On October 14, 2015, Ralph Allen and Elise Hill disappeared into the dense forests of the San Juan, leaving only a locked car in the parking lot.

A large-scale search yielded no results, and the couple was officially declared dead.

But on October 23rd, 2016, Ralph emerged from the thicket to people, dirty, exhausted, and mute with terror.

But what happened to him, where he was all this time, and where Elise is, you will find out in this video.

Enjoy your viewing.

On October 14th, 2015, the weather was deceptively clear in the San Juan National Forest, Colorado.

The sky was clear, but the air at an altitude of 10,000 ft was already cutting the lungs with icy freshness.

It was on this day that 25-year-old Ralph Allen and his girlfriend, 24year-old Elise Hill, began a journey that was supposed to last exactly 3 days, but would stretch into a year of horror.

According to the plan they left with their loved ones, the goal of their expedition was the Mullis Pass area.

This place is known for its breathtaking scenery, but Ralph and Elise were not interested in touristy viewpoints.

Their real goal, which only a few friends knew about, was to go off the officially marked trail.

Ralph had spent several weeks on forums studying the coordinates of abandoned silver mines, the entrances to which were rumored to still be open somewhere deep in the forest.

The chronology of events that morning has been restored by the police to within a minute.

At in the morning, the surveillance cameras of a local tourist equipment store in Durango captured a young couple.

The video shows Ralph wearing a black fleece jacket approaching the cash register.

Elise stands nearby looking at a topographic map of the area.

They buy two gas cylinders for a portable burner and a package of energy bars.

According to the cashier who served them that morning, the couple seemed completely at ease.

There was no tension between them.

They were joking about the cold night ahead of them in the mountains and checking their equipment list.

Elise seemed focused but in high spirits.

Nothing in their behavior indicated anxiety or a premonition of trouble.

At 8 hours and 25 minutes, they got into their dark blue Subaru Outback made in 2010.

The car headed north on Highway 550.

The legendary road locals call the milliondoll highway.

Traffic cameras last captured their car on the Durango exit.

After that, their trail was cut off.

The 3 days of silence passed quickly.

According to the plan, Ralph and Elise were supposed to return to civilization and get in touch on Sunday evening, October 17th.

But both phones were silent.

Elisa’s parents began to worry after in the evening.

When the clock crossed the 1000 p.m.

mark, the family contacted the Llata County Police.

An official missing person’s report was filed at 23 hours and 40 minutes.

The search began the next morning.

On October 17th, at around in the morning, a patrol officer spotted a dark blue Subaru Outback in a small gravel parking lot near Little Molasses Lake.

The car was parked neatly in the far corner of the lot.

It was locked and there were no signs of forced entry.

Inside on the back seat, there were sandwich wrappers, an empty water bottle, and a receipt from a store in Durango dated October 14th.

In the glove compartment, they found the wallets of both of the missing men.

The engine was cold.

A layer of dust and fallen pine needles on the hood indicated that the car had been parked there for at least a few days.

They went into the forest and simply did not return.

A large-scale search operation was launched on October 18.

US Forest Service rangers, volunteer groups, and the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office joined the effort.

The Mullis Pass area is a complex maze of dense forest, deep canyons, and sharp rocky cliffs.

Temperatures at night during this time of year dropped below freezing, making every hour critical.

On the second day of the operation, the K-9 team reported the first possible trail.

The dog picked up the scent of the clothes taken from the car and confidently led the group west towards Mount Sultan.

This confirmed the version that Ralph and Elise had indeed gone off the official route.

They were moving deeper into the wilderness.

But 2 miles from the parking lot, the trail broke off.

The group ran into a massive rocky scree, a field of sharp granite stones that stretched for hundreds of yards.

On such a surface, the smell does not stick.

The dog circled, but could not determine the direction.

The rescuers combed through the screeyard by yard, hoping to see the bright color of the jacket, but there was nothing.

Only gray stone and silent pine trees.

On October 25th, the first serious snow fell.

It covered the ground with a thin white layer, completely burying any potential traces.

The head of the search operation noted in his report, “The probability of finding the missing alive in these weather conditions is close to zero.” The search lasted 2 weeks.

An area of more than 40 square miles was surveyed.

Volunteers went down into accessible ventilation holes in old mines, checked the foot of cliffs, and inspected the banks of streams.

Not a single scrap of clothing, not a single trace of a campfire.

Ralph and Elise seemed to have vanished into thin air.

Eventually, on October 31st, the county sheriff made the difficult decision to call off the active phase of the search.

The official version of the investigation tended to favor an accident.

Detectives assumed that the couple trying to get to the abandoned mines could have fallen off a cliff into one of the many deep crevices or become victims of a predator attack such as a cougar or bear.

The case of Ralph Allen and Elise Hill was reported as missing.

