188. Camping Horror: The Mysterious Disappearances of Theresa Bier & Madison Scott

In the summer of 1987, sixteen-year-old Theresa Bier rode into the Sierra Nevada mountains with a 43-year-old man who promised to show her Bigfoot, and only one of them came back. Twenty-four years later and a thousand miles north, twenty-year-old Madison Scott vanished from a crowded campfire party at Hogsback Lake in Vanderhoof, British Columbia, leaving behind her truck, her tent, and a mystery it would take twelve years to crack open. Two campsites, two missing girls, and the question of what… or who… was really waiting in the dark. TW: Kidnapping/abduction of a minor, Grooming and alleged sexual abuse of minors, Child abuse and neglect Subscribe on⁠ Patreon⁠ https://www.patreon.com/heartstartspounding to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society and enjoy ad-free listening, monthly bonus content, merch discounts and more. Members of our High Council on Patreon also have access to our weekly after-show, Footnotes, where I share my case file with our producer, Matt. You can also enjoy many of these same perks, including ad-free listening and bonus content when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Follow on⁠ Tik Tok⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@heartstartspounding?lang=en and⁠ Instagram⁠ https://www.instagram.com/heartstartspounding/ for a daily dose of horror.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Kaelyn Moore?

  Welcome back to another episode of Hearts Are Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. As always, I'm your host, Kayla Moore. Today, I want to explore with you guys one of the most requested Dark Summer topics, and that is camping horror stories. So I have two for you today. They're both really bizarre mysteries that I got absolutely lost in. And you know, just from doing this show over the last couple of years, I've become really passionate about cold cases being solved. And I think that the last story I tell you might be really close to a major breakthrough. So you're not going to want to miss it. But before we dive in, to celebrate Dark Summer, I do want to do another Where I Listen giveaway. If there's one thing I'm going to do, it's going to be giveaway our merch.

• 0:45Kaelyn Moore?

  You guys can take photos of where you listen and tag me at HeartsArePounding on Instagram. I'm going to share some of my favorites, and I'm also going to pass out some merch codes to you guys for our store. The last time I did this, which I think was in March for Listener Appreciation Month, you guys had a lot of fun with it. I know a lot of people were in cemeteries. Some people were just wandering around scary woods. I think one person even broke into an abandoned hospital, which I don't think legally I can condone, but I was very excited when I got that photo. You guys should really get creative with this. I am always a fan of the weirder the better. Go have fun. I can't wait to see what you do. And with that, let's get into the episode. I will say, these stories can be heavy for some listeners. You can always check out

• 1:29Kaelyn Moore?

  our content warnings in the description, so listen with care.

• 1:34Kaelyn Moore?

  Late in the morning on June 1st, 1987, the phone rang in the home of a 43-year-old Fresno, California man named John Richmond. On the other end was an administrator at his 16-year-old niece's high school. His niece, Teresa, who lived with him, hadn't shown up for school that day, and the administrator was curious as to why. Thinking fast, John told the school that Teresa was homesick, and he had simply forgotten to call in, but he knew that that was a lie. He hadn't seen Teresa since early that morning. See, earlier that day, his friend, a 43-year-old man named Skip Welch, had come by and offered to take Teresa to school. There had to be an explanation for this, as to why Teresa never made it to her classes,

• 2:17Kaelyn Moore?

  he thought. But when he tried calling Skip, the landline just kept ringing. So John started calling around to some of his other friends. Did any of them know where Teresa and Skip had gone? And the answer was not anything that anyone would have expected. But that morning would be the last time that John ever saw his niece. By 9:30 PM that night, John had called the Fresno Police to report Teresa as a missing person. Teresa Beer was 16 years old, but those who knew her best described her as seeming a lot younger than that, at least emotionally. She was described as being childlike and very impressionable. Her teachers and administrators noted that she was a bit immature and was slow to learn.

• 3:01Kaelyn Moore?

  Teresa lived in Fresno, California with her Uncle John. One of her uncle's friends was a man named Russell Welch, also known to everyone who knew him as Skip. And Skip was this 43-year-old widowed house painter who mostly survived off of disability checks. Five days into the investigation, police were able to locate Skip. But Teresa was not with him, and she was nowhere to be found. They placed him under arrest on this outstanding DUI warrant that they had, and they took him down to the station, sat him down in an interview room, and asked him point blank, "Where is Teresa?" And at first, Skip doubled down on the story. He insisted that he had dropped Teresa off at school,

• 3:43Kaelyn Moore?

