The dense, whispering canopy of North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest holds countless stories of tranquility and wonder, but for ten years, it held a secret of unimaginable horror. On a crisp October day in 2023, a tourist named Michael Renck stumbled upon a scene so gruesome, the memory of it would haunt him for months to come. Beneath an old, forgotten tarp, tucked away in a rocky crevice, lay the remains of a woman and a young girl. They were the bodies of Sandra and Hann Web, a mother and daughter who had vanished a decade earlier, and their discovery wasn’t just a solution to a cold case—it was a window into one of the most terrifying ritualistic crimes in the state’s history.

The story begins on August 17, 2013. Sandra, a former high school biology teacher, and her 11-year-old daughter, Hann, set out for a weekend camping trip. After a difficult divorce from her husband, David, Sandra had moved with Hann to a small apartment on the outskirts of Asheville. Hann was a typical fifth-grader, full of life, a passion for drawing, and a dream of becoming a veterinarian. Though she feared storms and heights, she loved hiking with her mother, and this trip was meant to be a special bonding experience.

On that unseasonably warm August morning, with temperatures hovering around 75 degrees, Sandra loaded her 2007 red Honda Civic with camping gear and provisions for a three-day hike. She picked up Hann from her grandmother’s house at 8:30 AM, after the girl had spent the night at a friend’s house. Hann’s grandmother, Martha Clark, a 62-year-old librarian, helped them pack and watched them drive away, asking them to call when they reached their campsite.

The journey from Martha’s home to the entrance of Pisgah National Forest was a scenic 29-mile drive. Sandra planned to reach the Blue Ridge Parkway parking lot by 11:00 AM, then hike the Shining Rock trail to set up camp in the Graveyard Fields area. She’d chosen the spot on a recommendation from a fellow teacher who’d praised its easy trails and picturesque views. At 10:50 AM, Sandra made a brief, one-minute call to her mother, her voice a little garbled by the poor mountain reception. She confirmed they had arrived and were getting ready to start their hike. Martha heard her granddaughter’s faint voice in the background, saying something about butterflies. It was the last time anyone would ever hear from them.

When Sunday night came and went with no word, Martha Clark grew frantic. After repeated calls to Sandra’s phone went to voicemail, she contacted the Asheville police, reporting her daughter and granddaughter missing at 9:00 PM. Officer Robert Turner took the report and, due to a child’s involvement, immediately initiated a search, despite the standard 24-hour waiting period for adult disappearances. He notified the Transylvania County Search and Rescue service, and coordinator James Harris, a 15-year veteran of mountain rescues, took the call at 10:15 PM.

The search teams mobilized quickly, with the first group arriving at the Blue Ridge Parkway parking lot at 1:30 AM on Monday, August 18. They found Sandra’s red Honda Civic parked at the far end of the lot. The car was locked, the keys were gone, and a child’s jacket was visible on the back seat. Harris decided to wait for daylight to begin the search on the trail, knowing that the chilly 61-degree night air posed an additional risk to anyone stranded in the forest.

By morning, the search effort had grown to 23 people, including professional rescuers, volunteers, and police. The teams were divided to scour different sections of the Shining Rock trail. The first day yielded no results. They hiked the main trail, checked every campsite, and found no trace of Sandra and Hann. On the second day, the team was joined by a K-9 unit. Rex, a German Shepherd, picked up a scent at the third kilometer of the trail, leading searchers off the main path and into a dense thicket. A mile and a half from the trail, in a small ravine, Rex stopped and began to bark. Lying in the mud at the bottom of the ravine was a small purple children’s shoe. Martha Clark confirmed it was Hann’s, but the shoe was eerily clean, with no signs of having been exposed to the elements for long. The dogs lost the scent after the shoe, and subsequent searches turned up nothing.

After three days, the official search was suspended. The case was classified as a missing persons investigation, handed over to Detective Michael Stone of the Asheville Police Department. Stone, a 12-year veteran specializing in missing persons, began his methodical investigation. He interviewed Martha, who told him Sandra had been planning the trip for a month, buying new gear and studying maps. There were no family issues, no threats, and Sandra’s ex-husband, David, who lived in Tennessee, had an alibi and no history of conflict with his ex-wife.

