Just Creepy: Scary Stories - 5 True Mysteries From The Pacific Northwest

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

5 True Mysteries From The Pacific NorthwestLinktree: https://linktr.ee/its_just_creepyStory Credits:►Sent in to https://www.justcreepy.net/Timestamps:00:00 Intro00:03:49 Story 100:22:28 Story 200:35:37 Story 300:46:51 Story 401:01:18 Story 5Music by:►'Decoherence' by Scott Buckley - released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.auBusiness inquiries:►[e-mail]#scarystories #horrorstories💀As always, thanks for watching! 💀

On the afternoon of December 7, 1958, a family of five climbed into a cream and red Ford station wagon in Portland, Oregon, and told their neighbors they'd be back before dark. They were going to cut some Christmas greenery in the Columbia River Gorge. 60 miles up the river, they bought five gallons of gas, and then every single one of them disappeared. The search that followed was the largest in the history of the state of Oregon, and it would take 67 years, before any one of the state of Oregon. could say where that family went. 13 years after that, on the night before Thanksgiving, a man in a dark suit and a black tie sat in row 18 of a Boeing 727, ordered a bourbon and

soda, and handed a flight attendant a note. A few hours later, that man stepped off the back of the airplane, 10,000 feet above the Washington wilderness, in the rain, in the dark, with $200,000 strapped to his body. He has never been seen again. Not once, not by anyone. And his case remains the only unsolved act of air piracy in the history of American commercial aviation. In the spring of 2000, a 23-year-old woman drove a white Jeep across the entire country, bought a single movie ticket in Bellingham, Washington, and then vanished so completely that when investigators finally found her Jeep,

wrecked at the bottom of an embankment below Mount Baker, they realized something that still hasn't been explained. There was a very good chance no one had been inside that Jeep when it crashed. In 1924, five gold miners ran out of the foothills of Mount St. Helens and told authorities that something had attacked their cabin in the night. Not someone, something. And to this day, the place where it happened carries the name they gave it. And in September of 2001, three days after the worst attack in American history,

a quiet young man with no luggage stepped off a bus at the edge of the 11th. Olympic rainforest, checked into a small motel under a name he had taken from a novel and died there alone. For 17 years, nobody on this planet could say who he was. His headstone, and I'm not exaggerating, his actual headstone read, unknown. Five cases, one region, the Pacific Northwest of the United States, a stretch of country where the forests run so deep, the rivers run so cold, and the fog sits so heavy that people don't just go missing here. They disappear in ways that defy explanation. Tonight, I'm going to walk you through all five of these true stories, in detail, from beginning to end.

And I want you to pay attention as we go, because here's the thing about the Pacific Northwest that most people don't know. And it's the thing that ties every one of these cases together. Secrets in this region stay hidden for a very, very long time. but they don't stay hidden forever. But before we get into it, if you like scary stories, then you're in the right place. We put out episodes a few times every week,

so if that sounds good to you, please go ahead and hit follow or subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss a single story. Also, drop a comment down below and tell me where you're watching from. And if you're watching from the Pacific Northwest, well, maybe leave a light on. Okay. Let's get into it.

Our first story begins on Wednesday, November 24th, 1971, the day before Thanksgiving. It's mid-afternoon at Portland International Airport in Oregon, and the terminal is packed with holiday travelers. And somewhere in that crowd is a man who, by every account, is the single most forgettable person in the building. He's somewhere in his mid-forties. Medium height, medium build, dark suit, white, white shirt. shirt, thin black tie. He's carrying a briefcase and a paper bag. If you passed him in the terminal, you wouldn't look twice. He looked exactly how every other businessman flying home for Thanksgiving looked that day. This man walks up to the Northwest Orient Airlines counter and pays cash,

$20, for a one-way ticket on Flight 305, a 30-minute hop north to Seattle, Washington. And when the agent asks for his name for the manifest, he gives it, Dan Cooper. Now hold on to that name, because in the chaos that's about to unfold, a wire service reporter is going to get it wrong. The reporter will type the initials DB. Instead of Dan, the mistake will go out nationwide before anyone can correct it, and the wrong name will become one of the most famous names in American criminal history. The man at the counter called himself Dan Cooper. The world would come to know him as D.B. Cooper. Cooper boards the plane, a Boeing 727, and takes a seat in row 18 in the very back of the cabin.

The flight is barely a third full, maybe three dozen passengers scattered around, six crew members, everybody in a holiday mood. Cooper lights a cigarette, which you could do on planes back then, and he orders a drink, bourbon and soda. He pays for it, and witnesses would later say he was calm, polite, quiet, completely unremarkable. Shortly after 3 o'clock in the afternoon, Flight 305 lifts off the runway in Portland

and turns north towards Seattle. And almost immediately, Cooper waves over a young flight attendant named Florence Schaffner, who's seated near him in the back, and he hands her a folded note. Now Florence was 23 years old, and she was used to this. Businessmen handed flight attendants

their phone numbers all the time back then. So she did what she always did. she smiled and she slipped the note into her pocket without reading it and that's when the man in row 18 leaned over and said quietly miss you'd better look at that note i have a bomb florence opened the note it was printed a neat felt-tip pen and it said in effect i have a bomb in my briefcase i want you to sit next to me so she did she sat down next to him and she asked to see it and cooper opened the briefcase just a few inches just for a moment moment, and Florence saw what was inside. Eight red cylinders, wires, a large battery. Whether it was a real bomb or the most convincing prop in the history of crime, nobody will ever know. But Florence Schaffner believed it, and so did everyone else who mattered that day. Cooper gave her his demands, and she wrote them down. He wanted $200,000 in negotiable American currency. That's around one and a half

million in today's money. He wanted four parachutes, two main rigs, two reserves, and he wanted a fuel truck standing by in Seattle to refuel the plane when it landed. Think about that parachute request for a second, because the FBI certainly did. Four parachutes. Why would one man need four? Well, here's why that detail was brilliant. By asking for four, Cooper made the authorities believe he might force crew members, hostages, to jump with him, which meant they couldn't risk handing him sabotaged equipment. They had to give him parachutes that worked. Florence carried the demands to the cockpit, and the pilot, Captain William Scott, radioed it in. And from that moment, everything about Flight 305 turned into a careful, quiet operation. The airline's president

authorized the ransom payment within minutes. Police and the FBI scrambled in the Seattle. And up in the air, the crew told the passengers there was a minor mechanical issue, and the plane began flying long, slow loops over Puget Sound for about two hours, while on the ground the money was pulled together. And here's a detail I love. The FBI didn't just grab random cash. They took $10,020 bills from a Seattle bank, bills whose serial numbers had been put on microfilm. Every single one of those 10,000 bills was recorded, remember. that. It matters later. Meanwhile, back in the cabin, the most surreal hostage situation in aviation history is unfolding because almost nobody on board knows it's a hostage situation. The passengers

