A 25-year-old Alabama woman who vanished in July 2017 after fleeing a burglary emerged from dense woods nearly a month later, naked, severely underweight and covered in injuries, authorities said.
Lisa Joy Theris of Louisville was spotted walking along U.S. Highway 82 outside Union Springs in Bullock County around 2 p.m. on Aug. 12 by a passing motorist. Deputies took her to a local hospital, where she was treated for cuts, insect bites, rashes, severe sunburn and significant weight loss estimated at 40 to 50 pounds.
Theris later told investigators she had survived by eating berries and mushrooms and drinking water from brooks and puddles. When it rained, she squeezed water from her hair into her mouth. Bullock County Sheriff Raymond Rodgers said she had no shoes, phone, shelter or other supplies and had wandered through thousands of acres of isolated forest.
“She was in really, really bad shape,” Sgt. Chad Faulkner of the Bullock County Sheriff’s Office said. Faulkner and other officials described her will to live as extraordinary, with one calling the outcome a miracle.
Theris was last heard from by her father on July 18. She was reported missing to Troy police on July 23. Investigators determined she had been with Manley Green Davis, 31, of Pike County, and Randall Wade Oswald, 36, of Troy, when the men burglarized a hunting camp on Pleasant Hill Road in Midway in the early hours of July 19.
More than $40,000 in property, including ATVs, trailers, tools and chainsaws, was taken from the lodge. Officials said Theris did not know about the planned break-in and did not want to participate. She fled into the woods at night in an unfamiliar area and became lost.
Davis was arrested July 31 and Oswald in early August after leading officers on a multi-county chase. Both faced third-degree burglary and first-degree theft charges related to the hunting camp. Neither was charged in connection with Theris’s disappearance. While in custody, the men gave conflicting accounts and at one point accused each other of killing her, prompting searches with cadaver dogs and divers that turned up nothing.
Rodgers later told reporters he believed Theris and the men had used drugs and that she may have become disoriented and hallucinated. “Me personally, I think she was on meth, she was hallucinating and she just got lost in the woods,” he said in an interview with the Daily Mail. “She was probably so under the influence of drugs that she stripped her clothes off.” No toxicology results confirmed the theory, and Theris said she was unsure whether drugs played a role.
Theris’s mother, Joanne Theris, rejected the drug speculation as “fabricated gossip.” Family members described her condition after rescue as severely weakened, emaciated and in pain, yet said she remained resilient. Her brother Will Theris posted that she was “still standing” after 28 days and called her the strongest person he knew.
Theris, a radiology student at Wallace Community College who is legally blind without corrective lenses, had been facing a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge in Coffee County at the time of her disappearance. Prosecutors dropped the case on Aug. 10 after authorities presumed she was dead. Police said there was no indication she fabricated the survival account to avoid court.
Authorities confirmed she had genuinely remained in the woods for the duration. Search efforts involving multiple agencies never located her until the motorist’s call. Theris was reunited with family at the hospital and later returned home to recover.