  but that was the last he saw of her. But as investigators kept pressing him, Skip finally admitted that he had picked Teresa up from her uncle's house that morning and driven with her into the Sierra Nevada Mountains. "But it's not what you think," Skip said. And this is the part of the story where it turns into something that police could have never predicted. Skip told them that he and Teresa had gone into the mountains with a mission. They wanted to see Bigfoot. The two of them then set up a campsite, and before long, Skip said, "The cryptid emerged from the forest and presented itself to them." They had several Bigfoot sightings while they were in the woods,

• 4:24Kaelyn Moore?

  and Skip told the police that Teresa got so excited seeing these creatures that she ran off to go live with them. The last time he saw her, Teresa was bounding towards the tree line, determined to go live amongst a family of Sasquatches, and Skip just couldn't catch her, and that's why he returned to town without her. Obviously, this did not look good for Skip, an adult man who went into the woods with an underage girl and emerged alone, now telling the police that she consensually went to go live with Bigfoot. And this sounds ridiculous to you and I. I mean, at least to me. I don't want to make assumptions on your behalf, but I assume a lot of you agree with me.

• 5:07Kaelyn Moore?

  But the area that Teresa disappeared from, Shadai Peak, actually does have this long history of Bigfoot sightings, and the police knew that. So Shadai Peak is in the Sierra Nevadas, and it's this really inviting destination for people who love the outdoors. But its hiking trails are really not for novices. At around 8,300 feet, Shadai is the highest peak on the Eight Mile Chiquito Ridge, and its steepness and its rugged terrain make it what backpackers classify as a really hard hike. But it's a hike that's very rewarded with these stunning panoramic views. Now, in 1971, two men ventured into these mountains and came back with this audio recording of what they claimed were Bigfoot vocalizations,

• 5:50Kaelyn Moore?

  these distant yips and howls and knocking sounds, and strange voices that almost sounded like an unknown language. This recording became very famous. It was called "The Sierra Sounds", and it cemented the Sierra Nevadas as a landscape where people believed that Sasquatch lived. Take a listen to it.

• 6:27Kaelyn Moore?

  In the spring of 1987, Skip Welch approached Teresa and told her that he knew where Bigfoot lived. He said that he had seen one of these Sasquatches before. Now, this was really exciting to Teresa. Like a lot of people in that area, she had heard stories of Bigfoot and had always wanted to see one for herself. Skip claimed that he was a Bigfoot expert. He and Teresa would talk for hours about the subject, and in fact, it was basically all they talked about. Skip eventually did convince Teresa that there was a whole community of Bigfoots living in underground caves in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and that he had communicated with them. And that's when Skip convinced her to come along with him on one of his Bigfoot hunts.

• 7:12Kaelyn Moore?

  They planned this expedition in secret, and on the morning of June 1st, Skip showed up to her uncle's house and pretended that he was going to drive Teresa to school. Teresa played along with this plan. She stepped outside, got into Skip's truck, and then he drove them 70 miles north into the mountains. And now Teresa Beer was missing. Investigators needed to get to the bottom of what really happened with the two of them out there, but the longer Skip sat with them, the more his story started changing. In one version, he told Teresa ran off with another young woman, and another version, she ran off with other campers. And then the story was that Teresa had actually run off with Bigfoot,

• 7:55Kaelyn Moore?

  and now she was happier and healthier and better off living with a colony of Bigfoots in the mountain than she was at home, and she would rather stay with that Bigfoot colony. "So can I please leave? I'm done doing this interview," essentially is what he told police. Investigators listened to Skip's shape-shifting story with increasing unease. He kept referring to Teresa as "Sam", which was a nickname that only her family and close friends used. And then Skip volunteered information that was really disturbing, and it was totally out of the blue. He insisted, and this is without being prompted, that if Teresa were to be found, there would be no signs of sexual abuse. And Skip added that, although Teresa was willing to have sex with him,

• 8:38Kaelyn Moore?

  "It just wasn't in his nature to do so with such a young girl." And police heard that statement from him, and they knew, like you and I right now, that something was very wrong. Skip eventually agreed to lead investigators to the spot where he claimed that he and Teresa had camped. He accompanied the detectives out to Brown's Creek, which is about 25 miles southwest of Shadai Peak, and he walked them into a small grove of trees where they found this smoldering fire somewhere in the damp pine needles, and picture-perfect remnants of what looked like a campsite. They found blankets arranged in a way that made them look like they were staged. There was also a woman's purse, a bra, a t-shirt, a camera, and several photographs at this campsite.

• 9:23Kaelyn Moore?

