We are back from Crime Con and just getting caught up on our various responsibilities.
The trip was tremendous and we'll have a lot more to tell you about
in the next coming episodes of Mind over Murder. In the meantime, we
wanted to bring you a bonus episode where we interviewed Andrea Lankford just a few
months ago discussing her book Trail of the Lost. Andrea's book was the top
prize winner at Crime Con in the True Crime Books category, much like our
friend Kate Miles was last year for her book Trailed. So another phenomenal book,
and we thought we would bring you this episode on Trailer of the Lost
as a bonus episode, and we'll look forward to catching up with you soon
here at Mind over Murder. You're listening to the Mind over Murder podcast.
My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting for and now podcaster.
I am now trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder
victim to help other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on
the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders, and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway
Murders Facebook group. Together with Kristin Dilly. My name is Kristin Dilly.
I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate,
as well as the social media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders
Facebook page with my partner in crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind Over
Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm Bill Thomas, and we're joined today by
Andrea Lankford here to talk to us about her book Trail of the Lost,
the relentless search to bring home the missing hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail.
Andrea, thank you for joining us today. We appreciate you being here.
Yeah, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Go ahead
and start by telling our listeners about your new book and ultimately why you decided
to write it. Trail Bloss came out last August twenty three. It is
about three hikers who went missing for the Pacific Crest Trail and my journey to
try to figure out why. I started writing the book in November twenty seventeen,
and I embedded myself with a group of amateur sluic searchers for five years.
We did our darndest to try to solve this ministry. I'll also befitted
the families of the missing people. And so this book is a big journey
of showing what the things I learned and solved during that research tell us a
little bit about what happens when a hiker goes missing in a national park.
Most of us go to national parks, have a wonderful time. We might
interact with the rangers and other staff, but for the most part, except
for maybe asking directions or attending a workshop, most of our interactions with the
National Park Service rangers and staff are not in urgencies. What happens when a
hiker goes missing. Now, when you're a park ranger, you usually refer
to this as an overdue hiker, and you can get reports of overdew hikers
several times a day, definitely several times a week if you work at a
busy park like the Grand Canyon Ordysemite. And usually what I happened is a
friend will say, hey, hey, Joe went hiking into the Grand Canyon
and he didn't show up for work, or he didn't show up meet us
for dinner tonight. And when the ranger gets that type of report. We
are trained to treat this as an emergency because there's a good chance this hikers
in trouble somewhere in the wilderness and needs your health right away. So the
ranger starts to investigate and ask questions. Is maybe assign someone to be the
an investigator. You also will often send a hasty what you call a hasty
team, and a hasty could be rangers on foot, or it could be
jumping in a helicopter and flying to where you think this person may be in
trouble. The other thing that arranger needs to do when they get an overdew
hiker case is contain the search area. And containing the search area can involve
setting up a roadblock or having somebody at the trailhead to make sure the person
doesn't hike out of the search area without you knowing it. So, Andrew,
you've said that overdue hikers happen on the daily. How many times?
How many occasions do we have in which people have gone missing and national parks
and just have not been found. Do we have a number on that there
is another gets thrown around. It's probably an underestimate because the federal government has
not done a good job across your stations like your US Forest, your National
Park Service, your other wilderness lands of tracking this, but the number of
that gets thlown around. At sixteen hundred hikers have gone missing and stayed missing
international parks now the overdue higer. One thing that's interesting is around ninety seve
hundred percent of those cases are resolved within twenty four to forty hours. Person's
usually not alive. Sometimes the body is recovered, so it is rare,
but there's still a pretty big number. Sixteen hundred even as an underestimate,
that's a pretty big number of assault cases. I know, it's hard to
generalize of the ninety seven percent, which is a pretty happy statistic of hikers
that are found, what are some typical reasons for why they were overdue?
If what are the classic explanations, Because I'm sure lots of different things happen,
but what are fairly typical things that happen to a hiker and then he
or she has later found. Yeah, it really runs the gamut. The
best is they just overextended their self and they are just not out yet.