Their photos hung on bulletin boards for some time, gradually fading under the mountain sun.

The parents continued to come to the parking lot at Little Molasses Lake, staring at the forest wall, but the San Juan forest knew how to keep its secrets.

Silence swallowed their names, leaving only dry lines in police reports.

No one knew then that this was not the end of the story, but only its long, cold pause before the real horror.

Exactly 1 year and 9 days have passed since Ralph Allen and Elise Hill were last seen in Durango.

The San Juan National Forest has survived winter, a short mountain summer, and plunged back into the cold fall.

For locals, the story of the missing couple has become another sad legend told to tourists as a warning.

The photos on the bulletin boards had long since been washed away by the rains, and the names of Ralph and Elise were mentioned only on the anniversary of the tragedy in brief notes in local newspapers.

But on October 23rd, 2016, the silence that had rained over the case was broken by an event that shocked the entire state of Colorado.

That evening at around , the small automatic gas station on the outskirts of Silverton was quiet.

The town, located at an altitude of more than 9,000 ft, was already preparing for winter, and there were almost no tourists on the streets.

The cashier for the night shift, a 50-year-old man named Joe, was checking invoices when he heard a strange sound at the front door.

A faint scraping noise as if someone was struggling to push the handle.

When the door finally opened, a creature entered the room that Joe first thought was a wild animal or a local homeless man who had lost his mind.

The man was barefoot, his feet covered with deep cuts and dried blood mixed with black mountain dirt.

He was wearing the remnants of what had once been his clothes.

Rags that did not warm him, but only covered his body.

A thick tangled beard covered half of his face and his hair was stuck together in one continuous tangle.

But the most terrifying were the eyes.

Witnesses who were filling up their car on the street at the time later described his gaze as an empty tunnel.

He looked through people through walls, not focusing on anything.

The man took a few unsteady steps toward the counter, staggered, grabbed the rack of chocolate bars with his bony hand, and fell to his knees.

The cashier, recovering from his shock, rushed to him with a bottle of water.

When he asked if he needed help, the man raised his head.

His lips, cracked from cold and dehydration, barely moved.

His voice sounded like the horse rustle of dry leaves, but in the silence of the store, it was clear.

I’m Ralph Allen.

The name was an electric shock.

There was not a person in Silverton who did not know the story of the disappearance at Mullis Pass.

Joe immediately pressed the emergency button to call the sheriff.

While they waited for the police and paramedics, Ralph just sat on the cold floor with his arms wrapped around himself, shaking so hard you could hear his teeth chattering.

He never said another word.

On the same day, by an ominous coincidence, events were unfolding in another part of the mountains.

15 miles from Silverton in the inaccessible Red Mountain Mining District.

A group of three deer hunters were trudging through dense brush.

This area is considered dangerous because of the large number of old vertical mines and unstable soil.

So, even experienced foresters rarely venture in.

One of the hunters looking at the slope with binoculars noticed an unnatural flash of color at the bottom of a deep ravine.

Among the gray granite and brown pine needles, a bright blue spot was visible.

It could not be a stone or a plant.

Guided by hunting instinct and curiosity, the group decided to go down, spending more than an hour doing so.

What they found at the bottom of the ravine made them forget about hunting.

Under the overhanging rock was a half-deayed blue hiking backpack.

The fabric was torn, the contents partially stretched by the animals across the meadow.

But the worst was a little further away.

The hunters found human bones.

They were scattered over an area of several yards, the work of coyotes and bears that had managed to stretch their prey over the year.

The skull was lying separately, partially covered with moss.

A digital camera in a black protective case lay next to it, almost undamaged.

The memory card, which was later seized by forensic experts, contained hundreds of photos of a smiling girl against the backdrop of Autumn Mountains.

It was Elise Hill.

Information about both incidents came to the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office a few hours apart.

The sheriff, who led the search a year ago, refused to believe it was a coincidence at first.

Ralph Allen was found alive on the very day the mountains gave up Elise’s remains.

But when the detectives put the coordinates on the map, they were struck with cold surprise.

15 mi of rugged mountainous terrain separated the place where Ralph went out to the people in Silverton and the place where Elise was found.

These are two different mountain ranges separated by a valley.

It was physically impossible for Ralph to walk this distance in the condition he was in.

in one day.

And given that their car was found a year ago in a completely different place near Little Molasses Lake, the geography of their movement ceased to be subject to any logic.

Even the initial examination of the site where Alisa’s body was found raised questions for experts.

The backpack was lying as if it had been thrown from above, not left during the halt.

The clothes on the remains were torn not only by animals.

The jacket showed even cuts characteristic of a sharp blade, but the main evidence was the camera.

The last picture on it was taken on October 14, 2015 at 16 hours and 30 minutes.

