It was just a few weeks shy of Christmas when a fourth grader at East Lake Elementary School went missing more than 20 years ago.
Joshua Walden had been preparing to take his bike out for a ride on Dec. 8, 2000, an unseasonably warm Friday in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
“They were all ready to go and ride their bikes, but my two other brothers didn’t want Josh following ‘em, and then Josh found out he had a flat tire,” his sister Crystal recalled in an interview with The Daily Beast.
So Josh stayed back, calling around and trying to enlist somebody’s help in fixing his flat.
Crystal, who was 17 at the time and doting on her first child, remembered laughing at the bad advice her now-husband gave to Josh over the phone: “My husband was like, ‘Put super glue on it.’ And I remember thinking in my head, ‘That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.’”
Moments later, after making another phone call in his quest to fix the tire, Crystal said, Josh was out the door without a word.
Where he went after that, and who he may have encountered while trying to fix his tire, remains a mystery. The only thing that’s certain is Josh didn’t come home that night, the next two days an agonizing countdown to something so gut-wrenching it would lead to a life sentence of nightmares for Crystal, and the devastation of the entire family.
“I’ll never forget those days. I relive ‘em in my head over and over,” Crystal Walden told The Daily Beast, adding that she was the one to take care of her brothers, as her parents had mostly left them to “fend for themselves.”
While Josh’s family initially thought on that Friday night that he must have stayed at a friend’s house, by Saturday, the innocuous explanation began to unravel.
“I don’t know how to explain it. People say you can feel when something’s wrong, but I never believed it till that day,” Crystal said. “And that day changed everything. I had this feeling come over me, this sense of dread. I knew something wasn’t right. I started crying uncontrollably.”
“And I was like, ‘Something’s wrong.’”
Crystal said she contacted police later that Saturday after seeing that all of Josh’s jackets were still in the closet, but he was still nowhere to be found.
“He had a dog that just howled all night that night. And I remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, that’s not a good sign.’”
According to investigators, at that exact moment, Josh was only about a half a mile from home.
But he was already cold and covered in leaves, lying alone in a wooded area where he’d be found by a crowd that included his own brother just a few hours later.
Crystal said she remembered every moment of that day almost as if it were perpetually replaying in slow motion.
After a call from a friend’s mom telling her a body had been found, she rushed to East Lake Park with her baby to find her father and brother already at the scene, her father pacing at the bottom of the hill that leads into the woods and talking to a police officer.
“I remember my brother Jonathan looking at me, ‘cause I remember hollering at him. I said, ‘Is it Josh?’ and he goes ‘No, it’s not Josh, Crystal, I swear it’s not Josh.’”
Johnny Walden, Josh’s father, was quoted in the Chattanooga Times Free Press at the time saying Jonathan had told him he didn’t look at the boy’s face.
“It scared him and he ran off the hill,” he said.
For a little while at least, it seemed like maybe it was all an awful mistake—or at least a bad coincidence.
Even after police definitively ID’ed the body as Josh that weekend and announced that an autopsy had confirmed he’d died of mechanical asphyxiation, or suffocation, Crystal said, she couldn’t let go of the hope that he’d come home.
On the day of the funeral, she said, “I didn’t want to leave the house. I kept saying he would come home, he would come home… I didn’t want to believe that was my brother in [the casket].”
The reality of his death didn’t sink in for Crystal until, she said, she remembered a “little game” her brothers used to love playing, knocking a quarter back and forth across the table “like a little football game.”
Josh had played the game so much it showed on his hands.
“The only thing that made me realize it was him, is when I looked at his hands… and he had the scar from the quarter on his knuckle.
“That’s when I totally lost it.”
“When I looked in the casket, it shook me. My brother didn’t have a nose, they had drawn holes, or I don’t know if they drew ‘em on or if that was where his actual nostril holes were,” Crystal recalled.
According to the Hamilton County District Attorney’s Office, an autopsy report revealed that Josh had suffered small abrasions on his nose and the right side of his face, but otherwise no injuries, and there were no signs of sexual abuse. Though police have never publicly described any further damage to Josh’s face, at the time of the funeral, they had not yet disclosed all the details of the boy’s murder.
As investigators would reveal at a press conference only a year later, Josh’s body had been doused in muriatic acid.
“It had ate his nose off,” Crystal said.
In the weeks and months after Josh’s body was found, his loved ones were tormented by unthinkable questions about his final moments.
“Everybody has been crying. It’s been a shock. We are coping with it as best we can. We have a lot of support. We’ll be all right. Josh is living in our hearts,” another brother, Dallas, told the Chattanooga Times Free Press three days after Josh’s body was discovered.