are reading newspapers and dozing, and Dan Cooper is sitting calmly in row 18 next to a flight attendant named Tina Mucklow, who has now taken over as the go-between, and he's making small talk. He orders a second bourbon and soda. He pays for it. He even tries to. He even tries to to give the crew change as a tip. At one point he looks out the window and remarks that the landscape below looks familiar, mentioning Tacoma. Witnesses said he never raised his voice, never made a threat beyond that first note. He was in the words of the people who sat with him, polite the entire time. Just after 5.30 in the evening, with the money and the parachutes finally ready, flight 305 touches down at Seattle Tacoma International Airport and taxis to a remote, brightly lit section

of tarmac. Cooper's instructions on the ground were precise. He ordered the cabin lights dimmed so police snipers couldn't see inside. He had Tina Mucklow walked to the front of the plane, lower the stairs, and collect the money, a heavy canvas bag, and the four parachutes alone. And then Dan Cooper did something nobody expected. He let everyone go. All 36 passengers, Florence Schaffner, the other flight attendant in the rear. Every hostage he didn't need walked off that plane unharmed. Most of them stepped onto that tarmac in Seattle without ever knowing they'd been hijacked at all. They found out from reporters. What remained on board was a minimal crew, Captain Scott, the first officer, the flight engineer, and Tina Mucklow, and one hijacker

with a bag containing $10,020 bills. While the plane refueled, Cooper laid out phase two, and this is where investigators realized they were not dealing with an ordinary criminal. Cooper told the cockpit crew exactly how he wanted the plane flown. Altitude, 10,000 feet, low enough that the cabin wouldn't need to be pressurized. Speed, as slow as the aircraft could safely fly, around 200 miles per hour. Landing gear, down, wing flaps, lowered to 15 degrees, destination Mexico City, with a refueling stop the crew negotiated in Reno, Nevada. and one more thing.

He wanted the rear stairs, the aft air stair, a stairway built into the tail of the 727 that lowered down beneath the aircraft, left open for takeoff. Now stop and think about what that list of demands tells you. This man knew the 727 was one of the only commercial jets in the world with a rear stairway that could physically be opened in flight. He knew the exact flap settings and airspeed that would make jumping from a commercial jet survivable. He knew 10,000 feet met no pressurization, which meant the rear door could open without

tearing the plane apart. Whoever Dan Cooper was, he had either flown, jumped, or worked around aircraft before. This was not a man guessing. At about 7.40 that night, in the dark and in the rain, flight 305 took off from Seattle for the second time that day, headed south on a flight path called Vector 23, a corridor that runs over some of the most rugged, remote, heavily forested terrain in the continental United States, southwest Washington, the land between the Cascade Mountains and the Columbia River. Cooper ordered Tina Mucklow into the cockpit with the rest of the crew and told her to close the curtain behind her. As she walked away, she looked back at him one last time. He was standing in the aisle near the back of the plane, tying something around his waist, the money bag, secured to his

body with cord he'd cut from one of the reserve parachutes. That glance from Tina Mucklow is the last confirmed sighting of Dan Cooper in human history. A few minutes after 8 o'clock, a red warning light came on in the cockpit. The aft stairs had been unlocked. The crew picked up the intercom and asked Cooper if he needed anything, if there was anything they could do for him. And through the intercom came the final word anyone would ever hear from this man. He said, no. And then, at exactly 8.13 in the evening, the crew felt it. A sudden upward bump in the tail of the aircraft, the kind of pressure change you'd expect if a man's weight had just left the air stairs. The plane was, at that moment, somewhere over the drainage of the Lewis River, north of the Columbia,

in the vicinity of a reservoir called Lake Merwin, near the tiny town of Ariel Washington, Below the plane, total darkness, freezing rain, wind, hundreds of square miles of old-growth forest, canyons and water. Cooper jumped wearing a business suit, loafers, and a trench coat, into a storm, at night, in late November, over wilderness. The temperature outside that aircraft, with wind chill, was dozens of degrees below zero. When Flight 305 landed in Reno just after 10 o'clock that night, FBI agents stormed aboard. The plane was empty. Cooper was gone.

He'd left behind his clip-on tie, a mother-of-pearl tie clip, two of the four parachutes, and eight cigarette butts. That's it. Now, to understand the impact of this case, you need to understand the era it happened in. Because most people today don't realize this. Between 1968 and 1972, the United States was living through an epidemic of skyjack,

More than 130 American commercial flights were hijacked in those years. At the peak, it was happening more than once a week, mostly by people demanding to be flown to Cuba. Airport security, as you know it, did not exist. No metal detectors, no bag screening. You could walk onto a jet airliner in 1971 carrying anything, under any name, paying cash. That's the world Dan Cooper operated in.

But here's what made him different from, the hundred-plus hijackers before him. He didn't want to go anywhere. He didn't have a cause, a manifesto, or a destination. He wanted money and a parachute. He treated everyone on board with courtesy. He harmed no one. And he got away. And that combination did something dangerous. It made him a folk hero. Within a year, more than a dozen copycats tried parachute hijackings of their own. Every single one of them was caught or killed. All of them. The only man who ever made the Cooper plan work was Cooper.

What followed his jump was one of the largest manhunts in FBI history, a case the Bureau code named Norjack. Hundreds of soldiers, federal agents and volunteers walked the forests of southwest Washington in grid patterns for weeks, helicopters, boats dragging Lake Merwin, door-to-door interviews, submarine searches were even discussed. They found nothing, not a parachute, not a body, not a single $20 bill, not one boot print. The man had jumped out of that airplane,

and from the moment his feet left those stairs, no confirmed trace of him has ever been found. The FBI worked through more than a thousand suspects over the decades, paratroopers, pilots, smoke jumpers, disgruntled airline employees, men who confessed on their deathbeds. Every single one was eventually ruled out, or could never be confirmed. And the suspect list is long and strange. There was Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr., a Vietnam veteran and skydiver who,

less than five months after Cooper's jump, hijacked another 727, using almost the identical method, and parachuted away with half a million dollars. McCoy was caught within days, escaped from federal prison, and died in a shootout with the FBI in 1974. Plenty of investigators liked him for the Cooper job. The method was nearly identical. The FBI ultimately concluded McCoy didn't match the physical descriptions from Flight 305, and was likely home with his family in Utah on Thanksgiving. But the McCoy theory has never gone away.

As recently as the past few years, McCoy's own adult children came forward with a parachute rig recovered from family property, claiming it could be tied to the Cooper hijacking, and federal investigators took possession of it for examination. Half a century on, the evidence is still arriving. Then there's the tie. Remember, Cooper left his clip on tie on seat 18, and decades later, a team of civilian scientists was granted access to it. Using electron microscopy, they pulled thousands of microscopic particles off that tie,

and what they found was genuinely strange. Particles of pure titanium, stainless steel, rare earth elements like serum, In 1971, unalloyed titanium wasn't something an ordinary businessman would carry on his clothing. It pointed toward a narrow slice of American industry. Aerospace plants, chemical facilities, metal fabrication, exactly the kind of workplace where a man might also learn about aircraft. The tie didn't name him, but it told us what kind of rooms he stood in. And here's my favorite odd detail of the entire case, the name itself.