In the photo, Elise is standing on the edge of a cliff, smiling and pointing at the sunset.

This photo proved that on the first evening they were alive, healthy, and not where the rescuers were looking for them.

Ralph, meanwhile, was taken to the intensive care unit of the district hospital.

The doctors who cut off his dirty rags were shocked by his condition.

It was not just exhaustion from hunger.

His body was a map of pain.

Numerous hematas of different ages, burn marks on his back, improperly fused rib fractures.

The skin on his ankles and wrists was worn down to meat and covered with rough ring scars that could not have been left by branches or stones.

These were shackle marks.

When the detective on duty tried to ask the first questions, Ralph became hysterical.

He covered his head with his hands, shouted for the lights to be turned off, and begged not to open the door.

It was the animal uncontrollable horror of a victim who knows that escape is only an illusion.

The news of Alisa’s body had not yet reached him.

The police decided to withhold this information.

They understood that what happened in the San Juan Mountains was not a benal wandering of tourists.

Ralph had come back from the dead, but he was not alone.

The shadow of what had killed Elise and held him captive for a year stood invisibly behind him in a sterile hospital room.

And the 15 miles between them were not just a distance.

It was a path paved with a secret that Ralph Allen feared to voice more than death.

On October 24, 2016 at in the morning, two detectives from the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office, senior investigator David Torres and his partner, Detective Sarah Lance, entered room 304 at Mercy Regional Medical Center.

The room smelled of strong medications, overpowering the pungent smell of iodine that had been used to treat the patients numerous wounds.

Ralph Allen lay on the bed looking up at the ceiling.

His hands wrapped in bandages trembled slightly on top of the white blanket.

When the detectives introduced themselves, he did not even turn his head.

Doctors described his condition as an acute stress reaction against a background of prolonged physical exhaustion.

But Torres noticed something else.

In the corners of Ralph’s eyes was not just stress, but animal paralyzing fear.

The interrogation began slowly.

The detectives turned on the recorder at and 15 minutes.

Ralph spoke quietly, his voice breaking into a rasp, and he often made long pauses as if he were selecting words or checking some invisible instruction in his head.

According to his testimony, the disaster occurred on the second day of their march, October 15th, 2015.

The morning of that day was gloomy with low clouds clinging to the tops of the fur trees, promising early snow.

Ralph said that he and Elise had decided to take a shortcut to the area where the old forum said there were entrances to the addits.

This decision was fatal.

They left the marked trail around in the afternoon.

The terrain was becoming increasingly difficult.

Soft ground gave way to slippery granite covered with a thin film of ice.

Ralph said that they were moving along a narrow ledge above the gorge trying to get around a massive stone outcropping.

Elise was walking behind.

In his testimony, he described the moment of the fall in horrifying detail.

He heard a sharp sound, the scraping of his soul against the stone, a short inhalation, and then a thud.

When he turned around, the path was empty.

Elise had fallen into a narrow, deep creasse hidden behind juniper bushes.

Ralph said it took him almost 20 minutes to find a safe way down.

When he got to the bottom of the creasse, about 20 ft deep, he saw Elise in an unnatural position.

She was conscious, but in a state of painful shock.

According to him, both of her legs were broken and a deep wound on her head was bleeding.

She was unable to move.

He tried to lift her, but any movement caused her to scream in pain, which echoed off the stone walls.

It was impossible to pull her up the steep wall alone without ropes and equipment.

Ralph decided to stay with her, hoping that they would be searched for.

Night fell.

The temperature dropped below.

Freezing.

Ralph described to the detectives how he covered Elise with their jackets and sleeping bag and laid down next to her trying to warm her with his body.

She was delirious.

She asked for water even though the bottles had been emptied during the day.

He collected snow, melted it in his palms, and moistened her lips.

According to his version, the agony lasted 3 days.

Elise faded away slowly.

She would come to and cry, then fall into oblivion.

Ralph claimed that he never left her side.

He told her about their future, about their home, that help was on the way.

But help never came.

On October 18, before dawn, Elise stopped breathing.

Ralph was silent for several minutes, looking at his bandaged hands.

Detective Lance recorded in her notes that at that moment, he did not cry.

He looked as if his soul had died with the girl in that gorge.

Then began the part of the story that raised the most questions for investigators.

Ralph claimed that after the death of his beloved, his mind turned off.

He didn’t remember how he got out of the creasse.

He didn’t remember where he was going.

He called it a state of fugue, a complete breakdown of the personality due to unbearable trauma and guilt.

He said that the next year turned into a blur.

He wandered the forests of the San Juan, avoiding people.

He was afraid to return because he believed he was a murderer.

According to him, he survived by breaking into abandoned hunting huts and seasonal dockas that stood empty in the winter.

