Girl From Spaceship That Walked Into a Forest and Never Seen Again
They found what was left of him in the spring of 2014. Firefighters battling a huge blaze on Alaska'southward Kenai Peninsula first spotted a boot in the dirt. Then they noticed some bones scattered beyond a wide grassy surface area. Fire crews in Alaska are used to seeing the basic of moose, caribou, bears, and other large creatures that live and die in these wood. Then it wasn't until crew members plant a homo skull that they stopped to consider that the pieces might go together. The skull was resting on its side, the face angled toward the footing. A few blackened molars clung to the upper jaw. The lower jaw was missing.
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The Alaska State Troopers arrived past helicopter and salvaged what they could. "The bones were shut to being ash," Lieutenant Kat Shuey later recalled. "They weren't 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. Too found at the site were three hunting knives, two quarters, 2 metal buttons, a zipper, and part of a Samsung mobile phone. 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 identify one local described as "the middle of the center of nowhere."
No one knew at the time that the Funny River basic would set in motion a series of other discoveries, adding a surreal twist to a long and disjointed tale of people lost and institute and lost again, and in the procedure reminding everyone involved of their smallness in this vast land.
Troopers guessed that the bones were those of an adult male, based on the size and style of the boot and the fact that in these circumstances, the deceased is usually a man. But the condition of the bones fabricated determining the cause of death impossible. The man may accept gotten lost and frozen to death. He could have tumbled down one of several steep embankments nearby and broken his cervix. He could accept run across the incorrect bear; as many as four,000 of them roam the peninsula, including some of the largest brown bears on the planet. He might have eaten poison berries, by accident or by blueprint—the location was ideal for someone who wanted to vanish, and Alaska is famous for alluring dropouts, runaways, and finish-of-the-roaders who wish to comport a life, and sometimes a death, in isolation. In that location were, to infringe i trooper'south phrase, a great number of "equally plausible alternative inferences."
Within hours, news of the discovery spread from the firefighters' camps to the small communities along the Sterling Highway, the road that transects the peninsula. In the boondocks of Soldotna, about 20 miles from where the basic were establish, Dolly Hills got a call from ane of her granddaughters. The granddaughter was upset. Why hadn't the police told them well-nigh the bones? Later, Dolly began to hear from people around town. They wondered the same thing that Lieutenant Shuey wondered aloud at headquarters, a question Dolly wasn't prepared to entertain quite nevertheless. She listened and mostly kept silent. In individual, though, she could think of cipher else: Could information technology be Rick?
When I kickoff met Dolly, in January of 2005, her son Richard Thomas Hills had been missing for almost a year. I was working on a story most the phenomenon in Alaska of ordinary people disappearing while doing ordinary things. In Anchorage, the statewide coordinator of search-and-rescue at the time, Lieutenant Craig Macdonald, had told me about some recent cases, including that of Rick Hills. He described the case equally tragic for the family simply typical of what troopers dealt with nearly every day. More than 3,000 people had been reported missing the previous twelvemonth in Alaska, a state with a population smaller than San Francisco's.
Curious to know what Macdonald meant past "typical," I flew south to the Kenai, a peninsula shaped like the craggy profile of a T. male monarch'southward head, extending 150 miles southwest into the Gulf of Alaska. Glacier-topped mountains spread across the eastern and southern parts of the peninsula; marshy lowlands embrace much of the rest. From the air, it was easy to see why Alaska attracts sure kinds of people—not just loners and misfits but explorers and adventurers also, anyone drawn to wild, wide-open spaces.
Soldotna, a fishing boondocks of about 4,000 people, sits along the Kenai River in the western lowlands. I was met there past Dolly Hills and Heidi Metteer, Rick'southward longtime partner. Heidi and Rick had two children together, and he had also been raising her eldest, a girl from a previous relationship, as his own.
