Ben Matthew Garrett: Found, Identified, and the Questions Left Behind

BEN MATTHEW GARRETT: FOUND, IDENTIFIED, AND THE QUESTIONS LEFT BEHIND

What We Know. What We Don't. And What the Public Record Actually Shows.

By RICHIE D MOWREY
For The Sassy Gazette's Dicking Around With Richie: A True Crime Feed

Updated October 9, 2026 | A Richie Standard investigation

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article substantially revises our January 2026 missing-person coverage following Ben's identification. It distinguishes police-confirmed facts, family-reported information, coroner determinations, credible news reporting, and questions that cannot yet be answered from public records. No records request discussed below has yet produced a new response. Ben's death was officially ruled a suicide. This investigation does not assert otherwise or suggest a proven connection to another death.

There was a whole life here before there was a case.

That is where I want to begin.

Not with skeletal remains.

Not with a wooded strip between two farm fields.

Not with a cause of death.

Not with another dead man found less than a mile away.

And definitely not with the rumors that eventually wrapped themselves around this story until separating fact from repetition became an investigation of its own.

I want to begin with Ben.

Because before May 2025, Ben Matthew Garrett wasn't a missing-person poster. He wasn't a headline. He wasn't a photograph strangers shared on Facebook. And he wasn't skeletal remains described in a police release.

He was a father. A son. A brother. An uncle. A friend.

He was somebody people knew as "Uncle Benny." His family's obituary recalls how he spent time playing with children in the family. Ben played football and wrestled when he was younger. He was 36 when he disappeared and 37 when his remains were identified. [1]

And there are photographs of Ben that tell us something official records never could.

In one, he's standing in a Captain America shirt, smiling at the camera. In another, he's at the gym.

And then there is my favorite.

Ben is shirtless, wearing a bandana and enormous mirrored sunglasses, laughing with his mouth wide open.

It is gloriously ordinary.

There is no mystery in that photograph. No crime scene. No coroner. No missing-person flyer.

Just Ben being Ben.

THE LAST CONFIRMED POINT

The strongest public starting point in Ben's disappearance is simple.

Hanover Borough Police said Ben was last heard from by family "on/or about May 21, 2025." The department also confirmed that he had been entered into NCIC as a missing person. [2]

Those are official facts.

But other accounts add details, and our job is to label them correctly.

Earlier versions of our coverage described a communication at approximately 2:00 a.m. with a friend. The friend part has not been established through an identified primary source. But the hour itself cannot simply be dismissed as an invented internet detail. In its May 2026 reporting, WGAL attributed to Ben's family that nobody had heard from him since about 2 a.m. on May 21. WGAL also attributed a lack of bank activity and credible leads to the family. [3]

That is family-reported information, not a public police verification of an exact final-contact time or a forensic account audit.

So here is the correction: the approximately 2 a.m. account and bank-activity concern may be discussed only with that attribution. We cannot write that police independently confirmed them. And we cannot convert a family statement into proof of Ben's movements, whereabouts, or death.

Another assertion, that his cellphone pinged in particular woods, remained too thinly sourced in our audits. We have not located an attributable official confirmation of that claim. It does not get promoted into fact.

This is important.

Because investigating a case does not mean collecting every interesting detail you can find and building a story around them.

Sometimes investigating means taking an eraser to your own work. Sometimes it means putting the attribution back where you should have put it in the first place.

Treat every claim as guilty until it earns its way in.

Some of our earlier wording didn't meet that standard.

So we're changing it.

WHEN WAS BEN ACTUALLY REPORTED MISSING?

This is where another widely repeated claim needs correcting.

May 21, 2025, is Ben's approximate last-known-contact date. It is not established as the exact date his family filed the missing-person report.

Hanover Borough Police later said Ben was reported missing by his family in May 2025. But the department's public update does not specify which day. The public CrimeWatch alert was created June 16, 2025. [2]

That is 26 days after May 21.

And somewhere along the way, those 26 days became a much bigger accusation:

"Police waited 26 days."

We cannot establish that.

Twenty-six days measures the interval between the approximate last contact and the public alert. It does not establish a delay in taking the family's report, entering the information into NCIC, or acting on the disappearance.

