REVISITED: The Boys

In 2004, 9-year-old David Gonzales vanished from his mother's sight in San Bernardino National Forest. In 2006, 8-year-old Samuel Boehlke disappeared from his father's line of vision over a hilltop in Crater Lake National Park. Though the stories of these two boys are not connected, their fates remain mysteries that haunt the recreation spaces they were last seen in. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit parkpredators.com

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi, park enthusiasts. It's Delia. If you listen to Park Predators, you already know that sometimes the most beautiful places can hide the darkest secrets. But what happens when the danger isn't miles from civilization? It's in your community, and sometimes even in your own backyard. On Crime Junkie, hosts Ashley and Britt dive into real cases every week, from missing persons to unsolved murders, breaking down what we know, what we don't, and the details that still don't sit right. If you care about the stories behind the headlines and the victims at the center of them, you'll want to check out Crime Junkie. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra. And this fall, we want to try something new on the Park Predators feed. Every Thursday this month, we'll release an episode that features a crime that took place in the summer, and these cases happened all across the United States. They are some of the most compelling crimes that I've covered on the show. From mysterious missing persons to unsolved homicides, I cover it all. And don't worry, on Tuesdays, you'll still get your new episode, as always. Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra. And today, I'm going to tell you two stories, both of which are bewildering mysteries that

• 1:20Speaker 00

  still haunt the families of two young boys and remain on the minds of police investigators. The disappearances of David Gonzalez and Samuel Bulkey, sometimes pronounced "Belkey," are not formally connected, mostly because they happened two years apart in two very different places. But I think it's important you hear their stories together, because, to be honest, they're chilling reminders of just how quickly a child can be in one place, one moment, and then seemingly gone the next. And there's no place that's truer than in a national park or national forest. David vanished from San Bernardino National Forest, which sits about an hour and a half

• 2:03Speaker 00

  east of Los Angeles, California. According to the U.S. Forest Service, the area has hundreds of miles of hiking trails, seven designated wilderness areas, and 42 campgrounds, many of which are praised as being "family-friendly." Samuel disappeared in the blink of an eye while out walking with his father in Crater Lake National Park. Somewhere in the breathtaking snowy terrain surrounding America's deepest lake, the truth of where Samuel went—or maybe still is—has eluded Oregon law enforcement for 17 years. Both boys deserve more than the label of "lost" or "missing."

• 2:44Speaker 00

  They deserve to have resolution to their cases or be brought home. This is Park Predators.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  Around 8 o'clock in the morning on Saturday, July 31, 2004, Jose and Rosenda Gonzalez woke up at their campsite inside Hannah Flat Family Campground in San Bernardino National Forest. The temperature outside was cool, but the couple could tell the day was going to heat up fast. Rosenda told her husband the family needed water and volunteered to go to a nearby spigot to fill a jug. Around that same time, the couple's nine-year-old son, David, asked his parents if he could go to their truck to get some cookies they'd left locked inside. Which, can we just pause for a second here and say how amazingly nine-year-oldish this request was? Cookies for breakfast? Yes, please.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  Totally something I would have done as a kid. Anyway, David really wanted these cookies, and because he was nine years old and capable of handling himself, his mom felt totally comfortable letting him take the keys and go get the snack on his own. Their truck was less than 50 yards away from their campsite and was only a few yards away from where Rosenda herself would be getting water, so she knew David would probably be okay on his own. She didn't expect him to be gone more than a minute or two. But that much time came and went, and Rosenda hadn't heard from David. She went over to the truck to look for him, but when she arrived, she realized he wasn't there.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  She called out his name and walked around nearby, but David never answered. She didn't panic right away, though. She figured her son had probably just gone back to the campsite with his treat and given the car keys back to his dad—or maybe his older brother, 11-year-old Eduardo. But after Rosenda hurried back and spoke with her husband, Jose, they both realized David hadn't returned. That's when a deeper fear took root for the couple. Wandering off was just so out of character for David. He was a fairly quiet and shy kid who enjoyed being with his own family, not wandering off and adventuring on his own.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  The family had been at the campground since the day before—Friday—with other families from their church. The trip was an end-of-the-summer and birthday celebration for David before all the kids went back to school. When Rosenda and Jose asked around with these other families to find out if David might be with the other kids from the group, everyone told them, "No, they hadn't seen David that morning." The Hannah Flat Family Campground, where everyone was staying, is in a section of the national forest called Big Bear Lake Recreation Area. It's known as one of the best campsites for families or large groups, especially those with young children. It's somewhat isolated, but not like "way out in the boonies" kind of isolated.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  The U.S. Forest Service says it's only two miles from California Highway 38, which is the main road that goes around the top of Big Bear Lake. Shortly after the Gonzalez's realized David was missing, they flagged down a safety officer at the campsite, and that person radioed the information to San Bernardino Sheriff's Office and the U.S. Forest Service. By the time authorities arrived around 10 o'clock, the Gonzalez's were in a full panic. Deputies tried to calm them down and learn as much information as they could about why the family was there, when the last time David had been seen, and all of that kind of stuff. Authorities also wanted to know if anyone in the family had seen suspicious activity