Dolly was 53, petite and gregarious, with short black pilus, glasses, and an angular face. She had a loftier, lilting voice that sounded cheerful even when she wasn't. Heidi was 33, tall and robust and dressed for the outdoors, merely with a soft manner that seemed to vest inside. Heidi worked at a coffee store; Dolly helped her husband, an electrician, run his business.
Dolly introduced Heidi as "my daughter," and I would come to know the two women equally a unit. Dolly was the talker, the instigator who moved things forth. Heidi was the thoughtful ane, more than apt to listen and blot. Dolly seemed to rely on Heidi for steadiness, Heidi on Dolly for uplift.
"Praying 24/7," Dolly told me, was the only way she "didn't just lose information technology." She said she'd been reciting the Lord's Prayer silently, over and over, since getting up that forenoon. "I don't desire to come up across equally super-religious," she added. "I swear now and then. And I similar beer."
I spent two days with them, going over the investigation, discussing theories, and retracing Rick'due south last known movements. On February 24, 2004, he had been home from an oil-rig job for only a few days when he left Soldotna in his cerise Contrivance truck to pick up a paycheck in Anchorage, about 150 miles away. The company confirmed that Rick had gotten his check that day, but his truck was plant 2 days later, plowed into a snowbank in the town of Sterling, merely 15 miles from home. The keys were in the ignition and his commuter's license was on the forepart seat. In the center console was $292.
Rick's tracks in the snow—right foot dragging, as if he'd injured his leg—led into the woods. Afterwards about a quarter mile, he'd come upon a firm and walked upward to the back porch, maybe hoping to observe help. So he'd wandered onto an abandoned airstrip, and there his footprints ended. Search dogs lost his scent, as if Rick had been plucked from the snow and lifted straight into the air. He was 35 years erstwhile.
Dolly and Heidi ruled out suicide: Rick had never shown any inclination, and they didn't believe he would abandon the children, who were 5, ix, and 13 at the fourth dimension. He adored them; he had nicknames for each of them and took them fishing every chance he got. A couple of months before he disappeared, Rick fabricated a hole-and-corner trip to Anchorage to buy Christmas presents for the kids so drove to a friend's firm to wrap them, coming home with an armful of ribboned gift boxes. "It made him happy to see the kids and so amused," Dolly said.
On the 24-hour interval he left home for the last time, Rick had asked two of the kids whether they wanted to come up with him. A man planning to kill himself wouldn't have done that. Heidi and Dolly also couldn't accept that he might accept gotten lost and succumbed to the elements. "He spent a lot of time in these woods," Dolly said. "He knew them."
The two women feared that Rick might take been a victim of foul play. Devoted equally he was to his kids, he had a wild streak. He liked to get high on cocaine or pills so leave drinking all night, and he ran with a crowd of men and women who had been in and out of jail. For the sake of his family unit, Rick had tried many times to quit partying, only to exist drawn back in. "But he would never not come home," Heidi said.
"Or call home, at to the lowest degree," Dolly added. "Fifty-fifty when he was dumb, he never failed to call."
Afterward the police force stopped searching, Dolly and Heidi kept the case alive. Dolly'due south husband, Tom, helped just by and large kept busy with work. The two women plastered the communities along the Sterling Highway with missing-person posters. They interviewed friends and acquaintances police had overlooked. Dolly recruited snowmobilers and pilots to get over the search surface area once again and again. She even consulted psychics.
One, a British woman who lived in Anchorage, told Dolly that 2 men had been nearby as Rick was dying, that they had rifled through his glaze for drugs and and then left, and that Rick had frozen to decease. The psychic seemed to intuit aspects of Rick's disappearance that matched what police had told Dolly and Heidi. The two women came to believe she was closer to the truth almost what had happened to Rick than anyone else, certainly closer than the Alaska State Troopers. She said it would be 10 years before they plant Rick.
"Ten years?," Dolly replied. "Nosotros can't wait that long."
The beginning year was specially hard on Dolly; she essentially stopped eating, and by the time I met her she'd dwindled to about 100 pounds. In the middle of telling me about one of their searches for Rick'south body, she lost her train of thought and fell silent, then shook her head, every bit if trying to dispel some unpleasant notion. "If a truck came along and ran me over, I wouldn't care," she said nether her jiff.