Stone hit a wall, but a tip from a neighbor changed everything. Sandra’s neighbor, Jane Miller, told Stone that Sandra had been getting strange, late-night phone calls that left her looking worried. A check of Sandra’s phone records revealed a pattern of calls from a man named Thomas Greeks. He had called her 17 times between May and August 2013, with conversations ranging from 2 to 15 minutes. Thomas Greeks was a 41-year-old former member of a religious cult, “Sons of the Pure Light,” which had disbanded in 2010 after its leader was charged with fraud. The sect, based in the mountains of West Virginia, believed in purifying the soul through isolation from the modern world and ritualistic practices. Their leader, Jeremiah King, taught that women and children held a special spiritual purity that could be corrupted by urban life, and to save their souls, they had to be brought to the forest.

On August 30, 2013, Detective Stone, accompanied by two patrol officers, went to Greeks’ remote cabin. The man, a gaunt figure with long hair and a thick beard, greeted them with a rifle in hand, but made no move to use it. Greeks admitted to knowing Sandra, claiming he’d met her at the Asheville library and that she was interested in his philosophy of rejecting civilization. He told the police that she was unhappy with city life and planned to move to the forest with her daughter. Greeks said he was teaching them survival skills and that Sandra was seriously considering the move.

A search of the cabin revealed maps, nature photos, and handwritten religious texts. On his desk, there were journals with philosophical reflections on the purity of the soul and the depravity of the modern world. There were also books on child psychology and development, which Greeks claimed were to help Sandra raise her daughter in the wilderness. There was no direct evidence linking Greeks to the disappearance, and his alibi—that he was chopping wood on his remote property all day—was impossible to disprove. The psychic evaluation of his writings concluded that he was socially isolated and a religious fanatic, but not an immediate threat. Stone took Greeks’ journals for analysis, but found no specific references to Sandra or the events of August 17th.

The case went cold. Theories about bear attacks and hiking accidents were disproven. Even a chilling report from a couple who heard a child’s cries in the forest a day after the disappearance led to a dead end. The official investigation was closed, but Martha Clark refused to give up. She hired a private detective, Richard Brown, who theorized that Sandra and Hann were victims of a serial killer specializing in targeting women in remote locations. The FBI, however, found no connection between the Web case and other similar disappearances.

In 2014, a new lead emerged when a tourist found a pink child’s backpack with a butterfly pattern, confirmed to be Hann’s. The backpack was found in a remote valley, a spot that had been searched before, leading investigators to believe someone had placed it there to throw them off the scent. The search that followed was exhaustive but fruitless. A few months later, another bizarre lead surfaced. A man named Carl Jenkins, a local school janitor, was reported by his neighbor for stockpiling children’s toys in his shed. Jenkins was arrested, and while some of the items he possessed were similar to Hann’s belongings, he was cleared after a psychiatric evaluation revealed he had a compulsive hoarding disorder. The items were found to have been purchased from a second-hand store, and a store clerk confirmed they were sold by an elderly woman whose granddaughter had moved away.

The case remained a mystery, fading from the public consciousness until Michael Renck’s horrifying discovery in October 2023. Under the tarp, investigators found not just the remains of Sandra and Hann, but a macabre scene that pointed directly to the motives of Thomas Greeks. The bodies were surrounded by a circle of animal skulls, a child’s tooth necklace was found on Hann, and a note was discovered nearby with a chilling message about “purity” and “ritual.”

This new evidence, along with the recent analysis of Greeks’ journals, provided the missing puzzle pieces. The motive was finally clear: Thomas Greeks had seen Sandra and her daughter as “pure souls” that needed to be saved from the corruption of the city. He had lured them into the wilderness under the guise of teaching them a new way of life, only to perform a twisted ritual. The details are still unfolding, but for a family that waited a decade for answers, the truth, however gruesome, has finally come to light, revealing a dark tale of fanaticism, manipulation, and murder hidden for ten long years in the serene, silent depths of Pisgah National Forest.