Thursday, September 11th, 2014, 5:47 a.m. Cold September light through thin curtains, room 14, Flagg Ranch Resort, just south of Yellowstone’s south entrance.
A topographic map spread flat on the bed. A field notebook, half full. Ellie Marsh, 19, biology student, University of Colorado Boulder, solo hiker.
She has done the Colorado Trail, the John Muir Trail, the Wind Rivers. She knows how to read weather.
She holds a Wilderness First Responder certification. She is not careless. This matters because people will later look for the mistake that separates them from her.
There was no such mistake. 6:15 a.m. Ellie eats breakfast in the resort dining room.
Scrambled eggs, toast, black coffee. The waitress, Darlene Pruitt, will remember her. She was cheerful.
She had a lot of gear and I thought, that girl knows what she’s doing.
6:44 a.m. She buys two Cliff Bars and spare batteries at the general store.
Pays cash. 7:02 a.m. Checks out of room 14. 8:19 a.m. Collects her backcountry permit at Grant Village Visitor Center.
The issuing ranger, Thomas Beauchamp, notes she asks smart questions about the thermal areas near Shoshone Geyser Basin.
She had the kind of questions that tell you a person has done their homework.
Weather forecast, low 50s by day, mid 20s at night, possible afternoon showers from Saturday.
Ellie nods. She has a tarp system rated for sustained rain. It’s in her pack.
Her planned [snorts] route, a 6-day 47-mile loop through Yellowstone’s remote interior. DeLacey Creek Trailhead to Shoshone Lake to Shoshone Geyser Basin to Heart Lake to South Entrance Road.
Backcountry campsites reserved, everything documented, everything printed. 9:05 a.m. She parks her silver 2011 Honda CRV at the DeLacey Creek Trailhead.
She photographs the car in its parking spot, a habit her father taught her, and texts it to her mother with the message, “Heading in.
Out September 17th. Love you. Call you then.” Her mother, Karen Marsh, replies at 9:09, “Be safe, my love.
Call the second you’re back.” 9:14 a.m. Ellie slips her phone into the hip belt pocket of her Gregory Baltoro 65 pack, 32 lb of gear, food, and water, and starts down the trail.
1 mile in, she passes two hikers heading out. Robert Tillman, 56, retired school teacher from Boise.
She said, “Good morning.” She was walking strong. She looked like she belonged out there.
That is the last time anyone who was not her captor saw Ellie Marsh walking freely.
The lodgepole pine forest closes behind her. The sound of the parking lot fades to nothing.
It is 9:14 in the morning on the 11th of September, 2014. Wednesday, September 17th.
In the days that followed, Karen Marsh calls her daughter at 8:00 a.m. Voicemail. She calls again at 10:00, at noon, at 2:00, at 5:30, at 7:15 she calls her husband, Dennis.
She’s probably driving. She’ll call tonight. She does not call that night. September 18th, 7:08 a.m.
Karen calls Yellowstone National Park and reports her daughter overdue. A ranger is dispatched to DeLacy Creek Trailhead.
The silver CRV is exactly where Ellie left it. Frost on the windshield. The case shifts categories, overdue hiker to missing person.
Incident command is established by 1:00 p.m. Three search teams deploy into the backcountry. A fixed-wing aircraft begins aerial passes at dawn on the 19th.
The terrain is brutal for searching. Yellowstone’s interior is architecturally complex. Uniform lodgepole pine in every direction, flat and featureless.
Standard visual grids nearly impossible to implement. The thermal areas add specific danger, hot springs that can destroy soft tissue within minutes of immersion, leaving almost nothing recoverable.
Ellie had food for 6 days. She has now been in the field for 9.
September 20th, 9:17 a.m. In the rain on the left side of the trail between two large boulders of volcanic rhyolite, Ranger Lindsey Croft spots something on the ground, Ellie’s field notebook, face down in the mud, heavy with water.
The last entry, dated September 11th, timestamped 11:38 a.m. In Ellie’s own hand, “Thermal smell stronger here.
Stopping to check boot, right heel rubbing. Fixed with moleskin. Birch trees in the gap, not sure species, check later.
Someone else on the trail, heard footsteps behind me, stopped to let pass, no one appeared.
Probably acoustic effect from the rock, strange. Beautiful day, 47 miles.” Below that entry, a single trailing pen line, as if the hand holding it had been moved suddenly.