• 7:08Speaker 00

  in the campground leading up to David vanishing. While some deputies began interviewing visitors, a few detectives and David's parents went over to the family's truck to take a look around. What they found was odd. The cookies David told his mom he wanted were still sitting inside the vehicle, the doors were locked, and the keys he'd taken with him weren't on the ground nearby, which meant only a few things could have happened. One, David had changed his mind about getting the snack and then just kept the keys and, for some reason, hadn't returned to his family right away. Or, two, he'd never made it the short distance from his family's campsite to the vehicle.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  Somewhere in the 25 to 50 yards after talking with his mom and leaving to go to the truck, something had derailed David. But his parents couldn't wrap their heads around what that might have been, because if he'd wandered off—or maybe gotten lost heading back to the wrong row of campsites or something, surely they—or one of the families they were with—would have spotted him. ABC News reported that at the time David disappeared, Hannah Flat Campground was full of visitors, so it just didn't make sense how he'd seem to just vanish into thin air. Investigators felt confident someone had to have seen something. Rosenda told sheriff's deputies that she'd noticed a large beige truck speeding away

• 8:34Speaker 00

  from the campground around the time David would have been going to get the cookies. She told investigators that she felt in her heart this vehicle might be involved. Deputies took that tip and ran with it. The department told ABC News that they'd like to speak with the driver because they felt it was possible whoever it was might have some information about David's disappearance. The sheriff's office didn't go as far as to say, though, that they thought this driver had abducted David or anything like that. They just wanted to know if the driver saw anything. David's family told investigators and the media that David mostly spoke Spanish, so if someone he didn't know had found him, they should be aware that he probably wouldn't

• 9:18Speaker 00

  be able to understand them very well. They also said that he had a speech impediment, so that would also make communicating with him difficult. The missing person report that went out for the nine-year-old described him as "three feet, 10 inches tall, weighing 52 pounds with black hair, brown eyes, and a missing tooth." The last time his parents had seen him, he'd been wearing a blue t-shirt with motorcycle designs on it, gray sweatpants, and white Nike shoes. David was also said to have a scar on his right knee and a mole near his belly button, which for authorities was a helpful detail. If investigators found themselves in a situation where they needed to rule out other boys

• 10:00Speaker 00

  that tipsters sent their way, those unique details about David would come in handy.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  What's wild to me, though, is that according to reporting by the Los Angeles Times, an Amber Alert was not issued for David on Saturday, or any day after he disappeared. His dad, Jose, told reporters he didn't want to ask San Bernardino County Sheriff's Office to put out that alert if it wasn't necessary. And the sheriff's office clearly agreed, because according to a spokeswoman for the department, investigators never issued one because they, quote, "saw no sign of an abduction", end quote. Now, I'm not sure why a young boy disappearing in the blink of an eye from a busy campground with a truck seen speeding off shortly afterwards isn't a qualifier for a sign of an abduction,

• 10:49Speaker 00

  but regardless of what I think, that's what happened. Some of you are probably wondering, well, maybe the department didn't issue an Amber Alert because they already suspected David's family might be involved. And you'd have a point, but the problem with that theory is that early on in the investigation, like from day one, San Bernardino detectives went on record with the media and stated they did not believe Rosinda, or Jose, or any of their church friends were involved. There's no source material that explains how exactly investigators came to this conclusion, but they did make it a point to say the family and friends had been cleared. My best guess is that all of those individuals were accounted for and had corroborating witnesses

