- [Narrator] What is that viewer crew?
Think about being trapped in a cave, really trapped.
You have slid head first into a tunnel
between two larger caves, dark walls surround you so close
that you cannot even move your arms,
they're trapped at your sides.
You've gotten yourself stuck.
You are completely unable to for yourself
no matter what you do.
There is no way out.
You're counting on other people to come rescue you
and good news, they know exactly where you are.
You can even communicate with them,
even better, they've actually managed to grab hold of you
and I've started to pull you to freedom.
But just as you start to believe
that you might actually breathe fresh air again,
they lose their grip on you and you slide back down
into the pit, still unable to use your arms.
It is quickly dawning on both you and your rescue party
that there is nothing they can do to save you.
It's too dangerous to try to grab you again.
And even if they did want to risk it,
it takes so long to get to you
that you are likely to already be dead
by the time they reach you again.
Think about dying alone, totally trapped,
able to hear your friends and family
and even respond to them
but you know you'll never see them again.
You know they're going to leave you to die,
trapped down there in the dark and they do.
You die all alone, terrified, claustrophobic,
blood pooling in your head.
This is exactly what happened to John Jones
in Nutty Putty Cave.
The cave, named for the sticky moldable clay
that lines most of the walls of this network of caves.
Nutty Putty Cave is located just West of Utah Lake
in Northern Utah.
Unlike the expansive underground structures
you might be imagining,
this cave is actually a web of very tight tunnels,
opening up into slightly larger rooms.
Most of the time spent in the cave
is spent crawling through narrow passages,
making it an oddity that has attracted spelunkers
from all over the world.
The shoots are large enough for the average person
to navigate but small enough to make it a unique experience.
Since its discovery in 1960, thousands have made their way
through the cave on their hands and knees.
John Jones.
John grew up in the area.
His parents described him as good natured,
funny, hardworking and curious.
He and his family had made hundreds of outings
to surrounding caves as he was growing up.
They were not only familiar with the caves in the area
but with the appropriate safety measures
to take when exploring a cave.
When John grew up, he moved away from Utah,
settling in Virginia with his wife, Emily
and their year old daughter.
He was studying to become a doctor who took
a break from classes to travel back to Utah
for the thanksgiving holiday, his small family in too.
His brother, Josh, glad to have his brother back in town
for a few days, planned a caving expedition.
Nine of their friends and family members decided
to tag along, not including John's wife, Emily,
who is newly pregnant with their second child.
At 26, John had not been inside of a cave in years.
He was no longer the scrawny teenage boy scout
who could easily shimmy his way
through any crack and crevice.
He was just over six feet tall
and now weighed about 200 pounds
but he had loved caving as a boy
and was eager to get back out into the Utah wilderness
to do some exploring.
Even at this time of year,
as snow was blanketing nearby Salt Lake city,
the interior of the cave would be temperate,
heated by the geothermally warmed water
that had originally made the cave millennia ago.
It would be a fun outing.
The party arrived at the mouth of the cave at 8:00 p.m.
The next day, no one would be able to explain
why they had arrived at the cave so late.
Their first stop was the big slide,
wide enough for explorers to sit down and slide forward.
This one was one of the most expansive areas of the cave.
John, his brother, Josh and two of their friends
were not impressed.
They wanted a challenge.
They'd heard about Nutty Putty Cave all their lives
and were eager to find one of the tighter crevices
to squeeze through.
There were dozens of smaller passages that required twisting
and a precise pattern of movements to navigate.
And they weren't going to leave the cave
without trying one.
An hour after entering the cave,
the foreman broke off from their group
in search of a formation called the birth canal.
If you enter the birth canal head first,
you slide out onto a smaller circular room
that gives way to even more claustrophobic passages.
When John would later be located by rescue teams,
they would see that the group
had overshot the birth canal and were properly lost.
In the moment, however, he believed he found
the right tunnel and headed inside,
leading with his head and inching along by moving his hips.