Even Josh’s neighbors were shaken to the core, with some quoted in the same paper vowing to move away from the area—or never let their kids out of their sight again.
“It was such a shock that I’m moving my family to Wallaceville,” one neighbor, Larry Clayton, told the Free Press, adding that his son and Josh had been like “two peas in a pod.”
About a week after Josh’s murder, Crystal said, she was shown the crime scene.
“I remember I kept asking the detectives, ‘Well, why does the ground look burnt?’” Crystal said. “There was an impression of a body, but the whole area around it was black, like he had just been set on fire. At the time, I didn’t understand, and I kept asking them, ‘Why does it look like that? Was he burned? Did he suffer?’”
“They didn’t tell me [about the acid] until the one-year anniversary… so for that whole year I’m sitting there thinking my brother might have been burned alive,” she added.
Chattanooga police admitted at the press conference a year after Josh’s death that they had kept quiet about the disturbing use of acid on his body. “There was something done to the body post-mortem that we’ve never run across before,” Mike Mathis, then a major crimes detective with the Chattanooga Police Department, told reporters at the time, per the Free Press. “We sat on this because if we heard from somebody who knew about it, we’d have a suspect.”
“I didn’t know anybody could be so cruel,” Josh’s mother, Ann Walden, said after the public revelation, according to the paper.
Investigators soon offered more detail on the horror of the child’s demise.
“When I walked up into the woods where Josh’s body was at, it’s just an image you’ll never forget. I mean, a child, an innocent 10-year-old, is laying there dead, and you could smell the acid. We didn’t know what it was at the moment, but you could smell it. I can still smell it,” Mathis would later say in a video released by authorities.
At their 2001 press conference, police revealed further clues about the suspected killer provided by Federal Bureau of Investigation profilers. The killer was likely to be from the immediate neighborhood, or at least familiar with it, they said, and may have had unexplained wounds to their hands in the wake of the murder, due to the handling of acid.
“This case has not gone unsolved due to a lack of effort,” then-Police Chief Jimmie Dotson reassured the community.
Bafflingly, Josh’s shoes had been removed and they, along with his red bike, have never been found. Crystal believes whoever killed her brother wanted to throw investigators off their scent by dumping his body in what was then considered a “drug area” local children knew to avoid. While investigators have never said publicly whether Josh was killed where he was found or moved there, Crystal said she was told he’d been moved, and that his time of death was likely “sometime between Friday and Saturday morning.”
The Hamilton County District Attorney’s Office declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing investigation. Mathis, one of the original detectives on the case and now the head of the Cold Case Unit with the Hamilton County DA’s office, confirmed ongoing efforts, but would not comment further.
The FBI directed an inquiry about the case to the Chattanooga Police Department, which, in turn, redirected any questions to the Hamilton County DA’s office.
Retired Chattanooga Police Sgt. Bill Phillips, one of the original detectives on the case, said he could not comment on the investigation itself. But he said that Josh’s death had a profound impact on law enforcement.
“It’s a case that, you know, any case involving a child is going to be something that’s going to stick with you. And that obviously was a young boy and it’s one that we worked on for many, many years,” he told The Daily Beast.
The biggest questions in the case have never gotten any answers: Why was a 10-year-old boy killed and disposed of in such a ghoulish manner? And who would do it?
After the shock of Josh’s killing wore off in the community, it seemed for a time that all hope of answering these questions was lost.
Within three years of Josh’s death, the local newspaper stopped marking the anniversary of his killing, as it had done in the two years prior. Nine years later, it seemed the only reminder of Josh was a steady stream of obituaries for his remaining family members. First, a third brother, Jason, followed by his mother, Ann, two years later. And then his father, Johnny, nearly 20 years later, in 2018.
Omitted from the local papers was the fact that his older brother Jonathan—who found Josh’s body when he was only 12—also went on to attempt suicide, according to Crystal. Attempts to reach Jonathan for this story were unsuccessful.
“I feel like I’m the only voice my brother has at this point,” Crystal said.
Mathis expressed the same sadness at Josh’s case going cold in a video released by the Hamilton County District Attorney’s Office last year.
“It didn’t seem like anybody cared. There was some outcry in the community to begin with, and then it was just like ‘eh,’” he said.
The video was part of a public appeal to solicit more tips after many years of radio silence on the part of investigators. Around the same time the video came out, the Hamilton County District Attorney’s Office called a press conference announcing “renewed efforts” to solve the case along with the FBI, which had rolled out its Behavioral Analysis Unit and the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team.
