Chapter 29
[Intro music fades under]
HOST (MARA): Welcome back to Fading Away.
I’m Mara Cho, and today we’re heading into the heart of Jackson County, North Carolina—a place where, if you listen to the right people, nothing is ever really forgotten.
Not even the cases the sheriff’s office would rather leave in a dusty box on a back shelf.
Today’s box?
The disappearance of Caroline Simms.
If you’ve listened to Vanished in the Valley—hi, Lila, we see you—you’ve heard the basics. Young mom. Late-night drive. Car found abandoned off a rural road. No body. No answers.
But there are pieces of this story that haven’t gotten much oxygen—pieces we’ve been digging into with the help of you, our listeners, and a few people in Jackson County who are finally ready to talk.
[Soft underscoring returns]
Let’s start with the flyers.
After Caroline disappeared, her parents did what desperate families do. They printed her face and put it everywhere.
Parking lots. Telephone poles. Church bulletin boards. Rest stops off Highway 23. Grocery stores from Sylva to Waynesville to Gatlinburg.
Everywhere.
And then, just as quickly, they started coming down.
Not all of them. Not every time.
But enough that people noticed.
We spoke to one of those people.
[Cut to pre-recorded phone audio – slight hum]
VOICE (LOCAL WOMAN – “KAREN”): “I remember seeing those flyers in the Food Lion parking lot. I’d take my kids in, buy groceries, come back out the next day, and half of them would be gone. Not torn up, not weathered, just… gone. Like someone had come through and cleaned house.”
MARA (V.O.): That “cleaning house” happened again and again. Listeners who grew up in Jackson County have been writing in.
One of you, user BlueRidgeWatcher, sent this:
“My church put up a whole bulletin board for Caroline. Pictures, candles, the flyer. It was gone by the next Sunday. No one admitted taking it down.”
And then there’s the roadside memorial.
People left flowers and candles near the spot where Caroline’s car was found.
Those kept disappearing, too.
The sheriff’s office eventually set up a camera, hoping to catch whoever was tearing down Caroline’s memory one paper and petal at a time.
No luck.
Whoever was doing it either knew exactly when that camera was rolling… or got very, very lucky.
We’re not the first podcast to talk about the missing flyers.
But there’s something Vanished in the Valley hasn’t connected.
Because the more we talk to people in Sylva, the more one name keeps coming up.
Not Caroline’s.
Not her ex.
Her son.
Davie.
David Mercer Jr.
[Beat]
Davie was barely a year old when Caroline disappeared. A baby caught in the middle of a tug-of-war.
On one side: the Simms family. Caroline’s parents. Grandparents who, according to everyone we spoke to, adored that little boy and were ready to raise him if they had to.
On the other side: David Mercer, Caroline’s ex, and his parents. Wealthy. Well connected. Very clear that they saw Davie as theirs.
The courts were trying to sort it out when Caroline vanished.
And that’s where our next voice comes in.
We’re calling him “Rick.” He worked construction for Mercer back then, when the fight over Davie was at its loudest.
[Cut to pre-recorded interview – slightly rough mic]
RICK: “Look, everybody knew he was wound tight about that kid. You’d be on a site, and he’d be on the phone just… losing it. You’d hear him from halfway across the job. ‘She is not takin’ my boy out of this county,’ ‘I’ll see her in court,’ all that.”
MARA: “Did he ever say anything that felt… more than angry?”
RICK (hesitates): “Yeah. Once. A couple of us were loading rebar when he came back from a call, red in the face. I asked if everything was okay.”
[Soft chair creak]
“He laughed. Not happy. Said, ‘She thinks she’s takin’ Davie to Knoxville with that new boyfriend? Over my dead body or hers.’”
[Silence beat]
MARA (V.O.): Over my dead body or hers.
Is that a confession?
No.
Is it the kind of statement investigators pay attention to when a woman goes missing a few weeks later?
Absolutely.
And about that boyfriend.
We’ve confirmed through multiple sources—and yes, through you, the listeners who went digging through old social media—that Caroline was seeing someone new.
A man we’ll call “Matt” for now.
He lived in Knoxville.
Several of you sent us screenshots from old Facebook posts and comments, archived on long-forgotten accounts, talking about Caroline “trading up” and “finally getting out of Sylva.”
