In October of 2013, Linda Willis took her father Gregory, who had early onset dementia, on a short hike in Zion.

It was to be their last hike together, a place where he had once taught her to take photographs and where his memory still captured the familiar shapes of the canyons.

They were supposed to return in the evening, but in the afternoon, the connection was cut off and neither of them made it to the road.

Search teams worked for 11 days exploring the canyons and slopes, but found no trace of either Linda or Gregory.

Both were reported missing.

6 years have passed.

In August of 2019, surveyors working in one of the remote faults found human remains.

An examination confirmed that it was Linda Willis.

But the most important thing was different.

Nothing belonging to her father was found nearby.

Not a single bone, not a single piece of clothing.

No sign that he had died in the same place.

Linda was dead and Gregory was gone without a trace.

This was no longer just a story about two lost tourists.

It was a mystery that required an answer.

And then the case file for the first time contained a question that made my skin crawl.

Did the father really kill his own daughter? On October 24, 2013, early in the morning, 26-year-old Linda Willis leaves her apartment in Salt Lake City.

She’s wearing hiking boots, a lightweight fleece jacket, and a small backpack with a camera.

It’s a ritual she and her father share that they haven’t performed in years.

Now that 61-year-old Gregory has been diagnosed with early onset dementia, it’s only a matter of time before these trips are made.

Doctors warned that his memory would fade in spurts.

Familiar places could suddenly fade away as if they had never existed.

Linda decided to make it before this happened for good.

She wanted to show him Zion, the very landscape under whose walls he had once set up her childhood tripod, and explained how to catch light on stones.

Witnesses in the parking lot of their Salt Lake City home later recalled that Linda looked focused but not anxious.

A neighbor who was walking his dog that morning told investigators that he heard her softly say to her father something like, “Let’s go, Dad, before it gets hot.” This passage was one of the few fixed moments of their last morning.

They headed west in a blue Subaru Outback.

Another surveillance camera captured the car at a gas station near the town of Garacane.

Linda is seen filling up the car and Gregory is sitting in the passenger seat holding an old paper map on his lap.

During the interrogation, the gas station attendant recalled that the man looked confused as if he could not figure out where they were.

However, Linda behaved calmly as if she was used to her father’s states.

They pulled up to Collab Terrace Road at about 11 in the morning.

This is one of the most remote sectors of Zeon, rarely visited by casual tourists.

The landscape there is challenging.

Rocky ledges, narrow bridges, steep descents, and loose soils that can fail even experienced hikers.

Linda has known the area since childhood.

According to the visitor log, she planned to hike up the trail to the lookout near Northgardian Angel Peak.

This route was not technical, but it required care and good physical fitness.

Thus began their last hike, recorded only by cameras and the testimony of a few drivers who saw the car parked on the gravel lot.

No one could give an exact time when Linda and Gregory set out on the trail, but all the accounts agreed on one thing.

Nothing suspicious happened.

The first alarm bell rang 2 days later.

Linda’s co-workers at the agency in Salt Lake City were concerned that she hadn’t shown up for work and wasn’t answering her phone.

When they heard from her friend about the hike with her father, they immediately contacted the police.

National Park rangers confirmed that the Willis’s car was still in the same place, locked with their personal belongings inside.

They found wallets, phones, and Gregory’s insulin.

He could not do without it for long.

This was the first serious signal of danger.

On the same day, a search headquarters was set up.

A unit of Zion Ridge rescue unit reinforced by volunteers and dog handlers began combing the area.

According to the team leader, they covered more than 40 square miles.

Helicopters were flown into the air, but the terrain was too difficult.

Gorges crisscrossed in mazes and dense Magenita bushes hid every meter of land.

The dogs picked up a barely perceptible trail several times, but it was lost in stone areas where the scent did not linger.

The rangers report states, “No signs of struggle, no items that could belong to the missing.

The area is extremely fragmented.

One of the tourists may have been injured or disoriented.” Some of the volunteers suspected that Gregory might have gone off on his own and Linda might have followed him, but there was no evidence of this.

The search lasted 10 days.

Temperatures dropped to freezing at night and winds from the ridges brought dust drifts that covered the tracks in minutes.

The rescuers returned to the canyons every morning with new roots, but found only empty ledges and fresh layers of soil that could hide anything or nothing.

