[Applause] my name is Roger I'm from Minnesota and I came across your YouTube channel at the beginning of this year I'm a retired forest ranger having spent the better part of three decades working for the US Forest Service law enforcement and investigations division since my retirement I've had plenty of time on my hands and over the past few months I spent a lot of that Time listening to various anthologies that you've published I think it's awesome that you publish the stories of regular folks like me so with that in mind I think I have a
story that you might be interested in it seems a little strange that I'm so excited to tell you about this as it's not exactly the kind of thing most people want to hear I used to wonder how you get so many people wanting to share the bad memories with you but after having thought about it For a while I think I figured it out these aren't the kind of things that we can talk about around the dinner table in polite company and I've never had a single person Ask Me In the Flesh what was the
scariest thing that's ever happened to you people don't want to know at least not the kind of people I've ever associated with but at the same time these are things that for whatever reason we want to share with people and much like your Channel's Viewers I'm pretty apt to lend my ear to a story that's a little darker and so without further rambling on this is the story of one of the truly terrifying moments in my time as a forest ranger for the vast majority of my career I was posted in the voyagers National Park
up near the Canadian border since the park is Split in Two by a series of lakes it's popular with fishermen and kayakers but these Lakes Are also populated by many small Islands many of which are popular camping spots people come up to the vnp to get away from the city and get some private privacy and it doesn't get much more private than your own personal Island really does it well one afternoon I got a call from a chief Ranger asking me to do him a little favor he gotten a call from the International Falls Police
Department if being a small Border City about 20 mi to the West after an officer Over there had received a missing person's report some lady's husband had gone on a camping trip with an old friend and had failed to return after being due back that morning my husband was to head over to their regular camping spot on a place called wolf Island to see if they'd moved on or not the ranger team at vnp is probably one of the most amphibious in the country definitely the most waterborne in the region half of our job Consists
of policing the waterways and making sure all fishing and boating is within regulation so not only do we have ready access to kayaks and motorboats but were very comfortable operating them so when I got the call I headed to the ash River Visitor Center which was where we docked our boats but then just as I'm prepping the boat to sail over to Wolf Island I get a second call from the chief the ifpd had reached out with an update one I needed to be informed of Immediately according to the chief this wasn't just a case
of two fishermen having overslept after too many Miller lights the missing man's son had been in touch and this time it was to warn law enforcement that Not only was his father most likely armed but had been acting extremely erratically prior to the departing for the camping trip this is not what I had been hoping to hear when I'd heard that there was an update but I was more than equipped to deal with the Situation seeing as I was on the law enforcement side of things as opposed to working solely at The Visitor Center I
had pretty much all the same options as your average police officer but that didn't mean that I wasn't feeling a sense of apprehension regarding what I might run up against nine times out of 10 incidents in the park are resolved quickly and peacefully but as you can probably guess it's 1 and 10 that keep you up at night so after prepping the Boat I sailed West for around 20 to 25 minutes until I spotted wolf Island after using my binoculars to observe the island from a safe distance I can make out a slight plume of
smoke coming from its eastern side I could have really done with some kind of ballhorn to call out to the missing camper but I didn't have the good sense to bring one so I was forced to bring my boat right up to within about 20 or 30 ft of the shore before Calling out using nothing but my lung power I called out once and then twice and after the third call receiv received no response I decided to make landfall in order to get a visual on the campfire which presumably had been started by our missing
camper I brought the boat up a little closer hopped overboard then waited my way ashore calling out to our missing camper all the while I could smell the campfire by that point along with whatever was cooking on it so I was Doubtless with an earshot of whoever had been tending to it but since no one called back and since I didn't see anyone as I walked up the beach I figured whoever had made Camp had moved on yet as I walked further onto the island in search of the source of the smoke something caught my
eye for as long as I live I'll remember this in photographic detail it runs in my head on its own sometimes like someone pressed play on a remote control in my Brain I saw something falling out of the corner of my eye and when I looked I saw it was a raven Landing to join some of its brothers and sisters but then I saw what it was landing on there was a man sitting in a camping chair not quite upright but not all the way slouched either with a big old hole in the upper rear
portion of his skull one of the Ravens was pushing its beak into the hole while a few others fought over whatever had leaked onto the Ground the body of accounted for one of our missing campers but I didn't have to wait long to find the second lying motionless next to the campfire was what remained of the second missing camper someone had made the effort to cut off his legs I'm guessing after he was deceased and had worked on cutting them into small sections before placing them onto the fire what had been smelling on the way
in hadn't been the camper late lunch it Had been a section of the second Camper's leg sizzling away on the dying Embers I guess the guy in the chair hadn't the heart to finish disposing of his Camping Buddy and had decided to let nature take its course on both of them we never did find out why it happened but we did figure out how the killer had invited his quote unquote friend on a camping trip to their regular spot he hadn't hidden anything From his wife or anyone else for that matter which led us to
believe that his decision to kill his Camping Buddy was either a spontaneous one or that that he had planned to Simply kill him before taking his own life as a way of avoiding any consequences he obviously wanted to conceal what he'd done at least at one point we believe he had but then this is where another argument for the spontaneous murder Theory comes into Play personally I don't believe that he' taken the time to research just how arduous the disposal of a dead body can be there was no accelerent at the scene so I don't
