True Crime Conversations · Mamamia Podcasts

Trenny Gibson Went On A School Trip And Never Came Home

·54 min·5 clips

Sixteen-year-old Trenny Gibson left for a school field trip to the Smoky Mountains — and never came back.

True Crime Conversations opens in Knoxville on a dreary Friday in October 1976. Sixteen-year-old Trenny Gibson is on her way to school for her horticulture class when she learns on the bus that the field trip is going to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The weather is poor, and she has not brought a jacket. Robert Simpson, her big brother's best friend, lends her his warm brown plaid jacket, and she takes it. Forty students head into the mountains with their teacher. At 3.30 that afternoon, Mr Dunlap takes roll back on the bus and Trenny's name is still missing. He starts searching straight away and sends student Danny Johnson back up the trail. He also checks Double Springs, an area reached if someone leaves the route they were meant to follow. Around 4 p.m., he calls the National Park Service to report the missing student. A ranger comes down and joins the search. By 6.30 that night, 19 volunteers are out in the area. Still, nothing turns up. Trenny's family does not learn she is missing until the bus returns to school without her. The show also sits with that 1970s reality, when there were no mobile phones and no quick way to warn a parent. The case then turns to the loose ends that keep nagging at it: another student has Trenny's jewellery, Robert refuses to cooperate with police inquiries, and her scent is tracked to a nearby road before it disappears. Fifty years later, the question is still the same. Where did Trenny go?

As heard by us

A rainy school trip, a missing student, and a case that still resists a tidy explanation.

Trenny Gibson Went On A School Trip And Never Came Home follows a bleak October 1976 field trip from Knoxville to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where a 16-year-old heads out with her horticulture class and runs into rain, a missing jacket, and a hike she did not plan for.

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Why you'd press play

A rainy school hike, a borrowed jacket, and a disappearance that still has no answer fifty years later.

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