On the 10th day, the National Park Service announced that active search efforts had been suspended.

Linda and Gregory were officially listed as missing persons.

Their case became another in a long list of journeys that ended not in return, but in silence.

In those days, no one could have guessed that the answer would be found only years later, and that it would destroy all the initial assumptions about what happened in the Zeon canyons.

6 years have passed.

August of 2019 was particularly hot in Zeon.

It hadn’t rained for several months, and many of the dry streams had narrowed to cracks in the stone.

It was on one of these days that a group of National Park Service surveyors set out for a littleknown sector near the left fork of North Creek.

Their task was to clarify the boundaries of the protected area and check for possible landslides that could affect the future map of the area.

Two of the surveyors, technicians from Utah and Arizona, were moving across the narrow plateau when one of them noticed something unnatural at the bottom of a dry canyon.

He said it was a faded sheen of fabric that did not belong to the natural color of the stone.

At first, they assumed it was garbage left by another hiker years ago, but the shape of the object didn’t match anything familiar.

When the technicians got closer to the edge, it became clear that something was lying between the stones and had been for a long time.

According to protocol, such objects must be checked.

So, the team called a colleague with equipment.

According to the senior engineer of the group, the descent was dangerous.

dry scree, shaky sandstone layers, a narrow corridor that in some places narrowed to the width of one shoulder.

At a depth of about 20 feet, they saw the faded fabric of a hiking backpack.

Nearby were fragments of boots and bones partially covered with rock fragments.

They immediately stopped all work and notified the rangers.

When the park rangers arrived, it became obvious that these were human remains.

The fabric almost crumbled under their fingers, but on one of the plastic remnants, they saw the outline of a rectangular card.

After cleaning it from dust, they could read a name.

It was Linda Willis’s library card issued in Salt Lake City.

The discovery was recorded, the area was blocked off, and the Washington County forensic experts were called in.

The anthropologist team arrived the next morning.

According to the head of the examination, the first task was to establish stable access to the gorge because any incorrect movement of the stone could destroy the remaining material.

They started by widening the narrow passage and gradually removing the upper layers of the rubble.

Nearby, they found fragments of clothing, remnants of fabric that had once been a thermal fleece and parts of backpack straps.

The hiking boots were the best preserved as the dry environment and the shadow of the gorge slowed down the destruction.

On the tongue of one of the boots, the logo of the company used by Linda was partially readable, according to her friends.

Jaw samples were taken for identification.

A few days later, the laboratory confirmed the match with the dental records.

The discovery was officially recognized as the remains of Linda Willis who disappeared in October 2013.

However, there was supposed to be another person in that place.

And it was this absence that became the turning point of the investigation.

According to the protocol of disappearances, rangers comb the area around the place of discovery within a radius determined by experts.

In this case, it was an area of about a 100 yards, an extremely difficult area with landslides, deep cracks, and natural stone wells that often form in such massives.

The dog handlers worked side by side with the geologists as every careless step could have caused a cascading landslide.

According to one of the survey participants, they expected to find at least a fragment, a tissue, a bone, an element of equipment that would have belonged to Gregory Willis.

But the ground was silent.

For 2 days, they found only fragments of stone and old branches brought by seasonal streams.

There was nothing where logic would suggest the presence of a second body.

An entry appeared in the protocols.

No traces of Gregory Willis were found at the sight of the remains.

There are no signs of the presence of a second person.

This wording effectively negated all previous assumptions about their joint deaths in a single incident.

At this stage, the case was reclassified.

What had been considered a simple disappearance of two tourists for 6 years now received a new version, a possible criminal nature.

County investigators began to analyze all the details of the previous search operation, but found that no logical scenario at the time could explain the situation when one person dies in a remote gorge and the other disappears without a trace.

The question of what happened to Gregory Willis suddenly became central.

Why was he not with his daughter? Could he have gone to get help and gotten lost? Or did someone take him away from the scene? or the most dangerous version which no one has yet dared to voice officially.

Was he even there at the time of her death? This was the point at which the usual logic of mountain tragedies stopped working and the story of the Willis’s disappearance turned into something much more complicated and dark.

After Linda Willis’s remains were recovered, the Washington County Medical Examiner’s Office was tasked with determining the cause of death and the approximate circumstances of the fall.