think he'd planned to burn his friend's body and when it became obvious that it was going to take take way longer than he' thought and that law enforcement might well come looking for him or his dead friend before the disposal could be completed I think he decided to just check out there and Then there was a somber mood among the park staff for a while after that as far as I knew nothing like that had ever happened before and nothing like that happened again for the remainder of my career as you can probably guess national
parks aren't exactly high crime areas and at the vnp the most intense things generally get is catching up to a speeding Boating Party so you can tell them to slow down so to have something so terrible happened right under our Noses it had a real strong effect on our mood during the weeks that followed sometimes I think about what happened in that guy's head to make him want to murder one of his best friends like I said we didn't hear about any Affairs or betrayals or anything else that might cause a man to temporarily go
crazy it's all just one big mystery and like so many other of life's mysteries I think I'm a lot more comfortable living and Blissful [Music] ignorance my daughter is a very big fan of yours and as part of her birthday present she asked me to write up a story that I told her last Thanksgiving regarding my days volunteering with the park service I I promise it's not the only present that she's getting this year and I'll admit to being very taken aback when she first proposed the idea but while very unusual it was impossible to
refuse so here I am at her request I Grew up in St Louis then moved down to Knoxville after I enrolled at the University of Tennessee then during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years I signed up to a seasonal volunteer Ranger program at the nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park although my career aspirations involve sitting behind a desk I'd always thought it would be cool to be a park ranger maybe it's the masculine ideal of working Outdoors rescuing wounded animals and becoming one with nature along the way so when I heard I could
basically play the part of one for a month while wearing my very own campaign hat my interest was peaked I got in touch with the right people arranged the dates then spent seven long months looking forward to it but when I got there I found my work to be anything but exhilarating in essence the seasonal volunteer program was little more than a Way of securing vacation time for the grossly understaffed Ranger teams and what's more we were never trusted to do anything that required any real experience or expertise this meant that around 60% of the
time myself and the other two volunteers were Staffing the parks Visitor Center the other 40% of the time we were only trusted to do things like basic administ straight of tasks or boundary Maintenance I don't know what I was expecting National Parks have to keep their books in order just like the rest of us but I most definitely preferred boundary maintenance over anything that involved being cooped up indoors boundary maintenance was a very fancy name the forest service gave to fence checking and as you can probably guess all that involves walking long sections of boundary
fence to make sure they're in a decent state of Repair walking those boundary fences was probably probably the closest I got to living my ideal Ranger lifestyle but it was also one of those hikes that I came across someone I still think about often even after all these years later I was out near a place called Cosby Creek which is on the eastern boundary of the park this area is of particular importance during the boundary checks as there's an old graveyard named trit Cemetery out that Way so we obviously don't want the wildlife digging up
old bones or otherwise desecrating the place in some way I made sure all the fences on the cemetery were intact and then continued Eastward along the fence line for maybe 10 to 15 minutes when suddenly I saw someone moving through the trees up ahead of me the second I laid my eyes on them I had this moment of bizarre doubt where I thought there was no possible way that What I was seeing was real I'm not a doctor or so I couldn't tell you how much blood a person can lose and still be functioning but
my God the girl who Softly sobbed As she walked Barefoot through the trees must have been running on fumes she was completely without clothes and with big patches of her skin missing revealing all this clotted blood and dried Gore underneath almost every part of her from Her hair down to her toes was covered in blood and I was stunned that she was even on her feet I immediately rushed into action rushing over to her as she collapsed into the dirt I took off my shirt used it to cover her up as best I could then
picked her up and carried her back to my truck I guess it was a stroke of good fortune that I found her so close to where I parked but I was still fit to Collapse by the time we got there I knew There was an Urgent Care up in Newport which is around 12 Mi or so north of Cosby so I drove as fast as I possibly could after loading the girl into the backseat of my truck I don't think I said anything to her aside from Don't Close Your Eyes you got to stay awake
she kept her eyes wide open the whole way but she never made a sound either she just laay there curled up into a ball with my shirt over her staring at Nothing until we finally made it to the Urgent Care Center I know they're not necessarily equipped to deal with emergencies like that but I didn't know where else to take her so after administering some initial treatment I was told the girl will be taken over to severville where there was a general hospital equipped with a dedicated emergency room and that's where my role in the
whole thing ended I asked if I could be of any More help but was told that the best thing I could do was go back and tell the chief Ranger what had happened this was way back before cell phones and I could have used the hospital's pay phone to let the team know where I was but by that time I figured it was better to just drive back change out of my bloody clothes and tell everyone what had happened face to face when I walked into Ranger HQ and the chief and my co-workers saw the
Blood on my clothes they knew something terrible had happened they thought it was me that was hurt at first and I had to tell them something I've only heard said in movies before it's not my blood I told them and then I launched into the explanation where i' been and what had happened the chief took notes the whole time seeing as we had full jurisdiction the only other group that could legally push us out of the way would be the FBI or Something unless we called in their help or they stepped in without us asking
