it is hard to find closure with the unknown. "He contacted my sister regarding his expedition fall '06 It is surmised his cancer, which had been in remission, had returned and this walk in the woods and down river was to defy the odds. The June before Griffis faded away into the wilderness, Sue Nott, 36, and Karen McNeill, 37, went missing on 17,400-foot Mount Foraker in the Alaska Range. Any number of climbers are missing from the missing list, though they have never officially been declared dead. She was found safe. And yet, something happened, and he disappeared without a trace into a land that sometimes leaves few traces. Keith Mallard, who has participated in scores of searches. Miller is a white woman with brown hair and brown eyes. Winds light and variable. When everyone was settled around the dining-room table, the captain started reading. The partial jawbone in. Hed lost a son, thought hed found him, and lost him again. Confirmed by DNA. story is now being updated. Aug 23, 2006 . I guess if he did it, he did it. He was like a few others who have over the years turned to ghosts in the scabrous vastness of Alaska. His patched together boat was found on a beach at Cape Douglas. Four months later, in January of 2015, I flew back to the Kenai Peninsula. Dolly recruited snowmobilers and pilots to go over the search area again and again. Had the men succumbed to that river, they would have joined the likes of Harper, or 28-year-old Peter Kysar, who tried to float out of the area via the White River only to drown, or Griffis, who started a hike up the White only to disappear. Mounties found where Griffis paid for a bus ticket north. The two women plastered the communities along the Sterling Highway with missing-person posters. The missing in Alaska - Craig Medred Enter your email address to follow Craigmedred.news and receive notifications of new stories by email. After almost four hours, Jane entered a meadow and peered into a small, shaded clearing. It was about 8 p.m. local time on July 4 when Seward, Alaska's Fire Department received word that 66-year-old Michael LeMaitre of Anchorage, was missing. By 6:30 that evening, more than four hours after the start of a race that takes most people less than two hours to complete, LeMaitre's wife, Peggy, was worried. Alaska encompasses 39 mountain ranges, 12,000 rivers, 100,000 glaciers, and 3 million lakes. The great majority of cases involve young runaways who eventually turn up alive, said investigator Bill Hughes, who manages the clearinghouse. The Race Point timers, whod been high on the mountain in inclement weather for more than three hours, were headed down to warm up when they passed LeMaitre. If theres anything we can do, or if you just want to talk, call us, Dolly said. It was like he was planning on coming back.. In the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta, in western Alaska, the Bethel Search and Rescue group puts up color-coded markers. Their stories are represented by color-coded flags dotted across an Alaska map in Hughes office. Investigators from the medical examiners office tracked down the X-rays at Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage and gave them to two forensic anthropologists. One such recent find _ a human foot inside a shoe discovered in northwestern Alaska _ is being sent to the FBI's new National Missing Person DNA Database at the agency's Quantico, Va., academy. Please use the button below to verify an existing account or to purchase a new subscription. "But we may never get to know what happened to him. Jane called Leon, who was living in Bremerton, Washington; he flew to the Kenai the next day. Hed fished and hunted since he was a child. Jenny Miller Obituary (1984 - 2015) - Juneau, AK - Juneau Empire Landslides, avalanches, fissuring glaciers, overflowing rivers, and collapsing riverbanks all make travel unpredictable at best. He remains missing. But probably the best known missing person case in wild Alaska involves 66-year-old Michael LeMaitre of Anchorage who went up Mount Marathon on July 4, 2012 and never came down. Jenna Miller. The late Bradford Washburn -- the famed director of the Museum of Science in Boston who died at the ripe, old age of 96 at his home in Lexington, Mass. He left some of his gear at a lodge near the White River. People on foot scoured all likely routes down the east side of Mount Marathon. "As I searched the gullies on the north side of this ridge,'' Kelley wrote, "I hoped that my logic would lead me to solve the LeMaitre disappearance mystery. That same morning, in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, Lieutenant Kat