Father Convicted Of Murdering Son During Court-Ordered Thanksgiving Visit

Almost a decade after a Colorado boy suddenly seemed to vanish, his father has been convicted of killing him and then dumping the body.

On July 16, a Colorado jury deliberated for less than a day and found Mark Redwine guilty of murder and child abuse resulting in the death of his 13-year-old son, Dylan Redwine.

The boy mysteriously disappeared on November 19, 2012, one day after he flew to Durango, Colorado, for a court-ordered Thanksgiving visit with his father. Elaine Hall, who had full custody of the teenager after a contentious divorce from Mark, reportedly said their son was dreading the trip.

Mark picked his son up at the airport, and the two went to Walmart, surveillance video showed. According to Mark, he and Dylan then went to dinner and a movie.

The following day, Mark told investigators he got up early and went into town to run errands while his son slept on the couch. When he returned home just before noon, he claimed, the door was open and the television turned on — but his son was nowhere to be found.

As the hours passed, Mark said, he grew concerned and began looking for Dylan.

According to the Associated Press, Hall messaged her ex-husband hours after learning their child had gone missing. She wrote in the text: “He wouldn’t just leave He would have called me. I am so suspect of you right now. How could he just disappear?”

That evening, the boy’s mother and brother, Cory, drove from Colorado Springs to La Plata County in the southwestern part of the state and contacted police.

Investigators learned Dylan had last used his cell phone just after 9:30 the prior evening to text a friend to make plans to meet at 6:30 a.m. the day he purportedly disappeared. He never showed.

Elaine began to look closer at her ex-husband’s actions — or inaction — following their son’s disappearance. “He isn’t getting out and looking. Mark was sitting in his La-Z-Boy recliner watching TV," she once recalled in an interview with Investigation Discovery.

Mark countered: “As a parent, can you ever do enough to find a missing child? And until that child is found, I don’t think anybody has done enough.”

Police questioned Elaine and Mark and gave them both lie detector tests. Elaine said she passed, while Mark noted law enforcement officials told him he “failed it miserably.”

At the time, investigators said they did not consider Mark a suspect, however, he said, “I believe that they thought that I was involved with kidnapping my son.”

In June 2013, Dylan’s partial remains were located off a road on Middle Mountain. In November 2015, hikers discovered the boy’s skull a mile and a half away. The skull showed he had suffered injuries consistent with blunt force trauma to the head, KMGH-TV reported.

In July 2017, four and a half years after he went missing, authorities announced the boy was the victim of a homicide and arrested his father in Bellingham, Washington. Mark denied he was involved in his son’s death.

During Mark’s recent trial, prosecutors pointed out investigators had found traces of Dylan’s blood in the father’s home and cadaver-sniffing dogs had alerted in his truck.

Prosecutors also offered a motive for the murder: Dylan had stumbled upon compromising photos of his father dressed in women’s lingerie with a diaper in his mouth, the AP reported.

The defense dismissed the claim, arguing the boy did not wish to see his father over the holiday and a wild animal may have attacked him after he decided to run away, according to the outlet.

Redwine’s sentencing is currently scheduled for October.

For more on this heartbreaking story, stream the "Down the Hill" episode on the first season of Still A Mystery on discovery+.