serious consequences or even gotten him kicked out. But before long, detectives uncovered something else. After speaking with Erin’s best friend back in her hometown, they learned that the affair with Chris hadn’t actually ended after it was exposed.

 Or rather, it had stopped for a while, but then the two of them started seeing each other again. This time, they were much more careful about hiding it. But Erin had mentioned it more than once in messages to her best friend. Erin said she wanted to leave John and move to Alaska with Chris. After she found out she was pregnant, she told both her friend and Chris that the baby might be his.

Chris reacted positively, but there was one major problem. He already had a wife and daughter. Because of that, he asked Erin not to tell anyone she was pregnant and to give him time to figure out what to do. But keeping it secret didn’t work out. Just a few days before Erin disappeared, she started feeling unwell and John took her to the hospital.

 That’s where doctors discovered she was pregnant and talked about it to both her and her husband. So now John knew about the pregnancy, and detectives started wondering, did he also know that Erin had kept seeing Chris in secret? If he did, he could have easily started thinking the baby wasn’t his, especially considering how far along she was, and the fact that he and Erin had already been having serious problems in their marriage.

 Police considered the possibility that John may have done something to his wife out of anger, but there was another theory, too. Could Chris have hurt Erin in order to keep her quiet? Police questioned Chris again, but he kept insisting they had never been intimate, and that there was no way Erin could have been pregnant by him.

 Since Erin had told her best friend the exact opposite, detectives weren’t ready to just take his word for it. But at that point, they had no proof he was lying. At the same time, police intensified the search for Erin, and eventually, it paid off. They found her car parked in the outskirts of town, out in an empty, desolate area. No one was inside, but a set of women’s boot prints led away from the vehicle for several yards, then suddenly stopped.

 In that spot, investigators found tire tracks from another car, and detectives came to the conclusion that Erin had gotten into someone else’s vehicle and been driven away to an unknown location. While crime scene techs processed the area more thoroughly, detectives uncovered something else. When Jessie, Erin’s best friend from back home, heard that police were starting to suspect Chris, she immediately told them Erin had been planning to meet him on the day she disappeared.

 According to Jessie, Erin had messaged her saying Chris had asked her to meet him out in that same National Park so they could talk about the relationship and her pregnancy and that he had some kind of surprise for her. Erin thought he might be planning to propose and she had been genuinely excited about the meeting. The only thing she couldn’t understand was why Chris wanted to meet in the middle of nowhere.

But that wasn’t all. Detective spoke to Aisling again and this time she shared something interesting. The day before Erin disappeared, Chris had told Aisling’s husband that he was planning to head out into the desert the next morning to hunt coyotes and even invited him to come along. But the man backed out at the last minute.

Even so, he had noticed a propane tank in Chris’s vehicle and asked why he was bringing that along on a hunting trip. Chris replied that he just wanted to blow up some abandoned mine shaft and there were plenty of those scattered around the area. It sounded strange but at the time his friend didn’t think much of it.

After that, Chris drove out into the desert and a few hours later his friend texted to say he had gotten free earlier than expected and could still join him. Chris sent him his location but then for some reason he switched his phone to airplane mode. His friend couldn’t find him at the coordinates he’d been sent and he couldn’t reach him by phone either.

He looked for him for hours then eventually gave up and left. Chris didn’t turn airplane mode off until around 3:30 that afternoon and then went back to the base. When his friend asked where he disappeared to, Chris said he gotten lost in the desert. According to him, he never found any coyotes so he just ended up shooting at some rocks.

 His friend also asked why he had put his phone in airplane mode and Chris said he was trying to save battery. Finally, the friend noticed that the propane tank was no longer in the vehicle. He asked whether Chris had managed to blow up the mine, but Chris replied that things hadn’t gone the way he had planned. At that point, detectives were almost certain Chris had met up with Erin that day, but they still didn’t have hard proof that he actually harmed her.