He described how he found canned food in basement, how he slept wrapped in old blankets found in attics, how he melted snow in rusty pots.

He moved around at night and during the day he hid in the thicket or in caves, afraid of the sound of helicopters or the voices of tourists.

He became a ghost, a wild creature that existed only to punish himself for Alisa’s death.

“I couldn’t look her parents in the eye,” he whispered at the end of the interrogation.

“I had to die there instead.” The story seemed coherent.

It explained his disappearance, his physical condition, his knowledge of the area.

It evoked sympathy for the press.

It was the perfect tragedy.

A guy who went crazy with grief and survived in the wild.

But Detective Torres, stepping out into the hallway, felt something was wrong.

He had worked for many years with people who survived in the mountains.

Their stories were usually chaotic, full of emotional outbursts.

Ralph spoke as if he had been memorizing this text for months.

His details about Elise’s fall were too clear for a person in shock, and his description of the year of wandering was too general.

Torres recalled one detail he noticed while examining Ralph.

His fingernails, a man who spent a year picking hutlocks and digging through the earth for food, would have rough, calloused hands with dirt permanently embedded in his skin.

Ralph’s palms, despite the scratches and wounds, were soft and pale, characteristic of a person who had spent a long time indoors.

In addition, Ralph never once asked if Alisa’s body had been found.

He spoke of her in the past tense as a fact, but showed no interest in whether she had been returned to her family.

It was strange.

A man who had spent a year beating himself up for leaving his beloved in the gorge should have wanted a decent burial above all else.

The detectives returned to the police station to draw up a report.

Ralph Allen’s testimony became the official version of events.

But this was only the beginning for the investigation.

Torres ordered a detailed check of all reports of hutbreak-ins in the San Juan area over the past 12 months.

If Ralph was telling the truth, there should have been a trail of broken windows and missing canned goods in the woods.

If there was no such evidence, then Ralph Allen had been in a completely different place all year.

Ralph was left alone in the hospital room.

As soon as the door closed, he shifted on the bed, pulled his knees up to his chest, and closed his eyes.

He fulfilled the first part of the order.

He told the story that had been drumed into his head hundreds of times in the darkness of the dungeon.

Now the hardest part was to live with this lie, knowing that the real horror had not ended, but had only changed form.

The pitman was free, and Ralph knew that his every breath no longer belonged to him, but to someone waiting in the shadows.

While the local newspapers in Durango and Silverton were running headlines about the San Juan miracle and the survivor who defeated death, a completely different atmosphere reigned in the closed office of the county medical examiner’s office.

The romantic story of tragic love and a year of wandering in the wilderness crumbled to dust as soon as the first official pathology reports landed on senior detective David Torres’s desk.

What the doctors found did not just contradict Ralph’s words.

It screamed that every day of his story had been made up from start to finish.

The first blow to Ralph’s version came from the report on Elise Hills remains.

Dr.

Anderson, the state’s leading anthropologist, conducted a detailed analysis of the bones found in the ravine.

Ralph claimed that the girl had suffered injuries as a result of a 20ft fall onto rocks.

Indeed, she had fractures to her tibia, which could be consistent with a fall.

However, the skull told a different story.

On the left parietal bone, experts found a clear localized dent with divergent cracks.

Dr.

Anderson’s conclusion stated, “The nature of the injury is not consistent with an impact on a flat or uneven stone surface during the fall.

It is the result of a purposeful blow with a heavy blunt object with a limited area of contact.

This was not a rock she fell on.

It was a blow inflicted by someone standing over her.

The instrument was probably a hammer, gunbutt, or the handle of a heavy tool.

It was not a fall.

It was a murder or a killing.

But the most frightening discovery was the second paragraph of the report.

Ralph swore that Elise died on October 18th, 2015.

However, modern methods of forensic science allow us to determine the time of death, not only by the state of decomposition, but also by the chemical composition of the bone marrow and the remains of tooth pulp.

The results of the analysis shocked the entire investigation team.

The isotopes contained in the bones and the condition of the organic residues indicated that the biological processes in Elise’s body had stopped much later.

The examination gave a time lag of several weeks, but the conclusion was unequivocal.

Elise Hill was alive for at least four or 5 months after the date of her disappearance.

She did not die in October.

She survived Christmas.

She was alive in February of 2016.

This discovery turned everything upside down.

It is physically impossible to survive a harsh winter in the mountains of Colorado at an altitude of 10,000 ft where the temperature drops to minus20° without equipment with broken legs in the open air.

The conclusion was self-evident.

She was not in the gorge all this time.

She was warm.

She was fed.

she was kept.

The third set of evidence came from the hospital where Ralph himself was staying.

Dr.

Lewis, the general practitioner who was treating the patient, invited the detectives in for a private conversation.

