In August of 2016, three employees of a private surveying company surveying the slopes above Lake Tahoe stumbled upon a ground that had given way under the weight of their equipment in a deep pine forest covered with camouflage as carefully as if someone had been concealing its existence for years.

Inside lay the timeworn metal frames of two mountain [music] bikes, torn clothes and bones cleaned by the rainy and snowy season.

In a few hours, forensic experts would confirm what no one expected.

The remains belonged to a young Reno couple, Celia Parker and Donald Bryant, who disappeared 5 years ago [music] while biking the Flume Trail.

But then, in the moments after the discovery, workers stood silently over the hole, not realizing they had uncovered one of the darkest secrets of the forests above Tahoe.

August 2011, according to the Spooner Lake State Park visitor log, Celia Parker, 22 years old, and Donald Bryant, 24 years old, checked in at the entrance around in the morning.

Ranger Marcus Gray noted this on his shift as he told investigators later.

They looked like all the other cyclists that morning, cheerful with new helmets, asking about the condition of the trail.

The weather was dry, the sky was clear, and visibility was near perfect.

Typical conditions for the Flume Trail, known for its spectacular views over Lake Tahoe and sudden stretches of steep drop offs.

The couple’s pickup truck, an old dark blue Ford Ranger, remained parked near the information booth.

Inside, two empty coffee cups and a folded map of the route lay on the passenger seat.

According to another visitor, 35-year-old hiker Jaime Clark, she saw Celia and Donald heading out with their bikes on the northern section of the trail at about in the morning, she recalled.

They were laughing, and the girl told the guy not to go so fast, I even thought they were experienced.

This was the last confirmed contact with the couple.

The Flumey trail route was considered relatively safe in those days, although it required caution.

The trail ran along steep slopes with soft soil that was easily crumbling after weeks of dry weather.

That day, however, the rangers did not record any landslides or tree falls.

[music] Until noon, the rangers checked the areas around Marlet Lake, but saw no signs of accidents or [music] abandoned equipment.

Celia and Donald did not show up in the evening.

When it got dark in the parking lot, a patrol ranger noticed that their pickup truck was in the same spot.

the doors locked and the [music] bike racks empty.

At about p.m., he made a brief detour to the surrounding area, but seeing nothing suspicious, decided to wait for the official closing time of the park entrance.

Around in the evening, Celia’s mother, who according to relatives, expected to receive a short message about her return from the route, called her daughter’s cell phone.

The call did not go through.

An hour later, the family called the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office to report the alarm.

Formally, the search was allowed to begin only after confirmation that the car was indeed still in the parking lot.

This information was provided by the rangers at in the evening.

In the first hours of the search, only flashlights and a voice call were used.

The rangers combed a section of the main trail to the viewpoints, but found no bicycles, [music] no clothing, and no fresh tire tracks.

The next morning, a full-scale operation was announced.

According to the park’s official report, the search involved about two dozen volunteers, a K-9 team, and two patrol crews from Ormsby County.

The area was divided into sectors, starting from Lake Marlet and moving toward the steep cliffs where rocks often fell.

The dogs picked up the trail at the first mile marker, but lost it 50 yards further on.

Several fuzzy [music] tire prints were visible in the sand of the trail, which experts later acknowledged did not allow them to unequivocally identify Celia and Donald’s bicycles.

Dry dust quickly erased any prints.

[music] Particular attention was paid to areas where the trail passed over a canyon that descended to a narrow stream bed.

That [music] same day, the rescuers descended to the bottom of the canyon on two ropes and inspected the channel for nearly one mile back and forth.

No items, debris, or signs of a fall were found.

An aerial survey from a Nevada helicopter was also inconclusive.

Tall grass and pine trees hid even large objects.

On the third day of the search operation, police received a report from a couple of tourists who claimed to have seen a gray van with no license plates on the [music] park’s access road.

The man who testified described the driver as a young white male with a baseball cap, but admitted to seeing him for only a few seconds.

The van, he said, was standing on the side of the road as if waiting for [music] someone.

The information was passed on to investigators, but no confirmation could be found.

There were no cameras in [music] the area, and other witnesses did not notice a similar vehicle.

The search continued at night.

Volunteers told investigators about strange sensations in those places.

The silence was unnaturally dense, and [music] the dark forest around seemed like a closed space from which nothing could escape.

But this silence did not hide any material trace.

On the seventh day, the headquarters, located right in the park’s parking lot, decided to expand the radius of the [music] operation to several miles beyond the Flume Trail, including the hard-to-reach areas around the canyons.

Volunteers from Reno, veterans of local rescue teams, and even a few cyclists who knew the route well took part in the search.