it would be up to us to investigate what had happened to the girl and that's where things got really weird obviously we needed to talk to the girl that I'd found in order to establish what had happened to her but when the chief contacted the hospital and spoke to the relevant doctors we found out that she hadn't said a word not just about what had happened to her either she wouldn't Say a word to anyone this didn't strike any of us as particular ularly unusual the poor girl had no doubt gone through an extremely traumatic
event meaning she most likely wouldn't want to talk about it until she'd sufficiently calmed down the doctors told us to check back the next day but also that they'd be in touch if there were any changes so that's what we did we waited until the early afternoon of the Following day then called the hospital again to see if the girl had started talking she hadn't she wouldn't talk to doctors wouldn't talk to nurses and we sure so could try but the doctors didn't think that she talked to us either the chief handled all the calls
but seeing as I was the one who found her he asked me to join him on the ride to the hospital in hopes that seeing me again might push her to talk I got the word on my radio and when I did I stopped what I was doing Resource Management so it wasn't all that urgent and then drove back to HQ to join the chief at his truck we talked about how the investigation might unfold on the drive over to the hospital completely unaware of the fact that there wasn't going to be any kind of
Investigation at all because when we got to the hospital and went looking for our nameless victim we found the nursing staff in a minor Panic it took us a while to work out what was going on but when we did shocked doesn't even begin to cover it the hospital had lost our victim a review of their sec SEC camera showed a man dressed in hospital scrubs pushing a wheelchair through the hospital's main entrance just after 1:15 p.m. he wore some kind of ID clip to his chest somehow talked his way past reception and then headed
straight for the room where our victim was kept there He loaded her up onto the wheelchair then simply pushed her out of the hospital without any attempt to stop him whatsoever obviously it was a huge breach of the hospital's standard of practice but without any idea who our victim or her apparent abductor was we had almost no means of recourse except one seeing as we had a potential abduction on our hands we actually did call on the help of the FBI obviously our main concern was that Whoever had taken the girl out of the hospital
was the same person or at least part of the same group of people that had put her in the hospital in the first place we didn't have the resources to go chasing after the guy but the FBI did so after we officially transferred the investigation over to them it was pretty much out of our hands we hope that that meant the investigation might actually progress but about a month later when our chief Checked back with the FBI contact we learned that the case just wasn't a priority for them we had expected to be contacted regarding
the formation of a Joint Task Force which a standard practice whenever the FBI coordinates with local law enforcement but after a RW of the evidence some desk jockey somewhere had decided the case wasn't worth pursuing they weren't keen on allocating resources to a case where potentially The only charges would be impersonating a healthc care professional I'm not a lawyer so I couldn't tell you the kinds of punishments a crime like that might get you but I know it wouldn't be nearly as much as assault or kidnapping neither of which had any real evidence for if
the girl had talked if she said anything that was pertinent to the case we might have something to work with but we didn't all we had were theories and assumptions none of which were Comparable to hard evidence and so that's where the story ended if the girl came forward to make a criminal complaint then our case was back on but until then or until our mysterious fake nurse committed another crime someplace then we were all out of options and it was better to just let it go I'm not saying I was okay with that if
it were up to me I'd have chased that case to the ends of the Earth to find out what the hell happened to that poor Girl but it wasn't up to me I wasn't even a real Ranger at the time and when my time was up I went back to summer vacation then back to my studies come fall time but that doesn't mean I forgot I've never forgotten what that girl looked like or how it felt to see her limping through the trees hearing that awful exhausted sobbing sound that she was making and when I
felt like the time was right I decided to share the story with my daughter I know that might seem Strange to you and your listeners telling my teenage daughter something so frightening and strange but I feel like there's a lesson in there that I needed to teach her when driving back to HQ after dropping the girl off at the Urgent Care I was under the impression that the ranger team along with whatever other law enforcement agencies got involved would fight to bring her attackers to Justice I don't know if I mentioned it already but at
one point The idea was floated that the girl had been in some kind of accident maybe falling down a rocky Hillside had torn her clothes off someone suggested but all of them every scrap of clothing just so happened to be torn to shreds but somehow she wasn't killed on the way down I don't buy that not for a second she had to have been attacked by someone or something now that's obviously a very frightening thought but whether we like It or not monsters are always going to exist and they exist as they've always done in
a variety of different forms you can always expect bad things to happen in life but what you don't expect is seeing the very people that you thought were charged with your very protection acting like they just don't care if you lived or died there might have been a time in this country where Justice was a man with a fast horse a shiny badge a well-oiled pistol and a warm heart but Now nowadays Justice sits behind a desk Justice wears a suit and a tie and justice has a budget and whatever heart it once had has
grown cold callous and [Music] uncaring the story I'm about to tell you is strange all on its own but to understand why it continues to haunt me long after it occurs heard I have to fill you in on a little background information I tied the knot with my now ex-husband in 1987 we were madly in love with one another and had every intention of staying together until we were old and gray but the truth was we wouldn't last 5 years we had trouble getting pregnant so we went to a fertility doctor to do some tests