According to the chief medical examiner, the first thing that caught the eye was the nature of the fractures.

The report states that there were multiple injuries to the pelvis and both shins, as well as small cracks in the ribs.

Such injuries are typical of a fall from a height of at least several meters onto a hard surface, probably a stone.

The expert emphasized that the injuries were not instantly fatal.

Based on the degree of healing of the edges of the cracks and the condition of the surrounding tissue, it was determined that Linda lived at least a few days after the fall.

This meant that she was conscious, moving, or at least trying to move, and obviously aware of the severity of her injuries.

During a second examination of the site, anthropologists discovered a detail that significantly changed the perception of the tragedy.

Next to the bones were the remains of branches and pieces of a camera strap twisted into the shape of an improvised tire.

There were traces of tension and friction on the surface of the belt.

Experts concluded that Linda was trying to fix one of her injured legs, deliberately constructing a bandage from what she had at hand.

This also confirmed that she was not paralyzed and could move at least to a minimum extent.

But it was her backpack that raised the most questions.

Although it had been largely destroyed, the contents were still recognizable.

There was a water bottle, a set of camera lenses, a small flashlight, and small personal items.

But two important items were missing.

A fleece jacket and car keys.

This circumstance was the first real deviation from the accidental death scenario.

Rangers unanimously confirmed that nights in that sector in October are extremely cold, sometimes with frost.

Any experienced hiker or even a poorly prepared person in the face of severe injuries would never give away warm clothing voluntarily.

The fact that the jacket was missing indicated two possible options.

Linda either gave it to another person herself or someone took it from her.

But even more important was the absence of keys.

All relatives confirmed this to the investigators.

Linda always carried them in the side pocket of her backpack.

Her close friend said during the interrogation that Linda was extremely responsible with her keys, always checking them before going on a hike and never leaving them without an obvious reason.

The fact that they were the ones that went missing became the focal point of new speculation.

Investigators considered several hypotheses.

The first was that someone was with Linda during the last hours of her life.

The second was that this person took the keys, possibly intending to get to the car.

The third is that the keys were taken by Gregory, who may have acted unconsciously due to dementia or stress.

The investigation materials indicate that Gregory always relied on his daughter for navigation and travel arrangements.

However, in a state of confusion, he could perceive the situation incorrectly, react impulsively, or even dangerously.

Several psychiatrists consulted confirmed that early dementia is characterized by sudden behavioral changes ranging from complete apathy to sudden aggression or panic reactions.

In theory, this could lead to an accident.

However, this version had weaknesses.

None of the experts could say that a person in a state of dementia would have overcome the difficult terrain of the surrounding canyons on his own and gone so far that no trace of him remained.

The absence of any signs of his death near the place where Linda fell gave rise to another equally disturbing thought.

He may have left the location alive.

The investigative team considered another possibility.

Linda could have given the keys to her father on purpose, asking him to go for help.

But then it would have been logical to find at least some traces of his movement.

A piece of cloth, a shoe print, a piece of equipment, or the insulin pouch he always carried with him.

Instead, the area around him remained clean as if no one had passed there in the past 6 years.

The detective’s protocols contained the first indications of the possible involvement of another person.

Some investigators speculated that the keys could have been taken by an outsider, a random tourist, a poacher, or someone who came across Linda severely injured.

However, there were no reports of unauthorized persons in the area on the dates of her disappearance.

Ranger patrols had not spotted any suspicious vehicles, and the visitors log, which was not kept by everyone, also revealed nothing useful.

The appearance of the makeshift tire showed that Linda was struggling and doing so rationally despite the pain and cold.

Her actions contradicted the idea of chaos or panic.

But the disappearance of the keys and jacket on the contrary indicated the intervention of another person.

It was the combination of these two opposing elements, thoughtful attempts at self-help, and an explanation for someone else’s presence that made the Willis case even more complicated.

According to one of the detectives who worked on the investigation, the scene spoke of a struggle for life, but was silent about who or what she was fighting.

At this point, all subsequent versions began to revolve around a single silent witness, Linda’s body, which spoke through injuries, details, absences, and little things that did not fit into chance.

And each of these details raised a new question.

