Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, D'Lia Diambra. And the story I'm going to tell you about today

is a mystery that has confounded law enforcement for more than 40 years. And it's a case that

online slews have been obsessing over, I feel like, for as long as the internet has been around.

It's a missing person's case from the early 1980s that has quite a few twists and turns.

You can almost hear the goat of true crime himself, Robert Stack, narrating the details.

And speaking of Robert, Unsolved Mysteries way back in the day did a segment about this case.

It's one of the sources I use for this episode.

But forget TV programs, news clippings, and anniversary specials for just a second, and rewind with me all the way back to late June 1983, and Helena Lewis and Clark National Forest in Montana.

Because understanding where this story takes place, I think, is critical to hopefully one day figuring out what happened.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Services website, the National Forest is

divided into two parts by the continental divide and spans 2.8 million acres across north

central Montana. According to the National Forest Foundation's website,

the forest was only known as Helena National Forest in 1983.

In 2015, it merged with the Lewis and Clark National Forest

and is now called Helena Lewis and Clark National Forest.

From 1880 until 1940, there was a massive mining boom in the mountainous regions

of the forest, and that activity, unfortunately, left a lot of inactive mines and abandoned shafts behind.

Those ruins still remain in places today and pose a serious risk to visitors because some of them

are unstable and contain large volumes of heavy metal mining waste.

The area gets the latter part of its name from the renowned military explorers,

Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark,

who ventured into what was in 1804, a vast western territory in the United States, known as the Louisiana Purchase.

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