It would only be a few short minutes before he would realize
he'd made a huge mistake.
When he realized that this was not in fact
the tunnel he had been looking for
there was no way for him to turn around
or to slide backwards.
The only option was to keep going forward,
ahead however, the passage only became tighter.
He exhaled pushing the air from his lungs
to help flatten his chest and inch forward again.
That was his final mistake.
When he took his next breath, his lungs expanded
and he was stuck.
Unable to move forward
and certainly unable to move backwards.
As he struggled to free himself,
the headline he'd been wearing slid off his head
and disappeared down the tunnel in front of him.
He was trapped.
He was alone and the dark was closing in.
Josh found his brother quickly.
He could reach his brother's legs and desperately tried
to pull him back out of the tunnel,
but was not strong enough to free him
from the vice-like grip of the caves walls.
The pulling loosened him a little
but when Josh lost his grip on John's legs,
he only slid further into the tunnel,
pinning his arms under his chest.
The fact that John was in serious danger,
dawned on the brothers quickly,
they shared a quick desperate prayer
and then Josh made for the cave entrance to call for help.
Because of the location of the cave itself
and how deeply in the cave John was stuck.
It took more than an hour for search and rescue
to make their way to John's position
with the equipment they hoped they could use
to extricate him from the tunnel.
It seemed like an easy enough task.
Just grab his legs and pull him backwards.
If he could slide in, then he could slide out.
By the time that the first rescuer reached John,
he had been in the tunnel for over three hours.
She told John her name was Susie Mattola.
She was covered in dirt, mud and sweat
from the long winding track down to where John lay
almost upside down.
John responded, "Hi Susie, thanks for coming
"but I really, really want to get out."
Susie was significantly smaller than John
and she knew every inch of Nutty Putty Cave.
That's why she had volunteered to go in first.
At five three she could at least get her arms out
in front of her after inching her way out of the tunnel.
She told John, "Oh, no worries.
"You're going to be out of here like it split."
That wasn't the case.
Susie started by tying a rope around John's legs
and running it back to the team,
waiting higher up in the cave.
The three rescuers weren't strong enough
to dislodge him from the crevice.
She tried to have him twist into a different position
but they still couldn't leverage him out of the tunnel.
She tried cutting away his clothing,
hoping they would be able to peel it back
and give him an extra inch of room.
None of these efforts netted any improvement
in John's situation.
Susie tried to keep John talking,
talking would keep both of them calm
but the human body isn't designed to be tipped forward
like John was for any length of time.
When standing upright, the heart can use gravity
to do a lot of the work of circulating blood.
Flipped upside down like John was,
his heart was having difficulty pumping the blood
pooling in his chest and head.
Susie could hear the sound of fluids starting
to collect in his lungs as John talked.
After two hours, sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m.
on November 25th, Susie had exhausted her options.
She told John to hold on and crawled back up to the surface.
Another member of the surgeon rescue team
joined John in the tunnel.
Up above the team had been putting together a pulley system,
each piece had to be carefully lowered into the cave.
The team had to find somewhere to anchor the pulleys
in the brittle stone of the cave walls
but they were optimistic as the night dragged on more
and more people responded to the call.
They began offering alternative ideas.
Could they reach the tunnel from the other side?
Could they cover him in oil and slide him out?
Could they bring an industrial drill?
These ideas were all too dangerous
or were made impossible by the size and shape of the cave.
The main team of rescuers continued to work
on the pulley system.
It was the same idea that had pulled a teenager
in a similar predicament to safety only a few years earlier
that teenager had been 60 pounds lighter
and considerably shorter.
But as they hooked John up and started to winch in the line,
it looked like it was going to work
until John's feet hit the ceiling of the tunnel.
He had been tipped forward for so long
that even the slightest pressure on his legs
caused him so much pain that he screamed.
Poor dawned on the rescuers as they discovered
that the tunnel was angled in such a way
that John could not be pulled straight upwards out of it.