He showed them detailed photographs of Ralph’s body taken during the initial examination.

Do you see this? The doctor pointed to the boy’s ankles.

The skin on the lower part of his shins was covered with wide bands of scar tissue.

These were not scratches from thorny bushes or marks from tight shoes.

These were deep old calluses formed from the constant friction of metal against the skin.

Such marks are left by shackles if you wear them for months without taking them off.

Now look at the test results.

The doctor continued, “The patient has a critical vitamin D deficiency.

His levels are so low that he has begun to develop bone demineralization processes similar to ricketetts.” Detective Torres immediately got the point.

A person who roams the forests for a year gets enough ultraviolet radiation even in cloudy weather.

Ralph’s skin should have been weathered, rough, and tanned.

Instead, he was pale as paper.

His body had not seen the sun for months.

“This is not a survivalist’s body,” Lewis explained.

“When you walk in the mountains, even when you’re starving, your leg muscles stay toned.

They become wiry.

” In Ralph, we see a specific atrophy.

He was not walking 10 mi a day.

He was sitting or lying in a very confined space, perhaps in a cage or pit where it was impossible to straighten up to his full height.

The picture formed a single terrifying puzzle.

The story of heroic survival was a lie.

There were no wanderings, no hunting huts, no death of a loved one in his arms.

In the early days, there was a basement.

There were chains.

There was a long cold winter in captivity and Elise who died not from the cold in the mountains but at the hands of an executioner while standing next to Ralph.

Detective Torres closed the file with the reports.

In his eyes, there was no more sympathy for the rescued boy.

Now he saw before him a key witness who tried to cover up a crime of unprecedented cruelty.

Ralph Allen knew who killed Elise.

He knew where it happened and he deliberately misled the investigation.

The only question was, was he doing it because he was an accomplice or because his fear of the real killer was stronger than his desire for justice.

Torres stood up from the table and nodded to his partner.

“Let’s go to the hospital, Sarah.

It’s time to stop with the tourist fairy tales.

We’re dealing with a kidnapping and a murder, and Ralph is going to tell us the truth whether he wants to or not.

On October 25th, 2016, the atmosphere in room 304 at Mercy Regional Hospital was feverish.

Detectives David Torres and Sarah Lance returned to Ralph Allen, not as a victim in need of support, but as a witness hiding a serious crime.

Their tactics changed.

Instead of asking soft questions, they decided to use facts that could not be denied.

Torres walked over to the bed and placed two photographs in front of Ralph.

The first showed a close-up of his own feet with deep darkened scars around his ankles that formed a perfect circle.

“These are not frostbite, Ralph.” The detective’s voice sounded hard.

“And they are not marks from tight shoes.

We consulted the prison doctors.

They’re shackle marks.

You wore them for months.

You didn’t wander the forest.

You were tied up like a dog.

Ralph looked away.

His hands began to tremble, crumpling the hospital sheet.

But Torres didn’t stop.

He handed over the next document, the forensic report on Alisa’s body that she died on October 18th, 2015.

You said you held her hand as she died in the canyon.

But bones don’t lie.

The autopsy proved that Elise was alive on Christmas Day.

She was alive in January.

She survived the winter.

You lied to us about the time of her death, Ralph.

Where was she for 6 months? Who fed her? Who killed her? Ralph’s face turned ash gray.

His chest heaved as if he was short of breath.

Drops of sweat appeared on his forehead.

It seemed that he was about to break down and tell everything.

But instead of saying anything, he began rocking back and forth, closing his eyes.

“I don’t remember,” he whispered, his voice breaking into a screech.

“I don’t remember anything.

Everything was a blur.

” He repeated this phrase like a spell, like a memorized text.

That was his only defense.

It was a fog.

I don’t remember.

The detectives looked at each other.

It was obvious that this was not amnesia.

It was a block.

A conscious impenetrable block.

Detective Sarah Lance, who had been silently observing the patient until then, noticed a strange detail.

Ralph was sitting with his back to the window, and every time someone walked down the hall or the sound of an engine was heard outside, he would flinch and throw a panicked glance at the blinds.

The room was bright.

It was a sunny day outside, but Ralph had asked the nurses to close the curtains in the morning when Lance tried to move one slat slightly to let in the light.

Ralph screamed.

It was not a cry of pain, but a cry of animal horror.

Close it.

Close it now.

He cringed as if he was expecting a shot.

Lance closed the blinds.

She realized that he was not afraid of the light.

He was afraid that someone would see him from the outside or that he would see someone.

The interrogation reached a dead end.

Torres, frustrated and angry, gathered the photos from the table.

We’ll be back tomorrow, Ralph, and we’re not leaving until you tell us the truth.

You’re covering up for a murderer, and that makes you an accomplice.

The detectives left the room, leaving the officer on duty at the door.