and that is how I found out that I was incapable of bearing children it didn't seem like the end of the world not at first anyway and discuss both the possibilities of adoption as well as living a child-free Lifestyle I thought our marriage was strong enough to survive something like that and it turns out that I was wrong when he filed for divorce I was heartbroken and I never really experienced true heartbreak until then if heed have said from the GetGo look babe I can't be with someone who can't have my kids then at least
I'd have more time for it to sink in and for me to get over it but it was how he raised up my hopes before dashing them that's would Hurt more than anything else I couldn't bear to be around him after that he wanted to be an amicable split but I just didn't have it in me to remain friends with him I guess that must make me seem pretty immature to some people but I just wasn't emotionally equipped to deal with something like that I left town moved back in with my parents for a few
months than set about deciding what I wanted to do with my life it might sound silly but I had half expected my Role in life to be a mother and Homemaker I know that isn't exactly shooting for the stars to some but it was all I ever really wanted I wanted a simple life a happy life and it took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize that I could be happy being something other than a housewife during that time when I was finally able to go outside without bursting into tears at the first
sight of a mother and child I spent a lot of Time hiking Woodland Trails the peace and seclusion helped me put my mind back together again but the more I did the more I realized something about myself I could quite happily spend the rest of my working days walking around the woods in relative peace and quiet then when I mentioned that to my dad he very casually suggested something that changed my life forever why don't you apply to the forest service he asked one day and I Remember trying to think of a reason why that
wasn't possible I couldn't picture myself being a ranger but back then I could hardly picture myself doing anything at all except crying myself to sleep every night after hours upon hours of just terrible television but then the more I thought about it the more I realized that there were no reasons I couldn't be a park ranger since I didn't have a bachelor's degree I'd have to intern for a full two Years before being offered a full-time position but that didn't bother me I sure didn't have anything else going on for me at the time so
I decided to just go for it it now having grown up in Garrett County Maryland I sometimes pictured myself walking the Appalachian Trail during the warm summer months wearing one of those Smoky Bear hats but when it came time to applying for internships there was only one place accepting applicants and that was Acadia National Park up in Maine I'd never pictured myself living that far north and I wondered how I was going to survive the winners up there but it also offered a new start and a new new place far from the painful memories I
wanted so much to leave behind and so in the late summer of 1992 I packed up my things and moved up to the small Hamlet of seal Harbor I moved into a small rental house on a street called and this is not a joke Hille way I never did figure out if it was some sort of Nod to Dr Seuss or not none of my neighbors had a definitive answer but it was nice a quiet place to live and it made getting to and from the park every day much easier I interned for 2 years
completed all the necessary training then by the fall of 1994 I was a fully-fledged member of the accadia Ranger team badge and all there was a presentation ceremony which my mom and dad traveled Up for especially and I experienced feelings of Pride and self-belief that at one point I'd never have thought possible I considered it a huge achievement and there's no denying how happy it made me but I still felt this sort of Babys sized hole in my life one I knew that I'd never be able to fill now cut to about a year later
to June of 1995 and I was completing a land inspection near a Rocky Hill named Connor's nuble once I was done I turned Around and started walking the two miles back to park HQ but as I got closer to the shores of Eagles Lake I decided to take a shortcut between two trails to SA saved me some time it wasn't a well walked out section of trail and I never made the shortcut before but I knew the park well enough to know that if I worked my way through the undergrowth I'd come out on the
opposite Trail and have a much easier hike back to HQ so that's what I did I turned off the trail And was walking through the trees when suddenly something caught my foot I didn't see the thing at all meaning I was so caught off guard that the stumble almost sent me crashing into the dirt so after calling whatever it was a mother lover I decided to kick away some shrubs to see exactly what had almost taken me out I figured it'd be a rock of some description and if it was possible to do so I
planned on digging it up and tossing it to one side to ensure that no One would be tripping over it again some might call this a little extreme but it becomes second nature to make the park as safe A place as possible for visitors and co-workers alike one thing you learn as a forest strangers that a lot of things are completely out of your control which then teaches you to always act on the stuff you can control anyway after stamping my foot down to find the thing that had tripped me and then kicking away the
shrubs around it I was Surprised by what I saw it couldn't have been a rock the shape was way too unnatural and after wiping away some of the soil around it I caught a glimpse of something that looked a lot like a seam and if it had a seam then it might just be some kind of box that someone had buried there sometime in the recent or distant past but no matter what it was I didn't have the time nor the energy to stop what I was doing and dig it up so instead I tried
to Mark out the Spot as best I could stamping down more of the undergrowth to make the clearing more visible than made my way back to the HQ I mentioned the thing in passing to one of my co-workers and although she wasn't exactly shocked she did show some interest I know for a lot of you the first thing that comes to mind is some kind of Buried Treasure and with Northeast Harbor boasting some summer residents such as the Rockefellers no Less it wasn't out of the question that something valuable had been buried there but even
so no one was rushing to go dig it up I mean I didn't even really know what it was so while the Box remained of Interest digging it up wasn't a priority by any stretch of the imagination a few days went by then one afternoon I found myself with a few spare hours but then rather than finish early for the day I decided to grab a shovel Head down to the shortcut near Eagle Lake and dig up the box to find out exactly what it was it made for hard and sweaty work but after maybe
