DURANGO, Colorado — The last image of 13-year-old Dylan Redwine shows him scowling at his phone, sending a text to his mother that he had landed safely and that his father had picked him up. It was the Thanksgiving of 2012, and everything about that visit was wrong. Within hours, the phone went dark.
Within days, Dylan was gone. Within months, his bones were found scattered across a remote mountainside. And it would take nearly nine years before a jury finally answered the question that had haunted an entire community: What happened to Dylan Redwine?
The answer, when it came, was more disturbing than anyone could have imagined. Dylan Redwine did not wander off. He did not run away.
He did not hitchhike into the mountains to fish, despite what his father suggested. Instead, authorities said, he was killed by the one person he was supposed to trust most in this world, his own father, Mark Redwine. And the motive may have been rooted in a secret so dark that a teenage boy stumbled upon it and planned to confront his dad about it, a decision that prosecutors believe cost him his life.
The nightmare began in the simplest of ways. Dylan flew from Colorado Springs to Durango to spend Thanksgiving with his father, a court-ordered visit he did not want to make. He was 13 years old, athletic, funny, and inseparable from his older brother Cory.
His parents, Mark and Elaine Redwine, had divorced in 2007 after 18 years of marriage, and the custody battle had been brutal, bitter, and unending. Elaine had primary custody. Mark had visitation.
But by 2012, neither Cory nor Dylan wanted to visit their father anymore. The relationship had soured into something cold, distant, and tense.
Dylan begged to stay home. His grandmother was dying of cancer, and he wanted to be with her. He wanted to be with his friends.
But a judge had ordered the Thanksgiving visit, and Elaine’s hands were tied. A lawyer warned her that refusing to send Dylan would violate the court order. So on November 18, 2012, Dylan boarded a plane to Durango, knowing he didn’t want to be there.
He texted his friend Ryan and made plans to meet at 6:30 the next morning. He asked his dad if he could stay at Ryan’s house instead. The answer was no.
The last text from Dylan’s phone arrived at 9:37 p. m. that night, sent to Ryan.
Ten minutes later, at 9:46, the phone went dark. It never came back on. His mother Elaine texted him just after 10 p.
m. and got no response. That silence was the first crack in the timeline, and it would grow into a chasm that swallowed the entire family.
The next morning, Ryan waited for Dylan. He never showed. He texted, and there was no reply.
Mark Redwine told police he left the house around 7:30 a. m. to run errands, claiming Dylan was still asleep.
He said he returned around 11:30 a. m. to find the house empty.
He noted that the television was on Nickelodeon, a bowl of cereal sat on the table, and a fishing pole was missing. He said he assumed Dylan had gone fishing. But as the afternoon wore on and Dylan did not return, Mark texted Elaine to ask if she had heard from her son.
Elaine panicked instantly. Her son was in regular, near-constant communication with her and with Cory. He would never simply vanish without a call, without a text, without any trace.
She got in her car and began the six-hour drive from Colorado Springs to Durango. She would not sleep that night. She would not rest for years.
When Elaine arrived in the early hours of the morning, the search was already underway. Volunteers, law enforcement, search dogs, divers, helicopters, boats, and aircraft scoured the rugged terrain around Vallecito Lake and the nearby dam. Temperatures were dropping below freezing, and the mountains were brutal, steep, and unforgiving.
Elaine handed over Dylan’s pillowcase so search dogs could track his scent. They followed it about a hundred yards down the road from Mark’s home. Then it stopped.
Almost immediately, Elaine knew something was deeply wrong. Mark had said the television was on Nickelodeon, but Dylan had not watched Nickelodeon in years. Mark had said Dylan may have gone fishing, but Dylan didn’t even know how to string a fishing pole.
Mark said he had reported Dylan missing to the marshall’s office, but when Elaine called that same office, there was no report on file. Nothing added up.
Mark’s story began to shift almost immediately. He told police that Dylan may have seen a contempt of court document left on the table and gotten upset. He claimed Dylan may have run off.
He later told the media that Dylan was a known hitchhiker, a claim that contradicted everything Elaine and Dylan’s friends said. In interviews, Mark painted himself as a devoted father and suggested Dylan was torn between his parents. He said he and Dylan were inseparable, that Dylan would come to him before going to his mother.
He said he was hopeful Dylan would be found. But investigators noticed something strange. Mark barely participated in the searches.
