The Night Ryan Vanished - British Columbia’s Unanswered Disappearance

Are you ready to dive into the unknown? Join me, Peyton Moreland, on Into the Dark, the true crime podcast from Ono Media with a hint of horror and mystery. Each week, I dive into a different case, breaking down the facts, and pondering the age-old question, "Why do people do what they do?" Now sometimes the answer isn't so clear, and that's why I'll also explore conspiracy theories, hauntings, and all things spooky. From the Green River Killer to the Mothman Incident, we will unravel all of the questions that keep us up at night. So don't miss out, subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform. New episodes drop every Wednesday. Into the Dark, where true crime meets the eerie unknown. Every town has a dark side. It's been four years since Ryan Stuka, a 20-year-old at the time, went missing from Sun Peaks Resort in Kamloops BC. In a ski town like Sun Peaks, people come and go all winter long. The most nights look the same, friends heading home after a party, a short walk through the cold, and everyone safely back in their beds come morning. While one February night, a young man here took that same familiar walk and never made it home. Until this day, no one can explain how that happened, and there's not a single shred of evidence pointing to what went down. Hey guys, it's Andrew and welcome to every town where today we're heading up north to Canada to explore missing persons' case that doesn't sit right for multiple reasons. So let's go to British Columbia now and check out the mystery behind Ryan Stuka, a vanishing at Sun Peaks. Ryan was 20 years old at the time, right in that strange stretch of life where you're technically an adult but still trying to figure out what that really means. And he liked to have fun, a guy who could hit you with a dry one liner before he even realized he was joking, and his sarcasm wasn't the prickly kind, it was the sort that made conversations feel lighter, like he was letting you in on the joke. And underneath all that, he was steady. If you ever needed help moving or ride somewhere, or someone to just sit with you when things weren't great, he was there without making a big thing out of it. Growing up in Beaumont, which is just outside Edmington, his life was filled with hockey and when he was little, not to dinosaurs. He went heavy into that phase, like a lot of young kids do, and he could list off every long-necked species without even taking a breath. It stuck with the family and so, after he went missing his mother Heather began using a simple green dinosaur as a symbol form, something instantly recognizable to the people following his story. After high school Ryan set off to figure some things out, he spent a year working for his dad, Scott's commercial construction company, learning some lifelong skills and the value of a hard day's work, and after that he tried college for a year, not because he had some grand plan, but because it felt like the next logical step. But the thing that pulled out of him the most was a love for snowboarding, and he grown up on the smaller Alberta hills, carving up whatever snow he could get, the idea of spending a full winter in the mountains felt like something he needed to try while he was still young enough. He set his sights on sun peaks resort in British Columbia, and in December 2017 he set out for this beautiful spot, a place where he could work, ride and hit reset. And Ryan wasn't generally known for quick and pulsive choices, and he usually weighed things out, but this was different. It was like the mountains were calling him, and he asked one of his closest friends, Danny Perol, to join him, but Danny had just started working on his brother's electrical company and couldn't drop everything. The Ryan asked another friend, James Maxwell, instead, and a two then headed west for an adventure, ended up in an older section of the Sunpeets Village, sharing a cramped room in a house with four other seasonal workers. Heather would later joke that the room barely counted as a room at all, while like a closet with a bed squeezed into it, but to Ryan, the tradeoff was worth it, and he finally got his winner in the mountains. So Ryan arrived at sun peaks on December 1st, and from everything his friends and family later pieced together, he was getting exactly the kind of winner he'd gone out there for. He picked up work as a lift operator at the tube park, one of those easy-going resort jobs where half of your day spent studying kids and oversized inflatable tubes before they launched down the run. The pace suited him, and left him with long stretches of daylight to ride, and he took full advantage of it. At one point he texted his dad to brag that he'd snowboarded 36 days in a row, and had finally landed his first backflip. And he was making friends and settling into the rhythm of a ski town, and at least from the outside seemed genuinely content. To picture the place he'd thrown himself into, a sun peak sits about 35 miles northeast of Kamloops in British Columbia's interior. It's the second largest ski area in Canada when you go by total terrain, and it's spread out over three mountains, Todd, Sundance, and Morrissey. The village tucked beneath them is small and self-contained, and kind of spot we end up recognizing the same jackets, the same faces, even if you never learn their names. On paper, it felt like a safe, insulated kind of environment, and that's what Ryan believed he was stepping into. A few