• 11:34Speaker 00

  who could vouch for them. But despite not thinking David had been abducted, authorities still vetted everyone they could. Daniel Hernandez reported for the LA Times that deputies checked every vehicle and license plate at the campground, and cross-referenced that information with registered sex offenders in the area, but nothing hit. On Sunday morning, 24 hours after David disappeared, search teams regrouped and began scouring the pine and cedar forest near the campground. Other volunteers began searching Big Bear Lake a few miles away. For nearly four miles in each direction of where David and his family had been staying,

• 12:17Speaker 00

  volunteers combed through the woods on horseback and on ATVs. Despite searchers having printouts of the tread that would have been on the soles of the bottom of David's small tennis shoes, nothing turned up along the trails that indicated he'd been walking on his own or wandering around in the forest. Crews using helicopters and scent dogs also had no luck in locating David, or anything that might tell them where he'd gone. Authorities weren't sure what to think at that point. Was David lost? Most likely. Could he have been kidnapped? Maybe. But there was a third scenario they at least had to investigate, and that was that maybe he'd been attacked by a wild animal.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  This is something I've come to find a lot when researching and writing stories for this show. Authorities often mull around the theory of if nature itself contributed to a person going missing. And honestly, sometimes that is the case, but a lot of times, I'm specifically thinking of the Laura Bradbury case from a previous episode, an animal attack is just super rare and not to blame. But in David's case, this idea that maybe he'd been mauled by some kind of large animal wasn't that far of a stretch. You see, according to the Associated Press, a mountain lion had been seen roaming near the shores of Big Bear Lake on Friday, the day before David disappeared.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  A second sighting of it crossing a roadway near the campground was reported shortly after the first sighting. So authorities thought maybe it was possible that a mountain lion had gotten David. I mean, after all, mountain lions are stealthy, and they're known to strike quickly and go after prey that would have been around the same size as young David. The fact that other hikers and campers had seen it showing itself so close to populated areas could have meant it was hungry and looking for its next meal. But wildlife experts who were called in to assist with this case quickly questioned that idea. Even Jose, David's father, believed that if David had been snatched or mauled by a

• 14:27Speaker 00

  mountain lion, his family and anyone else that had been at the campsite more than likely would have heard him scream. Not to mention, there should have been a blood trail or evidence of an attack within a short distance of the campground. Wildlife trackers who'd sent out dogs that specialize in tracking scents for a variety of large carnivorous animals had spent hours combing miles and miles of the forest. But none of the trained hounds had alerted to a single scent associated with a large predator. In response to reports of this mountain lion seen lurking, a spokeswoman for the San Bernardino Sheriff's Office told the Associated Press, quote, "In light of the recent sighting,

• 15:10Speaker 00

  it's a concern, but at this point, the search members are looking for a lost boy," end quote. In that same news article, the sheriff's office confirmed that at that point investigators didn't suspect foul play was involved, and again doubled down that no one in David's family was suspected of doing anything to him. David's parents, on the other hand, weren't so sure about the sheriff's office's opinion about no foul play being involved. During a press conference on the Tuesday after David vanished, his parents said they were convinced that someone had taken their son and intended to harm him. Jose told the Los Angeles Times, quote, "We're destroyed. We're in pieces.

• 15:54Speaker 00

  We appreciate all the support, but our hearts are broken. I believe somebody took my son away. Now, we're waiting on God. Only he can bring my son back." And later he said, "I know my son is alive. I have to believe that until I see him dead," end quote. Shortly after that press conference, the investigation caught a break it desperately needed, and a new clue emerged that supported investigators' notion that David was possibly alive.

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  One day last year, detectives knocked on the door of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Los Angeles County. Inside, they found a strange scene. A dining area converted into classrooms with children and toddlers seated at rows of desks. The couple that lived there had 21 kids.

• 17:20Speaker 04

  It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived.

• 17:35Speaker 05

  Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp.

• 17:38Speaker 06

  That's the one time that we called the cops, because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun. I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?

