KallMeKris

Two sets of adult remains, bleached white by years of direct sun, scattered by wind and most likely by animals.

And Egbert and Cornelia had made it eight or nine miles from wherever the van had been broken down over rough ground in street shoes in the July heat.

And you have to know that in July, like there's been reports of people's soles of their shoes being melted because the sand is so hot.

And Mahoud stood there for a moment and absorbed what that meant.

And he wrote about it later saying, quote, to reach this spot required them to have hiked eight or nine miles over rough terrain in street shoes in July.

In my mind, they had earned a lot of respect for this accomplishment.

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.