On June 12th, 2015, three friends went hiking on the north rim of the Grand Canyon.

They disappeared without a trace.

A month later, one of them was found on the side of the road, exhausted with a shaved head and a shocking story to tell.

But what really happened to the other girls and why only one of them was found, you will learn in this video.

Enjoy.

Some names and details in this story have been changed for anonymity and confidentiality.

Not all photographs are from the actual scene.

On June 12th, 2015, the sun was at its zenith on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, burning the colors on the rocks to a dazzling white.

This place, known as the North Rim, is very different from the popular and crowded South Rim.

It is dominated by silence, isolation, and wildlife that does not forgive mistakes, even for experienced travelers.

It was here at the Ranger registration point that three 18-year-old girls approached that morning.

They looked full of enthusiasm, ready for a great adventure that was to be the final chord of their school life before adult paths took them in different directions.

In the log book of that day, there was an entry about a group of three people planning a route in the Powell Plateau area, a remote and difficult section of the park.

The leader of the group, judging by who negotiated with the ranger and filled out the paperwork, was Irma Tucker.

In the case files, she is described as the brain of the company Pragmatic.

Focused, always resultoriented, Irma had received a prestigious scholarship to a university on the east coast and was preparing to move in a few months.

For her, this hike was not just a walk, but a sporting challenge that she had planned to the smallest detail, studying topographic maps and calculating water reserves.

Next to her stood Regina Williams, the complete opposite of Irma, a bright, charismatic, artistic person who was going to study art in California.

Her friends called her the soul of the company.

For Regina, the harsh cliffs of the canyon were just a backdrop for beautiful photos and a place to laugh out loud without worrying about others.

She was the emotional link that smoothed out the corners in the communication between the demanding Irma and the third member of the group.

The third girl’s name was Lisa Owen.

In police reports and classmates memoirs, she appears as a shadow.

Quiet, compliant, always seemingly calm.

Lisa almost never argued and agreed with any decision Irma made.

She was the only one of the three who did not plan to leave.

Lisa was staying in her hometown while her friends were preparing for a big future in the big cities.

That morning, she stood a little behind while Irma clarified the details of the route with the officer on duty.

According to the plan, the girls had left their rented SUV in a remote parking lot near Swamp Point, one of the park’s most difficult to access viewpoints, accessed by a ruted forest road.

The car would be found there later, dusty, locked, silently waiting for its passengers, who were due back in 5 days.

The last confirmed contact with the group took place on the same day, June 12th.

On the North Bass Trail, they were met by a group of hikers on their way up.

According to witnesses, the girls were in good spirits, moving confidently, and did not look exhausted.

They briefly greeted each other, exchanged some pleasantries about the weather, and continued their descent deep into the hot stone maze.

After that meeting, they were never seen again.

On June 17th, 2015, their permit to stay in the back country expired.

According to protocol, they were supposed to report to the ranger station to complete the route.

However, by the evening, none of them showed up phone calls from their parents, which began to arrive later that night, went unanswered.

There was no mobile phone service in that part of the canyon.

The next morning, when the SUV was still parked in the Swamp Point parking lot, covered in a layer of red dust, it became clear that something was wrong.

The search operation began on June 18 at in the morning.

It was one of the largest actions of that season.

The National Park Service deployed two helicopters for aerial surveillance, as well as several ground teams that descended difficult routes into the plateau area.

Temperatures in the shade reached 40° C, making every hour critical.

The searchers checked the main water sources in the Muav Saddle and Chinumo Creek area, the only places where the hikers could replenish their fluids.

Dog handlers working in the area tried to pick up the trail of the vehicle, but dry, hot winds and rocky ground made the dog’s work impossible.

The groups combed the area for kilometer after kilometer, looking into every crevice under every boulder, checking old landslides and dangerous cornises.

Rescuers reports indicated that the terrain was extremely rugged with many blind spots that could not be properly inspected, even from the air.

On June 21st, the fourth day of the active search, the first and only report of a discovery was received.

One of the ground teams, which was inspecting the area of a dried up riverbed near Shinumo Creek, noticed a bright object among the gray stones.

It was a cap.

Her parents later recognized it as the hat belonged to Regina Williams.

The cap was lying there as if it had been dropped or blown away by the wind, but there were no other traces around it.

No backpacks, no shoe marks, no signs of a campsite.

The discovery only increased the anxiety because it showed that the group had reached this depth, but their further journey was dissolving into emptiness.

Days passed and the canyon continued to remain silent.

