In 2024, hunters in northern Yellowstone were granted permission to shoot a large brown bear.

The animal had become a problem, regularly attacking livestock on nearby farms.

It was a routine wildlife control operation.

However, when biologists opened the predator’s stomach, the routine came to an end.

Inside, they found not animal remains, but fragments of synthetic fabric resembling hiking gear and something else.

a metal dental implant with a serial number.

This small detail set off a chain of events that revealed the truth about a couple of tourists who had gone missing 8 years earlier.

But the truth turned out to be much more terrifying than anyone could have imagined.

It wasn’t about the bear.

The bear was just the last person to touch this story.

The absolute horror was what had been done to the bodies long before the animal found them, especially to one of the skulls.

It all began in August 2016.

Daniel and Savannah Moore, a couple from South Carolina, both in their 30s, arrived in Yellowstone.

They were not new to tourism, but rather experienced enthusiasts.

They planned a 3-day hike along one of the park’s wildest and most remote trails, the Beeler River Trail.

The area is known as the Cascade Corner because of its abundance of waterfalls and geysers.

It is beautiful but challenging.

Swampy terrain, dense forests, and few people.

It’s the perfect place to be alone with nature.

Daniel was a programmer and Savannah was a graphic designer.

They were a normal couple who wanted to take a break from city life.

On Monday, August 15th, they registered their route at the trail head.

They had all the necessary equipment, food for 3 days with extra supplies, a map, and a clear plan.

They were supposed to leave the park on Thursday afternoon.

The last time they were seen alive was by a park ranger named Mike Donovan.

It was in the afternoon about 10 mi from the trail head.

He was on a routine patrol.

According to him, Daniel and Savannah were in high spirits.

They stopped him and asked for directions to one of the secluded hot springs that wasn’t marked on any tourist maps.

Donovan explained it to them.

He noted that they seemed wellprepared and confident.

Nothing about their behavior raised any concern for him.

He wished them luck and continued on his way.

That was the last confirmed contact.

On Thursday, August 18th, Daniel and Savannah failed to appear at the trial exit at the appointed time.

At first, no one thought much of it.

Delays happen in the wilderness.

The tourists could have miscalculated the time, gotten tired, or decided to spend a few more hours in the park.

But when 6 hours passed and there was no word from them, the ranger on duty raised the alarm.

The procedure was standard.

If tourists did not make contact within a specified time frame after the scheduled date, a search operation would commence.

Their car, an old Subaru, was still in the parking lot at the trail head.

Everything inside was satisfactory.

A road map, empty water bottles, and some loose change.

Nothing suspicious.

The next morning, Friday, a search party of six rangers and two volunteers set out on the trail.

The weather was good, which gave them hope.

They followed the route Murakami had described, shouting their names loudly.

By noon, they had reached the spot where they thought the couple had spent their second night based on the standard speed of travel in such terrain.

The place was empty.

No traces.

The group moved on toward the hot springs that the couple had inquired about with Ranger Donovan.

It was there, in a slight depression by a stream, that they found the camp, or rather what was left of it.

The discovery was immediately puzzling.

The tent was still standing, but one corner near the entrance was melted and burned.

It was a small area about a foot square.

It looked as if someone had held a burner to the fabric or thrown something burning on it.

There were things scattered around the tent.

Sleeping bags had been taken out of their covers and lay on the ground.

Several packages of freeze-dried food had been torn open, their contents, rice, pasta, dried fruit, scattered on the grass.

But the strangest thing was that the food had not been eaten.

If it had been a bear or other large animal, it would have devoured everything.

But here, the food was scattered as if in a fit of rage or haste.

The cooking pot lay nearby, slightly dented.

The backpacks stood by the tree, but they were open, and some of the items had been pulled out and thrown nearby.

The rangers were experienced men.

They had seen hundreds of campsites attacked by grizzlies.

This didn’t look like one of those.

In a bear attack, everything would have been turned upside down, the tent torn to shreds, and there would have been no trace of food left.

Here, the scene was more reminiscent of a domestic quarrel or a sudden panicked escape.

