I Uncovered the OTHER “Into the Wild” Story...and I'm NOT Okay

I uncovered the other into the wild story, the other Christopher Mechanless, and I'm not okay. In this episode I'll be telling you that story and then I'm going to tell you a bonus story about the horrifying discovery police made at Whosier Pass. Viewer discretion is definitely advised for that one, so good luck and let's get into it. You've heard of this man before. Christopher Mechanless, the young nomad who inspired into the wild, but you probably haven't heard of this man. This is Everett Russe, and he's got some secrets. When searchers went looking through the desert for him, he wasn't there. Instead, they found two live donkeys tied to a tree, a campsite left perfectly intact, and a single word carved into a rock nearby. Nemo. Latin for no one. Remember that. Everett's story echoes Christopher Mechanless's in so many ways, but where Mechanless's story ended in tragedy, Everett's takes a turn that's far darker and far stranger. Everett Russe was born in 1914 in Oakland, California, the second son of Christopher and Stella Russe. His father was a Harvard graduate and a minister, and his mother was a teacher. Now growing up, Everett's family was highly cultured, and his parents, as well as Everett's older brother Waldo, loved reading Everett bedtime stories that were meant for kids way older than him. And just like Christopher Mechanless, Everett became obsessed with books, and his creativity really took off from a young age. Both Mechanless and Everett actually read a lot of the same authors and took inspiration from many of the same stories, including a shared favorite, which was Jewels Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Pretty much every day, Everett would grab a book, run away from his family's home, and wander off onto a long walk without any adults or any siblings. And on those walks, the young Everett would scribble pages and pages of writing in notebooks and diaries. He was just one of those kids who always seemed like he had a secret, or like he knew some mysterious solution to the universe that was just out of reach, right? And this kind of freaked out his parents, as well as his older brother. The Russe family was pretty conservative, we'll say, you know, not politically, but just like, you know what I'm saying, you know, they had a minister as a father, and so even though they did support Everett's, let's just call it creativity, they did fear even all the way back then that one day he might just wander off and then never return. And you know, who else's family had those same concerns? That would be the family of Christopher Mechanless. This was very similar to Mechanless's relationship with his family. They were also more conservative and maybe more practical. And again, they have this young son who was, let's just say, a little different. So let's flash forward a few years. And at this point, Everett's family was living in Southern California where he attended high school. And while most 16-year-old boys were out there worrying about school dances, sports, and girls, Everett was instead venturing out into the rugged trails of California's coast, going on long camping weekends pretty much as soon as school led out on Fridays. All he'd bring with him was a bedroll, some food, and of course, his sketching supplies. And much like his childhood, he really liked being alone during these adventures. And so obviously, Everett wasn't going to be winning the Homecoming King Award anytime soon, though I did find out that he was involved in his high school's literary and civic clubs, and he did actually win an award for a poem he wrote titled Lonesome. Yeah, I could have guessed that one. His family knew by this point that Everett probably wasn't going to college, and any typical career was most likely out the window for him, right? In first and more context, Everett's high school years were right at the start of the Great Depression, which definitely affected his ideas for the future, of course. Now, Everett's father had helped thousands of struggling people who came through his church's doors looking to him for spiritual guidance. And so, when Everett decided that he wanted to drop out of high school at 17 years old and head into the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, all in search of his own spiritual guidance, well, his parents and his brother, though they felt kind of weird about it, certainly couldn't stop him. And so they gave Young Everett some supplies, a few bucks, and a long heartfelt goodbye. Everett walked out the front door of his childhood home with some plans that only he knew about. And maybe, just maybe, he'd make it back home for Christmas. Folks, this is where the legend of Everett Ruse really begins. It was spring of 1931, and he was heading east on a horse. But this isn't like full red-dead redemption vibes. I mean, at this point, there were cars on the road, obviously, and electricity. No Tesla's yet, but you got what I'm saying. And apparently, at some point, Everett actually ditched his horse and just started hitchhiking. He stuck his thumb out. But other than that, Everett was essentially doing his best impression of being this kind of like vagabond character, right? He was traveling with very few resources. He was working odd jobs, sleeping outside. And again, all that really reminds me of Christopher McCannless too. Just by the willingness to really live the part, even if he didn't necessarily have to rough it as hard as he did. After a few weeks of travel, Everett arrived in Cayenta, Arizona, and he immediately became entrenched in the Navajo and Hopi communities learning how to do business with the local tribes by selling his artwork in exchange for food. I mean, picture that for a second. The 17-year-old pasty wannabe vagabond shows up in a town of Native Americans and starts painting stuff. And he doesn't really speak the language that well, and so he's kind of just around. And this of course could go one of two ways. Either this random kid could be run out of town, or he could become a straight-up local legend. And folks, that's exactly what happened. Everett's artwork was by all accounts very, very impressive, and he actually gained a pretty big following during those first few months. Almost like he was the original influencer or something. I bet if you had a YouTube channel, he'd have even more subscribers than me, unless once again you do something about it and hit that subscribe button. Is that bad? Should we cut that? I'll knock it off. Everett was really loving his life at this time. His days were full of meeting people and making arts, and every night he would fall asleep under a blanket of desert stars, which sounds really good to me. But there was something on Everett's mind that he just couldn't shake. And that was his home. He missed his family, and of course he knew just how much they missed having him around, right? And we know this, by the way, because Everett's family was constantly sending care packages to local post offices, just kind of guessing where Everett was going to be, and so in return, Everett often wrote letters back home to his