Here's what the timeline actually permits:

On or about May 21, 2025: Ben last heard from by family, according to Hanover Police.
Sometime in May 2025: Family reported Ben missing, according to the later police update. The precise report date remains unknown publicly.
By the June 16 alert: Police said Ben had been entered into NCIC. The entry date remains unknown publicly.
June 16, 2025: Hanover Police's public CrimeWatch alert was created.

That may not be as dramatic as "police waited 26 days."

But it has one tremendous advantage.

It is accurate.

THE LONG MIDDLE

Then something happens to Ben's public timeline.

It almost disappears.

Ben remained missing through summer 2025. Then fall. Then winter. Then spring 2026.

News reporting in 2025 said regional officers had helped search for missing men in the Hanover area. But our review still has not reconstructed a dated, location-specific search ledger for Ben, including whether the wooded strip where his remains were later recovered had previously been searched. [4]

We cannot establish search dates, search boundaries, whether particular dogs or drones were used for Ben, or what was known about the eventual recovery location while he was missing.

Read that carefully.

It does not mean nobody searched for Ben. It does not mean police did nothing. It does not mean his eventual recovery area was ignored.

It means we do not possess a sufficiently documented public search chronology to make those claims.

And therefore I will not write that police "searched those woods and missed him."

I don't know that.

Absence of public evidence is not evidence of absence.

A SECOND MISSING MAN

While Ben remained missing, another Hanover-area family was searching for someone they loved.

Mark Hicks disappeared in June 2025. On April 16, 2026, Hanover Police responded around 7:23 a.m. to a report of human remains in a wooded area in the 400 block of East Middle Street. The remains were decomposed. On May 15, police confirmed their identification as Mark Hicks, who was 39 when identified. [5][6]

The York County Coroner ruled Mark's death a suicide, with the reported cause asphyxiation. [6]

That would become enormously important one month later.

Because Mark's publicly reported cause does not specify hanging.

Let me repeat that.

We have not located an official source establishing that Mark Hicks died by hanging or was found hanging. We found no official report of a rope, strap, or noose recovered with his remains.

Those details would eventually circulate in community discussion.

But repetition is not evidence.

Put a pin in that. We're coming back to it.

JUNE 9, 2026: THE CASE CHANGES

More than a year after Ben was last heard from, the case changed.

At 7:24 p.m. on June 9, York County 911 dispatched police to the 700 block of Old Ridge Road, near Hanover, for a report of human remains in a wooded area. The response involved Penn Township Police, Hanover Borough Police, the York County Forensic Team, and the York County Coroner's Office. [7]

That time matters.

And we need to get it right.

7:24 p.m. is the documented dispatch time. It is not necessarily the precise moment somebody discovered the remains.

Penn Township Police published its incident notice the next morning, June 10 at 8:51 a.m. That is a publication timestamp, not a discovery timestamp. [7]

The remains were described as skeletal. News reporting and the coroner's account described a wooded area between two large farm fields. [8]

And that is where the geography changed how I understood this case.

WHERE BEN WAS FOUND

When I first began researching this case, "wooded area" created an image in my mind.

Thick forest. Trees everywhere. A place where someone could disappear into miles of woods.

Then I saw the aerial imagery.

That is not the landscape the available aerial depicts.

The general Old Ridge Road and Ridge Avenue area is agricultural land broken by wooded strips, tree lines, and pockets of vegetation. Large farm fields dominate the view. Roads and development are relatively nearby.

That is a much more accurate mental picture than "deep in the forest."

And that last sentence matters.

The red marker on a television-news graphic is not GPS evidence. Authorities have not publicly disclosed the exact recovery coordinates. We cannot point to one individual tree line, strip of woodland, or parcel and declare, "There."

A thin strip of woodland can still be extremely dense at ground level. Vegetation can obstruct visibility. Terrain looks different beneath a canopy than it does from above.

But we don't publicly know the ground-level conditions at the specific recovery point, whether the spot was routinely traveled, or whether it had previously been searched.

Those remain questions.

Not conclusions.

WHAT WAS ACTUALLY FOUND?

This may be the most important distinction in the entire investigation.

Authorities publicly described skeletal human remains.

What the public releases do not describe is how those remains were positioned.

We do not publicly know whether Ben's remains were suspended, on the ground, or associated with a visible suspension point. We do not publicly know whether investigators recovered a ligature, rope, belt, note, phone, wallet, or other personal property. We do not know what trauma findings, if any, were recorded, or the precise postmortem interval.