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  I'm Eva Kaufman. The Journey is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark feed, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  The Los Angeles Times reported that around the same time the sheriff's office and David's family held a press conference voicing contrary opinions about whether David was alive, dead, or abducted, a team of searchers who were out looking for him found a set of small footprints on the ground around some boulders about a mile north of where he'd last been seen. Now, the source material isn't specific about how many shoe prints there were, or if there were any adult-sized prints next to them. But the LA Times article says the small impressions were in a steep area of the forest that could have been possible for David to get to. Authorities told reporters that the shoe prints seemed to be a close match to the size-two

• 18:47Speaker 00

  Nikes that David had last been seen wearing. But without having David's actual shoe to compare the prints to, they couldn't be 100% sure. Right after this discovery, the sheriff's office told news outlets that since Saturday morning, they'd been able to locate and interview a handful of people who'd come and gone from the Hannah Campground on the morning David disappeared. The spokeswoman for the sheriff's office told the Times that witnesses who'd left the campground shortly after 8:00 AM on Saturday morning remembered seeing David. These visitors explained that they'd been on their way to breakfast when they saw a young boy matching David's description, walking alone in the dirt roadway at the campground.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  And he was headed in a direction that would have led him deeper into the woods, instead of back towards where all the campsites and other visitors were. When deputies showed these witnesses pictures of David, they positively identified David as the boy they saw. The source material isn't clear, but based on what I could gather, these witnesses weren't the people from the beige truck Rosinda saw speeding away. I think these folks were in another car, because every time they're mentioned, it's never stated that they were the people in the beige truck that police had asked to talk to early on.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  The information these witnesses provided, though, reinforced investigators’ hope that David wasn’t abducted like his family believed. But instead, he was just lost in the woods. The department enlisted the help of more search and rescue teams and deployed a helicopter that had night vision to continue searching for David after dark. The spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office told the LA Times, quote, “It is possible for David to survive a number of days without food. We also know there are several water sources in the forest. We’re hoping he found them.” On Wednesday, five days after David vanished, investigators got additional information that made them even more optimistic that he was still alive.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  A person who’d volunteered to help search told authorities that she and her friend had heard a young boy crying and saying the words “daddy, daddy, daddy.” This volunteer said when she and her group got closer to where the sound had come from, they found several small footprints in matted vegetation that, quote, “looked like the bed an animal makes.” But investigators were never able to really follow up on that lead because it was, to be honest, kind of weak. The women who reported the information said after they first heard the faint cries, they’d never heard them again because the small voice had been drowned out by other searchers roaming the forest nearby.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  The same day that tip came in, investigators headed to another part of the search radius to examine several children’s shoe prints that volunteers had found on a dirt trail. Next to those prints, witnesses had collected a Jolly Rancher candy wrapper. The LA Times reported that lead also went nowhere, though, and within an hour of the discovery, authorities definitively said the prints and candy wrapper had nothing to do with David. As day five of the search turned into day six, the sheriff’s office had to face the reality that their window of time to find David alive was dwindling. The sheriff at the time, a man named Gary Penrod, told the Los Angeles Times, quote,

• 22:16Speaker 00

  “The best guess we’re getting from survival experts we’ve consulted is that if the child is taking care of himself and not overextending himself, he can last seven days out there without water, perhaps longer if he runs across any water.” But the ticking clock wasn’t the only looming issue facing investigators. A huge mistake of their own threatened the progress they’d made thus far. According to Louis Sahagan and Monty Moran’s reporting for the Los Angeles Times, the picture of Nike shoe tread that authorities had handed out to volunteers and deputies during the first six days of searching were the wrong type of tread.

• 22:59Speaker 00

  So all of the shoe prints that volunteers had seen and suspected belonged to David were not even the right shoe. Apparently investigators early on had printed out pictures of the tread for the style Nike shoe David was said to have been wearing, but instead of having pictures of the child model of that shoe, authorities had given volunteers pictures of the adult version of that shoe, which was slightly different. It had more of a zigzag pattern, which clearly would have made a very different impression. So for almost a week, searchers had been finding shoe prints they thought might be David’s and ignoring all others.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  But they’d had the wrong image to compare tracks to. This mishap was a major blow to the investigation, and San Bernardino Sheriff’s Office’s response to this debacle wasn’t, in my opinion, super great. They kind of passively blamed David’s parents for not being specific. The department said when deputies first asked Jose and Rosenda to look at photos of Nike tennis shoes and identify which ones resembled the ones David wore, the couple had pointed to a specific picture. All of the photos they’d been shown were of adult sizes of that shoe. And early on, detectives didn’t think to check if the tread on the adult model of