an hour or so of digging I was finally able to see that yes it was a box no bigger than the kind that you'd buy shoes in and it looked like it had been buried there for a long time I heaved it from the dirt dusted it off and set about pulling away the rotten twine from the latch where a padlock might have otherwise been I'll Admit to being quite excited at the time and it didn't once occur to me that it could have been anything Sinister but when I opened the box and lifted up
a rotten piece of cloth away from whatever was inside I gasped and slammed the lid shut after catching just a glimpse it wasn't gold or silver or Jewels nor was it a murder weapon from some decades old murder as one Ranger had suggested with a Chuckle it was a skeleton the tiny newly formed skeleton of a departed newborn baby I didn't touch anything else I just ran back to HQ to tell people what I'd found soon almost everyone on duty that day was down near Eagle Lake then not long after so were several other state
troopers and the whole forensics team but before they all got there and taped the scene off our chief Ranger looked inside the Box just to see for himself What was in there like I said I only got a glimpse but I saw enough to know what I was looking at where is the chief he took a long hard look at that poor little thing long enough to see the things I hadn't I couldn't bring myself to look at it again for a long time but when the chief said the skeleton looked all wrong he was
right I hadn't never seen a baby skeleton before so it wasn't like I was an expert but all who said it agreed that the skull seemed way too Large and that the arm seemed way too long as one of us put it the poor little thing barely looked human but it was because the genetic testing came back positive as being entirely human in origin in the end we pieced together a very sad chain of events sometime between 1920 and 1930 some unsuspecting mother gave birth to a heartbreaking disabled child there was a chance that this
child died of natural causes because there Were no signs of any trauma on the skeleton but that didn't rule out the possibility that someone had taken it upon themselves to personally end the child's suffering then after the child was gone someone placed it in what would have been at the time an expensive felt line box then buried it deep in the woods where no one might ever find it why they might opt to do that in Li of just giving the child a proper funeral I have No idea but the reason couldn't have been a
good one cut to almost 80 years later and some slowly growing tree root has pushed it further and further to the surface over time until just a nub is sticking above ground a little nub that I just so happen to have stumbled over seeing as the child's body was found on federal property we were able to enlist the help of the FBI's DNA analysis unit down in Quantico like I think I already mentioned and we were hoping that we Might get a match on a distant relative that had a file but nothing came back positive
this little kid had no name no date of birth and its only possession was the small improvised coffin we found it in we also heard from the FBI that the child's large skull which they called macroy was probably the result of a genetic disorder such as Weavers or SoDo Syndrome from what I can understand conditions like those are Rel relatively Easy to treat today but back then some poor kid born in bad circumstances they wouldn't have nearly the same chances it all makes for a heartbreaking story even our most probable theories were nothing but speculation
but no matter which way you can cut it whatever happened to that child had been simply awful and that's not why the whole thing has haunted me for all these years not the story on its own anyways instead it's been this Sometimes in my darkest of moments I feel like that poor baby was my own I feel like it was a strange kind of destiny that brought me to that shortcut and had me stumbling over its makeshift coffin I know that probably sounds like I'm losing my mind and it's definitely not an idea I've ever
discussed out loud really with anyone but it really is the way I feel sometimes I'm not able to have children but what I was given was the chance to bring peace in the form of A proper burial to a child child whose real parents were unwilling or unable to give them one and in doing so I think I've been able to get just a taste of how boundless and unconditional a mother's love can be and for that I'll always be [Music] grateful so I was listening to your other park ranger stories and I wanted to
send mine in too I hope don't mind if I send this to a few of my other Favorite channels as well and hopefully that means you'll get to mine first I'm medically retired from the United States forest service but I was a ranger at kenu National Park for 7 years between 1985 and 1992 kenu was up in the Idaho Panhandle less than 50 mi from the Canadian border think forests mountains and lakes in the summer then a carpet of snow and ice in the wintertime with the c River to the north and Lake pen Orel
to the South Everything else is a lot of ridges and valleys and on the last day on the job I was walking through one of those very same valleys I was performing my regular duties minding my own business when suddenly I experienced what felt like Prime Mike Tyson punching me on the right side of my hip it spun me but the force of it also took my legs out from under me and as I fell I heard the crack of a rifle coming from up the valley somewhere my first thought was that it Was an
accident might seem crazy but you'd be surprised the kind of mistakes Hunters make when they're itching for that first bag of the season it's why we have so many regulations in the first place I couldn't see the shooter so I started to call out don't shoot I'm a ranger one hand putting pressure on the bullet wound at my hip and the other waving wildly back and forth as if to say no no no no I expected someone to emerge from Behind the tree or to stand up and reveal themselves before running down the valley in
horror but instead the shooter fired at me again I don't know how they didn't hit me I was sat right there on the forest floor but when I saw the dirt explode just inches in front of me I instinctively rolled behind the only cover I had which was a rotting log barely long enough to cover my whole body believe it or not I still couldn't Believe whoever was out there was deliberately shooting at me I just couldn't imagine why someone would want to do that who in their right Minds would be willing to open fire
on a forest ranger I tried calling out again I'm friendly stop shooting a few times and the shoot responded by putting a bullet into the log I was hiding behind somehow it didn't penetrate but Depending on how much ammunition they had they could just blow the log apart then blow me apart once they had a clear line of of sight only then did it really sink in what was happening and only then did the solution become obvious before rolling onto my front I made sure my legs were still working enough to run then began to