I'd covered many stories of loss, but Dolly and Heidi'due south seemed specially fell because it had no foreseeable terminate. They knew Rick was likely dead, but without his body, they couldn't rule out the possibility that he was somehow still live, maybe injured or in pain, or even held against his volition. When they permit their minds become there, the possibilities multiplied, became endless. They tried to block those thoughts, only they never went abroad completely.
By the end of my visit, I came to believe that whatever had happened to Rick couldn't have involved more prolonged suffering than what Dolly and Heidi were going through. However the two women would continue searching for the side by side 10 years. As I left to catch my flying home, they were bent over a map on the dining-room table at Dolly's house, discussing the logistics of dragging the Kenai River.
"It'due south but a couple guys in a gunkhole," I heard Dolly say. "They driblet a long pole with a big hook in the water, and the boat goes back and along. The hook grabs onto whatever's on the lesser."
The email appeared in my inbox in September 2014. In the years since my visit to Soldotna, I'd thought of Dolly and Heidi whenever I ran across stories of people who had disappeared. There was something about them that stayed with me, growing more vivid equally the years passed and I suffered losses of my own. The paradigm of two women studying a map, a single lite overhead, spoke to me of an inner toughness rising to the occasion. A resilience equal to the worst thing that can happen.
Now they wanted me to call.
"You're not going to believe it," Dolly told me. "I promise you're sitting."
"We plant him," Heidi said.
She and Dolly took turns filling me in. I'd never heard of the Funny River, much less the fire that had ravaged the Kenai. They told me a body had been found, and that its DNA had been tested.
"Information technology wasn't Rick," Heidi said.
"Information technology wasn't Rick," I repeated. "Who was it?"
For the side by side hour, Dolly and Heidi described a series of events that I could barely follow. They were still piecing the narrative together themselves. The three of us would wind up having regular telephone conversations, trying to make sense of what had happened.
4 months later on, in January of 2015, I flew back to the Kenai Peninsula. I arrived ten years to the month later my first trip and found Soldotna exactly every bit I remembered it: a gritty little village trying to exist a boondocks, drab in its winter coat of month-onetime snow and ice. Dolly and Heidi had obtained a thick stack of official instance files, many of them marked privileged. Among a hodgepodge of field reports, lab results, correspondence, handwritten notes, and transcribed witness accounts dating back to 2004 was a two-page alphabetic character from the director of the Alaska Land Troopers, Colonel James Cockrell, dated August 28, 2014.
The letter had been hand-delivered by Helm Andy Greenstreet, the commander of the detachment that covers the Kenai. He'd knocked on the forepart door of the Hillses' tidy rambler on a Thursday, effectually ten:30 in the morning. Only Dolly was home. She chosen Tom and Heidi and told them to come to the house. When everyone was settled around the dining-room tabular array, the captain started reading.
I begin this letter of the alphabet knowing full well that mere words on a page cannot adequately express the magnitude of apology which you and your family are due based upon errors made past the Alaska Land Troopers. A failure on our function has created a circumstance which will undoubtedly bring y'all and your family a great deal of sorrow during the grieving process and go out you with more questions than answers.
Halfway through, Heidi interrupted him.
"Are you lot kidding me?" she said, glaring.
"Ten years," Dolly muttered.
"Are you fucking kidding me?," Heidi said.
Captain Greenstreet paused without looking up from the letter. He allow Heidi's question hang in the air. "I felt for them," he told me later. He was relatively new to his postal service, and hadn't been involved in the investigation. He was only the messenger. By the time he finished, Dolly and Heidi were weeping.
"Ten years," Dolly repeated. It was just equally the psychic had predicted.