Dan Cooper is also the name of the hero of a French-language comic book series, a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot whose adventures, in some issues, featured parachute jumps. Those comics were never translated into English, but they were widely available in French-speaking Canada. Remember the flight attendants describing a man with no discernible accent but careful, slightly formal speech. Some researchers believe the hijacker borrowed his alias from a comic book, he could only have read in French. It proves nothing. It's one more lead in a case full of leads

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or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531. 2,600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge. That MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with I Gaming, Ontario. One thing the hijacking did change forever, the airplane itself.

Within a few years, every Boeing 727 was fitted with a small mechanical wedge on the rear stairs that physically prevents them from being lowered in flight. The device is required to this day, and it has a name. It's called the Cooper Vane.

The man was never caught, but a piece of hardware that exists only because of him is bolted to every aircraft of that type flown since. Many agents privately believed Cooper never survived the jump at all, that he slammed into the forest canopy that night, and that his remains still sit, undiscovered somewhere in that enormous terrain. And maybe that's true. But then there's the money. On February 10, 1980, more than eight years after the hijacking,

an eight-year-old boy named Brian Ingram was on a family outing along a sandy stretch of the Columbia River called Tenne Bar, about nine miles downstream from Vancouver, Washington. Brian was clearing a spot to build a campfire, raking his arm through the sand, when his hand hit paper. Three bundles of $20 bills, still wrapped in rotting rubber bands, rounded and decayed at the edges. $5,800 in total. The family turned it in. The FBI checked the serial numbers against that microfilm list of 10,000 bills. Every single one matched. It was Cooper's Ransom. And here's the part researchers still cannot explain.

Tenabar is not under Cooper's flight path. Depending on which experts you ask, that money should not have been able to drift there naturally from the jump zone. The rubber bands alone shouldn't have survived years in a river. So how did $5,800 of Dan Cooper's ransom, end up buried in the sand of a river bank miles from where he jumped. Did he survive, wade out through the Lewis River drainage, and lose part of the bag? Did he bury it there himself?

Did his body, or the bag, washed down through the river system over the years? More than four decades later, there is still no accepted answer. Those three bundles of cash remain the only physical trace of Dan Cooper ever recovered. Not one of the other roughly 9,700 bills has ever seen. surfaced, not in circulation, not in a bank, not anywhere on earth. On July 8th, 2016, after 45 years, the FBI officially suspended active investigation of the Norjack case. It remains the only unsolved hijacking of a commercial aircraft in American history. Somewhere out there, in a forest, at the bottom of a lake, or in a quiet grave under a different name, is the answer to who Dan

Cooper really was. The answer is physically out there, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. It simply has not been found yet. And as wild as that case is, it's not the strangest thing that's happened along the Columbia River, because 13 years before Dan Cooper jumped into the darkness north of that river, an entire family drove into the Columbia River gorge on a Sunday afternoon and stayed lost at the bottom of the Columbia for 67 years. This next one is the case that, for my money, is the most haunting in the history of the state of Oregon. It's Sunday, December 7, 1958, in northeast Portland, Oregon. And I want you to picture this neighborhood because the detail matters.

The Martens lived on a street so famous for its Christmas spirit that the whole area went all out every December. Lights, carolers, slave photos, the works. And right in the middle of that neighborhood was the Martin family, Kenneth Martin. 54 years old, a businessman, by all accounts a careful methodical safety-conscious man, his wife Barbara, 48, and their three daughters, Barbara Jr., everyone called her Barbie, who was 14, Virginia, who was 13, and Susan, the youngest, who was 11. There was also an older son, Donald, who was 28, and serving in the United States Navy, stationed across the country in New York.

That Sunday after church, Ken and Barbara told their neighbors and family the afternoon's agenda. They were going to take a drive east, up the Columbia River Gorge, to collect evergreen boughs, greenery, to make Christmas wreaths and decorations. A two-hour errand, the kind of thing thousands of Oregon families did every December. They left the dishes in the sink. They left laundry in the washing machine. The girls left their rooms exactly as girls' rooms always look mid-de-de-celling. with Christmas plans half finished because they were coming right back.

Sometime between one and two in the afternoon, the five of them climbed into the family car, a 1954 Ford Country Squire station wagon, cream and red, the kind with the wood panel styling, and they pulled out of the neighborhood, and they drove east into the gorge. Now, from this point forward, every confirmed fact about the Martin family's last day can be counted on one hand. Fact one, witnesses, including a waitress, reported serving the family a late lunch at a snack bar in Hood River, about 60 miles east of Portland. Fact two, at a Chevron station in Cascade Locks, a small town on the Oregon side of the river, about 40 miles from home. Ken Martin bought five gallons of gas. We know this because the receipt was later mailed to the family

home. Five gallons. Think about that. That is the purchase of a man. topping off for the drive home. That is not a man planning to run. And fact three, after that gas station, the Martin family was never seen alive again, any of them, ever. When Ken and Barbara didn't show up for work on Monday, friends called the police. And right away, this case ran into the problem that would cripple it for decades. Nobody knew where the family had actually gone missing. Was it Multnomah County, Hood River County? Was it Oregon? Was it Was it Was it Washington? across the river, no single agency took charge.

Jurisdictions overlapped, hesitated, and deferred to one another, while the most critical early days slipped past. What followed became the largest search effort the state of Oregon had ever mounted. Police, sheriff's deputies, the Coast Guard, volunteers, aircraft over the gorge, boats dragging the Columbia. Newspapers across the country picked it up. An entire family, five people, gone on a Sunday afternoon. afternoon errand, in a car, on a public highway, and the search found nothing. No car, no bodies, no crash site, no skid marks, nothing. A family of five, and a full-size station wagon had

simply ceased to exist. Now, over those first weeks, the official theory took shape, and it was the boring one. The Martens must have pulled over somewhere along the river, maybe at a viewpoint, maybe to turn around, and somehow, in the dark or the dark. the wet, Ken Martin backed the car into the Columbia River and the current took them. A terrible accident. Case closed more or less in the minds of most officials. But there was one man who never believed that. And this is where the Martin case stops being a tragedy and starts being a mystery. His name was Walter Graven and he was a detective with the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office. Graven could not leave this case alone. He would stay on it, officially.

and unofficially for the rest of his career, and his family would later say he was convinced of two things until the day he died. One, the Martin family was murdered, and two, and remember this, the case would be solved when the vehicle was located. And Graven had reasons, real, physical reasons. First, there was the bluff near the Dals. Graven traveled east past Hood River, passed where the family was last confirmed alive, and on a bluff overlooking the Columbia, he found tire impressions leading toward the edge. The tread pattern matched the type of tires on the Martin's station wagon.

On a rock near that same edge, he found paint chips. He sent them to the FBI crime laboratory. The analysis came back, same make, same model, same paint scheme as the Martin family's 1954 Ford. Now ask yourself, If the family died in an accidental rollback near Cascade Locks, what was their car doing on a bluff miles further east, near the Dows? Second, there was the gun.

Shortly after the disappearance, a man near Cascade Locks found a handgun close to an abandoned stolen car. He turned it over to the Hood River Sheriff, and here is the detail that should stop you. The sheriff let the man keep the gun. It was never processed as evidence. decades later in 1986, the man's widow described that gun to a Portland television station. She said it was damaged and it was coated in dried blood.