  And the pictures were of the landscape. There was a picture of Skip playing his guitar in the same area that the detectives were currently standing, and there were also photos of Teresa. But the police noticed something really important. The topography that was visible in the photos of Teresa was very different from the area they were standing in around Brown's Creek. The campsite that Skip had led them to was almost certainly staged, and it was not where she disappeared from. The real campsite where the two had been, the police believed, was somewhere else, somewhere closer to Shadai Peak, possibly in the vicinity of Ghost Canyon. That was more than 20 miles away. But even though police believed that they were in the wrong place,

• 10:05Kaelyn Moore?

  that was still the area that was searched. They organized air and ground searches with helicopters and bloodhounds. For a moment, it actually did seem like one of the bloodhounds had picked up Teresa's scent, but then the dog lost it. And after that, a search helicopter that was scanning the area from above spotted something blue on a hillside near the camp. Investigators made their way over to it, and it turned out to be a blue shirt. And Skip admitted that that shirt was his, and when police reached into the pocket, they pulled out a small baggie of meth. After that, nothing else turned up. There was no trace of Teresa that was ever found.

• 10:47Kaelyn Moore?

  But authorities now believed Teresa was dead and Skip Welch was responsible. But without a body, they couldn't charge Skip with murder, at least at the time. So instead, they were able to charge him with felony child stealing and child endangerment. At his arraignment, Skip pleaded, you guessed it, not guilty, and the judge released him without realizing that there was actually another judge that increased his bail to $30,000. So, once this oversight was discovered, a new arrest warrant was issued for Skip. And then Skip was taken back into custody two days later. Over the next couple of months, prosecutors built their case and they set a trial date for October 5th. All the while, they hoped that Teresa would be found so they could officially charge Skip with murder.

• 11:32Kaelyn Moore?

  Even though that's really dark and they were hoping to find a body, they at least wanted her found. But that wasn't going to happen and prosecutors realized that they had a really big problem. If they proceeded to try to get Skip on the lesser charges and he was convicted, and then Teresa's body turned up later on, they might not be able to pursue a murder case because there would be double jeopardy protections. So, three days before his trial, the deputy DA approached Skip and he offered him a deal. Skip would receive a sentence of just one year on the child stealing charge if he would agree to sign a waiver allowing them to charge him with murder should Teresa's body ever be found.

• 12:14Kaelyn Moore?

  Skip's public defender said no to this. He said that was a very bad idea. And Skip refused to sign this waiver. But later that day, prosecutors totally dropped the case. And Skip walked out of that courthouse a free man. It's a devastating outcome, obviously, but I looked more into Teresa's backstory to learn more about who she was as a person because that seems to get really overlooked in this case. And unfortunately, it just doesn't seem like there was anyone in her life protecting her. She was in an ideal situation for a predator like Skip to walk into her life. By the time Teresa was just 10 years old, she had already endured more hardship than most of us have seen in our entire lifetime.

• 12:59Kaelyn Moore?

  When she was barely three years old, Child Protective Services removed her and her sisters from their mother's custody after she was found to have multiple broken bones. Her father filed for divorce and Teresa and her sisters were separated when her sisters went to live with a family friend and Teresa went into the foster care system. A few years later, Teresa's father remarried and the woman he was married to was named Margie Richmond. Margie was actually the ex-wife of Teresa's uncle, John Richmond, if that's not too much of a tangle web to follow. And Teresa moved from Fresno, where she grew up, down to LA County to live with both of them. But her new stepmother was just as abusive as her biological one and she would do things like lock up the refrigerator so that the children couldn't eat.

• 13:44Kaelyn Moore?

  By Teresa's pre-teen years, every adult responsible for her care had failed her. And before long, Teresa returned home to Fresno to live with her uncle John Richmond, who was her stepmother's ex-husband as well as her biological mother's half-brother. So, he had a direct familial link to both of Teresa's abusive mother figures. Now, around the neighborhood, John went by a different name. People actually called him Blind Johnny on account of his poor eyesight. He claimed that he lost his eyesight in an unlucky round of Russian roulette. But a lot of people in the neighborhood thought that he could actually see a lot better than he was letting on and that that story was a total lie. Blind Johnny was in his 40s. He was unmarried, but he didn't live alone.

• 14:28Kaelyn Moore?

  Living with him were his two sons, whose mother were not involved in their lives. And Teresa was often forced to babysit these two. And living with Blind Johnny was his girlfriend, if that's even what you could call it, because she was 17 years old. I personally would call her a victim, but tomato, tomato, I guess. Blind Johnny became Teresa's legal guardian, yet another string of unsuitable parental figures in her life. And Blind Johnny was really known to traffic drugs in the area. And it had been alleged, according to multiple sources, that Blind Johnny and several of his friends were abusing Teresa. One of Johnny's many questionable friends was Skip Welch. And that is how Skip got close to Teresa. He was a man with a reputation. He was known to be addicted to meth.

• 15:12Kaelyn Moore?