That same morning, in Lake Havasu Metropolis, Arizona, Lieutenant Kat Shuey read an almost identical letter to a man named Leon Bennett. He was home alone that solar day; his wife, Bette, was sick and being cared for by relatives in Washington Country. The Hillses and Bennetts hadn't known of each other's existence, simply at present their lives were inextricably linked, the peace of i family unit coming at the expense of the other'south. Delivery of the letters had been coordinated and then that they would go the news at roughly the same fourth dimension.
"I didn't know what to do," Leon Bennett told me, recalling the days and weeks afterwards Lieutenant Shuey showed upwardly at his business firm. In early 2015, I traveled to Lake Havasu City to run across the other family unit that had gotten a knock on its door the previous August. Leon sat with his elbows propped on a small tabular array, his hands clasped as if in prayer. He spoke slowly, his voice similar gravel. "How could this happen?"
A retired contractor in his early 70s, Leon is a compact, sturdily built human being, naturally reserved merely with a lot on his mind. Bette Bennett was in the last stages of a concluding lung illness. She was at home when I visited, just partially lucid, so I spent ii days with Leon at the business firm of his sister, Jane Potter, who lives downwards the street. Jane and her hubby, Leroy, are snowbirds, Alaskan residents who winter in the Southwest.
The Bennetts' but son went missing from his home on the Kenai Peninsula in 2005. His name was Richard too. He and Rick Hills must accept crossed paths many times—at the Safeway and the hardware store, at gas stations and stoplights—given that they lived just a few miles apart along the same highway. But they traveled in different circles, and no show exists to suggest they knew each other.
Richard Bennett's family described him every bit a boy of few words who grew into a human of even fewer words. When he did interact with people, he was soft-spoken and kind, particularly to his young nieces and nephews; at family get-togethers they would listen in rapt silence as he read children'southward books aloud—the only fourth dimension many of them heard him speak at length. Ane of his neighbors in Alaska told me that Richard would occasionally come over for a beer, simply wouldn't come up in the house. He preferred to stay outside, on the front steps.
Richard was most comfortable in the wilderness. He'd fished and hunted since he was a child. One of Leon'south favorite pictures is of Richard at historic period 5, wearing fishing boots given to him by his grandfather. The boots are too big; the tops reach all the way to his crotch. The boy is smile from ear to ear. "For a long fourth dimension, he never took them off," Leon told me. "He slept in those things."
In 2005, Richard was 39 and living lonely in a trailer on the outskirts of Sterling, a short walk from the Kenai River and one-half a mile from the spot where Rick Hills'south red Dodge truck had been found the previous twelvemonth. I'd walked right past Richard Bennett'southward trailer when I retraced Rick's last steps, and Richard had probably been habitation. For several years, he'd struggled to observe steady work. He did automobile-body repair, only so did a lot of other people on the Kenai.
In August of that year, Jane and Leroy stopped by Richard'southward trailer. They lived less than a mile abroad and hadn't heard from him for a while. They were startled to find the trailer completely cleaned out. Jane called Leon, who was living in Bremerton, Washington; he flew to the Kenai the side by side day. The three of them went to Richard's place and looked around in silence. Richard's holding had been moved into a shed. Several large Rubbermaid bins were each labeled with the name of a friend or relative. A few were marked for Jane, with whom Richard had always been close. Inside she found household items: coils of rope, a few tools, frying pans, spatulas, mismatched bowls. "They were things he knew we could apply," Jane told me. On a shelf were the titles to two old pickups, which Richard had signed over to her.
"If y'all would've told me 'suicide,' I would have said you were total of crap," Jane said. "Richard wouldn't do that. But seeing all his things packed upwardly and labeled, the trucks signed over, it looked similar he got his diplomacy in order."
Cypher was certain, however. Leon, Jane, and Leroy reported Richard missing to the Alaska State Troopers, noting that they hadn't found any of Richard'southward camping gear—his tent, sleeping handbag, and mess kit—on the property, and that some of his guns were missing besides. They learned that no i had seen Richard in several months and that just earlier Memorial Day weekend, he'd withdrawn his last $10 from an ATM in Soldotna.