parents. And in these letters, he spoke of the freedom that he was experiencing so far off the grid, the beauty of the landscapes, and the people, and the piece that he found while he was out there. I find this really interesting, because this was something that both Everett and Christopher McCandless were really drawn to, almost in a hypnotic way, right? With that said, not all of Everett's letters were positive. Let's just say that he kind of had this fascination with the darker sides of life, namely death. He wrote things like quote, "I must pack my short life full of interesting events and creative activity, then I shall go on some last wilderness trip to a place I have known and loved I shall not return." And once again, I need to remind you, he was 17, 17 while talking like this. And I'm sure that if you were his parents or his older brother Waldo, after not seeing him for many months, reading things like that would not have been easy. Like this is almost giving me emo kid vibes. Like maybe that's just because that's how I was when I was 17, but maybe Everett was the original influencer and the original emo kid. Okay, that's a stretch. I gotta stop doing this, dude. Despite these concerning letters that he was writing and his concerning attitude, Everett's family really just wanted him to be happy at the end of the day, and so they didn't really dig into things all that deeply. In return for letting Everett live out his dream, his parents just had one simple request for their young son. And that was, please just come home for Christmas. This was a big deal for the Roos family. They were very serious about Christmas. Remember, they're a very Christian family with a father that was a literal minister, right? And in Everett, knowing how much his parents cared for him and knowing how much they cared about this holiday, he lived up to that promise. Everett finally returned home a whole six months after he left his family behind in the first place. And the family probably thought, you know, maybe maybe Everett got the travel bug out of him and he was ready to kind of think more about his future, maybe consider going to school, maybe find a girlfriend, but no, not for Mr. Lonesome. As soon as Christmas was over, Everett was already planning his next trip. In 1932, now 18-year-old Everett spent seven more months in the southwest before returning home for Christmas once again. And in 1933, Everett took to the trails once more, spending five months trekking from Los Angeles all the way to the top of California. And at the end of that excursion, Everett's family actually met up with him in San Francisco for Christmas, of course. By this This time, Everett was pursuing his art career a bit more seriously, and he was actually building out a network of some pretty prominent artists for the time, like legendary photographers, Dorothy Lang, and Ansel Adams. Which should tell you a lot, right? I mean, basically everyone who met this kid was charmed by his story, his attitude, and he was starting to get a decent amount of attention from artists across the west coast. But by April of 1934, Everett, who was kind of jumping between friends in San Francisco and family in Los Angeles, will Everett had just become totally fed up with the city life, and he longed for his days back in the desert. This time, he was obsessed with the idea of not only the settled communities, but more than that, the vast unknown regions of wilderness in the southwest. And to narrow it down even more, I'm talking about the giant sweeping deserts of Utah and Arizona. And so, at 20 years old, Everett grew's prepared for his most ambitious journey yet. He was going to head into a region so remote that even today, few people go there. And folks, I'm talking about the Escalante canyons of Southern Utah, which if you look at a map, is just about as close as you can possibly get to True No Man's Land. Everett kissed his parents goodbye, and he promised, once more, that he'd be home for Christmas. And then, he set out, once again, from Los Angeles all the way to the southwest. And this time, Everett actually brought along two companions, uh, which were two donkeys, I should say, or, or burrows, which is a very poor pronunciation of the Spanish word. That's what Everett used. Burrows, I don't know, I'm probably butchering that, but, um, anyways, these, these burrows' names, as chosen by Everett himself, were Chaco Latero, and Cockle Burrow, or, as I like to call them, because they're a little easier to say this way, Chaco, and Cocko. On second thought, on this particular excursion, Everett actually rode the entire way from L.A. to Arizona. He wasn't a lazy hitchhiker or a nervous teenager anymore, right? He was fully confident in his return to the southwest, almost like he had some unfinished business there. And whenever it arrived in Arizona, he went right back to Cayenta, and he reunited with the Navajo and Hopi communities. And by the way, this wasn't just some quick pit stop. Everett literally took part in a Hopi religious ceremony, and he became fluent in the Navajo language. He also took an odd job with archaeologists from the University of California, and, of course, he continued to grind out paintings, and poems, and journal entries, and letters. By this point in time, Everett was pretty much a young philosopher, quoting all of the great thinkers of history in his writings, and learning languages like French and Latin in addition to the local Navajo language, which, once again, sounds very similar to Christopher McCannless. And just to remind you, there was some pretty serious belief in many artistic circles at this point that, once Everett returned home, he would have a career in the art ahead of him, right? Things were looking very promising for him. But Everett still had one more stop in his itinerary on this trip, before he could think about returning home for Christmas. Sometime, in early October, Everett made it to Escalante, Utah, which is a tiny dirt road community that's literally out of a western movie, or at least that's how it felt at the time. It's obviously changed now, but it's still pretty small, fully been there once. But anyways, Everett knew that, from here, his next travels would be into mostly uninhabited territories of southwestern Utah. And so he took a beat, and he actually spent a few weeks in this small desert town. According to his writings, he saw a movie called Death Takes a Holiday, which isn't a total surprise considering his interest in the subject matter. And one thing that's a little more wholesome is that he also took on an older brother role to some of the kids in town, teaching them to ride horses, and to hunt for arrows. And that all is to say that pretty much anywhere he went, he was starting to be seen as this like, folk hero. During these weeks in Escalante, Everett wrote a letter to his parents, explaining that he wouldn't be able to communicate for a little while. And this was, of course, very disappointing for Everett's parents. Ever assured them that he'd still be home for Christmas no matter what. Now of course, Everett's parents had their doubts, but you have to remember that Everett had