I came across this thread through a link in a current case and was immediately pulled into reading about Susan's story. Although it's been 10 years now since her death, the search for Susan stands as an incredible example of the fact that sometimes ordinary, untrained people can accomplish...
I agree, and IMO, even the sheriff didn't seem like he thought they would find anything, as he was speaking about them doing this to help LE who might deal with this crime years from now.
The one thing I wonder about Jack and Lilly is, if they did indeed go out into the woods that morning, what would they have done if they realized DM was looking for them? Would they have gone to him?, or might they have been afraid he would be angry and they would be punished? Could they have...
IMO, if he is still alive, and he's not hiding in the wilderness somewhere, the most likely place he could be is a large homeless encampment somewhere. Portland is not that far, maybe Seattle or even California. An unkempt, mentally ill man could blend in and if he stayed out of shelters and...
The location where he was possibly spotted seems like such an extremely remote and unlikely place for him to wind up in, the kind of place only locals would know, IMO. I had a hard time even trying to find a good map of the area on Google Earth. So I looked at my old pre-internet book of paper...
If the witnesses were close enough to him to see his earrings, you would think they would have also noticed the very distinctive tattoos on his forearms as it says he was wearing a t-shirt.
With it being a long holiday weekend, there will certainly be many hundreds of people out hiking and camping in the mountains near Leavenworth. I hope somebody comes across some kind of evidence.
There was a movie made about this event in 1993, called "The Flood: Who will save the children?". It was a long time ago that I watched it, but I recall many children climbed up into trees and were eventually rescued by helicopters.
Even though I've been following all this though local social media news reports, I find myself coming back to Websleuths to get the best up to date and accurate information.