By Lucky Lane standards, these are examples of full-frontal madcappery. It is not the winter of whooping skiers and snowboarders, of fresh flocks of pink-cheeked tourists. STATE: WY LOCATION: SHOSHONE NATIONAL FOREST DATE MISSING: 07-24-1997 DOB: 08-04-1972 AGE: 24 CURRENT STATUS: UNRESOLVED. No solid evidence that she hadn’t been as happy as any young woman might reasonably hope when she drove into the mountains that afternoon. She was seen … She exists in a shadow land that we, the waiting, invest with both our fantasies and our nightmares. That she is being kept by someone infatuated, obsessed with her. The little group arrowed flashlights past tree trunks, into blurry undergrowth. The driver panics and throws her in the trunk, and he’s out of those mountains before you know it…”, “Militia crazies. In 1996, she ran the Boston Marathon in 3:08:33. Here the asphalt ends. At the northwestern edge of Lander, past the Toyota dealership, on a rise above the tidy town, ten identical frame houses face the Wind River Range. Captain Larry Makeshine, at tribal police headquarters in Fort Washakie, heard about Amy's disappearance soon after it happened, but Fremont County authorities never contacted his office directly. His initial response was that he would take it, but the next day he had a lawyer, Kent Spence [son of famed defense attorney Gerry Spence], and he refused the test.”. Her to-do list was long: run & lift, recycling, call phone co., electric, gas, insurance, get photo mounted or matted, flyers for race, get more boxes, mow lawn, call Ed, close road?, have Karn do drawing. Subscribe to our newsletters to stay up-to-date on the latest outdoor news. IN THE NORTHWESTERN PORTION OF WYOMING, the weather turns stormy the afternoon of July 24, and Steve Bechtel and his friend choose to scout routes rather than climb. The climber, leaning against air, seems to be hanging onto the mountain by his very fingernails. They’re going to think that the search for Amy is over. By day four, when the weather takes an ominous turn, Williams concludes the same. With little training, Amy ran a 3:01 at the Tucson Marathon, which qualified her for the centennial Boston Marathon. "It's not within me to be angry at someone for having feelings or thoughts and for dealing with them by placing them on a piece of paper," Casey Wroe-Lee told the Star-Tribune. No, there’s nothing in my journal I’m at all uncomfortable with. “A guy from Texas. There is Amy in their wedding photo, smiling serenely, almost remotely—as if she's listening to a happy story she's heard before. His demeanor has taken on the alert exhaustion of an air traffic controller. Bechtel says no, thanks, he’ll wait for Amy. "I expected her to come stumbling out of the woods," said Billings. Waitressing in Fort Myers, Florida. Each week scores of the Bechtels’ friends gather to stuff envelopes for fresh waves of mass mailings. Beneath Lander's just-folks exterior is a town that, like most others, has not been able to fence itself off from trouble. Soon they would head off, climbing past killing switchbacks, toward Frye Lake, ten kilometers distant. Two or three dozen psychics have offered their services. Soon after, Nels restated—for a reporter from the Casper Star-Tribune and on a Wyoming public radio news program—his fervent wish that Steve would take a polygraph test. They drive until the road again starts to rise, and there! The golds of autumn become more golden; the greens of summer, greener; the warm, clear days, warmer, clearer. But the Toyota affords a curious scarcity of clues. Two women, including Steve's sister Leslie, stuff envelopes with canary-yellow flyers—a photo of Amy, her vital statistics, the date and place of her presumed abduction, a phone number to call, a heading: HAVE YOU SEEN AMY? That's where you could go to relax, to breathe in deep, to listen to your best self. Frail clues. Here was a one-bedroom apartment for rent: $350 plus utilities. Bechtel exhorts the runners to keep pushing, keep searching, keep distributing posters and flyers. They called her Wadzi-wipe: Lost Woman. It is the season of iron silence. Hunting is seasonal. She tended to listen rather than confess. Porchlight International for the Missing & Unidentified > Missing Persons Forums > Missing Persons Cases 1990 - 1999 > Missing Persons Cases 1997 > Her third novel will be titled My Russian. He dreams about Amy at night and knows, on some inchoate, instinctive level, that she’s still alive. Amy Joy Wroe Bechtel (disappeared July 24, 1997; declared legally dead 2004) is an American woman who disappeared while jogging in the Wind River Mountains approximately 15 miles south of Lander, Wyoming. Their father, Duane Wroe, 66, is a retired city administrator—intelligent, gaunt, testy, chain-smoking, a former big-time drinker (he gave it up 20 years ago). "Amy is the summit," said Skinner, the motivational speaker, during the early days of the search. As always when mapping out a course in a car, the distance seems appallingly long and difficult. She stopped in at the Camera Connection on Main and asked owner John Strom about several photographs she planned to submit in a competition. That is the first terror-dream when a person is missing, and it is linked to a second: that of dying in such a way that one is never conclusively missed, never completely mourned. What it is near is the spectacular eastern front of the Wind River Range—fierce, sharp peaks that give onto gentler ones