sort of aim my body in the direction I'd parked my truck the shooter didn't fire and that seemed to scare me even more he was just Watching waiting for me to make a move if I stuck my head up and they were still there waiting to take a shot I was dead I had to do something to make them Flinch enough to at least Miss if they took a shot and since all I had at my disposal was my sidearm that's what I used I fired off a few rounds over the log After Rolling onto
my side then got up and sprinted off through the trees firing wildly behind me as I ran I know The shooter took one last shot at me I heard the crack as the bullet flew just over my head but I was somehow able to run far and fast enough to to break his line of sight and make it back to my truck alive since Ranger HQ was way down in Calene I drove to the emergency room in Sandpoint instead it's a long story but I was only able to notify one other Ranger regarding my injuries
and it was she that relayed the information back to Ranger HQ while I drove over to Sandpoint my biggest fear was passing out at the wheel due to blood loss but as a doctor later told me I've gotten extremely lucky regard guarding where the bullet had struck me as well as the path that it took through my hip any further to the left and I probably wouldn't have been able to run and any further down and it risked severing my femoral artery if that had happened I wouldn't even made it to my truck let Alone
the hospital with the park being federal land the FBI actually joined in and our Ranger team in scouring the park for a potential shooter but by the time they got there the person who tried to kill me was long gone the bureau took the matter very seriously and interviewed me extensively mostly As I recovered from surgery in my hospital bed they had dogs running all over the park for weeks looking for Bootprints bullet casings you name it but they didn't find a thing the best that they could do was tell me the kind of rifle
that had been used to shoot at me which was a Remington model 700 but during the final interview One agent shared one of their prevailing theories with me they couldn't rule out that my attacker was some kind of crazed Hunter who suffered a psychotic episode and took a few shots at me but that being said There was one angle the task force was particularly interested in working just a few months before I was shot a team of US Marshals approached a cabin over in boundary County they had an arrest warrant for a guy named Randy
Weaver but during their approach they ended up shooting the guy's dog then his son one of we W's friends then open fire on the marshals kicking off an 11-day standoff in which a police sniper shot Weaver's Wife this guy was wanted on Firearms charges so the marshals thought that he had a whole arsenal of machine guns stashed away in his cabin and that's why they went in like it was a war zone and how they ended up killing two innocent people Randy Weaver ended up getting millions in compensation from the government but before that the
whole situation created a media Firestorm and pissed off a lot of very violent people and that's where the FBI agent I talked To figured it tied into my case it was just speculation but he and some of his fellow agents believed that since I was a representative of the federal government some wacka with a hunting rifle figured I was a legitimate Revenge Target for what came to be known as Ruby Ridge a few years later that psycho who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City said Ruby Ridge was the thing that drove him nuts
and those are my words by the way not his the FBI never caught the Guy who shot me and as far as I know they're still out there proud at having hit back at the fed or whatever crazy bull crap they've brainwashed themselves with and who knows maybe they regret it maybe they'd apologized if they knew they could get away with it but I can't say it's one I'd ever accept not until I can afford that second round of hip surgery anyway [Music] The Picos de Europa National Park is a mountainous Nature Reserve in the
northern Spanish region of canabria the park attracts around 3 million visitors a year who come seeking its verdant forests Crystal Clear lakes and Majestic snowcapped mountains however each of these visitors is issued a stark warning as the Picos de Europa are known to be every bit as brutal as they are beautiful during the winter months freak snowstorms can send Temperatures plummeting into the mid-30s resulting in an extensive list of fatalities and missing persons the park is also home to contaban brown bears whose population exploded following a ban on the hunting of the species in the
early ' 70s the Bears aren't known for their aggression towards humans but along with the wolves and wild bores the park is also home to they can prove a deadly threat to those caught in the wrong place at the wrong Time yet canabria isn't just famous for its wild natural beauty it's also the place where a decades long mystery was finally brought to a close but like so many other similar instances the Revelation raised many more questions than it answered back in 1945 31-year-old Eloy cilio Perez was employed as a forest ranger at the Picos
deopa National Park he also happened to be the elected mayor of the small nearby town of sres which Is nationally renowned for its queso de Comales a kind of blue cheese which is matured in the many Limestone caves present in the surrounding mountains but eloy's life was anything but peaceful or happy between 1936 and 1939 Spain had been scorched by the fires of Civil War and by its end fascist dictator General Franco had declared himself the victor and ruler of all of Spain with a surrender of anti-fascist forces in the face of a unified far
right the Civil War may have officially come to a close but for much of Spain's Republican resistance the fight was far from over they took refuge in the last of the country's Wilderness areas melting into the forests and mountains whenever pursued by Franco's forces and the region of Picos de Europa was no different many of the resistance fighters who sheltered in the park were known to Eloy all his life some he'd shared a classroom with during his Formative years others were blood relatives meaning there's no doubt that aloy had a degree of sympathy for them
however given he was mayor of surace aloy had certain obligations to his fascist overlords essentially he was stuck between a rock and a hard place he could betray his country or betray his friends both of which would result in his death so instead it seems a loyal attempted to remain as neutral as possible he paid Just enough lip service to the regime to avoid falling under suspicion while remaining tight lipped regarding the location of anti-fascist guerillas in the Picos de Europa all that mattered to him was keeping the people of sura safe one of fascist