Richard'southward closest neighbors, Frank and Nancy Kufel, retirees who lived downwards the route, appeared to be the last people who'd had contact with him. Nancy said that Richard had come up over in March or April to utilize their fax auto to send out job applications, and that he had seemed despondent about his prospects. In mid-May, the Kufels noticed he was burning a lot of stuff in a large metal barrel. That's how people in these parts dispose of garbage, merely this seemed far more than the usual amount. And so in June, the Kufels noticed what they described every bit "a tremendous amount of bird action" in the woods across the street from Richard's trailer. Every seasoned Alaskan knows that a large number of ravens and eagles circling in one area means a carcass below, merely Frank and Nancy assumed it was a moose or a caribou or some other large brute.
The morning after they talked to the Kufels, Leon, Jane, and Leroy went into those wood, a dense wood of spruce, alder, and birch. They proceeded slowly, scanning their eyes over everything. Subsequently about four hours, Jane entered a meadow and peered into a small, shaded clearing. Off to one side, next to a rotting log, something defenseless her eye. Jane felt her center pound. "You guys better look at this," she said. The men rushed over, and the iii stood in silence. It was a human being skeleton, minus a head.
"Information technology was just lying there on the ground, kind of turned on its side, legs stretched out," Jane later told me. "Kickoff thing I noticed, it had Levi's on. Richard always wore Levi's. Under the Levi'southward, blueish sweats. Richard always wore blue sweats."
Leon tin barely talk about the scene now, merely at the time, he kept his emotions in bank check. He looked at the skeleton and thought information technology seemed about the correct size. He felt the urge to touch it. He leaned down and gently turned the trunk "to make sure information technology was what it looked like," he told me. "When my hand touched, I idea, That's him."
The Alaska State Troopers came to the same decision. The skeleton was found about 300 yards from Richard's trailer. The accounts of Richard'due south country of mind, the approximate height of the skeleton, the jeans and sweatpants—they all added up.
Investigators sent a os sample forth with a swab of Bette Bennett's saliva to a Texas lab for Dna assay, to confirm that the remains were indeed Richard's. But the lab warned that the test could take upwards to 18 months, and the Bennetts wanted to bury their son. They called the medical examiner's office several times, request when the remains could be released. Both the medical examiner and the State Troopers were reluctant to declare the remains Richard Bennett'south without Dna confirmation.
What finally tipped the scales for the investigators seems to have been the skeleton'south right leg, which showed the markings of an sometime injury. Richard had fractured his shin and calf bones in a 1980 motorbike accident. Investigators from the medical examiner'southward office tracked down the X-rays at Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage and gave them to two forensic anthropologists. The anthropologists found them "consistent" with the markings on the skeleton. Robert Hunter, the lead investigator on the case, received the anthropologists' findings in March 2006 and discussed them with a superior. "We decided that with the information discovered during the investigation that it is reasonable to believe the man remains are that of Richard Bennett," he wrote in an official report on March 28.
The medical examiner's function released the remains, and the Bennetts had them cremated. On June 23, 2006, the family held a memorial in Anchorage. The next mean solar day, a small group hiked up a grassy hillside overlooking Lower Summit Lake, one of Richard's favorite places to hunt. Bette was notwithstanding salubrious enough to make the 20-minute hike from the highway to a picturesque immigration betwixt two large birch trees. A high-school friend of Richard'due south, Harold "Hap" Pierce, dug a hole and buried the urn. Jane placed a wreath on the freshly turned soil. Nether a blazing sun, Leon said a short prayer and bid farewell to his son.
For Leon, Bette, and Richard's 2 sisters, the ceremony marked the finish of a nightmarish twelvemonth. They could brainstorm to motility on. Jane felt relief too, but something nagged at her.
"There was closure in the sense that the family unit said goodbye and maybe he was laid to balance," she told me. "I still couldn't believe he would take his own life. I guess if he did it, he did it. Just in the back of my listen, there were still questions."
