The Best American Sports Writing 2017

by Glenn Stout

  According to Mercado-Espinoza, it’s been a calm year in relation to Dijmarescu, who is allowed to visit with his daughters as long as his mother or another designated supervisor is present. Last month, Lhakpa left the girls with Claudio Dijmarescu and his wife and returned home to Nepal, where she’ll climb Everest on a trip run by her brother’s outfit, Seven Summits Club. Mingma Gelu will provide her with everything she needs. “We will climb together,” he says. “We have a great climbing family. She doesn’t need a Sherpa. She is so strong.”

  By early May, the Sherpa fixing team had set ropes to 27,000 feet, well ahead of schedule for Everest’s north side. Lhakpa had been doing her acclimatization rotations to the North Col and beyond. Everest, she had told me before she left, isn’t a physical challenge so much as a mental one. It requires the strength to endure and to keep getting up, putting icy boots on, and stepping out of your tent even when you’re cold and tired, no matter how bad you feel. That much Lhakpa knows she can do.

  Even if she succeeds in nabbing her seventh summit, she’ll almost certainly return to housekeeping in a world that is slow to validate her accomplishments. It’s not that she wouldn’t welcome a little recognition. She wants to have a movie made about her, and she desperately wants to meet Oprah Winfrey; she’s carried copies of O: The Oprah Magazine to the summit on multiple occasions. For now, though, Lhakpa is happy to have her freedom, and she has no plans to move. “I like my friends,” she says. “I don’t want to have to find new ones.” And the girls have their friends and their school and a place in the world.”

  But that doesn’t mean Lhakpa is at peace. Last winter, I asked her for the fifth time whether she was sure that she wanted me to tell the details of her story. She said that she did. Then she added, “You tell me when this story is public. I must watch which way I walk.”

  JON BILLMAN

  (Long) Gone Girl

  from runner’s world

  The car chugs around switchback after switchback, crunching gravel beneath its tires as it ascends the Loop Road through Sinks Canyon in mid-central Wyoming. Its headlamps cast twin beams of light that pierce the midnight blackness. Todd Skinner and Amy Whisler scan the edges of visibility for something—anything—that would hint at their neighbor Amy Wroe Bechtel’s whereabouts. To their right lies the inky Frye Lake, which was to be the terminus of a 10K hill climb Amy was planning for the fall. They pass the lake, drive a few miles, round a bend—and then they see it. Directly ahead, a flash of white where the road forks.

  Amy’s white Toyota Tercel wagon is parked by the side of the road where the Loop Road splinters out to the smaller, pine-shrouded Burnt Gulch turnoff. There are puddles below the driver’s door and behind the vehicle, but no footprints, no tire tracks in the mud. If she parked before it had stormed that afternoon, did she get caught in the rain? Where did she go?

  There is no sign of Amy, though, so Todd pulls out his cell phone to call her husband, Steve.

  From here, the calendar will hurtle forward days, months, years at a time. Meanwhile, Steve, authorities, Amy’s family and friends—America—will rewind the clock on that single day, patching together hazy eyewitness accounts and scarce facts in hopes of uncovering what happened to the runner who never came home.

  Amy Wroe Bechtel, 24 at the time of her disappearance, has been missing for 19 years. Nineteen years, with nary a shred of evidence, other than what was found in her car in those early morning hours on the Burnt Gulch turnoff. There were her sunglasses, her car keys left on the driver’s seat, and a to-do list—a small scratch of paper written in Amy’s light, busy hand. Her last words to the world. She’d already contacted phone and electric companies to have services turned on at her and her husband’s newly purchased home (check), dropped off the recyclables from the gym where she worked at the recycling center (check), been to the photo store (check). There were other things she hadn’t yet done, or at least hadn’t yet checked off the list. At the bottom: run.

  It’s heartbreakingly ironic that what would become such a disorganized investigation began with this tidy little window into Amy’s plans for the day.