Spain's primary sponsors had been Germany but following the red armies rushia Berlin and the collapse of Germany's naratic nightmare the future of Spanish fash fism was Brought into doubt with his strangle hold on Eastern Europe assured Joseph Stalin declared that Global Revolution would continue indefinitely Fanning the hopes of marxist insurgents around the world the gorillas of Picos Europa were no different and following the German surrender began immediately stepping up the intensity of their operations they ambushed units of the Spanish Civil guard with ever increasing frequency and even went so far as to seek out ways
of Producing in explosive material this was an extremely risky move and in trying to involve the people of surace in their pursuit of volatile chemicals the gorillas risked bringing the full force of fascist retribution down on the small mountain town this was something that Eloy could not tolerate and AD mid April of 1945 he sought out a parlay with an old friend 27-year-old Juan Fernandez Ayala was an old companion of Alo and had joined up with The Republicans at the outbreak of hostility some 9 years before over the next decade Juan Rose through the ranks
receiving multiple Battlefield promotions until he found himself second in command of all regional resistance forces it was under Juan's Deputy leadership that canabria saw a sharp uptick in political violence so in an attempt to avert a wider conflict aloy reached out to his old friend to arrange a meeting then on Sunday April 5th 15 of 1945 aloy walked deep into the Pico de Europa Wilderness Far From Any Road or tract to an old abandoned Villa being slowly reclaimed by Nature there Juan and a Cadre of his gorillas were waiting and after some brief introductions aloy
began to make his appeal Franco's overthrow could not come quick enough he explained but an escalation of violence risked destroying the very place they called home Juan and His Comm comrades listened as Eloy made his case until suddenly they heard footsteps coming from outside 2 days before the meeting was due to take place aloy had confined in a fellow park ranger that he was due to meet with the gorillas it's clear that aloy trusted the man enough to share such sensitive information with him so there's no doubt to believe that he was a government informant
but at the same time there's no doubt that he would have Been terrified that he too might be implicated in the plot because the night before the meeting aloy's fellow park ranger betrayed him to the Spanish Civil guard the footsteps Swan and aloy heard that afternoon didn't belong to more of the forers anti-fascist comrades nor did they belong to some innocent hikers who just so happened to have stumbled upon the place they belonged to a heavily armed troop of Spanish Civil guard all of whom were intent on slaughtering Those present at the meeting yet the
gorillas weren't stupid there was a reason they'd survive for for six long years up in the forests and mountains and when they chose the abandoned Villa as their meeting place they did so because of how easily defendable it was this meant that when they realized that they'd been discovered by their sworn enemies they weren't only capable of mounting a defense they were practically spoiling for a fight despite Being aware of their location the gorillas were able to rush into position and execute an almost perfect Ambush on the approaching civil guard two of the fascists were
immediately dispatched and the remaining civil guard were pinned down picked off and then forced into a retreat until reinforcements could arrive the gorillas used this law in the fighting to flee the area but before they did so they fell upon the bodies of the dead and Dying fascists looting everything they possibly could before making their escape Eloy ran all the way back to S where the Victorious gorillas melted back into the mountains Vanishing among a network of hidden encampments over the days that followed aloy waited anxiously for that fateful knock on his front door the
Spanish government had an extensive network of Civilian informants and seemed only a matter of time before someone would come For him but when the knock came and aloy opened his front door he discovered it was Juan on the doorstep come with me his old friend said we need to talk in the aftermath of the firefight at the abandoned Villa the anti-fascist gorillas carried away a great deal of loot from the slain civil Guardsmen Apparently one of the Fallen Guardsmen was an officer because among that loot was a small folded piece of paper with the group's
orders written on It the note named eloy's fellow park ranger Alfonso Martinez is their informant and it's possible that it mentioned that another unnamed park ranger being the primary source of the information it's reasonable to believe that in order to preserve the anonymity of a man he was no doubt close to Alfonso Martinez neglected to name Eloy in his report to the Spanish police but seeing as the Pico de europa's Ranger team was so small in Number the gorillas Quickly deduced that the primary source was none other than aloy cilo Perez on April 24th of
1945 aloy was marched up into the mountains to a top secret guilla headquarters and subjected to several rounds of intense interrogation with what happened afterwards is a subject of much speculation even today but a few months later one captured Guerilla fighter claimed to know the definitive truth referring to Juan Fernandez aala by his Nickname juanan the captured gorilla explained that he'd spotted Juan walking aloy into the jungle the parot seemed relaxed with Juan assuring his old friend that everything was going to be okay and then he'd been forgiven for his accidental transgression moments later a
single gun shot was heard and Juan returned alone after learning of his death aloy's relatives contacted the Spanish police and pleaded with them to bring home his Body joined by dozens of Civilian volunteers officers conducted extensive searches of the peos de europas but no trace of aloy could be found it was hoped that one day Juan Fernandez aala might reveal the location of aloy's body but it was a secret that he would take to his grave on April 24th of 1957 12 years to the day since aloy's execution Juan was killed in a shootout with
Spanish military police in the end aloy's loved ones grew to accept that Dead or alive he was never coming home but in the words of Walt Whitman nothing is ever really lost during the summer of 2018 a team of professional cavers was exploring a system of underground passageways on the Eastern inside of the Pico Europa thanks in part to funding from the European Union the Spanish government hired the group of Highly experienced spelunkers to search for the remains of those who had gone missing as A result of both the Spanish Civil War as well as
