by Ann Rule
The irony of fate, bad luck, or chance, or whatever we choose to call it, intervened. The truck broke down, and no amount of tinkering with it got it going. Secretly, Richard wasn’t really disappointed, because it meant they could take a few days for fun instead of spending them shoveling gravel.
Belinda fixed a picnic, and they packed up kids, their dog, Droopy, supplies, fishing poles, and disposable diapers for Melissa, and they all headed for Carberry Creek, twenty-five miles southwest of Medford.
The camping area in the mountains is isolated. The town of Copper had yet to be flooded, and it was close by. But “town” meant a crossroads, a country store, and a few houses. A scattering of farms popped up downstream from the campsite the Cowdens picked on Carberry Creek, but upstream the land became deep woods.
The drive to reach Carberry Creek was part of the fun of the outing. The Cowdens’ old pickup passed through Jacksonville, once a booming gold-rush town. Many of the fine old homes built in the last century still stand in Jacksonville, with turrets, gables, and intricate fretwork all advertising that they once belonged to men who had struck it rich. The old county courthouse is there, too, now a museum, filled with the rusting tools of the men who sought gold in the streams and earth of Jackson County. The Cowdens were aware that even in the 1970s, the challenge of a fortune still waiting in the ground drew miners, but they were only looking for a quiet spot to fish and picnic.
Richard turned in to their favorite site along Carberry Creek Road, and he parked the pickup on the road above their campsite. There was a picnic table close to the creek, trees for shade. The creek itself was less than a foot deep this late in the summer, and as clear as glass.
They planned to camp until Sunday and then stop at Belinda’s mother’s house in Copper for dinner on Sunday, September 1, before returning home. The weather was so perfect and the scenery so beautifully peaceful that they were glad the gravel truck had broken down.
Melissa played happily on a blanket while young David and the basset hound, Droopy, scampered around. Then Richard and David fished while Belinda prepared lunch on the camp stove.
Even though the Cowdens knew the area well and had been to Carberry Creek many times, there was always something new to discover. Belinda and Richard kept a close eye on David; there were still mine shafts around from the old days, as well as wild animals and deceptively deep spots in the tranquil creek.
Belinda’s mother lived just under a mile from where they camped; her home was one of the few in Copper. If it grew cold or rainy during the night, or if one of the youngsters became ill, they could always pack up and be under a sheltering roof in no time.
The thought of danger was probably one of the farthest things from the Cowdens’ minds as they enjoyed the lazy Labor Day camping trip. Beyond the normal caution that any young family takes while camping outdoors, they had nothing to fear—or believed they didn’t.
On Sunday morning, September 1, David and his father hiked the mile into Copper and visited the general store. They bought a carton of milk and walked off toward their camp. They appeared perfectly normal—happy, certainly not under any pressure, nor anxious about Belinda and Melissa, whom they had left alone back at camp.
Later in the day, in Copper, Belinda’s mother prepared a big family dinner and waited for her daughter’s family to arrive. The hot dishes grew cold and the cold ones warm as time passed. Too much time. It just wasn’t like Belinda to be late for a dinner; she knew how much trouble it was for the cook when guests were late, and she was a considerate young woman. At length, the older woman took off her apron and drove to the campsite. She had no trouble finding it. The Cowdens’ pickup truck was parked up on Carberry Creek Road, headed down toward the general store. Richard had been doing that lately, in case the battery failed.
She walked down to the creek, fully expecting to see the family.
They weren’t there, and she felt the first niggling pricks of panic. All their lives were so predictable, and they kept in touch as often as they could. There were, of course, no cell phones in 1974, and she had no way to call her daughter and son-in-law. She was positive that they wouldn’t simply have forgotten about having dinner at her house and driven on home.
Belinda wouldn’t do that. Besides, it was obvious that they hadn’t packed up their campsite. And their truck was still up on the road.