  True crime mysteries have always captivated America, in the same macabre way a car accident attracts rubberneckers, but they’ve struck a cultural nerve lately. In late 2014, NPR released Serial, a podcast that unraveled the mystery of a murdered high-schooler and the conviction of her boyfriend, week by agonizing week. A month and a half after the season aired, the boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was allowed to challenge a previously denied appeal on the grounds that he’d been provided ineffective counsel. Early last year, HBO aired The Jinx, a documentary series that detailed how New York real estate scion Robert Durst evaded convictions in the deaths of three people despite a preponderance of circumstantial evidence that seemed to incriminate him and only him. Stunningly, Durst appeared to confess to the killings over a hot mic during the show’s finale, and the night before its airing he was arrested by the FBI for one of them.

  Perhaps, in this age of ubiquitous information, people have grown increasingly intrigued by the questions that remain unanswered. The cable television network Investigation Discovery took a crack at answering Amy’s case in a 2013 episode of its Disappeared series; a flurry of local news stories followed suit. Behind the renewed interest in Amy’s case: a new lead detective taking a fresh look at decades-old clues.

  Wyomingites are fond of describing their state as America’s biggest small town, and like nearly every other resident in 1997, my soon-to-be wife, Hilary, and I followed Amy’s disappearance in the Casper Star-Tribune—the paper of record in the state—and on KUWR, Wyoming Public Radio, day-to-day as it transitioned from a local to a national story that made Amy Wroe Bechtel a household name. The story was featured on Unsolved Mysteries, the New York Times covered it, and Runner’s World went so far as to put Amy’s photo on its cover in January 1998 for a story by John Brant. (The story generated more reader mail than any other in the magazine’s history.) Most media accounts, driven by the hunches of the lead investigators, named but one suspect: Amy’s husband, Steve Bechtel.

  Nearly two decades later, however, it appears that there were hardly enough facts to merit such an intense focus on Steve. In the absence of hard evidence, what happened in the immediate aftermath of Amy’s disappearance more closely resembled a work of fiction than the stories documented in Serial or The Jinx. In HBO’s award-winning 2014 crime drama True Detective, Marty Hart, played by Woody Harrelson, tells his partner, “You attach an assumption to a piece of evidence, you start to bend the narrative to support it, prejudice yourself.”

  The “evidence” investigators had was Steve’s journals. They contained poetry that sometimes erred on the violent side and included troubling philosophies about male-gender dominance. Steve, in conversation as on the page, was a cocky, wisecracking, superfit slam-dunk. It’s almost always the husband, right?

  A week and a half after Amy vanished, Steve sealed his public fate as the villain when he lawyered up and refused to take a polygraph test.

  The narrative bent toward Steve. Chauvinist. Coward. Wife killer.

  Meanwhile, potentially crucial evidence was rendered useless by shoddy crime-scene management. Meanwhile, a critical lead was ignored.

  Meanwhile, a monster roamed free.

  July 24, 1997, 10:30 p.m. “Uh, yeah, hey, I’ve got a person missing here, I think, and I wondered if you had a spare around anyplace?”—Steve Bechtel, in a phone call to Lander (Wyoming) authorities to report his missing wife.

  Amy and Steve had been married for a year and a month. After they’d graduated from the University of Wyoming in Laramie with degrees in exercise physiology, the couple moved to Lander, population around 7,000, and lived at Number 9 Lucky Lane, a small white house in a group of 12 utilitarian miners’ houses the locals call Climbers’ Row. The Bechtels were tenants of the neighbors who would eventually find Amy’s abandoned car, Todd Skinner and Amy Whisler. Skinner, who died in a tragic fall at Yosemite in
2006, was a world-renowned climber and Steve’s frequent climbing partner.

  In 1997, Lander was on the cusp of becoming an elite climbing town and, in that world, Skinner—and to a lesser extent, Steve—were stars. Today, it has evolved into an outdoor enthusiast’s mecca, hosting the colossal climbers’ playground of Sinks Canyon in its backyard, the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and an emergent road-racing and ultrarunning scene. Now, just as then, cowhands sit on stools next to “rock rats” at the historic Lander Bar, the prominent watering hole that happens to be owned by a climber. But in 1997, to some, the climbers who now in many ways give the town its identity were aliens, transients who didn’t appear to have real jobs. They were fraternal and secretive, almost cultish.

