1934 Everett Ruess Missing person case SOLVED after 75 years

[CSAFD]

Remains of lost American explorer identified by DNA
April 30th, 2009 @ 6:50pm
By John Hollenhorst
SALT LAKE CITY -- One of Utah's most enduring mysteries has been solved. DNA evidence released Thursday confirms that a young man, who became a legend and a folk hero after he disappeared, was actually murdered, and his body was carefully hidden for 75 years.

The secret was hidden in a crevice of rock, apparently known to only a single Navajo man for decades. Eventually he shared the secret with his granddaughter, and last year she shared it with her brother. He spoke in a telephone news conference Thursday.

"I looked in the crevice and I saw the top of the skull there," Denny Bellson explained.

That's very near to the end of the story. The beginning was in 1934 when Everett Ruess disappeared. He was a 20-year-old artist and poet who had spent four years exploring the canyons with his burros.

"[He] wrote magnificent letters about his impressions of the red rock country," said W.L. "Bud" Rusho, author of "Everett Ruess, A Vagabond for Beauty."

Rusho wrote the book about the vanished vagabond 25 years ago. Diane Orr made a movie called "Lost Forever, Everett Ruess" about the search for Ruess 10 years ago.

"What drives the search for Everett Ruess is the search for the spirit of the wilderness, the fact that he had this incredible ecstatic experience of the landscape, and people want to share that," Orr said.

Ruess disappeared in the canyons south of Escalante and was never heard from again. According to the Navajo siblings who found the bones, their grandfather claimed to have seen two Ute Indians chasing a white man in 1934.


The story is told in the latest issue of National Geographic Adventure by reporter David Roberts. "The Utes knocked him off the burro and killed him, and the grandfather carried the body up to the crest of comb ridge and buried it in a rock crevice," Roberts explained.

In that same phone conference, scientists explained how the bones matched up perfectly with old photos of Ruess taken by famed photographer Dorothea Lange. They also obtained DNA from the bones.

"The DNA evidence is irrefutable that the bone is a close blood relative of the nieces and nephews who are surviving," said Dr. Kenneth Krauter, of the University of Colorado.

"They're probably right, much as I hate to say it," Rusho said.

Rusho and Orr are having trouble swallowing the solution to the mystery. Ruess's bones were found 60 miles from where he disappeared, across some of the most rugged land on the planet, the opposite direction from where Ruess told his family he was heading.

"It's very puzzling. Bud's right, it opens new questions," Orr said.

Another puzzlement is the so-called "burro problem." Searchers recovered Ruess's burros shortly after he disappeared. So whose burros did he have, 60 miles away, on the day he was murdered? It's a mystery this good isn't giving up its answers easily.

http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=148&sid=6327358

[Faith]

DNA comparison proves bones are those of artist Everett Ruess who disappeared 75 years ago in Utah
Remains found near Bluff belong to legendary figure.

Updated: 06/23/2009 09:57:01 AM MDT

A team of geneticists at the University of Colorado in Boulder this year compared 600,000 genetic markers to prove that a pile of bones found in a small crevice near Comb Ridge in southeast Utah belonged to artist and romantic vagabond Everett Ruess.

The first public forum gathered since that find, however, showed that the mystery and allure behind the legendary figure has not cooled at all.

Almost every seat in the University of Utah's Orson Spencer Hall Auditorium was filled Monday night to hear experts narrate their firsthand accounts of the astounding find. The forum also included a niece and nephew of Ruess who disappeared into the southern Utah wilderness more than 75 years ago: Michele and Brian Ruess.

http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site297/2009/0623/20090623_095613_EverettRuess3aeh_300.jpg
Brian Ruess, nephew of Everett Ruess, left, W.L "Bud" Rusho, editor of Everett Ruess' journals and letters, and Denny Bellson, who made the initial discovery Ruess' remains at a U. forum Monday. (Al Hartmann/The Salt Lake Tribune)

http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site297/2009/0623/20090623_095417_everettRuess_200.jpg
Everett Ruess and his horses in Canyon de Chelly, 1932. (From "Everett Ruess, A Vagabond for Beauty" by W.L. Rusho)

Denny Bellson, a member of the Navajo Nation who found the site containing the bones last summer, also traveled from Shiprock, N.M., to enjoy his newfound fame. "I try to hide out on the 'res,'" he said. "Everyone's looking for me now. I'm a little nervous."

Including questions from the audience toward the end, the two-hour forum hosted by the Glen Canyon Institute ranged far and wide over Ruess' legacy, constituting a conversational wake of sorts for the 20-year-old California native.

Last seen near Escalante, Utah, in 1934, Ruess' journal entries and art gradually caught the attention of such luminaries as Wallace Stegner and, years later, Jon Krakauer, who reserved an entire chapter for Ruess in "Into the Wild," about Christopher McCandless' similar disappearance into the Alaskan wilderness. Michele Ruess shared with the lecture crowd never before seen photographs of her late uncle as a young infant, as well as slides of Ruess' watercolors and artwork. She also placated criticisms against the family for cremating Ruess' remains and scattering them along the Pacific, rather than burying them in southern Utah, by reading a poem Ruess penned as a teenager: "My soul hurls outward, to the sea," he wrote.

An April/May article in National Geographic Adventure by David Roberts, also in attendance at Monday's forum, recounted how Bellson embarked on a search for Ruess' remains after his sister said their grandfather, Aneth Nez, told her about the murder of a young white man by three Ute Indians. Nez witnessed the killing from afar while walking the area in the 1930s.

