Owner of home where boy suffered one of worst deaths possible raised major doubt over tragedy

In 2008, an 18-year-old named Joshua Maddux left his family home and went for a short walk which he never returned from.

His family hoped he was still alive and wondered if he'd 'decided to leave town and start a new life', while his father Mike searched homeless shelters and campgrounds around Colorado in an attempt to find his missing son.

"I got up one morning and he was there, then he just never came home," Mike told Sky News of his missing son.

"We thought he was with friends, but no one had seen him. It's a long-term thing where you're grieving on hold."

It was seven years later when the truth was discovered, as construction workers tearing down a cabin noticed an awful smell which they traced to a blocked-up chimney, and when they investigated they found human remains stuck in there.

Joshua Maddux went missing in 2008 and his body wasn't found until 2015 (Handout)

Folded up clothes had been neatly left by the fireplace and inside the chimney were the mummified remains of Joshua Maddux, who was identified through his dental records and him missing the tip of his right index finger as he'd lost it in a bike accident as a child.

The county coroner ruled that Joshua's death was 'accidental by unknown cause', believing that the teenager climbed into the chimney and got stuck, then died from either exposure or a lack of food and water.

Either way, it sounds like one of the worst possible ways to die, being trapped in the foetal position inside a chimney for an unknown period of time before he died.

However, according to the Denver Post, the cabin owner had some doubts about the official version of events.

The cabin owner was a builder named Chuck Murphy who said that his brother had been living in the home until a few years before Joshua went missing, after which point it was used for storage and would be left alone apart from occasionally being broken into.

The owner of the abandoned cabin where his body was found said he couldn't have climbed down the chimney (NamUs)

Murphy said he didn't believe Joshua could have climbed down the chimney because he'd installed a steel bar in it to keep animals from getting inside the cabin.

He said: "There’s no way that guy crawled inside that chimney with that steel webbing. He didn’t come down the chimney."

That would appear to eliminate the chimney as Joshua's entry point to the home, though given his clothes were folded by the fireplace it would indicate that he entered it from the inside.

Such a detail throws up another complication, as the bottom of the fireplace had been blocked by a large piece of furniture which raises questions to which there may never be an answer.

County coroner Al Born said it was a 'very confusing' case which had 'no answers to a number of things'.