Student ‘mysteriously vanished’ from SC college town. What we know 25 years later
A student “mysteriously vanished” from a South Carolina college town in 1998 — and hasn’t been seen since, officials said.
Now, 25 years later, deputies are still seeking clues about the disappearance of Jason Knapp. The York, Pennsylvania, native was 20 years old when he reportedly was last seen at his apartment in Clemson, South Carolina, on April 11, 1998.
Then, 10 days after he was last seen, his Chevrolet Beretta was found abandoned about 30 miles from his apartment. It was found in a parking area at the vast Table Rock State Park, which spans 3,000 acres of mountain terrain, according to the Pickens County Sheriff’s Office and the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
The discovery sparked “extensive searches” of the area, and a lake was drained at one point after Knapp’s disappearance. Chief Deputy Chuck James told McClatchy News in a phone interview that the parking lot is a gateway to miles of trails at the park.
“It’s dense trees and vegetation in a mountainous area,” James said. “Searching those types of areas can also be very difficult because there are areas that are in some cases inaccessible just due to the danger.”
At the time of his disappearance, Knapp was a mechanical engineering student at Clemson University. He had just gotten into the “elite” Pershing Rifles ROTC program and shared his excitement with his mom days before he went missing, officials said.
“He was totally looking forward to the future,” friend Amanda Outen told The Greenville News in 2014. “He had so many things to look forward to. He was just in a happy place.”
Knapp, who has brown hair and blue eyes, was “wearing a t-shirt, blue jeans, and blue sneakers” when his roommates last saw him leaving their apartment complex. They believe he was going to a restaurant over Easter weekend in 1998, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and a post that deputies shared in 2015.
After Knapp’s car was found in Table Rock, his mother Deborah Boogher said she met with the park manager for years to get search updates. Her son wouldn’t go hiking alone and didn’t tell his friends about going to the park, she told The York Dispatch in 2018.
“That’s the one thing to this day that I don’t understand,” she told the newspaper. “It’s all a mystery to me.”
Twenty years after the disappearance, Boogher told the newspaper her son had been declared legally dead, despite no body being found. Deputies said there isn’t evidence of foul play in the case, but they haven’t ruled it out in their investigation.
Then in 2022, an age-progression photo was released to help people visualize how Knapp would look as a 44-year-old. But the release didn’t produce leads, and tips slowly have been trickling in over the past few years, James said.
“25 years later Jason’s mom, Deborah Boogher, still holds on to the hope that she will find the answers she has been searching for and longs to bring her son home safely,” the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children wrote April 12 on Facebook. “Deborah told NCMEC that several years ago she created scrapbooks filled with cherished photographs, mementos, and belongings of Jason. She holds these close to her heart and hopes that they will be passed down through their family.”
Anyone with information about the case is asked to call the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 800-843-5678 or the sheriff’s office at 864-898-5500.
Clemson is roughly 30 miles southwest of Greenville.
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