KallMeKris

This was a tough group.

So they had hiked roughly nine miles back to the truck, roughly 14 miles total that day.

And Mahoud found a sliver of cell signal and made the call.

So they reached the Furnace Creek Visitor Center at 5.02 p.m., two minutes after closing, and a ranger met them out back.

And the next morning, Mahoud flew out to the site in a Navy Seahawk helicopter alongside law enforcement, including an FBI agent, and guided them to the location using his personal GPS.

And in December of 2009, a formal multi-agency evidence search was mounted with roughly 27 searchers, tracking dogs, and helicopter support.

And DNA extracted from deep within one of the adult bones was matched to Egbert Rimkus with high confidence in May of 2010.

And the female remains identified by the surrounding documentation and the wallet could not yield conclusive DNA after 13 years of desert exposure.

But we can safely assume that that was Cornelia.

So the families were contacted in Dresden.

And Heike Weber, Georg's mother, the woman who had not responded to the facts from Las Vegas, learned that her son was deceased.

Whatever she had allowed herself to believe in the years of silence or refused to believe, she now had the answer.

And Georg Rimkus, 11 years old in July of 1996, had walked into the desert with his father and had not come back.

And remains consistent with children were found in the same general area where the adults had been located because the years of summer heat cycles in Death Valley had degraded the children's remains to a degree that made positive DNA identification impossible with the technology and samples available at the time.

And a subsequent trip Mahoud made in March of 2010 turned up German health insurance cards in Cornelia's and Max's names.

and a set of European house keys in the surrounding terrain.

And Interpol's missing persons database still carries active entries for Georg Rimkus and Max Meyer.

This is not because there is any serious question what actually happened to them or any real uncertainty about where they had ended up, but it's just a bureaucratic reality of forensic identification because without a confirmed DNA match, the cases cannot be formally closed.

But we know almost for certain that four people died in that desert.

Egbert, Cornelia, Max, and Georg.