They're still walking, hiking, limping maybe when they just haven't got out.
Another is they get lost and they're wondering around lost another they fallen or they
fall into hypothermia and they're either injured or they've passed away. And so usually
it's an environmental thing, an accident of sub kind, the scarier ones,
or every once in a while is foul. Ply. Also on occasion it's
a voluntary disappearance where they actually are either pretending to be missing, or they
are contemplating suicide, or they're not even in the area that you're searching them.
They're off having a vender or something. That those voluntary disappearances do happen
on occasion. I think of the proximity of the Grand Canyon National Park in
Las Vegas, having combined visits to those two areas in the same vacation,
I think that would be unusual, wouldn't it if someone said, Oh,
I went to the Grand Canyon, but in reality, I took a side
trip to Las Vegas, and we're on a bender. Yes, I worked
at Grand Canyon about four years, and we would make jokes about people being
in Vegas, but I don't think I ever had a case where they actually
weren't in the park, So that is rare. The interesting when I was
researching trail, the loss there seems and you'll hear families of the missing talk
about this, and it seems to be something more like the county agencies do
where they especially if a young male goes and missing, they just the cops
have a tendency to assume they are doing this on purpose, and that's very
frustrating for the family because the family will be like, oh, no,
not my son. He would be home, he would call his mom,
things like that, and that bias I think could be a problem in my
experience from researching the book, when someone does go missing in the wilderness and
you have to send out a search team for them, whether that's in the
Grand Canyon or Yosemite, what are some of the issues that face NPS,
rangers and rescue personnel when they're out looking for someone who's gotten missing. You've
got vast wilderness, treacherous areas. Often people go missing when the weather,
when there's a big storm, there's an avalanche situation on in Tahoe. I'll
see it's Tahoe right now, it's wide out and they've got people buried in
the snow. So not only is that just hard to search for people,
it's also hazardous for the searchers. You also have staffing. Most are agency
search and rescue agencies, and definitely the National Bark Service is understaffed. You
also have triage issues because let's say you've got three people buried in avalanche,
and then you've got five skiers who fell and broke bones over here, and
so you have to triosh how you're going to respond, like in the Mashazli
situation. So those are some biggies. Another is cooperation. Are sometimes these
areas are in more than one jurisdiction, So are the agencies cooperating with each
other to help get these people found? You mean adjoining lands where you may
be leaving a national park and entering a state park or some other preserve.
How does one end up in one place versus another. Yes, it's that's
exactly one of the issues that I write about in Traivel Loss is one of
the missing hikers, Chris Fowler. He went missing in Washington State in the
Pacific Crest Trail. This is a long trail. It's twenty five hundred plus
miles and so it goes through numerous counties, three states and two countries,
and through hiker is out there for a week months and so they're crossing jurisdictions
on an hourly basis sometimes. So in the Chris Fowler case, what happened,
it was real easy for the agencies to go, he's on in my
county, he's in your county, it's in that county's in that county.
And so the family was having to do a run around, are run around
with five different counties to try to get somewhere to initiate a search, and
that was very frustrating to them. And I write about that and Trail the
Loss. Oh. I was absolutely appalled by that when I read that section.
That's unbelievable. Let's turn our attention very briefly to crime and national parks,
which is something that is a concern for both of us. So what
are the numbers like when we think about crime and national park is that something
that happens terribly often? What are the numbers for crime like in national parks?
Unfortunately, we don't really know one. We've got jurisdictional issues. You
have some parks, like you see many the rangers have exclusive jurisdiction, and
you seemity you could probably go there and get pretty good numbers and what the
crime rates is, but other parts that shared with the county, and so
a lot numbers could get lost in the system. So I'm going off of
experience, and so from my experensive ranger, it's definitely more than people think,
but it's probably less than it and your home like driving to your workplace
or going to the mall, so it's probably less than that, but it's
more than what you think. It's still it's a problem. Still there.