Where was Gregory Willis in those last days when his daughter was alive among the cold stones of the canyon? The search for any trace of Gregory Willis continued for several weeks after Linda’s identity was confirmed.

Rangers and volunteers checked the vast area that experts had marked on the map about 20 m in different directions from the canyon where his daughter’s remains were found.

They followed the same pattern as during the initial operation 6 years ago.

slow, careful examination of every ledge, every narrow canyon arm, every possible place where a person could have fallen, hidden, or where natural processes could have hidden them.

The result remained the same.

Not a single thread, not a single piece of cloth, not a single metal buckle that could have belonged to Gregory.

For the investigators, this meant one thing.

Their initial picture of events was incomplete or wrong from the start.

The very factor that had seemed logical before that the father died next to his daughter now had no evidentiary support.

It was during this period that the name of the person who actually changed the trajectory of the case appears in the file.

A young intern at the Washington DC Police Department who worked with missing and unidentified persons databases was assigned to check interstate records, a formally routine but often useful task.

She reviewed the databases of neighboring states including Nevada and Arizona, trying to find even a remote match of descriptions.

It was among these records that one case caught her attention.

The Nevada records mentioned an unidentified man who was found in Msquite in the fall of the same time Linda and Gregory disappeared.

The date of the discovery was not accurate to the hour, but it coincided with a period of approximately 3 weeks after the Willis’s disappearance.

That alone seemed sufficient reason to investigate.

The patrolman who had once reported the discovery of the man stated in his report that the elderly man was walking along the side of the highway extremely exhausted with signs of dehydration.

The man was unable to say who he was, where he was coming from, or where he was going.

He did not remember his own name.

He did not respond to most questions.

According to the patrolman, he repeated short phrases that resembled fixed cycles, but the words themselves were meaningless.

According to the procedure, such persons are taken to the nearest hospital where their state of consciousness and physical parameters are determined.

From there, the man was sent to a state psychiatric institution that officially accepts unidentified patients who are unable to provide minimal information about themselves.

He was given the name John Doe, a standard label for unknown persons.

The first medical examinations in Nevada showed a strange combination.

The man’s physical condition was relatively satisfactory with no critical injuries that could explain his condition, but mentally he was in deep disorientation.

Doctors diagnosed retrograde amnesia accompanied by dementia spectrum.

The records of that period indicate that the patient could not name the year, did not recognize simple objects, and did not understand how he ended up on the highway.

According to the staff of this medical center, the man behaved politely, but had one feature that distinguished him from other patients.

He was obsessively interested in time.

At whatever point he was approached, he would either ask for the time or repeat it if he had just been told.

For this he was called Mr.

Clock among the staff.

The medical staff recalled different episodes.

One of the nurses recalled how the man once woke up in the middle of the night, went to the communal clock in the hall and touched the glass with his finger as if trying to make sure the time was right.

Another worker said that the patient knew how to fold his bed neatly, but every morning he would stop and look out the window as if he was waiting for something.

The doctors attributed such small repetitive actions to the manifestations of his disorder.

The brain was grasping at certain routine elements to somehow stabilize its internal state.

For all six years, this man had been in the same institution under constant supervision.

He could not be identified even though his photo was included in the interstate data exchange database several times.

No family came forward to report him and his fingerprints were missing from any criminal or civil records.

So he remained a completely anonymous patient officially classified as an undocumented person with no known past.

It was this coincidence in dates, the period of Linda and Gregory’s disappearance and the appearance of the unknown man on the highway that first gave investigators what could be called a direction, not a search horizon.

There were too many coincidences to ignore.

Age, location, state of disorientation, proximity to the Utah border.

The intern passed the information on to the detectives and they entered it into the working version.

But at this stage of the investigation, they had no evidence that the man was related to the Willis family.

They had a much more difficult question to answer.

Should this unknown person in Nevada be considered a possible Gregory Willis? Or was it just a coincidence that could be misleading? For now, the answer remained open.

But it was from that moment on that the Willis case ceased to be just a case of disappearance.

It became part of a wider, darker set of questions.

Who was the man who lived for 6 years without a name or memory? And why did his journey begin exactly 3 weeks after Linda and Gregory disappeared into the Zion Canyons? After information about a possible Gregory Willis in a Nevada state psychiatric institution appeared in the case file, the investigation team received official permission to travel.

