The phone was off, and she never came home. Erin Corwin was twenty years old, three months pregnant, and living on a Marine base in the middle of the California desert. She had moved there with her husband, John, after he was transferred, and she had tried her best to make a life out of a place that felt like the edge of the world. She volunteered at a horse rescue ranch half an hour away.
They had two dogs and a cat. The apartment building was full of other Marines and their wives, so they had company, at least. But things had been falling apart for a while. Earlier that year, Erin had a miscarriage, and it broke something in her.
She pulled away from John, grew quiet and depressed. She started spending money online to feel better, and the debt piled up until John took away her bank cards. She felt trapped. Somewhere in the middle of all that, she had started an affair with a neighbor named Chris.
He was a Marine too, married, with a daughter. His wife found out almost immediately, and John learned about it as well. But John decided to stay and try to fix the marriage. The affair supposedly ended.
It didn’t. Erin told her best friend, Jessie, back in Tennessee, that she wanted to leave John and run away to Alaska with Chris. When she found out she was pregnant, she told Jessie the baby might be Chris’s. Chris told her to keep it quiet until he could figure things out.
A few days before she disappeared, John took her to the hospital, and doctors told them both she was pregnant. Then, on the morning of June 28, 2014, Erin told John she wanted to scout out some spots in the nearby national park to show her mother, who was flying in for her birthday. She said she’d be back by four. She packed up, got in the car, and drove off.
She never came back. John called her phone all evening. Nothing. The next morning, he reported her missing.
The police noticed that lost night immediately—why hadn’t he sounded more worried? But then a neighbor named Aisling told them about the affair, and the investigation opened a second front. Detectives brought Chris in. He swore he barely knew Erin.
He said they only ever said hi on the street. Jessie told police that was a lie. Erin had told her that Chris had asked her to meet him in the park that day, supposedly to talk about the pregnancy and their future. Erin thought he might even be proposing.
She just didn’t understand why he wanted to meet in the middle of nowhere. Aisling added something else. The day before Erin disappeared, Chris had invited her husband to go coyote hunting out in the desert. The man declined at the last minute.
But he noticed a propane tank in Chris’s vehicle and asked about it. Chris said he wanted to blow up an abandoned mine shaft. He drove out anyway, and a few hours later, when his friend texted to say he had gotten free and could still join, Chris sent coordinates, then switched his phone to airplane mode. The friend searched for hours, couldn’t find him, and gave up.
Chris’s phone stayed off until 3:30 that afternoon. When he got back to the base, he said he’d gotten lost and found no coyotes, so he shot at rocks. When asked about the phone, he said he was saving battery. The propane tank was gone.
Police searched Erin and John’s apartment. Nothing pointing at the husband. But on Erin’s computer, they found open tabs with rental listings in Alaska, in Chris’s hometown. And they found a handwritten poem Chris had written her.
When police brought him in again, he stuck to his story: no affair, no intimacy, no meeting on the day she vanished. He said he saw a strange man in the distance who pointed a gun at him, so he fired a few shots and drove off. When asked why he never reported that armed stranger, Chris said he’d been outside cell service. But the detectives caught it.
He said, “we. ” As in, “we were outside cell service. ” By his own story, he had been alone. He kept lying, and they kept pushing.
Eventually, he admitted he saw Erin’s car that day, but insisted she wasn’t in it. He said Erin was a pathological liar, that she had even falsely claimed her husband hit her—but that wasn’t true either. He gave a DNA sample and left. They found Erin’s car parked in an empty, desolate area on the edge of town.
Her boot prints led away from it for a few yards, then stopped. There were tire tracks from another vehicle, the kind that meant she had gotten into someone else’s car. The rifle Chris had taken hunting that day went missing. His wife had taken it to the horse rescue ranch, but the owner swore she had no idea it was there.
Then, a new clue: Chris had asked a fellow Marine, weeks before Erin vanished, how to hide a body so it would never be found. Another acquaintance said the two of them had scouted abandoned mine shafts days before she disappeared and showed police the photos they had taken. The searches went on for over a month in brutal heat. Volunteers slept in their cars.
They checked hundreds of mine shafts with almost no luck. Then, a week before the search was set to be called off, a team member found one last shaft. A strong smell of gas and decomposition drifted up from inside. Rescue workers couldn’t get down far enough because of the fumes, so they lowered a camera on a homemade rig.
At first, the picture came back unclear. But a specialist with better gear eventually got a clear view of the bottom. There was a human body. They found Erin deep in the shaft.
Her body was too decomposed to identify by sight, so they used dental records. A rope with handles tied at both ends, like a homemade garrote, was around her neck. Near her were a white propane tank, spent shell casings, a blue climbing rope, a piece of rebar, and a stick with a rag wrapped around it, like an unlit torch. Police kept the discovery a secret, afraid Chris—who had gone back to Alaska after his military contract ended—would run.
He was taken into custody there and extradited to California. Under his passenger seat, investigators found a homemade garrote matching the one around Erin’s neck. They found the same kind of blue rope in his vehicle. His DNA was on items recovered from the shaft.
But for two years, Chris insisted he was innocent. The trial began in October 2016. The evidence against him made the case look almost impossible to defend. And then, on October 27, Chris took the stand and stunned everyone.
He admitted he had killed Erin. But the story he told was grotesque. He claimed she wanted to leave everything behind and move to Alaska with him, that she told him she loved him and his daughter. And then he made a shocking accusation: he claimed Erin had abused his daughter on multiple occasions.
He said that while they were out in the desert, he confronted her, she admitted it, and he snapped. He grabbed a homemade strangulation device that happened to be in his pocket, attacked her, killed her, and panicked, dumping her body in the mine shaft. Nobody in the courtroom bought it. Chris and his wife had never reported any such abuse.
They had continued letting Erin watch their daughter. He had even restarted the affair afterward. And the prosecution’s theory made much more sense: Chris saw the relationship as a dangerous problem. He had no intention of leaving his wife and daughter, and if Erin’s pregnancy became public, he would lose them both.
So he lured her into the desert, strangled her, disposed of her body, and tried to destroy the evidence with gas and a torch. Something went wrong. The jury deliberated for ninety minutes. They found him guilty of first-degree murder.
He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. One detail was never resolved. By the time Erin’s body was found, her remains were too decomposed to recover DNA from her baby. No one knows for certain whose child she was carrying.
On that, the truth stayed buried in the dark with her.