The key moment happened 20 minutes after they left.

A young nurse came into the room to check his blood pressure.

She looked ordinary, doing her job mechanically.

Adjusting the pillow, she said quietly.

“You had a visitor here while you were sleeping.

He said he was an old friend of yours, but he didn’t want to wake you.” Ralph froze, his eyes widened.

“What friend?” he asked, barely audible.

“An ordinary man?” The nurse shrugged.

He was wearing a work jacket and a baseball cap.

He looked like a mechanic or a construction worker.

Very polite.

He asked me to give you this.

She handed Ralph a folded piece of paper, a simple one torn from a cheap notebook.

The nurse left, leaving him alone.

Ralph stared at the paper as if it were a poisonous snake.

His hands were shaking so badly that he could barely unfold the note.

There was no signature.

The handwriting was even sharp with a strong pencil pressure.

Only two sentences were written on the sheet.

You know what I will do to your parents if you open your mouth.

You are still mine.

Ralph let the note fall from his hands.

The piece of paper slowly fell to the blanket.

Everything fell into place.

The detectives thought he was silent out of guilt.

They thought that he was ashamed of not saving Elise or that he helped kill her.

But the truth was much simpler and more terrible.

He did not escape.

He was let go.

He was let out on a leash that went as far as his house.

The man in the cap, the minor, the executioner who had kept them in the dark for a year, was here.

He walked past the guards.

He spoke to the nurse.

He stood by his bed while Ralph was sleeping.

He was in control of the situation.

Ralph grabbed the note and put it in his mouth.

He chewed on the dry paper, choking back tears, and swallowed it piece by piece to destroy the evidence.

He couldn’t tell the truth.

If he spoke, his parents would die.

“You are still mine.” These words pulsed in his head in time with his heartbeat.

He left the forest, but the forest followed him to the city.

And in this hospital room under police surveillance, Ralph Allen was trapped in the same way as in the underground cell.

October 26th, 2016, in the morning.

The corridors of Mercy Regional Hospital plunged into silence, broken only by the humming of fluorescent lights and the footsteps of the officer on duty at the door of room 304.

The police had tightened security.

There was a real threat that Ralph Allen would try to escape or commit suicide.

His silence became a wall that neither threats nor facts could break through.

Detective David Torres, who was on duty that night, could not sleep.

He reviewed the expert reports and kept returning to the boy’s frightened look in his mind.

Experience told him that Ralph was not a cold-blooded killer.

He looked like a cornered beast, afraid not of the law’s punishment, but of something much more terrible.

Torres decided to go against protocol.

He quietly entered the room without turning on the light.

Ralph was awake.

He was sitting on the bed, huddled in the corner, staring at the strip of street light that was coming through the blinds with such terror that it was the devil himself.

The detective did something Ralph hadn’t expected.

He went to the window and closed the curtains tightly, completely cutting off the room from the outside world.

Then he turned off even the dim lamp of the nightlight, plunging the room into total darkness.

“He won’t see you now, Ralph,” Torres said quietly, sitting down on a chair next to the bed.

“It’s just us, me and you.

The darkness is your friend now.” Ralph froze, his breathing ragged.

Torres continued, lowering his voice to a whisper.

We know you didn’t kill Elise.

I’ve seen the eyes of murderers, Ralph.

There is no anger in your eyes.

There’s hell in them.

We know you’ve been where the sun doesn’t shine.

But listen to me carefully.

If you don’t tell me who did this, he won’t stop.

He will come after someone else.

Maybe another couple.

Or maybe he’ll carry out the threat he made in the note.

The mention of the note was the key.

Ralph sobbed.

It was a sound like a broken branch cracking.

He calls himself the Pitman, he whispered, barely audible.

Torres did not interrupt.

And in the darkness of the hospital room, a real story was told.

A story that was more terrifying than any police guess.

We didn’t get lost.

Ralph’s voice trembled, but grew stronger with each word.

We didn’t even make it to the pass.

He tracked us.

He was waiting.

He knew where we were going.

Ralph told us about a man in a work uniform who appeared on the trail to help with the map and then used a stun gun.

When they came too, they were already deep underground.

It was not just a cave.

It was a network of old, forgotten mines that this man had turned into his personal bunker.

He kept us in a cage, Ralph continued, swallowing back tears.

It was made of rebar right in the rock.

It was cold in there, always cold.

He fed us like dogs, threw food on the floor.

He played with us.

He turned the light on and off, made us watch him eat while we starved.

Torres listened, feeling his blood run cold.

Ralph told him about Elisa’s death.

She didn’t fall.

It happened in the spring.

He forgot to close the outside circuit when he brought water.

We tried to run.

Elise.

She was braver than me.

She threw herself at him to give me time.

He hit her.