A plastic dishpan full of now-cold water sat near the picnic table. And on the table itself was a carton half-full of milk, dishes and silverware stacked neatly. (The milk would turn out to be the same milk that Richard and David had purchased Sunday morning, and it would help to establish a time line.) The keys to the pickup were on the table. Belinda’s purse was in plain sight. Fishing poles leaned against a nearby tree. Even little Melissa’s diaper bag was there, and the camp stove was nearby, still assembled.
It looked as if the family had taken a walk into the woods, expecting to come back momentarily. Belinda’s mother called their names, and her own voice hung in the air, startling and eerie in the silence that followed. No one answered. Even the birds stopped chirping.
When does one begin to be really afraid?
She walked closer to Carberry Creek itself. She was somewhat reassured to see how low it was, barely wading depth. They couldn’t all have drowned, although she knew Richard and Belinda would have jumped into deep water to save their children. They would do anything to save their children.
And then her eye caught sight of something else. Richard Cowden’s wallet lay on the ground. His mother-in-law picked it up and saw that there was twenty-three dollars inside. Close by, she found his expensive wristwatch, and an opened package of cigarettes, her daughter’s brand.
Even if the family had decided to go into the forest to explore or to pick berries, she doubted that they would have left such valuable items as a purse, wallet, watch, and truck keys behind.
Belinda’s mom moved back to the truck. All the clothing they had brought with them was there—with the exception of their bathing suits. And bathing suits and blackberry thorns don’t mix. If they’d meant to go hiking, they would certainly have changed into more appropriate clothing.
Puzzled and more than a little frightened now, she sat down at the picnic table to wait. She tried to tell herself that they’d all be trooping into camp in a minute and she wouldn’t have to admit how worried she’d been. She tried to be angry because her supper was ruined, but her gnawing fear overcame the anger.
What could have happened? Was there a deep hole beneath the calm surface of the creek—or maybe even a whirlpool? Could David have fallen in and Richard and Belinda gone to his aid? Could they all have drowned? But what about Melissa? Left alone on the creek’s edge, she would be helpless; she couldn’t yet crawl, could barely turn over. And she was always kept in her plastic infant seat. Where was that?
Her grandmother’s mind raced, picking up and then churning all kinds of thoughts about tragedy and disaster. All right. Face it. If they all drowned, where was Droopy? A dog could survive where a human couldn’t.
And Droopy was gone, too.
She strained her ears for the familiar hoarse whooping sound of the basset hound’s bark—but all she heard was the gentle sighing of the fir trees and the lapping water in the creek.
Although summer days are long in Oregon, Belinda’s mother could see the sun sinking in the west, and she knew she had to get help before it was fully dark. With one last look around the deserted campsite, one last hard listen to the woods that might hold a terrible secret, she ran to her car. Ten minutes later she called Jackson County Sheriff Duane Franklin’s office.
The dispatcher listened to her story, tried to comfort her, but thought privately that the report didn’t sound good. Sheriff’s men and troopers from the District 3 office of the Oregon State Police arrived at the Carberry Creek scene. It was just as Belinda’s mother had described it. Certainly the young family had been there—and recently—but they were not there now. The men’s voices ec
hoed in the wind as they called out the Cowdens’ names, and their shouts drew no more response than had hers.
An accident could have happened, of course—but to an entire family? They doubted the creek was either deep or swift or wide enough to cause them all to drown. At any rate they agreed that the dog would have survived, but he was gone.
There were animals in the deep woods—brown bears, coyotes, cougars, some poisonous snakes.
There might have been human “animals,” too. Prowling, stalking voyeurs more dangerous than bears and cougars. Still, the lawmen, too, figured there had to be a reasonable explanation. Maybe one of the Cowdens had been injured in an accident or a fall, and other campers had taken them all to a hospital.
When it became too dark to effect a thorough search, the investigators departed for the night, with officers left behind to guard the spot. A full-scale search would begin in the morning.
