Some of the most puzzling unanswered incidents in the Atadero case:
1. Young female reports father as possible suspect. Before Jaryd went missing, a man by the name of LP wound up at Allyn Atadero's resort claiming he was looking for work in the canyon. Allyn had a policy of letting people in need (such as stranded motorists) stay for free. Over the course of his stay, "LP" wouldn't allow anyone to take his picture, nor did he ever go by his real name. When it became clear LP was just freeloading off of Allyn, he was kicked out. He relocated himself to Indian Hills Resort a few miles east on Highway 14. Allyn got a phone call not long after telling him that LP was saying some malicious things about Allyn. Allyn went to Indian Hills where tempers got out of hand and they had to be separated. After Jaryd went missing, his daughter filed a report saying he had been talking about Jaryd obsessively. A news segment was aired about this, with one of Larimer County's deputies saying they were in the process of doing background work on him. Nothing ever came of it. Two of Allyn's regulars at the resort had been fishing along the Poudre River when they came across LP's dark blue minivan out in the woods. They went through the glovebox to find anything on him, and it turned out the van wasn't registered to him. Not a peep about any of this in the Sheriff's report.
2. Friend of Allyn has threatening encounter at remote cabin. A few days after the official search had ended, a close friend of Allyn's he identifies in his book as 'Cindy' claims she was driving through an area of the canyon where she thought Jaryd might have ended up. She lived in the area where Jaryd disappeared, and conducted her own search in the backroads of Poudre Canyon. On this occasion she saw a family who was staying at a cabin 'back in the sticks' painting a Volkswagen van a different color. A man who spotted her jumped in a truck and sped toward her location. He demanded to know why she was there and demanded her to leave. She left in a hurry. A couple days later she told her friend Jane what had happened, who then reported this to the sheriff. Jane also alerted Allyn, who was unable to get any answers about the situation. This goes back to a statement from a former LCSO deputy, who said that they turned a blind eye to a lot of things in order maintain a working relationship with the people of the canyon as informants. Either the lady was making things up, or the sheriff looked the other way. I am inclined to believe the latter regarding Jim Alderden's office. Once again, this incident did not turn up in the sheriff's report. They did, however, make mention they were fielding calls from psychics.
3. The Mesa Verde sighting. This has been talked about so often, so I will not go into much detail. A park ranger encounters a child who kept trying to hold his hand while he walked with a tour group, but the man he was with kept calling him back by a name that "sounded something like Gerald." The Atadero family knew this was a trait of Jaryd's, who apparently liked holding hands with adults he trusted. This is the incident that led to Sheriff Jim Alderden exclaiming on camera that he had never heard of anyone taking a child and then parading them around, ending his rant with the famous line,"Are you as tired of this story as we are?" Although this did end up in the sheriff's report, it was given no further credence.
4. DNA Lab Does A 180 on Jaryd's remains. After the Colorado Bureau of Investigation released inconclusive and unprofessional results on the remains recovered from above the trail, Allyn sought answers from the University of North Texas thanks to an introduction made by NCMEC. He submitted Jaryd's remains to them, only for Hurricane Katrina to hit several months later. There had already been a large volume of cases in front of theirs, but Katrina destroyed their hopes. Allyn called month by month, and after three years he was no closer to an answer, eventually being told to stop calling. The next day, he received a call from the lab stating it was Jaryd's skull, Allyn asked what changed overnight. The man on the phone said he was just as confused as he was, but that's what he was told. In 2014, Allyn was finally told by a third lab that it was Jaryd beyond a reasonable doubt, but the earlier two incidents remained a confusing and frustrating situation that was never answered.
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