The search team’s resources were running out and the hope of finding the girls alive was melting away with each passing hour under the scorching Arizona sun.

The rangers checked version after version from wild animal attacks to dehydration and disorientation.

However, the absence of bodies and equipment made the situation abnormal.

Usually, even if tourists die, searchers find their last campsites or abandoned belongings.

Here, however, there was only one clue to the vast territory of the wild desert.

Two weeks after the start, the operation was officially transferred to the passive phase.

In the final report, investigators and search team leaders came to a disappointing conclusion.

Most likely, the group went off the route, trying to shorten the path or find water and fell into the Colorado River.

The powerful current, which was especially strong that season due to snow melt, could have carried the bodies many miles downstream or dragged them under massive underwater rocks where they could not be found.

The girls parents refused to believe that their children had simply disappeared without a trace, but the official version remained unchanged.

The case of the three friends who went on their farewell trip and never returned became another tragic page in the history of the Grand Canyon.

The SUV was taken away from the parking lot.

The search helicopters returned to their bases and silence fell over the Powell Plateau again, broken only by the wind and the sound of the distant river.

No one then could have guessed that this silence was deceptive and that the story that everyone thought was a complete tragedy was actually just beginning and that the truth was not hidden in the waters of Colorado but much closer than anyone dared to look.

On July 14th, 2015, 32 days into the hike, the usual midsummer heat rained on Forest Road 67, also known as North Rim Parkway.

It’s a long isolated strip of asphalt surrounded by dense coniferous forest where cars don’t pass very often.

Around in the afternoon, a truck driver transporting timber to Utah noticed strange movement on the side of the road.

In his testimony, he later said that at first he thought the object was a wounded deer or a large dog trying to crawl out of a ditch.

But when he slowed down and got closer, he realized he was wrong.

It was a human being.

The figure was moving on four limbs, slowly moving its arms across the hot gravel.

Its clothes had turned into dirty rags that barely covered its body.

The driver stopped the truck, grabbed a bottle of water, and rushed to its aid.

When he turned the unknown woman on her back, he could hardly contain his scream.

She was a young woman, but her condition shocked even the experienced paramedics who arrived 40 minutes later.

She had lost critical body weight.

Her ribs and collar bones were protruding so much that the skin seemed stretched over the bones like parchment paper.

But the worst part was her face.

Her head was completely shaved down to the skin and covered with horrific sunburns, blisters, and deep scratches that had already begun to fester.

She was immediately rushed to St.

George Hospital in Utah.

The patients condition was so severe that doctors spent the first day struggling to stabilize her vital signs.

Severe dehydration, exhaustion, and a scalp infection threatened her life.

Only 24 hours later, when Lisa was able to utter her first coherent words, where detectives allowed into her room, what she told them made law enforcement officials shudder and immediately launched a hunt for what the press would later call the canyon maniac.

According to the interrogation report, Lisa Owen testified that the nightmare began on the third day of their hike.

The group was in the area of Shinumo Creek when a man appeared on the trail.

He looked like an experienced hiker or geologist.

He had equipment, worn out clothes, and a confident demeanor.

The stranger introduced himself as a digger, a seeker of old mines or rare minerals.

He told the girls that the main water sources ahead had dried up due to the abnormal heat, but he knew of a hidden underground spring that was not marked on the maps.

Trusting his confident tone and fearing thirst, the girls agreed to follow him.

He led them into a narrow blind gorge where the walls narrowed the space to a few meters.

It was there, in a stone sack that the trap closed.

The man pulled out a gun and forced them to submit.

Lisa said that he took them to a cave, the entrance to which was skillfully disguised by shrubbery and stones.

It was dark and damp inside.

The kidnapper immediately declared that they were sinners who had defiled the canyon with their presence and now had to go through the path of atonement.

He forced them to kneel for hours on sharp stones and pray to unknown gods or forces of nature that he said ruled the place.

The most terrifying episode, Lisa said, happened on the fifth day of their captivity.

The man dragged them out of the cave into the sun, tied them to boulders with ropes so they couldn’t move, and announced the beginning of a purification ritual.

He pulled out a rough, poorly sharpened hunting knife.

Lisa cried as she told detectives how he cut their long hair.

It wasn’t a gentle shave.

The blade scratched their skin, leaving cuts.

Blood flooded their eyes and the maniac shouted that he was depriving them of their vanity.

The pain was unbearable, but the fear of death made them endure.

Then the worst began.

On the 10th day, he entered the cave and silently pointed to Irma.

Lisa recalled how her friend tried to resist, but the captor was stronger.