• 24:23Speaker 00

  the shoe was different than the tread on the child’s version. And they said David’s parents didn’t alert them to that fact. Now, if you ask me, I don’t think making sure the cops are paying attention to those kinds of details was Jose and Rosenda’s job at the time while their son is missing. So it’s kind of annoying to me that the sheriff’s office even framed their response like this, but that’s whatever at this point. Anyway, it was the sharp eye of a detective who caught this mix-up on day six of the search that ultimately got everything back on track. Once new photos of the correct tread for David’s shoe were distributed to search teams, a group of volunteers found a set of tracks on a trail near the family’s campsite

• 25:06Speaker 00

  that were a match. But the problem with those tracks was that they led away from the family’s campsite and back to it, which just didn’t seem right. Jose and Rosenda confirmed to investigators that the family had hiked that trail the day before David vanished. So the tracks were definitely David’s, but they were made before he even went missing. That was another fruitless lead and frustration to investigators. One week after David vanished, the pastor of his family’s church set up a trust to help Rosenda and Jose pay for the expense of being away from work and living at a command post in the national forest. Soon after that, authorities scaled back search and rescue efforts in and around the

• 25:51Speaker 00

  campground. During a press conference, the sheriff’s office said it was officially calling off the search and firmly believed David had just walked off into the forest and gotten lost. The command post where the Gonzalez family had been every day since David went missing was dismantled, and Jose and Rosenda and their other son Eduardo left the national forest. They went back to their home in Lake Elsinore, about an hour and a half away. Towards the middle of August, a private investigator returned to the national park to search for David, but didn’t have any luck. About a year later, on Memorial Day weekend of 2005, some hikers walking less than a

• 26:32Speaker 00

  mile from Hannah Flat Campground found a piece of human skull that appeared to belong to a child, and they found some other bones scattered in the woods. Investigators with San Bernardino Sheriff’s Office immediately were interested in this find because they thought, maybe, just maybe, it could be David. They notified Rosenda and Jose about the development, but couldn’t tell them for sure if the remains were David. That private investigator I mentioned a minute ago told the Hartford Current the bones that were found included several teeth and a long bone. The remains were sent to the county coroner’s office for examination and DNA testing.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  And by mid-June, the results confirmed that the bones belonged to David Gonzalez. The only mystery left to solve was figuring out how he died. The sheriff’s office went on record with the Los Angeles Times, saying that detectives felt several forensic anthropologists and medical examiners’ findings of animal activity on the partial skull likely meant that David had been killed by a mountain lion. I know, we’re back to the mountain lion theory again. That conclusion wasn’t founded in any scientific proof, though. Detectives just theorized that more than likely, David had been attacked quickly by a cougar or mountain lion while on his way to his family’s truck, and the animal had

• 27:57Speaker 00

  dragged him to an isolated area of the forest, possibly even through a nearby stream, which they said explained why searchers had never found his body or any blood trail. But Jose Gonzalez responded to the sheriff’s office announcement, saying he didn’t believe that theory at all. He still felt strongly that David had been taken by someone and then killed. He told the LA Times, quote, “When we were looking, they didn’t find a bit of blood or clothing.” Anthropologists and mountain lion experts all agreed that the animal activity noted on David’s bones was minor and likely happened in the days and weeks after he died.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  None of the marks on the bones were large, which they said meant they were most likely made by rodents or possibly coyotes. Wildlife biologists found no sign of puncture wound marks near the base of David’s skull, which they said they expected to see if a cougar had killed him. In the end, no professional could say for sure how David died or how he ended up so far from his family’s campsite. His cause and manner of death were officially labeled as undetermined. July 20, 2005 marked David’s 10th birthday and was just shy of the one-year anniversary of his disappearance.