  His wife had actually died from an overdose. And he was also known to be very predatory to teenage girls, as obviously Johnny is too. The previous summer, Skip had invited a 17-year-old girl named Michelle on a camping trip in the mountains. Skip's own daughter warned Michelle to not go with him, explaining that her father had a habit of luring young women into the mountains, plying them with drugs and taking advantage of them. Michelle would tell police that, you know, even though she had this warning, she did go anyways. But she made sure that it wasn't just her and Skip on this trip. She actually brought along two guy friends. And while she made it back to civilization safely, she believed that she had been drugged on her time in the mountains with Skip.

• 15:55Kaelyn Moore?

  So, Skip took drugs and gave them to young girls. Blind Johnny sold drugs, so it wasn't really hard for police to see the connection between these two men. Skip came by Blind Johnny's house often and there was no one around to protect Teresa from him. When he told her all of these fantastical tales of his Bigfoot encounters, she believed him. And when he proposed a secret trip to the mountains, she jumped at the opportunity. And then, when Skip offered to give Teresa a ride to school that morning, Blind Johnny said yes without thinking twice. Teresa Beer's body never turned up. Skip Welch died in 1998 from coronary artery disease at the age of 54, taking whatever he knew about Teresa's disappearance to his grave with him.

• 16:39Kaelyn Moore?

  In 2025, there was a three-part documentary about Teresa's case called Bigfoot Took Her. It premiered on HBO Max. And during the documentary's production, Skip's great niece talked to the filmmakers and shared her belief that her great uncle may have buried Teresa on his mother's property. The filmmakers made contact with the current owner, who agreed to search the current property with cadaver dogs. And one of the hosts entered the crawl space beneath the house and did find bones. The production team sent those bones to a county coroner and the coroner examined them and concluded that they did belong to an animal. Teresa Ann Beer remains a missing person and if she were alive today, she would be 55 years old.

• 17:20Kaelyn Moore?

  Like I said earlier, sometimes the scariest thing in the woods is a person you thought you could trust. And though Skip tried to insist he did not know what happened to Teresa, in my opinion, this case was never a mystery. Our next case, however, is kind of the opposite. It's a real puzzle, the kind that still keeps an entire town up at night. We're going to leave 1987 behind. We're going to leave California. And we're going to head a couple thousand miles north to a small logging town in British Columbia, to a summer night lake party and a mystery that I think might soon have an answer.

• 17:58Kaelyn Moore?

  It was the very beginning of summer in British Columbia, Canada, Saturday, May 28th, 2011. At 8:30 that morning, in the small rural community of Vanderhoof, a young woman named Jordy was on her way to work when she made a detour to Hogsback Lake. The night before, Jordy and her friend Maddie Scott had gone to a campfire birthday party at the Hogsback Lake Recreation Site. This annual party was thrown by one of their friends and it usually drew dozens of people from around town. Jordy didn't want to stay the entire night. She ended up going home, but she left a couple of things behind. So, she figured she'd swing by the lake early that morning to grab her stuff, catch up with her friend Maddie about how the night had gone. But as she pulled into the site, the first thing Jordy noticed was how empty it was.

• 18:44Kaelyn Moore?

  Every single tent from the night before was packed up and gone, even though it was still pretty early in the morning. All of the tents, except for one. Jordy recognized it immediately. It was Maddie's tent, sitting there in an empty campsite, unzipped. She walked over and she peered inside. Maddie's whole area was a mess. Her sleeping bag and blankets had been pushed to the side. Her earrings and her rings were scattered in the grass outside the tent. Now, this was jewelry that Maddie wore all the time. It was jewelry that was really sentimental to her. And Maddie herself was now nowhere to be seen. But Jordy noticed that Maddie's truck was still there, parked in the same spot it was when Jordy was leaving the night before, and the doors were locked.

• 19:30Kaelyn Moore?

  Now, this didn't feel right to Jordy, but she wasn't necessarily panicking. She told herself that there had to be a reasonable explanation for this. Maybe Maddie had gotten a ride home with some of the other partiers. Jordy collected her stuff and then she took off and drove to work. That evening, another party materialized at Hogsback Lake, a much bigger one. About 150 people showed up for it. And according to that group, there was an empty tent already set up at the campsite, a tent that didn't move the entire time they were there, and the owner never showed back up. Maddie's tent. At some point during the night, someone at the party fell onto it and flattened it. And just after midnight, Maddie's parents arrived at Hogsback Lake. Maddie had not come home.

• 20:15Kaelyn Moore?

