**Active AMBER Alert since June 16, 2021**
By Kelli Gunn
Summer Wells went missing from her home on Ben Hill Road in the Beech Creek area, close to Rogersville, TN on June 15, 2021. Her parents, Don Wells and Candus Bly, gave their first interview to New Channel 11 on June 29, 2021 in an attempt to calm rumors and give their account of what happened the day Summer went missing.
Unfortunately, the story they presented to the news had the opposite effect, sparking months of analysis by true crime content creators on YouTube, including several people who formerly worked in law enforcement. The story they offered to the public has many moving parts because it is not yet known which of those parts hold the key to what happened to Summer. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation considers everyone involved to be a suspect until they find Summer.
I have prepared a series of posts breaking down the language Candus uses to describe Summer, in general, and how she describes what happened the last day she saw her daughter. I took quite a bit of time to unpack each example, so rather than post thirty plus pages of text, I will post one point at a time, three times a week.
Before anything else, I want to acknowledge that I am cognizant of the fact that, while everyone remains a suspect, police have yet to charge anyone in connection with Summer’s disappearance. Also, there are real people at the heart of this story who have lost their child in a traumatic way, however that may have been.
There is also new situation that is quickly spiraling out of control in Rogersville this week as hungry YouTube content creators encroach on the Wells’ place of worship, their job site, and their home, “protesting” for Summer. In actuality, they are exploiting the loss of a child in exchange for money they receive from viewers who support their antics. The people involved in that onslaught of harassment have left a community, a church body, and a very vulnerable family feeling attacked and exposed.
Bearing all of that in mind, I’ve decided to adopt a more informal tone to my posts. I’m not a journalist. I’m not reporting. I’m taking a real world situation and applying my insights that I have gained throughout my life as a human, a writer, and a mother to do my part to keep the conversation about Summer going.
Now, to the interview:
“Something isn’t right” is acommon response in connection with Summer Wells’ disappearance, mainly stemming from the first news interview with her parents after she went missing. I don’t know what happened to Summer and I’m not trying to solve the case, as much as I want to see it resolved and for Summer to be safe. My skill set falls into the language, literature, writing category.
I’ve been writing about people all my life, which means I’ve also been observing. This series unpacks certain things that jump out at me as peculiar when I listen to Candus.
Problem One: Comic Strip Version of Events
On June 29, 2021, Candus Bly told News Channel 11 a version of events that reminded me of “Bazooka Joe” comics, those little two-frame comics that come wrapped around the bubble gum, minus the witty punchlines. Candus delivers her Bazooka Joe story in a series of concrete images I like to call “snapshots” that have no apparent congruency or connection and are one-dimensional in that only one activity is assigned to each person in each frame. Some examples are:
- Summer splashing in the water hole
- Summer planting flowers with Grandma and Candus
- Grandma giving Summer a peppermint
- Summer walking into the house to play with her brothers
- the three boys watching tv in the living room
- Candus adjusting her mother’s knee brace, and so on
These brief snapshots of the day are offered as concrete facts that don’t invite alternative explanations, despite the obvious gaps in the story.
Now, I am keeping in mind that Candus was most likely in a traumatized state when she gave that interview on the news and that she had drugs in her system. I’m not sure of the extent to which Candus has been using drugs, or which drugs she has been using, but I have noticed that every time anyone has been asked about drug use in connection to this case, meth is immediately mentioned. Don, especially, has had a lot to say about the dangers of meth and the general decrepitude of people who use it, often stating that he has to deal with them because they are on his road all the time. The frequency in which meth is mentioned in connection with the Wells leads me to believe it may have a larger role than it’s been given.
So, drugs may have prevented Candus from telling an accurate or believable story and that needs to be considered. I have no idea what the mental implications are of various drugs or how much cognition is effected, but I am willing to consider that her story sounds ridiculous to me because her mind isn’t operating properly and vague snapshots may be all she is capable of producing from her memory.
Watch for “Problem Two: Broad Brush Strokes” on Monday where I compare the way Candus describes her daughter with other parents whose children have gone missing!
But, is the snapshot story Candus tells actually a proactive tale to throw us all off the scent of what really went down? Is she actually more clever and cunning then we are giving her credit for? What we know about Candus, based on records available online, is this:
- she is a drug addict, possibly an alcoholic
- she has a long history of domestic abuse
- she’s given birth six or seven times and has none of her children living with her
- she has been charged for child abuse in her younger years
- she didn’t worry about driving Summer around without her car seat
- she provided alcohol and nicotine vapes to a minor child
- she has four children with a man who has recently been publically exposed as a child predator by his step-sister, Mary (who claims Don molested her daily starting when she was five, the age that Summer is now).
- Former friends allege that she often invited strangers back to her house to party, which means she was ok bringing potentially dangerous people around her small children.
That is a long string of big red flags, in my opinion, and it’s not even a comprehensive list.
Candus certainly has a capacity for crime, whether she is a hapless victim who lacks the insight to prevent herself from becoming enmeshed with people who wish her harm in some way, or she has a skillset that non-criminals would rarely see and we need to start asking what she’s hiding in the gaps between snapshots.
Could Candus possibly have been doing an OK job as a mother and just slipped up here and there or did Summer live an agonizing existence full of abuse, violence, and neglect so unpalatable that Candus invented a story in place of what truly happened?
One thing to consider is maybe everything happened exactly the way Candus claims. Maybe she wasn’t lying about walking Summer into the house that afternoon, meaning she really was watching her as closely as she says. If that was the case, there are only two reasons I can think of that a parent would be hyper-vigilant about her daughter in their own yard.
The first would be if Summer was a flight risk, which I don’t think is an unreasonable possibility. Don has said that they have to always tell the boys to remember Summer when they came in from outside, so maybe Summer liked to wander off sometimes. We know she wandered around in church because there is more than one video where Summer sought attention from her Sunday School teacher, Robin, and liked to be held by Robin while she was at the front of the church singing. If she is a flight-risk child, then wandering off into the mountains may not be an unreasonable explanation for what happened.
The second reason makes more sense to me given the situation and that is perhaps Candus and Don had an acquaintance who was known to take children, so they were already on alert to protect her. Maybe they did something dirty to that person or owed them money and the threat had been made before that if they didn’t pay that the person would collect payment any way they saw fit. It’s possible that Candus and Don lived for some time under a constant threat of having one of the children taken and that day it finally happened.
It’s also possible that this is a Catch 22 situation where Candus and Don have associated with so many shady characters who would potentially be low enough to take a child that they honestly don’t know who did it, but they can’t give up what information they do know because it would implicate them in something illegal.
Candus herself, won’t consider any alternatives to kidnapping. She says that she believes Summer was “lured” away from the property. The way she clings to that one narrative is partly what makes her story so suspicious. I think that she feels if she sticks to this story, eventually, police will believe her and leave her alone. In a later post in this series, I will go into more detail about why I believe Candus is doing more harm than good to her credibility by clinging to a story that doesn’t evolve.
At the end of the day, there are probably small veins of truth running through her story, but I believe Candus padded her story with details that she believed made her sound like a good parent who wouldn’t let anything happen to her baby. The image of her that she’s asking us to accept just does not jive with everything we have learned about Candus thus far.
Anyone with information on Summer Wells is asked to contact the Hawkins County Sheriff’s Office at 423-272-7121 or the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation at 1-800-TBI-FIND.
The Gunn Journal 