months into this, on the night of February 16th, Ryan and his friends headed to Bottoms, one of the ski town's bars wedged right into the center of some peak's village. If you spend time in a mountain town, you already know the type of spot it is, pool tables pushed into the corners, and dartboards, lift past tickets slapped onto every fridge and freezer door. That night, the place was hosting a silent disco where everyone wears headphones. You could switch between two DJs, so one group would be bouncing to a completely different beat than the cluster just two feet away. It's a little weird if you're on the outside looking in because the bar itself stays oddly quiet, except for people belting out lyrics only they can hear. Ryan had gone out with his friend, James Maxwell, and another roommate, Chris Feeney, an Australian who'd come for the same seasonal adventure as them. After a few people mention, there might have been MDMA floating around that night, but nothing about the atmosphere suggested chaos or danger, and it was just young adults partying in a ski village, pretty standard stuff. And when Bottoms closed for the night, Ryan and his roommates headed back to their place on Burfield Drive, but the night was still young. It was an after party at a house that was about a 15 minute walk from Ryan's place, so they followed the flow of people moving up the road. The weather wasn't the kind of brutal cold people sometimes describe later. Historically, that night dipped to around 19 degrees Fahrenheit. It's still well below freezing, but it is a ski town, so you get used to it. And while reports later mention fresh snow in the days that followed, there's no clear record showing a major snowfall during the party itself. What is undeniable is that it was a typical deep winter night in the mountains, dark, cold and quiet, and the way resort towns get once the lift shut down. And somewhere between 30 and 50 people moved through that house over the course of the night. No workers, locals, friends, friends of friends. And James Maxwell was the first to leave. Then somewhere between 1.30 and 2.00 am, Chris Feeney and his girlfriend decided to call it an I-2. And this is where things start to lose shape. And several people later said Ryan stood up when Chris did, like he was getting ready to leave too, and pulling on his coat, shoes on, prepared for the walk back. When Chris and his girlfriend got on to the road and glanced behind them, Ryan wasn't there. He was last seen leaving a house party in the early morning hours of February 17th, 2018. He was just a short walk from home, but he never made it. Now no one remembers him staying there any longer, and there's no conversations people had late in the night. So by all accounts he headed out, but somewhere between the living room or the front door and that short familiar walk home, Orion Stukeka simply disappeared. Raise your hand if you've been putting off a doctor's appointment. Yep, lines up too. If something feels off my usual process is doom scroll symptoms, self-diagnose and tell myself it's probably nothing and then just live with it. But this year I'm done doing that. That's where ZockDoc comes in. ZockDoc is a free app and website that helps you find and book high quality in network doctors so you can actually find someone you'll love. We're talking about booking in network appointments with more than 150,000 providers across all 50 states. 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Plus right now, every town listeners can get an extra 10% off, site-wide, and that's on top of the already reduced prices. Just go to ghostbed.com/etown, and use promo code e-town at checkout. That's ghostbed.com/etown, promo code e-town, and upgrade your sleep with Ghost bed, and makers of the coolest beds in the world. Some exclusions apply and see site for details. For a long time, based on all the information gathered, investigators believed Ryan had walked out of that party around 2.10am. That timestamp shaped the entire early timeline. But months later, a delayed text Ryan had sent, the message saying he was heading out, finally pushed through the system. It didn't provide any new answers, but it shifted the timeline back by about a half hour. Instead of bringing clarity, only widen the gap in those crucial minutes. By the next morning, February 17th, the sun was up, and Ryan was supposed to be at work at the tube park. When he didn't show, his supervisor reached out to one of the roommates, and that's when the concerns started to settle in. A Ryan rarely skipped a shift, and if he did get something came up, he'd always give someone a heads-up. His friends tried the easiest steps first, posting on the resort's community facebook page asking if anyone had seen him. And then called the hospital thinking maybe he'd slept, or something minor had happened, and someone had brought him in. The hospital told them to contact police, and that's when James sent the message to Ryan's parents, letting them know a missing person reported been filed, and that the RCMP would likely be reaching out. For his mom Heather, that text made her world spin. She immediately opened her phone and saw that the message she'd sent Ryan earlier that morning. A simple good morning love bug still hadn't delivered. His phone was off or out of service, and that wasn't him, not answering her, so she knew something was deeply wrong. Heather and Scott made the nine-hour drive from Beaumont to sun peaks through the night, and every mile was agonizing