In her words, it looked used, used to club something to death. That weapon and whatever evidence it carried is gone from history. And third, there was the matter of what Graven's superiors did with all this. According to his family, who kept his case notes after he'd, died, Graven's findings were not welcomed. He was, at points, ordered to stand down. His reports filed away, his homicide theory dismissed in favor of the tidy accident story. Graven kept his notes anyway. He kept them his entire life, organized and annotated, because Walter Graven believed that someday somebody would find that car, and when they did, he wanted them to know where to look

for the truth. Five months after the disappearance, in May of 1950, something finally surfaced. Fishermen near the locks spotted what they thought were two objects floating through, and days later, downstream, near the Bonneville Dam, searchers recovered two bodies from the Columbia. It was Virginia Martin, 13 years old, and Susan Martin, 11, the two youngest girls. The autopsies could not establish how they died. The water had destroyed too much. Some accounts raised the possibility of injuries that didn't fit a simple drowning, but nothing could be proven. And that was it.

That was everything that would come out of the Columbia River for the next 65 years. Ken Martin, Barbara Martin, and 14-year-old Barbie Martin were still missing. And the car, the one piece of evidence Detective Graven said would solve everything, was still somewhere in that river. It stayed there while the case files yellowed. It stayed there when Walter Graven retired, and it stayed there when he passed away. His notes handed down through his family. It stayed there through search after search.

Over the decades, divers and salvage crews returned to the Columbia again and again. Sonar sweeps, dragging operations, private expeditions, tips that went nowhere. The river near Cascade Locks is deceptive, deep scour holes, shifting sediment, current strong enough to move and bury a vehicle and visibility that drops to inches. A car could rest 50 feet down, 100 yards from a public boat ramp, and stay invisible for a lifetime, and that, it turns out, is exactly what happened. It stayed there while Donald Martin, the son, the brother, the only one left, grew old waiting for an answer that never came. The Martin family disappearance became Oregon's most famous unsolved case, argued over by podcasters and armchair detectives,

accident or murder. Why were they east of Hood River? Whose blood was on the gun? Decade after decade after decade. Sixty-six years. That's how long the answer sat at the bottom of that river, and the case kept its grip on Portland the entire time. Detective Graven, before his death, made sure of that. He organized his files, his maps, his own. witness statements and his theory, and he left them with his family, because official channels had stopped listening to him years earlier. His grandson, Greg Graven, has spoken publicly about growing up surrounded by this case, about a grandfather who said, over and over, the same sentence. It will be solved when the vehicle is located. Those preserved notes became the

foundation for journalists and independent researchers who picked the case up decades. later. A podcast series, television retrospectives, anniversary coverage every December 7th. The Martin family disappearance never faded the way most old cases fade. It sat in Portland's memory for three generations, waiting on one piece of evidence at the bottom of a river. And then, in November of 2024, a diver named Archer Mayo, a man who had spent years independently searching the Columbia for this exact car, studying curing. currents, mapping the riverbed, announced that in a deep scour hole near Cascade locks known to locals as the pit, under 50 feet of water, he had found a 1954 Ford station wagon.

It was upside down. It was buried nose first under sediment and rock. It had been sitting in the dark at the bottom of the Columbia River since the Second Eisenhower administration. Recovery operations pulled portions of the deteriorating vehicle from the river, and in 2025, inside that wreck, searchers found what 60-plus years of investigators never could. Human remains. The remains went to the Oregon State Medical Examiner's Office, and from there, to a forensic genetics laboratory. And in April of 2006, just weeks ago as I'm recording this, the announcement came. DNA analysis had positively identified the remains found in that car, Kenneth Martin, Barbara Martin, and Barbie.

Martin, the 14-year-old who had been missing since 1958. 67 years after a family of five drove into the Columbia River Gorge to cut Christmas greenery, all five of them were finally accounted for. The family was, at long last, together again, at least in the records, at least in name. Detective Walter Graven didn't live to see it, but here's the thing, half of his prediction already came true. He said the case would be solved when the vehicle was located. The vehicle has now been located. The family has been identified, and investigators finally have what Graven begged for his entire career, the car itself, physical evidence, the position it sank in, what is and isn't inside it. What remains open,

officially open, to this day, is Graven's other conviction, accident, or homicide. Did Ken Martin really back his family into the river in the dark. Then what about the tire tracks and the paint chips on a bluff near the dals? What about the bloody gun the sheriff gave away? The recovery of that car didn't kill those questions. If anything, it renewed them, because now, for the first time since 1958, there is actually evidence to examine. The Martin family stayed lost in the Columbia for 67 years. They have finally been recovered. And somewhere in what came out of that water may be the answer to what really happened on the afternoon of December 7, 1958.

So that's a case where the answer sat underwater for three generations. But our next story is different, because in our next story, the witnesses came out of the wilderness alive. Five grown men, armed men, hard men. And the problem was never finding them. The problem was that nobody wanted to believe a single word they said. To tell this one right, I have to take it. take you back more than a century to July of 1924 and to the southeastern slopes of Mount

St. Helens in southwest Washington State. And before you picture the Mount St. Helens you know, the blown-out crater from the 1980 eruption, understand that in 1924 this was a perfect snow-capped cone, surrounded by some of the most remote terrain in the country. No highways, no trailheads, no helicopters. If you were two miles up the side of that mountain, you were a full day's hard travel from another human being. The only people out there were prospectors, which brings us to five of them. Fred Beck, Gabe Lefevre, John Peterson, Marion Smith, an older, hard, experienced man, and Marion's son Roy. These men had a gold claim staked along a creek feeding the muddy river drainage, about two miles from the mountain,

at the edge of a gorge with walls dropping a few hundred feet to the creek below. They'd built themselves a small, sturdy cabin out of logs near the rim of that gorge. No windows. One door. They'd been working the claim off and on for years. Now, by the summer of 1924, the men had started noticing things out there that they couldn't explain. They would tell investigators about it afterward, and the details were consistent. They'd been finding tracks, enormous, barefoot, human-shaped tracks, around 19 inches long, pressed into the volcanic soil in places where no barefoot man had any business walking. They'd heard whistling in the evenings, coming from one ridge and answered from another, back and forth. And they'd heard a dull thudding, a booming sound

that none of them could pin to any animal they knew. These were experienced woodsmen. Between the five of them, they had decades in the mountains. They knew elk. They knew bear and cougar. This was none of those, and it had been going on for days. Then came the afternoon that started it all. Fred Beck and Marion Smith walked down to the creek to fill their water buckets, and as they came up the draw, Smith froze and pointed across the canyon. Standing beside a pine tree about a hundred yards away watching them was a creature roughly seven feet tall. It was covered in dark hair.

It stood on two legs, fully upright, on two legs, and when it realized it had been seen, it didn't simply bolt. It dodged, ducking behind that tree, then peering back out around the trunk, exposing only its head and shoulders. Smith, who was carrying a rifle, fired. Bark exploded off the tree next to the creature's head. It ran. The two men fired again as it crossed an opening, and then it was gone into the timber.