We would want no crime and no foul play in the national barsh would be
the PCT preference. Is there a database somewhere where all of these incidences of
crime and national parks is stored? If there is, I can't find it,
and so I don't. Like I said, you probably call Yosemite and
maybe they'd make you have a what where you have to ask for information public
information requests. You could probably get some good numbers over park block yusemity,
but over the system as a whole it exists, I can't find it.
Wow, You're not the only National Park Service employee or former employee that we've
ever talked to who has brought this up. So this has come up several
times. I don't want to bog the podcast down with this too much,
but I will say some of the people that we've talked to have said they
think that this is deliberate on the part of the Park Service. That the
Park Service wants to sell us something which is the great outdoors and access to
natural lands, and I at it how wonderful national parks are. At the
same time, much like Disneyland or any other big operation, they don't want
to focus on the fact that occasionally it may be rare and from an overall
perspective, but sometimes bad things do happen inside national parks. It seems like
the Park Service doesn't want to talk about it. I've gotten the same feeling
when I was arranged at Yosemite. They assigned me to go with the news
crew, and I was naive and I just showed them what was happening.
We went into the evidence, we looked at guns and drugs, and took
them on actual crime scenes. What I've heard is that the concession wasn't too
happy with the story that came out because it was disturbing to the viewers.
Oh my gosh, there's a lot of crime going on Yosemite, and that
we were told to not talk about these things to the media anymore. We've
also found in the Colonial Parkway murders that we've gotten sometimes a distinct lack of
cooperation in terms of access. Even several years back, when we wanted to
search for some missing persons who was part of the Colonial Parkway murders, we
actually asked the National Park Service for permission to bring in cadaver dogs. And
these are professionals and they know how to conduct a search with a very low
impact. Boy did they give us a tremendous amount of grief. It was
one roadblock after another to the point where all of the families involved were so
exasperated with the National Park Service. I actually said, it feels like they're
more concerned about the blades of grass in the Colonial Parkway National Park than they
would be about the fact that we think several murders happened there and our loved
ones are still out there inside that national park, and they are doing everything
they can to prevent us from looking for it. I think sometimes there's a
very strong pr focus on the part of the Park Service. Yeah, there's
something there. I don't understand it. It does exist outside the partures as
well. This is tangential to issues I discussed in the Trail to Loss.
For example, drones can be used to find to work cold cases. They
could do a grid photograph search, take photographs. Those photographs can be searched
by humans that are called squinters because they're staring at the computer screen searching images
all day. And this has been successful. But drones aren't allowed in the
National park or wildness areas or state parks. And there's other cases where even
the FAA has been problems with drone searchers in Texas, for example, just
being two. They need to be, in my opinion, more flexible when
it comes to human life and suffering. We can let let a blade of
grass go on occasion. Totally agreed. I want to pivot to the subject
of Trail of the Loft, which is the missing hikers on the PCT.
I think most people have probably heard of the Appalachian Trail before, but there
may not be people who are as familiar with the Pacific Crest Trail. Can
you give a brief overview for anybody who's not familiar. What is the PCT?
The Pacific Crest Trail runs through the Pacific Coast states, California, Oregon,
Washington. It goes from the Mexico border in California all the way up
to the Canadian border in Washington. It's twenty five hundred miles. A little
bit more nap and people to like it. Now, you guys, if
you're thinking, then you've read you might understand why the numbers of people wanted
to throw hide the trail. And that's people wanted to go from A to
B all the way to Canada to Mexico in one season since the release of
Rails Strain's memoir Wild In the movie starring Reice Witherspoon that came out in December
twenty fourteen. So it was since that movie came out the numbers of people
wanted to do this of skyrocketed. They had to issue a permit system to
curtail the numbers each day. And it's also a new kind of hikers are
attracted to it. People who are seeking a new life, the more seeking
spiritual growth, like Cheryl Straight in her novel or her memoir. Not necessarily
you're Pardy, I climb Mount Everest and k two type people are hiking it.