One comment from a college friend:
“Girl, take that baby and RUN. Don’t let him grow up like the Mercers.”
So we have:
A mother talking about leaving town with her son
A father who did not want his boy around another man
A quote—if true—where that father says she’ll take Davie “over my dead body or hers”
Is that enough to convict anyone in court?
No.
Is it enough to warrant a second, hard look at a case that never sat right?
The Jackson County sheriff’s office seems to think so.
We’ve confirmed with two independent sources that the Caroline Simms file is being reopened.
And that brings us to something else we’ve been working on.
The phone.
Caroline’s cell was left in her car that night.
According to a source close to the Simms family, it was still active on her mother’s plan. Which means her mother had the right to access the records—and tried.
This was 2017 in a small mountain town—not exactly a CSI episode. Some things slipped.
We’ve obtained copies of a few text messages from that phone, recovered later.
How?
Let’s say the password wasn’t hard to guess.
Davie’s birthday.
[Soft key-click sound]
Here’s one message, sent from Caroline’s phone to David Mercer three weeks before she disappeared:
You can’t control everything, David. I’m not staying here to make you comfortable. Davie is my son too. He deserves better than walking on eggshells around you.
And another, two days later, from David to Caroline:
You are not taking my boy away from his family. He’s a Mercer. You think I’m going to sit back while you let some other guy play dad? Not happening.
We don’t know everything that was said between them.
We don’t have every call, every fight, every threat or apology.
But we do know this:
Flyers vanished
Flowers disappeared
A camera never caught who was doing it
A young mother talked about leaving town with her son
And the father of that boy, by multiple accounts, was not okay with that
And there’s something else.
We spoke with a former sheriff from a neighboring county who reviewed what’s publicly available from the original investigation.
His takeaway?
“In a case like this—young mother, abandoned vehicle, no confirmed sighting—you treat that as a potential homicide from the start.”
A brief pause.
“And you don’t release a primary scene—like the vehicle—back to the family within twenty-four hours.”
MARA (V.O.): Because once that happens… you don’t get that evidence back.
“At the time, the case fell under then-Sheriff Burton Scott—father of current Sheriff Burke Scott.”
We reached out for comment.
We did not receive a response. Not a denial. Not an explanation.
Which raises a question that’s hard to ignore—was critical evidence lost before this case ever had a chance?
And if David Mercer really did mean what Rick says he meant… someone in Jackson County has been cleaning up Caroline Simms’ memory for seven years.
In our next segment, we’re going to talk about the lawyer who took David Mercer’s case—and why that choice has Jackson County buzzing for reasons that have nothing to do with billable hours.
Because when the district attorney and the woman representing the man he might have to treat as a murder suspect are spotted kissing under a streetlamp?
Even in a town that pretends to mind its own business…
People talk.
[Music swells and fades]
Sylva Wakes Up
The episode dropped at 6:00 a.m.
By 6:12, it was already making the rounds in Sylva.
At the City Limits Café, the morning regulars sat in their usual booth with coffee mugs warming their hands.
“Turn that up,” someone said.
A phone on the table played the familiar podcast voice.
“…Over my dead body or hers.”
The booth went quiet.
Old Mr. Henson shook his head slowly.
“Mercer always did have a temper.”
Across town at the gas station on Main, two construction guys leaned against a truck listening.
“Did you hear that?” one said.
“Yeah.”
“You ever work for Mercer?”
“Once.”
“Guy’s got money,” the other said.
“Don’t mean he ain’t capable of something stupid.”
Meanwhile, at the courthouse…
Reid Calloway pushed open the heavy wooden door as two clerks stopped talking mid-sentence. One of them quickly turned her phone face down.
He’d already heard it.
Reid kept walking, his stride long and measured, his eyes fixed on the elevator.
But he could feel the weight of their stares like a physical heat on the back of his neck.
He wasn’t the District Attorney anymore.
He was the man who had been "spotted" with the enemy.
Every step he took on the marble floor sounded like an accusation.
The elevator doors slid shut, and for a second, he was alone in the mirrored box. He caught his reflection—the Windsor knot he’d tied so carefully for her. He reached up and jerked the tie loose, the silk hissing against his collar. The stupid grin from that morning was dead.
Something hard and protective settled low in his chest. Not District Attorney. Something else entirely.