The 30-Year-Old Cold Case Of “Coal Train Carlos,” Found Frozen In A Railcar

Little is known about the mysterious man whose frozen dead body was discovered in the bottom of an empty coal train car at Belle Ayre Mine in Wright in 1995.

It was November, and authorities noted he was not dressed for the weather in a short-sleeve cotton shirt and pants and a vest that appeared to be made out of a Mexican-style blanket.

A mine worker who was loading the trains peered through the window and saw a pair of yellow dress shoes in the bottom of an empty car. He went outside on the catwalk and hollered down at the body with no response before calling his supervisor, who then called the Campbell County Sheriff's Office.

The man of Hispanic descent became known as "Coal Train Carlos." He appeared to be between 35-40 years old was found frozen to bottom of the empty car with no obvious wounds or other signs of trauma, and nothing in his pockets to identify him except for a comb, lighter and set of keys, according to the sheriff's report.

Drag marks indicated he'd climbed over the top of the coal car and lowered himself inside, despite his small stature of just over 5 feet tall and 165 pounds.

The Burlington Northern Santa Fe train had originated in Richman, Texas, a roughly seven- to 10-day round-trip to Wyoming, and he may have boarded at any spot along the way.

The coroner deemed there was no foul play with the official cause of death listed as hypothermia, according to the coroner's report.

His frozen body was lifted out of the railcar with a small crane and transported to town by the coroner. With no means of identifying him, the John Doe was cremated and buried in Mount Pisgah Cemetery on Nov. 21, 1995. His grave is simply marked "Unknown Man."

Today, he remains unidentified despite at least one former coroner's attempts to identify him and track his family down.

Now, however, a citizen sleuth from Virginia has picked up the case of Coal Train Carlos with new efforts to reunite the man found dead nearly 30 years ago with his family.

The trouble is there's virtually no means of identifying him short of plastering his face on the internet with the hopes of locating family or someone who might have known him, and potentially, by a matching tattoo.

Citizen Detective Christie Harris is the founder of Unidentified Nameless and Never Forgotten Facebook group with more than 8,600 members.

The Virginia resident calls herself a citizen sleuth and does not claim to have any professional skills beyond a dogged passion for finding missing and identifying missing people.

Like many budding amateur sleuths, Harris has a full-time job and spends the bulk of her spare time scouring the internet, databases and other Facebook groups, such as Genetics Uncovered in Cheyenne, which is run by twin sisters and amateur genealogists Megan McWilliams and Ashley Kroner , who share the same mission.

Harris made national news for her work helping to identify the remains of Vance John Rodriguez, a hiker known as his trail name "Mostly Harmless," whose dead body was found in his tent of undetermined causes in Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida in July 2018.

With the help of Harris, he was identified by a former coworker in 2020. She was featured in an in WIRED magazine and also appeared in the HBO documentary "They Called Him Mostly Harmless" in January 2024.

Harris told Cowboy State Daily that finding and identifying missing people is her passion.

When she was younger, Harris dreamed of becoming an FBI profiler, which morphed over time into a desire for finding victims and getting answers for their loved ones and families.

She doesn't dabble in forensic genetic genealogy, but rather takes what she calls a "crowd solving" approach, meaning plastering the internet and social media with flyers and doing her own outreach to law enforcement and coroners.

As in the case of Rodriguez, getting the posters and information into the right place is the challenge and goal.

"I kind of take the approach that we take is we're always putting out flyers, first of all, because you never know who's gonna see it," she said.

There's also plenty of hair pulling and screaming at her computer when the cases become incredibly complicated, which she said unfortunately are the ones that draw her most.

In the case of Rodriguez, the work was made easier because they had a lot more to go on — including his DNA and some preliminary forensic genetic genealogy — versus Coal Train Carlos, where even nearly 30 years after his body was discovered, authorities have nothing but a sketch and a few scant details.

File Missing Carlos has been on Harris' radar for a while, and she had contacted current Campbell County Coroner Paul Wallem for more information only to learn that the folder on Coal Train Carlos has since disappeared.

Wallem has served two terms as coroner and worked as deputy coroner for years before that. He told Cowboy State Daily that he has no idea what happened to Carlos' file, which is among the more than 40 others he's reported missing to the sheriff dating back to 1995.

Thomas Eekhoff was coroner at the time of Carlos' death, at which time he did not conduct an autopsy or take DNA, nor did he get dental records, according to former coroner, Laura Sundstrom, who was interviewed by the Gillette News Record for a 2015 story marking the 20th anniversary of the mysterious man's discovery.

She also stated in the same story that Carlos' fingerprints were taken at the time of his death, but those disappeared prior to the file going missing. There's no indication of this in either the coroner's or sheriff's report.

Sundstrom was unable to be interviewed by Cowboy State Daily because she was recovering from recent surgery.

According to the scant coroner's report provided by Wallem, Eekhoff did not request a jury inquest into the cause of death and instead deemed it accidental.

Carlos was entered into NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, presumably by Sundstrom in 2014, according to his case record , though no name is recorded and the Campbell County Sheriff's and Coroner's offices listed as contacts.