"Like what?," I asked.
"Questions like 'Was that really him?' "
"Errors were fabricated."
Lieutenant Kat Shuey says information technology with the practiced detachment of a 28-twelvemonth constabulary veteran. She isn't the one who made the errors. She's the one who uncovered them, and felt honor-jump to evangelize the news face-to-face. Shuey spent fourteen years as a trooper in the field. At present she's the deputy commander of the Alaska Bureau of Investigation, a special unit within the Alaska State Troopers that handles, amidst other things, missing persons. Last year, 2,295 people were reported missing in the land. Many were runaways who eventually returned home, simply some were people who will never be seen again.
"Families inquire, 'How come up you can't find our son? How come you can't notice my husband?,' " Shuey told me. She understands why they inquire. But, she said, "sometimes I think they forget how big Alaska is." Betwixt the westernmost tip of the Aleutian Islands and the eastern edge of the Alaska Panhandle—a span roughly equal to the distance from California to Florida—a total of 1,332 police-enforcement officers keep the peace. About a third piece of work in and effectually Anchorage, the just Alaskan community that tin can pass as a metropolis. A few hundred more patrol towns and villages, mere flecks in the landscape. The remainder of Alaska is policed by fewer than 400 troopers.
When someone goes missing in Alaska, search areas can be equally big as entire states in the Lower 48, and considerably more treacherous. Alaska encompasses 39 mountain ranges, 12,000 rivers, 100,000 glaciers, and three million lakes. The mudflats tin can exist like quicksand; ice and snow can erase a person'south last traces. Landslides, avalanches, fissuring glaciers, overflowing rivers, and collapsing riverbanks all make travel unpredictable at best. Anybody I met there seemed to know of people still missing or "unfound." Dolly Hills herself lost a 13-year-sometime blood brother, William, in 1962. He was presumed drowned, but his body was never recovered.
In June 2014, soon subsequently the discovery of the Funny River bones, Shuey asked for a list of people in the area who'd gone missing in recent years. At the tiptop of the listing were Rick Hills and Richard Bennett, whose final known locations were close together and only virtually iii miles from the Funny River site. She wasn't involved in either case, and knew little about them.
While cross-checking records with the state medical examiner'southward role, Shuey learned that Richard Bennett'southward remains had been found and released to his family years earlier. This puzzled her—Bennett was still listed equally missing in the police database. She went back to his file. Tucked among the documents was the notification letter that the Bennetts had been waiting for in the months after they'd found the skeleton. The letter, from the University of Due north Texas, ended: "The private represented past the unidentified remains F-3677.1 is excluded as a potential maternal relative of Bette P. Bennett." The DNA did not lucifer. The body constitute in 2005 and released to the Bennett family in 2006 was not Richard Bennett.
Shuey was stunned.
The letter was dated November five, 2007, some xvi months after the Bennett family unit had buried the remains of a man they'd believed was their son. Shuey said that the letter of the alphabet had been filed away by a clerk who no longer works for the Alaska Country Troopers, and that the agency hadn't adopted electronic filing until 2012—facts that she acknowledges are no excuse and no consolation to the families.
"It was the Alaska Land Troopers that failed," she told me.
Was information technology possible that the remains released to the Bennetts and now buried near Lower Meridian Lake were those of Rick Hills, and the scattered bones found in the Funny River burn down, Richard Bennett's? Troopers privately hoped and so. That outcome would lessen the agony for the Bennetts, and the humiliation for the Country Troopers. The medical examiner'south office ordered a round of expedited DNA tests. The results came back in two parts. The outset concluded that the bones plant at the Funny River site were neither Rick Hills's nor Richard Bennett'due south. 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.
Three months after the Funny River bones were discovered, Shuey and another investigator found themselves speeding through the Arizona desert in the center of the dark to reach Lake Havasu Metropolis by morning time. Both knew they were almost to deliver upheaval to an unsuspecting family.