never broken this promise, and he had made good on it every single time in the past. And he seemed to actually be in a pretty good place when he was writing this letter. He sounded more mature. He even sent his parents $10 in that letter, along with over 20 of his paintings. Everett's parents would use that money to frame these paintings as they anxiously waited for Christmas time to roll around. On November 12th, 1934, it was time for Everett to leave Escalante. He left wearing a light red shirt that people in the town described as "fin as smoking paper." He had been warned by the people of Escalante about the brutal winters, and that in December, snowstorms could even come through the area, which might sound weird for the desert, but that's how it is, as a lot of you know. Yet despite these warnings, Everett told everyone in town what he had told his parents, which was that he'd be home for Christmas. He told everyone, including his parents, that he was heading in to Davis Gulch, which is 45 miles or around 72 kilometers from Escalante, and he chose this area because he had heard a rumor that out there in the Gulch there was this remote Native American cliff dwelling. And so he obviously told the people of Escalante and his parents quite a lot before he left. But there were a few things that he didn't tell anybody, because of course, as I've hopefully made clear by now, Everett was a very complicated young man. He had different relationships with different people, and he definitely had plenty of secrets. Some of his writings would later reveal that he had gone through some controversial business dealings with Native American tribes, and also that he didn't really like many of the people he came across, despite his popularity among strangers, and then other writings to a close friend named Bill Jacobs revealed his frustrations with the vagabond life, and a deep longing for the intellectual people of Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as some not so subtle hints of his romantic interest in both women and men alike, knowing that Everett's family was, you know, very religious and conservative, and it also still being the 1930s. This would have definitely been a secret to keep, and possibly even something to run away from. But maybe most revealing of all is a letter that Everett wrote to his older brother Waldo during those weeks he spent in Escalante. And this to me is really where I feel like Chris McCannless was literally speaking through him, Everett said that quote, "He would not be revisiting civilization anytime soon." Quote, "I'll never stop wandering, and when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is." Which is very concerning just on its face, but notably, this contradicts the promise that Everett had made to his parents that he would be home for Christmas. At this point, Everett's life could have gone in several directions, right? And the truth is that his next move was genuinely a mystery. That is, until November 19th, 1934, a whole week after he left Escalante. According to two sheep herders near Davis Gulch, Everett and his two donkeys wrote up next to them. These sheep herders, stunned to see such a young solo traveler, offered Everett and his donkeys some of their mutton to eat. Which sounds delicious, right? And yet despite that, Everett politely declined, and he moved on deeper into the unknown. And I need to make clear here, the unknown that Everett and his donkeys were heading into was no cakewalk to put it mildly. Danger was everywhere in Davis Gulch. Slickrock stretched for miles. Smooth sandstone that, if Everett slipped, could have sent him tumbling down hundreds of feet. The slot canyons here twisted like veins through the desert, some no wider than Everett's shoulder, like claustrophobic nightmare, right? And always something I haven't even mentioned yet was the threats of flash floods. A storm that could literally be miles and miles away could still send a wall of water roaring through a canyon without warning, sweeping away anything and anyone in its path. And plus, there were the human dangers. Because you gotta remember, this was still largely an unexplored, unknown frontier, with plenty of unaccounted people living on it. With Mormon ranchers and rural Navajo people were known to be hostile to anyone who came onto their land uninvited. And plus, the Great Depression had turned many people into outlaws and drifters, outcasts from society who could hide in the canyons looking to rob anyone that they could see, especially a nice looking naive 20 year old with two donkeys. You gotta remember that Everett was chasing this freedom, right? But to me, and feel free to disagree, but I don't know. This sounds more like a death wish, and a lot less like freedom. But Everett was young, he was idealistic, maybe he didn't calculate every risk, or maybe he did, and as his writing suggests, maybe he was just ready to embrace whatever came next, and maybe, just maybe, he wasn't just ready to to embrace the risks. Maybe he was actively seeking them out. I don't know, that's just speculation, but weeks and weeks would go by and Christmas, 1934, came and went at the Roo's household. They did not get even a single letter from Everett. Let alone, you know, have him actually show up and return home for Christmas. Everett had, for the very first time, broken his promise to his parents. And this terrified them, but it didn't necessarily surprise his brother Waldo, especially after the last letter that he had received from Everett. To kind of test the waters, Everett's family would end up sending a Christmas card to the post office in Escalante, addressed to their absent son. And a whole month later, a message came back, but it was not what they expected. All that returned was the exact same card that they had mailed to Everett, now labeled return to sender. So at this point, Everett's family began to panic, right? Because, as we all know, return to sender only meant one thing. And that was, of course, that Everett was unaccounted for. He was missing. And so Everett's father, Christopher, traveled to Escalante and he started asking questions. Eventually, he even pieced together that Everett had gone into Davis Gulch, and so he hired several parties of ranchers, cowboys, and even Navajo guides to go out into Davis Gulch and to look for his son, looking for any sign of life or even just traces of him being there. But every single time they went out, they came back having found nothing. No sign or trace of Everett whatsoever, let alone actually finding him. And then, finally, after weeks of this, a group of searchers came upon an incredibly disturbing site in a shaded area of Davis Gulch. They found Everett's two donkeys alive, but they were tied up to a tree with food and water next to them. And nearby, they found Everett's actual campsite. They found his cooking gear, carving tools, painting supplies, art supplies. Everything perfectly arranged. Almost as though Everett was creating one final portrait of the vagabond life that he was leaving behind. And to finish it off, they found a signature on a nearby rock wall. But the signature didn't have Everett's name, but