Nothing else. FBI forensic analysis confirms three partial palm prints on the back cover, unknown origin, consistent with a large male hand, insufficient for database matching, sufficient to confirm they do not belong to Ellie.
14 days of active search operations, 312 person search hours, 67 aircraft hours. Tracking dogs lose the scent trail within a few hundred yards of the boulder site.
Ellie’s reserved campsite at 8S1 was never occupied, the fire ring untouched, the bear box undisturbed.
September 26th, active search suspended. Case assigned to Special Agent Marcus Webb, FBI Salt Lake City Missing Persons Division.
Webb reviews the evidence and says, “A person who falls, who wanders, who goes into a thermal feature, they don’t drop their notebook and leave one line.
Something took her from that trail, and something took the notebook from her hand. Case classified.
Missing person, circumstances unknown, possible foul play. The park closes its backcountry campgrounds for winter.
The trail to Shoshone Lake will be empty until May. September 2014 to September 2015.
Karen Marsh later describes the first winter as learning to live inside a question. Dennis Marsh, civil engineer, handles it the only way he knows.
Systematically. He builds a spreadsheet of every person recorded entering Delacy Creek Trailhead within 48 hours of September 11th.
19 entries, 13 interviewed by the FBI, three unreachable, three with no contact information. Dennis calls every ranger station in the southern quadrant of the park.
Nobody can help. He keeps the spreadsheet open every evening from October through March. Their son Tyler, 23, drives from Denver every other weekend.
He doesn’t know what to say, so he fixes [music] things. Replaces weather stripping, reseals the driveway, drinks coffee in the kitchen, and pretends the absence is temporary.
Their younger son Aaron, [music] 16, carries it alone in his room, invisibly, the way teenagers grieve.
April 2015. Private investigator Carl Brewer, 58, former Teton County Sheriff’s detective, contacts Dennis Marsh.
He has been tracking the case on professional courtesy. He drives to Fort Collins and sits in the family kitchen for 3 hours.
The partial prints on the back cover, he says, “Someone picked up that notebook, and then they left it there, either because it wasn’t useful to them, or because they wanted us to find it.”
He pauses. “I don’t like the second option.” Brewer begins working the case at a reduced rate.
He drives the road corridors of southern Wyoming and northern Utah. He shows Ellie’s photograph to campground hosts, fuel operators, fishing guides.
Nobody has seen her. He also builds a geographic analysis of remote properties along the southern Yellowstone approach corridor, male single occupancy, purchased between 2010 and 2014, limited visible activity.
The list has 47 properties. He has no legal authority to investigate any of them.
He drives past as many as he can on public roads and takes notes in his small handwriting.
The public largely forgets the case by December 2014. [music] Karen Marsh gives one interview on the one-year anniversary.
She says, “She is still out there. I know she is. A mother knows.” The field notebook sits in an evidence bag in the FBI’s Salt Lake City storage facility.
The single trailing pen line says nothing to anyone. It waits. The silver CRV sits in the Marsh family driveway in all weather.
The University of Colorado parking sticker beginning to peel at one corner. Dennis walks past it every morning on his way to work >> [music] >> and does not look at it.
Every evening when he comes home, he does not look at it. It keeps its silence perfectly.
Sunday, September 13th, 2015, 7:22 a.m. Janette Forsyth, 61, has fished Shoshone Lake at dawn every September for 17 years.
She knows the lake’s moods, its light, its particular morning smell of cold water and sulfur and pine duff.
This morning she moves east along the northern shore. The wind is from the west.
The section of shoreline here is different. A flat rocky shelf extends 8 ft into the water before the floor drops away sharply.
The water knee-deep, opaque with dissolved minerals from the thermal areas a quarter mile to the west.
She sees the girl at 7:22 in the morning, standing approximately 15 ft from shore, water at mid-thigh, hiking clothes, colors faded, arms at her sides, not moving, head slightly lowered, gaze on the water, not fishing, not swimming, simply standing in the lake in the early morning.
The water moving in slow rings around her legs, her hair loose and damp around her face.
Janet stops. [music] She calls out, “Hello, are you all right?” The girl does not move, does not look up.
Janet calls again louder. The girl turns her head very slowly. She looks at Janet from across 15 ft of cold water.
Her face is pale. Her eyes are open. There is no expression in them that Janet can identify.
Not fear, not recognition, not confusion. “It was like looking at someone who was present in their body but not inside it,” Janet says later.