There's potential there for problems because people are hitting the trail a little bit
naive, and the Pacid of Cristil is very rugged and very remote. These
are living the Sierra the North Cascades in Washington. These are very rugged,
dangerous areas. My boyfriend had done some hiking in the Sierras when he was
in high school and lived in California, and when I told him about this
section of the PCT, he was like, you could not pay me enough
money to try to hike that. He was like, it's very rugged and
very difficult, and he was teasing me. He was like, we can
go out there sometimes. I said, you know what, No, I
think I'm good. I think I'm good. Especially having read this and looking
at those photos, I got a sense of just how terribly imposing the sounds.
So what drew you to the stories of Chris Sherpe Fowler, David O'Sullivan,
and Christopher Sylvia. How did you have those come onto your radar,
so to speak? I heard about a case, the Chris Sylvia case.
He was twenty eight years old and he was hiking the Pacific christ Trail in
twenty fifteen and he vanished in February, and the San Diego County that's in
southern California made searched hard for him. They had dogs or patrol agents,
you name it. Whereuth there trying to find him for five days, and
then they eventually gave up. But his gear was found on the Pacific Crist
Trail, and his circumstances reminded me of a case. I had worked at
the Grand Kenyon of another young man in his twenties and I failed to find
him. I was assigned as the search coordinator, and I tried to coordinate
the entire church effort. I didn't find the guy, and that bothered me.
I had to tell his husband that we were winded. His father excuse
me that we were winding down the search, and it bothered me. Fears
it haunted me. So the chrys silvia case reminded me of that case so
much. I just had a compassionate impulse, and I called his family and
asked for their blessing to open a pro bono investigation into that case. Now,
from that case, I started to learn about the I look for patterns.
I investigated case, and I learned there were two other young men who
were missing for the Pacific Christ Trail, three young men, one each year
three years in a row and that struck me as uncanny. And so then
I started to meet some of these amateur sleuths and I joined their effort and
was just compelled to do my best alongside them to try to solve this mystery.
So I would say for me that one of the most intriguing parts of
the book was reading about the people that you met online, some of you
you eventually met in real life, who were dedicated to searching for Chris,
Shurpa and David. What would you say were some of the highlights for you
of working with online researchers and what are some of the challenges as well that
come along with that. Yeah, that's an excellent question. What happened is
I started joining the Facebook missing hiker groups, and especially the Chris Fowler Missing
Hiker group, and I was watching all these amateur searchers, and by amateurs,
I just mean they're not professional searchers. They're professional people, a lot
of them, but they don't search for a living. And to me,
these Facebook Missing hiker groups were like, it's joining those is like walking into
the saloon in a while with anything goes. You've got all kind of rowdy
characters in there. Bitter squabbles are likely to break out at any time.
It's a little rough and rowdy in there. But every once in a while
I'd see the saloon doors open at this crazy Facebook place, and quiet hero
would walk in, somebody that had pure intentions, just wanted to help this
family fund their missing loved ones. And the first quiet had I write about
a lot of these flight heroes, but the first one that struck my interest
was a woman named Kathy Tar. She was near me and age. We
were both in our mid fifties at the time, and she was had searched,
given up her summer to search for Chris Fowler in Washington, and she
announced on Facebook she was going to drive all the way down to California to
now initiate a search for David O'Sullivan, who went missing about fifty two trail
miles north of where Chris Silvia went missing in southern California. She was going
to be there searching for David Sulivan at the same time I was going to
be there searching for Chris Silvia. So I begged her to meet me for
dinner, and we started talking, and you could say once I met Kathy
Tar, I was hooked. I wanted to learn I want to learn how
to be missing and o their families, but also wanted to learn more about
this Facebook missing hiker group phenomena. I wanted to learn more about how the
Internet is affecting hyperculture, and so that's where the book was born. Now,
I have a perception, and I'm probably wrong here, that in a
lot of our wilderness areas there's no cell service. And so I was intrigued
by this idea that there were Facebook missing hiker groups and that they were using
social media as a way of communicating what they were up to, what they
were hoping to do in terms of searching for missing hikers. So social media
actually has had a significant impact on, as you put it, hiker culture.
What are some of the ways things are changed or impacted by new technology.
So with the so state, maybe in a lot of ways. Right,
we even know about the selfie phenomenon where I call it the fatal selfie.