One member of the Cowden family did show up the next morning, but he couldn’t talk. Early Monday morning, September 2, Droopy, the basset hound, scratched at the door of the general store in Copper. Perhaps the only living witness to the fate of the Cowden family, Droopy had no way of telling the officers what he had seen. The dog was hungry and tired but did not appear to have been injured in any way. Where had Droopy been all night?
The Cowdens, however, did not show up. There has probably never been a more massive search effort in the state of Oregon than the search for the Cowden family. Oregon State Police, Jackson County sheriff’s officers, the Oregon National Guard, Explorer Scouts, the U.S. Forest Service, and scores of volunteers were sure—at least in the beginning—that they could find them.
Lieutenant Mark Kezar, assistant commander of the Oregon State Police’s District 3 division, took on the overall coordination of the search and the subsequent investigation. A year later, he remarked wryly, “I felt like that campground was my second home.”
In retrospect, Kezar regretted that the investigation didn’t start at top speed immediately and was delayed “for maybe a day” because there was no sign of violence at the Cowdens’ campsite. No blood, nothing broken. Nothing stolen. He agonized for months over that delay.
Scores of police personnel and reserves searched the Carberry Creek campsite for a few weeks, and almost a dozen detectives worked the case as a task force for five months.
The U.S. Forest Service rangers checked every road and trail within a twenty-five-mile radius of the campground. Planes and helicopters flew as low as they dared, taking infrared photographs. If the Cowdens had been killed and buried, the freshly turned dirt and dying vegetation would appear bright red on the film, although it might well be invisible to the naked eye.
Investigators at the campground looked in vain for footprints, tire tracks, or for a pattern of scuff marks in the dirt that might indicate a struggle had taken place. But there was nothing at all.
Oregon, the pioneer state, has long been known for a very modern skill. The state has outstanding forensic science labs, and their crime scene investigators are well trained. But they have to have something to work with. There were no footprints, no tire tracks with which to form moulages. On their hands and knees, CSIs sifted the dirt at the Cowdens’ camp, looking for metal fragments (from slugs and/or bullet casings), cloth, buttons, ID, and any other infinitesimal clue that might still be there.
They found nothing that would help solve the disappearances. Someone—or some “thing”—had entered the Cowdens’ camp and taken the family away, literally without a trace.
It was almost as if some craft from outer space had hovered, landed, and carried off a typical American family to examine in some far-off planet. But would they ever bring them back?
Law enforcement investigators think in far more pragmatic ways and tend not to believe in such things as psychics, crystal balls, and alien abductions. They continued to search for the Cowden family.
More and more, it looked as if someone had kidnapped the Cowdens. But why? Robbery obviously hadn’t been the motivation. Richard’s wallet, his watch, his truck—complete with keys—were there. A sexual attack was quite possible. Belinda Cowden was a lovely young woman; left alone at the campsite, clad in a bathing suit with only a friendly basset hound for protection, she could have inspired lust in the mind of someone hiking in the area.
But wouldn’t that mean that only Belinda and Melissa should be missing? And, if Richard Cowden and David had walked back to find intruders in the campsite and a fight had ensued, wouldn’t there be evidence of a struggle? Why would the entire family be missing now?
Lieutenant Kezar and his fellow Oregon State Police officers—Lieutenant George Winterfeld, Sergeant Ernie Walden, and troopers Lee Erickson and Darin Parker—set up task force headquarters at the camp. They called for aid from state police technical experts in Salem, the state capital.
Sheriff Franklin cut down on some patrols and shifts so that he could make every man possible available for the search that was becoming more baffling by the day.
They searched the abandoned mine shafts, as well as both sides of every creek, river, and gully for miles. If, however improbably, the Cowdens had drowned, their bodies would have surfaced and been caught in the rocks and debris downstream in Carberry Creek.
But none of them did—nor was even a shred of cloth from a bathing suit found.