On the 10th day after the disappearance, when all known trails and several side passages marked on old maps had been checked, the official search was suspended.

The families were informed in the presence of the sheriff that no significant traces had been found that could point to the whereabouts of Celia [music] and Donald.

The pickup truck was left in the parking lot as evidence.

The parents were only allowed to take their personal belongings from the cabin.

The families insisted that the couple could not have [music] just left the trail.

According to them, they both had basic experience in mountain hiking and knew how to navigate the terrain.

But the search team’s report stated, “There is no confirmed hypothesis as to the cause of the disappearance.

There is no point from which to conduct further investigation.” Lake Tahoe remained just as calm and indifferent.

The trails they had traveled on that August morning continued to receive new visitors, and their pickup truck in the parking lot became the first symbol of the mystery that began to grow into rumors, speculation, and disturbing questions that would not be answered for a long time.

September 2016, the Silver State GI Odyssey Company’s log book records that a group of four specialists traveled to a patch of forest east of Lake Marlet to conduct a soil stability assessment before future slope stabilization work.

The route was off the beaten path in an area where old maps only showed dense shrubbery and impenetrable forest.

The work was scheduled to last until noon when the temperature would not rise too high.

Around in the morning, according to a report by engineer Lawrence Gibson, they were moving through a narrow natural depression between two hills when one of the employees, geotechnician Steven Howell, slipped on a layer of soft soil.

According to a colleague, he first thought he had stepped on a rotten tree stump, but the ground had settled more than 2 feet beneath him.

Howell felt a void beneath the layer of branches and moss, and the faint smell of old metal and dry leaves immediately became apparent in the air.

They cleared away the top layer with their hands and a small trowel to sample the soil.

Beneath the moss was a crude camouflage structure made of intertwined branches and bark fragments.

When the workers removed the first layer, a dark cavity was revealed.

According to Gibson’s explanation, he shown a flashlight into it and immediately noticed rounded pale outlines that he first thought were shards of old pottery.

But as the beam slid further, it became clear that they were bones.

The workers immediately stopped work and called the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office.

On the official recording of the call made at 11 hours and 32 minutes, Howell’s voice is shaky.

We think it’s human remains, and there are two of them.

The patrol arrived in just under 40 minutes, and the area was immediately declared a potential crime scene.

The forest around the site was completely taped off and the company’s employees were taken outside the perimeter.

The description of the pit given in the forensic report is detailed.

About 3 ft in diameter, about 4 ft deep, the walls reinforced by the roots of young pines that sprouted several years after the disguise.

Inside were two skeletons partially intermingled.

The bones had been cleaned by time and small forest animals, but were almost completely preserved.

To the left of the bodies, the rescuers found two metal bicycle frames.

Both were badly damaged.

Rust had eaten away at the parts, and the rim of one of the front tires was bent as if from a strong impact.

Several pieces of clothing were also found among the belongings.

a piece of synthetic fabric from a sports jacket, a torn backpack strap, and part of an elastic cycling shorts.

The fabric was torn in uneven torn lines.

And according to forensic scientist Germaine Sloan, these tears were not consistent with natural wear and tear or fall damage.

Some of the pieces contained microtraces of brown stains tentatively identified as blood, but DNA analysis was conducted later.

The diary of the scene inspection notes that the ground under the skeletons was compacted as if they had been placed there at the same time and covered with a thick layer of moss and wood [music] fragments.

The pit was formed by hand without the use of a shovel or tools as evidenced by the uneven edges and natural depressions left by the fingers.

The disguise was so skillful that in 5 years, the roots of young trees had partially grown [music] into the top layer of the hidden structure.

On the same day, forensic experts from Carson City [music] arrived at the scene.

They announced their first conclusions in the evening.

The physique and size of the bone remains [music] were consistent with adult young people, one man and one woman.

The jaws of both bodies were well preserved.

It was thanks to this that the next morning, dental experts compared the data with the state archives.

At 12 hours and 20 minutes, [music] it was officially confirmed that the remains belonged to Celia Parker and Donald Bryant, who disappeared in the summer of 2011.

The examination report states that many of the bones showed characteristic damage, micro cracks, and rounded [music] dents.

Forensic expert Brandon Hail stated, “These deformities are consistent with blows with a medium-sized blunt [music] object, at least several blows to each victim.

There were no signs of a fall from a height as the families had hoped.

On the contrary, the injuries had a clear focus and repetition [music] characteristic of a deliberate attack.

Bicycles found nearby [music] also provided evidence.

One of the steering units was broken as if it had been hit on a hard surface.

Several dents were found on the metal, which according to experts could be the result of blows from the same weapon as the bone injuries.

Some paint fragments were removed from the frames for examination, but no traces of foreign DNA were found on the metal.