Beck and Smith got back to that cabin fast, and the five men held a council, whatever this thing was, shots had now been fired at it. The decision was unanimous. They were leaving in the morning. It was already too late in the day to hike out. There was no chance they were walking that trail in the dark. One night, they had to get through one more night. So as the sun went down, the five of them barricaded themselves inside the cabin. They wedged a long pole from the heavy front door to the back wall, braced it shut. They had their rifles, and they waited for. for morning. At around midnight, something hit the cabin wall so hard that chinking blew out from between the logs, and dust fell on the men inside. They were on their feet instantly, and then it came again. And then, on the roof, thud, thud, rocks, rocks were landing on the cedar shakes above their heads one after another, some of them, by the men's account, far too heavy for any person to throw. and outside in the dark they could hear footsteps, heavy two-legged footsteps circling the cabin, more than one set. What followed, according to all five men, lasted nearly until dawn. Five hours,

five hours of pounding on the walls, of rocks slamming onto the roof, of the door, braced with a pole and the body weight of grown men, shuddering in its frame as something threw itself against it from the other side. The men fired their rifles, through gaps between the logs and through the roof at the sounds above. At one point, by Fred Beck's account, the attackers reached the wall itself, and the entire cabin shook on its foundations. And then there's the detail that, for me, makes this story. At some point in the chaos, an arm came through. There was a gap in the chinking between the logs, wide enough in one spot, and the men watched a long, hairy arm reach in through that gap, grope along the inside wall,

and close its hand around the handle of an axe. Marion Smith lunged and twisted the axe head so it jammed against the logs, so it couldn't be pulled out through the gap, and the men fired at the wall, the arm withdrew. Sometime before first light, it stopped. Silence. The men stayed braced behind that door until the sun was fully up, and then they stepped outside into the morning,

and they found the ground around the cabin scattered with rocks, and giant tracks pressed into the earth. They started packing immediately. And as they were preparing to leave, Fred Beck walked to the rim of the gorge, and he saw it. Standing near the edge of the canyon, about 80 yards out, one of the creatures. Beck raised his rifle and fired three times. He would swear for the rest of his life that he hit it, and that it went over the rim, falling toward the creek some 400 feet below.

The men did not climb down to check. They left their gear, their supplies. and a working gold claim on that mountain, and they hiked out, and they did not stop until they reached other people. Now here's what separates this from a thousand campfire stories. What happened next is documented. The men reported it. The story hit the newspapers. The Oregonian ran it that July under headlines about ape men attacking miners, and it became a regional sensation. Forest Rangers went up to the cabin. Reporters went up. Aupon. Apoena. A port of party that included law enforcement went up. And here's what they found at the scene. The damage was

there. The rocks were there. And surrounding the cabin, they found the tracks, enormous barefoot tracks that nobody on site could conclusively explain away. So what really happened up there? Let me give you the skeptical explanations, because they exist, and they deserve a fair hearing. The most popular one is this. There was a YMCA camp in the region, and for years afterward, people claimed that a group of teenage campers and counselors had been up on the rim of the gorge that night, hurling pumice stones down at the miners' cabin as a prank, and that the miners, already spooked by days of strange tracks, filled in the rest with their imaginations. Decades later, a few locals even claimed they had personally helped fake giant footprints in the area. A geologist will also

tell you that volcanic terrain does strange things, pumice falls, echoes, rock slides that sound rhythmic in the dark. And maybe that's the whole story. Maybe five armed miners were besieged all night by teenagers with rocks. But before you settle on that, let me give you the other side of the argument. These five men were not tourists. They were prospectors with years on that mountain, and they walked away from an active gold claim, money in the ground, and most of the never returned for it. Marion Smith was by every account a hard, proud, practical man, who hated the publicity and stood by the story until his death. The tracks were seen, measured, and reported by Rangers and newspapermen, not just the miners. The fuselot of rocks went on for

hours, a long shift for pranksters standing in the dark above a cabin full of men who were actively firing rifles toward them. Think about that part. Whoever, or whatever, spent that night assaulting the cabin, did it while bullets were coming back out. Teenagers tend not to keep that up until dawn. Fred Beck told the story consistently for 43 years, and near the end of his life in 1967, he put it all down in a small booklet titled, I fought the apement of Mount St. Helens. And the canyon where it happened? Look at a map of Mount St. Helens today. Southeast flank. You'll find it labeled with the name the incident attached to it permanently, Ape Canyon. The 1980 eruption sent volcanic mud flows tearing right through that drainage

and destroyed the cabin site completely. But the name survived, and it's on federal maps right now. One more thing. In the century since that night, the area around Mount St. Helens has produced a steady series of reports, tracks, sightings, sounds, and the legend of what loggers in the region used to call the mountain devils never went away. Whatever those five minds experienced in July of 1924, they experienced something, something that scared five armed, experienced mountain men badly enough to abandon gold. The Pacific Northwest is the world capital of exactly this kind of story, and it all traces back, in the modern record, to one sleepless night in a windowless cabin above a creek. And there's a final chapter

to the mountain's strange reputation that most people have never heard. In May of 1950, 26 years after the night at the cabin, an experienced ski mountaineer named Jim Carter was descending Mount St. Helens with a climbing party, pausing to photograph the others. At some point, he separated from the group, left his camera behind, and skied down ahead of them. And somewhere on that descent, Jim Carter vanished. The search that followed put dozens of experienced mountaineers on the slopes for days. They found portions of his ski tracks, and the searchers who studied them said something that has been argued about ever since. The track showed a man descending in long, reckless, desperate jumps, taking drops no sane skier would attempt,

heading down toward the ape canyon drainage. Jim Carter, his skis, and his remains were never found. Officially, it was a mountaineering accident, but several of the search veterans, hard men with decades on that mountain, maintained until their deaths that they could not rule out the other explanation, the one tied to the canyon's name since 1924. I'll leave that one with you. That night at the cabin had five survivors and a thousand questions, but the next case in our lineup might be the loneliest mystery in this entire video. One young woman, one white jeep, 3,000 miles of highway,

and a crash seen in the mountains that investigators looked at, and quietly concluded, made no sense at all. This story begins about as far from the Pacific Northwest, as you can get, in Durham, North Carolina, on the morning of Thursday, March 9, 2000. Leah Roberts was 23 years old. And to understand what happens in this story, you have to understand the three years she had just lived through, because by March of 2000, Leah Roberts had experienced more loss than most people see in a lifetime. Her mother had died of cancer, then her father's heart failed, and she lost him too. And Leah herself had been in a serious car. And Leah herself had been in a serious car

accident. A crash bad enough that surgeons had to place a metal rod down the entire length of her right femur. Both parents gone, and a metal rod holding her leg together, all before her 24th birthday. People process grief in different ways. Leah went searching. She'd been a senior at North Carolina State University, months from graduation, when she simply stopped, dropped out, started spending her days at a local coffee house reading. And what she was reading matters to this story. Leah had fallen in love with the writers of the Beat Generation, and above all, with Jack Karowak, the writer most associated with getting in a car and driving west until the road ends at the Pacific. Friends said she talked about the Pacific Northwest specifically,

the mountains, the coast. She told people she wanted to be out there. On the morning of March 9th, Leah spoke with her older sister Kara on the phone, a completely ordinary conversation about future plans. She even agreed to babysit later with her roommate. And then, sometime that day, without telling her sister, her brother, her roommate, or a single friend, Leah Roberts packed her white 1993 Jeep Cherokee, took her cat, and drove away from Durham, North Carolina. She didn't sneak off without a trace, though, and this detail is important. She left money for her roommate to cover her share of the expenses while she was gone. She left a note. The note referenced her favorite writers, that restlessness she'd been carrying, and it made one thing clear. She was going on a journey,

and she intended to come back. Investigators and her family have always agreed on this point. Everything about how Leah left says temporary. Money for bills. A note. The cat in the car. people who plan to disappear forever don't pay next month's expenses. For the next four days, Leah drove, and we can reconstruct her route, because her bank card created a record of her route across the entire United States. Gas, food, motels, heading west, then northwest. Tennessee, the plains, the mountains. By the early morning hours of Monday, March 13th, a purchase puts her at a gas station in Brooks

