Negative Evidence

Negative evidence is the absence of traces that an expected action should have produced. In the investigation of Chase Andrews’s death, the missing footprints and fingerprints matter not because absence alone identifies a killer, but because they contradict the straightforward account that he walked to and climbed the tower before falling. Ed Jackson treats the gaps as clues: they weaken the appearance of an accident while leaving more than one explanation open.

What Makes an Absence Evidence

The distinction turns on expectation. Mud surrounds the body, and the scene is marked by the tracks of people who approached it; under those conditions, footprints would ordinarily be expected from someone who crossed the bog to reach the stairs. Likewise, a person climbing a tower would be expected to leave fingerprints on its railings or grates. When those traces are absent, the investigation cannot simply record that nothing was found. It must ask what actions should have left marks, why they did not, and whether the absence points to concealment or to an entirely different account of events.

The reasoning is therefore comparative rather than conclusive. A missing trace has force only against a plausible expectation: a fall should bring people to the body, and a climb should leave tracks or prints. Yet neither expectation proves exactly what happened. The evidence can narrow the apparent possibilities without establishing who removed the traces, whether they were removed, or where the death occurred.

Footprints at the Body and the Stairs

At the scene, tracks led from the staircase across the bog to within eight feet of Chase Andrews. One of the boys who had discovered him said that they stopped when they recognized the body and then backed away. Ed Jackson points to the contrast: the boys’ own tracks are deep in the mud, but there are no other fresh prints around the body, none leading toward or away from the stairs, and none suggesting that anyone knelt beside Chase to see whether he was alive. The missing tracks interrupt the expected sequence after a fall, when companions would likely hurry down to him.

The gap extends backward from the body. Ed Jackson asks how Chase Andrews could have walked along the path, crossed the muddy ground, and reached the stairs without leaving footprints. The question makes the route itself part of the evidence: the apparent accident requires an approach to the tower, yet the muddy ground records no such passage by the person who supposedly fell from it.

Ed Jackson and Joe Purdue search the area for ten minutes. They find no footprints beyond those left by the boys and no sign that someone brushed prints away. Ed Jackson initially describes the scene as an apparent accident, then treats the missing tracks as a reason to investigate whether someone covered them. The search thus distinguishes two possibilities without settling between them: the traces may never have been made in the expected place, or someone may have deliberately removed them.

The Open Grate and the Accident Explanation

The tower’s construction gives the absence of tracks a physical counterpart. At the top, the platform has a central floor of old wooden planks and see-through square grates around its perimeter. When closed, the grates can be walked on safely; if one is left open, a person can fall about sixty feet. On the far side of the platform, Ed Jackson and Joe Purdue find one grate open. Below it lies the outline of Chase’s body in the mud, with yellowish goo and duckweed splashed to the sides.

An open grate can fit an accidental fall, but its placement also raises a question of preparation. Ed Jackson observes that people sometimes forget to close the grate over the stairs, while the other grates are almost never left open. He considers whether someone opened the grate through which Chase fell in order to push another person to his death. Leaving it open afterward could preserve the appearance that Chase fell through it on his own; if he had fallen, he could not have closed it. The open grate therefore does not stand alone as proof of murder. It joins the missing approach marks in making the accident account less secure.

Fingerprints and Competing Explanations

The medical examiner places the time of death between midnight and two A.M., October 29 to 30, 1969. When Ed Jackson and Joe Purdue review the investigation, they find no fresh fingerprints on the railing or grates—not even any attributed to Chase Andrews. The absence repeats the earlier pattern: the scene contains no clear physical record that he crossed the mud, climbed the tower, or opened the grates. Ed Jackson also notes that there is no evidence anyone else performed those actions.

The investigators consider deliberate wiping as one explanation. But the absence of prints also leaves room for a different possibility: Chase Andrews may have been killed somewhere else and moved to the tower. Joe Purdue points out a problem with that account: moving a body by vehicle should have left tire tracks. The competing explanations thus generate further questions and searches rather than a definitive answer. Missing fingerprints may indicate careful cleaning or a body brought to the scene; the lack of tire marks, if confirmed, would bear on the second possibility.

Investigative and Narrative Significance

Negative evidence changes the investigation from a simple reading of the body’s position to a reconstruction of what the scene ought to contain. Deep tracks from the boys establish that the mud could preserve impressions; the absence of other tracks becomes more telling because the investigators can compare it with marks that remain. The tower’s open grate supplies a possible route of death, while the missing prints leave uncertain who used that route and how.

The concept’s force lies in that uncertainty. The gaps make the apparent accident difficult to accept, but they do not name a perpetrator or yield a single proven scenario. Ed Jackson calls the material negative data and insists that it still counts as data: the investigation must take seriously not only what the scene shows, but what a straightforward explanation says should be there and is not. Each absence redirects attention—from the body to the muddy approach, from the approach to the tower, and from the tower’s missing prints to the possibility of cleanup or relocation—without pretending that an unanswered question is already an answer.