Right, They're trying to get a sexy selfie on the edge of the
cliff and they fall. It's very tragic. Yeah, it's very sad.
But in this missing hiker world, Facebook is both a blessing and a curse.
It'll bring in false leads, It'll bring in catfishers who are trying to
get money out of the family. It'll all these fights. People will get
on there and argue, people will say negative things, but it also will
bring positive It'll bring support, it'll bring awareness, It'll bring in good leads.
And in my book, Facebook proves to be a very powerful investigative tool
that I couldn't imagine using when I was looking for my missing hiker, the
Grand Kenyan in nineteen ninety five, a clue is found via Facebook. Morgan
clements for the amateur searchers and Kathy tar that I write about, they prove
that a witness statement is false using Facebook. It just flows lit off.
There's just all good and negative things happening in both hiker world and the missing
person world via social media. And as I was reading this, I was
definitely seeing some of the same things that you do in your missing hiker social
media groups. We have the same sorts of dynamics on the pages that we
run for the Colonial Parkway murders case. So this was all looking very familiar
at certain points. And we two have our quiet heroes, we have our
rabble rousers, and we do get the people who are like I have this
big, extravagant lead, but it pans out to nothing. So this was
a very interesting book for me to read and compare the two experiences. You're
listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back after this word from our
sponsors. We're back here at mindover Murder. You had talked a couple of
minutes ago about drone technology, and that was one of the things that I
was most interested in hearing you talk about here. How has technology like drones
helped search and rescue teams and rangers in locating missing people in hard to search
areas. Earlier on I talked about your hasty search, right, This is
when you just shoot out a helicopter or you shoot out some run or some
humans or some dogs maybe to go find this missing person. And they are
using drones in that way and to find people in real time. And this
can work well if you've got a person going waving their arms on a mountaintop
and the drone can find them, or when they use it for red thermal
imagery and so they can find a live person because they're warmer than the environment.
Where my book focuses on it is with cold case drone searching. And
so with a cold case drone search this is very esoteric at this point,
but I also feel very promising, and they are only a handful or less
of teams trying to improve this technique. And so with a cold case drone
grid search is you send a very good, high quality drone with a drone
pilot that's an extremely good problem solver, and they've got a search area mapped
out in GPS. They do it on the computer software and the drone flys
a grid like a lawnmower, back and forth, and the drone is taking
photographs along that grid. You will come back with thousands of photographs. Now
they have software that searches, but today it's just not as good as what
humans could do. This is very tedious. If I mentioned already, they
call these humans that view these images squinters. Love it squinting at their computer
screen so much winters, and they're very dedicated. Yeah, the squinters are
very dedicated, hardworking people, and so they're searching these images looking for clothing,
equipment, gear, even bones. It's a little bit of a spoiler,
but in the book this ends up working. They find missing people,
using this drone coqu strone image search technique. One group Western State's Area Search
in cooperation with the Follower Solar Foundation, which we'll probably talk about later.
They have found four people who's in this technique since twenty and nineteen. I
was talking to my boyfriend Mark about that very thing, and he said,
thousands of photographs, that's crazy, And then he said that sounds like that
would be the kind of thing that we should be training AI for, because
wouldn't that be a much better use of AI's time rather than you know,
generating memes or giving high school students essays on demand. Couldn't we be training
AI how to identify these sorts of things in photos. Yes, I believe
so. I believe the AI at this point has some limitations. There's been
a study it shows that today with the software, that humans could do it
better or quicker with assimilated death scene is what I'm going to say, is
like bones of clothing. But there's promise. And I've talked to deep learning
experts about this. They feel this is a solvable problem. But the AI
has to look at thousands, ten thousand images to learn that where's a human
beings teach them. This is what THEMUR looks like much quicker. But there's
hope that we will eventually get there. Was it going to be one year,
two year, ten years, I don't know, but I do think
there's hope that we could train at AI can learn itself how to find clues
during a cold case. Dro grid search one thing I was surprised by,
and I learned that in your book. I didn't realize drones could be programmed
to fly a grid pattern, which I know is that's searching one oh one.