Shuey read an almost identical letter to a man named Leon Bennett. The official version of events, according to a still active missing person's bulletin from the Alaska State Troopers is that Griffis went into the wild "to test out a survival 'cocoon' that he had invented. Chance of rain 40%. The skeleton was found about 300 yards from Richards trailer. Because of senility, he might have set out on foot, only to encounter a bear or fall into the nearby Nushagak River. Some of Alaska's unsolved missing persons cases are detailed on the trooper clearinghouse Web site, including that of Charlie Chocknok, an elderly Yupik Eskimo last seen walking near the New Stuyahok village airport in July 2000. In 2005, Richard was 39 and living alone in a trailer on the outskirts of Sterling, a short walk from the Kenai River and half a mile from the spot where Rick Hillss red Dodge truck had been found the previous year. Later, Dolly began to hear from people around town. A GoFundMe account has been opened for the family of Texan Brad Broach, who has joined the missing in Alaska. The Alaska missing person's bulletin refers questions on Griffis's "Sept. 20, 2006" disappearance to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Beaver Creek. But you cant ignore that theres a possibility. The Alaskan bush would suit his sons temperament and skills. And still there are those who go lost never to be found by searchers. Once in a while, the dead return. Finding his body would be a relief at this point, he said. it is dedicated to the idea that if everyone is thinking alike, someone is not thinking. Low around 30F. They were startled to find the trailer completely cleaned out. The letter had been hand-delivered by Captain Andy Greenstreet, the commander of the detachment that covers the Kenai. His remains were found near Edna bay almost 12 years to the day of his disappearance. "Mr. Griffis was added to the Missing Person's Clearinghouse in 2009,'' Beth Ipsen, a spokeswoman for Alaska State Troopers said earlier this month. Yet the two women would keep searching for the next 10 years. An experienced wilderness traveler, the 31-year-old man left a cabin on the Ambler River in Northwest Alaska in November 2012 to hike 30 miles across the Brooks Range Mountains to meet a plane in the tiny village of Kobuk for a flight home to his young wife in Wisconsin. Even in shock, Leon Bennett knew right away that he would never tell his wife about the troopers visit. I didnt know what to do, Leon Bennett told me, recalling the days and weeks after Lieutenant Shuey showed up at his house. Dolly and Tom spend winters in Phoenix, just 200 miles from Lake Havasu City, and the families decided to meet. Routes connecting the lodge to both places were searched. Clearly something catastrophic happened to him. Soldotna, a fishing town of about 4,000 people, sits along the Kenai River in the western lowlands. The first year was particularly hard on Dolly; she essentially stopped eating, and by the time I met her shed dwindled to about 100 pounds. Jenna Miller Profiles | Facebook They covered all the likely exits he should/could/would have taken within hours of his disappearance. He had quietly hoped the man would turn out to be his son, even though troopers had ruled out that possibility the previous summer. Even when he was impaired, he never failed to call.. MISSING IN ALASKA Clip - Killer Mermaids? They built a makeshift 75-foot "rope" out of pack cord knotted together and fought the current, half-slipping, half-swimming, falling into the icy waters past their heads.". Jenna miller missing in alaska - eelks.janusz-andrzejczak.pl Thirty-two-year-old French adventurer Francois Guenot paddled his kayak out of Kamishak Bay on the Gulf of Alaska coast in June 2014 and disappeared along the north shore of Shelikof Strait. There are cases like this all over the state. The second concluded that the original DNA sample taken from the remains released to the Bennett family in 2006 was in fact that of Rick Hills. If a truck came along and ran me over, I wouldnt care, she said under her breath. Griffis remaining missing. There are lives that are erring and nameless. At left is LeMaitre's driver's license photo. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. They looked for another month and found nothing. Two families, two bodies, and a wilderness of secrets. There was no evidence of criminal activity at the scene of the truck, troopers said. The Alaska State Troopers announced that they were able to positively identify a body that had been classified as 'missing' for 32 years with the use of DNA evidence. I suspect he didnt realize that the pile of rocks just ahead of time was the turn-around point and instead saw the goat trail and followed THAT until.??? In September 2007, Paul Schoch, a 68 year-old adventurer from Brule, Wisconsin, was dropped off by airplane at 4,500-foot Skolai Pass in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park for a few days in the wilderness. Theres Maryellen McMillin, who disappeared from her Fairbanks home with her green Subaru station wagon in November 1998. Seward's Mount Marathon is one of the most watched, single-day sporting events in the 49th state. There was something about them that stayed with me, growing more vivid as the years passed and I suffered losses of my own. Three weeks ago, the 46-year-married father of three walked away from the Alyeska Resort for a hike along the popular Winner Creek Trail. MISSING IN ALASKA Clip - Killer Mermaids? (2020) History Channel All of the items were charred to varying degrees, like most everything else in the path of the Funny River Fire, which burned nearly 200,000 acres in the western lowlands of the Kenai Peninsula, a remote corner of this remote part of the world, a place one local described as the middle of the middle of nowhere.. But seeing all his things packed up and labeled, the trucks signed over, it looked like he got his affairs in order.. From the air, it was easy to see why Alaska attracts certain kinds of peoplenot just loners and misfits but explorers and adventurers as well, anyone drawn to wild, wide-open spaces. Because of senility, he might have set out on foot, only to encounter a bear or fall into the nearby Nushagak River, although a thorough search of the area turned up no sign of either. It is home to a footrace the Seward Mount Marathon that rivals the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race as the best known sporting event in the 49th state. Searchers scoured the known routes for horses for 35 miles west to the deserted mining camp of Chisana and 35 miles east to the tiny community of Beaver Creek in Yukon. And I like beer.. Volunteers were flown in to comb the area on foot. His battles with the church arent over, How Palm Springs ran out Black and Latino families to build a fantasy for rich, white people, U.N. envoy says Sudans warring sides agree to negotiate, Yellen says U.S. could hit debt ceiling as soon as June 1, U.S. says 20,000 Russians killed in Ukraine war since December, Speaker Kevin McCarthy addresses Knesset amid fraught U.S.-Israel ties, First Republic: Cheap, interest-only jumbo mortgages to Silicon Valleys elite fueled the banks failure. What he doesn't know is whether his brother wanted it that way. Good Samaritan Gerald DeBerry disappeared in the foothills of the White Mountains while helping for a search for a missing woman in the fall of 2011. That means one of every 161 people goes missing in the state, which has a population of nearly 644,000. Author Dave Roberts would later write one of the north's greatest mountaineering tales with the 2007 publication of the book "Escape from Lucania: An Epic Story of Survival.''. Under a blazing sun, Leon said a short prayer and bid farewell to his son. Not a lot of people could do it. Troopers privately hoped so. @RedBalloonBooks. CORRECTION: This story was corrected on July 21, 2014 to reflect that Great Smoky Mountains National Park reaches into North Carolina, not South Carolina. Its less a hope than a torment, the reflex of a parent who has no evidence to the contrary, even if 10 years have passed and all signs point the other way. Delivery of the letters had been coordinated so that they would get the news at roughly the same time. its always tough to lose parents, and doubly tough to lose one the way you lost your father. He disappeared during a May 2013 snowmachine trip in remote Northwest Alaska and was not found until September. See Photos. A tour and other events are coming, but for now I'm thrilled to share my book launch is on February 7 at. See Photos. He preferred to stay outside, on the front steps. When he wasn't found in the immediate area of the lodge, searchers speculated that he might have tried to ride west 35 miles to Chisana, a deserted cluster of old mining cabins around an airstrip in the park, or Beaver Creek in Canada's Yukon, about an equal distance to the east. He could have run into the wrong bear; as many as 4,000 of them roam the peninsula, including some of the largest brown bears on the planet. The boots are too big; the tops reach all the way to his crotch. It's one reason Eric Miller will always wonder about his brother's fate. This past July, I received an e-mail from