Barkley Cove fire tower

The Barkley Cove fire tower is a ruined structure whose physical decay becomes inseparable from the discovery of Chase Andrews’s body and the investigation into his death. Its elevated platform and hinged floor grates give the tower a dangerous, specific mechanism: a person can fall through an opening to the ground below. When investigators find one grate open directly above the impression of Chase Andrews’s body, the tower shifts from an eerie landmark in the marsh to a central piece of physical evidence.

Setting and Physical Form

The tower stands over a bog in a hushed forest. Its legs are rotted, and tendrils of mist rise around the structure. On the morning of October 30, 1969, the quiet is broken only by crows as ten-year-old Benji Mason and Steve Long climb its damp staircase. Their remarks about the heat and the silence establish a setting that feels out of step with the season, but the tower’s condition is more than atmosphere: the decay makes the place seem neglected and potentially hazardous.

The ascent leads to a platform assembled from different kinds of flooring. Splintered, gray wooden planks make up its center; square, see-through grates run around the perimeter. The grates can be opened and closed, and, when shut, are safe to walk across. An open grate, however, leaves a drop of sixty feet. An iron grate in the floor also provides access to the platform, so the structure’s openings are not incidental details: they shape how people move through it and create the possibility of a fatal fall.

Discovery Beneath the Tower

At first, the boys see a face that does not move. They run back down and around to the other side of the tower’s base, greenish mud clinging to their boots. There they find a man lying flat on his back, his left leg turned grotesquely forward from the knee and his eyes and mouth open. Benji identifies him as Chase Andrews. The boys’ discovery places the body in direct relation to the tower, though it does not by itself establish how he came to be there.

The discovery draws investigators to the tower as well as to the body. Ed Jackson and Joe Purdue photograph Chase Andrews’s position in relation to the steps, take close-ups of his head wounds and bent leg, and record measurements from the body to the trail. The ambulance crew carries him away with marsh sludge still clinging to him. The investigation’s attention to both the body and its position makes the surrounding structure part of the evidence rather than merely the setting for the discovery.

The Open Grate and the Investigation

After the body has been removed, Ed Jackson and Joe Purdue climb the tower’s narrowing stair levels to the top. The ascent opens out over the surrounding forests and marsh, but the platform’s design turns their attention downward again. Jackson pushes open the iron floor grate to reach the platform, then eases it shut because it forms part of the floor. This ordinary act of entering also makes the tower’s hazards legible: the platform is safe only when its openings are closed.

On the far side, the investigators find one perimeter grate standing open. Looking down through it, they see the outline of Chase Andrews’s misshapen body embedded in the mud, with yellowish goo and duckweed splashed to either side. The mark below matches the opening above and makes the grate’s position a consequential forensic detail. Ed Jackson notes that people sometimes forget to close the grate over the stairs, but says the other grates are almost never left open. The distinction complicates a simple explanation based on routine carelessness.

The investigators consider why Chase Andrews would have opened this particular grate, or why anyone else would have done so. Ed Jackson raises the possibility that someone planned to push a person through it. When Joe Purdue asks why the opening was not closed afterward, Jackson reasons that if Chase had fallen through on his own, he could not have shut it; leaving it open could make the fall look accidental. This is an investigative hypothesis, not an identification of who opened the grate or proof, in this evidence, of the exact sequence of events.

Narrative Significance

The tower’s danger depends on a contrast between ordinary use and lethal exposure. With its grates closed, the platform can be crossed safely; with one left open, the same floor contains a fall of sixty feet. That practical difference gives the structure’s design a sharp narrative function: a feature that might otherwise remain part of the tower’s worn architecture becomes a possible means of death and a clue to whether the death was staged as an accident.

The opening also makes the scene readable in two directions. From the platform, investigators look down at the body’s outline; from the mud below, the misshapen form corresponds to the grate above. The tower thus links an elevated, partly concealed action to visible evidence on the ground. Its rotted supports and abandoned condition create an atmosphere of danger, but the open grate—not decay alone—drives the investigation’s central question: whether this was a fall the tower permitted by chance, or one its design made possible through deliberate action.