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Troy Cleaver

Troy Cleaver is the name of the dead man found in a stolen Chewbacca costume on Frotter Comstock's land, an ex-military drifter who staged fake Bigfoot sightings around Dahlonega, Georgia, and who, according to Clive, was the mercenary who smelted gold for Jan's Conspiracy.
Type NPC (deceased)
Aliases John Doe; the drifter; the Chewbacca man; the hoaxer; the mercenary; the Bigfoot guy
Affiliation Jan's Conspiracy
Status Dead, shot in the back of the head
First appearance Appalachia 06 (as an unidentified body); named in Appalachia 07
Played by Andre

Description

The body was a white man of 25 to 35 with a military haircut, scars, fit build and calloused hands. His face was crumpled with the eyes hanging out. Under the costume he wore a plain white T-shirt, blue jeans, nondescript sneakers and white socks, with every clothing tag cut out, even the one on the belt. His pockets were empty. He had a small anchor tattoo on a bicep and a small trident tattoo on a calf, which Kurt took to be a Navy SEAL emblem (Appalachia 06).

History

Discovery

Frotter Comstock reported a dead Bigfoot on his land and refused to touch it for fear of disease. Andrew Howard looked down from the hilltop and found a man in an expensive Chewbacca costume soaked in real blood, with a wound like a gangland execution. Kurt found no body armor and ruled out UTAW ("he's not one of my boys"). Blood pooling matched the way the body lay, and the spatter showed he was shot standing, dead-center from behind; Kurt's best guess for the weapon was a .357 Magnum fired at point-blank range (Appalachia 06).

Ezra's character, the Biz, found ATV tracks that stopped near the body and continued down the mountain toward the freeway. He also found a snapped plaster-of-Paris toe matching the fake Bigfoot footprints in the mud. The molds were missing, so someone had cleaned up after the killing. The costume's bandolier had also been removed. The costume itself was traced to Derek Edwards, who said it vanished from Apollo's dry cleaners eight months earlier (see Chewbacca Costume) (Appalachia 06).

Tracing the drifter

The Spud Hut counter savant recognized the photo: the man had visited three times (4, 9 and 25 days earlier), paid cash, wore a holster and had no ID. He arrived by ATV, and once he was in the restaurant at the same time as a man in a business suit, though the two did not speak. The Spud Hut auditor said he was not on the plant's employee list. The owner of Apollo's described him as an out-of-town drifter who stood watching, sometimes on a walkie-talkie. The clerk at the Motel and Suites said he registered as "John Doe", paid cash, was picked up on an ATV by a helmeted man once or twice, and had a female caller a couple of times. His belongings were thrown out after he stopped renewing the room (Appalachia 06).

In the motel dumpster the team found his briefcase with a false lining shaped for a high-caliber handgun, about $10,000 in hundreds and twenties, a coil of animal hair in one snakeskin boot, and a walkie-talkie in the other. Kurt read him as a mercenary, possibly sent to kill someone and double-crossed, and the team later spent part of the cash on dinner for the Circle Chasers (Appalachia 06, Appalachia 07).

The name Troy Cleaver first appears in the recap that opens Appalachia 07, when Andre refers to the garbage the team had been searching as Troy Cleaver's. The photos had been sent to the FBI for identification at the end of the previous session, but the episodes never show the identification being made (Appalachia 07).

Role in Jan's operation

In the mines beneath the Spud Hut plant, Clive described Jan's conspiracy as five people: Jan, Clive, a mercenary who melted the gold down, and two bodyguards. Dante and Ezra's characters recognized the mercenary as "the Bigfoot guy", and Kurt told Clive that a man in a Bigfoot costume with ex-military tattoos had been found dead in the forest. Clive was dismayed that the Chewbacca costume had been used: he did not know where the mercenary got it, and said he had told him people would know it was Chewbacca. He explained that some of the workers had escaped and been seen, that Jan told him the mercenary had put one of them down, and that the fake sightings were meant to discredit the real ones (Appalachia 09).

In the epilogue, Kurt asks Jan about "the mercenary, who I assume you took care of in the woods"; Jan does not dispute it (Walkers 01).

Trivia

  • It is never established who pulled the trigger. Frotter Comstock was suspected only briefly, and Kurt did not think he was the killer. Kurt assumes Jan was responsible, but no one confirms it.
  • It is never established whether Cleaver is the naked, hairy "Chewbacca" figure that Monica Cartwright saw at her driveway before getting into a black sedan, or who the helmeted ATV rider and the businessman at the Spud Hut were.

Appearances