They would have to bend his legs backwards
over his body, breaking them.
He was already in so much pain and his body
was already struggling to stay awake and alive.
The pain could send him into shock
and the shock could kill him even faster.
This was the 12 hour mark.
The powdery walls of the cave or doing a poor job
of holding the pulley systems cams.
So the rescue team began to try to drill deeper holes,
to anchor them more securely.
They were just going to have to break John's legs
and try to pull him to safety quickly enough
to treat the shock.
John was waning.
When Susie had first slid down into the tunnel behind him,
he was coherent, answering her questions,
talking to her about religion, music and her family.
Now he was accusing the rescuers
of having put him in the tunnel.
He'd been calmed before to his credit,
it had taken 12 hours for panic to truly set in.
It was all consuming now.
He kicked and thrashed, calming down
only when the rescuers prompted him to talk
about his wife and Emily and their one-year-old.
On the morning of November 25th,
Emily was allowed to come to the scene
and talk to John through a radio.
They were both panicked, crying
but John promised her he was going to get out.
It was late afternoon by the time
the new pulley system was in place.
After 19 hours upside down, the team was ready
to pull him to safety.
Slowly allowing him to rest every few minutes
as they yanked him upwards,
both John and the rescuers knew they were going
to get him out.
At the mouth of the cave, the line suddenly went slack
and the eight people pulling it sprawled backwards.
Later, they would learn that the stone arch
above the tunnel, through which they had threaded
the rope attached to the pulleys was broken.
It rained rock down on John.
A Caribbean plummeted into the phase of the rescuer
at John side, knocking him out and breaking his jaw.
When the wounded rescuer was hauled out
and another slid in, John asked if he was going to die.
The team assured him that they were going to get him out.
The last thing John would ever do was to ask
about the rescuer who had been in the tunnel with him
when the pulley system failed.
He asked, "is he okay?"
And then nothing.
The team continued to try to pull him out.
- [Man] Rescuer say John is exhausted.
They were able to pull into a more comfortable position
for a short period of time and even provided him
with food and water but then equipment fail.
They tried to drill new holes to support the pulleys
but they were exhausted.
They had to swap positions frequently
and only one person could ascend
or descend the cave at one time.
Emily believed her husband would survive.
He was unconscious, the team told her
but he was alive.
She told him, I know you've been pushing so hard
for so long, why don't you rest for a minute
and take a break?
And then you can push again.
He couldn't hear her.
Over 25 hours after John crawled into the tunnel
and got stuck, a paramedic braved the frightening press
of Nutty Putty Cave and pronounced him dead.
Emily was not so sure.
They had been trying to take his pulse in his legs
but his heart hadn't been able to pump blood
into his legs for hours.
How could they really know whether or not he was breathing?
He might still just be unconscious.
How could she leave him there?
Not knowing whether or not he was really dead.
Finally, she agreed to leave Nutty Putty Cave
when Utah County Sheriff's Lieutenant Tom Hodgson,
the commander on the scene,
promised her that they would get her husband's body
out of the cave.
Even that however, turned out to be a hollow promise
after hours of trying.
Even after they were sure that John Jones was dead,
the entire team realized that as impossible as it had been
to get John out when he was alive,
it would be even more impossible now that he was dead.
He was no longer able to push.
The tunnel was a tight corkscrew.
And with his body limp and lifeless,
he couldn't twist to help them maneuver
his body out of the space.
Hodgson decided that it was too dangerous
to continue to try to get him out.
Instead, they would seal the entrance of the cave
with John's body inside.
His death had been torturous.
It had been physically painful, yes
but the trauma of believing he was going to get out
and then having that dashed twice
would have been much more terrifying.
The deep seated fears of loneliness and of the dark
reared their heads as John died.
Out there in the Utah desert Nutty Putty Cave
is John Jones tomb, leaving only a bleached skeleton behind
all alone, still wedged in that twisted tunnel.