that give, in turn, onto the oceanic high plains. That is why we're making this a nationwide search. At this point, everything about Amy Wroe Bechtel—her movements, her well-being, her very existence—becomes subject to speculation. Helen is an Olympic gold medalist who, with her … It crests above 9,000 feet and then descends to connect with Wyoming 28 near the skeletal mining hamlets of Atlantic City and South Pass City. “Hey, I just walked in the door,” he dissembles to his in-laws. "Let's say someone says, 'Check out a yellow mobile home off the highway ten miles from Lander,'" Steve says. AT 4 P.M., WENDY AND JIM GIBSON, proprietors of Lander’s Pronghorn Motel, leave town for Louis Lake, deep in the Shoshone National Forest. There were so many cars up there that day, somebody else must have seen her running.” Gibson shakes her head tersely, wiping away tears. Steve speaks of an FBI agent who he says told him, point-blank, just two weeks or so after the search for Amy began, "We have evidence you killed Amy." “There was material here that just had to be explained. Steve was dropped from the expedition at base camp because of a severe sinus infection and eye hemorrhages. "We think that is unlikely. 5.5K likes. Long before dawn and the arrival of the official search party, a dozen friends were looking for Amy-with-a-sprained-ankle, Amy-with-a-broken-leg, or Amy-attacked-by-a-bear. These are friends of the Bechtels who turned out instantly on the night of the disappearance; who left school, abandoned jobs, and aborted climbing expeditions to rush to Lander and search the woods. At 8:45, Whisler and Skinner go to the movie in town. We know Amy's alive.". It is the end of August, then early September. By the start of the hill climb, everyone was tired. Out on Lucky Lane. Jo Anne said little. ATVs scampered over the land. "We have 50 activations a year. Drinkers vanish, druggies vanish. Bechtel turns to McCullough, to the mountain of paper. Lander, however, took stock. She’s still up there, you can bet on it…”, “Amy’s running up there and a car’s coming, the driver drunk probably, and hits her. The request automatically pulls the plug on the interview. After graduating in 1995, she set her sights on the marathon. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google, Thanks for signing up! Had she gone climbing? The swing of the lights, a deer’s eyes reflected. Steve can’t remember, and the thought still haunts him. Swenson, whose story was the subject of a 1987 made-for-TV movie, eventually escaped. A dozen small, identical prefab houses, jacked up and trucked from a strip coal mine in northeastern Wyoming. When he spoke again, it had returned to full strength. Those were the mantras at Lucky Lane, even during the best of times. In the early nineties, the rock climbers began to arrive, drawn by some of the most accessible and difficult walls in America. “You can show me the rough stuff now.”, But what fails to faze Skinner disturbs Amy’s family deeply. Steve Bechtel Sr., former CEO and empire-builder of Bechtel, explained, "In this business, you get to know people, sit on their boards and one day when something comes up, they ask you to take on a project. They said they didn't want to cause a stir, to have the families' choppy sorrows upstage an event that should focus exclusively on Amy. There at the Y of the Burnt Gulch cutoff is the white Toyota! He rises from bed and drives up to Burnt Gulch. During the night, the number of climbers and other friends searching for Amy has swelled to 25. Nine miles from town, in the Sinks Canyon State Park Interpretive Center, among other exhibits, is a mounted photograph of a rock climber. And like Amy, he progressed through sheer doggedness. Focus. “Amy is trusting, she is intelligent. "You want to be lean, skinny, wiry, small, compact, like me. He’s reaching in to get it just as Amy runs up. "They've made it look like Steve has something to hide.". In the days that followed, searchers painstakingly staked out and scoured roughly 20 square miles around Amy's car. Gear-obsessed editors choose every product we review. Thousands of man-hours have been expended on generating publicity and following up on the hundreds of tips that have come in. No Amy. Both sides mistrust and denigrate the other’s search efforts. “When I read that stuff, I was completely freaked out,” recalls her brother, Nels Wroe. Labour has a three-point lead over the Conservatives, according to a new poll, putting Sir Keir Starmer above Boris Johnson for the first time.. The mouth of the Sinks was searched by divers. Helicopters, including one equipped with infrared sensors, thwacked over the mountains for hours, days. They had taken some visiting relatives, Nebraska flatlanders, up to the mountain for some predinner sightseeing. People follow patterns, people turn up. But not this year, not in Lander. Wyoming Case #3 Amy Joy Wroe Bechtel, 24 (48) Lander, WY July 24, 1997 Last time I went through Wyoming I remember this case because it really sticks out as far as a mystery is concerned. The concrete world of a physical search—gullies, cliffs, thick copses—has given way to the more abstract realm of an investigation: theories, networks, possible sightings, criminal profiles. Race day combines cathartic release with cheerleading. There’s less bumping into one another that way, less hysteria. Wavery memories, contradictory as dreams. Bechtel starts writing up the phone call. Or they could be those who