On October 6, 2024, my two brothers and I drove into the Ouachita National Forest. We were navigating to the best lead we’ve had in years on locating the place where my father died.
Captain Richard Lumpkin was in the second seat of an F4 Phantom fighter jet when it crashed into the south Arkansas forest on June 5, 1985. That’s as much as I knew when I started searching for answers in my 20’s in college. My search for where he died ended this year after a series of breakthroughs led to some locals confirming the place where the plane went down.
Crash Site Visit
Day 1
We met up in Mount Ida and all piled into my little brother’s Tacoma which we were glad of when we hit our second portion of the road washed out by a dry stream. About an hour later we pulled off into a clearing with a metal gate blocking the path down a grassy road.
We walked down the road through another clearing and into a food plot that had been plowed under. A large forking oak stood on the eastern edge of the food plot. We walked beyond it into the trees.
Within 5 minutes we started spotting pieces of the plane. Small, hand sized pieces of forest green aluminum; the skin of the plane twisted and deformed. Wiring harnesses embedded in the ground we pulled up like carrots.
The first thing that struck me was the violence of the destruction. It was as though the plane had been put through a blender. I had always imagined that the plane had crashed and my dad and the pilot had burned. But it was clear that the plane had simply been annihilated; turned to confetti. We filled three shopping bags with debris before we stopped picking up pieces. There were too many to gather them all.
My little brother had a special knack for seeing things my older brother and I missed. He kept pulling pieces from the ground I had stepped over without seeing.
He found the end of a zipper attached to a piece of green nylon flight-suit. At that moment I realized and said aloud, that we needed to be prepared to find human remains. I learned in 2022 that they only found 40 lbs of human remains between the two men who died there and that’s what we buried in the cemetery. This spot is where they were truly buried.
We walked the compass bearing 40 degrees off north from the first pieces we found. We found a partially buried piece of one jet engine and another large piece eroding out of the ground. Beyond the buried pieces we didn’t find any more debris.
We left most of the pieces near where we first found them. Each of us selected some to take.
What they would have seen
I flew a drone capturing video along the trajectory they would have taken before hitting the trees.
Day 2: He would have loved this place
The next day I came back alone. I drove another dirt road about a mile south looking for any clue of a road or offshoot from there to the second jet engine which eye witness accounts place about one mile southwest of the main crash site. Then I drove back to the main site and stopped about a mile west and walked south to pick up the trajectory line again. I walked that line back to the main crash site and found nothing.
On the second day in these woods, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the place. My dad was an avid hunter who traveled all over the United States hunting big and small game. I have a photo of him posing with a bear he killed. In the photo, my dad is dressed in camo with a camo bucket hat and two turkey feathers sticking out in front.
I found a turkey feather near where we first found the pieces of the plane. I put it on a rock near where I found the flight suit as a kind of gesture at a memorial. This is where he died and where his body went into the ground. He would have loved this place.
I returned to the main debris field and immediately started finding more. Shortly after while walking back up toward the clearing, I found a piece of a boot. The toe section, sheared off with the lining still inside.
What it means to me
It’s taken me months and I’m still unpacking what this all means for me. But a few things feel different now:
1. He’s no longer missing
One day he just disappeared from our lives and I knew it happened somewhere in the woods but now I know where.
2. I am heir to his life
I have felt from the beginning of this quest that I wanted to join the line of my life to the end of the line of his life. I had expected it to close the loop and bring something to an end.
What I did not expect is that by joining my line to his, I feel a new security and confidence in my identity as the son of Richard Lumpkin. And as a result I feel a new quiet power that flows from his supreme competence, curiosity, gregarious exploration and self-reliance. I’ve spent my adult life waking up to little bits and pieces of this. But now, somehow, after visiting this place, I feel the heir to it all. I am this kind of man because he was this kind of man. His way of being lives in me and is fully mine. And it wants to explore ever outward into new territory, new wilderness, new creativity, into fresh possibilities. And because of who he was, I am.
Thanks
I want to say thanks to a few people in particular who went above and beyond in helping us find the spot.
– Bill Womble who was one of the first on the scene and went over maps with us to help us confirm the general area.
– HC Varnadore who first took my family to visit the crash site on the one year anniversary and filled in a lot of details about the location. It was much easier to find back then and in the years since it got a lot harder to find.
– Josh Jackson who suggested I try OnX mapping software to identify who owned the land. Turns out it’s federal land but that put me in touch with Dustin and ultimately Arkansashunting.net.
– Arkansashunting.net user AR1234 who found the historical aerial photo from 1986 that showed the shattered trees and road used in the investigation. I was able to overlay this onto current maps indexed to the position of the road and get within 100 feet of the original ground scar to start our search.
– ArkansasHunting.net user DeputyDog (aka Seth Allen) who spent the better part of a week driving around the area talking to folks who were around when it happened and went out to visit the site ahead of us.
– Dustin Opine of Arkansas Game and Fish who responded to my cold email, remembered a local, Johnny Haga, who had pointed the spot out before and went out to confirm it. Their GPS pin led us straight to the debris field.
– Ryan Bolger who inspired me to keep pushing after he shared the story of his own search for his birth mother which had so much in common with my search.
– And of course, my two brothers, Jason Lumpkin and Andrew Wyers who joined me on this wild goose chase. Though Andrew’s father is my step-father, after the visit, he shared that he feels that so much of his life was set up by the foundation that Richard laid.