Time and weather conditions [music] had taken their toll.

The area around the pit was a continuous forest with dense pine and large trees.

Observers noted that the location of the cache was extremely well chosen, far from any roots on a slope hidden between two natural ledges.

No eyewitness could have been there by accident.

Ranger Will Kempton’s report contains the phrase, “Even an experienced [music] hiker would not come here.

This is pure wilderness.

” After the bodies were identified, [music] the case was officially reclassified as a double homicide investigation.

The sheriff’s office press release said, “The nature of the injuries indicates clear violence.

The victims were fatally stabbed with a blunt object.

The bodies were carefully and deliberately disposed of which may indicate a motive and preparation.

” The families were informed of the discovery in the evening and according to one of the investigators, [music] they reacted the way parents react after 5 years of not knowing, a mixture of shock, relief, and rage.

Over the next two days, forensic investigators re-examined the area in an attempt to find the murder weapon.

They checked every few feet around using metal detectors and hand probes.

But the forest had [music] changed too much over the years.

Rains had washed away tracks.

Roots had torn up the soil and fallen leaves had formed new layers on top of the old.

No weapons or indications of the presence of a third party could be found.

The conclusion of the experts was unequivocal.

The bodies were deliberately hidden.

The bicycles were destroyed by blows.

And the place was chosen so that it would not be found for as long as possible.

The mystery of the disappearance of the couple from the Flume Trail finally took a gruesome shape and at the same time raised new questions that needed to be answered.

The investigation, which was officially opened in September 2016, immediately forced detectives to go back to the old Douglas County Archives.

In the days after the bodies were identified, they studied all cases of aggressive behavior recorded in the vicinity of Lake Tahoe.

Over the past two decades, a short but hard-to-reach statistic appeared on a whiteboard in the investigative department.

Several assaults on tourists, threats to rangers, conflicts over access to forest roads.

And in all these episodes, the same name appeared, Arthur Graves.

County records show that Graves was born in a small town near Carson City and spent most of his youth working on a logging crew.

He was fired after an incident in 2004 when, according to his colleagues, he attacked a visitor who was taking pictures of equipment.

At the same time, a court found him guilty of aggravated assault and sentenced him to a short term of probation.

After that, Graves moved into a lonely cabin off North Canyon Road in the forest.

He was known to live there without electricity, getting water from a spring and collecting firewood by hand.

Ranger reports over the years contain records of complaints from hikers who claimed to have encountered a bearded man in a worn jacket who demanded they leave the trail.

One such witness, Reno resident Michael Doyle, recalled in a statement, “He said it was his territory and that we were messing up the forest.

I thought he was just drunk or not quite sane.” Such episodes never went to court, but Graves remained on the lists of persons capable of violent acts.

After the discovery of Celia and Donald skeletons, Graves name was immediately at the top of the list of possible suspects.

Detectives had several reasons.

First, his cabin was located about a mile and a half from where the hidden pit was discovered, as evidenced by old maps of forest roads that officers used to analyze the route.

Secondly, in early 2011, a report was drawn up against Graves for verbally threatening a cyclist who, in his words, rode under his window.

Thirdly, his isolated lifestyle and lack of an official job gave grounds to assume that he might be engaged in covert activities in the forest.

On September 22nd, 2016, detectives went to Graves Cabin.

The official report describes the location as an old wooden structure with a broken porch surrounded by scrap metal, old tools, and logs stacked in a haphazard manner.

During the initial interview, officers said Graves appeared to be disturbed.

He did not deny that he had been on the trails near Lake Marlet the summer the couple disappeared, but claimed he did not remember that day.

His words are recorded in the report with a qualifier given without a lawyer voluntarily.

Detectives noticed several details.

There were three hand axes near the wall of the hut, one of which had dark spots on the blade.

Experts later confirmed that it was just rust, but [music] at the time of the inspection, it was suspicious.

Also in the shed, they found an old pickaxe with a curved handle that could theoretically match the shape of the injuries on the bones.

The item was seized for further examination.

In another corner of the shed, there were ropes and several old bicycle parts, including a bent rim and a rusted bolt from the frame.

The inspection did not clearly establish whether these items had belonged to graves for many years or could have been brought in later.

Investigators paid special attention to possible illegal logging.

A report from the Division of Natural Resources stated that along several hundred yards in an area near [music] North Canyon Road, they found evidence of fresh, unofficially cut trees.

The stumps were [music] had been cut with a handsaw and some logs were lying in the brush ready to be removed.

Such activity could have been a motive for aggression against people who accidentally approached the site.

Investigators added this to the materials as a potential motive.

Conversations with local residents also confirmed this.