She had crossed the country in roughly four days. She was moving fast, and she was moving with a destination, and that destination was clearly the upper left corner of the map. By that same afternoon, March 13th, Leah Roberts was in Bellingham, Washington. Bellingham sits about 90 miles north of Seattle, close to the Canadian border, at the foot of Mount Baker. And at 2.10 in the afternoon,

Leah bought a single ticket at the movie theater at Bellis Fair Mall. Bellis Fair Mall. The film was American Beauty. Think about how normal that is. A roadtripper, four days and 3,000 miles in, parks the Jeep, stretches her legs, and catches an afternoon movie alone. The ticket stub would later be found among her things. That evening, two men sitting at the counter of a Bellingham restaurant called the Elephant and Castle struck up a conversation with a young woman matching Leah's description, sitting alone at the counter. And what did this young woman talk about? Her cross-country road trip. And Jack Kerouac. It was her. It had to be her. The men's accounts agreed on almost everything, except for one detail, and it's the detail this entire case may turn on.

One of the men said that when she left the restaurant that night, she left alone. The other man said she left with a man, a man whose name he thought was Barry. Barry has never been identified. The sighting has never been confirmed or disproven, and that conversation at the Elephant and Castle, on the evening of March 13, 2000, is the last reasonably credible sighting of Leah Roberts on record. Her bank activity stopped that day. Her trail simply ends in Bellingham, Washington, with a movie ticket and a conversation about Carawak.

Back in North Carolina, it took only days for her sister Kara to sense something was wrong, and Leah was reported missing. But here's the brutal math of a case where someone leaves voluntarily. Police here adult woman left a note, paid her bills, and the urgency disappears. For five days, nothing happened. And then, on the morning of Saturday, March 18th, a couple went jogging along Canyon Creek Road, a remote logging road that branches off the Mount Baker Highway east of Bellingham, winding up into the foothills of the North Cascades.

and as they ran they noticed something strange at the top of a slope beside a curve clothing articles of clothing scattered at the roadside and some of it this is in the reports tied to tree branches tied they looked down the embankment below a drop into the trees and at the bottom on its side smashed against the forest floor was a white jeep Cherokee with north carolina plates The Whatcom County Sheriff's Office responded, ran the plates, and connected the Jeep to the missing persons report out of Durham. They had found Leah Roberts' vehicle, and then they processed that crash scene, and almost immediately, the physics of it stopped making sense. Start with the crash itself. Based on the path the Jeep tore through the trees and the damage to the vehicle, investigators estimated it left the road at somewhere between 30 and 40 miles per hour.

and rolled on its way down the embankment. A violent crash. Anyone inside that vehicle when it went over should have been seriously hurt, should have left evidence of being hurt. There was none. No blood, anywhere. No hair.

No tissue. No stretch seat belt. None of the marks a human body leaves when it's thrown around the inside of a rolling vehicle. No footprints walking away from the wreck. No drag marks. No sign that any injured person person had crawled, stumbled, or been carried out of that ravine.

Area hospitals had no record of treating anyone matching Leah's description. Search teams with dogs worked the drainage and found nothing. The conclusion investigators eventually reached, and said publicly, is the sentence that turns this from a tragic accident into a genuine mystery. The Jeep may well have been empty when it went over the edge, meaning someone may have sent that vehicle off the road on purpose. staged it, and the contents of the Jeep made that theory stronger, not weaker. Inside, scattered through the vehicle and the crash site, was Leah's life.

Her guitar, her compact discs, her checkbook, a keepsake box of mementos, her clothes, some at the bottom of the ravine, some up at the road, tied to branches, and cash and jewelry totaling around $2,500, $2,500, $2,500, sitting in a little bit of a little bit of a wrecked jeep at the bottom of an embankment for five days, untouched, so you can rule out robbery as a motive right now. Whoever walked away from that scene, if someone walked away from that scene, left a young woman's money behind. Two things, though, were missing, Leah and her cat. Neither one, despite searches of that entire drainage, was ever found. And before we get to the strangest physical detail in this case. Sit with the geography for a second, because the location itself is a question.

Canyon Creek Road is not on the way to anywhere. It's a dead-end logging road climbing into the foothills of the North Cascades. The kind of road you only drive if you live on it, work on it, or want to be somewhere nobody goes. Leah had never been to Washington State before in her life. She'd been in Bellingham, by every indication, for a matter of hours. So how does a woman from North Carolina, on her first day in the region, end up on an obscure dead-end logging road in the mountains east of town, at night, or in conditions bad enough to put a jeep through the trees. Either she found that road herself, for reasons nobody has ever explained, or somebody who knew the area found it for her. Then, years later, came the detail that settled the question

of foul play for a lot of people, including Leah's own family. During a re-examination of the vehicle for a television investigation, a mechanic inspected the Jeep's ignition system and found that the starter mechanism had been tampered with. The wiring had been rigged in a way that would let the engine run without the key in the normal position. Let me say that plainly. At some point, someone modified Leah's Jeep so it could be started or kept running, in a way the factory never intended. Combine that with an apparently unoccupied vehicle leaving a remote logging road at speed, and you can see what investigators were starting to consider. A crash with no victim, a scene with no blood, a motive with no robbery,

and a vehicle that someone, somewhere along the line, had rewired. So what are the possibilities? There are really only three, and each one fails in its own way. One. The Accident Theory Leah crashed, survived, wandered into the North Cascades disoriented, maybe a head injury, and died of exposure somewhere the dogs never reached. It's the simplest theory, but it has to explain a rolled vehicle with no blood and no footprints,

and it has to explain who tied her clothes to tree branches above the crash site, and why. 2. The Runaway Theory Leah staged the whole thing, crashed her own Jeep so people would stop looking for her, walked away and started over, living the caroac dream under another name. People want to believe this one, because in this one, she's alive, but it contradicts everything we know about her. She left money for her roommate. She left a note promising to return. She took her cat. She was carrying $2,500. She then, in this theory, abandoned in the wreck along with her guitar and a box of keepsakes from her dead. parents. People who vanish on purpose take the money. They don't take the cat to a staged crash.

