To most people, living in a treehouse with no running water or electricity on a Tennessee farm might seem eccentric. But for David Riemens, a Michigan native who grew up with five siblings, living off-grid in the Volunteer State became his paradise.
“David wanted to leave a very small footprint on the earth,” Julie McManus, who was married to Riemens for 10 years, told The Daily Beast. “We never thought of ourselves as ‘hippies’ but everyone called us that. We were just focused on helping—not hurting—the planet.”
A “kind and compassionate person” who had an affinity for hitchhiking, Riemens moved to Tennessee in 1976 with his wife and a group of friends who wanted to “live as close to nature as possible,” she recalled.
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Over the years, Riemens’ love for nature inspired a passion for art, which often featured oil-painted landscapes of the countryside, and the creation of a treehouse he built off the side of his friend’s property at Quietude Farms and shared with his dog, Kodi. He also built a “hobbit house” reminiscent of those in the Lord of the Rings trilogy after his hosts indicated they wanted a root cellar.
“That’s the kind of guy he was. He would go out of his way to help people,” said McManus, who added that the “hobbit house” dwelling also served as a studio.
To support himself, Riemens took on several odd jobs around Watertown, a small community boasting a population of less than 2,000 about 45 minutes outside of Nashville. Among the odd jobs, his most lucrative were gigs as a carpenter and stonemason.
From an outsider’s perspective, Riemens’ life was going exactly as he had planned—which made his disappearance of Aug. 8, 2012, at the age of 60, all the more surprising to friends and family.
While the details of what occurred that Wednesday remain unclear to investigators and those closest to Riemens, witnesses told the Wilson County Sheriff’s Department he was last seen in the parking lot of a Dollar General store in Watertown. Others said they heard Riemens had been buying bricks from an unknown “old man” and was meeting up with the seller to discuss an upcoming project nearby.
For six years, Riemens’ friends, family, and investigators were more stumped than enraged about what happened to the “funny and eccentric” guy who had plans to head to Michigan the day he vanished to see friends and family.
“The longer that time went by, the more we thought that maybe he wasn’t off just doing his own thing,” Wilson County Detective Major Robert Stafford, the lead investigator on this case, told The Daily Beast.
Then, in January 2018, the Wilson County Sheriff’s Office revealed an “intact skull” was located on a property in Watertown about a mile away from the Dollar General store in town. The skull, and a few other bones that were found at the scene, were later identified through dental records to be Riemens’. According to a report of investigation by the local medical examiner’s office obtained by The Daily Beast, the cause of death “could not be determined.”
“It was a huge break in our case,” Stafford said. “We finally knew for a fact that David Riemens was dead, and we were able to transform our case from a missing person to a death investigation.”
But authorities have yet to identify any persons of interest or suspects in a case that Stafford said has still not even been deemed a homicide. Stafford explained that a primary reason why there are so many questions surrounding Riemens’ death stems from the nature of his lifestyle.
“We don’t know what happened the day he went missing. We don’t know that he was killed, we don’t know that he wasn’t killed,” Stafford said. “It remains a mystery to us exactly what happened in 2012.”
For McManus, everything about her relationship with Riemens was “very different,” including how they met. Just 15 at the time, McManus said, she met her future husband over the phone, during one of her friend’s favorite games “where she would call random numbers and see who would pick up.”
“She called a random number and we realized we had phoned a house with multiple boys who were our age,” she recalled while laughing. “We were so excited and ended up exchanging numbers with the boys. And then I ended up with David.”
At the time, Riemens was working as a fry cook in a little restaurant in downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan, near where he grew up. McManus said that their relationship progressed quickly and she married him in 1971, when she was 18.
The Riemens treehouse at Quietude Farms
Julie McManus“I actually married him before I graduated high school,” McManus said. “He was my best friend.”
About six years into their marriage, the young couple moved to DeKalb County in Tennessee, in part, McManus said, because of the agrarian “back to the land movement” that promoted self-sufficiency through personal resources and labor.
“We wanted cheap land and everything was really expensive in Michigan. We were already thinking about the things that are big now—global warming, carbon footprints—and we didn’t want to contribute to that,” McManus said. “So we eventually went down to Tennessee with a group of people and lived amongst a community.”
From the start, McManus said, the young couple lived “a pretty off-the-grid lifestyle” that focused more on cultivating the nature around them—including learning how to grow organic food and build a fire—rather than setting permanent roots.
By the end of the 1970s, however, McManus said that she and Riemens split up, partly over their differences about having children. Still, she said, they continued an extremely close friendship.