I didn't realize that technology existed. It just never occurred to me.
I've seen drones, but I'm always seeing locally here a person flying a drone
using a handheld controller. So it's almost it felt to me like those radio
controlled airplanes that we'd play with when we were kids. Much more sophisticated and
expensive, but that's what it felt like. I didn't realize that the drone
could go up there and fly itself back and forth and do a grid pattern
and then come back to you with result. I didn't realize how sophisticated they've
become. Yes, and it's obviously it's getting almost maybe exponentially sophisticated over time.
Like I said, we only have a few people working on this technique.
I'm hopeful we'll have more, maybe a bigger companies doing this that can
put more resources to it, or the government. But I've worked with the
drone pilots. My husband is trained to do it, and we all worked
the case with him, and it's tedious for them as well as winters.
It's a hard job. It's also for the drone pilot to establish their grid
in the software and then to go out in the field and have the drone
fly the grid and hopefully safely for the drone. If we lose a drone,
it's not the end of the world. It's safer than losing a person
and the aircraft, right. But they can fully do that. It's like
self driving cars. We're there. You just tell the drone where to go,
it'll go and as long as it doesn't hit an obstacle or bad weather
or something, it'll do its job for you. That does seem like a
significant time saver. In other words, you can see the potential exists for
a drone search to be something that would be incredibly beneficial in some of these
situations. You're describing, Yes, it's potentially a game changer both for the
hasty, immediately life saving searches and then also the cold case. These teams
could do this very safely and if they have the time, because it's not
an urgent thing, an agency can assign a team to do this to try
in an attempt to sell the cold case. Now, you need certain environments.
If you're in a Everglades swamp where there's just a big overstory and you
can't see down below, that's not going to be a great case for a
drone. Desert environments are awesome because it's just cactus and you could see real
easily on the sparse, sparsely visitated terrain is I think potentially fall zones below
like scree slow oaks in the mountains also might be a great place for these
drove grid searches. Was there any other technology that you came across that you're
particularly excited about as like a new innovation in search and rescue efforts? Or
are drones really that's the cool that's where all the cool kids are looking these
days. Ours are more cool kids looking into this drone thing. It's I
think it's so tedious. Maybe you need the nerdy, the uncool ones working
on it because they have the dedication to be obsessive and nerdy about it.
But the other cool thing are the GPS units, So you've got your garment,
your spot, and these other emergency GPS locator devices. Those are going
to get better and better, equality they're heavy. Right now. Apple Phone
is getting a GPS track, or I think it's said the fourteens have it
already. Also air tags, those Apple tags, I see. We're going
to soon get to a point where you can have one of those in your
backpack or in your jacket, and it's just that easily defined it an airplane
could fly over, get a signal and find you. I think we're not
far from that, so it'll just be a matter of does every hiker have
one on their person or not, As it's possible people will still get in
trouble, they're still going to fall, they're still going to maybe die and
get lost, but if they have one of these locator devices on them that
we will find them. We will have fewer unsolved cases when we do have
this technology. Do you think it's something that everyone is going to be open
to having on them or are there going to be hiking purists who are like,
I'm not hiking with a cell phone, I'm not hiking with an air
tag. We were always going to have some outliers. But I think if
the tag, the GPS tag, let's call it that, if it's lightweight
enough, inconvenient, and inexpensive, I think most of your hikers will not
have a problem carrying on this, especially when they're familiar with the hardship that
will occur to their family if they're not found. YEA, when you're a
hiker, I'm guilty of that a little bit. I'm like, hey,
search for me. That's where I want to be. Leave me out there.
But as being related to someone with the unsolved case, it's one of
the worst things that can happen to a family member or a loved one is
to not know and to not have the answers that you want, and it's
called ambiguous loss. Especially with the missing person, you have no idea what
happened to them or where they are, and so this is very hard for
them. You do not want to do this to your family. If you
need any motivation to have one of these gpasunits, that should be it.