There were no signs of a struggle, blood, or large animals around the camp.

The dogs that were brought to the scene behaved strangely.

They picked up a scent from the tent, followed it for several dozen yards to the river, and then lost it.

It was as if Daniel and Savannah had walked to the water and vanished.

A full-scale search operation began.

In the days that followed, helicopters, more volunteers, and survival experts joined the search.

They combed the area square by square.

They searched the riverbed downstream and examined all the caves and crevices in the area.

Nothing.

Not a single trace.

Not a scrap of clothing, not a piece of abandoned equipment.

Nothing at all.

Interviews with other tourists who were in the area at the time also yielded nothing.

Some had seen the couple from a distance, but no one had spoken to them or noticed anything out of the ordinary.

The only lead was a report of another tourist who had set up camp about half a mile from Murov’s campsite.

He was registered as a single man from Idaho.

When the rangers checked his campsite, it was no longer there.

He had left the park on schedule and according to records, had not aroused suspicion.

He was interviewed by phone after the search began.

The man said he had heard voices in the evening, but he decided they were just other tourists and didn’t think anything of it.

He didn’t hear any screams or sounds of a struggle.

That was all.

A week passed, then another.

The search was gradually winding down.

There was no chance of finding Daniel and Savannah alive.

There were three main theories, and none of them explained all the oddities.

The first was an accident.

They could have drowned in the river or fallen off a cliff somewhere off the trail.

But then why did their camp look so strange? The second was an animal attack, but as already mentioned, the scene did not match a typical bear attack.

The third and most disturbing theory was foul play.

Perhaps they had encountered someone on the trail, someone dangerous.

That person had killed them and then tried to stage a bear attack, but had done so ineptly.

The burned edge of the tent could have been an unsuccessful attempt to burn the evidence.

But even this version lacked the most crucial piece of evidence, the bodies.

Where could two adults have disappeared in such a wild but limited space? Months passed, then years.

The story of Daniel and Savannah Moore became one of Yellowstone’s many mysteries.

Their faces appeared in documentaries about missing persons.

Their families continued to believe and wait, but the case was officially closed.

No new clues, no witnesses, just emptiness.

8 years of emptiness until the spring of 2024 when wildlife officers responded to a call from a farmer complaining about a bear.

None of them had any idea that they were not just going after an animal, but after the answer to a question that had tormented everyone for years.

The answer was hidden inside that bear and it was shocking.

And so in the spring of 2024, that answer began to emerge.

Piece by piece, hunters from the Fish and Wildlife Service tracked down and neutralized the bear.

It was a large male weighing over 500 lb.

Its carcass was taken to a laboratory for a standard autopsy.

The procedure was necessary to ensure that the animal did not have rabies or other diseases that could explain its aggressive behavior.

Inside the digestive system, as expected, they found the remains of domestic livestock.

But in addition to this, the biologist performing the autopsy stumbled upon something foreign.

At first, they were just scraps of thick, bright blue fabric that had not decomposed.

It was clearly synthetic, the kind used to make hiking jackets.

Then there was a small metal object.

It was almost clean.

The biologist washed it and realized that it was not part of a collar or any debris.

It was a titanium pin with a crown, a dental implant.

Such a find is a red flag.

The lab immediately contacted the Park County Sheriff’s Office.

The implant was carefully packaged and handed over to the forensic team.

Medical devices like this always have a tiny serial number that is only visible under magnification.

The experts used this number to trace the manufacturer.

The manufacturer’s database identified the clinic where this batch of implants had been sold.

The clinic was located in Charleston, South Carolina.

The rest was a matter of technicality.

The dental clinic searched its archives and found the patient who had received an implant with this serial number.

The patients name was Daniel Moore.

An 8-year-old cold case instantly became hot.

The news broke in the local media, then spread nationwide.

The Moore family, who had lived in uncertainty all these years, finally had a concrete fact for the first time in 8 years.

But this fact raised even more questions.

The most important question was where the bear was killed in the northern part of Yellowstone almost 60 mi as the crow flies from the Beckler trail where the moors disappeared.

