ted a headless skeleton slumped against a
honeysuckle tree, its right leg bent sideways
at a 90-degree angle, its left still flecked with
strands of muscle. Nearby was a rib and a
jumble of arm bones that had evidently been
gnawed off by coyotes and foxes. There were
no man-made objects in the vicinity that
might indicate an obvious cause of death: no
gun, no knife, no rope, no drug paraphernalia.
A few feet deeper into the forest, the
crime scene unit found two black sneak-
ers, a dark shirt, and a pair of black pants
with a vine threaded through its belt loops.
The clothes’ tattered condition suggested
that they, like the skull and loose bones, had
been removed from the body by scavengers.
Inside a pants pocket was a wallet contain-
ing a wad of waterlogged cash, rewards
cards from Subway and a chain of erotic
boutiques, and an Ohio state ID for Jerold
Christoper Haas, born September 30, 1975.
By running the name through an Ohio
law-enforcement database, the investiga-
tors learned that Haas had been reported
missing seven weeks earlier. Haas had
lived in Columbus, 80 miles from where
his remains were discovered, but he’d last
been seen at a gas station one county over
from O’Bryan’s sprawling property. He’d
disappeared along with a black backpack
in which he carried the tools of his career
as a computer programmer: three smart-
phones, two Dell laptops, an Amazon tab-
let, and an array of USB sticks and cables.
He never let the backpack out of his sight;
even on trips to the office bathroom, the bag
stayed glued to his shoulder. But the back-
pack was nowhere to be found in the woods.
Haas had vanished only months after he’d
been on the verge of a life-altering triumph.
He was a cofounder of Tessr, a buzzed-about
Columbus startup that aimed to use block-
chain technology to streamline data sharing
in higher education. The company had cre-
ated a blockchain-based token, known as
TSRX, that it had started selling to insiders
in the late spring and early summer of 2018;
the sale’s lofty goal had been to raise $30
million from investors. Haas, who’d received
1.5 million tokens as part of his compensa-
tion package, believed he could make a
fortune if Tessr panned out, and he’d been
pushing himself to finish the code needed
to launch the startup’s platform in the fall.
Much of the critical software he’d written
was stored on the hard drives he’d been tot-ing in his backpack. He had neglected to
make any copies of his work.
Such rank carelessness was not out of the
ordinary for Haas, a man whose genius was
frequently overshadowed by his penchant
for self-sabotage. Anyone who’s spent time
in the tech industry knows characters like
Haas: frighteningly intelligent, fiercely icon-
oclastic, socially maladroit. They seem to
live by their own inscrutable code. Often,
due to a combination of arrogance and
immaturity, they make a hash of all the big
opportunities that come their way. Haas
shrugged off his many failures by telling
himself and others that he actually preferred
life as an outsider. But he had come to regret
his obstinance as he felt the undertow of
middle age. He’d thrown himself into Tessr
as a last-ditch effort to achieve the wealth
and respect he’d missed out on during his
wasted youth.
Haas’ hard-fought attempt at reinven-
tion had somehow ended with his death in a
forest far from home, his priceless software
gone. For the detectives charged with unrav-
eling how that grisly tragedy had come to
pass, the first step was to follow the tokens.A
DAY AFTER collecting evi-
dence in the woods near
Clarksville, four investi-
gators from the Warren
County Sheriff’s Office
made the two-hour drive
to Columbus. Their first
stop was the headquarters of the police
department, where they spoke to the
detective who’d fielded the missing persons
report for Haas almost two months earlier.
The Columbus police hadn’t put any great
effort into locating Haas, as he was an adult
who was free to do as he pleased.
The Warren County investigators next
split up into pairs: Two headed southeast
to notify Haas’ mother, Judith Wallace Huff,
who lived in the hills near the West Virginia
border; the other two, Lieutenant Chris
Peters and Sergeant Brian Hounshell, stayed
in Columbus to interview acquaintances of
the deceased programmer.
One of the first people Peters and
Hounshell tracked down was Emanuel
Sylvia, one of Haas’ cofounders at Tessr,
who asked to meet the investigators in a
Kroger parking lot near his home. As soonERIC MEYERS STAYED silent as he trained
his rifle on the eight-point buck. He fired
once and watched the deer shudder from
the bullet’s impact. But the wounded animal
turned and fled through the woods north of
Clarksville, Ohio, spattering autumn foli-
age with blood as it ran. Meyers followed
the buck’s trail for hours before finally sus-
pending his pursuit well past sunset. But he
set out again the next afternoon, November
3, 2018, this time with two helpers: his
father, William, and a family friend named
Bill O’Bryan, a Cincinnati logistics magnate
who owns the estate where the hunt was
taking place.
The three men were scouring a thicket on
the edge of a soybean field, hoping to stum-
ble across the buck’s carcass, when Eric
noticed a peculiar stonelike object lying
on the ground. He knelt down for a closer
look and saw that it was a human skull, its
jawbone missing but its upper teeth still a
healthy shade of white. He and his fellow
hunters left the forest at once to call 911.
A dozen investigators from the Warren
County Sheriff’s Office used ATVs to search
the area around the skull. They soon spot-