  She wasn't answering her texts or her phone calls. Her parents found her pickup truck still there where she had left it, the doors still locked. They found the campsite full of strangers. And then they found her daughter's tent collapsed in the grass with no sign that Maddie had ever come back for it. Maddie's parents left that area and called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And what followed was one of the most exhaustive searches in the history of Canada's third largest province. And a question that I still think about all the time. How had Maddie disappeared from a campsite full of people? On the afternoon of May 27th, 2011, the day before she disappeared, 20-year-old Maddie Scott called her cousin to ask if she could reschedule the plans that they had made for that evening.

• 20:59Kaelyn Moore?

  Maddie explained that she had just learned about a campfire birthday party that was being thrown that night and, you know, the boy she had a crush on was expected to be there. She couldn't pass up the opportunity to go see him. Her cousin understood she was a young girl too, and that's what teen girls do. And so they postponed their plans. Maddie looked at the Facebook event page for the party and noticed that pretty much everyone attending was someone she knew. That was Vanderhoof for you. Vanderhoof, British Columbia, is one of those places where everyone does know everybody because there's only about 4,000 people to know. It sits 430 kilometers inland from the coast and about 10 hours from Vancouver by car. It's a small district municipality hemmed in on all sides by hundreds of kilometers

• 21:44Kaelyn Moore?

  of wilderness and cultivated land. Logging is one of the primary industries. And this community is small, it's tight knit, and it's very remote. The nearest city of any real size is Prince George, which is over 100 kilometers away. So Maddie grew up in the woods and as a result, she was a pretty outdoorsy girl. She loved being active, camping, dirt biking, horseback riding, team sports. But she also had these really creative interests like photography and amateur video production. She also figure skated because what couldn't this girl do? After graduating from high school in 2009, Maddie followed her father into the logging industry and she became an apprentice heavy-duty logger for the same company that employed her dad. Her friends described her as being really outgoing, really generous, spontaneous, and

• 22:29Kaelyn Moore?

  her family said that she was someone who always shared when something was wrong. If Maddie was upset, she would tell you. One of Maddie's closest friends was Jordy. They had gone to school together, they'd known each other for years, and it was Jordy that Maddie called to go with her to the Hogsback Lake party that evening. Now, the events of May 27th and 28th would later be reconstructed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police from interviews with dozens of partygoers, cellphone records, and the one piece of surveillance footage that captured Maddie that evening. So early that evening, Maddie swung by a liquor store and picked up a six-pack of beer, a bottle of wine, and snacks for the party. The store's surveillance camera caught her on video grabbing supplies and heading out to her truck.

• 23:13Kaelyn Moore?

  Now, this would become one of the last images of Maddie that anyone would ever see. Maddie and Jordy then headed out to Hogsback Lake in Maddie's pickup. It was about a 23-kilometer drive from town, mostly on good roads. There was a little bit of gravel on the last stretch. And by the time they pulled in, it was starting to get pretty dark. Hogsback Lake was a popular local spot for swimming, fishing, and camping. The lake itself is pretty small. It's about 128 acres. It's only 22 feet at its deepest, but it's scenic and it's quiet. And if you're young, you can drink there and people don't really bother you. When Maddie and Jordy pulled in at around 8:00 PM on Friday, about 50 people were already gathered around the campfire. As Maddie started unpacking, she realized that she had brought the wrong tent poles.

• 23:58Kaelyn Moore?

  So she told Jordy to wait for her and she drove the half hour back to her parents' house to grab the right ones. Her mom was home, they spoke briefly, and then Maddie was out the door again at around 9:00 PM. She was back at Hogsback Lake by 9:30, pitching her tent and sharing her drinks and snacks with her friends. Jordy watched as Maddie gathered the courage to go up and talk to that boy she had gone there for. But she also watched as Maddie came back, pretty dejected. The boy told her that he just wanted to be friends. And after that, Maddie's mood really changed. And by 10:00 PM, she retreated into her tent. Starting at around 11:00 that night, Maddie was texting with her dad. We have these text messages. They exchanged messages for about an hour and a half.

• 24:43Kaelyn Moore?

  And her father would later tell investigators that she seemed somewhat upset about that rejection. I mean, I don't blame her, but nothing about their exchange really alarmed him. It was all ordinary teen girl disappointment. I mean, the kind of thing that you feel at 20 years old when you're at a party and the person you came here for wasn't interested in you. But while Maddie was in her tent texting with her dad, the party outside had taken a turn. See, just after midnight, a small group of strangers showed up and crashed the party. No one seemed to know who these people were. And remember, pretty much everyone knew everyone in this town. Jordy thought that these guys might have been from out of town. I mean, the party had been posted on Facebook. It was public, so anyone could have found it.

• 25:28Kaelyn Moore?

