Way out deep in the Nevada desert, way past tourist traps and military bases and working mines and strange religious cults, sits a sun-bleached, wind-burned house. Rural Nevada is peppered with houses like this. You can find such houses in the strangest of places if you search through satellite imagery. One thing that sets it apart is that it's surprisingly large, considering its remote location, and its peers. Somebody must have spent a fortune hauling all those construction crews and their supplies way out here, down dusty dirty roads. It also would have cost a pretty penny for all those generators and diesel fuel tanks, giant water cisterns, supplying even a swimming pool, and a lot of other amenities usually foregone by the hermits who build houses way out in the middle of nowhere Nevada.
On the other hand, there are a number of similarities between this house and other abandoned homes of this remote nature. In addition to the lack of luxury, there's the litter. Surrounding the house is a great refuse field of empty beer cans, broken beer bottles, emptied liquor bottles, and rusting shell casings. One gets the idea that way out here, with very little to do, a person can throw themselves a fine night of entertainment by filling their bellies with booze, and emptying their guns of ammunition.
The man who built this home, or at least paid to have it built, was a man named Trevor Chalmers. Originally from South Texas, Chalmers had spent his youth, and much of his middle age, middling around in lower management at a series of failing Texas oil businesses, all during the boom years of the 50s and 60s. He never made it very big, at least in oil.
After one lousy high-proof alcohol bender that threatened a total nervous breakdown, Chalmers had been sent on a trip to Arabia, selling high value equipment assets to the Saudis for top dollar. His bosses reaped the profits, everyone else reaped the pink slips.
It's not exactly clear, on the official record, what turned Chalmers' luck around. Yet he still ended up a great success at his next oil venture, which he soon sold at enormous profit and, sick of the oil business, moved to Las Vegas. Chalmers' associates described him as having a free wheeling and very dangerous gambling habit, but Chalmers was only gambling for the fun. He went to Las Vegas to do business.
First he bought stakes in a casino, soon he'd have controlling shares. Soon after that, he owned interest in casinos and hotels all up and down the strip. At his prime, it's estimated that Trevor Chalmers was worth just over a billion dollars.
The FBI suspected him of money laundering. Who he was working with was never obvious, and yet at the same time he wasn't bribing any politicians or people of power, so he was fair game for an investigation. Yet no amount of forensic accounting was able to provide any evidence for any conviction, so Chalmers was never charged, and he never even knew he was being watched. The man appeared squeaky clean, and he always paid his taxes, despite the extraordinary amount of luck and acumen he showed in his dealings. It was like he'd simply been blessed by God.
In the mid-1980s, Chalmers had some sort of emotional episode, finally breaking down and hitting rock bottom many years after that big near-miss.. Chalmers liquidated all of his assets, sold all of his shares, cashed in all of his retirement savings, and stuck all his money in a single Wells-Fargo bank account. It seemed he had no problem eating all of those penalties and fees associated with such action, then he fell off the grid.
Not so much that the FBI couldn't keep some tabs on him. It seemed Chalmers, now a few donuts short of a dozen, built a big house way out in the desert. His only contact with society was making runs for groceries and fresh tanks of water. Oh, and guns and ammunition. Trevor Chalmers hoarded guns, including getting all the proper permissions and licensing for fully automatic and very high caliber weaponry. The fancy stuff only the richest of gun nuts could afford. After all, he had nothing on his criminal record. This raised a couple of eyebrows at the FBI, and a few over at the BATF as well, but nothing came of it. Whatever case they might have had was long gone. Trevor Chalmers was a fish that got away, and he probably wasn't a very big fish anyway. Besides, they'd all seen this kind of thing before. Some shady businessman, probably laundering money for bad eggs like the Mafia or Colombian Cartels, gets spooked or has had enough, tries to break free and becomes some hard-to-reach recluse out in the middle of nowhere. They had a tendency to arm themselves to the teeth. They'd spend the rest of their lives paranoid, always wondering if the cartel would show up to take care of old business.
In 2007, a group of young, out-doorsy “Urb-ex” explorers (they were aware of the irony of the term, given it couldn't have been a more rural location), found Trevor Chalmers home. They'd found all the beer bottles and spent shell casings and all the other detritus that could be found in abundance at a dozen previous abandoned houses they'd explored. They found high powered very expensive weaponry just laying around in the dirt, covered in dust. That worried them. They'd have to report that to the police when they got back to society, probably. People don't just leave that sort of thing laying around. People coming to a bad end way out here, and nobody ever knew about it until they stumbled across it. The young adventurers were expected to find a corpse before they actually found it.
The wide sliding glass doors at the back of the house had all been shattered. So to all the windows. That wasn't too surprising, in bad storms, the wind can drive good sized pebbles at surprising speed. With no glaziers around to replace them, windward windows don't last too long. The desert had gotten in. There was a lot of dust. Desert rats and other critters had nested here and there, sometimes digging into the drywall. The roof hadn't held up to the rare yet heavy rains that come once or twice a year, and there was, oddly, a lot of water damage.