Leon Bennett. Girdwood is a densely forested area. Richards belongings had been moved into a shed. Lieutenant Kat Shuey says it with the practiced detachment of a 28-year police veteran. But we may never get to know what happened to him.. The morning after they talked to the Kufels, Leon, Jane, and Leroy went into those woods, a dense forest of spruce, alder, and birch. No scrap of clothing. Searches that ended with bodies found. "Nothing new has ever surfaced,'' said Sewell, who still wonders if some part of the orange survival cocoon might pop up somewhere, some day -- even though he knows the odds are against that. They found no sign of LeMaitre. It would be almost a year before he was reported missing and even then it was unclear where hed gone. "One man didn't want to be found," Hughes said. who went missing from Anchorage last year about this time, or September? 2015. Everyone settled around the dining-room table at Janes house, with Dolly and Tom at one end, and Leon, Jane, and Leroy at the other. The image of two women studying a map, a single light overhead, spoke to me of an inner toughness rising to the occasion. Everyone glanced at it. Jenna Miller. They wondered the same thing that Lieutenant Shuey wondered aloud at headquarters, a question Dolly wasnt prepared to entertain quite yet. The missing woman was found. The former was headed to an obvious destination before crowds of spectators -- and still disappeared. Hikers in Denali National Park and Preserve earlier this year found the remains of 22-year-old Etienne Terrell from Atlanta who disappeared in July 2015. He was home alone that day; his wife, Bette, was sick and being cared for by relatives in Washington State. Jane and her husband, Leroy, are snowbirds, Alaskan residents who winter in the Southwest. Richard always wore Levis. But when he gets to Race Point rock in thick clouds and no one is there, and he sees a defined trail going UP and continuing west, he says to himself: 'I'm not at the top yet, I've got to keep going up.'". Hed knocked on the front door of the Hillses tidy rambler on a Thursday, around 10:30 in the morning. "He left bacon in the sink thawing out," Striker Overly, a hunting guide from Tok, told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Now we have to go down there and take it away from them. Human remains found near Seward likely not those of missing Mount . Curious to know what Macdonald meant by typical, I flew south to the Kenai, a peninsula shaped like the craggy profile of a T. rexs head, extending 150 miles southwest into the Gulf of Alaska. He had let Bette continue thinking that Richard had been laid to rest. Disappearance on Mount Marathon - Outside Online Nobody knows for sure how many people have gone into the wild here and never come out. She understands why they ask. He was last seen near 3,000 feet on the mountain towering above the bay. A $300-million (minimum) gondola to Dodger Stadium? Thanks for keeping Michael LeMaitres story and others alive. Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com. By then, winter was coming fast and the search had to be abandoned after a futile week. Tagged as: Alyeska, Bartlett Barnes, Brad Broach, Clifford Greist, Etienne Terrell, Francois Guenot, Gerald Deberry, Girdwood, GoFundMe, Jerry Warner, John Wipert, Joseph Balderas, Liam Walsh, Michael LeMaitre, Naomi Uemera, Nephi Soper, Paul Schoch, Richard Griffis, Susitna River, Talkeetna Mountains, Thomas Seibold, Valerie Sifsof, Winner Creek, craigmedred.news is committed to Alaska-related news, commentary and entertainment. His voice as gravelly as ever, he told me he was frustrated. Praying 24/7, Dolly told me, was the only way she didnt just lose it. She said shed been reciting the Lords Prayer silently, over and over, since getting up that morning. No one knew at the time that the Funny River bones would set in motion a series of other discoveries, adding a surreal twist to a long and disjointed tale of people lost and found and lost again, and in the process reminding everyone involved of their smallness in this vast land. Its easy to fall prey to the states unforgiving terrain and severe weather, according to those in the business of searching. By the time he finished, Dolly and Heidi were weeping. Richard had fractured his shin and calf bones in a 1980 motorcycle accident. In Bettes final weeks, Leon muffled his sobs and strained to hide his devastation. Malia Miller. Why is Frank McCourt really pushing it? Their stories are represented by color-coded flags dotted across an Alaska map in Hughes' office. "Finding his body would be a relief at this point," he said. Bette was still healthy enough to make the 20-minute hike from the highway to a picturesque clearing between two large birch trees. Jim Miller, 39, left his Anchorage home Sept. 22 in the midst of personal problems, including pending heart surgery. Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. "He always had an imaginative mind, somewhat sociopathic-charismatic,'' his sister Teddi Narkowich said by email from her home in Boca Raton, Florida. They tried to block those thoughts, but they never went away completely.. For a long time, there was hope they might find at least a hint to explain the disappearance. The family lost track of him after an illness. Charlie Chocknok, an elderly Yupik Eskimo last seen walking near the New Stuyahok village airport in July 2000. Richards closest neighbors, Frank and Nancy Kufel, retirees who lived down the road, appeared to be the last people whod had contact with him. Under the Levis, blue sweats. I want you to know he was well taken care of, Jane said. Alaska Offers Countless Ways to Vanish - Los Angeles Times Lucy Ann Johnson was 77 when her daughter found her. His name was Richard too. The skull was resting on its side, the face angled toward the ground. She had been missing for 52 years. The three of them went to Richards place and looked around in silence. Thirty-six-year-old Joseph Balderas from Nome faded away into the hills along the Nome-Council Highway while hiking in July. I have zero confidence in them, he said. Most of them went to the historic Kennecott Mine near the community of McCarthy at the end of a road that snakes into the southern portion of the park. On February 24, 2004, he had been home from an oil-rig job for just a few days when he left Soldotna in his red Dodge truck to pick up a paycheck in Anchorage, about 150 miles away. In August of that year, Jane and Leroy stopped by Richards trailer. Leon, Jane, and Leroy reported Richard missing to the Alaska State Troopers, noting that they hadnt found any of Richards camping gearhis tent, sleeping bag, and mess kiton the property, and that some of his guns were missing too. On the table were photographs and police reports, dog-eared and riddled with Postit Notes. Seventy-one-year-old Jerry Warner from Missouri, told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner at the time, https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/article/human-remains-found-remote-island-sept-belong-missing-french-adventurer-francois/2014/11/06/. Searches that found people and saved them. In the book "Into the Wild," author Jon Krakauer speculated the 24-year-old wanderer had fallen victim to mysterious wilderness poisons. By the end of the. Alaska State Troopers were notified. As I left to catch my flight home, they were bent over a map on the dining-room table at Dollys house, discussing the logistics of dragging the Kenai River. They told him to go to the top of the mountain, make the turn and follow them down. They found nothing. Before taking off, he told friends in the southern U.S. that he "might winter over'' in Alaska, Sewell said. The first concluded that the bones found at the Funny River site were neither Rick Hillss nor Richard Bennetts. Missing in Alaska: With Ken Gerhard, Jax Menez Atwell, Tommy Joseph, Matthew Evan Paine. I Google his name once or twice a year with the hopes that somebody has finally found him. Searches in this area are always difficult because of the huge glaciers, the jagged mountains, the sheer remoteness, and the limited search-and- rescue assets. Search dogs lost his scent, as if Rick had been plucked from the snow and lifted straight into the air. He left bacon in the sink thawing out, Striker Overly, a hunting guide from Tok, told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner at the time. He faded into the Brooks Range of northern Alaska just about the time DeBerry's four-wheeler was discovered along the White Mountains in the Interior. He told people there he was going upriver to McCarthy, an outpost town in the Wrangell-St. Elias Park in Alaska, to test his orange cocoon. They told us there was no one else missing in the area, Leon said. The medical examiners office ordered a round of expedited DNA tests. They wrapped the urn in a brown-paper grocery bag, and Heidi took it home. But in the back of my mind, there were still questions.. I spent two days with them, going over the investigation, discussing theories, and retracing Ricks last known movements. Not a shoe. "He was so unique because of that pod thing,'' said Thompson, now a ranger stationed in the isolated Alaska coastal village of Yakutat, population 600, near