Graves did not like anyone walking near his property.

One of the neighbors, an elderly woman, recalled that in the summer of 2011, she heard loud muttering from the woods and a metallic thud, as if someone was hitting a pipe or an iron barrel.

That evening, she said she saw Graves returning to the cabin with a large package on his shoulders.

But she didn’t attach much importance to it, thinking he was just carrying firewood.

All of this painted a nearly perfect picture of the suspect, a reclusive, aggressive man with a history of conflicts with tourists and a possible reason to hide something in the middle of the forest.

When detectives looked into his past arrests, they found another disturbing episode.

During an interrogation in 2004, Graves told the police officer, “If they had left my forest alone, no one would have been hurt.” This fragment was brought up again, using it as evidence of a possible recording on personal territory.

After inspecting the house and the land, [music] investigators obtained a search warrant.

They did not find anything in the hut that could directly [music] link him to the murder.

However, the investigative team’s report stated that the general condition of the house, the lack of communication with other people, and his open hostility to tourists make Graves a prime candidate for the role of the attacker.

At the time, detectives had no other individuals who matched both the profile and the geographic proximity to the crime [music] scene.

The case was sent for further investigation with a focus on his possible involvement.

The forest again [music] seemed silent, but this time investigators were certain that the answers were somewhere nearby in the dense [music] trees, which are easy to walk through, but just as easy to hide traces.

The arrest of Arthur Graves took place early in the morning on September 27th, 2016.

The report states that the [music] task force arrived at his hut at , 15 minutes.

Graves [music] met them at the door looking sleepy and according to officer Jeremy Brooks, more irritated than scared.

He was announced as being under arrest on suspicion of involvement in the double murder.

He did not resist, only repeated that he hadn’t done anything bad to anyone in recent years.

At the same time, the police began searching the area.

In the shed behind the house, they found dozens of tools.

Old axes, Tesla, hammers, two picks, and a large handsaw.

The pick with the curved handle and dents in the blade attracted the most attention.

This shape could, upon a superficial assessment, correspond to the injuries found on the bones of Celia Parker and Donald Bryant.

Several ropes and bicycle parts covered in rust were also found.

For the public, this was more than enough.

News of the arrest spread through local channels in a matter of hours.

Residents of Reno and Carson City commented on social media that they finally found the maniac hiding in the woods.

One of the volunteers who participated in the search said in an interview with local radio, “We’ve known for a long time that Graves was dangerous.

This is not surprising.” Although these words had no evidentiary value, they shaped public opinion and the police were under pressure.

In the interrogation room, Graves behaved calmly.

According to Detective Copeland, he answered briefly without emotion, insisting that he hadn’t been out there in years.

When asked about the tools in the shed, he replied that they were old junk left over from a job 20 years ago.

His words were recorded in the protocol, but at the time, investigators were inclined to believe that the suspect was deliberately making excuses.

The first doubts appeared the next day when experts began to analyze the seized items.

No biological traces were found on the pickaxe.

Neither blood nor tissue residues that could have been preserved under a layer of rust.

The ropes also gave no reason to believe that they had been used to tie people up.

The fibers were evenly frayed, typical of years of exposure to moisture.

The bicycle parts found in the shed didn’t match the models of Celia and Donald’s bicycles, which had been purchased a few months before the disappearance.

This information was confirmed by the store where the couple made the purchase.

The most important breakthrough came when the investigative unit submitted a request to the Carson City County Jail.

They were looking for confirmation of an old record they had found in the archives that Graves had allegedly been arrested for a bar fight in the summer of 2011.

A few hours later, the answer came officially.

Arthur Graves was indeed serving a 30-day arrest from August 1st to August 31st of that year, the period when Celia and Donald set out on the Flume Trail and disappeared.

This information was confirmed not only by documents, but also by the testimony of two prison guards at the time.

One of them in a telephone conversation with detectives said, “Yes, he was here.

He was calm.

Didn’t cause any problems.” The testimony was entered into the case as additional evidence.

Graves could not have physically been in the woods that day.

The detectives looked at duty schedules, log books, and even meal records, and they all matched.

This fact dramatically changed the investigation’s position.

If Graves could not have been in the park on the day of the couple’s disappearance, the likelihood of his involvement was rapidly decreasing.

Although some officers speculated that he might have had accompllices, no evidence of this was found.

There were no phone connections, no witnesses, no traces at the crime scene that would point to a group of people.

On September 29, the district attorney admitted that there was no evidence to keep Graves in custody.

His personal belongings were returned to him, and the sheriff’s department issued a brief press [music] statement stating that no person should be presumed guilty without due consideration of all the facts.

This wording caused a wave of outrage among some local residents who had already considered the case solved.