The decision was made quickly.

They needed visual confirmation which no electronic database can replace.

When the detectives arrived in Mosquite, they were met by the senior administrator of the facility.

She had been working there for more than two decades and knew all the patients who had been under state supervision for long periods of time.

According to her, the same John Doe was not aggressive, but had a peculiarity of reacting to the world as if part of his development had stopped or faded away.

The lobby was filled with the semi- silence typical of wards where people with progressive cognitive impairment are treated.

And when the nurse brought the man who had lived in the ward for 6 years to the investigators, the first impression was unequivocal.

Time had done its job.

His hair had turned gray, his skin had lost its elasticity, and his eyes seemed to be fixed on the faces of his interlocutors.

However, several features, the line of the cheekbones, the shape of the chin, the structure of the nose, matched the photographs of Gregory Willis taken shortly before his disappearance.

For the identification procedure, the detectives brought several printed photos with them.

According to the protocol, the patient is first shown less emotionally significant images to avoid stress.

In the first photo, Gregory was in a mountain park and in the second in the workshop where he used to work.

The man reacted in the same way.

He looked but did not recognize.

When he was called the name Gregory Willis, he showed no emotional response.

According to the doctor, this was typical of retrograde forms of amnesia.

The brain can completely erase a certain layer of personal memories, leaving only fragments that cannot be explained logically.

But the biggest contribution to the investigation came from a nurse who worked with John Doe almost every day.

She told the detectives that the patient had an object that he never gave away voluntarily.

He would hide it under his pillow or in his gown pocket, even carrying it to the treatment room.

When the staff tried to take it away from him before he went to bed, the man would start shaking his hands and withdraw from any contact.

Because of this, the staff decided not to touch the object unnecessarily.

The nurse opened a small safe where they temporarily stored the object when they sanitized the patient or changed his clothes.

Inside was an old car key fob.

The case was yellowed from years of use.

The buttons were worn and the plastic part showed a barely visible inscription that had once been bright.

World’s best daughter.

the best daughter in the world.

It was this detail that stopped the investigators for a few seconds.

The keychain, according to the Willis family, was a gift Linda gave her father for one of his birthdays.

She ordered the engraving herself, and it had a characteristic font shape.

Witnesses confirmed this in initial interviews in 2013.

However, this coincidence was not enough for the investigation.

It was necessary to establish whether this key fob really belonged to the car that the Willises had left near Collab Terrace Road on the day of their disappearance.

The detectives contacted the impound lot where the Subaru Outback was still stored.

The car was under a canopy sealed and mothballled in accordance with procedures for long-standing cases.

The next day, the detectives brought with them the key found on the John Doe patient and a duplicate that had been made in 2013 for the technical needs of the investigation.

The procedure was simple.

Just press the button on the key fob near the car and check the response of the electronic lock.

Witnesses who were present during this test said that when the detective brought the key fob to the door and pressed the worn out button, nothing happened at first.

The delay lasted only a moment, but it seemed extremely long.

Then a short mechanical sound was heard in the silence of the impound lot.

The car opened.

The electronic chip in the key fob matched.

It was the key to the same car that Linda had taken on the trip with her father.

Investigators then returned to Msquite to re-examine the man who had been living under the name John Doe for 6 years.

His photographs were compared with archival photos of Gregory Willis from different years.

And despite the aging and changes associated with the disease, the match was obvious.

Experts confirmed that the proportions of the face, the location of the cheekbones, the shape of the ears, and the scar on the chin were all consistent with the same person.

A note appeared in the Washington County Sheriff’s Office report.

The likelihood that patient John Doe is Gregory Willis is extremely high.

This meant that Linda’s father did not die in the same place as her.

He came out of the canyon.

He had traveled several dozen miles of desert terrain and crossed state lines.

He lived in a strange institution for 6 years without giving his name.

and he kept with him the only thing his memory would not let him let go of, a car key and an inscription that reminded him of his daughter whose name he could not remember.

September 2019, detectives from Utah arrive at the Nevada State Custody Facility located on the outskirts of Mosquite.

The place looks like a medical campus.

Several low buildings with concrete walkways between them and a wide parking lot nearby.

For most residents of the city, this center is an ordinary part of the landscape, but for investigators, it could be the key to the events of six years ago.

