It was a Thursday — October 15, 1981 — when twelve-year-old Amy Walters left Lincoln Middle School in Salem, Oregon, wearing a faded denim jacket and carrying her checkered backpack.

She was supposed to meet her best friend, Kelly, to walk home together, but Kelly’s mother had picked her up early that day.

Amy’s route was a short one — two blocks down Myrtle Avenue, then across a narrow field that led into a stretch of fir trees locals called “The Green Belt.”

She never came out the other side.

By 4:00 p.m., her mother, Deborah Walters, realized something was wrong. Dinner went cold on the stove. The light outside dimmed to orange. The police were called by sunset.

By the time they found Amy’s backpack — standing upright at the edge of the woods — it looked almost deliberately placed.

There were no drag marks, no footprints, no torn fabric.

Just silence, and the feeling that something was deeply, unnervingly wrong.

The Search That Never Ended

In the following days, Salem became a town transformed. Hundreds of volunteers combed the woods with flashlights and dogs. Flyers with Amy’s picture — smiling, braces glinting — were stapled to every pole.

Rumors spread like wildfire: A van seen idling near the school. A stranger offering candy. A cult rumored to meet deep in the forest.

But the truth was simpler — and darker — than anyone imagined.

Weeks turned into months.

Months into years.

Detective Robert Keane, who led the case, kept Amy’s photo pinned to his wall until he retired. “It was like she just walked off the earth,” he would later say. “And we all failed her.”

In September 2009, police in Reno, Nevada arrested a 58-year-old man named Harold Dean Mathers for trespassing and assault after he was caught breaking into an abandoned church.

Mathers was a transient — bearded, gaunt, moving from town to town for decades. But what made him different was what he said when officers tried to fingerprint him.

He whispered, almost calmly: “You’re gonna find out who I am. God already did.”

When questioned later, Mathers began talking — not about the trespassing, but about a girl named Amy.

At first, detectives thought he was delusional.

Then he gave them a date: October 15, 1981.

And a place: Salem, Oregon.

The Confession

Mathers told investigators he’d been living out of his truck back in the early 1980s, working odd jobs along the West Coast. He said that on that October day, he’d seen a girl walking alone near the edge of the woods. “God said she was the one,” he told detectives. “He said she was pure. He said I had to take her before the devil did.”

The room fell silent.

He described details no one outside the original investigation had ever known — the color of Amy’s backpack, the exact location it was found, the missing shoelace from her left sneaker.

When asked what he did after, Mathers stared at the table for a long time.

Then he said, quietly: “I ate her because God told me to.”

Investigators from Oregon were flown to Nevada. Under their supervision, Mathers led them to a clearing outside of Salem — just a few hundred yards from where Amy’s backpack had been found.

There, they unearthed fragments of bone and a child’s hair clip, still faintly blue. DNA testing confirmed what the Walters family had waited nearly three decades to know.

It was Amy.

The Man Behind the Madness

Court records later revealed that Mathers had spent much of his adult life institutionalized for violent behavior, drifting in and out of psychiatric care.
He’d claimed to hear voices — “messages from God” — commanding him to “cleanse the world of corruption.”

He’d been in Salem only a few weeks in 1981, working part-time at a lumber yard before disappearing. Police at the time never connected him to Amy’s case; his name never appeared in any file.

When asked in court why he’d finally confessed, Mathers gave an answer that sent chills through everyone present: “Because she still talks to me. Every night. She says she forgives me.”

Amy’s mother, Deborah, who had never moved from the family home, was 67 when she finally got the call. Reporters gathered on her porch, but she refused interviews. She simply said: “I prayed for answers. I didn’t pray for this.”

The news shook Salem to its core. For nearly 30 years, Amy Walters had been a symbol — her face on posters, her name mentioned at every missing child vigil.
Now, the truth was both closure and catastrophe.

Mathers was declared legally insane and confined to a maximum-security psychiatric hospital. He died in 2017 after setting fire to his cell during what he claimed was “a ritual of purification.”

The Forgotten Woods

Today, the Green Belt is mostly gone — the trees cleared to make way for a housing development. But locals say that at dusk, if you walk the narrow trail where Amy vanished, you can still feel it:
the stillness, the heavy quiet of a place that once swallowed a child whole.

Some say the air turns colder there.

Others swear they’ve heard soft humming — a girl’s voice, faint, drifting through the firs.

And at the edge of the new homes, one tree remains — older than the rest, marked with a single carving that no one claims to have made: A.W. — 1981

The Salem Police Department officially closed the case in 2010.

In the final report, Detective Keane wrote: “After twenty-eight years, the truth we found wasn’t what we sought — but it’s the truth all the same. Evil doesn’t disappear. It waits.”

Amy Walters was finally laid to rest beside her father, her grave inscribed with the words her mother chose herself: “You were too bright for this world.”