the southern edge of the 13.2-million-acre park -- a park bigger than the nation of Switzerland, but far more rugged. No piece of headband. They found his truck someplace at a pull off on Tunragain did they ever find him? We have one, Dolly said. When someone goes missing in Alaska, search areas can be as large as entire states in the Lower 48, and considerably more treacherous. There was no message, only a link to a story from the previous days Alaska Dispatch News. They turned out to be those of Guenot. Still, some expected the survival cocoon or some part of it would one day be found in one of the big river valleys that offer the easist travel through the uninhabited region. McCandless was a confused young man searching for himself. Now shes the deputy commander of the Alaska Bureau of Investigation, a special unit within the Alaska State Troopers that handles, among other things, missing persons. He let Heidis question hang in the air. The hurting that never goes away, we know. hey found what was left of him in the spring of. Although it's not as famous as the Bermuda Triangle, the Alaska Triangle has more unsolved missing-person cases than any other location on Earth -- more than 20,000 people have vanished in the area in the last 50 years. Lemaitre was never seen again. Others are lost hikers and snowmobilers, commercial fishermen lost at sea and plane crash victims whose remains have not been found. ", Missing Persons Clearinghouse: http://www.dps.state.ak.us/ast/cib/Missing.htm, Newsletters: Get local news delivered directly to you, Chargers, Chemics will meet on Wednesday at Midland High, A pair of aces: BCW's Kochany, Lacourse have been lights out. It never did. One of his neighbors in Alaska told me that Richard would occasionally come over for a beer, but wouldnt come in the house. 548 had been out overnight in cold, rainy weather. Ten years, Dolly repeated. A 27-year-old climber from Salt Lake City, he was attempting a solo ascent of 16,237-foot Mount Sanford when he disappeared. Of those, 1,027 are still listed as missing. About a third work in and around Anchorage, the only Alaskan community that can pass as a city. He'd spent years schooling himself in ancient ways of living off the land. dont know how i missed that. Some 80 percent of the Yukon's meager population of 33,900 huddles in Whitehorse, another 285 miles down the highway. And weakness, be it physical or mental, is given no quarter. He was presumed drowned, but his body was never recovered. A few people continue to search, but no one at this point expects to find Broach alive. People lined the race route up and down the mountain. Tucked among the documents was the notification letter that the Bennetts had been waiting for in the months after theyd found the skeleton. Alaska encompasses 39 mountain ranges, 12,000 rivers, 100,000 . They got together for the first time on a sunny Sunday morning in February 2015. Troopers identify remains of missing person after 32 years Even people who know the terrain and conditions can become disoriented. The mother-daughter reunion is now Alaskan legend. Top 8 creepiest unexplained disappearances - Sharing Alaska Sharing the news would have destroyed her. They werent quite to the point where if you touched them they would disintegrate, but close., The remains were spread across an area about 60 yards in diameter, presumably the work of scavenging animals. Until 1 a.m., the date claimed that he searched for her. Troopers ask anyone with information about her location to call 451-5100 or683-2232. Places where people fish and hunt to eat. Kysar's body was the only one eventually found. Griffis was an inventor always on the move across the country. The Bennetts only son went missing from his home on the Kenai Peninsula in 2005. After descending that mountain, the duo was forced to make a 140-mile hike to Burwash Landing, an outpost community on Kluane Lake in Canada, to survive. The anthropologists found them consistent with the markings on the skeleton. The boy is grinning from ear to ear. The clearinghouse is a repository of data submitted by law enforcement agencies throughout the state. Im frustrated that Im not out there looking for him myself., Leon was caring for one of his daughters, who was recovering from a quintuple bypass. When my hand touched, I thought, Thats him.. Last year the Justice Department awarded a two-year, $1.75 million grant to the Nation's Missing Children Organization and Center for Missing Adults, a clearinghouse that works with authorities. Her husband reported her missing in 1965, and police learned that she hadnt been seen in almost four years.