  And these strangers were not there to share beers and hang out. Their vibe was totally different. Within a half hour, a fight broke out and Jordy got caught in the middle of it. She was jostled into the campfire at one point. She hurt her knee pretty badly. The strangers took off a short time later, but the damage was already done. Jordy was injured, the vibe had been killed, and her boyfriend, who had come to the party separately, decided that it was time for them to leave. He lifted Jordy off the ground and he carried her back to his truck. But on the way out, they stopped at Maddie's tent. Maddie had been inside throughout the entire fight. She was already burrowed in her sleeping bag, half asleep. Jordy told her, hey, we're gonna leave. And Maddie pleaded with her to stay.

• 26:11Kaelyn Moore?

  Jordy tried to convince Maddie to come with them instead, but she was too tired to tear down her tent and she didn't want to leave it behind unattended. It was her dad's tent, she said. She just didn't want to risk it. So Jordy left, and that was a decision that she said she would regret for the rest of her life. Maddie didn't know it because she was inside of her tent, but Jordy wasn't the only one who wanted to leave after the fight. At around 1:40 AM, people began leaving the campsite in groups. One group stopped at Maddie's tent on their way out and asked if she wanted a ride home. But again, she declined. By 2:30 AM, the campsite was nearly empty. The only people left were Maddie, the birthday host, and his girlfriend.

• 26:54Kaelyn Moore?

  And then the host and his girlfriend got in some kind of disagreement and decided that they were going to leave too. It would later tell police that they offered Maddie a ride before they packed up and drove away. And again, she turned it down. And after that, Maddie was completely alone at the campsite. I'm not sure if she knew that every person had left and if that would have changed her decision. But what we do know is that at 8:00 AM the next morning, Maddie's phone stopped pinging the local cell tower. Whether the phone died or was turned off, no one knows. But that was the last electronic trace of Maddie Scott. The RCMP feared Maddie might be lost or injured somewhere out in the wilderness surrounding Hogsback Lake.

• 27:38Kaelyn Moore?

  And the area was really vast. I mean, think gravel pits, creeks, swamps, dense forest, and open fields that stretched for kilometers in every direction. If Maddie had wandered out into that landscape, disoriented or drunk, she'd be in the dark and the odds of finding her quickly were very slim. The Mounted Police launched what really quickly became one of the largest search and rescue operations in the history of British Columbia. Cadaver dogs were brought in to sweep the surrounding forest. Boats equipped with side-scanning sonar scoured the lake, all 128 acres of it, down to the deepest point. Divers searched the lake beds and the nearby swamps. Helicopters with infrared cameras flew low over the creeks, the gravel pits, the soft fields.

• 28:23Kaelyn Moore?

  They were scanning for any sign of Maddie. Search teams on horseback covered the trails and the backcountry, and all of them found nothing. Not a single footprint, not a piece of clothing, not a single trace of Maddie beyond the campsite that she had been sleeping in. With the help of Maddie's family, investigators took a careful inventory of everything that she had left behind at the campsite and inside of her locked truck. They examined all of the items. There was the sleeping bag, her purse, her pillow, her camera, her jewelry was also there. Her family confirmed that nothing appeared to be missing, except for Maddie's iPhone 4 and its blue protective case, and a set of keys that she carried on a lanyard.

• 29:07Kaelyn Moore?

  The phone and the keys were a detail that really stuck with investigators. If Maddie had wandered off, disoriented, if she had gotten in some kind of accident or medical event, if she had even gone for a walk and gotten lost, why would she have taken her phone and keys but left everything else behind? Her purse, which her mom said she carried everywhere, that was still at the campsite. Her truck was in working condition, had gas in it, that was still parked where she left it, the doors were locked. The phone and the keys, at least to the investigators, suggested that Maddie intended to come back. Cellphone records showed that Maddie's phone had last pinged the local tower at around 8:00 AM on May 28th. Before that, there had been no activity on the phone since a brief phone call with a friend at around 12:30 in the morning.

• 29:52Kaelyn Moore?

  That was a seven-and-a-half-hour window from roughly 12:30 AM to 8:00 AM, which anything could have happened. And investigators had almost nothing to fill it with. There was no calls, no texts, there's no movement data on the phone. And worse yet, no witnesses came forward saying that they saw her in that window of time. In 2016, the RCMP would publicly state that they believed foul play was involved. But at this stage of the investigation, in the weeks and the months after her disappearance, they had no one to point to. But they did not think that Maddie had some sort of accident.

• 30:30Kaelyn Moore?

