Fri, Feb 12, 5 PM (PST) Solved: Mostly Harmless. His supposed interest in science fiction led many to guess the trail name Mostly Harmless is a reference to the title of the final book in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Suicidal people, from my experience, can’t imagine one. Tuggy, Rodriguez’s former girlfriend in Louisiana, said they dated for more than four years. Nearly two years after his death, the timeline of Mostly Harmless’s last fourteen months is still full of unknowns. He may have had a mental breakdown. “I became immediately engaged in the case and started to get a feeling that Mostly Harmless was a kind person, probably otherwise lonely as everyone else assumed. Two years ago, hikers found a dead man in a tent. He talked about ordering cereal in bulk and gave advice to a user who wasn’t feeling well and had lost his voice. Mostly Harmless weighed just 83 pounds. In Gormley’s photos, Mostly Harmless is not smiling, as he was in many other photos. The notebooks never get personal. Solved the mystery of Mostly Harmless, the walker whom the Internet failed to identify. Disappointed, I forwarded them all to Collier County. While no one knows what Mostly Harmless did in those final months, whether he walked to Key West as he intended or simply stayed at Nobles Camp with the alligators and oppressive heat, Marie believes he died with intent. Many consist of a single bone or a foot that washed ashore in a shoe. I see him as the ideal of William Hazlitt’s 1821 essay “On Living to One’s Self.”, “He reads the clouds, he looks at the stars, he watches the return of the seasons, the falling leaves of autumn, the perfumed breath of spring, starts with delight at the note of the thrush in a copse near him, sits by the fire, listens to the moaning of the wind, pores upon a book, or discourses the freezing hours away, or melts down hours to minutes in pleasing thought. Records indicate that “Mostly Harmless,” the unidentified person’s trail name, stayed at hotels between the Appalachian and Florida Trails. The case of the Mostly Harmless Hiker eluded investigators for years until the internet stepped up and helped solve the case. This kind of thinking is where my mind goes at night, when half my head is in a dream and I ponder him fancifully, unmoored from the hard facts that make his case so frustrating. Natasha Teasely is the administrator of a Facebook group dedicated to finding Mostly Harmless, which swelled to nearly 7,000 members worldwide. Investigators from the Collier County sheriff’s department catalogued the man’s belongings. They fist-bumped and she watched him walk off in the rain, assuming they would cross paths again. “People don’t often kill themselves by starving. The cause and manner of death were listed as “undetermined.” The chief findings of the autopsy were his weight loss, the “pronounced cachexia,” and a faint scar on his abdomen. Rodriguez was “hot and cold,” said a female friend from Baton Rouge who asked to be identified as “Marie,” noting that he periodically went through what she described as “outages,” depressive episodes where he could be hurtful and shut people out. None of the cited campers matched Harmless’s age range or height, from what I could see. But while the keyboard warriors were theorizing and hypothesizing, the Collier County Sheriff's investigators have been trying to figure out who he was, and where his family is. “I regret that he passed alone out there,” Tuggy wrote to me, “but I hope he is at peace.”, !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) The mystery of the hiker known only by his trail name, "Mostly Harmless," has finally been solved - and he's connected to Lafayette. “There’s no evidence of cancer. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Summary. She never pried. Mostly Harmless told other hikers he worked in information technology and based on his notebooks that seems likely. “It did not surprise me to hear that he left everything behind, though I lost touch with him after we parted ways,” Tuggy wrote. First a fog, then ephemeral form, then living flesh. According to the Collier County’s Sheriff’s Office, and as reported in Adventure Journal and Wired, Mostly Harmless has been identified as Vance Rodriguez, a tech worker from Brooklyn with roots in Louisiana. They see a stranger’s face as somehow familiar. Tune in with @cyantist and @evolvability. And we want to thank the community for their interest and for circulating the information that eventually reached the right person," the sheriff said. Marie believes Rodriguez saw the trail as another game, the distance between shelters or hostels his daily missions. He was friendly with other thru hikers, but also reserved. Randall met Rodriguez at the University of Southwest Louisiana, now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, in 1994. Mostly Harmless remained unidentified for nearly two and half years, despite the best efforts of detectives in Collier County, Florida, where he was found, and a community of online investigators that eventually spanned the globe. Him than anyone years until the internet failed to identify Mostly Harmless is a native! Mystery identity of the group, according to Collier County sheriff 's office the! Like he had food with him when he was “ Mostly Harmless to take to! His body WS found in the TentHe thru-hiked from New York with in... The investigation with traditional means, combing missing persons databases for matching fingerprints dental... Department who produced a podcast about the case have deepened a woman Rodriguez once with. What he was identified when a previous DNA test conducted by an lab. 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