They brought in bloodhounds and necrosearch dogs—the canines trained to pick up scents of either living creatures or dead bodies. They were given the scents of the Cowden family from clothing left behind at the campsite. The dogs started out enthusiastically, but they soon ran in circles, then stopped and looked at their trainers as if to say, “What is it you want us to find?”
State police detectives talked cautiously to the press, who soon sensed a story of highly unusual circumstances. Erickson commented, “That camp was spooky; even the milk was still on the table.”
Sergeant Walden agreed. “It’s getting to look really strange. It’s not logical that a couple like that would take off with two young kids and leave all their belongings.”
As the weeklong intensive search continued, there wasn’t a person in the whole Northwest who could read or watch TV who hadn’t heard about the missing family.
The closest thing to a clue was a report that hikers had seen a dog, a basset hound, on September 1 some four to six miles upstream from the campsite. But they hadn’t seen anyone with him.
The Carberry Creek area is only a short distance from the California border, and it is literally crisscrossed with logging roads, honeycombed with abandoned gold mine shafts—some of them sunk as long as a hundred years ago. Lieutenant Kezar and his men realized that the Cowdens might never be found if they had been killed and hidden in some mine whose existence had been known only to old-timers—now long dead—with the mine’s entrance grown over with underbrush.
Kezar did not believe that an entire family could have stumbled and fallen into such a mine.
A few other possibilities, more shocking—if that was possible—had to be considered. Could the Cowdens have chosen to vanish voluntarily? Or had either Belinda or Richard murdered their own family and disappeared? It has happened in other cases. People do run away for private reasons: to avoid financial responsibility or some personal situation. They crack under pressure, shocking everyone who knows them.
The investigators scrutinized the Cowdens’ past thoroughly. They had no more debts than any couple in their twenties, and they weren’t behind on any payments. Moreover, Richard Cowden’s paycheck was more than adequate to meet their monthly bills. Belinda was a good manager—as evidenced by the full freezer and the garden she kept up. Cowden was considered a valuable employee on the job, and he hadn’t had any beefs with other drivers or loggers.
As far as the marriage went, it was described as very happy by friends and relatives. The handsome couple were devoted to each other, probably even more so since the birth of Melissa five months before. If there had been any breath of sc
andal about their marriage, it would have been well known in a town as small as White City—but there was none.
No, there was no reason in the world for the Cowdens to choose to disappear. Lieutenant Kezar was convinced that wherever they were, they had been taken against their will.
The searchers abandoned the organized efforts near the campsite in the Siskiyous a week or so after Labor Day. They had not found one scrap of physical evidence that might help find the Cowdens, much less the family themselves. They realized that the couple and their two children could be thousands of miles away by this time … if they had left of their own accord.
But no one who knew them believed that theory. Neither Richard nor Belinda would put their families through such pain—especially since Richard’s parents had already lost one son, and they were waiting to hear if another son had cancer. Richard’s brother Wes had started out Labor Day weekend with a reason to celebrate. He had just been released from the hospital after exploratory surgery on a tumor that his doctors feared was malignant. With the memory of his oldest brother’s death from cancer at the age of twenty-five, Wes had been prepared for a similar diagnosis.
But his lump was found to be benign, and he was tremendously grateful. Within a day, he learned that his beloved brother Richard and Richard’s family had disappeared.
The Oregon State Police and the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office were flooded now with clues, suggestions, theories. Some were too ridiculous to consider, but others were checked out thoroughly. In the months to come, Kezar and his men would interview 150 people, compile a file on the Cowdens’ disappearance case, and come to know the family as well as if they’d known them personally for fifty years.
As soon as Wes Cowden recuperated enough from surgery, he and his father, who had once been a trapper and knew the mountains, ravines, trails, and campsites of the upper Applegate Valley by heart, began their weeks-long search for Richard, Belinda, David, and Melissa. They were both eager to find some answers, and afraid of what those might be.