• 29:22Speaker 00

  An article by Lance Pugmire and Veronica Torahan in the Los Angeles Times, as well as later reporter Deidre Newman in the Hartford Current, mentioned that just a few months before the anniversary, his mother Rosenda had given birth to another baby boy that she named Abraham. As it turned out, she’d found out she was pregnant just a few days after David disappeared. As a new parent myself, something that really just struck me to my core about this whole story is just how quickly David seemed to vanish from his parents’ side. He was in a very busy campground with tons of people around, and yet, no one knows for sure what really happened to him.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  Did that speeding baby’s truck Rosenda saw have anything to do with what happened? We’ll never know. Was he taken by a mountain lion? We’ll never know. But just think about this for a second. If a stranger did abduct David, then they did something terrible to him and left him in the woods, hoping an animal predator would take the blame. That’s someone who knows what they’re doing. That’s an apex predator of the worst kind.

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• 32:29Speaker 00

  One day last year, detectives knocked on the door of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Los Angeles County. Inside, they found a strange scene. A dining area converted into classrooms with children and toddlers seated at rows of desks. The couple that lived there had 21 kids.

• 32:50Speaker 04

  It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived.

• 33:05Speaker 05

  Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp.

• 33:07Speaker 07

  That's the one time that we called the cops because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun.

• 33:12Speaker 06

  I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?

• 33:18Speaker 00

  I'm Ava Kaufman. "The Journey" is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark feed, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  The next case I'm going to tell you about is just as baffling as David's. It's the story of eight-year-old Samuel Bulkey. But like I said earlier, sometimes his last name is pronounced "Belkey."

• 33:48Speaker 00

  Around 4:30 in the afternoon on Saturday, October 14, 2006, 48-year-old Ken Bulkey was wrapping up an afternoon of hiking with his son Samuel, who everyone just called Sam or Sammy.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  The father and son had pulled off in a parking lot near an area of Crater Lake National Park known as Cleetwood Cove. The spot is on the northern rim of Crater Lake, just off Rim Drive, which is the main road everyone drives to get around. Because it was the second week in October, snow had already begun to fall, and this was going to be Sam and Ken's last chance to get up to the area before more intense winter weather started up around November 1. But the wintry conditions were nothing new to Ken. He and his son were from the suburbs of Portland, Oregon, about four and a half hours north of the park. So they knew a thing or two about cold conditions and how to have fun in them. In true father-and-son, carefree fashion,

• 34:46Speaker 00

  Ken and Sam decided to get out of their car and play a game of hide-and-seek/tag in an area that sloped upward from where they'd parked. The spot had trees and a ridge just over the top. The sun was close to setting by the time they got going, which made it somewhat hard to see, but not totally dark. Plus, the dim light would make their game of tag that much more challenging. After playing for a while, Ken made his way back to their rental car and called for Sam to come on. In what felt like a flash, Sam yelled out he was going to check out something he saw in the woods and then disappeared from Ken's line of sight. By the time Ken ran up and over the ridge to get Sam, his son was gone.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  Ken searched for a while on his own, but didn't have any luck. With each passing minute, he was feeling extremely worried and overwhelmed. So he ran back down the rocky slope to the main road and signaled a driver to stop. In a breathless panic, he asked the driver to use their cellphone to call 911. Within the hour, park rangers and deputies from Klamath County Sheriff's Office arrived on scene. And right away, they began searching for Sam and getting more information from Ken.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Ken told the authorities that losing track of his son had happened literally in a split second. He said that while they'd been playing, Sam had run across the street from where they parked their car and began climbing up a sloped rocky area in the opposite direction of the lake. He said Sam had refused to come back down to the car when he'd called him because he'd seen something gold glimmering in the tree line at the top of the slope and wanted to check it out. But Ken said before he could yell for him to stop, Sam disappeared over the ridge. Ken said in the moment, he felt confident that when he jogged about 50 feet in the direction of where Sam had been, he'd see his son on the other side. But when he'd arrived, Sam was nowhere.