Graves was released the same day.

According to a reporter who met him outside the sheriff’s office, he looked exhausted and did not say a word, just walked toward his cabin.

The police, meanwhile, found themselves in a difficult position.

The main suspect no longer fit the profile, and there were no other leads to solve the case.

The investigative department reanalyzed all the materials, the geography of the burial site, the nature of the bone injuries, the bicycle frames, and [music] possible escape routes of the attacker, but none of the lines led to a specific person.

An internal report from early October stated, “The case has been returned to its original state.

The alleged attacker is unknown.

The motives and circumstances remain unclear.

The forest became silent again and the investigation hopelessly confused as if all the roads they had tried to make had crumbled into empty ground like the footprints on the trail that August day.

When the investigation returned to ground zero, [music] detectives decided to focus on what is usually the most invisible but often key line of inquiry, the personal connections of the victims.

[music] In the first reports of 2011, this area was superficially addressed.

The focus then shifted to the accident version [music] and Celia and Donald’s circle of acquaintances was only formally checked.

Now that the story had been clearly identified as a double murder, detective Mark Copeland decided to go back to all the early mentions, including those that seemed secondary at the time.

One name popped [music] up almost immediately, Jason Reed.

He was mentioned several times in internal documents, but in each case in passing.

In the questionnaire filled out by the family of the missing Celia and Donald, it was stated [music] that before the relationship with Donald, Celia had been dating Reed for almost a year.

They broke up in the spring of 2011 due to inconsistencies in their plans for the future.

That’s how Celia’s mother put it in her testimony.

But during the re-examination of the archives, investigators found several other statements [music] that had not previously received proper attention.

One of them was left by Celia’s neighbor, Amber Ross.

In her statement, she claimed that she saw Jason outside Celia’s apartment several times after the breakup, standing in his car and looking out the windows.

The testimony was recorded, but at the time the police [music] did not consider it potentially dangerous behavior.

Another message came from an employee of the store where Celia worked.

According to her, Reed called her workplace, demanded to speak to the [music] girl, and when she refused, left annoying messages.

In two of them, according to the memo, he said that he still loves her and will not let anyone come between them.

Detectives decided to establish all possible contacts between [music] Jason Reed and the couple in the months before the tragedy.

From the cell phone records, they found that Reed had indeed tried to call Celia several [music] times during June and July.

While this was not a crime, this behavior was consistent [music] with evidence of his excessive emotional dependence.

Only one aspect remained important, whether he could have been involved in the events of August.

In 2011, the police quickly removed him from the list of suspects.

An early report reads, “Reed stated that he had been at home all day in a state of depression, had experienced anxiety since the breakup, and had not left his apartment.

At the time, his words were taken as sufficient without being technically or independently verified.

5 years later, such leniency seemed a mistake.” Copeland reached out to Reed’s former roommate, who by then was living in another state.

She agreed to talk on the phone and confirmed that Jason had been acting strange in the period after his breakup with Celia.

According to her, he had short fuses of anger, and once in a conversation, he said, “I’m not going to let her get away with this.” She passed this sentence on to the detective, clarifying that she did not know if it was directly related to Celia because he was almost always talking about her.

The case file also contained a message from an acquaintance of Donald’s who recalled the episode a few weeks before the disappearance.

According to him, Donald said that some guy named Jason wrote to him on social media accusing him of breaking up the family and kidnapping Celia.

These messages have not been preserved.

Reed’s account was deleted back in 2012.

But the very fact of their existence has been confirmed by a witness.

The combination of these details formed a disturbing image.

A man who could not accept the breakup, [music] did not hide his anger, and had access to information about Celia’s movements.

Several of her friends confirmed what she once said.

I told him not to write anymore, but he doesn’t listen.

One friend mentioned this phrase in a conversation with detectives after the bodies were found.

Detectives also investigated the possibility that Jason knew about the trip to the Flume Trail.

Celia’s family said she often shared her plans with friends on social media.

They did not find any public posts, but several of her close friends confirmed it.

Celia talked about the route in private messages in the week before she disappeared.

Jason, according to one of the witnesses, was still in the same group of friends as her, and it is possible that this information could have come to him by accident.

Now that detectives were returning to this old line of inquiry, it was clear that it had been underestimated for years.

Reed had no official alibi.

There was no record of his whereabouts on that August day.

No witnesses, no transactions, no confirmation, only his own words.

The first report reads, “He stated that he was at home but could not confirm it.

” At the time, investigators thought that was enough.

5 years later, in light of the new facts, this position looked like an unforgivable mistake.

Reed was no longer just a name in the old records.

He had become a potential shadow that stretched over the disappeared, present in all the accounts of their lives in the months before the tragedy.