On top of that, they still weren’t ready to cross her husband off the suspect list, either. Police couldn’t rule out the possibility that John had followed his wife, discovered she was meeting her lover, and then killed her. Detectives got a warrant to search Erin and John’s apartment, but they didn’t find anything there that pointed to her husband.

 When they looked through Erin’s computer, they found open tabs with rental listings in Alaska, in Chris’s hometown. They also found a handwritten poem Chris had written to Erin. Later, one of Erin’s friends explained that he had given it to her not long after his wife found out about the affair, and that it was after that that the two of them started seeing each other again.

Police brought Chris in again, but he stuck to his original story. He kept telling detectives that his relationship with Erin had never been serious, and that there had never been any physical intimacy between them. Chris also said he hadn’t seen Erin on the day she disappeared. According to him, he had simply gone hunting, but never found any coyotes and ended up getting lost.

 He said that at one point, he saw a strange man in the distance who pointed a gun at him. Chris claimed he fired several shots in the man’s direction, then drove away. When police asked why he never reported this armed stranger, Chris said that he he been outside cell service, and that was the moment detectives caught something important.

He said, “we.” Even though, by his own version of events, he had been out there alone. Everything they had learned was making detectives seriously doubt his honesty, but they still didn’t know where Aaron was or what had happened to her. By that point, experts had already compared the tire tracks found near Aaron’s car to the tires on Chris’s vehicle, the one he had driven into the desert that day.

 They looked very similar, but it was hard to say it was a 100% match. Even so, detectives used that during the interview, but Chris kept insisting he had never met up with Aaron that day. At one point, he slightly changed his story and said that he had seen Aaron’s car, but Aaron herself wasn’t inside. When asked why he had hidden that information, Chris said he didn’t want people thinking he and Aaron started sneaking around together again.

After that, police told him they had statements from Aaron’s best friend saying that not only had the affair started back up, but the two of them had planned to meet up on the day she disappeared. Chris responded by saying Aaron had simply lied to her friend and that she was a pathological liar. He claimed she had told people that her husband hit her, even though, according to him, that wasn’t true, and that she lied about plenty of other things, too.

At the end of the interview, Chris agreed to give fingerprints and a DNA sample, and then he was released. After that, detectives got a warrant to search his house and discovered that the rifle he had taken hunting that day was missing. When they questioned Chris about it, they learned that, for some reason his wife had taken that rifle to the ranch where he and Erin had spent a lot of time.

Detectives drove there with his wife to recover the weapon, and that’s when they ran into another interesting twist. The rifle was inside the ranch owner’s house, but the woman said she had absolutely no idea Chris’s wife had come by and left the gun there. As for the search of Chris’s own home, police didn’t find any evidence tying him to Erin’s disappearance.

Even so, during all of that, detectives found a homemade device, basically a kind of cannon for launching potatoes that worked by igniting gas. Police considered that device illegal under state law. So, they arrested Chris. Since investigators still couldn’t tie him directly to Erin’s disappearance, the cannon gave them a convenient reason to take him into custody, but his wife quickly posted bail, and they had to let him go.

That same week, Chris’s military contract ended. Not long after that, he left his wife and child and went back home to Alaska. For detectives, that became a serious challenge. More than a week had already passed since Erin disappeared, and everyone understood that the chances of finding her alive were almost gone.

Now that Chris had left for another state, police had no real option but to throw all their energy into the search. At that point, information about the suspicion surrounding Chris still hadn’t spread widely in the media. So, a lot of people continued to believe Erin’s husband was the one responsible. John was still serving on the base, but because of everything that was happening, his superiors decided to move him to a warehouse duty for the time being, worried that the situation could seriously affect his mental state.

The search for Aaron continued day after day, but nothing was turning up. Because Chris had told his friend he wanted to blow up an abandoned mine shaft, police started considering the possibility that Aaron’s body had been hidden in one of those places. But there were two major problems. First, there were countless abandoned mine shafts scattered throughout the desert.