as they ponder the what ifs. Heather kept circling the same thought. Maybe Ryan had gotten turned around in the snow, maybe the cold and darkness had disoriented him, and he was out there somewhere just waiting to be found. It was the only explanation that felt even remotely possible. But when they arrived in Met with Camloup's search and rescue the next morning, the reality hit hard. Not too many hours had passed, and the temperatures had been well below freezing, and Ryan had been drinking that night. The team was honest with them, compassionate but direct. The odds of finding him alive at this point were extremely low. Still, the search began immediately. For 15 straight hours, teams covered the area with drones, dog units, and dozens of trained volunteers working in tight grids through the valley. Over the months that followed, Camloup's search and rescue came back again and again, five full deployments in total, bringing in specialists from nearby regions. Their members alone logged over 1,000 hours searching for Ryan, and yet nothing at all ever surfaced. There were no signs he had been anywhere. Cadaver dogs were even brought in, trained for exactly these kinds of conditions, but they picked up no scent at all. The following morning in a desperate attempt, Tether and Scott began searching on their own. The five friends from Beaumont had driven through the night to stand with them and together, they started combing the resort and the surrounding terrain. That search didn't last a weekend or even a week. They carried on for five months. A more than a thousand volunteers from Camloup's, Alberta, and even further joined in. Among them were two teenagers, twin brothers cold-being Gregory Griffiths. They were just 16, but they showed up every weekend. When spring break came, they spent the entire week in the mountains, logging the same ridge lines and tree wells, refusing to give up on someone they'd never even met. And this search had carried on through the rest of the winter and into spring. When the snow finally began to pull back and the landscape opened up again, that's when everyone figured Ryan would be discovered. That his body, covered by inches of snow, would finally be revealed, and then, at least they could bring him home and hopefully find some answers as to what really went down. The working assumption from search and rescue had been straightforward. They believed Ryan may have slipped into one of the deep gullies or low pockets of terrain that surrounded Burfield Drive, places that can disappear completely under heavy snowfall. And if that had happened, the snow from that weekend could have buried him until the fall. But once the melt came and those areas were fully exposed, that idea began to fall apart. If Ryan had gone down somewhere along the short route between the party and his home, his body or at the very least some trace of them should have surfaced, but nothing did. When that happened, when people naturally began trying to fill in the gaps themselves. In some theories stayed rooted in reality. One suggestion was that perhaps Ryan had been struck by a driver who had been drinking and then panic. Some peaks have seen it share of hit and run, so it's plausible. But even that idea, it doesn't completely hold. Hit and run usually leave evidence behind. Some debris, tire marks, something. The idea that a driver would not only hit someone, but then remove the body and disappear without leaving a single sign. It stretches the scenario a bit too thin. And then, there were the theories that veered into darker territory. One detail that kept resurfacing came from a man named Jim Reed, who happened to be staying with friends near Ryan's place the night he went missing. Reed later told CBS News that he woke up in the middle of the night to something strange outside, a man shouting angrily over and over, "Get in the car. Get in the F in car." Reed thought it was serious enough to report it to the police. They followed up with them several times, but he was never told whether what he heard had anything to do with Ryan's disappearance. It's one of those details that sits uncomfortably in the middle of this story, not confirmed or dismissed it's just there. If it were connected though, it would point to the possibility of another person or multiple people being involved. That's where the idea of how play gains traction. A retired RCMP investigator named Brian Smith became involved in the search early on. At first his thinking matched what search and rescue believed. Ryan had likely wandered into snow and unfamiliar terrain and became trapped or disoriented, but after interviewing one of Ryan's friends, Smith changed course. He said this friend appeared nervous and not just shaken, but genuinely frightened. His instinct, based on decades of investigative work, was that Ryan's disappearance looked more like a homicide than an accident. And Smith shared his concerns and observations with the RCMP, but the official response never shifted. Police reiterated that they had no evidence pointing to criminal activity, so even if that were the case, that was nothing they could do. And what really continues to haunt this case is the complete absence of physical evidence. In more than seven years of searching, not a single item belonging to Ryan has ever turned up. In most wilderness cases, search teams expect some kind of trace, a glove, piece of fabric called on a branch, even footprints preserved under layers of snow. A Ryan left behind absolutely nothing, and