He dragged her outside.

Liza and Regina left in the dark, heard Irma’s screams, which lasted for several minutes and then abruptly ended, replaced by silence.

He returned alone without any emotion on his face.

3 days later, Regina suffered the same fate.

When he came back after she disappeared, he threw the bloody Panama Regina had been wearing at Lisa’s feet and said coldly, “They are part of the canyon now.

They have accepted it and it has accepted them.

Lisa’s escape, according to her testimony, took place on the 30th day.

That evening, the digger behaved strangely.

He drank a lot of some pungent smelling tincture from a dark bottle, mumbled incoherently, and eventually fell into a deep sleep right at the entrance.

In his intoxication, he made a fatal mistake.

He forgot to lock the padlock on the chain with which he had chained Lisa.

Realizing that this was her only chance, she broke free and ran into the night.

She ran non-stop, her feet bleeding, guided only by the stars and her intuition until 2 days later she reached Forest Road 67, where the driver found her.

Based on Lisa’s detailed description, a police sketch artist created a sketch of the suspect, a man in his 40s or 50s with hard features, tan skin, and a crazy look.

Dozens of rangers and police officers combed the Kaibab forests, checking homeless camps, hermit camps, and old mines.

They were looking for the cave the girl had described with a disguised entrance and traces of human activity.

However, despite all efforts, no object that fully matched the description in Lisa’s terrifying story was found, nor were any traces of the mysterious digger.

Three years have passed since the story of the Canyon Maniac shook the state of Arizona.

But over time, the loud headlines in the newspapers have been replaced by silence and the case itself moved from the desks of investigators to the far shelves of the archive.

By October 2018, the investigation officially became cold.

The Cookanino County police had not been able to find the mysterious cave described by the only surviving victim, nor the mysterious digger, who, according to her, held the three girls captive.

No new traces, no bodies of her friends, no evidence of the existence of the perpetrator, only the words of a girl who returned from hell.

Over the years, Lisa Owen herself has done everything possible to dissolve into the crowd and erase herself from public space.

She moved to Phoenix, a big hot metropolis where it is easy to get lost among millions of faces.

Lisa got a job at the city archives, an ironic place for someone who tried to bury her own past.

She worked with documents in the basement where there were no windows and no prying eyes, avoided any contact with the press, did not give interviews, and changed her phone number.

To her neighbors and colleagues, she was just a quiet, reserved woman who had survived a terrible tragedy and had the right to be left in peace.

She looked like the perfect victim trying to heal her wounds.

However, the Cookanino County Unsolved Crimes Unit occasionally went back to old files.

It’s a routine procedure.

When new crimes fail to produce leads, detectives look through old cold case files, hoping that a fresh set of eyes or new technology will help them spot what their predecessors missed.

In midocctober 2018, one of the department’s detectives took a box labeled disappearance on North Rome Owen case to work.

His task was to check if any new DNA matches or similar crime patterns had appeared in the databases in other states.

The detective began by rereading the basic protocols.

Lisa’s testimony, search party reports, maps of the area.

Everything seemed logical, albeit terrifying.

The story of a crazed hermit living in a cave and practicing his own religious cults fit in with the mythology of the Grand Canyon where people often go insane from isolation.

However, when he came to the section on medical examinations done in the first days after Lisa’s rescue in July 2015, one detail caught his attention that had somehow gone unappreciated.

It was a detailed report from a toxicologist at St.

George’s Hospital in 2015.

The doctors focused on the patients physical injuries, critical dehydration, thirdderee sunburn, scalp infection, and general exhaustion.

The blood talk screen was a standard procedure, the results of which were simply filed in the case file.

The column for detected substances contained a long list of indicators consistent with starvation and stress.

But at the very bottom, in the notes in small print, the laboratory technician noted the presence of traces of a specific chemical compound.

The detective, who did not have a medical degree, consulted reference books and a forensic pharmarmacologist.

It turned out that the substance found was a metabolite of a powerful synthetic sleeping pill of the latest generation.

It was not just a seditive that you can buy at the supermarket or gas station.

It was a strictly prescription drug prescribed for severe sleep disorders and its circulation is strictly controlled.

Its effect is characterized by the rapid onset of deep sleep and importantly possible antoggrade amnesia, the loss of memory of events that occurred immediately after taking it.

This dry medical fact struck the entire case structure like a hammer to glass.

The detective reopened the transcript of Lisa Owen’s interrogation from the 15th year.

In her testimony, she repeatedly described her life in the cave in great detail.