instead it had his alias. This alias was Nemo. And next to it, he signed the year 1934. And in case you didn't piece this together by now, the only thing they didn't find in this campsite was Everett. Now at first, some of the townspeople thought that Nemo, Everett's alias, was like a reference to one of his favorite books, which was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and a character named Captain Nemo, who did go missing in that book. But Everett's father thought differently, because, well, he knew what no one else in Escalante did. He knew Latin, as did Everett. And so Everett's father knew exactly what Nemo meant. And when you translate it, it means no one, which is a little bit disturbing. I mean, I mean, imagine realizing that your son, Everett, or Nemo, I guess, or no one, wasn't just gone, but that he had also basically signed his entire identity away. I mean, that's heartbreaking, because while the world now had a mystery to solve, the Ruse family had to come to terms with the total disappearance of their child. And though they struggled to come to terms with this, they didn't give up. Everett's father started broadcasting the search for Everett. And soon, the letters that he had written to friends and family became public, as people tried to piece together what the hell could have possibly happened. But from the moment that this story hit the press and through the decades afterwards, Everett's disappearance became even more mysterious and even more twisted. I guess the simplest explanation of what may have happened to Everett is that he had an accident while trekking through the backcountry. I mean, once again, this area is incredibly unforgiving. Probably one of the more unforgiving landscapes in all of America. Imagine Everett climbing some slick rock, his donkey's kind of tethered safely down a camp, and then boom, you know, one misstep, he could have tumbled into a narrow crevasse and then that would have been that. Or maybe he wandered into a slot canyon and then storm clouds miles away, unleashed a bunch of rain and then a wall of water roars through the canyon without warning and then that canyon becomes his watery tomb. For many people, this was the most rational theory that Everett was essentially claimed by the very wilderness that he loved, an accident. And in some ways, this does feel like the most poetic, but others suspected something a bit more sinister. Again, the 1930s and Southern Utah were rough years. The Great Depression left many people struggling to survive, willing to do just about anything to improve their law in life. So is it possible that Everett could have crossed paths with someone who was desperate enough to kill? His supplies, you know, his donkeys, his food, tools, all that stuff, it would have been very valuable. But as you probably realized, there's a massive, massive problem with this theory. And that is, of course, that none of Everett's stuff was taken. Nothing was stolen. The donkeys were left alive. The camp was intact. And so if Everett was murdered, the killers left almost no trace and took nothing. And so that doesn't really make sense to me, but still, at the time there were whispers, actually, for a long time. In the 1970s, the Navajo tribe, many of whom were alive during the time that Everett was around and disappeared, well, they began to peddle their own theories, suggesting that maybe he was killed by a local businessman or by the remote cave dwellers that he was searching for. And maybe he was buried in a shallow grave. A lot of rumors were floating around. A lot of just theories, but in 2009, these almost wacky theories were actually confirmed. A pile of bones were discovered about 50 miles east from Davis Gulch, around where the cave dwelling that Everett was searching for might have been located. And in an initial round of DNA testing, they basically confirmed that these bones belong to none other than Everett Roos. National Geographic, the New York Times, among a lot of other publications, ran headlines saying, basically, mystery solved, which is crazy. Imagine this case being closed after 75 years of mystery. I know this happens every now and again, including in other stories I've covered on the channel, but this almost feels too good to be true, right? And tragically, it was. Apparently, this first batch of DNA testing was completely botched, and all it took was one additional round of DNA testing to show that the bones were not Everett's. And so just like that, this mystery, this legendary mystery that had apparently just been solved, well, it turned right back into the legendary mystery that it is. And around this time, another theory came out from some scholars who had been studying Everett's letters. They tried connecting Everett's obsession with death in all of his letters to the idea that maybe he decided to take his own life out there in the desert. But it's notable that despite Everett's weird obsession with death, he never mentioned actually wanting to take his own life in any of these letters. And also, outside of some typical complaining, especially for a young man, he wasn't notably depressed or anything. And also, if he did this, why would he have tied up his donkeys and then just left them there? And so now we're getting into some even crazier territory with what could have happened to Everett, which leads me to the next theory. And this is my personal favorite theory. This is, what if Everett didn't die? What if he chose to vanish just like he had basically promised that he would? What if the Nemo alias and signature he used was not Everett's farewell, but rather a rebirth, essentially? I mean, could he have walked away from his donkeys, his possessions, and even his own name and identity and started a new life elsewhere? Remember when Everett sent $10 and pretty much all of his paintings to his parents? What if he wasn't really doing well financially as some people have suggested? And that was actually literally the rest of his money that he had and his entire collection of remaining paintings. And what if he was just trying to get all that out there to kind of start fresh? I don't know. I just have this weird picture in my mind of Everett hiding out in the desert while watching the search parties look for him and just feeling so free from it. Again, I mean, he made it abundantly clear that this freedom is what he was chasing. Maybe he was even returning back to his camp at night to feed the donkeys all the way up until his dad finally found them. And then at that point, he was released from what was literally the last responsibility that he had left. I don't know. That's just me speculating, obviously, but I don't know. We don't have anything else, so it kind of makes sense, right? Since 1934, several people have actually claimed to have seen Everett Rousse. People have said they saw him as a wandering artist in Arizona, a strange drifter all the way down in Mexico, a hiker in the Sierra Nevada, as even a silent, elderly white man in a Native American community. But none of these sightings were ever confirmed to be Everett himself. But still, I think this theory I've presented here is, I mean, it's