And this shadow seemed to finally demand the attention it had been denied in the early days of the investigation.

After the failure of the lumberjack Arthur Graves case, the investigation needed a new direction and the detectives decided to return to something that was hardly used in 2011 due to technical limitations.

Cellular data analysis.

In 5 years, technology had changed and it was now possible to reconstruct a person’s roots long before it became standard procedure.

That’s how detective Mark Copelan first gained access to the archived logs of the mobile towers used by Jason Reed.

The process was complicated.

The data was stored in fragmented form.

Some of it was printed on old thermal tapes and others were in formats that had long been unsupported by modern programs.

But after 3 days of digitization, a technical team from the Department of Justice was able to reconstruct the roots of the phones that operated in the Carson City and Lake Tahoe area in August of that year.

The detectives were most interested in the time periods from morning to evening on the day Celia Parker and Donald Bryant did not return from the Flume Trail.

The first match appeared on the computer screen at in the morning.

A senior analyst, Julia Menses, found that Jason’s phone was activated not near his apartment, as he had claimed in his [music] testimony, but near the southern edge of Carson City.

It was a tower that stood several miles from the trail that leads to the entrance to Spooner Lake [music] State Park.

The exact time the signal was recorded was around in the morning.

This was the first real contradiction between his words and the technical data.

Copelan turned to the official materials from 2011.

It reads in black and white.

The suspect claims to [music] have been in the apartment in the morning, did not leave, and did not answer the phone.

But now the billing showed something else.

The phone, which should have been physically in his possession, was near one of the key transportation routes to the place where the couple [music] later disappeared.

The detectives expanded the time frame and found a second signal about 40 minutes later.

Reed’s phone was again lit [music] up on a tower serving the northern sector of the same highway.

This meant movement in the direction of Tahoe.

Not a slow walk, not a casual deviation, but movement toward the park.

The time coincided with the [music] interval when Celia and Donald set out on the route.

Copelan drew up a generalized diagram and noticed the obvious.

The phone was moving parallel to the flume trail at almost the exact same time the couple was in the woods.

Reed hadn’t just lied about his location.

He was a few minutes away from the park’s entrance [music] point.

As soon as this information came to light, detectives sent a request to the rental agencies in the region.

In 2011, such a check was difficult, but now many companies have digital copies of their contracts.

The first to respond was a [music] small office in the southern part of Carson City, which provided an archived rental card for a Jeep SUV.

The most important thing was that the client had given a name that did not match any real residents of the city.

The document was signed on Saturday of the same August weekend [music] when the couple disappeared in the name of a fictitious Chris Loftton.

The handwriting noted in the report looked confident, but upon further analysis by forensic experts, [music] the signature style was remarkably similar to Jason Reed’s signatures in his old documents.

At that time, landlords did not require electronic identity verification, [music] and the client showed his driver’s license so quickly that the employee who drew up [music] the contract remembered.

He just slid the card.

I only saw his name and photo, and I had no reason to doubt him.” She told detectives this [music] later during a second interview.

A request to banking organizations showed that the payment was made in cash, so it was impossible to trace the transaction.

But the fact that the rental was made under a different name was the key that moved the chain of [music] investigation.

Why would a man who claimed to be depressed and spending the day at home rent an SUV on the day his ex-girlfriend and her new partner disappeared? And why did he show up a few miles from the park where they were last seen alive? The investigation was now moving in a clear direction.

Copeland ordered additional analysis of the cell towers.

Every time the phone was turned on, every short signal on the network, even unanswered calls, and over time, an even more precise route emerged.

Reed’s phone was turned on in the same sectors at around 10, 11, and around noon.

These intervals corresponded to the stages of the flume trail, which could have allowed the attacker to track or move in parallel with the victims.

The detectives also analyzed the signal strength, and found that the last connection before Celia and Donald disappeared, was to a tower serving the northeast slope, the exact area where their hidden grave was found 5 years later.

This was a major coincidence.

Reed’s phone was in the crime scene area during a time period that has never been accurately reproduced in 2011.

Then came another piece of evidence.

When the police analyzed the logs, they discovered that Reed’s phone had made one brief connection to the network at 43 minutes on that same August day.

It wasn’t a call, but a background ping, an automatic update that happens when a phone briefly moves between towers.

But this ping was the key.

It was made at an altitude that almost exactly matched the location of the Flume Trail lookout points.

[music] This meant one thing.

The phone was on the route or in places where the route could be reached on foot.

In the words of one of the technical analysts at the briefing, the phone was where it could not be.

According to the suspect, this was the phrase the detectives used in their internal report.

The version of depression and real estate at home was crumbling.

Billing records indicated active movements.