The patient, known in the documents as John Doe, was in a private room with a single bed and a small table by the window.

His attending physician, Dr.

Alan Vance, prepared him for the meeting in advance.

He explained that people would come who wanted to talk but did not elaborate on the topic to avoid stressful reactions.

According to Vance, sudden changes in the daily routine could cause the patient to become anxious or aggressive.

When the detectives entered the room, the man was sitting at the table with his hands locked and staring into space.

His posture was straight, but his eyes were unfocused.

The doctor warned me that the patient could only respond to very specific stimuli and I shouldn’t expect clear answers.

The first step was to show the photos.

The detective put a printed image of Linda Willis on the table taken a few months before her disappearance.

The man looked at the photo as if it were an object that had nothing to do with him.

There was no emotional reaction, no shade of recognition.

The doctor only confirmed what they had all feared.

Dementia along with traumatic processes had erased the images of his loved ones from his memory.

When the detectives tried to call out the name Gregory, the patient looked away as if the word had no internal meaning.

Further stimulation could have been dangerous.

So the detectives moved on to the second stage, demonstration of objects.

After a few minutes pause, they placed on the table a car key fob found on the patient’s person during his arrest in Mosquite 6 years ago.

The scuffed case, the erased inscription, world’s best daughter, the crack near the button, details that did not matter to an outsider, but could be a sign to someone who once had this object on a daily basis.

The reaction was immediate.

The patient leaned forward as if he saw something vital.

He grabbed the keychain and squeezed it so hard that his knuckles turned white.

The doctor who was monitoring the process noticed a sharp change in his heart rate and breathing.

This was the first manifestation of deep emotion during the entire meeting.

The detective following the procedure said the phrase recorded in the protocol.

Mr.

Willis, do you know what this is from? Who are you supposed to give it to? The phrase was uttered without pressure, calmly, in a neutral tone, but it was enough to trigger a response from the patient.

According to the doctor, the man looked sharply at the door, then at the large wall clock in the hall, and finally, for the first time in the entire meeting, he said a few words.

It was a quiet, almost broken phrase.

“It’s late.

I have to be there,” she said to wait by the road.

These words were recorded in the official report as the only meaningful verbal reaction that could be related to the events of 2013, but it was only a fragment without specific reference points or details.

Dr.

Vance interrupted further questioning, explaining that such an outburst could be followed by an emotional breakdown.

After that, the doctor invited the detectives to his office to show them archived surveillance footage from different years.

The monitor showed footage dating back to 2014.

A patient walking down the corridor and stopping at the window, peering into the driveway.

The next video is from 2016.

The same scene, then 2018.

He is standing still holding something in his hand.

According to the nurse, it was the same keychain.

The doctor explained that this type of behavior is called perseveration, fixation on one act or thought.

The patient has almost no long-term memory.

Most of the events have disappeared forever.

But there is one deep attitude that cannot be destroyed.

The need to wait.

He described the patients daily routine.

Every morning he tries to find a jacket that is not really there.

Then he carefully folds the bed and goes to the large window in the hall.

He stands there for hours, sometimes holding on to the windowsill, sometimes just leaning on it with his elbow.

When the staff tries to take him to lunch or for treatments, he repeats the same phrases in a low voice.

She’ll be back soon.

I have to be here.

She just went away.

According to Vance, psychologically, no years have passed for the patient.

He lives in the evening of the same day.

The place may change.

The people around him may change.

But for him, there is only one timeline.

Waiting by the road where he perceives the woman whose image he can no longer recall was supposed to return.

This discovery was critically important for the detectives.

They realized that the man was not able to give a classic testimony, but his instinctive reaction to the keychain and his repeated phrases confirmed what no other sources could.

He did not leave his daughter voluntarily.

He was fulfilling the last request he heard from her before his own memory was cut short.

The doctor concluded his explanation with simple words.

His body is here, but his mind is still there on the same road.

He is waiting because he promised.

This was the first fact that allowed the investigation to look at the tragedy in Zeon not as an accident or escape, but as a dramatic memory failure that turned the man into a living time loop that does not break.

In August of 2019, specialists from various fields gathered in a separate conference room of the Washington County Sheriff’s Office.

forensic scientists, criminalists, profilers, consulting psychiatrists, and heads of search units of the National Park Service.