While much of the public took this as a sign there may be new leads, Hamilton County District Attorney Neal Pinkston swiftly shot down that suggestion, telling reporters nothing had prompted the intensified efforts.
“It’s always been at the forefront of everyone here’s collective consciousness” and this was merely “a very good opportunity to launch an increased joint effort into Joshua’s homicide,” he said.
Moments later, Mathis told reporters that investigators had recently “resubmitted evidence that wasn’t submitted in 2000” or for which testing had not, at the time, been available.
Asked what kind of evidence or if he could elaborate, Mathis responded, “No, it’s just some things that we’re going to keep close to us.”
While those overseeing the case remain tight-lipped, a retired NYPD detective sergeant with extensive experience investigating homicides told The Daily Beast there’s “no way” the case would get such renewed attention if there had not been some new information to motivate it.
“These things just don’t appear out of nowhere,” said Joseph Giacalone, the former commander of the Bronx Cold Case Squad and currently an adjunct professor at New York City’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
“In order for somebody to re-examine a case, they have to have something that, somebody, maybe somebody in prison who wants to make a deal who gave up information or something... It could be..., ‘Hey, I got information on an old case.’ … It could be somebody who’s on their deathbed and knew something too and now wants to talk. There’s all kinds of things that can happen years later, but I don’t believe in coincidences. And no cop does.”
While police have never publicly revealed any leads or named any suspects, there was no shortage locally of theories of what happened. They range from the laughable—“Two people sitting around smoking pot said they saw a dog drag Josh down the hill and sit on him,” Crystal said—to the hopeful and rose-colored, such as the belief that Josh was accidentally killed by other children in a bit of roughhousing that got out of hand.
Throughout the years, police have also publicly hinted that Josh’s death could have been accidental.
“Was it intentional? Until we get to the bottom of it, we can’t say 100 percent, but we do think there’s an aspect that this may not have been intentional,” Mathis said in an interview with WRCB Chattanooga in early 2017.
It was not clear if investigators have since ruled out that possibility. But for Crystal, the suggestion is flat-out wrong.
“Mechanical asphyxiation, as far as I’ve read about it … it took him passing out, they would’ve felt him go limp,” she said. And they would have had to keep it up “long enough to cut off his airwaves.”
And then there’s the most heinous thing of all: the acid.
“Why, if it’s truly an accident, would you try to get rid of [him] to that point? Acid is a cruel thing to use,” Crystal said.
The acid, which investigators said at the time was used either to destroy evidence or make it appear as if Josh had been burned, instead preserved his remains and warded off animals. But while the acid itself was initially seen as a helpful clue in the case in terms of narrowing down the suspect pool, it was also widely available in hardware stores.
“That child died that day, a kid lost his life, and they tell me they’ve searched databases of all the murders in the world and not one murder had any similarities to my brother’s,” Crystal said.
In her eyes, there had to have been more than one person involved.
“The hill you would’ve had to go up … in that kind of weather, you would not have made it up with a body without sliding … it was like a straight up hill, it had to take more than one person to carry him up there.. … There was more than one person involved.”
“They went through so much to cover it up. Where they placed him, I believe that they either wanted to make it look like somebody else had done it in the area, or to make sure he wasn’t found because they knew no one else would go there.”
Giacalone was also troubled by all the planning that seemed to go into the crime.
“You treat it as a homicide until the evidence proves otherwise. But the problem with that is that they then tried to cover it up,” he said.
“I look at it as… this happened somewhere else and then they dumped the body there and tried to make it look like it is whatever they were trying to stage at that point,” the ex-cop added.
“I would bet you that the perpetrator, or perpetrators—there’s probably more than one—were teens,” Giacalone continued. “So you’re looking at maybe 40-year-olds right now or a little less. So there’s somebody out there that knows something.”
Investigators have hinted that there’s one secret that will give away the killer, or killers, according to Crystal.
“They keep telling me they’re keeping something because … there’s one thing that only the killer would know.”
“I just want to look at [the killer] and ask ‘em why. Why him? What did he do? I mean, how can you live with yourself? I don’t care who it is, they need to answer for what they’ve done,” she said.
Crystal, who has been raising her own family in the shadow of her brother’s brutal murder, said she’s gone out of her way to shield her kids from the horror she experienced.
“Bad people do exist in this world. And you know this person’s still out there,” she told The Daily Beast. “But [my kids] don’t know the bogeyman. They know the bogeyman exists, but they don’t know the extent of it.”