“I know how that sounds, but it’s what I saw.” Janet walks into the water, takes the girl’s arm gently.
The girl allows herself to be guided toward the shore without resistance. She does not speak.
On shore, Janet wraps her in an emergency foil blanket. The girl does not shiver.
The water temperature is 48° F. “What’s your name?” Janet asks. A long silence. Then, in a voice that is dry and very careful, testing each word to see if it will hold weight, “Girl, I don’t know.”
7:31 a.m. Janet activates her personal locator beacon. Ranger Patricia Dell arrives at 8:44. [music] Rapid trauma assessment.
Pulse 58, temperature 96.8° F. Borderline hypothermic. Eyes reactive. [music] No obvious external injuries, but bilateral wrist scarring consistent with prolonged ligature restraint.
The skin has healed and scarred repeatedly. Dell notes this and says nothing aloud. The girl’s photograph reaches Special Agent Marcus Webb’s office in Salt Lake City at 9:02 a.m.
He recognizes her in approximately 4 seconds. He has been looking at that face for 12 months.
He calls the park at 9:04. >> [music] >> He is told she is alive.
A silence that the dispatcher later describes as like the phone had gone dead. Then Webb, don’t move her until I get there.
I’m coming now. He drives 290 miles from Salt Lake City to the Yellowstone South Entrance in 3 hours and 49 minutes.
The medical evacuation helicopter arrives at 10:17. By this time identification is confirmed through the FBI alert system.
Eleanor Ellie Marsh, 19 at the time of her disappearance, now 20. Missing for exactly 367 days.
She is conscious. She follows physical guidance without resistance. She has not spoken again. 11:34 a.m.
Receiving physician Dr. Amara Osay >> [music] >> completes initial assessment. Intake notes, severe malnutrition, bilateral wrist scarring consistent with chronic ligature restraint, multiple healed contusions, and complete autobiographical amnesia.
Recommend psychiatric evaluation within 24 hours. Mark as possible prolonged captivity case. 1:19 p.m. Webb calls Dennis Marsh at his office.
Dennis hears four words. Webb, we found your daughter. 8:47 p.m. Karen and Dennis Marsh arrive at St.
John’s Medical Center. Karen opens the door to Ellie’s room. Ellie is in bed looking at the ceiling.
She turns her head. She looks at her mother’s face for a long time. The same careful studying expression Janet Forsyth saw at the lake.
Then something shifts. The nurses at the station outside hear Karen make a sound that exists below language entirely.
Then silence. Then Ellie says very quietly a single word. Ellie, Mom. September to November 2015.
Ellie’s memory does not return all at once. It comes back the way light enters a room with its curtains closed.
Not in a flood, but in widening strips. She is referred to Dr. Renata Samsky, clinical psychologist specializing in complex trauma.
They meet three times [music] a week. Shimanski does not push. In the first session, Ellie cannot say her own name with certainty.
She knows it intellectually. She has been told, but it does not feel like hers.
She describes the sensation as wearing someone else’s jacket. She can recall sensory details without narrative.
The smell of pine sap [music] and motor oil, a generator running at night, unfinished concrete under her hands, the weight of an enforced silence.
Not the silence of outdoors or sleep, but of a space where sound had been systematically prevented from existing.
Meanwhile, the physical evidence works faster than memory. September 17th, Webb’s forensic team searching the backcountry northwest of Shoshone Lake finds vehicle tracks cut into the forest floor.
Twin ruts pressed to bare soil, used repeatedly. Forensic specialist Roland Price follows them 600 yards through the trees to a wire and post gate padlocked, set in a barbed wire fence line.
The fence and gate are inside the park boundary. Someone has constructed a structure on federal land without authorization.
The road on the other side crosses the park boundary 1.2 miles further northwest, passing into the Caribou-Targhee National Forest, then descending to a county road 8 miles from Moran, Wyoming.
Property records search results at 7:00 p.m. A 12.4 acre parcel of forested land. [music] Owner of record, Gerald Alan Foss, 53, purchased 2011.
No utility connections, no prior law enforcement contact. September 19th, 11:14 a.m. Search warrant issued.
September 20th, 6:00 a.m. Nine agents and four sheriff’s deputies arrive at the property. Frost on the grass.
First light coming through the pines in flat horizontal shafts. The house is a single story structure with dark green painted siding, potted geraniums on the porch railing, a wind chime made of copper pipe, a welcome mat.