"The Bennetts had closure for eight years," Shuey told me. "Now we take to go down in that location and take it away from them. We have to tell them, 'The remains you lot received in 2006 were non your son, and we don't know where your son is.' "
The alphabetic character Lieutenant Shuey read to Leon Bennett in Lake Havasu City concluded exactly like the one Captain Greenstreet read aloud to Dolly and Tom Hills and Heidi Metteer in Soldotna: "I understand that at that place is cipher that I can say that can ever repair the devastation that your family is experiencing. For this, I am truly pitiful. Sincerely, Colonel James Cockrell, Director, Alaska Land Troopers."
Fifty-fifty in shock, Leon Bennett knew correct abroad that he would never tell his wife about the troopers' visit. Bette had been so distraught when the skeleton was discovered in 2005, and then relieved—more than anyone else in the family—when they'd laid the remains to rest on the mountainside. Now she was on oxygen and struggling to breathe. She became dislocated hands. Sharing the news would have destroyed her. In Bette'due south final weeks, Leon muffled his sobs and strained to hibernate his devastation. At that place weren't many people with whom he could share the burden: Jane and Leroy and, it turned out, Dolly, Tom, and Heidi.
Dolly and Heidi contacted Leon shortly afterward getting the news. They felt leap to him by circumstance, and by their shared experience of a grief few others could understand. "If there'south anything we tin can do, or if you lot merely want to talk, telephone call us," Dolly said. He offered the aforementioned.
Dolly and Tom spend winters in Phoenix, just 200 miles from Lake Havasu City, and the families decided to meet. They got together for the first time on a sunny Sunday morning in February 2015.
Everyone settled around the dining-room table at Jane's house, with Dolly and Tom at ane end, and Leon, Jane, and Leroy at the other. On the table were photographs and law reports, domestic dog-eared and riddled with Postal service‑it Notes. Atop ane stack was Colonel Cockrell's alphabetic character to the Bennetts. Everyone glanced at it. "Nosotros have one," Dolly said. Nervous laughter.
The two families talked well-nigh "my Richard" and "your Richard" and human remains and os fragments and detached skulls. Rick Hills's skull hasn't been found. Dolly and Heidi still suspect foul play, merely they fear they may never know the truth about what happened to him.
The conversation turned to the uncanny similarities between Rick and Richard—2 men close in age, roughly the same meridian, who disappeared in the aforementioned area about 15 months autonomously. They even wore the same kind of wearing apparel, and both had old fractures in their correct leg—Richard from his motorcycle blow, and Rick from playing hockey. Rick may have re-injured his leg when his Dodge plowed into the snowbank. That would explicate why he had been dragging his foot.
"They told us in that location was no one else missing in the area," Leon said.
The case documents I read show that the State Troopers indeed did not consider that the bones found near Richard Bennett's trailer could have been anyone else's. In going through police force reports, Dolly and Heidi counted 17 different troopers who'd had a hand in their son's case over the years. Of those, three were as well involved in the Richard Bennett case. Only the troopers didn't brand the connection. "They said it was because they didn't put their reports in computers then," Dolly said.
She talked most how her family unit had searched and agonized for 10 years, simply to observe out that Rick's ashes were buried above a lake they drove past all the time on their way to Anchorage. After Helm Greenstreet delivered the news, Dolly said, it took another month to find the verbal location of the urn. She, Heidi, and other family unit members hiked to the spot to a higher place Lower Summit Lake, held hands, and tearfully recited the Lord's Prayer before digging the urn out of the ground eight years after the Bennetts had put it in.
They wrapped the urn in a brown-paper grocery bag, and Heidi took it home. Late that night, she stared at the bag, beside her bed, and said, "I never idea you'd be in my bedroom over again." Dolly laughed as she told the story.
The room went silent.
Dolly told Leon, Jane, and Leroy that they had chosen a beautiful spot at Lower Peak Lake. She thanked them.
"I want you lot to know he was well taken intendance of," Jane said.