  Amy was a runner within this climbing clique. She had been a standout distance runner at Wyoming—she ranked first in school history in the indoor 3,000 meters (9:48) and second in the indoor 5,000 (18:07) in 1995—and, with a marathon PR of 3:01, had aspirations of qualifying for the 2000 Olympic Marathon Trials. She and Steve both worked part-time at Wild Iris, the local climbing shop, and Amy also waited tables at the Sweetwater Grill and taught a youth weight-lifting class at Wind River Fitness Center. The two had the appearance of happy young newlyweds. They had recently bought a house in the residential heart of Lander and were preparing to take the leap out of their “no-need-to-knock-door’s-never-locked” climbing-bum shanty on Lucky Lane.

  When Amy vanished, Lander divided. The climbers and NOLS crowd rallied around Steve, insulating him when it was clear the authorities suspected him. That raised suspicions with many of the townies, fueled by frustrated questions in the newspapers posed by law enforcement and Amy’s family. As Bryan Di Salvatore, a Montana-based writer who reported on the case for Outside magazine in 1998, puts it, “That town was freaked out. Scared and angry.”

  The fact that there was no body, no real sign of violence even, made Steve the go-to target in the fog of mystery. After all, he was familiar with many of the remote mountain areas in Wyoming. In the first few days after Amy vanished, however, Steve was hardly a suspect—he was helping lead the search. In fact, for the first few days, foul play wasn’t even considered by investigators.

  “Here’s the whole problem,” says Fremont County Patrol Sergeant John Zerga, who was assigned Amy’s cold-case file in 2010 and remains the lead detective today. “Nowadays, everything is viewed as a homicide. Back then it wasn’t viewed that way. She was just a missing runner. For three days.”

  A stuffed wild turkey keeps watch from the corner of Zerga’s small office in the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office facility in Lander. A stout 48-year-old with a close-cropped haircut and a cowboy’s Fu Manchu mustache, Zerga is essentially the Lone Ranger on Amy’s case, and has the nigh impossible task of cleaning up a 19-year-old mess made by the first lead investigator on Amy’s case, Dave King.

  “We didn’t close off any routes out of here,” Zerga continues. “We didn’t close off any vehicles. All we had was a bunch of people up here looking for a missing runner. We actually ruined it with the vehicle, because we allowed the Skinners to drive it home. [The investigation] was not good for at least the first three days. There was a lot of stuff that was lost.”

  “King rolled in a week late,” says John Gookin, PhD, a search-and-rescue expert who helped coordinate the mountain search for Amy. “He was off in the mountains on a horsepacking trip—so this guy who had just been promoted to detective from jailer was in charge of the search. The promoted jailer asked me, ‘Well, what do I do?’ The detective asking the volunteer running the search teams, ‘What do I do?’ ”

  The search began with just Steve and two dozen of his friends, but later that day there were ATVs, dogs, dirt bikes, and over 100 volunteers on the ground. The next day horses and helicopters joined in, and by the third day, the search area had been expanded to a 30-mile radius—a big wheel of rough country. But it would take a full week after Amy’s car was found for the area around it to be declared a crime scene.

  On August 5, an FBI agent named Rick McCullough accused Steve of murdering Amy. Steve then retained the counsel of Kent Spence. By then, Steve had already been interviewed four times by investigators, and Spence advised him to refuse the FBI’s request to take a polygraph test. Spence thought the situation had taken a turn to harassment.

  Then, two months after Amy vanished, King relinquished the case to Detective Sergeant Roger Rizor and turned his focus on campaigning for Fremont County sheriff, a position he would be elected to in 1998. The campaign didn’t stop King from discussing the case alongside Amy’s sisters on The Geraldo Rivera Show in February 1998. Spence would later say that he believed King used Amy’s case as a grandstand to help him get elected sheriff. King wouldn’t hold that title long, though: on November 3, 2000, he resigned amid allegations of impropriety, and was later convicted of stealing cocaine from a law enforcement storage locker.

  “Everybody that investigated this was focused on Steve,” Zerga says. “And they had good reason. But there again, there was information coming in pointing in different directions.”

