Officials confirm Cave City body found is missing man John Adwell

CAVE CITY, Ky. – Officials are now confirming, after a preliminary autopsy, the body found in Cave City is missing 61-year-old John Adwell. 

Police also say there were no obvious signs of trauma to the body.

People have expressed concern about the time it took police to find the missing man, but police say the field was searched several times, but due to the weather and height of the corn, the body went unlocated for 13 days.

They flew the field multiple times with a drone, each time seeing nothing of concern.

Then, upon interviewing people, the investigators were pointed in all different directions, which they checked, to no avail.

So, they started back over at the corn field and noticed farmers were beginning to harvest that field.

“We initially took the report on that Friday evening after he had not been seen for approximately two days. So at that point, that puts us kind of behind the 8 ball to get started. So we did start immediately. We did start from that area on Saturday because we got the report late Friday night. So Saturday, during the day, we did start at that area. We did have a drone fly over that area. Our biggest issue was the heat, the heat and the corn cover. Our thermal camera was no benefit to us at that point. So we come back out that Sunday, flew that same field, just trying to find any discrepancies, anything like that with the thermal. Again, no luck. So at that point, we start interviewing more people, you know, progressing the investigation. Those interviews led us to different areas. So at that point, we had to use our manpower in those other areas to cross those off the list. At that point, once those areas didn’t check out, that’s when Emergency Management met us over here [Tuesday]. We started again back at that field where the drone would still no luck. Thankfully, the farmers were out there harvesting. We were able to notify them of a possibility due to that being the last area. The farmers were very diligent. They paid attention and they did locate him, which is fortunate for us because now we have that closure in that location of him. It is an unfortunate situation with finding him,” said Officer Billy Courtway, Cave City Police.

Officials notified the farmers to be on the lookout, and several hours later, a tractor driver found the body.