Above the front door, pressed wood letters spell out the word home. Gerald Foss comes to the door at 6:08 a.m.
In a gray sweatshirt and canvas work pants. 53 years old, 5 ft 10, thinning brown hair.
He blinks at the dawn and the line of agents. He does not resist. He does not run.
He looks at Special Agent Webb with an expression Webb will later describe to the jury as “the most carefully neutral expression I have ever seen on a human face, as if he had been practicing it.”
Foss, “I’d like to call my lawyer.” What they find inside the house takes 7 hours to fully document.
The front rooms are orderly, unremarkable. Dishes drying beside the sink, a coffee carafe on a programmable maker, a calendar on the kitchen wall turned to September.
On the refrigerator, a single photograph, a magnet, a woman smiling at a lake. The refrigerator itself does not sit flush against the north wall.
It stands 4 in proud of the wall. The linoleum beneath it shows a curved wear mark, the kind left by something swung repeatedly on a fixed pivot point.
Forensic specialist Diane Kwan observes the wear mark and calls Webb. Behind the refrigerator, attached on its right side to a hidden pivot mechanism in the floor and wall framing, is a door.
Plywood, 3/4 in, painted to match the kitchen wall exactly. Secured from the kitchen side by a slide bolt mounted 12 in above head height, accessible to a standing adult, not to someone shorter reaching from the other side.
11 steps down, a concrete floored space, 20 by 14 ft, 7-ft ceiling, four fluorescent tube lights, switch accessible only from the top of the stairs.
Luminol testing confirms biological materials, blood, urine, sweat, [music] scrubbed but not eliminated, covering 40 square feet in the eastern corner.
In that corner, two U-bolts set in the concrete with epoxy. Between them, a length of 3/16-in steel cable 6 ft long, long enough to reach the bucket in the corner, not long enough to reach the stairs.
The room contains a bare folding cot, a galvanized steel bucket with a fitted lid, a small bookshelf holding 18 paperback books, mass-market fiction, nature writing, a Rocky Mountain Wildflowers Field Guide.
On the spine of the field guide, written in pencil in small, careful letters, Ellie.
The handwriting is not hers. A wooden box on the shelf contains 367 index cards.
Each card bears a date. The dates run consecutively from September 11th, 2014 to September 12th, 2015, with a gap beginning September 9th, 3 days before the cards end.
Each card, a brief entry in the same small, careful hand. Observations, weather notes, a daily log.
When the cards are read aloud at trial, the courtroom is silent in the specific way that silence has become something heavier than silence.
On the wall beside the bookshelf, at the height of a seated person, scratches in the concrete, not random, organized.
Lines in groups of five, the fifth line diagonal, the universal counting system of confinement.
71 complete sets, a partial group of two, 357 days, recorded scratch by scratch in concrete by a girl who had no pen, no notebook, no way to hold on to time except with her fingernails.
The scratches stop at 357. She was there for 367 days total. For the final 10 days, she had stopped counting.
Dr. Semansky will later note that the cessation of counting is consistent with the onset of the severe dissociative episode that ended, in some form not fully understood, with Ellie standing in Shoshone Lake on a September morning, empty of herself, waiting to be found.
Gerald Foss is transported to the Teton County Detention Center. He sits in the rear of the FBI transport vehicle with his hands in his lap and says nothing for the entire journey.
Carl Brewer receives a call from Dennis Marsh at 2:30 that afternoon. Dennis, they got him.
Pause. It was on your list. Brewer’s list of 47 properties built with no legal authority, no evidence, only geographic intuition and 30 years of reading landscapes had included Gerald Foss’s property at [music] number 31.
Brewer sits in his office for a long time after the call ends. He writes one line in his small notebook and closes it.
Trial. March through May 2016 and beyond October 28th, 2015. Grand jury indictment, kidnapping in the first degree, false imprisonment, aggravated assault, unlawful restraint.
Federal charges concurrent. Kidnapping resulting in aggravated sexual abuse, federal kidnapping under the Lindbergh Law.
The principal federal count carries mandatory minimum life imprisonment without parole. Trial commences March 7th, 2016.
United States District Court for the District of Wyoming Cheyenne. Prosecution, AUSA Carolyn Feld, 44.
Defense, court-appointed Paul Rector, 50, who argues that Ellie’s amnesiac state makes her testimony unreliable and challenges the chain of custody of forensic evidence.