She claimed that the maniac, whom she called the digger, was a nature fanatic.

He fed them roots, gave them muddy water to drink, and forced them to drink bitter herbal decoctions that he cooked over a fire.

According to her, he called these drinks purification and claimed that they brought them closer to the earth.

The entire profile of the criminal was built on the image of a savage, a hermit who rejected civilization.

There was a glaring contradiction here.

A hermit who lives in a hole, hunts tourists, and brews potions from roots could not physically have access to highquality synthetic pharmarmacology.

He couldn’t have gone to a pharmacy in Flagstaff or St.

George, presented a prescription, and bought a pack of modern pills without being caught on surveillance cameras and attracting attention.

If he was who Lisa described him, they would have found plant alkyoids, dope, mushrooms, or in extreme cases, cheap alcohol in his bloodstream, but not a sophisticated synthetic drug that requires a prescription from a licensed doctor.

The detective read the report again, looking for a mistake.

Could it be the medication Lisa had been given at the hospital? He checked the time of the blood draw.

No.

The sample was taken immediately upon admission before the start of drug therapy.

Traces of the drug had entered her system before she was found on the road.

This meant that during her stay in the cave, where she said there was nothing but stones and skins, someone had given her these pills.

This inconsistency was small, almost imperceptible against the backdrop of the horrific picture of torture, but it was the first crack in Lisa Owen’s perfect cinematic story.

Until that moment, the investigation took her words as absolute truth because no one dared to doubt the victim who had survived such hell.

But the presence of prescription sleeping pills in the blood of a girl allegedly held by a cave fanatic defied logical explanation.

It forced him to look at the whole situation from a completely different angle.

The detective put the folder away and felt the very air in the silence of the archive office change.

The story of the digger maniac, which had been considered the only version for 3 years, suddenly began to look shaky.

If Lisa lied about the herbal decoctions, what else could she have lied about? And where in the Wild Canyon, where they were supposedly cut off from the world, did a drug that is usually kept in city bathroom cabinets, come from? The question hung in the air, and this time it was impossible to ignore it.

What looked like a minor note from a lab technician became the key that could unlock the door to a completely different truth.

The investigation was resumed in absolute silence.

No loud statements to the press, no notifications to the relatives of the victims.

A group of Cookonino County detectives worked behind closed doors, realizing that any leak of information could frighten the one who was now turning from a victim into the main object of their curiosity.

The key to the solution was not new evidence, but old dead digital traces, transaction archives that had been stored on the store’s servers for years, waiting for someone to ask the right questions.

Investigators turned to databases of major retail outlets in Flagstaff, the last major city on the way to the North Rim, where tourists typically make their final purchases.

The system produced a match at a hiking gear store called Northern Outfitters.

The transaction was dated June 10th, 2015, exactly 2 days before the fatal hike.

The cash receipt indicated payment in cash, which usually makes the buyer anonymous.

However, the customer made a fatal mistake that became a sentence 3 years later.

During the payment, a loyalty bonus card registered in the name of Irma Tucker was scanned.

The video surveillance of that day had long since been erased, but the details of the receipt were preserved.

An analysis of the shopping list shocked investigators with its inconsistency with the official version of events.

The receipt listed high calorie freeze-dried foods, specialized food for climbers and the military, designed for long-term storage and maximum energy value.

The number of packages was impressive.

They were purchased for exactly 30 days of full nutrition for one person.

This was in stark contrast to Irma and Regina’s purchases who, according to their families and the receipts found in other stores, had bought a standard set of food for 5 days with a small margin.

Some in this group were preparing not for a week-long canyon walk, but for a month-long off-grid expedition.

The next item on the list of purchases made with Irma’s card was a set of replacement blades for a classic safety razor.

It was a strange choice for a hike in the wilderness where perfect hygiene is usually neglected.

But in the context of the shaved head of Lisa Owen, who was found a month later, this purchase took on a sinister meaning.

It was a tool purchased voluntarily and in advance, even before the mythical digger allegedly forced the girls to undergo a purification ritual.

Next, detectives checked Flagstaffarmacies.

In the Dragtore Canyon database, they found another record dated the same day Lisa Owen personally purchased a package of strong prescription sleeping pills, the same drug that traces of which were found in her blood.

A month later, a pharmacy log recorded that the medication was dispensed under a prescription written in the name of an elderly woman.

A check revealed that it was Lisa’s own grandmother.

The most cynical thing about this situation was the fact that the owner of the prescription had died a month before the purchase.