Yeah, ask your mom how she will see if you went missing. It
almost feels like a spiritual quest or something. And look, there's a lot
of people that are out in the woods, that are out there for renewal
and relaxation, and they might actually say what you said, Andrew, which
is, hey, look, if I get lost, I was where I
wanted to be, and it's all good. Their moms and dads, brothers
and sisters, their husbands, wives, partners might not feel the same way,
particularly as the days and weeks, and in our example, months and
years go by. It's hard. Yeah, at the other end of that
go ahead, Yes, and with a missing person there's the emotional thing,
which is the worst of course, but there's also legal and financial problems because
the person can't be declared dead and so if you're a bread winner, that
which has happened, and so your spouse can't get access to your insurance to
take care of your kids because you're just missing. So it's a huge problem
to have a family member that's missing on several different levels. Yeah, I
was thinking about that while you were using that example. I thought you're right.
If someone went out, let's say, and they're the breadwinner and they've
got a half a million dollar insurance policy. Heaven forbid something happens to them.
They want to make sure their spouse and kids are provided for, and
a lot of times people have, But twenty five year old son now who's
in law school. When he was a little bit younger, my ex wife
and I would talk about, oh, we want to make sure that Chris
has enough money to go to school or do whatever he wants to do.
So there's always this provide for your family motivation, which I think is valid.
And yet if you go missing, you're absolutely right the insurance company's not
going to pay off. They're going to say Joe or Jane could come through
the door tomorrow and he or she'll be fine, or maybe they're in hiding
or whatever. There's a lot of bizarre stories out there. I want to
shift back to Chris, David and Sherpa for a second, and I hope
this doesn't come across as an indelicate question, but I think we can be
frank about it. With regard to the missing men, is the goal now
one of recovery or is it still a rescue operation. Do you think it's
possible for any of the men to have survived for this long and woods and
it's just a matter of finding them. From a professional searcher point of view,
yes, it will definitely be recovery, and it's been that for a
long time. A professional searcher starts to think recovery pretty quickly. There's something
called the survival rule of threes. You can live three minutes without oxygen and
three days without water, and three weeks without food, and then shelter can
be as short as three hours if it's freezing out or you're underwater and where's
cold. This becomes recovery situation fairly quickly. Now with these cases, though,
the hard part is, especially when you don't have answers and you don't
have a body, is that could they possibly be voluntarily missing? You know,
without spooning it too much. One of the Hyders in particular, there's
some circumstances that suggest that it's possible that this is someone who just went voluntarily
missing. You know that you're familiar with Chris McCandless in Alaska into the wild
people go. Did they go the candless? Did they burn all their possessions
and just go off and live under another name? It does happen. I
do think that's the one of the least likely. There's a low percentage that
happened, but it does remain an intriguing possibility for me for one of them
missing. I was going to ask, do you think that is what happened
to Chris. I don't have affirm this happened to any of them. Also,
Chris Fowler and David Osulivan, there was snowy conditions and cold conditions that
lead me to think that was more likely an environmental accident occurred in their case.
With Chris Sylvia, I'm very much more perplexed. Are there a lot
of people hiking alone in America's wilderness? Yes, I hike alone, and
I'm going to gett solo hiking. But then you'll hear you are slightly more
at risk. If you're a solo hiker, you're slightly more at risks of
trouble or to die out there. Interesting enough, these statistics are a little
bit older. But a solo male is less likely to survive a perilous counter
and outdoors than a solo female. So that's counterintuitive to a lot of people.
So yes, there is more risk. But if you're a person who
joys sol to solo hiking. It's a risk worth taking. Now you can
mitigate that risk by planning better and then maybe not doing the hardest core mountain
climbing thing alone. I'm going to go down to your local park for a
few miles alone. That's see what I mean. It's nuanced. But yeah,
a lot of people hikers love to go hike alone, all of them.
But there are thousands if not men as that did. When you hike
the at were you by yourself or did you have a companion with you?
I was a solo hike of the I thought to trail. I did that
in nineteen ninety nine for cell phone smartphones, and I wanted to hike it
alone. Now, the longest trails are a very social experience. Though there's
a trail culture. Then there's also what they call the trammelie, the trail
family, and people will look out for you and more on you, so
you don't Today you're probably not as alone as you want to be. You
want to be more alone than you are because there's more crowds on the trails.