The rental record confirmed access to transportation.

And the established routes of travel intersected with areas where the trail was lost and where it was easy to wait for people going up or down.

What Jason Reed had missed was that he hadn’t taken into account that even a phone that is simply silent in your pocket still leaves traces.

And now those traces were beginning to form the outline of what the police in 2011 called lack of direction.

But there was a direction.

It stretched from Carson City to the Flume Trail and to the very slopes where the bodies were found buried years later.

Jason Reed’s real lie was finally visible in the numbers, signals, and routes he had underestimated.

When the cell tower data was finally confirmed, Jason Reed had lied about his whereabouts on the day Celia Parker and Donald Bryant disappeared.

Investigators decided to move on to the next stage.

They had to find at least one physical piece of evidence that would connect the suspect to the victims, not only through digital traces.

According to Detective Mark Copeland, a phone is a lead, but it’s not proof.

That’s why the sheriff’s department filed a court petition to search Reed’s current home.

The search warrant was signed by a Douglas County judge in the early morning hours.

The warrant, which was executed in accordance with all the rules, stated that there was a reasonable suspicion that the suspect might be in possession of items related to the murder.

At that time, Reed had been living in a suburb of Reno for many years in a quiet neighborhood with identical houses that [music] seemed to be placed in a pattern.

The irony of the situation was that he seemed to be a man who had forgotten his own past.

He was married, officially employed, and described by his neighbors as quiet and polite.

The task force arrived at the house around in the morning.

According to Officer Ellison, Reed came to the doorstep in his workclo as if he was about to leave for his shift.

He was confused at first and then tried to clarify whether there had been some kind of mistake.

One of the detectives read the order out loud.

Reed then allowed them to enter, although as [music] described in the report, he was visibly shaking.

The house was in perfect order.

The furniture was geometrically straight.

There was not a single superfluous thing in the living room and there was a bowl in the kitchen turned upside down as if the owner was protecting everything from disorder.

However, it was not the house that [music] interested the investigators, but the garage, a place where people usually keep things they don’t want to keep in plain sight.

Reed’s garage was filled with boxes, old tools, and seasonal equipment.

The report states, “At first glance, [music] it appeared to be a typical messy garage of an average Nevada resident, but the detectives had a methodical plan.

They moved from the walls to the center of the [music] room, examining every box, every crate, every bag.

On one of the shelves behind the fishing tackle, they found an old unmarked cardboard [music] box.

It didn’t look like much, but inside were small objects of various origins.

hooks, lead weights, spools of fishing line, and a small piece of jewelry wrapped in cloth.

At first, [music] one of the investigators thought it was just a fishing trinket, but when he unwrapped the cloth, a small metal pendant with a thin chain fell into the light.

Its description in the case reads as follows.

Oval pendant [music] with embossed pine silhouette, silver color, wear marks on the right edge.

This description immediately matched the photographs that Celia’s family had given to the police back in 2011.

In one of the photos, the girl was standing on the beach smiling at the camera, and the pendant [music] was clearly visible around her neck.

The officer holding the jewelry asked Reed’s wife if it was hers.

According [music] to witnesses, the woman looked genuinely surprised and replied that she had never seen [music] it before.

The detectives recorded her reaction, requested a written confirmation from her, and seized the pendant as material evidence.

The find was then sent to a laboratory in Carson City.

The first stage was the detection [music] of biological traces.

Microscopic particles of epithelial cells were found on the inside of the pendant.

They were highly degraded, [music] but suitable for analysis.

2 days later, the laboratory sent an interim conclusion.

The DNA was consistent [music] with a man’s.

The second stage, conducted separately, was to determine who [music] exactly these particles belong to.

The result was a turning point.

The genetic profile matched the profile of Jason [music] Reed, who was stored in the database due to an old minor conviction for disorderly conduct.

The forensic biology report states, “The probability of a random match is less than one in several million.” This wording was enough for the pendant to officially become evidence of Reed’s direct interaction with the object that was around Celia’s neck [music] on the day she disappeared.

Detectives interviewed his wife again.

She confirmed that Jason had never talked about his ex-girlfriend [music] and that their garage was a space where she doesn’t interfere.

Her anxiety during the conversation, as the investigator recorded, was strong but not demonstrative.

The woman could not explain why a woman’s jewelry that did not belong to her was kept in the house.

Investigators considered the possibility of an accident.

Could the pendant have ended up in the box without the intention of being kept as a trophy? But the case file refuted this.

The box was in the farthest corner, closed, and its contents did not look like something that had been used in recent years.

The pendant was wrapped separately, neatly, as if someone had treated it not as an unnecessary thing, but as an object of significance.

Copelan’s internal report states, “This is not an accident, trash, or lost item.