Lisa used the old form of her deceased relative to gain access to a substance that can turn off a person’s consciousness for many hours.

After gathering these facts, the investigation team turned to archival video captured by surveillance cameras in the Swamp Point parking lot on the day the expedition started.

This footage had been viewed hundreds of times in 2015, but back then they were looking for the direction of movement and the clothes of the missing.

Now the experts were looking at weight.

The grainy video clearly showed the three girls taking their equipment out of the trunk.

Irma’s and Regina’s backpacks looked standard for a 5-day crossing.

Instead, the backpack of Lisa Owen, the girl everyone described as the physically weakest in the group, looked unnaturally bulky and heavy.

In the video, she can be seen straining to throw it over her shoulders, her figure sagging under the weight, and the straps cutting into her body.

Experts in hiking equipment involved in the analysis calculated the approximate volume and weight of the cargo.

Their conclusion was unequivocal.

A backpack of this capacity could not contain only a standard set for light trekking.

There was something much heavier and bulkier in there.

Now with the receipts for 30 days of food, the investigators realized what exactly the weak Lisa was carrying.

It wasn’t just the weight of the equipment.

It was the weight of carefully planned survival designed to stay in the canyon when the others disappeared forever.

Having received evidence that Lisa Owen had prepared in advance for prolonged isolation, detectives were faced with the need to test the physical possibility of her escape.

In her initial testimony, the girl claimed that she escaped from captivity at night when her captor fell asleep under the influence of tincture.

She described in detail how she ran in the dark, guided by the stars, and in one night covered the distance from the cave at the bottom of the canyon to the forest road on the plateau where she was found by a logging truck driver.

This part of the story has always been questioned by professional rangers, but only now in 2018, the investigation decided to approach it with scientific precision.

A group of surveyors, experienced climbers, and specialists in search and rescue operations in the Grand Canyon were involved in the examination.

The task was to model the route described by Lisa Point.

A is the approximate location of the cave near the water where she said they were held.

Point B is the place on the side of the 67th road where she was picked up.

The difference in altitude between these two points is over a thousand meters.

But the problem was not only the height, but the geology.

Experts conducted computer modeling of the relief in the Powell Plateau sector.

The results were categorical.

The area is surrounded by a massive geological layer known as the red wall limestone, a red limestone wall that forms almost perfectly vertical cliffs hundreds of feet high.

There are virtually no natural passages or gentle slopes in this sector that can be climbed on foot without special equipment.

The only accessible routes are narrow, barely visible cracks that require high-end climbing skills, belay ropes, and perfect route knowledge.

To finally close this issue, investigators conducted an investigative experiment with a professional climber.

He was tasked with trying to climb from the bottom of the canyon to the plateau in the specified sector at night without light or equipment.

The experiment had to be stopped after 2 hours for safety reasons.

The climber reported that moving in the dark on loose shale and vertical walls without a safety harness was a guaranteed suicide.

He emphasized that even in the daytime, this climb would take a trained group at least a day of grueling work.

Then the medical factor was added to the equation.

At the time of her rescue, Lisa Owen was critically underweight.

Her muscles were atrophied after 30 days of malnutrition, and her body was suffering from dehydration.

The physiologists who analyzed her medical records from 2015 came to an unequivocal conclusion.

In this condition, a person can barely move on a flat surface.

Climbing the steep cliffs of the Grand Canyon was physically impossible for her.

She would not have been able to overcome even the first mile of the climb, let alone the vertical walls of Red Wall.

Her heart would have simply stopped from the exertion, or she would have fallen into the abyss due to weakness in her limbs.

This conclusion completely destroyed the geography of her lie.

If Lisa could not rise from the bottom of the canyon in one night, it meant only one thing.

She had never been down there.

The whole story about the cave by the river, about daily prayers by the water, and about the digger who led them through the gorges, was a fabrication from start to finish.

She did not survive at the bottom of the abyss.

All this time, all 32 days, while helicopters and volunteers combed the dangerous depths and banks of the Colorado River, Lisa Owen was above.

She was hiding in the forested area of the Powell Plateau itself.

a relatively safe flat area densely covered with pine and juniper trees.

It was there in safety with a tent, sleeping bag, and a month’s worth of food that she waited out the search operation.

She could hear the rotor noise of the search helicopters overhead knew they were being searched for, but did not get in touch.

Shifting the search area from the bottom of the canyon to the surface of the plateau dramatically changed the picture of the crime.

The detectives realized that they were looking in the wrong place.