Those are unknowns, not findings that the items were absent.

And therefore this repeated sentence does not survive our verification standard:

"Ben was found hanging."

The established wording is different:

"Ben's cause of death was officially recorded as asphyxia by hanging."

A cause-of-death determination is not the same kind of statement as a description of the recovery position.

In true-crime reporting, tiny wording changes can be where rumors are born.

NO TRADITIONAL AUTOPSY

Contemporaneous reporting of a June 10 coroner statement said that no traditional autopsy would be performed and that the remains would instead be examined with help from the Mercyhurst Forensic Anthropology Laboratory. [8]

That created another misconception:

"No autopsy" does not mean "no forensic investigation."

Skeletonized remains can require a different kind of investigation from a recently deceased person with intact soft tissue. Forensic anthropology can aid identification and help analyze human skeletal remains.

But there is another line we cannot cross.

What Mercyhurst can do is not automatically what Mercyhurst did in Ben's case.

The public statements specifically support Mercyhurst's involvement and the use of dental records to confirm Ben's identity. They do not publicly establish the full scope of any additional skeletal, trauma, or taphonomic examination or whether an anthropology report was created. [2][9]

We cannot responsibly write that Mercyhurst independently proved the hanging determination.

Capability is not evidence of performance.

That lesson came out of our own reinvestigation.

THE SIX-DAY IDENTIFICATION WINDOW

On June 9, skeletal remains were reported. On June 10, they were publicly described as unidentified. On June 15, 2026, at 2:32 p.m., Penn Township Police published a release identifying them as Ben Matthew Garrett, 37. [9]

That timestamp establishes when the police notice was posted. It does not tell us when forensic staff made the dental match, when a candidate was first selected, or exactly when the family was informed.

But one legitimate records question stands out:

What led investigators to select Ben as the person whose dental records should be compared?

To compare unknown remains against someone's antemortem dental records, investigators need to identify a candidate through some process. We do not know publicly what supplied that lead.

Was there some already-known investigative context? A location-based lead? Personal property? Another identification process? We do not know, and mentioning possible leads does not mean investigators found any of them.

This isn't a challenge to the identification. The coroner's office reported that the dental review confirmed Ben's identity.

It is a question about the documented steps leading to that comparison.

And it is one of the most useful questions to pursue with actual records rather than another round of theories.

JUNE 15: THE OFFICIAL FINDINGS

The police announcement supplied Ben's identity and recorded his cause of death as "Asphyxia by Hanging." [9]

The York County Coroner's Office publicly determined the manner of death to be suicide. Hanover Police's updated account also states there was no foul-play concern, no concern to the community, and no connection to previously discovered remains. [2][10]

Those are the official findings.

Let me be clear.

Across our research passes, we have found no affirmative public evidence contradicting the suicide ruling.

We are not declaring Ben was murdered. We are not claiming the coroner made an incorrect determination. And we are not pretending that investigators had no evidence because they did not narrate that evidence publicly.

Our finding is narrower:

The public documents available to us do not describe enough of the scene, forensic, and circumstantial information for a reader to independently reconstruct how the cause and manner were determined.

That is a question of public explanation, not proof of error.

"ASPHYXIA BY HANGING" IS NOT "FOUND HANGING"

These words deserve their own section because this is where so much of the information drift began.

"Asphyxia by hanging" is a cause-of-death determination.

"Found hanging" is a scene description.

One does not automatically tell us the other.

The official record can support the cause without publicly describing the final position of the remains. That is exactly why we use the longer, careful wording.

We are not saying the remains were not found suspended. We are saying the public releases reviewed do not establish their discovery position.

It may feel like a tiny change.

It isn't.

WHAT CAN SKELETAL REMAINS TELL US?

This required us to be especially careful.

Hanging-related determinations can depend on scene circumstances and forensic findings. With skeletonization, much of the soft-tissue information ordinarily relevant to investigating neck compression can be lost. Bones may retain certain information, but skeletal findings alone generally cannot establish a person's intent.

Investigators might consider scene position, surrounding objects, a suspension point, a ligature, skeletal observations, and circumstantial information. Those are general forensic considerations, not evidence we have documented in Ben's case.