• 36:48Speaker 00

  By 6 o'clock that Saturday night, roughly 200 law enforcement officers and search-and-rescue volunteers from Crater Lake National Park, Mount Rainier National Park, and Kings Canyon National Park came together to start looking for Sam. According to an article by Strange Outdoors, in the days leading up to their hike together, Ken and Sam were staying with a few of Ken's family members in a cabin about 45 minutes north of the park, near another body of water called Diamond Lake. Investigators highly doubted that Sam had taken off and would have been able to find his way back to where he and his dad were staying. It would have been nearly impossible for him to make the journey from where he vanished back to their cabin in Diamond Lake, alone in the dark.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  The information that went out about Sam described him as 4 feet 8 inches tall, weighed 85 pounds, and had light brown hair and brown eyes. His dad said he'd been wearing a long-sleeved, black-and-green striped shirt, a blue winter coat, and cargo pants when he vanished. Along with that outfit, Sam was said to have on red suede shoes. He also had two moles that made identifying him a bit easier. There was one mole under his right ear and a mole on the left side of his throat. Something else Sam's parents told law enforcement was vitally important when it came to searching for and identifying their son was the fact that Sam had a form of autism. Some source material defined his condition as a type of mild Asperger's syndrome,

• 38:18Speaker 00

  while other articles defined it as sensory integration disorder, or SID. A diagnosis, autism.org, closely associates with sensory processing disorder, or SPD.

• 38:31Speaker 00

  SID and SPD are not standalone disorders. They're most often linked with an autism diagnosis. But the basic definition is that the disorders occur in individuals whose brains have problems receiving and responding to information picked up by a person's five senses. Autism360.com says that side effects of SID and SPD are the sensation of pain when you hear loud noises, having a hard time judging distances, which can cause you to bump into things, and getting easily overwhelmed by bright lights or loud sounds.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Learning this information about Sam, authorities instructed volunteers not to shout Sam's name or use any kind of noise-making devices like a whistle, a siren, or a megaphone to get his attention. They feared that if his SID was triggered, his natural response would be to run away or hide, and that's the last thing authorities wanted Sam to do.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Another hurdle to search teams was the weather. At that time, the conditions in the park were chilly, wet, and snowy, which made it difficult to traverse the areas where Sam could have been. It also caused police to worry that their window of time to find Sam alive was narrowing significantly with each passing hour. According to several news outlets, his family said Sam had camping experience and knew his way around the outdoors, but the fact that he only had a winter coat to keep him warm and no other resources to provide for himself meant that he wouldn't last long alone in the park. It's not like he had survival training or anything more than what his dad had taught him.

• 40:14Speaker 00

  By Tuesday, crews had been searching for three days with no sign of Sam anywhere. They even sent up helicopters to circle areas of high elevation, but nothing turned up. During that time, weather conditions in the park had gotten worse and worse. KATU News reported that up to two feet of snow had fallen since Sam was last seen, which was going to make it challenging to find any tracks of his in the snow or an article of clothing. Even worse, the forecast for the rest of the week projected more snowfall. The Seattle Times reported that crews were determined not to give up, though, despite trudging around in sub-zero temperatures at nearly 7,000 feet in elevation.

• 40:59Speaker 00

  Search teams considered the scenario that maybe Sam had gotten turned around or fallen down and ended up in the water of Crater Lake. But that theory seemed implausible. For one, the distance Sam would have had to fall in to get into the water was anywhere from 700 to 1,000 feet. And two, there were a lot of fallen trees, small boulders, and stuff like that all along towards the water. Investigators felt sure that that kind of stuff would have caught Sam's body on the way down, making it easy to find him. However, he wasn't in any of those obvious places. So, pretty quickly, the idea that he was anywhere other than deep in the woods surrounding the spot he ran off into lost steam.

• 41:44Speaker 00

  Law enforcement also had to investigate the theory of whether Sam had been abducted by someone. According to reporting by Jeff Barnard for the Associated Press, park staff went on record saying they didn't think an abduction scenario was a strong possibility. For one, Ken said he'd only seen one or two cars pass by him and Sam the entire time they were in the Cleetwood Cove parking lot area. And rangers reported that traffic in the park generally was extremely light that time of year, and no one manning the entry and exit points remembered seeing a young boy leave in any cars exiting the park. But this statement kind of struck me as odd, because unless rangers knew to be looking