The real cave was not down there among the rocks, but somewhere very close in the thick of the forest where Lisa was methodically implementing her plan, waiting for the right moment to come out onto the road and play the role of the only survivor.

When physical evidence began to erode the foundation of Lisa Owen’s story, the investigation turned to tools that could look deeper than geology or logistics.

Behavioral psychology.

A specialized group of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was involved in the case.

Their task was not to look for footprints on the ground, but to understand the architecture of the girl’s personality, who everyone was used to considering a silent victim.

Experts began to collect a complete anomnesis of her life long before the fatal hike, pulling up school records, medical records, and interviewing those who had known the trio since childhood.

The image of Tina, as she was called at school, began to take on a disturbing meaning.

Classmates and neighbors portrayed Lisa not just as a shy girl, but as a person with a pathological need for attachment.

She had no social circle of her own outside of Irma and Regina, copying their interests and even their style of dress.

But the loudest signal was the story told by the girl’s former class teacher.

The incident happened in elementary school before an important Christmas performance.

Regina got the lead role while Lisa was supposed to stay in the extras.

An hour before the performance, Regina’s festive dress was found cut to pieces with scissors.

At the time, the guilt was never proven, but the teacher remembered Lisa’s reaction.

She didn’t look upset or gloating.

She was calm and even pleased that Regina, who had been crying backstage, stayed with her instead of shining on stage.

This was the first documented manifestation of what psychologists call aggressive withholding.

If I can’t be a part of your success, you won’t have it without me.

The next step in the investigation was a secret search of Lisa’s apartment authorized by the court based on the newly discovered evidence.

The detectives were looking for anything that could shed light on her state of mind before the hike.

In an old box of belongings that she had moved from her parents’ house, they found a hardcover notebook.

It was a personal diary she had kept during her last year of school.

The pages dated in the spring of 2015 were saturated with despair and quiet rage.

The entries showed that Lisa perceived her friend’s enrollment in universities on the other side of the country not as a natural stage of growing up but as a personal betrayal.

She described their plans for the future as a conspiracy against her.

In one paragraph written a week before leaving for the Grand Canyon, her handwriting became uneven.

The letters pressed into the paper with force.

Lisa wrote about the need to stop time.

She fantasized about a world where there were no colleges, no moves, no separations.

The phrase, “We have to stay here forever,” was repeated several times, becoming an obsessive mantra.

This document was direct evidence of the motive.

The fear of abandonment transformed into a deadly plan to capture reality at the only point where they were still together.

The final element that allowed the profilers to complete the portrait was the repeated trace evidence examination of the photographs taken at St.

George’s Hospital.

Forensic experts specializing in wound analysis carefully examined the nature of the injuries on Lisa’s head.

Her initial account of a maniac with a crude hunting knife who forcefully cut her hair included chaotic deep cuts, signs of struggle, and uneven flaps of skin torn off during resistance.

The reality captured in the photographs was different.

The scratches on her scalp were thin, even, and mostly in parallel lines.

The back of the head was particularly revealing.

The angles of the notches indicated that the hand holding the blade had come from behind at an unnatural angle typical of a person trying to shave the back of their head blindly or by looking in a small pocket mirror.

These were the so-called hesitation marks, superficial cautious cuts made by a person who is in control of the process and trying to minimize his own pain rather than a victim writhing under the executioner’s blade.

The combination of these factors, the childhood story of the dress, the diary entries about stopping time, and the cold analysis of the wounds formed a clear psychological profile.

The investigators were not facing a victim of Stockholm syndrome or a bystander.

This was a person who methodically constructed her own reality where pain was a tool and the destruction of her friend’s future was the only way to preserve her past.

Lisa Owen was not running from a monster.

She created it to hide the fact that the real darkness had always been hiding in her own shadow.

Lisa Owen’s arrest took place without noise or resistance.

When the detectives came for her, she did not look surprised, only tired, as if she had been waiting for this moment for 3 years.

The interrogation room at the Cookanino County Station had a sterile, cold atmosphere.

Lisa sat down on a metal chair, habitually crossing her arms and lowering her eyes, preparing to play the role of a broken victim who had barely survived hell.

But this time, the scenario was different.

The interrogating detective didn’t ask sympathetic questions about how he was feeling.

He silently laid out a folder on the table in front of her, the contents of which shattered her legend to the ground.

First on the table was a receipt from a store in Flagstaff.

The detective pointed to the date and the list of items, a set of replacement blades, and a month’s worth of food.

Next came a copy of a prescription for sleeping pills written in the name of the deceased person.