"I want yous to know that we know how you're feeling," Dolly said. "The hurting that never goes away, we know. We as well know, the mode this turned out … Information technology could accept been the other way around."
This past July, I received an email from Leon Bennett. There was no message, simply a link to a story from the previous day's Alaska Acceleration News. The headline read, "Troopers Place Human being Remains Constitute During Last Year's Funny River Wildfire." The bones belonged to a Soldotna resident, James Allen Beaver, who'd been missing since 2011. He was 42 when he disappeared. Investigators had traced the Samsung phone to Beaver, but they'd decided to wait this time for DNA confirmation before releasing the bones to his family unit. Vast every bit the peninsula is, it tin can yet seem similar a small world. Rick Hills went to high school with James Beaver, and Heidi knows his brother Roy.
I chosen Leon.
His voice as gravelly as ever, he told me he was frustrated. He'd lost a son, thought he'd found him, and lost him again. He was frustrated that his grief felt and then raw, every bit if Richard had disappeared just yesterday. And this time, he diameter the grief without his wife. He had permit Bette go along thinking that Richard had been laid to rest. "It was the right thing to do," he said. She died concluding April.
"I'grand frustrated that the Alaska State Troopers aren't looking for Richard. They say they are, only I'g about sure they're not," he said. "I'm frustrated that I'm not out there looking for him myself."
Leon was caring for one of his daughters, who was recovering from a quintuple bypass. He couldn't but drop everything and go off to the Kenai. All he could practice from Arizona was check the news from Alaska every day for updates on the Funny River basic. He had quietly hoped the homo would turn out to be his son, fifty-fifty though troopers had ruled out that possibility the previous summertime. "I have zip confidence in them," he said. "So yes, it was in the back of my mind that it could be Richard."
With the bones now identified, a new idea has taken root in the back of Leon'south mind: What if Richard is alive? Information technology's less a hope than a torment, the reflex of a parent who has no evidence to the contrary, even if 10 years take passed and all signs point the other way.
Leon isn't the only one who'south had that idea. Jane has always idea that Richard may have just wanted a clean outset somewhere else. "Nosotros never institute his firearms," she reminded me on several occasions. "And we never plant his camping stuff." Richard's friend Hap Pierce told me he wouldn't exist surprised if Richard one day knocked on his door. "I'd be pissed," he said, "but I wouldn't be surprised."
Alaska brims with stories of people who vanish and are given up for dead. In one case in a while, the dead return. A woman named Lucy Ann Johnson fabricated headlines a few years ago. Born in Skagway, on the Alaskan Panhandle, she eventually moved to British Columbia. Her hubby reported her missing in 1965, and constabulary learned that she hadn't been seen in almost four years. Police force suspected he'd killed her, only they had no show, and he died in the late 1990s. Then, in 2013, the couple'due south only daughter, Linda Evans, went searching for answers and, to her shock and amazement, institute her mother living with a unlike family in the Yukon Territory. The female parent-daughter reunion is now Alaskan legend. Lucy Ann Johnson was 77 when her daughter establish her. She had been missing for 52 years.
Leon Bennett believes his son may have wanted to leave his life. Merely what if he left it to find a different life? When he allows himself to follow this train of thought—that maybe Richard is roughing it in the wild, or hiding out in some tiny native village far off the beaten runway—he feels a tinge of comfort. But then the not-knowing returns, and it keeps him awake at nighttime.
"In that location'due south a possibility," Leon told me, speaking in a faint voice, equally if not wanting to hear himself say information technology. "You lot don't want to dwell on it. He's probably gone. Just you can't ignore that in that location's a possibility." The Alaskan bush would suit his son'due south temperament and skills. There are places out there with enough space for a man to remake himself without anyone bothering him. Places where people fish and chase to eat. A unmarried moose can feed a person for a year, Leon told me. "It'd be difficult living. Non a lot of people could practice information technology. But if there's anybody who could, information technology would be my son."
Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the nonprofit organization Images & Voices of Hope.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/in-the-land-of-missing-persons/471477/
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