Hello Friends!
Steve Stockton here with you.
Welcome to our latest video.
Today we bring you a special episode called: Lost Never Found
Join us!
There are tens of thousands of people who go missing every single year in the United
States alone.
These are due to kidnappings, homicides, people taking their own lives and many other situations
and circumstances.
There are cases though, that come up from time to time, where a person or people go
missing in such unusual and enigmatic circumstances that family members of the missing, the authorities
and the public in general are left scratching their heads for decades to come.
Sure, there are theories and rumors.
Always tons of speculation as to the how or why, where and when but the fact of the matter
is that most likely, no one will ever know the truth.
This is one such case.
It’s not a challenge to go missing in a National Park.
The woods of our world in general are filled with all sorts of dangers we could run, slip,
fall, walk or somehow get into in general.
One misstep or wrong turn could turn a person’s peaceful hiking or camping trip into a life
or death situation in which there could possibly be no return or going back from.
One such place of extreme and almost unreal beauty combined with labyrinthine twists and
turns, tall cliffs and scree fields, where a person could take one wrong turn and end
up in a disastrous struggle for their very survival, is Glacier State National Park.
This is where approximately 240 visitors have died in the past 240 years.
Some succumbed to drowning, others took their own lives, others had a tragic accident befall
them and still others were simply victims of mother nature.
The list of ways to die in the woods is tragically long and seemingly never ending.
Glacier State National Park is located in Western Montana, United States and we are
going to discuss just a handful of cases of men who have gone missing and have never been
seen again, dead or alive.
They are considered “lost but never found.”
In the summer of 1924, two brothers named Joseph and William Whitehead went missing
somewhere in the lush forests and beautiful mountains of Glacier State National Park and
they were never found, alive or deceased.
Their particular tragic disappearances took place in the 20 mile span between the Granite
Park Chalet and lake McDonald.
Joseph Whitehead was the elder of the two brothers at 29 years old.
He was an engineer for the Universal Battery Company, located in Chicago, Illinois.
His brother William was just 22 and attending MIT in Boston, Massachusetts at the time.
The photographs used in the reward photo after they disappeared showed them as two impeccably
groomed and very well dressed.
Letters they had written to their mother showed their personalities to be kind of reserved
and extremely respectful.
At the time of their disappearance, the brothers had been traversing the wilderness of Glacier
National Park for more than a week.
Theri hiked while there included those to Iceberg Lake, Cracker Lake and Grinnell Glacier.
They traveled by car and boat and then horseback from Glacier Park Lodge to Granite Park Chalet.
They were on an adventure.
Their itinerary had them next hiking 20 miles from the Chalet to the Lewis Hotel (now called
Lake McDonald Lodge.)
William and Joseph set out on August 24th with a plan to board the Great Northern Railroad’s
Oriental Limited home to Chicago at the end of their long and somewhat arduous journey.
The young men were characterized as “cautious and conservative.”
They were not men who took any kind of great risks or who would purposely put themselves
in harm's way for the sake of some sort of possibly ill fated adventure.
They were well prepared and seemed to have planned every single thing they did and that
they were going to do, while on this mini vacation together.
On August 20th, 1924, just four days before they would go missing, Joseph wrote, in art,
to his mother, “We are enjoying ourselves very much and taking no chances of injuring
ourselves.
Don’t worry mother, we won’t get into any danger.”
Four days after writing this, on a bright and sunny Sunday morning, the brothers left
the Granite Park Chalet on foot and headed into the forest for a hike which would take
them to the Lewis Hotel at lake McDonald for the last leg of their journey.
They were last spotted here, wearing what are still described to this day as “hiking
knickers” and smiling.
A mere ten miles from their final destination.
On September 1st, the boy's mother was there at the train station in Chicago to meet her
sons.
They never stepped off of the train though and thus began an intensive and rather extensive,
especially for the time, search for them.
At one point, even president Calvin Coolidge went to the park and told the rangers involved
to “spare no expense” in the search for these two young men.
“Thirteen rangers, two famous Indian Guides and seven tried mountaineers were out for
more than two weeks,” Interior Secretary F.M.
Goodwin reported on September 16th of that year.
“There never has been a search in the national parks conducted with more vigor and effort.”
By now this was national news and the Whitehead brothers had seemed, much to the nation’s
surprise and sadness, to have disappeared into thin air.
The park’s chief ranger and Superintendent Charles Kraebel, when he became aware of the
men’s disappearance, launched another massive search effort, confident that they would be
the ones to find the boys’ remains.
It had now become a recovery mission.
“With the coming snows, the search shifted to include a few criminal possibilities.
For more than two years, the new chief of the young Bureau of Investigation personally
oversaw the efforts of his ‘G-Men.’
Almost every month, J. Edgar Hoover filed a detailed progress report with the director
of the National Park Service or the Secretary of the Interior.
Clues for the investigators quickly ran out, as did the patience of Dora B. Whitehead,
the missing men’s mother.” wrote Charles R. “Butch” Farabee Jr., author of “Death,
Daring and Disaster: Search and Rescue in the National Parks.”
Even J. Edgar Hoover himself, instructed the FBI to get involved but it was still all in
vain.
Not a single clue as to the brother’s whereabouts was ever unearthed.
Most people just figured the men had come to a tragic, but accidental, demise.
Others though were convinced some sort of foul play had befallen them- perhaps at the
hands of bootleggers in the area.
No evidence ever turned up, one way or the other.
The men’s mother Dora, however, started to believe in the bootleg and foul play rumors
and wrote to the Secretary of the Interior, “I want my two sons, dead or alive.
Surely I am not asking too much.
They belong to me – I have a right to have them.
