Dawn of Mantis: True Crime, Mysteries and More · Dawn of Mantis Podcast

DOM Ep343 - The Mysterious Death of Jordan Grider

August 29, 2025·1 hr 5 min·5 clips

Dawn of Mantis opens on Jordan Grider, a New Mexico native who spent much of his life living alone and off the grid. He traveled north into the wilderness of northern Minnesota. Then he disappeared from contact. For several months, nobody in his family could get him on the phone or even pin down where he had gone. The hosts lay out the case as a stack of details that never quite fit. Jordan’s truck showed up at the Sue Hustler trail parking lot. Police ran the plates and tied it to him. The family paid the tow bill to have it moved, which sounds like the sort of thing that should settle matters, except it did not. It only made the whole thing look more off. After that, the family still could not reach him. The silence stretched for days, then close to two weeks. On October 22, thirteen days after they had last heard from him, they called the sheriff’s department for a welfare check. They gave deputies a general location for the campsite and even shared a photo of a beaver pond that Jordan had sent back on October 8. The truck was searched. Inside were trash bags full of clothes, camping gear, a couple of Bibles, a large collection of knives, hunting knives, some tools, and a ukulele. That is not the kind of inventory that calms anybody down. It is the kind that makes everyone stop and look at the map again. Sheriff’s deputies and park rangers still could not find the campsite. They did find a baseball cap on the ground near the trail and kept it as evidence. Whether it actually belonged to Jordan was not clearly verified in the discussion. The hosts treat that uncertainty as part of the story, not something to smooth over. They do not pretend the evidence behaves itself just because everyone wants an answer. The case then sat cold through the rest of the winter. The episode leans into that coldness without getting stiff about it. The group keeps talking through the contradictions, the guesswork, and the empty spaces. One moment they are laying out the timeline in plain language. The next they are joking about the episode being the kind of mystery that annoys them because it refuses to resolve cleanly. That loose rhythm is part of the appeal. The prepared narrative gives the story shape, but the panel keeps tugging at it with questions, side comments, and skeptical asides. They do not race toward a polished theory. Instead, they sit with the fact that the available details are awkward and incomplete. By the end, the conversation is still stuck where the case itself is stuck. One theory involves a timber rattler. Another drifts toward poisoning. Then the show swerves into a wendigo joke, because of course it does. The point is not to solve the case by vibes. The point is to show how a strange death can stay strange even after everybody has done the digging.

As heard by us

A case-first episode that keeps the uncertainty intact.

Dawn of Mantis keeps Jordan Grider's death stubbornly unresolved. It follows a New Mexico native who lived alone and off the grid, vanished after heading into northern Minnesota, and was later found only through scattered remains.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a missing-person case that stays genuinely unresolved.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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