He watched from across the street with a cup of coffee while search teams combed the area. He spoke of Dylan in the past tense, even while the boy was still only missing.
Then the deeper history began to surface. Mark’s former wife from a previous marriage told investigators that Mark had made disturbing threats years earlier, including a statement that he would 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 his children before letting their mother have them. She also recalled him saying that if he ever needed to get rid of a body, he would leave it in the mountains.
Mark’s son from that marriage, Brandon, said Mark seemed neither concerned nor interested in helping with the search from the very first day.
The darkest revelation came from Dylan’s brother Cory. About a year before his disappearance, Cory and Dylan had been on a road trip with Mark to Cleveland. While Mark slept in a hotel room, Dylan went on Mark’s computer and found photographs that would change everything.
The images showed Mark wearing women’s clothing, wearing a soiled diaper, and eating excrement from that diaper. Dylan was disgusted. He took pictures of the photos and showed Cory, and the brothers agreed to keep the discovery between themselves.
But Dylan did not forget. He told friends he planned to confront his father about the images during that Thanksgiving visit. He had texted Cory asking for the photos.
Cory did not send them to Dylan, but he had already sent them to Mark before Dylan ever boarded the plane. Mark knew that his sons knew about his secret. Prosecutors believe that knowledge ignited a rage that ended in murder.
The search dragged on through the brutal winter. Searchers held out hope, and a $50,000 reward was offered. Tips poured in from around the world, including a reported sighting from Australia.
None of it led anywhere. In early December, both Mark and Elaine took polygraph tests. Elaine said she passed.
Mark was reportedly told he showed deception when asked whether he knew where Dylan was. He was urged to take another test but made excuses. By then, investigators were convinced Mark was involved.
They just didn’t have enough to charge him.
In February 2013, the family took their battle to national television, appearing on Dr. Phil. Elaine accused Mark directly.
Cory confronted his father, saying, “I think Mark has something to do with it. I think he’s either got him hidden out or done something and disposed of him.” Cory also revealed the photographs on national television.
Mark did not deny that he was the man in the images. Instead, he claimed the photos were staged and 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒, planted as a trap because he suspected Elaine and Cory had been snooping through his things. Elaine later said that after watching Mark’s demeanor on that show, she knew her son was dead.
In April 2013, about five months after the disappearance, a witness reported seeing Mark driving an ATV down Middle Mountain Road, an area that had been too snowed in to search during the winter. When conditions improved, search teams went back. They found a Nike Air Jordan youth shoe matching the pair Dylan was seen wearing on Walmart surveillance footage.
Human remains dogs alerted nearby, and bones were found. Scraps of a t-shirt, a sock, and an elastic underwear band were scattered nearby. The remains were confirmed to be Dylan’s.
It was a devastating blow, but it was not the end of the story.
Mark’s reaction was telling. When police told him Dylan’s remains had been found, Mark focused on how little of the body had been recovered. He argued it wasn’t enough proof that Dylan was even dead.
Then Mark’s son Brandon told investigators that Mark had brought up the term “blunt force trauma” repeatedly during their conversation, at least four times, and suggested investigators would need to find Dylan’s skull before they could determine a cause of death. It was a startlingly specific detail for a grieving father to volunteer.
Dylan’s skull would not be found for another two and a half years, discovered by hikers more than a mile further down Middle Mountain Road. Analysis revealed a fracture above the left eye and two marks consistent with a knife or sharp tool. These injuries were consistent with blunt force trauma and occurred around the time of death, not from animal activity or natural causes.
The case officially became a homicide investigation.
In August 2013, investigators executed a search warrant at Mark’s home. Cadaver dogs alerted to several areas inside and outside the house, including the living room, the washing machine, clothes Mark was wearing the night he picked Dylan up from the airport, and both the cab and bed of his pickup truck. Blood was found in the living room, on the coffee table, beneath a rug, and on a loveseat.
DNA testing identified Dylan as the source of the blood on the loveseat and could not exclude him from the other spots.
Mark’s explanations shifted wildly. First, he claimed he and Dylan had roughhoused but no one was hurt. Then, when he learned police were searching for blood, he claimed Dylan had a oozing cold sore.
When investigators said they would check that with Elaine, he changed the story again, saying Dylan had been hit in the face with a Nerf football and bled from that. None of it held up. Investigators were confident that whatever happened to Dylan started in that living room, even if there was no obvious sign of a violent struggle.