And three, the worst one. Somewhere between the elephant and castle on the night of March 13th and Canyon Creek Road, Leah Roberts met someone, maybe a man called Barry, maybe a stranger on the Mount Baker Highway. And that person took her life and then drove her Jeep up a logging road, sent it over an embankment to conceal the evidence, and walked away. It would explain the empty crash. It would explain the absence of blood inside the cabin of the vehicle. It might even explain the rewired starter. What it cannot explain is where she is,

because in 26 years, no trace of her has ever been found in the North Cascades. I want to spend a moment on what Leah's family did, because it deserves to be on the record. Within three days of the Jeep being found, her sister Kara and her brother Heath were on the ground in Washington State. Two siblings from North Carolina, walking logging roads in the North Cascades, handing out flyers in Bellingham, standing at the lip of that embankment, trying to read a scene that professional investigators couldn't read.

They checked hospitals. They checked shelters. They retraced her route. They gave interviews to anyone with a camera, year after year, decade after decade, to keep their sister's face in front of the public. The case has been featured on national television multiple times. and every airing produces new tips, and the tips have, so far, produced nothing solid. The family put up a $10,000 reward.

It has never been claimed. And that, unbelievably, is where the case still stands. About a week after the Jeep was found, an anonymous caller told police he'd seen a disoriented young woman at a gas station in the area. It went nowhere. The man named Barry has never come forward and never been found.

The Whatcom County Sheriff's Office still carries Leah Toby Roberts as a missing person. Her family has never stopped looking. Her sister and brother flew out within days back in 2000 and walked that ground themselves. And a reward for information stands to this day. If she were alive now,

Leah would be 49 years old. She has a metal rod the full length of her right femur, a scar on her right hip, and dimples, and somebody out there, Maybe somebody in Bellingham, maybe somebody who was in a restaurant on the night of March 13, 2000, knows what happened on Canyon Creek Road. 26 years, one movie ticket, one conversation about Kerouac, and a Jeep that crashed as far as anyone can prove, with nobody inside it.

Now, I told you at the top of this video that the Pacific Northwest keeps its secrets for a long time, but not forever, and I want to close tonight with the case that proves it. Because our last story is about a man who died with no name, a man the entire world failed to recognize for 17 years, and about the small army of complete strangers who simply refused to let him stay lost. This one for my money is the most quietly devastating and ultimately the most hopeful mystery in the history of the Pacific Northwest. Amanda Park, Washington is barely a town. It's a scatter of buildings on Highway 101 at the southern tip of Lake Kinou, on the Olympic Peninsula. pressed up against the largest temperate rainforest in the lower 48 states. Moss on everything, 200 days of rain, a gas station, a mercantile, and a small motel called the Lake Kinoe Inn. If you wanted to find the most remote, most overlooked corner of America,

you could do a lot worse than Amanda Park. On Friday, September 14, 2001, a young man walked into the office of the Lake Kinole Inn and asked for a room, and I want to pause. on the date because the date is part of the mystery. September 14th, 2001, three days after September 11th. The country was in shock. Every airplane in America had been grounded that week. The television in every motel office in the nation was showing the same images on a loop. And in the middle of all that, at the edge of the rainforest, a man appeared in Amanda Park. Apparently having arrived by bus, possibly from Aberdeen or Port Angeles. carrying no luggage, none. He was young, somewhere in his twenties. Around six feet tall,

thin, with short dark hair, polite, soft-spoken, calm. The motel clerk noticed his accent and guessed he might be Canadian. He paid for his room, and on the registration card, in careful handwriting, he wrote his name and address. The name he wrote was Lyle Stevik. The address he gave was in Meridian, Idaho. Both were lies. The address, when investigators eventually checked it, traced back to a best western motel in Meridian, a place where it turns out nobody on staff recognized his photograph, and the name. The name was the strangest lie of all, and it would take investigators' time to decode it. Lyle Stivic, spelled slightly differently, is not a real person. He's a fictional character, a sad, struggling man from a 1987 Joyce Carol Oates novel called

You Must Remember This, a character who, in the book, attempts to end his own life. The man had checked into the most remote motel in the country under the name of a character from a tragedy. Whoever he really was, he was literate, he was thoughtful, and he had chosen that name. It meant something to him. Hold on to that. Witnesses saw him only in fragments over. that weekend, he was seen walking along the shoulder of Highway 101 near the motel, just walking back and forth, alone. At one point he told the office the noise near his room bothered him,

and he was moved to a different room, room 8. He made no phone calls from the room, he received none. He ordered no food anyone remembers. He simply existed at the edge of that rainforest for a weekend, quietly, bothering no one. And on Monday, September 17, 2001, motel staff entered room 8 and found him dead. He had taken his own life. There was no identification anywhere in the room. No wallet, no card, no bus ticket, nothing. What there was, and this detail has stayed with everyone who has ever touched this case, was a short note and money. He had left cash neatly behind with a note reading, in essence, for the room. In some accounts, there was even a sense he'd left enough to cover any trouble. This man, in the final hours of his life, was worried about the motel being

shorted for the room. The Greys Harbor County Sheriff's Office responded, and they did everything right. I want to stress that, because this is not a story about investigative failure. They photographed everything. They took his fingerprints. They collected DNA. They documented. They documented his dental work. They noted his clothes, his height, his estimated age, about 25 years old, and then they started feeding all of it into every database American law enforcement has, and they got nothing. No fingerprint match, which told them this man had never been arrested, never served in the military, never held certain licensed jobs. No DNA match, no dental match, No missing persons report anywhere in the United States or Canada matched him.

Detectives fielded calls for years from agencies across North America and even Europe trying to match him to their missing men. Nothing fit. Facial reconstruction sketches went out. Careful life-like renderings of a handsome young man with dark hair. Nothing came back. Stop and absorb how strange that is. This was not a man who died anonymously in some chaotic,

place. He died indoors, intact, with a full set of fingerprints and teeth and DNA, in a country with the most extensive identification systems on earth. And the systems all returned the same answer, this person does not exist. Worse, nobody is looking for him. Somewhere out there, presumably, was a family, parents, maybe siblings, and as far as investigators could tell, no one had ever reported him missing. The county buried him in Fern Hill, cemetery in Aberdeen, Washington. The records carried him as a John Doe, and the name on the case, the only name anyone had, was the fake one, Lyle Stevik. And that's where this story should have ended, a nameless grave at the edge of the rainforest, case file in a drawer, one more man the

world failed to identify, except the internet found him. In the years after his death, the Lyle Stevik case migrated online, to web-slooth forums, to missing persons databases like Namas, and eventually to a community on Reddit devoted entirely to him. Thousands of complete strangers, all over the world, became obsessed with one question, who was the polite young man in room eight? They analyzed his handwriting on the motel registration card. They mapped bus routes into Amanda Park. They dissected the Joyce Carol Oates novel line by line, looking for clues in the character he'd chosen to die as. They compared his face to decades of missing persons photos, hundreds of them, one by one, year after year.

Mothers of Missing Sons wrote in asking, with hope and dread in the same sentence, whether Lyle might be their boy. He never was. They tried everything the era allowed. His description and reconstructed face went into NamUs, the national database of unidentified persons. where he became one of its most viewed cases. Investigators chased the Idaho address. They canvassed bus lines into the Olympic Peninsula. They studied his handwriting, neat, controlled, educated. They consulted on his possible ancestry.