Do you want to fess up as to what your trail name was?
Yes, it was Tennessee Walker, Tennessee Walker yeah, I don't know if
you guys are hearing an accent now Tennessee that sounds like a brand of alcohol.
It does. I think there's a horse horses, and even the whiskey
I think is named for the Tennessee horse walking horses. By the way,
we failed to ask you. I know you have a very proud history with
the Park Service. Tell us your history about where you started with the Park
Service and some of the places you served. Yeah. So I always wanted
to work in the outdoors and I loved animals, So I got a degree
four street from the University of Tennessee. Pretty quickly got a job as a
law enforcement park ranger at Cape Patters National Seashore in North Carolina. I wrote
a book about this called Ranger Confidential, around my experience with the Park Service.
From Cape Patteris, I went to Zion National Park in Utah, then
Yosemite National Park in California, and then I ended my career at Green Cayne
National Park in Arizona. All of these places are so stone cold beautiful,
as you described each one. Briefly, I thought, oh, I want
to be there, and then move on to the next one. I'd be
like, oh, no, I want to be there too. This had
to be pretty amazing. It was. I fell in love with it really
quickly. You know. I was idealistic about the job. But what happens.
I was a protection ranger, and that's to protect the park from the
people, protect the people from the park, and protect the people from each
other. Park rangers orn't every which way trying to protect everything things that sometimes
they want to kill each other. You are caught in the middle. I
was a protection ranger is often always does wildwide for our structural far ems.
I was a medic and search and rescue as we've talked about. So there's
a lot of heavy duties on one set of shoulder for the park ranger.
Gee, if I'm going to go hiking, I'm going to ask you if
I can go with you, because I feel a lot safer all the way
around. There's a lot of experience there. Before we go, I want
you to talk to us a little bit about the work that the fouler O'Sullivan
Foundation is doing and how we can assist you and how our listeners can assist
you in that work. Yeah, that's one of the happy endings in Treble
Loss is a foundation is created by Kathy Tarr, one of these quiet heroes,
and it's called the foul Sullivan Foundation, named after Chris Speller and David
O'Sullivan. This foundation is dedicated to helping families of missing hikers and venning hikers
from going missing in the first place. They have a program where you can
donate a GPS unit and they will give that in a lottery system to drew
hiker, so that a throker that couldn't afford one can have one of these
while they hike. They also initiate searches. They've found several people on their
searches and they're searching for people today using this drone technique we talked about.
They have trained pilots, said, they've trained to do this, and so
yeah, go check them out. That's on fof found fofound dot com.
So excellent and so what's next for you in terms of projects? This is
a this is a beautiful book, very ambitious. Are you jumping right into
something else or are you taking time to pursue other projects. I'm taking time
off. That was I've worked really hard on that book. I had some
my own adversity in the book, which I write about and so I still
help out with the foundation from time to time. I'm in a search for
missing people for coming time, but I'm also taking a break to recover,
rest and recover myself for now. So does that mean you go for walks
in the woods. I go for walks alone in the woods. Yes.
The book is Trail of the Lost, the relentless search to bring home the
missing hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail. Andrea, where can everybody find your
book? It's pretty much everywhere, Deadly, Amazon, your local book favorite
bookstore. You should be able to find it. Definitely. You can you
order it for sure. Thank you so much for joining us, Andrea.
We love the book and we appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.
Yeah, thanks for having me work. We will try. That is
going to do it for this episode of mind Ever Murder. Thank you so
much for listening. We'll see you next time. Mind Over Murder is a
product of Absolute Zero and Another Dog Productions. Our executive producers are Bill Thomas
and Kristin Dilley. Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois. Our theme music
is by Kevin McLoud. Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with Coral Space
Media. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. You
can also follow our page on the Colonial Parkway murders on Facebook, and finally,
you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at Bill Thomas. Five six.
Thank you for listening to Mind Over Murder