Chaos Divers Jacob Grubbs and Lindsay Bussick place a remote controlled sonar boat in a pond off Miller Lane in Columbus, searching for the remains of James Ryan Taylor.
After 30 minutes of scanning the water, the boat comes up empty handed. The team then packs up and moves on to a new location for the search.
“Sometimes we are in a body of water like this for 20 or 30 minutes and find nothing,” Bussick said. “Then we just move on to the next spot.”
Since Taylor disappeared in July 2020, neither his remains nor his car has been recovered, although four people have been charged in connection with his alleged murder after authorities declared him deceased in 2021. The family is offering a $10,000 reward for any information that leads to the recovery of his remains.
Karli, Taylor’s niece, said she reached out to Grubbs in 2021 after receiving a tip that her uncle was dragged into a river.
“I tried another group, but they told me they don’t do searches and then recommended Chaos Divers,” she said. “They have been helping us find Ryan since then.”
Over the past two years, the team has visited Lowndes County four times and has searched Lake Lowndes, Officers Lake, the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway and the Luxapalila Creek. In those efforts, they have recovered two vehicles, but neither were related to Taylor or his disappearance, Bussick said.
“All we have found here so far are a few cars that came back as stolen,” she said. “We will continue searching for Ryan until we find him or the family asks us to stop.”
How it started
Chaos Divers was founded in Illinois after Grubbs received his scuba diving certification while he worked as a coal miner.
As a hobby, he and a friend began cleaning out waterways in Illinois and along the Ohio River, specifically removing things like garbage and vehicles. On one of those jobs, they found a body.
“I first started out just wanting to clean water systems,” Grubbs said. “After we found someone, we got together with a diving group called Team Waters out of St. Louis, who had found a vehicle that matched the description of someone named Nathan Ashby in the Missouri River, and I helped recover Nathan Ashby.”
Ashby went missing from his hometown of Warrenton, Missouri, in 2019.
After that, Grubbs said he assembled a team with Bussick and a few others to investigate active and cold cases of missing persons. Since then, they have traveled to Ohio, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Illinois and other states. They have so far worked on more than 50 cases and recovered the remains of 17 people.
“Getting a company to come out here and do this type of work would cost a bloody fortune, and we’re fortunate enough to do this because of our supporters,” Grubbs said. “Being popular is helping us to help these families for free, and it’s a beautiful feeling.”
To do this, Grubbs and Bussick said they started a YouTube channel to raise funds for their diving trips, and they take donations via GoFundMe and Facebook.
Their YouTube channel has garnered more than 16.8 million views and 213,000 subscribers.
While the equipment costs can run more than $10,000, Bussick said, they don’t take payment from the family they are helping.
“We are a for-profit company in the sense that YouTube and Facebook pay us essentially as content creators,” Bussick said. “This allows us to put the stories out and bring awareness to the missing person case. If it’s a cold case, then it allows us to bring it back to the forefront of people’s minds.”
How they do it
Grubbs said each diving trip can take anywhere between a few days to several weeks, depending on the scope of the search.
The team first gathers information about the missing person from the family and facts about disappearances from case files. Once Grubbs and Bussick get a lead, they hit the waters with a fishing boat, a remote controlled sonar vessel, underwater scopes and cameras to record the whole process.
If they find a vehicle under the water, they attach a large magnet to it, suit up and dive down to see if it’s connected to the case they are working on. In some instances, they also find the body associated with it.
“We’ve found cars so far out it looks like it would have been dropped down from a helicopter,” Grubbs said.
If they find a vehicle, Grubbs said they drag it as close to shore as possible and call local authorities and a towing company to remove it.
New efforts to find Taylor
Grubbs said that after searching the larger bodies of water in the area, the team is now focusing on searching private ponds, creeks and lakes where the family has heard Taylor might have been.
Bussick said they have already searched eight places since arriving in Columbus Monday and plan on searching 14 others before leaving Sunday.
“We’ve knocked off all of the options of where Ryan was supposed to be,” Bussick said. “ We’ve heard he was in the Luxapalila Creek at a boat ramp, and we heard he would be in Officers Lake, but we have knocked out all of those locations at this point. Now, it’s focusing on those suspected to be involved with Ryan’s disappearance and identifying associates and locations he could be.”
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 34 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
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