It is a souvenir kept on purpose.” This view was echoed by several criminal psychologists who advise the investigation.

A person who takes a victim’s object does so for an emotional purpose, as a reminder, proof of control, or a symbol of closure.

Reed reportedly behaved extremely quietly on the day of the search, but the report notes one important detail.

When the detective showed him the pendant in a transparent bag, Reed turned pale and looked away.

He refused to answer questions without a lawyer and stopped [music] all cooperation.

For the investigators, this was the first material evidence of a direct connection between him and Celia after her disappearance.

And at the same time, it was indirect confirmation that Reed had kept something he should not have.

The pendant became the material point that connected years of silence lies in the billing records and the suspect’s unexpected geographical proximity to the crime scene.

When the billing records, the rented SUV and the pendant Jason Reed’s position went from shaky to crumbling.

His lawyer initially insisted that everything could be explained, but investigators only added new layers of evidence.

Detective Copelan’s report contains a brief entry.

We saw him ringing his hands under the table, which was the first external signal that his resistance was breaking down.

According to procedure, the suspect was taken to the Douglas County Detention Center where he was interrogated for two days in the presence of a lawyer.

During the first hours, Reed remained silent or answered with the same phrases, repeating that he had nothing to do with what happened in the summer.

However, the investigators acted methodically.

They put on the table a map of his phone’s location, a map of the Flume Trail with tower activation zones, a photocopy of the SUV rental agreement, and a photo of the pendant in the evidence bag.

According to one of the detectives, at that point, Reed stopped breathing for a few seconds, as if he was trying to stop time itself.

The lawyer demanded a break, and the protocol recorded that the suspect spent almost an hour in the breakroom.

When he returned, he looked changed.

The official record shows that his behavior became less defensive.

His voice was trembling.

It was then that the first statement was made.

I didn’t want it.

I just wanted to talk.

The phrase remained in the protocol as a turning point.

The following reconstruction of the events is based on Reed’s official confession which he gave on the record in the presence of his lawyer.

According to him, a few weeks before Celia and Donald’s trip, he learned from mutual friends that the couple was going to go skiing near Lake Tahoe.

He claimed that he just wanted to see if she had really moved on with her life.

But detectives immediately noted the contradiction between these words and previous aggressive actions that witnesses described back in 2011.

In his confession, Reed said that he had traveled to Carson City the day before the couple disappeared, stayed in a cheap motel, and rented an SUV so I wouldn’t have to drive my own so that no one would think he was stalking anyone, he said.

The investigation revealed that [music] this was exactly what he was trying to avoid, recognition.

He left his car at the motel and headed toward the park in the morning.

He then found a section of the Flume Trail on the map that was off the main trail of place with a narrow passage between stone outcroppings.

Reed called it a place to wait.

He said he wasn’t sure if the couple would choose this particular segment of the route, but he knew they would show up sooner or later because it was the most popular part of the trail among cyclists.

Then his words became more difficult to understand.

He admitted that he had seen them from afar, even as they were approaching the narrow section.

He hid behind a boulder and waited for Donald to ride ahead.

When there was a short distance between them, Reed came out of ambush and in his words tried to talk to Celia.

However, as he claimed, the conversation quickly turned to yelling.

He was then silent for a few seconds, after which he said, “He came back for her.

He threw himself at me.

I [music] I wasn’t thinking.

The official record states the suspect admitted to being struck with a blunt object he was carrying.

Reed did not specify which object, saying only whatever was on hand.

Detectives noted that his words matched the nature of the injuries described by forensic experts.

In his confession, he also said that after the incident, he panicked and tried to create the impression that the couple had left the route.

He found a small depression in the ground among the pine trees and began to clear it with his hands using sticks and stones as leverage.

It was there he admitted that he hid their bodies and bicycles.

I thought that the forest would take everything away and no one would find anything.

The investigator who was present during the interrogation said after the confession, the lawyer asked to end the interrogation, but the investigators already had what they had been waiting for for [music] years.

A straightforward, albeit heartbreaking story of the crime.

The trial took place later, but the available documents in this case [music] confirmed that Jason Reed pleaded guilty under pressure from the evidence and his own words.

The judge, having heard the materials, [music] sentenced him to life imprisonment without the possibility of early release.

This verdict was based on a full confession, digital traces, evidence in his home, and a reconstruction of the route.

According to Celia and Donald’s relatives, when they were informed of the conclusion of the case, the room was silent.

For years, they had been living between two states of hope [music] and fear.

Now there was finally an answer, albeit one that was hard to accept.

Thus ended one of the darkest stories of the Lake Tahoe forests, one that had been hidden for 5 years under soil, roots, and silence.