Several groups of materials were laid out on the table in front of them.

Photographs of Linda Willis’s remains, an old initial report on an unidentified man from Nevada, notes from staff at a psychiatric facility, and photographs of a car keychain that the man had kept with him all these years.

At first glance, these data had no obvious connection to each other.

But the experts quickly realized that each of these pieces of evidence was part of the same puzzle where the main details were hidden not in what was found, but in what was not there at all.

The forensic expert began by reconstructing the fall.

According to him, the nature of the injuries to the pelvic bones and both shins gave an almost unambiguous answer.

The fall occurred from a height of at least several meters and the impact was on a hard stone surface.

He noted that the angles of the cracks indicate that the victim fell not on a horizontal plane but on a sloping ledge.

Such a blow does not kill instantly, but it leads to severe pain, shock, and significant limitation of movement.

The expert paid special attention to the improvised tire.

The branches used to fix the leg did not belong to the vegetation growing at the bottom of the gorge.

So, Linda either went down with it or the branches got there during her fall.

The camera strap used as a restraint was tightened deliberately and evenly, indicating that she was conscious, aware of the extent of the damage and trying to stabilize her leg to at least minimize movement or survive the night.

The next to speak was a psychiatrist who had been working with patients with various forms of dementia for over a decade.

He described Gregory’s behavior which was recorded in the materials of the care facility.

It was obvious that his brain had retained one dominant attitude that had supplanted the rest of his memories.

The man might have forgotten his own name, but he had not forgotten the instruction to wait.

Experts traced the origin of this behavior to the last minutes of communication between the father and daughter.

All those present confirmed that the absence of Linda’s jacket and car keys in her belongings could not have been an accident.

The available evidence indicated that it was Gregory who had retrieved these two items before he walked away from the fall site.

That day, the temperature in the area of the gorges dropped sharply after sunset.

Without warm clothes, the injured man would not have survived for long.

According to the experts logic, Linda must have realized that she had almost no chance of getting out on her own.

So, she might have believed that the only way to save herself was to send her father up.

Forensic psychological analysis supported this reconstruction.

Gregory’s condition in the years before his disappearance was characterized by early forms of dementia, recurrent memory lapses, and difficulties with navigation and orientation.

However, he retained automatic functions, obedience in response to clear instructions, the ability to follow short instructions, and move in a familiar direction.

Detectives suggested that Linda, realizing that both of them might freeze at night, gave her father her fleece jacket.

Then she handed him the keys as a form of incentive to walk to the road.

She could say simple phrases to him that he could understand.

Go to the car, bring someone, wait by the road.

According to the psychiatrist, such instructions under stress can become the only support for a person with dementia that will determine all subsequent actions.

After the fall, Linda was left downstairs without warm clothes, but with the knowledge that her father was on his way up.

According to experts, she could have been consciously hoping for several hours or even days that he would return with help.

The key role in the reconstruction was played by the mechanism of dementia.

described by the doctors.

Under severe stress, the brain of a person with memory impairment can suddenly reboot.

In Gregory’s case, this could have happened within a short period of time after he left the scene of the fall.

Instead of a logical sequence, all that remained in his mind was general anxiety and a fragment of an attitude to wait.

He could no longer remember what to wait for.

This explained why he walked in the opposite direction, gradually losing his orientation rather than toward the car.

He was found along a highway that went far beyond the national park.

With no documents, no language, and no memory of who he was.

He was identified by the authorities only as an elderly man in a state of disorientation.

One of the investigators read an excerpt from the initial medical report from Mosquite.

The patient repeatedly repeated fragments about time.

He said he was late.

He had to be at a certain place.

The psychiatrist noted that a person with dementia often does not remember details, but he remembers the emotional center, the very state of waiting.

In fact, it was the expectation that became Gregory’s main reference point.

He no longer remembered whom he was waiting for, but he retained the inner conviction that he could not leave.

That’s why he pulled over to the side of the road where he was eventually picked up by a patrol officer.

The detectives agreed that this reconstruction most logically combined all the known facts.

Linda’s fall, her conscious attempt to help her father survive, the keys she handed over, the absence of a jacket among her belongings, and the strange behavior of Gregory, who continued to follow her last instruction for years without even realizing where it came from.