 And second, checking them wasn’t easy at all. Many of them were extremely hard to access, which meant police simply couldn’t examine what was inside. Even so, the search continued every single day because investigators had no other real chance of getting justice in this case. They brought in rescue teams and volunteers who spent weeks coming through the desert looking for Aaron.

Because the area was so remote, many of the people involved in the search ended up sleeping in their cars just to avoid wasting time driving back and forth to town. On top of that, they were forced to work in unbearable heat, which made everything even harder. That went on for more than a month, and during that time police checked hundreds of mine shafts, but Aaron still wasn’t found.

By then, detectives had completely crossed John off the suspect list because there was no evidence that he had left the military base that day. Once that information made its way into the media and reporters started writing about police suspicions surrounding Chris, one of his fellow Marines came forward with a pretty interesting story.

According to him, not long before all this happened, Chris had talked to him about how to hide a human body so it would never be found. Another acquaintance of Chris told detectives that just a few days before Erin disappeared, the two of them had gone out into the desert to look at abandoned mine shafts.

 And he even showed police the photos they had taken that day. Detectives immediately brought in a local expert on those mines and showed him the pictures. After studying them, he gave police several possible locations where those shafts might be, and detectives focused their search on those areas. Even then, there were still hundreds of hard-to-reach mine shafts out there, and the search teams still couldn’t find Erin.

 About a month and a half after she disappeared, the sheriff’s department announced that they could no longer keep pouring manpower and resources into the search, and that the operation would be called off after August 16th. Investigators understood that if that happened, they would have almost no chance of ever holding Chris accountable.

But they simply had no other choice. On that day, one member of the search team was checking another stretch of desert when he came across yet another mine shaft. But this time, something immediately felt different. A strong smell of gas was coming up from inside, mixed with another odor that smelled like decomposition.

He immediately reported it, and the team started trying to figure out how to look inside. The shaft was difficult to access, and because of gas, police couldn’t just send someone down there. So, they built a makeshift device with a camera and a battery that they hoped they could lower into the shaft and use it to see what was inside.

 But the bottom wasn’t directly under the opening. It was off to one side, so they still couldn’t get the camera down far enough. At that point, they brought in oxygen tanks and sent a volunteer down. He managed to descend about 20 ft, but at that depth, the gas detectors started going off hard, warning that the air was dangerous.

 On top of that, he said he could actually smell the gas even through the oxygen mask. Because of that, he couldn’t make it all the way to the bottom. But, he took that same camera and lowered it down the slope inside the shaft, which finally gave him a view of the bottom. The image wasn’t clear enough to be certain, but to him, it looks like there was a human body down there.

And that wasn’t all. There also appeared to be a white propane tank and a car tire. After that, police brought in a specialist with more advanced equipment, and he managed to go down deeper. This time, he got a much clearer look at the bottom of the shaft, and detectives could now clearly see a human body. Right after that, they called in the fire department, and firefighters organized an operation to bring the body back up to the surface.

It turned out to be extremely difficult because of how hard the shaft was to reach. But in the end, they managed to do it. The body was in advanced state of decomposition, so there was no way to identify the victim by sight. The only thing detectives noticed right away was a rope around the neck with two handles tied to the ends, making it look like a homemade garrote.

On top of that, they found a white propane tank near the body, several spent shell casings, a blue climbing rope, a piece of rebar, and two mugs marked property of the US government. There was also a stick with a rag wrapped around it, which looked like an unlit homemade torch. Not long after, medical examiners confirmed that the victim was Erin using her dental records.

 Because of the advanced decomposition, they couldn’t determine the exact cause of death, but they did find multiple fractures. Some of those could have happened when she fell into the mine shaft, but one injury stood out from the rest. The back of her skull was broken in a way that looked like she’d been struck in the head.

 On top of that, the rope around her neck suggested Erin may have died from strangulation. Detectives also noted one more strange detail. Erin’s purse, phone, shoes, wedding ring, and keys were never found. That suggested the killer may have dumped them somewhere else. From the very first moment the body was discovered, detectives made the decision to keep that information secret so they wouldn’t scare Chris off.