He hit her with a hammer that was hanging from his belt.

I heard this sound, a crunch.

She fell down and never got up again.

Ralph stopped talking, his shoulders shaking with sobs.

He didn’t kill me.

He said I was his now, his favorite toy.

He broke me.

He made me live next to her body for 3 days before he took it out.

He said that if I was good, he would let me go.

The ending of the story was simple and brutal.

A week ago, the minor put a bag over Ralph’s head, threw him in the trunk, and drove him to the highway near Silverton.

Before he dumped him on the side of the road, he gave him clear instructions.

Tell the police the story of the accident.

He knows my parents address, Ralph whispered, grabbing the detective’s sleeve.

He showed me pictures of them.

If you tell the truth, I’ll cut them out in my sleep.

Detective, he’s not a man.

He’s the devil.

Torres sat in the dark, digesting what he had heard.

Now it all fell into place.

The shackles, the vitamin deficiency, the lies, the panicked fear.

He won’t touch your parents, Ralph,” Torres said firmly, turning on his radio but not the lights.

“You’re not his play thing anymore.

You’re the prosecution’s star witness.

” The night in room 304 is over.

But for Gornic, it was just beginning.

Ralph Allen’s testimony taken in the darkness of the hospital room was the key that finally unlocked the mechanics of the crime.

It became obvious to the detectives that the remains of a lease Hill found 15 mi from where Ralph had left had not been simply dumped.

They had been placed there on purpose.

The killer, whom Ralph called the minor, tried to stage an accident by planting the body in an area where a fall from a cliff would look natural.

He had calculated everything.

The location, the terrain, the presence of predators.

The only thing he was wrong about was the timing.

He didn’t take into account that modern forensics can tell the difference between a death in October and a death in February, even by the condition of the bones.

On October 26, 2016 at in the morning, a convoy of three armored SUVs and a special forces van set off from Silverton to the north.

He was pale and his hands were shaking, but he was pointing the way.

It was a completely different area, a remote stretch near the headarters of Simon Creek that was marked on maps as an avalanche hazard zone.

There were no hiking trails, just old technical clearings overgrown with aspen and spruce.

At about in the morning, the convoy stopped.

There was no further road.

Ralph, without getting out of the car, pointed with a trembling hand to an inconspicuous rocky slope covered with dense shrubbery.

There, he whispered, behind three dry pines.

That’s the ventilation.

The SWAT team moved forward, observing complete silence.

The detectives followed.

What appeared to be a pile of rocks and debris turned out to be an elaborate camouflage on closer inspection.

A layer of artificial moss and netting hit a massive steel grate embedded in the rock.

It was the entrance to an old ventilation shaft that hadn’t been used in over 50 years.

But the hinges on the grate were greased and the lock looked new.

The special forces cut the lock with hydraulic scissors.

The door gave way without a sound.

Stale but warm air mixed with the smell of diesel fuel wafted in from the darkness.

When the beams of tactical flashlights cut through the gloom, the detectives saw something that did not fit the concept of wildlife.

It was not just a hole.

It was a full-fledged underground complex.

The walls of the tunnel were reinforced with new beams.

Electric cables stretched along the passage leading to the depths.

After walking about 100 ft, the group found themselves in an extended room that served as a living module.

There were powerful diesel generators, shelves with supplies of canned food and water that would last for years of autonomous existence.

Everything was organized with meticulous manic precision.

No trash, no chaos.

In the far corner of the room was what Ralph was talking about, a soundproof cell.

It was a cage welded from thick rebar built into a niche in the rock.

The walls of the niche were covered with old mattresses to muffle any sounds.

Inside, on the dirt floor, there were dog-like bowls and chains attached to anchors in the wall.

It was there that the detectives found the main evidence.

On a small table near the cage was a familiar blue backpack.

Inside were Elise’s clothes and a small leatherbound notebook.

Detective Torres opened it with trembling gloved hands.

It was a diary.

The first entries were dated November 2015, a month after the official disappearance.

Elise described the days in the dark, the cold, the pain, and the fear of a man who came silently and brought food.

This notebook was a voice from the grave that finally confirmed Ralph’s every word.

But there was one more detail in the room that made the special forces commander tense up.

The hood of one of the generators was warm.

On the table was an open can of canned food, the contents of which had not yet had time to air out.

“He was here,” the commander said quietly.

“He was here less than an hour ago.

The minor didn’t just run away.

He was watching.

He knew Ralph would break.

He knew the police would come.

And he prepared a meeting.

One of the sappers who was inspecting the tunnel entrance from the inside suddenly shouted, “Wire! Get back now!” He noticed a thin line stretched at ankle height near the exit, leading to a bundle of dynamite bombs attached to the vault support beams.

The timer on the detonator was already counting down the last seconds.

