‘I’m pretty confident there’s a body in that pond’: Deathbed confession prompts search for boy’s body

A deathbed confession has led search crews in Crawford County, Arkansas, to a private pond near Chester, where investigators are looking for the possible remains of a 13-year-old boy who may have been killed decades ago.

40/29 News reporter Brett Rains reported that Crawford County Sheriff Daniel Perry said the tip came from a woman who relayed what her brother allegedly told her while he was dying. According to Perry, the man claimed he had killed a 13-year-old boy sometime in the 1980s and that the boy’s body had been dumped in a pond.

The details are still incomplete, and that is part of what makes the case so difficult. Rains reported that investigators do not yet know the boy’s name, do not have a matching missing-person report from the time, and are now asking the public for help identifying who the child may have been.

Perry told 40/29 News that the tip described the boy and the man as being out camping when “some things happened,” and the boy was allegedly struck in the head with a rock before being pushed into the pond. The sheriff said the man only narrowed the timeframe to the 1980s, leaving investigators with a broad and frustrating window to search.

It is a haunting kind of case because the confession, if accurate, came too late for a straightforward investigation and too vague for detectives to immediately know who they are searching for.

Searching A Pond Near Chester

Rains reported that the pond is located on private land near Chester, not far from the interstate, though Perry said the alleged killing may have happened before the highway was built.

That detail matters because the landscape may have looked very different when the body was allegedly placed there. Roads, property lines, local memory, and even access points can shift over the span of 30 or 40 years, making old cases harder to reconstruct.

Dive teams entered the water after trained dogs alerted to a specific part of the pond, according to the report. As of Rains’ broadcast, crews had not yet located human remains, but Perry said the dogs’ reaction made him believe the search was justified.

“I’m pretty confident there is a body in the pond after the dogs alerted the way they did,” Perry told 40/29 News. “I’m pretty confident that there’s a body in that pond.”

That is a strong statement from a sheriff, especially in a case where so many basic facts remain unknown. It also explains why crews are continuing to work the scene despite the challenges of searching underwater for remains that may have been there for decades.

Perry said if a body has been in the pond for 30 or 40 years, it may be covered with silt and mud, and there may not be much left. That reality makes the divers’ job extremely difficult, because they are not searching for something obvious or recent; they may be looking for fragile evidence buried beneath years of sediment.

Search Dogs Join The Effort

Rains also reported that the Missouri-based nonprofit 3R K-9 Search Foundation was called in to assist with the search.

Hugh Murray, with the foundation, told 40/29 News that the Crawford County search was the group’s 27th search of 2026, adding that about 90% of their work is in Arkansas. Murray explained that trained dogs can detect and distinguish human remains odor from other smells, including animal remains.

“The dog’s nose is going to be an invaluable tool,” Murray said in the report.

According to Murray, when a trained dog is out on a search, it can discriminate between the odor of human remains and other scents in the environment. In a case like this, where investigators may be dealing with an old pond, uncertain records, and no confirmed victim identity, that kind of specialized search work can become one of the few available tools.

The dogs’ alert does not, by itself, solve the case. It does not identify the boy, prove the confession, or tell investigators exactly what happened.

But it gives crews a reason to keep looking in a specific place, and in a decades-old mystery, even that can be significant.

Few Records From The 1980s

One of the biggest problems, Perry told Rains, is that investigators do not have the kind of records or databases that modern cases often rely on.

The sheriff said his office has gone to the library to look through newspaper articles and has contacted the FBI, local agencies, and surrounding departments to see whether any missing-child case matches the tip. So far, according to the report, they have not found a clear match.

Perry noted that if the alleged killing happened in the 1980s, many reports from that time were handwritten. He also pointed out that some of the missing-child resources people know today either did not exist or were not available in the same way back then.

“The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children wasn’t a thing,” Perry said. “The Morgan Nick Foundation obviously wasn’t a thing. All those resources we have now weren’t available then.”

That part of the story is sobering because it shows how easily a child could disappear in an earlier era without leaving the digital trail investigators would now expect. A missing report may have been filed somewhere and lost, miscategorized, or never connected to this location. It is also possible, as Perry said, that the child came from somewhere else entirely.

That uncertainty leaves investigators trying to build a case backward from a confession, a location, and a possible age.

A Case Without A Name

Rains emphasized that investigators are not just searching for remains; they are also searching for an identity.

The tip says the victim was a 13-year-old boy, but officials do not yet know who he was, where he lived, whether he had family looking for him, or whether his disappearance was ever formally reported. Without that information, the pond search is only one part of a much larger effort.

The public request for help is important for exactly that reason. Someone may remember a boy who disappeared in the 1980s, a family story that never had answers, or a local rumor connected to camping, Chester, or Crawford County.

It is also possible the case reaches beyond Crawford County. Perry told 40/29 News that the boy could have been from somewhere else, which means the answer may not come from local records alone.

That is often how cold cases begin to move again: not through one perfect document, but through one person who remembers something that seemed small at the time.

The Search Will Continue

According to Rains, Perry said the search will continue until investigators are confident there are no human remains in the pond.

That is the right standard in a case like this. A deathbed confession can be difficult to verify, but once trained dogs alert and the story points to a specific place, investigators have little choice but to take it seriously.

There is also a human responsibility behind the search. If a 13-year-old boy was killed and left in that pond decades ago, then someone lost a child and never received the truth. Even if the evidence is old and difficult to recover, the possibility alone is enough to justify the work.

Rains reported that anyone with information is being asked to contact the Crawford County Sheriff’s Office.

For now, the case remains a mystery built around a dying man’s alleged confession, a pond on private land, and a sheriff who says the dogs’ alert has made him believe there may truly be a body beneath the water.

Whether the search confirms that belief or not, the investigation has already reopened a question that may have been buried for nearly 40 years: who was the boy, and what happened to him?