• 42:26Speaker 00

  for a young boy abducted in a car around the time Sam vanished, they wouldn't have noticed that at all. Still, a chief ranger at the park told the Seattle Times, quote, "We're treating the situation as that of a missing person. There's absolutely nothing to indicate foul play or criminal activity," end quote. And that statement wasn't just to clear the air about whether Sam was abducted or not. It was also intended to squash any rumors or notion that authorities suspected Ken of doing anything bad to his son. Based on all the source material I read, it was clear early on that police didn't think Ken had harmed his son in any way, and that was mostly due to there being zero evidence to prove that.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  According to The Oregonian, Sam's dad, Ken, and his mother, Kirsten Becker, divorced in 2005, but they were both on the same page about wanting to find their son and doing everything possible to figure out what happened to him. In a way, his disappearance brought them together instead of driving them apart. For weeks, they lived in a duplex together near the park's headquarters while search crews were out looking for their son. On day five of the search, a tracking dog picked up Sam's scent near the spot he'd vanished, but the dog only trailed it a short distance before losing the scent altogether. Sam's family placed a pink ribbon around a dead tree in that area to identify the spot.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  And unfortunately, one week after Sam disappeared, investigators were left with no option but to scale back and eventually suspend the search for him. They told news outlets that trying to find Sam in Crater Lake's wintry environment was just too difficult. Forty feet of snow was predicted for the winter that year, and authorities said none of it was going to melt until at least the following summer. Kirsten, Sam's mom, told The Doll's Chronicle, quote, "Nature has blanketed the ground where we believe Sam perished. Until the world awakens next summer at 6,500 feet, all we can do is wait. We want to bring Sam home. We commend the men and women who risked their lives to find our Sam.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  You were our eyes and our feet in the wilderness. Thank you for your bravery and determination. Blessings on each and every one of you," end quote. On November 25, about a month and a half after Sam was last seen, his parents held a memorial service for him in downtown Portland. The ceremony was meant to celebrate Sam's life and all the joy he'd brought to his parents in his short eight years with them. At that time, the FBI and the National Park Service again emphasized that they didn't think foul play was involved. In July 2007, shortly before the one-year anniversary, search crews went back out to Cleetwood Cove and began searching for remains.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  No one expected Sam to be alive, but teams at least wanted to attempt to bring him home. In late August, skeletal remains were found in a remote area less than 50 miles from where Sam had last been seen, but a quick examination of the bones indicated they didn't belong to a child, and they'd been in the woods for several years. Law enforcement suspected the remains were related to a missing hiker from 1991. In the years since, no one has ever found a trace of Sam. Not a scrap of clothing, nothing. Newspapers have published anniversary pieces and a documentary on YouTube called Missing 411 Features His Case, but no one has ever learned the truth of what really happened

• 46:07Speaker 00

  to him. His family has had to move on and grieve over their loss in the worst imaginable way, never having any concrete answers. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children created an age-progressed image of what Sam would look like now. It's on the blog post for this episode. If he were still here, he'd be 24 years old. For a long time, indigenous people who have generations of history around Gwaz, which invasive prospectors later named Crater Lake, have believed that the water is a spiritual portal of sorts. I guess maybe because the lake is the result of a collapsed volcano, it gives off supernatural vibes. I'm not really sure.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  But it's said that the spirit of a supernatural being from above and a being from below waged war in the lake, with the spirit from above winning out. The version of the story, often coupled with Sam's disappearance, describes the soul of the spirit who lost the battle as still residing in the lake and contributing to the volatile weather patterns associated with the region. Some variations of this tale even go as far as saying the begrudge spirit from below abducts people from the shores and brings them down into the lake. Now, I wasn't raised with the same deeply-rooted spiritual beliefs of the Klamath tribe,

• 47:30Speaker 00

  so my gaze remains fixed on Sam, because he's still out there, somewhere. His remains may very well be buried on the shores or beneath the waters of Crater Lake, but then again, maybe they're not. If you have any information that could help law enforcement investigators in this case, please call the National Park Service tip line at 888-653-0009. Sam is still listed as a missing person on the NPS's website. I, for one, would like to see that description changed to "found."

• 48:14Speaker 00

  Park Predators is an AudioChuck production. You can view a list of all the source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com. And you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram, @parkpredators. I think Chuck would approve. In the dark, even the most familiar trail can feel like it leads somewhere else. Every rustle becomes a warning, every shadow, a doorway. In Full Body Chills, those doorways open into worlds pulled straight from your nightmares. This spooky season classic returns with chilling you tales, immersive sound, and

• 48:59Speaker 00

  no promise that you'll find your way back. So, step off the familiar path if you dare. Listen to new episodes of Full Body Chills every week, wherever you get your podcasts.