KallMeKris

So he brought the helicopter lower and the dust that had accumulated on the van was not the light coating of a vehicle that had just been parked for a few hours.

It was thick.

undisturbed layer of something that had been sitting in the same spot for a very long time.

And three tires were flat and the rims were visibly damaged, bent and scraped in a way that suggested the vehicle had been driven for some distance after the tires had already failed.

And there were no footprints that he could see in the area.

and there was no campfire remnants, and there was no indication that anyone was nearby or had been nearby recently.

So the ranger landed and ran the place.

And he would see that Dollar Rent-A-Car reported stolen by LAPD in September.

So he cross-referenced the rental records, and Egbert Rimkus and Cornelia Meyer, who were German nationals, were active on Interpol Alert.

So the vehicle had been found, but the family was nowhere to be seen.

So the search that followed was large by any standard.

Over 200 search and rescue personnel were deployed to the area over five days.

And at any given moment, roughly 45 of them were on the ground working through terrain that was miserable to move through even in late October.

and eight horses were brought in to cover ground that was difficult on foot, and four helicopters ran continuous aerial sweeps, and the total cost came in somewhere above $80,000 at the time, which is a lot of money, but they would find almost nothing.

The most significant item recovered was a single beer bottle approximately a mile from the van.

Beyond that, the search teams came up essentially empty,

there was no clothing there was no supplies there was no indication of which direction the family had even traveled in or when or under what circumstances and the van itself offered a little bit of evidence because the destroyed rim suggested it had been driven for a significant distance on those flat tires before being abandoned and it was buried to its axle in sand

consistent with the driver who had tried to power through loose terrain and had just gotten stuck.

But the family themselves had left no trail that the search teams could follow.

So the search was called off after five days and the case settled into an uncomfortable status, not closed exactly, but without any viable path forward.