as good as any, right? I mean, to disappear completely and restart as a new person may have been to Everett the ultimate act of freedom, which aligns with his-- letter about not wanting to return to civilization anytime soon, with his documented stress about the people in his life including his family, and especially with his final sign-off to the world as no one. And to me, this is why Everett really is the Christopher McCannless that no one really talks about, because just like McCannless, neither of them wanted to be famous, neither of them was looking to become a legend or a folk hero, or even a role model. These two guys just loved nature, and both seemed to be running away from society, from family names, and even from some secrets that they were hiding. And in a strange way, Everett achieved exactly what he sought. If he vanished into the desert and became timeless, neither alive, nor dead, neither found, nor forgotten. Over 90 years later, we're still asking the same question, what happened to Everett Rousse? But what do you think? And now I need to warn you that this next story is incredibly dark. Your discretion is advised, but if you think you can handle it, please leave this show a 5 star review right now, it helps us a ton, and it's totally free. They say you should never trust a stranger, and on a cold night in the Colorado Mountains, Barbara Oberholzer learned that lesson the hard way. On January 6th, 1982, the 29 year old was hitchhiking home in Breckenridge, Colorado. But she never ended up walking through her front door, and what followed was one of the most disturbing mysteries this town, and frankly the state of Colorado had ever seen, and the most enraging part is that the answer to this mystery was accidentally printed in a local newspaper the very next morning, and yet, somehow, nobody saw it for 40 entire years. Earlier that evening, before everything went wrong, Barbara, who is known to her friends and family as Bobby Joe, picked up the phone and she called her husband Jeff. She had some good news. She'd been given a surprise promotion at work, and naturally, she wanted to celebrate. Jeff was at home with their 11 year old daughter at the time, about 30 minutes south of Breckenridge. And naturally, you know, as a husband, he offered to go and pick his wife up and drive her home, but Bobby Joe brushed this off. She told him not to worry that she would just hitch a ride home, like she had done so many times before. Now I know that we've talked a lot about the dangers of hitchhiking, but you need to remember, back then, in the early 80s, in a close-knit ski town like Breckenridge, hitchhiking wasn't unusual at all. Bobby Joe did it all the time. Most people did, neighbors, co-workers, and even strangers, all seemed like they were part of the same community, and it was almost guaranteed that someone familiar would stop to pick you up. And this night wasn't like any other night, and I say that because outside, a brutal winter storm was tearing through the mountains. The wind hollowed, the snow piled up, and the roads were slick and treacherous. I hate driving in the snow. This sounds like a nightmare. And storms like that don't just swallow trails and roads. They can sometimes swallow evidence. They can bury secrets that might not resurface for hours, days, or even decades. Now back at home, Jeff sat in the family room. His eyes kind of looking towards the door every few minutes, waiting for Bobby Joe to come walking in. Jeff waited, and waited, and waited. The house was quiet. Just the sound of the storm pressing against the windows, while the clock hands crept forward. Eventually, exhaustion overtook Jeff, and he drifted into a light sleep on the couch. But then, sometime after midnight, he kind of startled awake, and he rubbed his eyes, he glanced at the clock, and immediately felt this sinking feeling inside of his chest. Midnight had come and gone, and his wife, Bobby Joe, still wasn't home. A flicker of panic tried to clients weigh in, but Jeff kind of pushed this back down inside himself. He trusted his wife after all. She was reliable, responsible, and she was celebrating after all, maybe she just lost track of time. Jeff told himself that Bobby Joe would be walking through that front door any minute now. And so with that, Jeff went back to bed, pulling the covers up, and trying to force himself to sleep, telling himself that his wife would wake him up when she finally got home. But what he didn't know was that the storm outside wasn't just hiding wind and snow drifts. It was hiding something much, much darker. When the early morning light of January 7th, the following morning, spilled into the bedroom, Jeff woke up with a jolt. For a split second, as the sun crept through the blinds, he let himself believe that Bobby Joe was curled up in bed beside him, but when he turned over, the other side of the bed was cold. And that hit in Jeff's stomach, the one that he tried to ignore the night before, was now impossible to push away. He got up quickly, his heart racing, and he began searching the house frantically, like first the living room, which was empty, you know, but maybe she was in the bathroom, right? So he rushed down the hall, threw up in the door, but there was no steam. There was no sounds of a shower or running water. There was no sign of his wife. And so his mind scrambled for explanations. Maybe she'd gotten home late, decided to make coffee. Maybe she was just sitting at the kitchen table. And so he hurried into the kitchen, half expecting the familiar smell of a fresh pot of coffee brewing, but the kitchen was silent. There was no coffee, and there was no Bobby Joe. One by room, by room, Jeff searched the house, finding that each corner was emptier than the last. And with every step, with every silence, the truth crept closer, which was his wife hadn't made it home. Something was wrong, terribly wrong. And the storm outside suddenly felt like it had carried more than just snow into their lives. Jeff called the police, and he told them that when his wife still hadn't returned home by 2am, you know, after he knew the bars would be closing, he just, quote, "new something was not right." And right after that, Jeff started his own frantic search. He drove into town and looked for Bobby Joe at the home of one of the friends that she had been out with that night. And he learned that Bobby Joe had done exactly what she told him she was going to do. She left the bar early around 7.50pm, and her friends assumed that she had hitched a ride home, and that she had gotten there safe and sound. But at this point, she'd been gone for hours, and everyone involved was just starting to get extremely worried, because that night saw temperatures drop to nearly -20 Fahrenheit. And the mountains had been bombarded with a winter storm. If Bobby Joe was still out there, one could only hope that she had found some kind of shelter and some warmth. And to make matters even worse, they knew that she was out celebrating that night, and there was even a chance that she could have drunkenly fallen in the snow and wasn't even able to fully help herself. And those were just the fears if