We do not know from the public releases what particular scene evidence was present, what skeletal observations were recorded, or what circumstantial material supported the manner determination.

And we are not going to invent a hyoid fracture, note, rope, or suspension point because it would make the conclusion easier to explain.

Sometimes the three hardest words in investigative reporting are:

WE DON'T KNOW.

THE CORONER'S PDF: A REAL DOCUMENT, A REAL LIMITATION

Hanover Police's updated case page links to a York County Coroner media-release PDF dated June 15, 2026. [11]

There is a wrinkle worth documenting. In the public PDF preview available during our October review, the form headings appeared, but the filled-in case fields did not render reliably. Search indexing associated with that same PDF surfaced more detail, but a searchable excerpt is not a substitute for a reliably readable original document.

So we are not going to pretend we have a complete, independently inspected copy of every field on that form. We can confirm the cause wording from Penn Township Police's own release and the manner and other coroner statements from police updates and contemporaneous reporting. [2][9][10]

Our next records request will ask for a flattened, readable copy of the original coroner release so future quotations can be checked directly against the document itself.

That is not an accusation that anyone concealed information. It is an ordinary document-access and verification problem.

"NO CONCERN FOR ANY FOUL PLAY"

The coroner's office was reported as expressing no concern for foul play, no concern for the community, and no connection to previously recovered human remains. Hanover Police's update independently relays that official position. [2][10]

Those statements matter. They are the position of the agencies handling the evidence.

The publicly available material does not explain in detail how the comparison between discoveries was conducted. That doesn't make the no-connection determination wrong. It means we cannot independently recreate the full basis from published records.

Another important point: the coroner's quoted no-connection language does not specifically name Mark Hicks. We should not silently turn a general official statement into a quotation naming one particular individual.

No public evidence currently establishes a connection. The official position is non-connection.

Both statements belong in this story.

BEN AND MARK: WHAT ACTUALLY MATCHES?

Now we arrive at the section that has generated so much discussion.

Ben Garrett and Mark Hicks.

Both were Hanover-area men. Both disappeared in 2025. Both were found deceased in wooded areas in 2026. Both were identified using dental records. Both deaths were ruled suicide. And local coverage estimated their recovery areas were roughly 0.60 miles apart. [5][6][8]

Those are similarities.

They are worth documenting.

They are not proof of a connection.

One major difference has been repeatedly erased:

Ben Garrett: cause officially recorded as asphyxia by hanging.
Mark Hicks: cause publicly reported as asphyxiation. His specific mechanism was not publicly stated in the sources we located.

From there, an internet shorthand can grow alarmingly quickly:

"Two deaths involving asphyxia" becomes "two hangings," then "both found hanging," then claims about ropes or straps.

That last chain does not have the documentary support necessary to appear as fact here.

One word changed the story.

ABOUT THAT 0.60 MILES

Yes, the recovery areas were close.

Local reporting placed them roughly 0.60 miles apart. But that is a newsroom estimate, not a surveyed distance between publicly released GPS recovery points. We do not know the endpoints used in that calculation. Our own block-level map checks returned different approximations. That does not prove the reporting wrong; it shows why the qualifier matters. [8]

So "roughly 0.60 miles apart" is defensible.

"Exactly 0.60 miles apart" is not.

And even if the exact distance were known to the inch:

Proximity is not connection.

WHAT ABOUT MATTHEW MEREDITH?

A third name entered public discussion about missing men around Hanover: Matthew Meredith.

Meredith, 41, was found deceased June 11, 2025, near North Blettner Avenue in Conewago Township, Adams County. Local reporting said a farmer encountered his body near trees at the edge of a field. The Adams County Coroner identified him, and contemporaneous reporting said the cause and manner were awaiting autopsy findings. Our investigation has not established a later publicly released final cause or manner. [12]

That distinction matters.

"Three Hanover men died the same way" is unsupported.

Matthew belongs in the historical context of the community's concern. We cannot place him in a hanging or asphyxiation cluster without evidence.

Context, not conclusions.

HOW A CASE GROWS ITS OWN FACTS

Ben's story taught me something uncomfortable.

Bad information does not always begin with somebody deliberately lying.

Sometimes it begins with compression.

A long explanation gets shortened. Then shortened again. Then somebody paraphrases the paraphrase. Eventually the qualifier disappears.