Eventually, McManus said she remarried and had a daughter, who would refer to Riemens as “Uncle David,” while her ex-husband built a treehouse at Dr. Donald and Laura Nuessle’s property in Watertown.
“Laura had moved down to Tennessee with us from Michigan. So we were all very close,” McManus said. The Nuessles could not be reached for comment on this story.
Through the years, McManus said that she best communicated with Riemens via letters, since he did not have a phone, electricity, or even running water in his lofted abode. The last letter from Riemens came about six weeks before he went missing and contained “a bunch of photos.”
“I never responded to that letter and now I feel horrible about it,” McManus said. “Time just flew by.”
According to Detective Major Stafford, witness testimony from the day has been contradictory, and Riemens’ off-the-grid lifestyle made it impossible for investigators to establish his whereabouts.
“He had a bank account but no debit card, no credit card. He didn’t have an electronic fingerprint we could chase,” Stafford said. “He lived in a treehouse... There were challenges to this case from the start.”
On the day of his disappearance, multiple witnesses told authorities they saw Riemens at the Dollar General parking lot in town. Stafford noted that while Riemens’ truck was found—and his wallet and keys were missing—that does not necessarily mean he left the car there that day.
“I had come out of the Dollar General and was getting into my car. He had parked his truck up in front and was walking toward the store, and he came over and leaned in the window, and we just chatted,” Toni Tau, a Watertown resident who may have been the last person to see Riemens, told The Wilson Post at the time. (Tau passed away last August.)
Other witnesses said they heard Riemens had planned to meet an “old man” he had met at a cafe in town who he had been buying antique bricks from. McManus said the “old man” had also asked Riemens to do some “stone work” for a project the mysterious individual was working on for his daughter.
“Nobody knows this old man’s name because David never told anyone his name,” McManus said, noting that Riemens had always planned to go to Michigan that day to see friends and family. “Anyway, how much does that meeting even have to do with what happened to David? We don’t even know. We have no idea what happened or when he was really last seen. All we know is that he never made it to Michigan.
In a 2015 interview with the Wilson Post, Jim Riemens also stated his older brother had left him a message two days prior to his disappearance to say he had “one more thing to take care of and then he would be leaving for Michigan.” He added that records showed Riemens also withdrew cash from Wilson Bank & Trust on the Watertown square.
McManus said it didn’t take long for friends and family to realize Riemens was missing after he failed to arrive in Michigan. “I had this sinking feeling that I would not see him again,” Riemens' sister, Janet, told the Wilson Post after learning her older brother was missing. The Riemens family did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The case immediately garnered local attention, spurring searches around the Tennessee countryside and prompting the Wilcon County Crime Stopper to issue a $1,000 reward for any information into Riemens’ disappearance. Riemens' family also offered a $2,000 reward at the time and the Nuessles even commissioned planes to aid in the search.
“We were investigating the case from every angle, because we had no idea what happened to him. He had a history of living off the grid and doing his own thing and friends and family said he wasn’t beyond that,” Stafford said. “But the longer that time went by, the more we thought that maybe he wasn’t off just doing his own thing.”
That hunch proved to be right on Jan. 21, 2018, when the Wilson County Sheriff’s Office received a call that “a skull was discovered” in a wooded area about a mile away from where Riemens’ car was found.
The autopsy report completed by the Wilson County Medical Examiner’s Office states that Riemens’ remains were discovered by the son of the property owner. “No obvious evidence of perimortem trauma was found” on the remains apart from Riemens’ tooth, whose crown “had been fractured and is missing.”
“Due to the nature of the skeletal remains, no known medical history, and no evidence of trauma, the cause of death is undetermined. The manner of death is undetermined,” the report concluded.
It was not clear whose property Riemens’ remains were found on, and the sheriff’s office declined to provide more information.
For McManus, the discovery of Riemens’ remains “was sad” but provided a measure of closure for something she said she knew from the beginning: that her ex-husband had died in 2012. Still, she added, the remains’ emergence also spurred more questions and frustration that the case wasn’t further along.
“How did he get there? He didn’t just walk up there and die,” McManus said. “It made no sense. This isn’t something he would have done to himself. I never felt that he was somewhere alive. He would not have taken off and not told people. He wouldn’t have wanted to do that.”
But Stafford stressed that the remains allowed investigators to finally look into “numerous leads” and pivot their investigation into “figure out what happened to David.” He insists the probe is active and ongoing.
“Our doors are wide open to know more about what happened that day,” the detective said. “But from an investigation standpoint, we have to prove that a crime has occurred. We are not going to label this a homicide. We don’t know what happened.”