Next came the calculations of the weight of her backpack, which proved that she was carrying a load incompatible with a weekend walk.

Lisa was silent.

Her gaze remained fixed.

But the final blow was the highresolution satellite images of the Powell Plateau.

The detective moved the photo closer and asked one simple but killer question.

In which gorge did you wait for your hair to grow back to shave it again? We know you didn’t go down there.

At this moment, as captured on the video recording of the interrogation, the transformation was instantaneous.

Lisa’s shoulders, which had been mournfully slumped, straightened.

The trembling in her hands disappeared.

She looked up at the detective, her eyes clear, cold, and completely empty.

She asked him to turn off the air conditioner because she felt chilled and spoke in a voice that did not contain a hint of tears.

It was not the voice of a victim, but of a director who was finally explaining the intent of his play.

Lisa admitted that the idea of killing her was not a spontaneous outburst of rage.

It was a plan that had been brewing for weeks like a slow poison.

She called it preparing for the inevitable.

Buying food, blades, and potent drugs, she saw it as insurance.

She claimed that until the last moment, she was not sure whether she would be able to cross the line.

In her mind, there was hope.

If during the hike she felt that her connection with her friends is still strong, that they are not drifting apart, then this arsenal will remain at the bottom of the backpack.

It was a test of loyalty that only she and the silent rocks of the canyon knew about.

The catalyst for the tragedy was a conversation around the campfire on the second night of the trip.

According to Lisa, the atmosphere was light.

The girls were laughing.

Irma and Regina, caught up in their dreams, began to discuss their future life in college.

Parties, new friends, boys, vacation plans.

Lisa sat in silence, listening to their words build a world in which there was no place for her.

Regina’s joking phrase, thrown without a second thought, was fatal.

Liz, don’t be sad in your library.

We’ll send you a postcard.

For Lisa, these words sounded like a sentence.

She realized that for her friends, she had already become a thing of the past, a sweet but boring memory, a burden that they would take off their shoulders as soon as they returned to civilization and boarded their planes.

Her hesitation disappeared at that very second.

She realized a terrible truth.

The only way to keep them from leaving, the only way to preserve their friendship forever was to leave them here in the canyon where time has no power.

The scenario was realized that night.

When the conversations died down, Lisa offered to make hot cocoa for everyone before they went to bed.

She went to the burners, took out the prepared powder from the first aid kit, and poured a double dose into her friend’s mugs, pretending to add sugar.

She watched them drink, their movements becoming slower, their conversation fading into sleepy mumbling.

The murder, as Lisa described it, was technical and bloodless.

She waited until Irma and Regina fell into a deep medically induced sleep from which they could not be awakened by touch.

She used plastic construction ties she had brought with her, tightening the nooes around their necks.

She said she acted quickly and carefully.

During the interrogation, she explained the choice of the weapon by saying that she wanted to avoid blood.

It was important for her to keep their faces beautiful, the way she wanted to remember them forever.

No resistance, no screaming, just the soft crunch of plastic in the night silence.

Then the stage of concealment began.

Lisa, who was physically the weakest in the group, found supernatural strength that night.

She dragged the bodies one by one to a narrow, deep tectonic fissure located not far from the campsite.

She had marked this spot on topographic maps at home while planning the route.

It was the perfect grave, a deep creasse hidden by shrubbery where tourists don’t look.

After dumping the bodies into the darkness, she was sure that without precise coordinates, it would be impossible to find them, even from a helicopter.

Lisa spent the rest of the 28 days in a rigorous simulation mode.

She found a small hidden grotto in a wooded part of the plateau about a mile from the murder site.

There, she set up camp and began her transformation.

She strictly rationed her food, eating just enough to not die, but to reach a state of critical exhaustion.

On a schedule, she took out razor blades and methodically shaved off her hair, inflicting controlled cuts to create the image of a martyr.

She prepared for her theatrical appearance on the road, rehearsing the story of the maniac while her skin burned in the sun.

At the end of the interrogation, when the detective asked about her true motive, Lisa looked at him with surprise as if he did not understand the obvious.

She showed no remorse or anger.

Her words sounded like a distorted declaration of love.

I didn’t kill them for the sake of hate.

I did it so that we wouldn’t be separated.

Now they won’t go to college.

They won’t find new friends.

And they won’t forget me.

On this plateau, the three of us will stay together forever, and no one will be able to separate us.

The Powell Plateau body search operation began early in the morning with thick fog still clinging to the tops of the Ponderosa Pines.