"Roughly 0.60 miles" becomes "0.60 miles."

"Asphyxia by hanging" becomes "found hanging."

"Asphyxiation" becomes "hanging."

The date of the public alert becomes the date police first acted.

A family-reported detail becomes an official determination.

A possibility becomes a probability. A probability becomes a fact. Then ten websites repeat it.

And suddenly everybody asks, "How can ten sources be wrong?"

Because sometimes those ten sources are all drinking from the same muddy puddle.

Breadth of repetition is not depth of sourcing.

THE CLAIMS THAT DIDN'T SURVIVE

Following the research audits, these claims cannot be stated as established fact:

Ben was last contacted at 2 a.m. by a friend. The timing was attributed by WGAL to family, but the alleged friend contact isn't established by the police alert.
Police independently confirmed a specific post-disappearance bank-activity pattern. WGAL reported the family's concern, not a published police financial audit.
Ben's phone definitely pinged at the eventual recovery location.
Police waited 26 days to take his missing-person report.
Ben was publicly documented as found hanging.
Mark was publicly documented as found hanging.
A rope or strap was recovered with Mark.
The bodies were exactly 0.60 miles apart.
Mercyhurst alone proved the cause of death.
No autopsy means no forensic investigation occurred.
Three Hanover-area men died the same way.
The deaths were proven connected.
Police searched Ben's precise recovery point and missed him.

Some of those claims may eventually be clarified by documents. But "might be true" does not meet our standard.

Evidence does.

91 CLAIMS UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

Our fourth-pass Juniper research report described an audit of 91 claims, grouped as follows:

13: confirmed by primary sources or arithmetic on confirmed dates.
15: credible but secondary.
6: official determinations with underlying evidence not publicly detailed.
28: unverified, unsupported, or rumor.
29: unknown or not publicly established.

Here is a precision note worth making: the report gives that 91-claim aggregate tally, but its printed verification board contains 76 individually listed or grouped entries. Our Evidence Lab lists those 76 searchable entries. We have not independently reconstructed 91 separate one-to-one rows from that table.

These are research-audit categories, not official police statistics. And newer source findings, including WGAL's attribution of some early claims to family, mean that individual labels must be revised when stronger provenance appears.

The bigger lesson is unchanged: the most secure claims concern identity, dates, and official announcements. Much of the underlying scene and forensic reasoning is not described in the accessible public releases.

THIS IS BEN

After all of that, I want to stop.

Because this is the point where a case can swallow the person.

Dates. Distances. Forensic anthropology. Coroner rulings. Public-record laws. Other missing men. Rumors. Maps.

Enough paperwork to bury someone twice.

So look at Ben again.

That photograph might be one of the most important images in this entire story.

Not because it proves anything.

Because it proves nothing.

It has nothing to do with his disappearance. Nothing to do with the recovery scene. Nothing to do with his death.

He's just laughing.

And maybe that's exactly what we need in the middle of an investigation like this.

A reminder that the man at the center of all these questions had ordinary moments that never belonged to us.

Moments where nobody was investigating him. Nobody was analyzing him. Nobody was arguing about him on Facebook.

He was simply alive.

THE QUESTIONS THAT ACTUALLY MATTER

After stripping away the rumor, these are the questions worth pursuing through documentation:

What evidence supported the cause-of-death determination?
What evidence supported the manner-of-death determination?
How were the remains positioned when discovered?
What non-graphic scene information, if any, is releasable?
What precisely was Mercyhurst asked to do, and what did it document?
What process first identified Ben as a candidate for dental comparison?
What was the exact date of the family's first missing-person report?
When was the NCIC entry made?
What dated, location-specific searches were conducted for Ben?
Was the Old Ridge recovery area among them?
What comparisons supported the official no-connection determination?
What was the mechanism underlying Mark Hicks' reported asphyxiation cause?
What was Matthew Meredith's final officially established cause and manner of death?

Those are questions.

Not accusations.

A question is not an accusation.

WHAT WOULD CHANGE THIS INVESTIGATION?

A responsible investigation has to be capable of changing its mind.

Suppose an available coroner document describes scene evidence and circumstances sufficient to explain the hanging and suicide determinations. Good. We report it.

Suppose a properly attributable Mercyhurst report clarifies what was examined. Good. We report it.