My two sons were murdered or kidnapped in a National Park, and I am pleading with the
Government of the United States to find them.”
The probe into the disappearance was exhaustive, yet still nothing became of it.
It’s been written that the disappearance of the Whitehead brothers is, “the most
perplexing and inexplicable mystery in our records.”
This case did come to serve a purpose though, one for the greater good.
From this point on, the job of the Park Ranger was forever changed.
Now not only was preserving the wildlife and natural resources of the park their most important
job, but protecting, finding and rescuing the visitors to the parks became their biggest
priority.
Whatever happened to the Whitehead brothers?
Decades later and still the Glacier Wilderness has divulged no clue.
It has, in fact, remained eerily silent in not only this case, but in the case of others
we are going to discuss today who disappeared under strange circumstances and who had their
disappearances itself become truly even more bizarre by the lack of evidence and clues
left behind.
Mainly there were none.
At all.
All of them fit to put under the rather heading of lost, never found in the wilds of the Glacier
National Park.
A man named W. Cosby Bell hiked up Mount Brown in the summer of 1933 and never came back
down again.
Another case of the mountain seemingly swallowing someone whole and spitting out no clue as
to where he ended up or what happened to him.
Records on this one are very scarce and hard to come by due to the date and lack of records
kept by the Park services.
Glacier National park has one million acres of rugged terrain alone.
This extremely vast expanse is almost unimaginable when trying to wrap our heads around the scope
of a search that would need to cover this much area in order to be fully complete.
On May 29th, 2003 a 40 year old man from Dorr, Michigan named Larry Kimble arrived in the
park, as was evidenced by an entrance ticket eventually found in his 1998 dark blue GMC
truck during the initial search.
When they hadn’t seen or heard from him in approximately 6 weeks, Larry’s friends
and loved ones reported him as missing.
The truck was found abandoned at the Rocky Point trailhead near Lake McDonald on June
16th.
Nobody had any clue whatsoever as to where he’d been or what he’d been doing from
the time he had entered the park until the time when his vehicle was discovered.
It’s a huge mystery how even search dogs and training SAR park personnel, including
rangers, could fail to turn up, once again, even a single solitary clue as to where in
the world Larry could have ended up.
It’s the same thing over and over again.
The same thing every time.
Person enters the park and is never seen or heard from again and there’s absolutely
no evidence whatsoever to even allude to where they may have gone.
Imagine the families and how they feel and what they must be going through.
Not knowing must be absolutely gut wrenching.
The Allegan County Sheriff’s Office took the initial missing person’s report on Larry.
Sgt.
Tony Saucedo stated, “his family is very worried about him.”
Jim Kinble, Larry’s brother, explained to investigators that nobody had seen or heard
from his brother since spring of that year.
Larry’s residence was searched but that, too, was an unfruitful search and yielded
nothing of any value to authorities.
Rangers discovered that Larry Kimble didn’t have a backcountry permit and discovered no
camping equipment in his abandoned vehicle.
There was also no record of him recently lodging in or even near the park either.
His family and friends reported that he was not the type to hike or camp and were unaware
of any itinerary he may have had when entering the park.
Nobody even knew beforehand that Larry had planned on going on this trip into the mountains
in the first place.
Authorities and Larry’s loved ones were stumped, to say the least and the lack of
any real clues or evidence as to his whereabouts stymied everyone.
Rangers initiated the first attempt at locating him on June 27th, but despite a search dog
and handler being brought in to search the Rocky Point area, the attempt was unsuccessful
and again, yielded nothing.
A second search effort on July 10th and a planned and mapped out grid search on the
11th also led nowhere.
Missing person flyers were posted at park trailheads in the vicinity of Rocky Point
and distributed around the park.
Sgt.
Clark said rangers are still seeking information or clues from the public or perhaps even other
visitors to that area of the park during the same stretch of time who may have seen or
spoken to him.
Larry Kimble is described as being six feet one inch tall, and weighing around 150-160
pounds He has brown hair and wears glasses.
When his family members last saw him, his hair was shoulder length and he was clean-shaven.
"For the time being, efforts to find Kimble will focus on trying to develop leads from
what was found in his truck, and following up on interviews with Kimble's family and
friends," Sgt.
Clark said July 14th.
Anyone with information about the disappearance of Larry Kimble can call Allegan County detectives
at 269-673-0520, or Glacier National Park Dispatch at 406-888-7801.
There has been no new information in 19 years and not a single clue has ever surfaced as
to what could have become of Larry Kimble.
If we think about the vastness mentioned earlier and the acres and acres of rough and rugged
terrain, four men seem extremely small, miniscule even, when compared to that amount of land.
Approximately one year after the unsuccessful search for Mr. W. Cosby Bell on August 30th,
1934 an Ohio State University College professor named Dr. Charles Frances Hillis Lumley who
was last heard from while at Goat Haunt Camp on the 13th.
It was, of course, unsuccessful.
A 21 year old seasonal park employee named David Paul Wilson climbed up Going-to-the-Sun
Mountain in 1963 and also never returned.
If you look at the states with the most missing people every year, it’s no surprise that
states like California (the state with the most missing people currently), Alaska (with
the most missing people per year), Arizona, Oregon, Washington and Vermont are always
in the top ten.
Is it just a coincidence that these states are states that house National Parks and mountain
ranges; places with acres and acres of woods and dense forested areas.
There’s something about the great outdoors and the great unknown that, as human beings,
simply calls to us.
Perhaps even lures us, but also keeps us off our guard with its beauty and tranquility.
While most people are found, whether alive or deceased, there are so many of those, throughout
the country and even the world, where we just are left wondering.
Sitting back and scratching our heads and hopefully, becoming ever more vigilant and
safe when we go out there, into the great unknown, ourselves.