This was a turning point for the investigation.

The version of an outsers’s involvement or deliberate violence lost its grounds.

Instead, a picture emerged of a tragedy that was the result of a combination of an accident, severe trauma, and progressive cognitive impairment.

Now, the last question remained, not a legal one, but a human one.

How to end a story in which one of the participants remembers nothing but the obligation to wait and the other never waited for rescue.

In October of 2019, the Washington County Prosecutor’s Office officially closed the case of Linda Willis’s death.

After several weeks of analyzing the materials, experts confirmed that her death was the result of an accident caused by a fall in a remote area of the canyon.

Psychological reports provided by the Department of Health also showed that Gregory Willis, due to progressive dementia, could not realize his actions either then or now.

Thus, there were no legal grounds to implicate him in the crime.

After cremation, Linda’s remains were handed over to her cousin.

The funeral, which took place at the old Salt Lake City cemetery, was attended by only a few people, a few employees of her former agency and relatives with whom she had rarely spoken.

The atmosphere was low-key with no long eulogies.

Her father was not present at the ceremony.

Doctors at the Nevada State Center strongly advised against transporting him even a short distance as any change in environment could trigger a panic episode or prolonged disorientation.

After the patient was officially identified as John Doe, his real name, Gregory Willis, appeared in the institution’s documents.

After that, access to his social insurance was restored and the state took over the costs of his stay.

This was the only significant change in his life.

He did not realize these changes himself.

Since the beginning of the winter of 2020, doctors have noticed that his cognitive functions have weakened significantly.

Gregory stopped recognizing most members of the staff and later those who worked with him on a daily basis.

His speech faded and some days he did not say a single word.

But despite this, one part of his behavior remained stable and unchanged.

Every morning after breakfast, Gregory would go out into the spacious hall with a large panoramic window overlooking the main entrance to the facility.

He chose the same chair located slightly to the side of the automatic doors.

He sat in it with a slight forward lean, holding a car keychain.

It was the same one he had on him the day the patrolman picked him up, but different in material.

The doctors had replaced the old one with an identical one when it had to be seized for investigation.

The staff recalled that at first they tried to forbid him to keep the keychain during the procedures so that he would not lose it.

But every time they tried to take the object away, the man showed a sharp emotional reaction.

He began to tremble, clench his hands, or turn away from the wall.

The doctors quickly realized that this object was an important element of stabilization.

So since then, the keychain has remained with him all the time.

The staff repeatedly described his morning behavior in their reports.

He sat still, but not indifferently.

His gaze was constantly moving to the door as if he expected it to open and someone to come in.

Sometimes he would tilt his head slightly to his left shoulder as if listening to the sound of a motor that was not actually there.

These movements were repeated day after day with an immortal regularity that amazed even the most experienced workers.

When the nurses asked him to go to lunch or to a medical procedure, he often resisted passively, either by not answering or by gripping the armrests of his chair tightly.

Only occasionally did he say short phrases that remained mysterious even to those who had heard them hundreds of times.

Among them, the most frequently repeated ones were, “Not yet.

I have to be here.

He’ll be here soon.” Doctors explained this phenomenon by the term stuck memory.

This is a condition when instead of accessing full memories, the brain of a person with dementia holds a single dominant attitude, mainly the one that was associated with the strongest emotional experience before the disaster.

In Gregory’s case, this attitude was obvious, the need to wait by the roadside.

For him, time had not moved forward for a long time.

Events did not change.

Days did not accumulate.

Everything blended into one endless evening of distant mountain canyons.

He no longer remembered whom he was waiting for.

He did not remember that the road was no longer where he was sitting.

He didn’t remember the fall or the despair or his own attempt to fulfill his daughter’s request.

But his body came to the door every day.

And every morning he clutched the keychain in his fingers, the only thread left of the person he once called his daughter.

Days, weeks, years passed in this way.

Medical reports recorded deterioration in his speech, motor skills, and memory.

But one thing remained the same.

He did not stop waiting.

He could not stop.

For him, it was the last promise he made and which he continued to fulfill.

Even when the world around him finally disappeared from his consciousness, this waiting was the end of the story of two people who went to the mountains together, but were to return only many years later, each on their own path.