Nez told his granddaughter, Daisy Johnson, of how he then buried the young man after his attackers left him for dead. When Nez became ill years later, a Navajo medicine man told him it was because he disturbed the grave. A curing ceremony using a lock of hair would cure Nez, the medicine man said. With his sister ill from cancer years later, Bellson thought it important to find the burial site for himself.

The Boulder forensic anthropologists in association with National Geographic recreated a skull using bone fragments found at the site, but Brian Ruess said Monday the family was not convinced of the find until extensive DNA tests proved the remains belonged to their late uncle.

Brian Ruess said he felt it was no mistake that Bellson's respect for Navajo oral tradition, and concern for his sister, led to the discovery. "I'd like to think that only that kind of noble pursuit would find Everett," he said.

Forum members said at least two mysteries concerning the legendary figure will endure: how he managed to traverse miles of rugged country between Escalante and Comb Ridge without burros, and why he decided to go there.

"All I can conclude is that he wanted to be Jules Verne ... and disappear," said W.L. "Bud" Rusho, author of the Ruess biography A Vagabond for Beauty , making a reference to Ruess' favorite pseudonym, "Nemo."

Brian Ruess said neither the family nor those who helped unearth Ruess' remains will divulge the location of the crevice where Bellson's grandfather buried the lone wanderer, as it's located on Navajo land.

"We do not want this site turned into a shrine," Ruess said, referring to what happened to the Alaska location where his late uncle's modern-day counterpart, McCandless, died. "It would be a grievous injustice to the Navajo Nation."

http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site297/2009/0622/20090622__RuessFound_0623~2_400.jpg

http://www.sltrib.com/outdoors/ci_12669084

[packy]

Seems there is still some doubt as to whether some accept that he was attacked by Utes or not. Some interesting comments after the National Geographic Story. http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/comments/3/873/

[Nut44x4]

Ummmmmmmmm........not so fast.....lol.

Remains found in Utah not poet Everett Ruess
By PAUL FOY (AP) – 26 minutes ago

SALT LAKE CITY — A skeleton found in the Utah wilderness last year was not that of Everett Ruess, a legendary wanderer of the 1930s, despite initial forensic tests that seemed to have solved an enduring mystery, his nephew told The Associated Press.

"The skeleton is not related to us," Brian Ruess, a 44-year-old software salesman in Portland, Ore., said late Wednesday.

Everett Ruess vanished in southern Utah in 1934, writing in a final letter to his family in California that "as to when I revisit civilization, it will not be soon" and "it is enough that I am surrounded with beauty."

He was 20 and a gifted poet who explored the Southwest over much of four years. In between journeys, he hobnobbed with famous artists of his time.

Initial DNA tests were termed "irrefutable" months ago by University of Colorado researchers. But the self-styled vagabond's nephew said more extensive analysis by the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville, Md., disproved the initial DNA tests.

Utah's state archaeologist, Kevin Jones, had questioned the original results, prompting the family to seek a second opinion.

Jones said a recovered lower jawbone was characteristic of an American Indian's, not a man of European descent, and that worn teeth suggested a lifetime diet of coarse grains.

"It's what we expected," Jones said Wednesday of results disputing the find. "That was why we raised the questions — we thought there were problems. I'm delighted at the courage of the family to pursue additional analysis about the identify of their ancestor."

The first forensic results — combined with a recently disclosed Navajo tale of murder — seemed to make a powerful case that Ruess' body had been discovered, as recounted in the magazine National Geographic Adventure.

A contributing editor of the magazine, David Roberts, encountered what he called a surprising backlash and even threats after writing the story last spring, but not on scientific grounds. Rather, the legend of Everett Ruess — long a figure of American West lore — provoked strong emotions.

Robert's discovery began with the haunting account of a Navajo elder who, according to a family story, had witnessed the young man's murder by other Indians and waited decades to reveal a burial spot.

Brian Ruess said that part of the story may still be true.

"It might mean there's a skeleton out there, but this isn't the right one. It just means there's a lot of graves out there," he said.

Ruess' supposed remains were found stuffed in a rock crevice against a cliff wall at remote Comb Ridge in southeastern Utah, about 60 miles from Escalante, the town where he set off for his final wilderness journey.

Brian Ruess said he accepts the analysis of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology lab as a pre-eminent authority on DNA testing. Jones believes the first researchers mixed DNA from Ruess' four nephews and nieces with that of the discovered bones, contaminating the results.

University of Colorado biologist Kenneth Krauter, who handled the initial DNA tests, was not taking calls late Wednesday, according to a recorded message on his phone. The message said, "The subscriber you have called is not receiving calls at this time."

There was no immediate response from National Geographic Adventure editors. Weeks ago, Roberts said he was fully preoccupied trying to reconcile doubts about the discovery. He could not be immediately reached late Wednesday.

The back-and-forth was jarring to the artists' only surviving family members.

"It is an up and a down, and certain members of the family would have really liked closure," Brian Ruess told The AP. "It's an emotional tug one way, and then a tug back the other way."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hGwHiLipSUh-7Ybmz1rmrTJJr7HgD9BFR36O0

[packy]

Wow, one lab does the testing and they say it's irrefutable but another lab's testing disputes the results. Brings to mind the question of how reliable different labs are when they do the testing.