Delia D'Ambra

Almost one year later, in February 2024, the 89-year-old mystery of what happened to Ellsworth was finally answered.

Turns out, when the Idaho Department of Fish and Game had been in the process of getting Ellsworth's name added to the fallen officers' memorials, elsewhere in the Shoshone community, people had been talking with their relatives.

And they kept talking, even after his name was added to the memorials in 2023.

When the agencies in charge of honoring Ellsworth put out the press releases about him being memorialized, several individuals came forward and told authorities a story they'd heard passed down in their families, a story about the killing of a game warden back in the 1930s.

According to an article by the Coeur d'Alene Post Falls Press, investigators with the Shoshone County Sheriff's Office looked into the claims and realized there might be some credibility to them.

Authorities pulled together all of the former law enforcement reports and newspaper articles about the case and successfully connected at least three people to the crime.

One of those suspects was a man named George Pentland Jr.

and his teenage son, John Robert Pentland, and John's friend, fellow teenager, Oscar Downey.

How exactly these guys knew Ellsworth or what led up to them reportedly attacking him is information that the Shoshone County Sheriff's Office admits is still a bit murky.

The agency explained to the Spokesman Review that four different people had come to them and shared that they'd been told by relatives that George and the two teens had been illegally harvesting deer in Boulder Gulch back in 1934.

On the day Ellsworth vanished, they'd come in contact with the game warden, and George ultimately killed him and got Oscar and John to assist him in getting rid of the body.

The folks who'd provided these accounts to the sheriff's office didn't seem to know one another, so the fact that all their stories appeared to align and name the same names made their claims that much more believable to authorities.

The sheriff's office emphasized in 2024 that they were confident those three guys were involved in murdering Ellsworth and then hid his body somewhere in the vast terrain south of Mullen.

Law enforcement officials had even cobbled together old forest maps to try and pinpoint where his remains could be.

But they opted not to expend any further resources to attempt to recover his remains, because they realized that after nearly 90 years in the forest with animal activity, fires, and decades of weather events, things had likely shifted a lot.

The Sheriff's Office's final word on this case is that it's closed, and the prime suspect, George Pentland Jr., was the person believed to have been responsible.

I found archival records online for George, which state that both he and his son John are now deceased.

George died in 1964 in his early 70s, and John died in 2002 at the age of 79.

While researching this case, I came across coverage by the Idaho statesman of a man sharing the same name.

According to that reporting, in September of 1929, about five years before Ellsworth's disappearance, a George Pentland Sr.