become a hermit, swapping the stress of Tessr
for the solitude of the Ohio wilderness.
After walking or hitchhiking the seven
miles between the BP station in Clinton
County and Bill O’Bryan’s estate, Haas prob-
ably survived in the Clarksville woods for
weeks, foraging food and camping supplies
from the farms that line State Route 22. As
he lost weight due to the meagerness of
the meals he cooked over open flames, he
took to using a vine to hold up his pants. He
seems to have never interacted with another
soul, as if uttering a single word to someone
might spoil his scraggly little Eden.
The fractured femur—a potentially fatal
injury if bleeding was heavy and untreated—
could have occurred in a number of ways.
One detective theorized that Haas scaled a
tree near the ravine to reach a deer stand,
then accidentally tumbled out. Or maybe
he walked too close to the edge of the ravine
and lost his footing. In either scenario, Haas
would have been separated from his back-
pack upon smashing into the rock-strewn
creek below; if conscious, he might have
watched in anguish as the bag was swept
downstream. Somehow the badly injured
Haas pulled himself out of the ravine and
crawled for nearly half a mile through a
labyrinth of soybean plants before reaching
another stretch of verdant forest. Then he
flopped against the base of a honeysuckle
tree and closed his eyes to rest.
If this sad narrative is true, it leaves a vex-
ing mystery. The injured Haas could have
inched toward Shepherds Way or Route 22,
both of which are closer to the area where
he likely had his accident. He could have
flagged someone down to take him to a
hospital. Was he so disoriented from phys-
ical trauma and caloric deprivation that he
couldn’t discern the shortest path to help?
Or did he purposefully continue to avoid
human contact even after it became appar-
ent that doing so would mean his doom?
W
HETHER intentionally or
not, Haas destroyed Tessr
by retreating into the
woods. Even if the hard
drives in his backpack
could be salvaged, the
ever-paranoid Haas—a
self-described “tinfoil hat guy”—had ren-
dered them unreadable with strong
encryption. The code he wrote for Tessr’s
blockchain seems fated to be locked away
for good. Emanuel Sylvia briefly toyed
with pushing forward with the company
to honor the memory of his cofounder, but
the task was just too daunting. “I could not
keep going,” Sylvia wrote to Haas’ mother in
February. Jerold “was more of a friend than
my partner and with the code gone, I lost
all motivation.” (Sylvia says he still plans to
launch his “educational blockchain” and
that it will be named after Haas.)
Judith Wallace Huff has dealt with her
incalculable grief by becoming an amateur
gumshoe. Holed up on her rustic property
high in the Appalachian foothills, she has
filled several notebooks with observations
about Tessr’s investors, the criminal records
of Clarksville residents, and the alleged short-
comings of the Warren County Sheriff’s Office.
She is especially incensed by the detectives’
failure to follow up on a clue she gleaned
from one of Jerold’s pseudonymous Twitter
accounts, @CompositionFore. Wallace Huff
kept close tabs on the account throughout
September 2018, hoping to detect a glimmer
of activity that might indicate her son was
still alive. As of September 22, the three most
recent posts were all dated August 27—four
days before Jerold disappeared:
“This just in: At one point in time, having
things meant things.”
“Ran out of phenibut feel ambivalent
about it.”
“Numerous time in my life when I’d
thought I was being the most selfless & con-
siderate, in retrospect I found I was egocen-
tric. Might have learn’t a valuable lesson.”
When Wallace Huff next checked the
account, on September 25, those posts had
been deleted. What was left at the top of the
page was Jerold’s last surviving post from
August 27—the most cryptic of his musings
from that day:
“Meanwhile: Anachrists”
Wallace Huff has repeatedly asked the
Warren County Sheriff’s Office to contact
Twitter and obtain information about the
IP address that was used to delete Jerold’s
tweets—data that might give her a better
sense of how long her son survived in the
woods, and whether he ever leeched off
someone’s Wi-Fi to satiate his internet addic-
tion. But the investigators said that Twitter
would need to perform “extensive engineer-
ing efforts” to recover information that is “not
necessary,” and declined to follow up.
Wallace Huff has not given up on thenotion that her son might have been mur-
dered. The story that makes the most sense
to her is that Jerold secluded himself in the
forest to engage in a 30-day religious fast,
which would explain the New Testament
in his backpack. Maybe he had an accident
while in a weakened state, or maybe he
crossed paths with someone whose malev-
olence he was too naive to recognize. “His
biggest flaw was that he had a loyalty for
friends and a trusting nature,” Wallace Huff
says. “This trait caused him to be hurt and
betrayed more than once.”
Wallace Huff wants to recover the tangi-
ble items found in Jerold’s backpack, since
they constitute nearly all the possessions
her son left behind. But the Warren County
Sheriff’s Office has refused to release the
property to her. “I realize we have closed this
investigation,” a deputy wrote to her in May,
“but we feel obligated to maintain custody
of the items we have to assist with further
investigation should that become necessary
in the future.” Nor has Wallace Huff been
able to visit the woods where her son lived
and likely perished: Bill O’Bryan will not let
her come on the property, according to law
enforcement. (O’Bryan did not respond to
requests for comment.)
The rest of Haas’ legacy is located primar-
ily on SoundCloud, where he uploaded doz-
ens of original tracks as both tonehog and
CompositionFore. The evolution of his music
offers a glimpse of how Haas’ perception of
himself may have changed through years of
unfulfilled promise. The danceable beats of
his collegiate rave days steadily gave way to
ominous industrial noise, and finally to
shapeless sonic experiments with titles like
“High Fidelity Hate” and “Robotic Oompa
Loompa March,” which all but a few listeners
will find intolerable. These last songs, which
the middle-aged Haas produced while grap-
pling with the burdens of his past, feel
explicitly designed to confound, to upset,
even to invite scorn. It is almost as if Haas
derived pleasure from being on the knowing
side of a cosmic joke—a joke that only
someone as cursed by narrow brilliance as
he was could ever hope to understand.Brendan I. Koerner (@brendankoerner) is
a wired contributing editor and author
of The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror
in the Golden Age of Hijacking. He wrote
about the rapid pace of evolution in urban
wildlife in issue 27.10.