Suppose public records establish Mark Hicks' mechanism as something different from hanging. Then the online narrative claiming two documented hangings becomes even less supportable. Good.

Suppose investigators release the basis for their no-connection determination. We can describe that basis rather than merely quoting the conclusion. Good.

And if credible documentation actually conflicts with what has been publicly established? We assess it fairly, too.

The goal is not to prove something suspicious happened.

The goal is to find out what the evidence actually shows.

Those are very different missions.

THE INVESTIGATION CONTINUES: FOLLOWING THE PAPER TRAIL

The next phase isn't another speculative theory.

It's paperwork.

Our October Evidence Lab has identified a practical starting point: the emergency time-response log for June 9, 2026. Pennsylvania's Right-to-Know Law expressly distinguishes time-response logs from most protected 911 audio/transmission records. We can ask York County for times such as call receipt, dispatch, and response, without seeking the identity of the caller or the recording itself. Those records may add precision; they may not tell us who first discovered the remains. [13]

We also have a more specific public timeline than before:

June 9, 2026, 7:24 p.m.: Documented 911 police dispatch, not confirmed discovery time.
June 10, 2026, 8:51 a.m.: Penn Township Police publicly posts its incident notice.
June 15, 2026, 2:32 p.m.: Penn Township Police publicly posts Ben's identification and cause-of-death notice.

These are dispatch and publication timestamps, not the hours of the dental comparison or a new finding about the time Ben died. [7][9]

For the coroner records, access is more restricted. York County's published policy says full investigative, autopsy, and toxicology reports are generally not public; it describes a public View of Body record and access for legal next of kin or certain authorized recipients. Simply offering to pay a fee does not grant a journalist access to the complete investigation. [14]

Therefore the responsible first requests are targeted:

York County emergency services: June 9 time-response log.
York County Coroner: public View of Body information, plus a readable copy of the original June 15 media release and clarification about any lawful access pathway for additional non-graphic material.
Hanover Borough: existing public notices or non-exempt records identifying the initial missing-person report date and published updates.
Penn Township: non-exempt incident information and public release copies concerning the June 9 response.

Those draft requests are prepared. They have not been submitted, and no new response has been received.

Our interactive Evidence Lab organizes the source links, timeline, 76 listed/grouped claim entries, and records tracker. It is a research aid, not an official case database or proof that a particular investigative step occurred.

The next real breakthrough, if one comes, should be another document we can actually read and cite.

At this point, the case is not starving for theories. It is starving for primary paper.

IF YOU KNOW SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING

Ben has been located and identified. This is not a request to circulate a stale missing-person alert.

If you personally witnessed something relevant to Ben's disappearance, have dated photographs, messages, video, or other firsthand material, provide it to the appropriate law-enforcement agency rather than publishing private evidence or unverified accusations online.

"I personally saw..." is information.

"I have a photograph..." is information.

"I have a message..." is information.

"I read somebody saying..." is not the same thing.

"The cases must be connected because..." is a theory.

Please do not identify private people as suspects or pressure Ben's family for information. Hanover Borough Police's public case page lists 717-637-5575 and the CRIMEWATCH tip system. For emergencies, call 911. [2]

THE FINAL VERDICT

After all of this research, here is what the public record supports.

Ben Matthew Garrett disappeared in May 2025. His family reported him missing. Police entered him into NCIC. A public alert followed on June 16.

More than a year after his last known contact, skeletal remains were discovered in a wooded area among farm fields in Penn Township. They were identified as Ben through dental records.

His cause of death was officially recorded as asphyxia by hanging. His manner of death was officially ruled suicide. Authorities reported no concern for foul play, no concern for the community, and no connection to previously discovered remains.

We found no affirmative public evidence contradicting the suicide ruling.

We found no public evidence establishing a connection between Ben's death and Mark Hicks' death.

We found no public evidence establishing that Mark's death involved hanging. We found no evidence that three Hanover-area men died the same way.

And we found that the detailed evidence underlying several official conclusions has not been described in the accessible public material.

Both things can be true at once.

The ruling is evidence.
The unanswered questions are evidence gaps.
Neither gives us permission to turn suspicion into fact.

THE STORY GOT SMALLER

When we began this reinvestigation, Ben's story looked enormous.