But the evidence was circumstantial. There was no confession. No witnesses.
No clean cause of death. The case stalled.
For years, the case sat in limbo. Elaine filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Mark, who countersued, blaming Elaine’s alleged actions for driving Dylan away from the home. A judge threw out both cases.
But investigators never stopped working. In July 2017, four and a half years after Dylan disappeared, a grand jury found probable cause to charge Mark Redwine with second-degree murder and child 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 resulting in death.
Mark was arrested in Bellingham, Washington, after what he thought was a routine traffic stop. The arrest was captured on body camera, with officers taking him into custody at gunpoint after being warned he might be armed. Mark seemed genuinely confused, saying he had no idea what the warrant was about.
But the evidence against him was mounting. An FBI profiler who assisted in the case said flatly, “I have yet to be wrong on a case, and I’m not wrong in this one.”
The road to trial was agonizingly slow. The first trial ended in a mistrial after a juror conducted independent research. A second trial date fell apart when Mark’s defense attorney reportedly had COVID symptoms.
At another point, the trial was delayed after his attorney was arrested on charges of assault and domestic violence. Nearly nine years after Dylan vanished, the case finally reached a jury.
The prosecution’s theory was clear. Mark and Dylan’s relationship was damaged beyond repair. Dylan knew about the humiliating photographs, and Mark knew he knew.
The state argued that something triggered Mark’s anger that night, that he snapped, killed Dylan in the living room, cleaned up the scene, and moved the body to the mountains. Prosecutors pointed to the 6:30 a. m.
plan that never happened, the errands that supposedly took Mark away while Dylan slept, the unexplained nap he said he took after returning to find his son missing, and the hours that passed before he reported anything. They pointed to the blood, the cadaver dog alerts, and the shifting stories.
Cory took the stand and described the photographs his brother found on their father’s computer. “He found pictures of Mark dressed in women’s clothing, wearing a diaper, taking selfies of him wearing the clothing, wearing the diaper, eating the feces that was in the diaper,” Cory testified. He said Dylan was disgusted and wanted to use the photos as ammunition, angry that Mark was criticizing Cory and Elaine as bad influences.
Dylan had also transferred money out of Dylan’s bank account into his own after the disappearance, and threw away photos of Dylan while he was still missing.
The defense called the case thin and overly emotional, arguing the blood evidence did not prove when it got there or that a crime occurred. They suggested the skull injuries could be explained by animal damage and said prosecutors leaned too heavily on the photos. But the jury did not buy it.
After a five-week trial and about six hours of deliberation, Mark Redwine was found guilty on both counts on July 16, 2021. He showed almost no reaction when the first count was read. He closed his eyes on the second.
At sentencing, Dylan’s family finally had the chance to speak directly to the man who took him away. Elaine told Mark he would never be called dad again, that Cory now went by Mike, and that every tragedy in the family was his responsibility. Brandon spoke about the physicality Mark showed his mother and the absence in his life.
Cory called Dylan his hero, saying his little brother became more of a man in 13 years than Mark had in 60. Mark did not speak at his sentencing. In a written statement to probation, he denied responsibility, calling the case a miscarriage of justice, a 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 conviction, and a sham trial.
The judge was not swayed.
Mark Redwine was sentenced to 48 years on each count, to be served concurrently. He is currently serving his sentence at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Crowley, Colorado. He will not be eligible for parole until 2041, when he will be 89 years old.
His mandatory release date is set for 2063, when he will be 101. He has appealed his conviction, continuing to maintain his innocence. The court ordered him to pay $900 for Dylan’s burial plot, an order that was upheld in April 2026.
He has offered no confession, no apology, and no remorse.
For Elaine and Cory, the sentence brought a measure of justice but never closure. Elaine said it was the end of one chapter and the beginning of another, a chance to start remembering Dylan’s life instead of the details of his death. Cory said that for nine years, everything had been focused on how Dylan died, which he called a complete misrepresentation of his brother.
He wanted people to remember Dylan the way he was, bright, funny, and full of life. He has honored his brother by passing Dylan’s name down to one of his own children. He also reflected on the cruelest part of the entire tragedy: while hundreds of strangers missed their own Thanksgivings, spent years searching those mountains, driving in from other states, calling Dylan’s name in the cold, Mark already knew where Dylan was the whole time.
The boy who never wanted to be there in the first place never got the chance to leave. And the father who was supposed to protect him was the one who destroyed him.
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