its prolonged and painful aftermath Eloy cilio Perez wasn't the only man to go missing in the area so it's not like the search team was specifically looking for him but there's no doubt that reports of his disappearance factored into the government's decision to dispatch cavers to the National Park upon reaching the entrance of a Subterranean cave known as the Tor de Topor the group unpacked their things and prepared to descend almost 200 M beneath the Earth the climb down took a great deal of care and precision no small feat even for such experienced cavers but
once they successfully reached the bottom of the Cave the cavers began a careful search for any trace of human remains they soon found some among a section of mud and debris the cers recovered bones later determined to be human after Extracting strands of DNA from the sections of skull and Jawbone police compared them to samples taken from aloy's living relatives and they were a perfect match after having been missing for almost a quarter of a century aloy cilo Perez had finally been found when news of the match reached eloy's 75-year-old daughter Mercedes she defied her
Advanced years to hike all the way out to her father's final resting place to pay her last Respects her loved ones implored her to await further developments at home but Mercedes insisted on camping near the cave system's entrance while the subsequent investigations unfolded she was present when investigators determined that aloy had been executed by a single shot from a 9mm Astra 400 handgun the same variety of pistol found in Juan Fernandez aa's possession following his sudden and violent Death throughout the remainder of 2018 summer Spanish authorities continued to reconstruct aoy skeleton and it was through
this process that they made a chilling Discovery the Lo weren't the only set of human remains that had been left down to rot there in the dark as investigators began working to reconstruct the second of the two skeletons several details became evident the first was that the bones belonged to a female aged 10 to 14 years old when She' expired the second was that the girl hadn't died on the same night as aoy but rather between 5 and 15 years later after analyzing the girl's bones to determine the date of her death investigators determined that
the girl was most probably the child of local Shepherds who had accidentally fallen into the cave while working or playing near its entrance yet this claim was quickly dismissed by accomplished forensic Anthropologist Dr Fernando culia Dr culia was famous in Argentina for having helped identify almost 100 nameless Argentine soldiers who died in their disastrous attempted takeover of the British Faulkland Islands then upon hearing of the Camry and Jane Doe she was generous enough to offer her services to the Spanish government however upon performing her own analysis of the girl's remains Dr CIA declared the girl
could not have Been a rural Shepherd her bone structure suggested that rather than a diet consisting mostly of corn which would have marked her out as coming from a lowincome rural family the girl had subsisted on high amounts of lowfat animal protein meaning she was probably raised on the much more populous krian Coast Dr culia further analyzed the girl's DNA to create a physical depiction of what she might have looked like she was said to have been around 4' 8 in tall with green eyes and dark brown hair this description was then disseminated all over
kabria in the hopes that it might jog someone's memory but sadly no one came forward with any pertinent information perhaps the closest investigators came to a definitive break in the case was after learning of a little known fact regarding the Picos de europas following General Franco's rise to power many innocent Spaniards simply Disappeared but not all were victims of the fascist secret police and not all joined the gorillas in the mountain Refuge some wish to go off the grid so to speak and live out their lives and privacy among Spain's remote mind riddled mountains some
of these people would have been wanted by Franco fascists for perceived disloyalty to the regime While others simply didn't want to live under a dictatorship but couldn't bear to abandon the country of Their birth most found work as undocumented Miners and Affiliated mining workers and built their own ramshackle housing hidden among the pine blanketed hillsides some would marry others would have children but all would remain utterly secluded from the world around them therefore it stands to reason that if one of their Community went missing they would do their utmost to avoid the involvement of outside
authorities a police investigation might Uncover far more than just the truth and for many of Spain's Republican fugitives such a possibility could not be entertained given that less than 20% of the girl's skeleton had been recovered investigators had been unable to determine the exact cause of her death in fact some attempts at analysis have preceded some very strange observations for example there's no doubt that the girl fell almost directly down the Cave's 180 M long entrance shaft before smashing into its Rocky floor yet only a few of the recovered Bones show any signs of high
energy impact damage the girl's femur and jaw were completely intact with only small sections of her Cranium said to display any significant damage this has led some to theorize that the girl was murdered via a Blow To The Head then somehow placed down in the cave in a way which precludes any kind of prolonged fall essentially there are Two competing primary theories here number one the girl's death was entirely accidental and by some physical anomaly only fractured her skull after a near 200 M Fallen to a hard Rocky surface or number two the girl was
murdered by someone with so much Twisted affection for her that he chose to gently lower her body into the cave in a sick parody of a funeral as of June of the Year 2022 the identity of the topor Janel remains a Mystery and while Spanish police have stated that investigation is still open the chances of further developments is highly improbable her DNA has since been uploaded to the Phoenix database a project launched by the Civil guard in 1999 to help solve cold cases as well as to identify John and Jane do aloy celio's remains were
eventually returned to his family and he was laid to rest in the ancient Cemetery of the very Town He'd given his life to protect his daughter stated that the topan noria Jane do is also buried in that same Cemetery right next to her father's grave after they've been so many years down there together in the cave she said it wouldn't be fair to separate them now hey friends thanks for listening click that notification Bell to be alerted of all future narration I release new videos every Monday Wednesday and Friday at 7 p.m. EST and There
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