Chapter 1: What is the setting of Mark Sutherland's hunting trip?
Tonight's story takes us into one of the most rugged and beautiful mountain ranges in the American Southwest.
We're heading to the Santa Rita Mountains of southern Arizona, a place known for its sky island wilderness, its world-famous birdwatching, and its archery deer hunts that draw experienced bowhunters from across the country. But the Santa Ritas have another reputation too.
They sit roughly 15 miles north of the Mexican border, and the canyons that wind through them have been used as smuggling corridors for decades. People disappear in those mountains. People die in those mountains. Some die from dehydration in the high country. Some die from exposure on cold October nights. And every once in a while, though it's rare, somebody is murdered.
The case we're covering tonight involves a 53-year-old father of three, a devoted husband, a respected member of his community, and one of the most experienced bow hunters in the region. He drove into those mountains on a clear October morning for what was supposed to be an ordinary five-day hunting trip, the same trip he'd been making, almost every year, for more than three decades.
He never came home. What investigators eventually found at his campsite was so disturbing that it changed how the Pima County Sheriff's Office approaches remote area investigations to this day. And even now, more than a decade later, the case remains open. The men responsible, and there were almost certainly two of them, have never been caught.
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His name was Mark Sutherland, and if you grew up in Green Valley, Arizona, in the 1990s or the early 2000s, there's a decent chance you knew him. Mark was one of those guys who seemed to know everybody. He coached youth baseball at the community park for 14 years running. He volunteered with the local fire department.
He ran an electrical contracting business out of his garage on Camino Encanto, and if your power went out on a Sunday night, Mark was the guy you called. He was a big man, 6'2", broad through the shoulders. He had the kind of forearms you get from 40 years of hauling conduit and pulling wire through new construction.
He had a salt and pepper beard that he kept trimmed close, and he wore the same beat-up Arizona Diamondbacks cap everywhere he went. By all accounts, he was patient, easy-going, slow to anger, and quick to laugh. He was the guy who'd loan you his truck for the weekend without asking why you needed it.
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Chapter 2: Who was Mark Sutherland and what was his background?
Karen would get that text when she woke up at six. She'd reply with a heart emoji and tell him to be safe. She would never hear from him again. From the turnoff at State Route 83, Forest Road 62 winds west into the foothills of the Santa Ritas. It's not a road for sedans.
It's a rough, rocky, washboarded track that requires high clearance, and after about eight miles, it gets steep enough that most vehicles need four-wheel drive. Mark's truck was a 2004 Ford F-250 with 33-inch tires and a custom lift kit. He'd built it himself over the course of about three years. It could drive over anything Mark would find in those mountains.
Mark's base camp was located in a small clearing about 12 miles up Forest Road 62, off a spur road that wasn't on most maps. He'd discovered the spot in 1998 when he was looking for a place to set up out of sight of the main forest road. He didn't want to be bothered by other hunters.
He didn't want to be checked on by border patrol agents who sometimes drove the main forest roads at night looking for smugglers. He just wanted a quiet place where he could be alone.
The spur road dead-ended at a flat patch of ground about a hundred feet across, ringed by oak trees and mesquite, with a clear view to the east. He could pull his truck in, set up his tent, hang his food bag from a sturdy branch, and have a comfortable camp that almost nobody would ever stumble across by accident. In 14 years of using that spot, he'd never once seen another camper there.
Not once.
Mark arrived at his camp at about 6.15 in the morning. The sun was just coming up over the whetstones to the east. The temperature was in the high 40s. The air was still. He spent the next hour setting up his tent, organizing his gear, and getting ready for an afternoon hunt. At 7.30, he sent Karen one more text message. This one said, That was the last time anyone heard from Mark Sutherland.
Now here's where I have to take a step back, because the next several days of Mark's trip are largely unaccounted for. Investigators have pieced together some of what Mark probably did between Sunday morning and Tuesday evening, but a lot of it is guesswork based on his gear, his journal entries, and the way his camp was set up when it was eventually discovered. What we do know is this.
Mark's hunting journal, which was found undisturbed in the small lockbox he kept in his tent,
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Chapter 3: What happened on the night of Mark's disappearance?
Because the man it belongs to has been in the dirt for a decade, we may never know. In the years between 2012 and today, the Pima County Sheriff's Office has chased down dozens of leads on the Sutherland case. None of them have panned out.
In 2015, an informant working in Tucson told investigators he'd heard a rumor about a Sutherland-style killing being talked about by a former Mochilero who'd been arrested in Phoenix on a different drug charge. The informant didn't have a name. He had a story. A story about a hunter who'd been killed in his sleep in the mountains south of Tucson.
The informant said the former Mochilero had been bragging about it at a party. By the time investigators tracked the man down, the former mochilero had been transferred to a federal facility and refused to talk. The lead went cold. In 2018, a man arrested in Nogales on a separate trafficking charge told investigators he had information about the Sutherland case. He wanted a sentencing deal.
When detectives interviewed him, his information turned out to be a fabrication. He'd seen news coverage of the case and had made up a story to use as leverage. He got no deal. Another dead end. In 2021, a journalist working on a podcast about cold cases in the Southwest contacted the sheriff's office with information she'd developed from sources inside Mexico.
She'd heard a name being mentioned in connection with the Sutherland killing, a name that had come up in conversations among former cartel members. The sheriff's office took her information seriously. They investigated the name. They found that it belonged to a man who'd been dead in Mexico for nearly seven years. Shot in a parking lot outside a bar in Hermosillo in 2015. Another dead end.
And so the case sits. The evidence is in storage in Tucson. The file is on a detective's desk at the Pima County Sheriff's Office. The DNA profile of the unknown killer, the man who sat by Mark Sutherland's fire and waited for him to fall asleep, is in the National Database, where it has been for more than a decade. It's checked against every new sample that comes in. So far, no hits.
That doesn't mean it'll never happen. Cold cases get solved every day. Family members of perpetrators submit their DNA to ancestry websites. Long buried evidence gets reprocessed with new technology. Confessions come in from prisons. Informants come forward. The case is still active. The case is still open. The case is still alive. Whoever killed Mark Sutherland is still out there.
And every day that passes is one more day they have to spend looking over their own shoulder, knowing that the case has not been forgotten, and knowing that the men who are looking for them have not stopped looking. In the years since Mark's death, the Sutherland family has done what every family in their situation eventually has to do. They've gone on. They've kept living.
They've raised the kids, run the business, paid the bills, gotten on with the long, slow work of being alive after somebody you loved has been taken from you. Karen is still living in the house on Camino Encanto. She kept the truck in the garage for two years after the funeral, untouched, with Mark's old hunting jacket still hanging from a hook in the cab.
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