Some thought Native American, some thought Hispanic. The clerk had guessed Canadian. Every avenue produced a profile of a person, intelligent, considerate, deeply alone, and not one produced a name. For 17 years the answer stayed out of reach, and it stayed out of reach because of a brutal catch-22 at the heart of his case. Identification databases can only match you to records that exist.

He had no criminal record, no military record, no missing persons report. The system wasn't broken. He had simply lived a life that never touched the system. By every traditional method on earth, this man was unidentifiable. full stop. But in 2017 and 2018, the traditional methods stopped being the only methods. A new field was being born, called forensic genetic genealogy, and the idea behind it sounds almost too simple. Millions of ordinary people had voluntarily uploaded their DNA profiles to public ancestry databases, hoping to find cousins or build family trees. So instead of asking,

does this dead man's DNA match a criminal database, investigators could now ask, does this dead man share DNA with anyone, anywhere, who's tested their ancestry? Find a distant cousin, and you can build the family tree backward. By hand, document by document, birth certificate by census record,

until the branches converge on a single missing person. A brand-new nonprofit called the DNA Doe Project, founded by two researchers named Margaret, Press and Colleen Fitzpatrick was pioneering exactly this, putting names on unidentified bodies. And here's the part of the story that gets me every time. The Lyle-Steveke case came to them through his Reddit community, the strangers, the people who had spent years refusing to forget him. When it became clear the lab work needed funding, that online community put up the money themselves. Ordinary people, most of whom had never set foot in Washington State, paid out of their

own pockets to give a name back to a man they had never met. In January of 2018, genetic material from the case was sent to a lab. By late March, a usable DNA profile had been uploaded to a public genealogy database, and the matches that came back pointed somewhere nobody expected, a cluster of distant relatives with roots in northern New Mexico. What followed was hundreds of hours of pure grinding genealogy. A volunteer team of roughly 20 researchers building family trees outward from those distant cousins. Generations of records, marriages, migrations between New Mexico and California, slowly closing in, until the branches converged and the team found what they were looking for,

a family with a son of the right age, who had quietly dropped out of contact around 2001, A candidate. Law enforcement took it from there and made contact with the family, and I want you to appreciate how hard this particular identification was, because the DNA Doe Project had a benchmark. Just weeks earlier, the same organization had identified another long-unidentified decedent, a young woman known for 37 years only as Buckskin Girl. And in that case, once the DNA profile went into the database, the family match came back in four hours. 4 hours, after 37 years, Lyle was the opposite. His matches were distant, the family lines ran through generations of records in New Mexico and California, and the tree building consumed

hundreds of hours across a team of roughly 20 volunteer genealogists working week after week. Two cases, same technology, one solved in an afternoon, one requiring months of grinding work. That's the reality of this science. It isn't magic, it's research, done by people who refused to stop. And on May 8th, 2018, the Grays Harbor County Sheriff's Office made the announcement 17 years of investigators, and an entire online community had been waiting for. The man known as Lyle Stivik had been positively identified. He was 25 years old when he died. He was from California, with family roots in New Mexico, and then came the detail that explains everything and devastates you at the same time. His family had never reported him missing because they didn't

know he was gone. He had pulled away from them in the time before his death, and for 17 years, they believed he was simply estranged, out there somewhere, living his life, choosing not to call. They thought he was alive that entire time. They never got a knock on the door in 2001, because in 2001, nobody on earth could connect the quiet man in room eight to them. The family asked that his real name be withheld from the public, and law enforcement and the genealogy community have honored that, and so will I. He doesn't need to be a headline twice. What matters is this. His remains went home. The man buried in Aberdeen as an unknown for 17 years, was returned to people who loved him, and the case file that opened on September

17, 2001, in a motel at the edge of the rainforest, finally closed, not because of a fingerprint or a warrant, but because thousands of strangers decided that no human being deserves to stay lost forever. The man who checked in under a fictional name, in the loneliest corner of the country, at the loneliest moment in modern American history, turned out to be the most found person in this entire video. So let's step back and look at what we just walked through, because I told you at the beginning that one fact ties all five of these cases together, and now you can see it.

In 1924, five miners came down off Mount St. Helens with a story nobody believed, and a century later, the canyon still carries the name they gave it, and the question they raised has never been answered. In 1958, a family of five drove into the Columbia River Gorge, and the official answer took 67 years to surface, literally, physically surface, pulled up from 50 feet of dark water, with three of the Martins still inside. In 1971, a man jumped out of an airplane over the Washington wilderness, and his fate has stayed hidden in that wilderness for over half a century. But even that case couldn't stay completely closed, because in 1980, $5,800 of his ransom

surfaced in a riverbank under the hands of an eight-year-old boy digging a fire pit. In 2000, Leah Roberts's trail ended on a logging road below Mount Baker, and her case is still open, still worked, still waiting, and in 2001, a man died without a name in Amanda Park, and 17 years later, science and sheer human stubbornness recovered his name. Here is the pattern. The Pacific Northwest is one of the only places left in America that can genuinely hide the truth.

Millions of acres of forest, rivers 50 feet deep, fog, distance, silence. And for years, sometimes for generations, the truth stays hidden out there. But these cases keep teaching the same lesson. Hidden is not the same as gone. The Martin family waited 67 years for an answer, and the answer came.

Lyle waited 17 years for his name, and his name came. Dan Cooper's money sat nine years under a sandbar, and a child found it with his bare hands. Every decade the tools get better, sonar, DNA, genealogy, 10,000 strangers on the internet who refused to let a case die, and every decade something comes out of this region that was never supposed to be found, which means the remaining questions in tonight's video are not closed. They are pending.

Somewhere in southwest Washington, there is a lot of, very likely a parachute, a skeleton, or a briefcase that settles the Cooper case forever. Somewhere in the North Cascades, or in someone's guilty memory, is the truth about what happened to Leah Roberts after she walked out of that restaurant in Bellingham. Somewhere in the evidence pulled from the Columbia River is the final word on whether the Martin's deaths were an accident, or whether Detective Walter Graven was right all along. The answers exist. They are physical things, sitting in physical places, waiting.

And if the history of this region tells us anything, it's that someday, maybe next year, maybe in 20, somebody is going to find them. Maybe it'll be a diver with a theory. Maybe a volunteer with a spreadsheet of DNA matches. Maybe an eight-year-old digging a fire pit. Maybe it'll be someone watching this video. If you know anything about the disappearance of Leah Roberts, the Whatcombe County Sheriff's Office is still taking tips.

and her family is still waiting. And if any of tonight's stories stayed with you, do me a favor. Leave a rating on the show if you are listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Click that follow or subscribe button, turn notifications on, and drop your theory in the comments, and some of the sharpest case analysis I've ever seen comes from you guys. We've got hundreds more true, dark, and mysterious stories on this channel waiting for you right now.

Thank you for spending the evening with me and the Pacific. northwest. Lock your doors. Stay off the logging roads after dark. And until next time, stay safe out there.