she was missing by accident. They hadn't even begun to wonder if something much darker had happened. Jeff spent the entire day searching, but he was exhausted, and he eventually had to just go home and wait things out, which must have been so painful. And while he was home, his telephone started to ring, so he walked over to the phone slowly. One part of him was excited, because maybe it was his wife on the other line, and another part of him didn't want to pick the phone up, in case there was awful news waiting for him. So Jeff gets this phone call and he's hoping that it's his wife on the other end. And in a weird way, you know, if it's not his wife, he's hoping that it at least is going to contain something about what happened to her. Some sort of answer, some sort of closure. But instead of either one of those things, this phone call only contained more mystery. A local farmer from just outside of Breckenridge had found Bobby Joe's driver's license and a few other items that he figured had been inside of her purse. All of her belongings were just kind of blowing around on his driveway on the side of the highway. Jeff and two of his friends drove over to the farmer's house, but as they approached the home, Jeff spotted something out of the corner of his eye. He wasn't sure how he saw it in the snow, but it was as if something pulled his attention to this random blue object. Folks, this was just one of many secrets that the snow and the mountains had hidden from the previous night. And while this particular one was finally revealing itself, many other mysteries would stay buried for much, much longer. Jeff hopped out of the car to investigate, and as he realized what it was he was looking at, chills ran down his spine. And not just because he was in the middle of the snowstorm, um, because the blue blob in the snow was Bobby Joe's backpack. The very same one that she had taken with her when she had left her work the last time that Jeff had ever seen her. And close by, he found one of her gloves and some tissues. I mean, this was also mysterious. Bobby Joe had seemingly disappeared, and yet here were all of her things in one random place. And things got even worse when Jeff looked a little closer at the glove and the tissues. They were staying in red, and you know where I'm going with this, he realized the truth almost immediately they were covered in blood. With the help of his friends, Jeff jumped into action and organized an even larger search party through the remote area between Breckenridge and Alma, along the route that Bobby Joe usually took as she was traveling back and forth to work. He was absolutely determined to find his wife. The cold was biting, you know, the kind that cuts into your lungs with every breath. If you've been to Breckenridge like I have, you know what I'm talking about. And his friends were all trudging through these conditions for hours. And eventually Jeff decided he needed a quick little break, and so he stepped away for just a moment. And while he did this, the rest of the search party finally found something. Something that stopped them cold. They didn't know how they would break the news to their friend Jeff, but they had discovered pure nightmare fuel right there in the snow. On that day, January 7th, about 20 miles from where her backpack and purse had turned up, Jeff's friends had found his wife. And folks, this was not good news at all, because as I'm sure you guessed, she was dead. Bobby Joe was lying fully clothed in a snow bank off Colorado Highway 9 somewhere between 5 and 10 miles outside of Breckenridge. The spot was near Hoosier Pass, which is a remote mountain summit, more than 11,000 feet or about 3,050 meters above sea level. They were way, way high up isolated where no one would be able to hear you scream if something went wrong. The body was discovered just 400 feet or about 120 meters from the summit's peak, lying on her back in the snow. And obviously they called the police immediately, and when they arrived, they began to poke around and investigate even more, and the grim reality started to set in. And that reality was that Bobby Joe's cause of death was a gunshot wound, actually two gunshot wounds. Twice. This was obviously hard for Jeff to process. I mean, as a husband, you obviously feel a great need to protect your wife from harm at all times, but he had to come to terms that there was nothing he could have done to save her from this fate. He felt just incredibly helpless, and essentially his wife had been hunted. Nearby the scene, investigators found a strange keychain with a hook on it, and they also found a single orange sock. This random sock originally didn't really seem like much of a clue, but it stood out against the white snow, and so investigators made note of it, and they collected it for evidence. Bobby Joe's body had clearly been there for some time. It was frozen solid from the brutal exposure, and there were two zip ties wrapped tightly around her left wrist. Police believed that she was trying to get away from who or what we still don't know, but she had broken free and made a run for it, struggling through the snow, desperate to escape. And if you've ever tried to run through deep snow, you'll understand just how impossible that would have felt. I mean, you just feel so helpless. You're so slow. For me, I imagine it feels just like whenever I'm running away from the terrifying clowns I see in my nightmares, with their giant red shoes and their fuzzy green hair and their honky horn noses, and sorry, I got a little carried away there. As you can tell, I'm not a huge fan of clowns. Can you blame me? But anyways, that kind of deep fear and terror likely doesn't even scratch the surface of what Bobby Joe was facing up there at 11,000 feet, all alone, in the freezing cold, and trying desperately to make it over that snowbank. As police investigated the crime scene, Jeff insisted on seeing his wife's body. He recognized the mysterious keychain that was found there, and he recognized it because he had actually made it himself. It was a heavy brass hook on a keychain, and he had hoped that one day, if she ever needed it, Bobby Joe could have used it as a weapon to protect herself. And all of a sudden, as Jeff looked at this gift he had made for his wife, he started to dread the idea that it might have been used for that exact purpose. But strangely, Jeff couldn't identify the orange sock they found there. He said that it didn't belong to Bobby Joe, maybe it was totally random, or maybe the sock or Jeff held more secrets than they could even know. And thus, the police began questioning everything, including Jeff himself. They didn't feel great about how much he wanted to see his wife's body, and they started to look into him deeper with each passing day in the investigation. But before they could even zero in on Jeff and truly determine if he was a suspect or not, everything else happened that would turn this entire case completely upside down. The day after Bobby Joe was found, another young woman was reported missing. A net Schnee was 21 years old. She had just moved to Colorado by herself, and she lived about 10 minutes south