Trail of the Lost by Andrea Lankford

Author:Andrea Lankford [LANKFORD, ANDREA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2023-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

Weird Science

FAMILIES OF THE MISSING LIVE IN AN AWFUL, FLUCTUATING LIMBO BETWEEN HOPE and hopelessness. They want and don’t want to know what happened to their loved ones. They want and don’t want news that a body has been found. They occasionally get angry at the missing person for causing them so much pain and these feelings—however normal they may be—induce crippling guilt. After a while, loved ones might tell them, “You need to move on,” even though the very idea of “moving on” seems impossible. As long as there is no body, even if the head can conclude a child is probably dead, the heart says that there may still be a chance. Perhaps, if they keep searching, they might find him alive. Trapped within this dreadful conundrum, Carmel O’Sullivan suffered—as the other mothers did—and it wracked her nerves to the core.

On the day late in 2017 when Martin Carew—a volunteer searcher with the Irish Outreach—lost his way while searching under Fuller Ridge, he and Cathy had been out until dark, and they returned to their hotel rooms late. Cold, grimed up, and dusty, Cathy showered first thing. After drying off, she grabbed her laptop and saw a fresh email in her inbox from Carmel, sent at two in the morning Irish time. From the email, Cathy could tell Carmel had been up all night, pacing around, her mind racing through all the worst-case scenarios, until she convinced herself that the volunteers had found David’s body, but the American authorities wouldn’t let them call.

Cathy felt a horrible, heavy burden. As if the responsibility of finding (or failing to find) David O’Sullivan was hers alone to carry.

In a way, it was.

“The [American] police, they don’t do anything,” Carmel had once lamented to Cathy, voicing her frustration with the lack of effort and cooperation she received from Riverside County.

There was some truth to Carmel’s complaint. The Forest Service had millions of acres to patrol and, unlike the National Park Service, the USFS didn’t consider missing-hiker cases as falling under its purview. The FBI was the government agency responsible for investigating serious crimes on most federal lands, but the politically driven bureau rarely got involved except when the case was super-high-profile. The responsibility of finding missing hikers on Forest Service lands primarily falls onto the local Sheriff’s Office. In David O’Sullivan’s case, the agency left holding the bag was the Riverside County Hemet Substation, a small underfunded department in a high-crime area. And searching for a (presumed) dead hiker from another country would never be a top priority for a locally elected sheriff dealing with tons of problems.

This left it up to Cathy to insist that David’s file make it into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUS). The NamUS database, a nationwide system, kept a massive list of DNA and other data on file so that experts would have a better chance of matching unidentified human remains to a missing person. No one had listed Chris Sylvia in NamUS’s public database, either, until Joshua Sylvia and I pushed for it.

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