  Police had asked Maddie's parents if it was possible that Maddie simply left on her own, and her parents said no, they rejected the idea entirely. Maddie was really close with her family, she had an active social life, all of these hobbies, a job that she liked. She left on foot without her purse from a campsite that was 23 kilometers from town. It just didn't really fit the Maddie they knew, and it didn't seem like a rational decision. They were really frustrated that investigators even floated this idea to them. And that's when her family realized that the RCMP could only do so much, and if they wanted to maximize their family's chances of finding her, they needed to take matters into their own hands. So they launched a website and a campaign called Find Maddie,

• 31:12Kaelyn Moore?

  and it spread across billboards, bumper stickers, they put flyers up all over British Columbia. They offered a reward of up to $100,000 for information that led to them finding Maddie. And the campaign really worked, at least in keeping Maddie's name in the public eye. Her disappearance received intense media coverage across Canada, and it would stay in the news for over a decade. Even 48 Hours covered her case in a segment about disappearances in central British Columbia. And although it was in the same relative area, Maddie's case didn't necessarily fit the pattern or the profile of the Highway of Tears disappearances. As we know, those largely feature Indigenous people who go missing in the area and don't receive this kind of coverage. So they stated publicly that Maddie's case just didn't

• 31:56Kaelyn Moore?

  meet the criteria to be lumped in with the other Highway of Tears murders and disappearances. And unfortunately, when there is an empty space in an investigation, someone will try to fill it with whatever theory they think is the most accurate. And for Maddie's parents, that involved Jordy. They started making public statements blaming Jordy for their daughter's disappearance. And then, as the case attracted more attention, strangers began piling on as well. Jordy was harassed on Facebook by people who were following the case, some of them who accused her outright of being a murderer. They said that she knew more than she was letting on, and they said that she probably had something to hide. Because Jordy was one of the last people to see Maddie alive, the RCMP held their focus

• 32:37Kaelyn Moore?

  on her during the early weeks of the investigation. They brought her in for all these interviews, they administered multiple polygraph tests, and Jordy cooperated fully. She passed every single polygraph test. She was devastated by the loss of her friend, and she wanted to do whatever she could to help find her. By 2016, when 48 Hours sat down with the RCMP investigators for a follow-up segment on Maddie's disappearance, a constable made it clear on camera, Jordy was no longer a suspect. But, they said, there were actually a couple of other new leads that had popped up that they had started following. So, in the first year of the investigation, the RCMP received several tips about a man who had been going around Vanderhoof telling people that he knew what happened to Maddie. His

• 33:21Kaelyn Moore?

  name was Fribyan Bjornson, known to his friends as Friv. Friv was 28 years old, he was described as being a single father with a cocaine habit, and he was known to socialize with Maddie. After her disappearance, Friv started telling people around town that he knew what happened to her. And there were rumors circulating in Vanderhoof that Friv owed money to drug dealers and that Maddie had been abducted to teach him a lesson. Police caught up with Friv and brought him in for questioning. He denied knowing anything about Maddie's disappearance, and he insisted that he had nothing to do with it. And then, investigators gave him a polygraph test, and he passed. But two days later, Friv disappeared. And

• 34:03Kaelyn Moore?

  unlike Maddie, he wasn't going to be missing for too long, because two weeks after his loved ones first reported him missing, Friv's severed head was found in an abandoned house near Fort St. James, about 60 kilometers from Vanderhoof. Investigators spent months piecing together what happened, and they would ultimately learn that Friv had traveled to the abandoned house to buy drugs, and he had been ambushed when he got there. Friv was beaten, he was strangled with a wire, and then he was beheaded. His body was left in the house and his head was found separately. In November of 2013, four men were charged in connection with his death, and the trial stretched out for years. And by October of 2017, all four men had been convicted, two for murder, two as accessories. But throughout

• 34:46Kaelyn Moore?

  the investigation and the trials, the RCMP looked for any possible connection between those men, Friv, and Maddie Scott. And they just couldn't find one. Their conclusion was that Friv's murder and Maddie's disappearance were unrelated. So whatever Friv had been telling people around town that he knew what happened to Maddie, he was either lying or he took the truth with him. And after that, leads in this case really start to dry up. The tips slowed down to a trickle, and then the case grew cold. Maddie's parents, frustrated with the pace of the RCMP investigation, launched their own. And this research they did is showcased in the 48 Hours episode that I was talking about earlier. In the

• 35:29Kaelyn Moore?

  basement of their house, they set up these big evidence boards and whiteboards, and they started mapping the names of every person that attended that party that they could identify. They looked for every potential witness and every possible suspect, and you could really tell how dedicated they are to finding their daughter. Now, there's something I noticed in this episode that I want to talk to you about. In this episode, those whiteboards are largely blurred out, probably because there's sensitive information on them. But I noticed, when I was watching it, that in a couple of the shots, the boards aren't blurred, and you can read what was on them. And there's two names on these whiteboards that keep showing up. Now, for various reasons, I'm going to keep the names anonymous, because I don't know if I was supposed to see that, so I'm going to call these two people the

• 36:13Kaelyn Moore?

