http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/jun/2 ... is-martin/
The Martin family declined to be interviewed for this story.
They came to believe someone took Dennis, said McCarter, who stayed in touch with the Martins for several years.
The afternoon that Dennis disappeared, Harold Key, 45, of Carthage, Tenn., was near Rowans Creek in the Sea Branch area with his family when he heard an "enormous, sickening scream." A few minutes later, he noticed a rough-looking man moving stealthily in the woods near where he had heard the scream.
"I thought he might have been a moonshiner," Key later told News Sentinel writer Carson Brewer.
Unaware of the search for a lost boy, Key did not report the incident until several days later, after he had returned home and learned of Dennis Martin.
But Key did not recall the exact time this occurred, and part of the time frame he gave included a period that would have made a connection to Dennis Martin's disappearance impossible. Park officials also discounted the likelihood of a connection because of the distance from where Dennis was last seen, and the FBI concluded it did not have sufficient evidence to launch a complete investigation.
As darkness fell on the first day of Dennis' disappearance, thunder and lightning filled the sky, and 2 1/2 inches of rain fell. It rained again June 17. Early in the second week of the search, nearly 3 inches fell.
Each storm would have demolished any new tracks that Dennis might have left after the previous storm.
"The rain washed everything away," said McCarter.
"The storm was so vicious, the people there at the shelter had trouble even lighting a fire. You have lightning and thunder and all of this rain. You can imagine the people there in the shelter just imagining what the little boy was going through. That's all you could possibly be thinking. Where was he? Where could he be?"
The following days crews started searching the trails and swollen creeks for any sign of Dennis Martin. Special Forces were in the area performing exercises and were made available to assist the search. The search party now included Green Berets with experience fighting and navigating in the jungles of Vietnam.
*cough*
Incident report PDF