are angry and confused by Steve's refusal to take a lie detector test. Her husband spends his every minute and hour organizing a search effort. The deputies come away with Bechtel’s truck in tow and a pile of journals that both Amy and Steve had kept over the past few years. Only her white Toyota station wagon parked on a turnout high on the rugged road through the wilderness. No note from Amy. The photo, shot by Amy Wroe Bechtel, placed third in the action category in a local contest. He talks to Bechtel, Skinner, and Whisler, and decides to play it by the book, start operations at first light. Runner's World participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites. Gossip, conjecture, and innuendo fill the vacuum left by the utter, haunting lack of solid clues or evidence. Its most famous resident was an old buckaroo, Stub Farlow, whose image atop a sunfishing bronc adorns Wyoming's license plates. Skinner speaks emphatically and with much eye contact. And she was smoking a cigarette.”. We leave unholy messes wherever we go, despite our best intentions. Alliances had frayed. Some just offer their insights. It would be the day that a Lander resident named Amy Wroe Bechtel—24 years old, five-foot-six and 110 pounds, Olympic marathon hopeful, amateur photographer, friend, employee, daughter, sister, wife—fell off the face of the earth. “Now, I wouldn’t take the test under any circumstances. At this point, while quotidian life went one direction in Lander—while the shopper at Safeway reached for discount Gatorade and the fisherman eyed the gathering clouds and the golfer double-bogied the difficult fourth hole at the local municipal and Jesse Emerson rehearsed that evening's presentation—life for Amy went another. At 10:30 he calls the sheriff to report Amy missing. Amy speeds up slightly, watching the odometer hit 6.2 miles near the middle of the lakeshore. He and her friends pointed to her heart, her drive. He is wearing a T-shirt, shorts, sandals. The lack of clues grows more disturbing as the searchers range farther from the car. Beneath Lander's just-folks exterior is a town that has not been able to fence itself off from trouble. Earlier girlfriends had resented Steve’s climbing; earlier boyfriends had been jealous of Amy’s running. NOLS stayed and prospered. No boyfriend-on-the-side. He knows by heart the lyrics to the complete works of They Might Be Giants. She was seen at a local photo shop at approximately 2:30 p.m. that afternoon; employees at the store said she seemed to be in a hurry and looked at her watch … The school district and the Gannett Grill needed cooks. On the way back to town, at Burnt Gulch, Wendy noticed a "dirty white vehicle" but had no reason to connect it with the young runner they'd seen earlier. Jo Anne Wroe's face is pulled long. It’s deeply flawed and completely unreliable. That he sent her to the framing shop upstairs to see about matting. Horses joined the hunt, and then the cadaver dogs and the national guard. Bechtel leaves a message on Sherline’s answering machine. Thundershowers were forecast for the afternoon, but the morning sky was cloudless. The close working relationship between law-enforcement officials and the recovery headquarters is abruptly severed. Steve is big, barrel-chested, and he's got those big legs to haul around." No, I am not going to take a polygraph test, because the test is flawed and a waste. And there is Steve, strong-jawed and smoothly handsome in a tuxedo. Bechtel leaves Dubois about 3:30 and arrives back at Lucky Lane around 4:30. A number of historians say otherwise—that the evidence points to an early death at Fort Manuel, far to the east in the Dakota Territory—but the Shoshone story is that she wandered for years after the expedition and came home finally to her people, who had long given her up for dead. She’s got all the time in the world. AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME, CHIP WILLIAMS, head of the Fremont County Search and Rescue team, gets the call from the sheriff’s office. Her pale blond hair is a shiny cap, her skin golden, her carriage slim and erect, her dress a simple, sleeveless column of white. Maybe Amy has changed her mind for some reason. They walked, four abreast, the length of the Loop. At 1 a.m. Whisler gets on the cell phone and calls Bechtel to tell him what they’ve found and haven’t found. Nearby, there’s no good set of footprints, even though Amy was wearing a relatively unusual pair of trail-running shoes. Armies of volunteers pitch their tents. Skinner, 39, has led four of the most notable first free ascents of recent years: Half Dome's northwest face, the Salathë Wall of El Capitan, Proboscis in the Yukon, and the Nameless Tower in Pakistan's Karakoram Range. "The FBI in their usual sensitive manner attacked Steve Bechtel when they became frustrated with their failure to come up with any clues," Spence said shortly after taking on Steve as a client. While the climbing community in Lander remained solidly loyal to Steve, things had unraveled badly among the family. By now, Steve and his friends have learned to discriminate between the promising and the ludicrous. You know the drill: large dogs barking, tights, running shorts, sweat pants, ski caps, singlets, gloves, Marmot, Columbia, Patagonia, The North Face, pre-race babble. Mike Lilygren, who accompanied Skinner on that 1995 Pakistan climb, lived last summer in number seven.
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