Everyone chalked it up to playoff pressure. The undefeated season. The scouts in the stands. The weight of carrying an entire coal-town’s dreams on a 46-year-old man’s shoulders. When Travis Turner started snapping at assistants, forgetting play sheets, and staring into the tree line like it was calling his name, people said: “Coach is just in his head. Happens every November.”

They were wrong.

The 14-page timeline released today by the Turner family’s attorney doesn’t just prove he knew the police were coming. It proves he’d been building his exit strategy since the first kickoff of the season; long before the NCMEC cyber-tip, long before the warrants, long before anyone realised the monster wore a whistle and a smile.

Here is the cold, methodical countdown that no one saw coming.

August 23 – Season Opener vs. Gate City After the 42-14 blowout, while the team dog-piles on the 50-yard line, Travis quietly buys two one-way Greyhound tickets online from a library computer in Norton: Big Stone Gap → Asheville → cash purchase for the connecting legs. Destination left blank. He never prints them. Just screenshots them to an encrypted folder titled “Rain Delay.”

September 6 – Homecoming He tells Emily he’s taking the equipment truck to Bristol for repairs. Instead, he drives 40 miles to an outdoor outfitter in Kingsport and spends $1,847 cash on gear: a two-person ultralight tent, a water purifier, a Garmin inReach Mini, and a topographical map of the Clinch Ranger District. The clerk remembers him joking, “Gotta be ready if we go all the way to states and the bus breaks down.” Receipt found crumpled in his desk drawer last week.

September 27 – Bye Week While the team gets a Saturday off, Travis and J spend six hours hiking the High Knob Tower trail “for conditioning.” GPS data from J’s Apple Watch (subpoenaed yesterday) shows they weren’t conditioning. They were caching. Three separate drops: a waterproof Pelican case with protein bars and a burner phone; a buried ammo can with $2,000 in twenties; a hollowed-out log stuffed with socks, underwear, and a note in Travis’s handwriting: “Phase 1 complete. You did good, kid.”

October 11 – Away Game at Grundy On the three-hour bus ride home, Travis sits alone in the back row. A parent filming the victory sing-along catches him on video staring out the window, mouthing the same sentence over and over. Lip-readers hired by WDBJ-7 confirm it: “After the lights go out, we go.”

October 18 – Senior Night During the pre-game ceremony, when each senior runs through the tunnel with their parents, Travis pulls J’s mom aside and says, “Your boy’s special. I see a future in him no one else does.” She thought it was coach talk. Now she cries every time she hears it.

October 25 – Region Clinching Win Post-game, while the town parties at the Dairy Queen, Travis drives to the closed-down Roaring Fork Baptist Church at 1:14 a.m. Ring camera footage from a nearby hunting cabin shows his truck parked for 47 minutes. Thermal drone imagery flown yesterday found fresh soil disturbance inside the burned-out foundation. Investigators won’t say what they dug up, but the hole was exactly six feet long and two feet wide.

November 1 – Playoff Bye He tells Emily he’s taking the boosters’ leftover concession money to the bank. Bank cameras show he never entered. Instead, he withdrew the final $1,400 from the booster-club account in three separate transactions, all cash. The booster president still has the text Travis sent that night: “Sorry for the short notice. Family emergency coming. Might need to step away after the season.”

November 15 – First-Round Playoff Win After the 40-7 rout, Travis gathers the team for the last breakdown of the night. He ends it differently than usual. No “one play at a time.” Just this: “Some of you will remember me as the guy who got you here. Some of you won’t. Either way, keep running the play even when the stadium’s empty.” Players thought he was being deep. Now they know he was saying goodbye.

November 20 – The Day the Plan Went Live 6:14 a.m. – NCMEC alert hits his phone. 6:37 a.m. – He wakes J with a single text: “It’s time.” 7:05 a.m. – Final duffel packed in the garage. 7:42 a.m. – Mickey Mouse pancakes and too many hugs. 8:15 a.m. – Tells Emily, “If they come, it’s a mix-up. I love you.” 9:47 p.m. – Walmart handoff. 9:48 p.m. – Two silhouettes disappear into the trees that have swallowed men for centuries.

The timeline ends with a single line scrawled on the back page in red Sharpie:

“I didn’t plan to hurt anyone. I planned to disappear so cleanly no one would ever have to choose between loving me and hating what I did. I was wrong.”

Tonight, as the temperature drops to 18°F and search choppers beat the air above No-Name Knob, the people who cheered loudest for Travis Turner are learning the hardest truth of all:

He wasn’t stressed about playoffs.

He was counting down the games until the season; and his life as they knew it; was finally over.

The lights are out. The stadium is empty. And somewhere in those black pines, the final play is still running.