60 mi in Yellowstone is a vast distance crossed by mountains, rivers, and impenetrable forests.

Bears can cover large areas, but how did Daniel’s remains end up so far away? This didn’t fit with any of the initial theories.

If they had drowned, their bodies would have been carried downstream by the Beeler River in a completely different direction.

If they had been attacked by an animal, it would have happened near their camp.

The crime theory became the leading one.

Someone had killed them and moved the bodies to hide them as far away and as securely as possible.

The FBI and Wyoming State Police launched a new search operation.

This time it wasn’t a search for missing persons, but a search for a crime scene.

Dozens of agents and rangers equipped with the latest technology began combing the area within a few miles of where the bear had been shot.

They used drones with thermal imaging cameras, but their main hope was dogs specially trained to search for human remains.

It was grueling work.

The terrain was wild with thick undergrowth and rocky scree.

On the third day of the search, one of the dogs picked up a scent.

It led the group to a ravine littered with fallen trees about a mile and a half from the farm where the bear had attacked the livestock.

The dog began digging at the roots of a fallen tree.

The agents carefully removed the branches and the top layer of soil, and they found it, a human skull.

It was almost intact but covered with moss and dirt.

It was sent to a mobile laboratory set up nearby.

And when the forensic experts cleaned the find, everyone fell silent.

There were no animal tooth marks on the skull.

There were no cracks from the fall.

Across the top, from temple to temple, there was a perfectly smooth horizontal cut.

It was as if the top of the skull, the so-called cranial vault, had been neatly sawed off.

The forensic expert who examined the skull immediately said that it was the work of a tool, not a surgical one.

The marks were too rough.

It was either a hacksaw or some type of hand or electric saw with a fine-t blade.

A carpenter’s tool.

Someone had done this after the person had died.

It had been done deliberately.

DNA analysis of the bone tissue was completed quickly.

The skull belonged to Savannah Moore.

Now, the investigation had two facts.

Part of Daniel’s remains and part of Savannah’s remains were found in the same area, far from where they disappeared.

And someone had dismembered at least one of the bodies, most brutally and bizarrely.

Why would someone need to saw off a skull? The theories were all pretty grim.

Maybe the killer wanted to make sure the victim couldn’t be identified from dental records if only the lower jaw was found.

Or perhaps it was part of some twisted ritual.

Or as the experts thought was most likely, the killer was trying to destroy evidence such as a bullet hole in the head.

By sawing off the top, he could get rid of direct evidence of how the murder was committed.

In the days that followed, search teams found several more small bone fragments in the same area.

There were very few of them.

The examination showed that they belonged to two different individuals, a man and a woman.

The picture was becoming clearer, yet at the same time more gruesome.

But the main conclusion of the FBI crime lab in Quantico sounded like a death sentence for any theory of an accident.

Anthropological experts having studied the condition of the bones, the degree of weathering, and the effects of microorganisms on them came to an unequivocal conclusion.

Daniel and Savannah Moore were killed and dismembered no later than the fall of 2017.

That is about a year after their disappearance, and the bear ate what was left of them quite recently in the spring of 2024.

Their remains lay in this ravine for almost 7 years before being disturbed by the animal.

This changed everything.

It meant that the killer didn’t just hide the bodies.

He may have kept them somewhere for a year before getting rid of them for good.

Or he may have returned to the crime scene a year later to dismember the bodies that had been hidden but not destroyed.

The investigation reopened all the files from 2016.

They began re-checking everyone who had been in the park during that period.

The name of the lone tourist from Idaho who had camped half a mile from Muros resurfaced in the documents.

In 2016, his interrogation was a formality.

He said he hadn’t heard anything and that was the end of it.

Now, however, FBI agents decided to talk to him again, but this time much more seriously.

They began searching for this man.

And very quickly they discovered another strange and disturbing fact.

This man had also disappeared.

This man’s name was Marcus Thorne.

In 2016, he was 42 years old.

He lived alone in a small rented house in rural Idaho about 3 hours drive from Yellowstone.