 At that point, he was still living in Alaska, and in theory, he could have easily disappeared if he wanted to. So, police told only Erin’s parents and asked them not to say anything until Chris had been arrested. After that, they contacted law enforcement in Alaska, and Chris was taken into custody there before being extradited back to California.

 Now the detectives had much more evidence against him, Chris’s involvement in Erin’s murder looked almost undeniable. The propane tank found in the mine matched the description of the one he’d had with him on the day she disappeared. Investigators also found the exact same kind of blue climbing rope in his vehicle, and under the passenger seat, they discovered a homemade garrote that looked just like the one used to strangle Erin.

 Even with all of that pointing to him, Chris kept denying he had anything to do with the murder, and the case moved to trial. Later, experts reexamined the items recovered from the mine and found Chris’s DNA on two of them, which only made the case against him even stronger. The trial began on October 2016, and all through those two years, Chris kept insisting he was innocent.

 The prosecution laid out all the evidence they had, calling a long list of witnesses, and overall, things were looking very bad for him. But then, on October 27th, he managed to shock everyone. Chris took the stand and suddenly admitted that he had killed Erin. But, according to him, it hadn’t happened the way it seemed.

 He claimed that the two of them had driven out into the desert that morning. Supposedly, a few friends had originally been planning to go, too, but they backed out at the last minute. So, Chris ended up alone there with Erin. According to his version, Erin started telling him she wanted to leave everything behind and move to Alaska with him.

 She also said that she loved him and his daughter. And that was when the entire courtroom was hit with something bizarre. Chris suddenly claimed that Erin had done something inappropriate to his daughter. He said Erin had watched the girl on multiple occasions while he and his wife were busy, and that after one of those times, they started to suspect she had done something disturbing to their daughter.

Now, according to Chris, while they were out there in the desert, and and said she loved his daughter, he was suddenly reminded of that incident and started accusing her. He claimed Erin admitted that she really had done it and he snapped. He pulled out a homemade strangulation device, which just happened to be in his pocket, and attacked her.

After realizing she was dead, he panicked and decided to dump her body in the mine shaft. Of course, no one in the courtroom was quick to buy that story for several reasons. First of all, those were incredibly serious accusations against Erin, and yet neither Chris nor his wife had ever gone to the police. More than that, they had continued leaving their daughter alone with Erin, and Chris had even restarted the affair afterward.

Second, the story itself made almost no sense. Chris claimed he had ended up alone with Erin in the desert purely by chance because their friends backed out at the last second. But all the evidence and witness testimony pointed to something very different, that he had invited her there specifically to talk about their relationship.

And then, there was the strangulation device. Chris just happened to have a homemade garrote in his pocket, a tool with basically one purpose, to strangle someone. So, his sudden confession didn’t create sympathy. It created disgust, and outrage. Even his own mother, who had stood by him the entire time, got up and walked out of the courtroom when she heard her son’s version of events, and she never came back.

To everyone listening, the accusations against Erin sounded less like the truth and more like a desperate attempt to get a lighter sentence. The prosecution presented a far more believable version of what happened. In their view, Chris had never seen his affair with Erin as anything serious.

 He had no intention of leaving his wife, and he was afraid that if they divorced, she would limit access to their daughter, especially once the affair came out. When Chris learned that Erin might be pregnant by him, he realized his wife would likely file for divorce the moment that became public. So, he decided to get rid of Erin, lured her into the desert, strangled her, dumped her body in the mine shaft, and then tried to destroy the evidence with gas and a torch, but something went wrong.

That version made far more sense to the jury. It took them only an hour and a half to reach a unanimous verdict. Chris was guilty of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. One more detail is worth mentioning. By the time Erin’s body was found, the level of decomposition was too advanced to recover DNA from the baby and determine paternity.

So, to this day, no one knows for sure whose child she was carrying. Share your thoughts on this story in the comment section, and don’t forget to press the like button if you enjoyed my video. Thank you for watching.