  One tip came from a man named Richard Eaton, who told investigators that his itinerant stumblebum of a brother, Dale Wayne Eaton, may have been involved. Rizor’s team, dead-set on nailing Steve, was unconvinced, and may have missed its chance to close not just Amy’s case, but at least nine cold-case murders. By not pursuing the lead, they may have allowed the notorious Great Basin Serial Killer to get away.

  JULY 24, 1997, 4:30 p.m. Steve arrives home after a day of scouting climbs with Sam Lightner Jr., a travel writer. Amy’s not home, but he knows she had had a busy day planned.

  Earlier in the day, he had rendezvoused with Lightner in Dubois—a town roughly equidistant from Steve’s home in Lander and Lightner’s in Jackson, 80 miles or so. The climbing partners had a history. They’d climbed throughout the West and in Asia, but just a year earlier, on a trip with Amy to Australia, the men were not getting along, and Lightner flew home early. But they always trusted each other on the rocks. From Dubois, the two climbers, accompanied by the Bechtels’ yellow Lab, Jonz, had ridden north together into the Cartridge Creek area of Shoshone National Forest. They’d both carried guns, Lightner and Steve will later tell authorities, because “that’s where they dump all the bad bears from Yellowstone.” But the scout had been a letdown. The rock wasn’t that great for climbing, had been a slog to get to, and wouldn’t have been worth the effort. Thunderstorms had lurked nearby and had driven Steve and his friend back to Dubois, where they’d gone their separate ways.

  A few hours pass. Amy’s not home for dinner. Steve makes a few calls. Nobody’s seen Amy, so he drives around town and rallies friends to help him find her. A few more hours pass.

  Steve begins to panic.

  “I actually got along with Amy better than I did with Steve in Australia,” Lightner will say years later, reflecting on the constant skepticism he received from investigators. “I’m not gonna cover for somebody who might have murdered a friend of mine.”

  Lightner, and the trip to Dubois, will be Steve’s alibi.

  A trip to Dubois was the beginning of the end for Dale Wayne Eaton.

  It’s a wonder Eaton was a free man at all when police found him just outside the mountain town on July 30, 1998, nearly a year to the day after Amy’s disappearance and, more specifically, just 10 and a half months after he attempted to kidnap the Breeden family.

  The botched kidnapping took place in an area called Patrick Draw, less than a three-hour drive from Lander. Shannon Breeden, her husband, Scott, and their five-month-old baby, Cody, were traveling the country when their van broke down at a pullout along Interstate 80. An overweight, disheveled 52-year-old stopped his off-green ’85 Dodge van and offered them assistance. The man—Dale Eaton—asked Shannon to drive. Eaton then pulled a rifle from the back of the van, kidnapped the family at gunpoint, and directed them south of the highway into the desert.

 
In a scene straight out of a B-grade ’70s chase movie, Shannon stepped on the gas and turned in a tight circle instead, which enabled Scott to jump out of the van with the baby and Shannon to get out the other side. Eaton grabbed her and would have plunged a knife into her ribs had Scott not grabbed Eaton’s arm and gun and hit him over the head with the rifle butt. A struggle ensued in the dirt, and ended with Eaton stabbed with his own knife, beaten with his own rifle, and left in the dirt while the family sped for help in the van.

  It wasn’t long before Eaton was arrested, and he quickly confessed to the attempted kidnapping.

  The incident got Eaton’s brother, Richard, thinking. He knew that Dale had been camping in the Burnt Gulch area at the time of Amy Bechtel’s disappearance. Burnt Gulch, average elevation 7,860 feet, is not far from where Amy was marking her 10K route, and was a favorite elk-hunting and trout-fishing spot of the Eaton brothers. But after Richard called Rizor with his suspicions, the detective dismissed the tip, choosing to believe instead the word of Eaton’s niece, who said Dale was visiting her in Greeley, Colorado, on July 24. A $100,000 reward out for information leading to a resolution of Amy’s case was enough to cast suspicion on Richard’s motives.

  Astonishingly, a plea deal for the attempted kidnapping meant Eaton would serve just 99 days in jail, where samples of his DNA were taken, before being paroled to a halfway house in Casper due to prison overcrowding. He remained on strict probation—which included a curfew—but was allowed his Dodge van so that he could work welding and construction jobs.