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The place had been a mess of unnatural causes long before nature got her turn. Here too were enumerable liquor bottles and empty food cans, and lots more empty shell casings. There were bullet holes and shotgun blasts that had ripped up a lot of the walls and what little was left of the furniture. It seemed to them that whoever had lived here, had a lot of personal demons that they were fighting.
They found his remains in the master bedroom.
The investigators never could determine when Chalmers had died, or exactly how. All that remained was a skeleton. He could have died in the 1990s as far as they knew. It wasn't a complete skeleton either, it had been scattered about by scavengers. Probably coyotes that had gotten in.
The skull was different from the other bones. Those had been gnawed on, before the insects stripped them clean. The skull, on the other hand, was shattered into a thousand little pieces. The Medical Examiner would guess, but not conclude, that Chalmers had taken his own life with one of the shotguns, also found in the room. After all, he'd been an old man, probably failing health, no family or friends. There was also a shotgun blast hole in the near wall, then again there were a lot of such holes all over the house. It was far too late to draw any solid conclusion, and the Medical Examiner wrote it up as “Death by misadventure.” This was the last time a government investigator would ever think of Trevor Chalmers at all.
There was something all of the investigators missed. It was a very important part to miss, if you had wanted to understand what had really happened there. It was the shell casings they found all over. They assumed it was just the sloppy leftovers of a gun nut playing with his toys, all alone all those last years. It wasn’t that at all.
Starting to the east above the complex was a rise, a small ridge. Up on this and across the ridge was a gun emplacement, a .50 caliber Browning heavy machine gun. Investigators supposed he had placed the gun here because of the view, it afforded a fine one of the flat plain sliding away to the East, a good place to fire any gun if you were into that kind of thing. They even noticed that Chalmers had placed stakes out on that plain at measured intervals, for range finding. They also noticed, though did not appreciate, the outdoor table, complete with umbrella, that he’d set up near the machine gun. The umbrella had long since blown off and wedged between nearby stones, the table overturned. They noticed large piles of empty beer and water bottles. They noticed several pairs of high price binoculars. Yet none of the detectives realized just how much time Chalmers had spent out here, under the shade of his umbrella, his view facing the sunrise. Watching. Waiting.
If they’d followed the easier footpath south then west around towards the main entrance to the homestead, they’d have seen more bullet casings. These were smaller, 5.56mm NATO casings, which made sense to the detectives. The M-16s, which Chalmers had been licensed to own, that Chalmers had fired this ammo from were far lighter and more portable than the Browning. He’d be able to fire them as he moved. Yet they didn’t notice they hadn’t been collected there over many years of Chalmers’ isolation. They’d collected there over minutes, over seconds, as Chalmers withdrew from his position near the picnic table. In some places they were laid out single file down the footpath, like a metallic string of pearls. Other times they laid out in little clusters, where Chalmers had dumped full mags. There were empty mags here too, discarded and never picked up.
Investigators were most impressed with the showpiece of Chalmer’s collection. To the south of the house, in a narrow defile between two ridges of stone, at the head of a trail that led curving north towards the front entrance, was where Chalmers had installed a 20 mm Oerlikon autocannon. It had once been an anti aircraft gun on a warship from WWII, before being sold as surplus after the war was over. He’d himself bought it at auction when a private museum had shut down.
Surrounding the gun emplacement was a large pile of 20 mm casings. Again, the gun was permanently fixed, and the investigators assumed Chalmers had just never bothered to pick up. They never guessed he had fired all these shells in one single action. There were several cases still full of ammunition. There was still a jammed shell in the breech, one that Chalmers had been unable to clear. The shell and the gun itself showed signs of partial melting, catastrophic overheating from excessive fire.
Leading up from the autocannon up to the front entrance to his house, largely unnoticed by investigators, were another chain of pearls of old casings, this of 9mm pistol casings, and in one place, a jammed 9 mm pistol. There were more pistols found in front of the house, and they appeared to match the holsters found on the remains of clothing found in the same bedroom as Chalmers remains.
At the entrance of the house, the same door that Chalmershad retreated through, was a rack of shotguns, Chalmers’ last hope. Many were still here when the hikers had found the home. Chalmers appears to have chosen a semiautomatic riot gun, which he discharged, as evidenced by holes in his walls, on his way back to his bedroom. This is where Chalmers met his final end.
One thing investigators did note is that there was not one single bullet or shell case that didn't obviously match one of Trevor Chalmers' guns. But of course there wouldn't be. He was out here alone, just shooting off his guns. They'd never suspected foul play in the first place.
Yet Chalmers hadn’t died alone. He had died fighting something. Something he had been preparing for years for, yet in the end it wouldn’t matter. A butcher whose bill was due. Something that didn’t shoot back. Something that couldn’t be stopped. Something that didn’t bleed. Something that couldn’t die.