Officially, he was listed as a handyman taking on odd jobs, minor repairs, carpentry, and helping out on farms.

When FBI agents began investigating his background in 2024, an unflattering picture emerged.

Neighbors described him as withdrawn and unsociable.

He had no friends and avoided conversation.

Some recalled that he had outbursts of anger over minor issues, but it never escalated into serious conflict.

He had no criminal record except for a couple of speeding tickets.

At first glance, he seemed like a typical grumpy loner.

But when investigators began looking into his life after August 2016, they discovered that about a year after Murov’s disappearance in the summer of 2017, Marcus Thorne had vanished.

He didn’t tell anyone he was leaving.

He didn’t terminate his lease.

He just packed some things and left.

His former employer, the owner of a small construction company, stated that Thorne failed to show up for work on a particular day.

They called him for a week, but his phone was turned off.

When the landlord of the house where Thorne lived went inside, he found that most of his personal belongings and tools were missing.

The food in the refrigerator had gone bad.

It was obvious that the man had left in a hurry.

And most importantly, his car, an old Ford pickup truck, was found a few months later.

It was discovered by a patrol on an abandoned logging road in northern Montana, just 20 m from the Canadian border.

The car was locked.

There was absolutely nothing inside.

No documents, no personal belongings, no trash.

Forensic experts who examined the pickup truck stated that the interior appeared to have been thoroughly cleaned.

Not a single fingerprint belonging to Thorne was found.

Not a single hair.

This was done deliberately.

The person didn’t just drive away.

They covered their tracks.

From that moment on, the puzzle began to fall into place for the FBI.

The time of Thorne’s disappearance, the summer of 2017, almost perfectly coincided with the conclusions of the forensic experts who determined that the Morov bodies had been dismembered no later than the fall of that year.

Thorne had experience working with carpentry tools, including saws.

He had no alibi.

He was near Daniel and Savannah’s camp on the night of their disappearance.

The official version of the investigation now appears as follows.

In August 2016, Marcus Thorne encountered Daniel and Savannah on the trail.

No one will ever know what caused the conflict.

Perhaps it was a dispute over a campsite, noise, or just a chance encounter that went wrong due to Thorne’s unstable personality.

He killed them both, possibly right at their campsite.

Then, in a panic, he tried to stage a bear attack and burn the tent, but he did it clumsily and hastily.

Realizing that the bodies would be found sooner or later, he hid them somewhere nearby, possibly burying them or covering them with rocks.

He lived with this secret for a whole year.

Perhaps his paranoia grew.

He was afraid that a random tourist or animal would discover his hiding place.

And then in the summer of 2017, he returned.

He dug up the bodies, which were already in a state of decomposition.

He did something that shocked even experienced criminologists.

He dismembered the remains.

Most likely he did this to make them easier to transport and to make identification as tricky as possible.

The cut on Savannah’s skull was probably an attempt to hide the cause of death.

If it was, for example, a gunshot wound to the head.

He then transported the remains in his pickup truck 60 mi north to a completely different, even wilder area of the park and dumped them in a ravine.

He figured they would never be found there.

Having completed his horrific task, he drove north, abandoned his thoroughly cleaned pickup truck at the border, and disappeared.

He most likely moved to Canada with fake documents, or entered the country illegally.

In 2024, the Federal Bureau of Investigation officially named Marcus Thorne as the prime and only suspect in the double murder of Daniel and Savannah Moore.

A federal warrant was issued for his arrest.

His photo taken for his driver’s license in 2015 now hangs on wanted boards across the country and in Interpol databases.

It shows a middle-aged man with thinning hair, deep set eyes, and a heavy empty gaze.

8 years after Daniel and Savannah Moore set out on their last hike, their story finally has an explanation, but not closure.

The case is open on paper, but the killer is still at large.

The families of the victims know who took their children’s lives, but they cannot see him in the dock.

The official status of the case, suspect identified, but not apprehended.

Somewhere out there, perhaps under a different name, in another city or even another country, lives the man who saw a woman’s skull in half with a carpenter’s tool.

And no one knows where he is or when justice will catch up with