that it involves genuine and periodic exposure to…
that it involves genuine and periodic exposure to the kinds of harm that wilderness areas, difficult terrain, and occasional human malice can produce.
Clare’s disappearance had affected him differently from the others, he said, partly because it was unresolved, and partly because she had been specifically exceptional in ways that made the loss feel specifically large.
He had stayed in contact with the case intermittently after his retirement, calling the Warren County Cold Case Unit every few years to ask about the status.
He had been told each time that there were no new developments.
He had accepted this and asked to be notified if that changed and gone back to his retirement in Harrisonenberg.
He was 78 years old in 2023 when the call came through.
He said later that he had known when the phone rang at an unusual hour that it was the call he had been waiting for and that the specific mixture of relief and grief he experienced in the following hour was something he had not been prepared for despite having thought about it many times across many years.
Ellen Dun Fields had organized her relationship with the case over 34 years into something she described as managed attention.
She checked in.
She stayed informed.
She did not allow the unresolved nature of the case to be the organizing principle of her daily life because she had seen what that did to people and she had decided she was not going to let it do that to her.
She had continued their mother’s landscape architecture profession.
She had a particular specialty in habitat restoration, returning developed or damaged land to its ecological baseline, which she had developed partly for professional reasons and partly because working with landscape recovery had turned out to be the thing that felt most continuous with what Clare had done and believed.
She had gone back to the Shannondoa at least once a year since 1989, usually in August.
She had hiked sections of the trail that Clare had known, not in the section where she disappeared.
She had found that she was not able to do that section comfortably, but in adjacent sections where she knew Clare had also walked.
She said she found it useful, that it was the closest she could get to the landscape her sister had worked in and loved, and that the landscape itself had a continuity that the events of August 1989 had not disrupted.
The trail was still there.
The ridge was still there.
The red tailed hawk still circled above the valley in the thermals of an August afternoon.
Clare had known all of this.
Ellen knew that Clare had known it, and knowing that was something.
Gerald Fitch had lived in Stuntton for most of the period between 1989 and 2023.
The specific proximity staunted to the central Shannondoa corridor was under 30 m had been noted by investigators as consistent with the pattern of a man who had maintained access to the terrain where he had committed a crime without relocating to the other side of the country.
Whether this represented something deliberate or simply the ordinary geographic inertia of a person who had built his life in a place and stayed, investigators were not able to say with certainty.
He had worked in logistics and transportation across those decades, driving routes, managing schedules, the kind of work that moves through the landscape without being visible in it.
He had been asked in the course of the 1994 Daly Assad’s investigation and the 1991 complaint whether he had a particular interest in the Shannondoa area.
He had said no.
He had said he hiked occasionally like a lot of people in the region.
He had been believed on both occasions.
The trail head log had held his name for 34 years in the NP’s archive, written in his own hand at 8:10 on the morning of August 15th, 1989 in the register that every hiker was supposed to sign, and most did.
He had signed it.
He had signed his own name.
It had not been the kind of detail that the 1989 investigation had the ability to cross reference against regional law enforcement databases because those databases were not yet built or accessible in the way they would become over the following decades.
In 2023, the cross reference took agent Reeves about 40 minutes.
The trail log had been patient.
The park had been patient.
The red-tailed hawks had circled above the valley through 34 August afternoons without knowing what they were circling above.
The truth had been in the records the whole time, waiting for the right question.
The specific challenge of the Shenondoa case for investigators over the years had been the absence of any evidence that a crime had occurred at all.
Trail gear found on the path could be explained multiple ways.
a fall, a medical event, a decision to leave the gear and descend the slope.
The terrain around the drainage ravine was steep and heavily wooded.
The search teams in 1989 had been thorough, within the limits of what was possible in a mountain wilderness search.
But thoroughess in wilderness searches is not the same as completeness.
and the geography could accommodate an outcome that left no immediately discoverable trace.
Daveqincaid had held on to a specific conviction for 34 years that he had found difficult to justify evidentially in the early years, but that had become more justifiable as the pattern of Gerald Fitch’s regional law enforcement history had emerged one piece at a time in databases that were not linked in 1989, but that were linked by 2023.
The conviction was simply this.
Clare was too experienced in that terrain for the trail gear to tell the story by itself.
She had not left her pack because she fell.
She had left her pack because someone had made her leave it.
He had said this to investigators in 1989.
He had been noted as saying it.
The investigation had been unable to build a case from the saying of it alone.
What it had needed was a name and a dena sample and a database that could match them to the pack.
And those things had required 34 more years to assemble.
Agent Thomas Reeves, who had found Gerald Fitch’s name in the digitized trail log and had made the cross reference to the regional law enforcement database, said in a 2023 interview that the digitization project had been undertaken primarily for historical and accessibility reasons.
making the NPC’s paper records searchable and preservable and that its utility for cold case investigation had been a secondary benefit that had not been fully anticipated when the project was approved.
He said the Dunston case was the first in which the digitized trail log had produced a direct cold case lead and that he expected it would not be the last.
The Shannondoa National Parks Visitor Center displays a photograph of Clare in her ranger uniform in its ranger heritage exhibit alongside photographs of other rangers who had served at the park across its history.
The photograph had been placed there in 2005 as part of a broader effort to document the human dimension of the park’s professional history.
It shows Clare in the summer uniform standing on a ridge above the Shannondoa Valley looking at something out of frame to the left, a hawk or a tree or a shadow moving across the ridge or something else entirely that had caught her attention and that she was looking at with the full unhurried quality of someone who is completely at home in the place where they are standing.
She is still there in the park, in the photograph on the wall, in the name that will now be attached to a solved case in the National Park Services records, in the landscape that she spent three years learning at the species level, and that she understood by the summer of 1989 better than almost anyone who had worked within it.
Ellen visits the park in August.
She hikes the ridges Clare knew and is not hiking them alone.
Before you go, what do you think about the National Park Services digitization of historical trail records and what cold cases it might have made newly resolvable? What detail in Clare’s story affected you most? And how do you think about justice in a case where the victim spent her professional life protecting the place where she ultimately became a victim? Justice found Claire Marie Dunston after 34 years found her through a digitized trail log and Adena match and an investigator who cross reference the right databases at the right time.
Stories like hers are why this channel exists.
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More cases are in the description.
Thank you for watching.