  Greens. Two brothers who, you know, according to these whiteboards, showed up to the party at some point on four-wheelers and were riding around the lake. And it seems like whoever Maddie's parents had spoken to to get this information, that person seemed to think that these brothers were among the last known people to have been around Maddie before she vanished. But this was from the parents' investigation, not the police's. And Maddie's case had been stalled, it was basically cold, so I'm not sure if the police had looked into these leads. After Friv's death, more than a decade passed without any new developments in Maddie's case. The not knowing haunted everyone who knew and loved her. But then,

• 36:54Kaelyn Moore?

  on May 29, 2023, 12 years to the day after Maddie's mother first reported her daughter missing, the RCMP made a wild announcement. They had recovered Maddie's remains from a property south of Vanderhoof, about 16 kilometers from where Maddie was last seen. And the RCMP provided no additional details. But in the town of Vanderhoof, far more information was circulating than what had been publicly released, and much of this information found its way onto Reddit and Web sleuths. Now Reddit is Reddit. It's not an official news source. I mean, you know that, I know that, but this is something I do need to clearly establish for obvious reasons before we move forward here. But since Maddie's remains

• 37:37Kaelyn Moore?

  were found, a lot of information has been posted about this case. And some of it has come from people who claim to be local to Vanderhoof and have firsthand or secondhand knowledge of this case. And the consensus seems to be that the property on which Maddie's remains were found was owned by the father of the Greens, the two brothers who were among the last known people to see Maddie alive. Now, the RCMP has not confirmed any of this, they haven't addressed it, they have not publicly named anyone connected to this property, but posters on Reddit and Web sleuths have reported that Maddie's remains were discovered when a contractor was at the Green family farm buying topsoil and accidentally unearthed a human skull. Either the contractor or the property owner, Mr. Green, then contacted authorities, and the remains were removed and soon identified

• 38:22Kaelyn Moore?

  as Maddie's. A few Redditors who claim to have the inside scoop have said that the father now has dementia, and this has complicated the investigation. Word of all of this had already spread by August of 2023, when some angry followers of the case began posting and sending messages to the father on Facebook, saying that his sons were murderers. He did reply to these messages, calling the senders "sick people" and "accusers," and he dismissed all of this talk as slander. But he also did seem to imply that how Maddie ended up on his property was "a mystery for everyone," kind of acknowledging that, yes, Maddie's remains were found on his property. That same summer, a candlelight vigil was held for Maddie on the athletics field of her high school. The vigil drew over 2,000 attendees,

• 39:07Kaelyn Moore?

  and that's equal to nearly half the population of Vanderhoof. And in the three years since Maddie was found, the RCMP has offered no public theories on her death, except to say that foul play has not been ruled out. And remember, earlier in the investigation, they did say they assumed that foul play was involved. To date, there have been no arrests in Maddie's case, and the police have not named any suspects, so this case is still technically open. And I have here that if you have any information on Madison Scott, you can call the RCMP at 788-290-5291, or 1-877-543-4822. And if you want to remain anonymous,

• 39:48Kaelyn Moore?

  you can call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477. And also, if you have any information on the whereabouts of Teresa and Beer, you can call the Fresno Police Department at 559-621-2541. But Maddie's remains have been found, she was able to be laid to rest. And, you know, that is why I do think that this case might be cracked very soon. It seems, you know, if we're going based on the parents' investigation and what people around town have been saying, it seems like the people who might be responsible is where her remains were found. So I'm just hoping that they're able to put those pieces together, and I hope that whatever happens next, we're able to see some justice in her case, and that that happens very soon. But what do you guys think? Now I kind of turn it over to you. You can comment wherever

• 40:33Kaelyn Moore?

  you listen to episodes. I'm always interested in hearing your thoughts on these cases. Is anyone local to that area and had been hearing about more information on Maddie's case? I'm very curious. I will be here next week with another story for you all. You can meet me here in the Rogue Detecting Society headquarters. And if you want more, we do have footnotes, which is an after-show that we do on our Patreon on the High Council tier, where you can get a little bit more context on the episode, stuff that goes into the research, and we just talk about what's going on in the Heart Starts Pounding community in general. And you'll also get 20% off merch, which is great, and we have our Dark Summer merch, so join me there. I will see you next week with more, and until then, stay curious. Ooh.

• 41:18Kaelyn Moore?

  Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kaila Moore. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Additional research and writing by Paul Haines. Sound design and mix by Red Rome Creative. Video editing by Creative Step. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grace and Jordan again, the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request, check out hearts startspounding.com.