A convoy of three police SUVs and a crime lab van moved slowly along the rutdded dirt road, kicking up clouds of red dust.

In the second vehicle, a man was in the back seat.

Lisa Owen was sitting in the back seat behind the bars of a partition wall.

She was dressed in a prison robe and her hands were shackled in handcuffs fastened to her belt.

According to the detectives who accompanied her that day, she was remarkably calm, even distant.

She didn’t look like a criminal being taken to the scene of a brutal murder.

She looked more like a guide who knew the route better than anyone else and was just waiting for the right moment to show the way.

When the cars stopped in a small clearing surrounded by shrubbery, Lisa was led out.

The air was cold, but the sun had already begun to warm the stones.

The girl did not hesitate.

She took a few steps forward and confidently pointed toward the dense thicket of mansin growing on the edge of a limestone ledge.

To the inexperienced eye, this place was no different from thousands of other bushes on the plateau.

But as the rangers cut a path through the stiff, thorny branches, they discovered a dark, narrow fissure in the ground.

A tectonic fisher that even those who had been patrolling the area for years had not realized existed.

It was the same grave that Lisa had chosen from topographic maps long before she set foot in Arizona.

The rift went vertically downward, disappearing into the darkness.

A group of technical climbers began to deploy their equipment.

They set up tripods, secured safety ropes to nearby trees, and began preparing for the descent.

According to preliminary estimates, the depth of the failure was at least 40 m.

Lisa watched these preparations in silence, standing near the car under the protection of two officers.

According to the report, there was neither fear nor pity in her eyes, only a strange frozen concentration.

The first climber started the descent at 20 minutes.

The radio communication in the crack was intermittent due to the rock shielding, so all commands were transmitted in short phrases.

After 15 minutes of tense waiting, a voice distorted by static came over the radio.

We have visual contact.

Deep down on a wide stone ledge that protruded from the wall like a natural shelf, there were human remains.

Time and nature had done their work.

The bodies of Irma Tucker and Regina Williams were completely skeletonized.

They lay unnaturally close to each other, intertwined with the remains of clothing and equipment, as if in a last eternal embrace.

Next to them, partially covered with stone dust and small debris, were their hiking backpacks, bright spots of nylon that had not faded even in the darkness of the dungeon.

These were the very things that Lisa had thrown down after her friends that fateful night to erase all traces of their existence on the surface.

The process of lifting the bodies lasted several hours.

It was a painstaking and morally difficult job.

Each fragment had to be recorded, described, and carefully placed in special containers so as not to damage the fragile evidence.

Silence reigned on the surface, broken only by the creaking of the winches and the commands of the operation’s leader.

As the first body bag was lifted to the edge of the creasse, the wind on the plateau suddenly picked up, blowing dry leaves.

The detective standing next to Lisa watched her reaction closely.

Most criminals at such moments break down, turn away, or start crying.

But Lisa Owen looked directly at the black bags.

She didn’t look away as forensic scientists packed up the remains of her best friends.

Not a single muscle in her face flinched.

For her, this was not a crime scene or a tragedy.

In her warped reality, it was a place of reunion, the point where she fulfilled her promise to stop time.

She did not see bones, but the moment of eternity that she herself had created.

When the operation was completed and the area was fenced off with yellow tape, Liza was put back in the patrol car.

The sun was already sinking into the west, flooding the canyon with a blood red light that was so fitting for the ending of this story.

Before the door closed, the detective who had been working the case all these years leaned in.

In his report, he would later write that he tried to see even a shadow of remorse, even a drop of understanding of the horror of what she had done.

He asked her if she realized that she had taken away their lives, their future, everything.

Lisa looked at him with her empty, calm gaze, which showed absolute confidence in her own rightness.

Her answer, recorded verbatim in the protocol, became the epitap for the whole case.

she said quietly but clearly.

You do not understand.

I did not take anything.

I saved our friendship.

They didn’t go anywhere.

They didn’t leave me.

They didn’t grow up and forget.

They stayed with me.

Now we will always be here, the three of us, as we promised.

The car door slammed shut, cutting it off from the sound of the wind.

The convoy moved back, leaving the Powell Plateau in its eternal, majestic silence.

The bodies of the girls finally returned to their families to find peace in the earth, not in a dark crack.

But the story of a friendship that turned into a cage and a love that became a death sentence will forever remain a part of this harsh landscape.

The Cleveland Woods and the Grand Canyon Rocks have seen many tragedies, but this one was special because the evil here was not the face of a monster with a knife, but the face of a quiet friend who was just too afraid to be alone.

One.