of Breckenridge. A networked two jobs, one as a maid and the other as a waitress. Both jobs were located along Highway 9, which is pretty bizarre because if you remember, that's the exact same mountain highway where Bobby Joe had been found. Hold on to that detail for now, because it's going to end up being very important very, very soon. She was at her maid shift at the holiday end, and she was complaining that she wasn't feeling very well. And so she decided to go see a doctor in the afternoon, and then she went to a pharmacy in Breckenridge around 4.30 pm. While at the pharmacy, she spoke with an unidentified dark haired woman. People who saw the two talking that day said they didn't think this dark haired woman was from the area. You know, she was someone nobody could place. And that had been scheduled to start work at 8 pm that evening, but she never showed up. Her coworkers at the restaurant started to get worried after they hadn't heard from her. It wasn't just that she missed work that day. It's that two more days passed, and still nothing. Unlike Bobby Joe, who had friends and a husband to notice her absence quickly, Annette lived all alone, and so her disappearance wasn't immediately obvious. In fact, it wasn't until January 8, two days after her last known sighting at the pharmacy, that one of her co-workers finally called in to report her missing. And so another search began, and this time it was for Annette Schnee. Her family rushed to Colorado to organize people, post-fliers, and knock on doors, and they also told police something that immediately raised red flags. They said that Annette, just like Bobby Joe, often hitchhiked. And so, quite obviously, the police couldn't ignore the similarities between these two cases any longer. Two young women both disappeared the same day, and both of them were known to hitchhike, and both of them were last seen along the same stretch of highway. The police were absolutely convinced that these two cases had to be connected. And so they went back to someone who they'd already talked to. That would be Jeff Oberholzer. He was still fresh off the discovery of his wife's body, but police just had to know if they could learn anything from Jeff about Annette's disappearance. But at the time, of course, Jeff denied ever knowing her. But shortly after this denial, Jeff came back to the police, and he told them that he had had a vision. And I know it sounds pretty crazy to me to, I mean, this guy who is possibly a suspect in two different missing persons cases or murders just calls up the police and tells them he has a psychic vision as if he's that sort of raven or something. Look, I don't know if Jeff had ESP or if he'd just like to watch ESPN, but he told investigators he had always been sensitive or prone to having visions or feelings about things. And believe it or not, his vision plays a pretty big role in this whole story. He said that he had a strong vision that Annette would be found dead and that he believed her body would be discovered four miles from his home and that it would happen on the 4th of July, which is pretty random and a little bit concerning. I mean, to law enforcement that didn't really sound like a psychic insight, it sounded more like a mysterious, indirect confession of some kind. I mean, Jeff didn't have any close connection to Annette, according to him, he had never even met her at all, and yet here he was offering up where and when she would be found. And he said it all came to him in a dream. Like what is that? Jeff insisted that he said he was just trying to help, but as you could probably guess, the suspicion surrounding him really started to grow after this revelation. This passed in the search for Annette, and heartbreakingly, the case would end up going cold and her family was left with just so many questions, right? But then on July 3rd, nearly six months to the day after she vanished, a young boy was fishing near Sacramento Creek close to the town of Fairplay, Colorado, which was only six miles away from Jeff's house. The boy cast his line into the creek when all of a sudden he spotted something strange along the water's edge. Now at first he thought it was a mannequin, like it looked like this discarded plastic lifeless something. And so he took a couple steps closer and he realized that it smelled and it certainly didn't smell like a mannequin. Folks, this boy stumbled across the remains of a Netchny. I'm gonna get a little deep for a second, but looking at her body lying all alone in the snow, it was hard not to kind of see it as a metaphor for her life at the time. She was living alone and it took days before anyone even realized she was missing and now here she was found lying on her back with one arm outstretched and the other kind of bent across her chest and again she was all alone. One of her boots was off and it was laying nearby. Now this boy that found her didn't stand there and look at her for very long, but something still caught his eye before he looked away and that was a single orange sock. That's right. Another orange sock and it was the matching sock to the one found at the scene of Bobby Joe's murder. Now personally I know that I'm always pretty stoked whenever I reunite my mismatched socks after losing them in the wash from months, but something tells me that investigators were anything but stoked when they brought these two socks together because it obviously made them believe that something very dark had pulled them apart and that sock was not the only mysterious piece of evidence found on a Net's body. They looked in her jacket pocket and they discovered a business card with a very familiar name and that name was Jeff Oberholzer. So it turns out that Jeff had actually once picked up a net while she was hitchhiking more than two months earlier, apparently. According to Jeff, he had even given her one of his business cards since he was a repair man and had just printed a stack of new cards and so he was basically just handing them out like candy. And for what it's worth, Jeff did actually contact authorities before they found a net's body and told them that he actually did remember picking her up after looking at some of the photos of her more, but when they combined his business card with the crazy vision that he had that was only off by just one single day and a few miles, plus the added insanity that his wife went missing on the same day. This man who had desperately searched for the love of his life was now squarely under the microscope. Police believe that a net was possibly essayed. You know what I'm saying? But the cold water had washed away any DNA evidence that might have been left behind over the course of the six months. She had been shot in the back and there were marks on her wrists showing that she had been tied up with zip ties just like Bobby Joe. The idea that these two murders were connected had basically become impossible to deny at this point, right? Over the next eight years, investigators worked tirelessly, but we're having almost zero success in solving either one of these cases. By the early nineties, both cases had basically just gone completely cold, right? Jeff had