Turn-around site? The hamlet of Choice, 11 miles north of Mabel, is where Fravel claimed he turned around and went back to Winona the day that Maddi Kingsbury disappeared. Fravel told police he was alone. The area was widely searched by hundreds of volunteers in the weeks following Maddi’s disappearance. No trace was found until April 7. The body, sealed in a blanket, was hidden along a wooded side road four miles south of Choice off Highway 43. Image: Steve Lunde
Search of 800-acre property proved fruitless
WINONA, Minn. – Suspicions of foul play turned increasingly to her boyfriend, Adam Fravel, 10 days after Maddi Kingsbury vanished from their Winona townhouse. Among dozens of police documents just unsealed by Judge Mary Leahy is a report that a trail camera picked up Fravel in the woods on a Polaris Ranger four-wheeler near his parents’ rural home on April 9. A shovel was in the bed. Oddly, considering the day was a warm, Fravel was clad in dark heavy clothing. The trail-cam video was provided by neighbor of Fravel’s parents on County Road 18 four miles north of Mabel. The parents live four miles by road from where Maddi’s body was later found, but forest trails, which Fravel would have known since childhood, are shorter. The day after seeing the video, on April 10, police with a search warrant stopped Fravel on the Polaris. Cadaver dogs found no scent on the spade of the shovel. Police also searched the neighbor’s 800-acre property and found an area of fresh dirt that appeared to have been transported from elsewhere and dumped there. For the dogs, though, it was another dead end. It would be another two months before Maddi’s body would be found wrapped in a blanket and hidden along a little-traveled road four miles away near the hamlet of Choice.
Fravel. In jail awaiting trial on a murder charge.
Cadaver dogs
In a search a week after Maddi Kigsbury’s disappearance, the cadaver dogs were unable to pick up a scent. The dogs are trained to ignore live human and animal scents and go only for human remains.