The strategy has a structural problem. Ellie Marsh is not the only evidence. By trial, her memory has returned to approximately 85% of its previous completeness.
Some gaps remain, specific periods from the first weeks of captivity and the final days before the lake, which remain almost entirely inaccessible.
What she can recall is documented, specific, and consistent with every piece of physical evidence recovered from the property.
She testifies over 3 days beginning March 14th. Gray blazer, hair pulled back. She sits very still and answers questions.
And when she needs time, she pauses and takes it. And when cross-examination pushes at the gaps in her memory, she says, without emotion, “Ellie, I don’t remember that specific period.
I have told you what I do remember.” She remembers the trail. She remembers stopping between two boulders to fix the moleskin on her heel and hearing footsteps and standing aside to let whoever was behind her pass.
She remembers the cloth pressed to her face from behind and the cold of the ground when she woke and the weight of the vehicle moving over rough terrain.
She remembers the smell of the basement before she saw it. She remembers the moment the light came on from the top of the stairs, which was always the moment that mattered most, and what she did when she heard footsteps on those stairs.
She demonstrates for the jury. She sits in the witness chair and pulls her shoulders inward and closes her eyes and stops breathing.
>> [music] >> The courtroom is silent for a moment. The court reporter later says felt like 15 seconds and probably lasted four.
>> [music] >> The 357 scratches are entered as exhibit 23. Forensic anthropologist Dr. Miriam Holcomb testifies that they were made with a human right index fingernail.
The nail having broken and regrown at least twice during the making of the marks, readable in the changing width of the scratches.
She presents this with the careful, professional affect of someone who has learned to deliver unbearable things as facts because facts [music] are what the system requires.
April 3rd, 2016. The jury deliberates 14 hours over 2 days. They return a verdict of guilty on all six counts.
Gerald Foss sits at the defense table and shows no expression. He has shown no expression throughout the trial, May 14th, 2016.
Judge Crane sentences him to life in federal prison without the possibility of parole. He [music] is transported to USP Victorville, California, where he remains.
At the sentencing hearing, under the victim’s right to speak provision, Ellie Marsh stands at the podium for 45 seconds.
She says, “Ellie, I want the record to show that I am here. I counted 357 days in that room, and I am here in this room now, and I will keep being here.
That is what I want the record to show.” She sits down. Judge Crane, “The record will so reflect.”
He means it as a formality. It does not sound like one. Ellie re-enrolls at the University of Colorado Boulder in fall 2016.
She majors in environmental biology. She graduates May 2019. The photograph from the ceremony shows her in cap and gown, holding her degree, looking directly at the camera.
Her expression is readable. It is composed and deliberate and present. She begins hiking again in summer 2018.
Her first post-recovery solo hike, 11 miles in Rocky Mountain National Park, a trail she has done before, same model Gregory pack, newly purchased, a new field notebook with a waterproof cover.
She does not return to Yellowstone until August 2020, when she hikes the South Rim Trail with her brother Tyler.
He later says she walked ahead of him for most of the day, setting a pace he struggled to match.
They camp near Lewis Lake. In the morning, she is up before he is, sitting outside the tent with her notebook, writing.
The field notebook from September 11th, 2014, retained as evidence through the final resolution of all appeals, is returned to Ellie in December 2017.
She does not open it for a long time. In spring 2018, sitting at her desk in Boulder with the window open to late April air and the sound of a lawn mower somewhere down the street, she reads it straight through all 31 pages.
The last line, the trailing pen mark, the sentence interrupted mid-word, she reads that, too.
Then she takes a new pen, >> [music] >> and in the space below the trailing line, in the same notebook on the same page, she writes the sentence to its end.
What she wrote [music] is her own. It was not entered into evidence. It does not belong to the record.
It belongs to the 47 miles and to the girl who walked them. Eleanor Ellie Marsh was 19 years old when she disappeared from the Delancey Creek Trailhead on September 11th, 2014.
She was 20 years old when she was found standing in the waters of Shoshone Lake on September 13th, 2015.
The 357 scratches in the concrete were documented, photographed, and preserved as part of the federal case record.
They remain in that record. They will not be removed. >> If this story shocked you, let me know what you would have done in this situation.
Did she make the right decision, or would you have handled it differently? Share your thoughts in the comments.
I read every one of them. And if you enjoy emotional stories with unexpected twists, don’t forget to like this video, subscribe to the channel, and I’ll see you in the next story.