An early-morning contact. A cellphone supposedly pinging in the woods. Financial inactivity. A 26-day police delay. Searches that somehow missed him. A body found deep in a forest. Another man supposedly found hanging nearby. Ropes. Straps. Three dead men. A forensic laboratory supposedly proving everything without an autopsy.

It sounded like the beginning of something massive.

Then we checked it.

And checked it again.

Then we sent another investigation after the first investigation. Then another one after that.

And something unexpected happened.

The story got smaller.

The early-morning report became a family-attributed account, not a police-confirmed timeline. The alleged police delay became an interval between last contact and a public alert. The forest became agricultural land threaded with wooded strips. The "two hangings" became one documented hanging determination and a separate, unspecified asphyxiation determination. The exact 0.60 miles became roughly 0.60 miles.

And the investigation became better because of it.

There is a temptation in true crime to believe that removing mystery makes a story weaker.

I think the opposite is true.

Every rumor we remove leaves more room for Ben.

BEN MATTERED THEN. BEN MATTERS NOW.

I keep coming back to that photograph.

The bandana.

Those giant mirrored sunglasses.

That laugh.

For one second, all the official language disappears.

No "decedent." No "skeletal remains." No "cause of death." No "manner of death." No theories.

Just a guy having a moment.

Somebody's son. Somebody's father. Somebody's brother. Somebody's uncle. Somebody's friend.

Ben was a person.

And that is why getting this story right matters.

We don't honor him by making his death stranger than the evidence allows.

We don't honor him by repeating rumors because they make better headlines.

And we don't honor him by pretending unanswered questions don't exist simply because asking them is uncomfortable.

We honor him by doing both things at once:

Respecting what the evidence establishes.

And being honest about what it doesn't.

Sometimes three words are harder to write than three paragraphs:

WE. DON'T. KNOW.

But when we don't know, that is exactly what I am going to tell you.

Because for the voiceless, accuracy is part of the advocacy.

And Ben Matthew Garrett deserves nothing less.

Thanks for dicking around with Richie.
Keep being a voice for the voiceless. 🦋

SOURCES & VERIFICATION NOTES

The links below are the public documents and news coverage used for the principal facts in this article. Bracketed numbers in the text correspond to these entries. Where a source repeats an agency statement, that distinction is noted. A link is not a claim that every field of a PDF was directly legible.

Family obituary, June 19, 2026: Murphy-Beck Funeral Home obituary reproduced by Legacy. Family-provided personal information and memorial description.
Hanover Borough Police, June 2025 alert and June 2026 update: UPDATE: Missing Adult Male. Primary police account of last contact, report in May, NCIC, identification, and official safety/non-connection statements.
WGAL, May 15, 2026: Remains of York County man missing for nearly a year found. Family-attributed 2 a.m. and bank-activity account, not independent police confirmation.
WGAL, July 2025: Several men reported missing from Hanover area. Context concerning families and searches; does not provide a dated Ben-specific search map.
Hanover Borough Police, April 16 and May 15, 2026: NEWS RELEASE: Found Human Remains. Primary dates, location, and Mark Hicks identification.
WDAC, May 15, 2026: York County Death Investigation Concluded. Coroner-attributed Mark Hicks cause and manner determination.
Penn Township Police, June 10, 2026, 8:51 a.m.: Police Incident. Primary June 9 7:24 p.m. dispatch and general location.
WGAL, June 10, 2026: Police investigating human remains found in York County. Coroner-attributed farm-field location and Mercyhurst plans; geographical figures may be newsroom estimates.
Penn Township Police, June 15, 2026, 2:32 p.m.: Media Release. Primary identification and official cause wording.
WGAL, June 15, 2026: Skeletal remains identified as missing Hanover man. Coroner-attributed suicide determination and farm-field description.
York County Coroner attachment linked by Hanover Police: 26-0298 Media Release, Ben Garrett (PDF). The PDF preview did not reliably render all filled-in fields during this review; a readable copy is being sought.
WGAL, June 19, 2025: Matthew Meredith identified after discovery in Adams County. Secondary account; final cause and manner not established in sources located.
Pennsylvania Right-to-Know Law: Section 708(b)(18). Distinguishes 911 time-response logs from exempt records; does not guarantee release of all CAD narratives.
York County Coroner: Official public records policy. Describes View of Body information and restrictions on investigative/autopsy/toxicology reports.

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