never been charged with anything, but of course, everyone's suspicion still hung over his head. As the years dragged on, investigators basically resorted to just hoping and praying, you know, hoping and praying for some sort of miracle, something that could basically just solve the case for them with the wave of a wand. And maybe that seems kind of crazy, but you gotta keep in mind that this point they had already exhausted all of the logical and reasonable strategies. So maybe crazy is exactly what they needed. And while this might seem like the end of the story, I promise you it most certainly is not. So just buckle up because we now have to go all the way back to January 6th, 1982 when all this started. And folks part of my language here, but this is where shit gets crazy. So it's January 6th, 1982 all over again. The night that both women had gone missing. And as we know, the snow was coming down in buckets. The freezing temperatures and howling winds had turned Colorado's guanilla past into a treacherous frozen hell. I mean, I don't know how it's to say it was the kind of winter night where you look outside and decide, you know what? I think I'll just stay inside and sip my hot cocoa and not leave the house at all. That's what I would do anyways, but on this particular night, not everybody had that same idea. And I say that because as a plane was flying up above the mountains, the pilots looked closer and closer from the sky until they noticed some mysterious lights flashing in a tight, desperate rhythm. They got on their radio and they called for help down on the ground. It seemed impossible that someone could have made it all the way out there up on this pass in the snowstorm, but that's what they saw. And so the sheriff's office was dispatched to investigate. It took nearly four hours of searching and trudging through the deep snow, but crews did eventually reach the top of the pass and they found a stranded truck that had ended up in a ditch with its headlights pointing straight up inside the truck. There was a man sitting there alone, cold and panicking. This man was middle-aged and he seemed like he was just disoriented, right? And on top of that, the rescue crews noticed that his face was all gashed and bruised. There was blood all over and they could see multiple scratches. And that begs the question, had he gotten all of those scratches and scars when he crashed his car into the ditch? The man claimed that he had gotten drunk in a bar and took some back roads home to avoid getting pulled over on the highway. That's why he ended up on this random pass in the middle of the mountains during a snowstorm. And he said that when he got stuck in the ditch, he ended up flickering his headlights, you know, that were pointing straight up in Morse code, spelling out "SOS" in hopes that the pilot up in the sky might recognize it. And on the surface, this really seemed like a miracle rescue mission, right? Well, rescue crews had no idea just who exactly they had saved. I mean, they were staring directly into the face of a man named Allen Lee Phillips. Allen was a local man from Clear Creek County, Colorado. He was a minor, a real minor, not underage. And he was also a part-time mechanic who had grown up in Michigan, but had lived in the Colorado area long enough to probably know better than to drive up in the mountains during a storm, even if he was drunk. Now, this part of the story might seem a little random to you. Like, what does this have to do with the murders? We spent, you know, most of the story talking about up to this point. And so now we're gonna jump back forward in time to 2020. And we're gonna connect the dots. So by then, technology had obviously advanced quite a bit. And so investigators were able to use DNA evidence from the blood on the glove and tissue that was found with Bobby Joe's body. And then they connected it to a public genealogy database. They combed through tons of data and searched file after file, hoping that they'd finally be able to crack this case that had stumped everyone for almost 40 years. And by the time that all of the numbers were crunched, the evidence led them back to one single person. And that person, of course, was Alan Lee Phillips. That's right. The scarred up man that was miraculously rescued in the snow was the culprit the entire time. He lived his life directly under the noses of authorities for decades. They literally saved his ass the night he committed these murders. And yet he had managed to escape suspicion seemingly because he had lied and told them that he was driving drunk in the mountains. And just a side note here, but this has to be the first and only time that a criminal was ever able to escape punishment by admitting to drunk driving. Was that just me? You see, when police used this genealogy information to look into Alan, they found out that he had a criminal record and had served time for a soul and kidnapping in Texas. Police then obtained a warrant and tested his DNA. And of course, it was a match. Alan Lee Phillips was arrested in 2021. Nearly 40 years after Annette and Bobby Joe had been murdered. Police believe that Alan had picked up both women while they were hitchhiking and killed them in separate attacks on the very same day. He then zip tied them, SA them, you know what I mean? And then shot them. And as it turns out, the only reason authorities even had Phillips's blood in DNA is because Bobby Joe fought back with that metal keychain, her husband made for her, and she scratched Alan Lee Phillips. And the craziest part of all of this, at least to me, might be the fact that Alan's rescue made the local newspaper headlines praised the dramatic mountain rescue, and they were printed right alongside of reports of Bobby Joe's body being discovered. That kind of coincidence is almost too devastating to believe, right? I swear I'm not making this up. It's it's almost like the answer to her murder was written on the very same page as the announcement of it. But for 40 years, nobody noticed. And when it comes to Jeff side of the story, remember him, can you imagine being the suspects of these murders, including that of your wife for decades, only to finally be proven innocent? I mean, talk about a weight off your back. Like at this point in the year 2021, I don't know what would feel like more of a relief, you know, finally being proven innocent or finally knowing what actually happened to your wife, like who killed her? Uh, you know, it's a situation he should have never been put in in the first place. But I don't know, one of the men that had rescued Alan Lee Phillips on the night of the murder told reporters, quotes, if I had known then, I probably would have left him freezing to death out there. Alan Lee Phillips was sentenced to two life sentences without the possibility of parole. He was sent to Arkansas Valley correctional facility in Colorado. But on February 27th, 2023, we got one final crazy twist in this story. Because on that night in prison, Alan took his own life, may he rest in hell, may Bobby Joe and a net rest in peace. I appreciate all of you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. [BLANK_AUDIO]