KallMeKris

But back in Germany, family members and colleagues would have begun to notice.

There was no postcards, no phone calls, no word at all.

But tracing a family moving through the American West in the pre-smartphone era of 1996 was not a simple thing to do.

And communication between German authorities and American ones took a lot of time.

And the bureaucratic machinery of the International Missing Persons case moved slowly when there was no crime scene and no accident report.

and no last known location beyond a country the size of a continent.

So Heike Weber, Georg's mother, the woman who had not responded to Egbert's facts from Las Vegas, was now waiting to hear from her son.

And she had said nothing when the money was requested.

And now she waited along with everyone else as the silence stretched from days into weeks.

And by September, so from July to September, Dollar Rent-A-Car had finally reported the Plymouth Voyager to the Los Angeles Police Department as stolen.

That was the car that they had rented to travel across the states because the family had checked it out on July 8th and never returned it and had gone completely dark.

So Interpol issued an alert on the family.

So the machinery was finally moving, but it had nothing to really work with.

Four people had entered the United States, rented a car and basically just vanished.

And where they had gone and why and whether they had chosen to vanish or had something else entirely happened to them was not completely clear.

But it was a routine helicopter patrol that broke that silence.

And in late October of 1996, a park ranger was conducting an aerial survey of a remote section of Death Valley.

Just one of the regular flyovers, the park service ran to look for illicit drug manufacturing operations, which had become a persistent problem in the more inaccessible corners of the Mojave during that era.

And he was covering a stretch of backcountry when something caught his eye below.

It was a vehicle sitting in a dry wash far from the road.