Among the personal items noted in NamUs are his clothing — a short-sleeve, purple button-down shirt, brown pants, undergarments and light-colored socks — as well a brown belt engraved with "Morillon."

Other items are a "green Mexican blanket vest," according to the NamUs record, as well as "yellow Cuban heel loafers" as well as the watch, lighter, key ring with three keys, a silver-coated pinky ring, comb and "snapclasp" recorded in the sheriff's report.

Sundstrom had also earlier said she was attempting to have Carlos' cremated remains exhumed to see if there were any clues or perhaps items may have been buried with him but was unable to answer as to the results of that effort.

However, exhuming his cremains to test for DNA would likely prove fruitless.

Experts are mixed on whether DNA can be extracted from cremains because of the high temperatures of the process, but some say it's possible to extract some from the bones and teeth with low chances of finding any usable samples, according to a survey of more than a dozen crematoriums.

Everything Lost Upon his death, all of items belonging to Coal Train Carlos were turned over to the Wilson/Noecker Funeral Home, the report states, though no signature indicates that the funeral home received them.

Sundstrom reportedly had reached out to the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation to see if any of the evidence may have made it to the state lab in Cheyenne. It's not clear if anything was ever located.

DCI Commander Ryan Cox told Cowboy State Daily on Friday he would look into it, but did not respond by press time.

Matching Tattoos? Though the evidence would have provided a handy starting point, Harris is not focused on what might have been done or was lost. She's used to looking for clues in the dark.

Apart from the lost items and misplaced files, Harris questions the circumstances themselves and how a decently well-dressed man like Carlos wearing light, summer clothing ended up on a coal train to Wyoming in the first place.

"It may be that he was running from something," she said, "and was obviously coming from the south."

These are just guesses, of course, but with nothing concrete to go on, Harris searches for any connections she can find.

So far, his tattoos provide the best clues.

According to his NamUs record, Carlos had a tattoo on his upper left arm with the words "caridad," or charity in English, as well as a small tattoo of a cross on the web of his right hand and one on his left hand that said, "Cubano," or Cuban, likely indicating his ethnicity.

After scouring databases, one potential match Harris has uncovered — albeit a longshot she — is Michael Duane Hissom , who disappeared in August 1994, about 18 months before Carlos was found.

Like Carlos, Hissom also had a cross tattoo on the web of his right hand.

According to his profile on the Charley Project, a national nonprofit that tracks missing people, he walked off of his job on a fishing vessel in Ilwaco, Washington, after getting in a fight with the captain, never to be seen again.

And despite matching tattoos, Harris acknowledged that's where the similarities end, with Hissom reported to be much larger at 5 feet, 6 inches tall and about 185 pounds. And though both men had dark hair, eyes and mustaches, Hissom is listed as Caucasian, though Harris said these profiles can be wildly inaccurate, in her experience.

She acknowledged that it's likely a long shot, but if nothing else, it's one person who can be eliminated. That's the way this process works, especially when dealing with decades-old cases with no evidence or starting points.

There's also a good chance that Carlos entered the country illegally, Harris said, and she plans to find someone to translate her flyer into Spanish to share with international groups on social media.

"If he entered illegally, then you have a whole different set of circumstances," she said, "because people are not seeing his face and they don't know where he is. All we can do is to keep trying."

Local Law Enforcement Remembers Campbell County Sheriff Scott Matheny remembers this case. Back then, he was new to the office and wasn't directly involved, though recalls they referred to the guy as Coal Train Carl.

The responding deputy was Eric Seeman, Matheny said, who has since retired and who he called to see what he remembered.

Seeman recalled that the body had been so frozen by the time it was discovered that the coroner had a hard time getting him out of the railcar. He, too, wondered how he'd gotten into the car and noted how he wasn't dressed for the weather.

Former Cpl. Scott Appley, now retired, also showed up on scene that night. In his report, he notes that the body was lying face down with his arms underneath with cigarettes scattered on the floor of the car.

He also noted no obvious injuries and said it appeared the body had been there for a long time, the report states.

Retired Gillette police officer and former deputy coroner Steve Rozier also remembers Coal Train Carlos.

He questions what happened to all the evidence and wonders if any of it can be tracked down, including the belt that may provide the clearest clue.

Rozier also questions how the guy got into the coal car in the first place and whether there's more to the story that may never be told and why an autopsy was not done in the first place.

In the absence of answers, those like Harris and others will continue their work in helping to identify unnamed people like Coal Train Carlos.

"There's always hope," she said, "and all you can do is keep trying."

Not unprecedented "Coal Train Carlos" would not be the only unnamed person identified in the Mount Pisgah Cemetery.

Mary Lynn Anderson, whose body was found in a shallow grave 13 miles outside of Gillette in 1983, remained buried as a "Jane Doe" in the cemetery until her identity was discovered through a DNA match in 2014, according to the Doe Project, and her body was returned to her family in Minnesota.

Her murder remains unsolved.