The group rushed to the exit.

It was a race against time with death.

Detectives and special forces flew out of the ventilation hole, falling onto the rocky slope and rolling down.

The last soldier managed to run only 30 ft away when the ground shook.

A dull, powerful explosion tore through the silence of the mountains.

A column of dust and stones erupted from the mine opening.

The tunnel’s vault collapsed, burying the prison, the evidence, and the monster’s lair under hundreds of tons of granite.

When the dust settled, the police were faced with a solid stone wall.

The entrance was blocked tightly.

The pitman destroyed its lair as soon as it realized it had been discovered.

But in the hands of Detective Torres remained a piece of evidence that the explosion could not erase.

The diary of Elise Hill.

And although the dungeon was destroyed, the hunt for the one who created it was just beginning.

After the explosion that destroyed the underground bunker, the police were left with nothing but ashes and stones.

The pitman disappeared, wiping his lair off the map.

But he underestimated one thing, the memory of his victim.

Being under guard in a safe place, Ralph Allen, working with a psychologist, remembered a detail that seemed insignificant at first, but now became decisive.

It was a smell.

Ralph recalled that the kidnappers clothes always smelled of a pungent specific chemical odor.

It wasn’t the smell of fuel oil or gunpowder typical of mines.

It was the smell of chlorine, a pungent sterile odor associated with swimming pools.

In addition, Ralph recalled that the canned food brought by the executioner was often packaged in specific yellow plastic bags with the logo of the Save the Date discount supermarket.

The nearest such store was in Montro, 40 mi from Silverton.

Detectives David Torres and Sarah Lance took the lead.

They made a request for transactions in the Saveaway chain over the past year.

They were interested in a specific combination of goods, bulk purchases of canned food, water, and large volumes of pool cleaning chemicals.

The algorithm produced only three matches.

Two of them belong to hotels.

The third belonged to an individual.

Arthur Vance, 52 years old, officially worked as a field service technician for private pools in three counties.

This explained the chlorine smell, the availability of tools, and access to chemicals.

But the most interesting thing was his place of residence, an old farm on the remote outskirts of Montrose, bordering a wooded area.

Vance lived alone, had no family, and according to the IRS, spent almost no money except for fuel and food.

On October 28th, 2016, at in the morning, a tactical response team surrounded Arthur Vance’s house.

It was a one-story wooden building with peeling paint that stood at the end of a dirt road.

A white service van was parked in the yard.

Everything looked quiet, but this time the police knew they were dealing with a predator who was always ready for war.

The assault began without warning.

The SWAT team kicked in the front door with a battering ram.

Vance was awake.

He was waiting in the living room, sitting in a chair across the hall with a hunting carbine in his lap.

As soon as the door fell, he opened fire.

The first bullet hit the shield of the frontline officer.

The firefight lasted less than a minute.

Vance refused to drop his weapon and tried to break through to the back door, firing back as he went.

Two special forces bullets hit him in the chest.

He died on the spot, never letting go of his carbine.

When the smoke cleared, the detectives entered the house.

The house looked aesthetic, almost uninhabited, as if the owner came here only to spend the night.

But the real horror was hiding downstairs.

Behind a massive door in the pantry, they found a staircase to the basement.

This room was not marked on the house plan.

The basement was equipped as a workshop.

On the tables were maps of the San Juan Mountains with marked entrances to old mines, diagrams of ventilation systems, and keys to dozens of padlocks.

But in the corner was an old metal cabinet.

When Detective Torres opened it, he saw something that made him freeze.

It was a collection of trophies.

On the shelves were driver’s licenses, student IDs, watches, and jewelry.

And on the inside of the door were taped photographs.

They were pictures taken in the woods from a distance through a telephoto lens.

They showed people walking along trails, setting up tents, laughing around a campfire.

Detectives began checking the faces against the database of missing persons.

A young man who disappeared in 2008 near Durango.

Two student girls who did not return from a hike in 2012.

A man who went hunting in 2014 and disappeared into thin air.

12 photos in total.

12 people who for years had been considered victims of accidents, avalanches, or wild animals.

Arthur Vance had been hunting them for almost 10 years.

He turned the mountains into his personal lands and abandoned mines into burial grounds.

Ralph and Alisa’s photographs were the last in this series.

They were not the first, but Ralph Allen was the first and only one to return from there alive.

The case was closed.

Elise Hill’s body was handed over to her family for burial.

Ralph’s parents took their son home trying to protect him from the press.

But even after the miner’s death, Ralph would wake up at night for a long time to the smell of chlorine and demand to check if the windows were closed.

He survived.

He won.

But looking at the news about another missing hiker in the Colorado mountains, he knew something that others did not.

There are places in the forest where light does not reach and the monsters that live there sometimes wear human faces.