for many people, that's the detail that makes an accidental disappearance hard to accept. And there's also been a lot of discussion, some fair, some purely speculative, about how Ryan's friends and roommates acted afterward. James Maxwell, Ryan's close friend, who moved to some peaks with him, hasn't spoken publicly about the case. And because James was the one who notified Ryan's parents that he was missing, his silence stands out to people, even if there may be personal reasons behind it. In Chris Feeney, the Australian roommate, who was the last known person to see Ryan at the party, has also stayed mostly quiet. A few weeks after Ryan disappeared, he left for a vacation in BAMF, which some people found strange, given the circumstances, and he eventually returned to Australia after that. Again, none of that proves anything, but in a case with so few answers, every unusual detail gets magnified. Another detail that continues to raise questions is the house where the after party was held. There's no clear public record showing that police or search and rescue teams went inside that home during the first 24 to 48 hours, the period when it would have mattered the most. The only first-hand account of anyone returning to the house comes from Chris Feeney's girlfriend, Kristen. As she said the day after Ryan disappeared, she, James, Chris, and another roommate drove over to check if Ryan might still be there. According to her, James went to the door, spoke with a homeowner outside, and never actually went inside to take a look around. And that's the part that noses at people. The question of whether Ryan ever left that house has been hanging over this case for years, because if something happened to him inside or even right outside that home, it would explain the total absence of physical evidence in the surrounding area, and would also explain why despite months of searching thousands of acres, nothing linked to Ryan has ever surfaced. Without access to police files, the real interviews, the scene checks, and whatever forensic steps were or weren't taken, the public can't know what investigators actually ruled out. As a result after all this time, every possibility still remains on the table. Maybe it was some kind of accident in the dark, maybe an animal encounter, even though there's little evidence to support that. Or maybe something entirely different happened in those early morning hours that involved other people. In the two years leading up to Ryan's disappearance, at least five other men vanished from that same stretch of British Columbia's southern interior. Not all of their cases are connected, but the pattern is hard to ignore. Now two of those men, Ryan Provincher and Ben Skurr, were found about a month after they went missing. Their white jeep Cherokee was discovered abandoned near Logan Lake, deep in the woods. Later their bodies turned up north of Spencer's Bridge. The RCMP made one thing clear. Criminal activity was definitely involved, but they've never disclosed how the two men died or who might be responsible. Another man, Luke Neville, disappeared from Spencer's Bridge in October of 2017, just months before Ryan vanished. His van was discovered burned out on a forest-service road 12 miles from his home. From search teams went out, but nothing was ever recovered. Then there's Ben Tiner, 32-year-old working cowboy he went missing from the merit area in January of 2019. And he'd ridden out into the hills to search for cattle. In two days later his horse was found standing alone on a forest road, fully saddled, calm, as if waiting for him. Despite enormous search efforts, Ben was also never found. One more case carries an unsettling echo of Ryan's Marshall Lawassa. And he vanished in November of 2019. His pickup truck was later located on a remote forest-service road near Darcy, burned down to its frame. And no sign of him as ever surfaced. Like Ryan, Marshall seemed to disappear without leaving so much as a footprint behind. Despite the timing and geography, police maintain there's no evidence connecting any of these cases, and each one stands alone. When you look at the time, place, and the number of men who vanish without a trace, it's hard not to feel the shape of something larger in the background. A pattern of some sort, no one is fully explained or even tried to. And then there's that voice Jim Reed heard that night Ryan vanished, a man outside yelling, "Get in the car, get in that thing car." And we don't know who he was. We don't know who he was talking to, and we don't know if it had anything to do with Ryan. But someone out there knows the answer to that. I look back and I can't believe that four years that were coming up to four years, and that I haven't seen him for four years. That I haven't talked to him. I haven't, you know, smelled the dirty socks from soccer and rugby and, you know, all the things that we're so annoying that you would give anything to have back. As of today, Ryan Stuka is still missing. And his family is still waiting for the truth about what happened on that cold February night. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Every Town. I hope you all enjoyed it. If you did, well, dig around because we have a bunch of other true crime stories that you have to hear to believe. I appreciate you very much. So thanks for tuning in. Remember to come back next week for another episode of Every Town. It'll be scary, strange, and mysterious stories, because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.