Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  The pamphlet also reproduced two pictures of Daisey with Michèle Ruess on Comb Ridge, a painting and a woodcut of Everett’s, and the famous stanza from his “Wilderness Song”: “Say that I starved; that I was lost and weary.…”

  In September, Brian Ruess telephoned me. The news he blurted out shocked me. “It’s not Everett,” Brian said. “In fact, even worse, it’s a Native American.”

  At first I refused to believe it. Of course, I did not want to believe it. How did we know this new lab hadn’t made a mistake, like the one that Family Tree DNA had apparently stumbled over in 2008? But Brian revealed that the new test had been performed by the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL), in Rockville, Maryland, a government-affiliated institution with vast experience in identifying victims such as soldiers on battlefields and a comparably vast DNA database, as well as the stored blood samples from thousands of veterans who have served in the armed forces.

  AFDIL took an entirely different approach from Krauter and Marshall’s. Instead of comparing DNA extracted from the skeleton’s femur with that in the saliva samples from all four of Everett’s nieces and nephews and using Affymetrix software to compare as many as 600,000 markers, the government lab did a Y-chromosomal test of DNA from two skeletal samples, a tooth and another piece of femur. Because the Y chromosome that is crucial to this test is passed down solely in the male line, AFDIL compared the skeletal DNA with a sample only from Kevin Ruess.

  Had Everett’s nephew been related to the person buried in the crevice grave, all seventeen key markers in the Y chromosome should have matched. Instead, AFDIL found only one matching marker. Scanning their database of Y-chromosomal types from all over the United States, the lab did not find any exact match. It did, however, find close matches with three individuals. All three were Native Americans.

  The brief summary an AFDIL scientist finally e-mailed me was full of technical terms such as “Y-STR profile” and “mtDNA sequence” and “Y-haplogroup,” and was thus beyond my comprehension. But the work seemed sound enough to convince the family. Brian had prepared a press release announcing our collective mistake to the world, as well as the family’s intention to return the bones to Ron Maldonado for reburial on the Navajo reservation. But several of us persuaded Brian and his siblings to hold off long enough for Ken Krauter and the AFDIL technicians to make a thorough comparison of notes.

  Months later, Krauter told me his initial reaction to the AFDIL finding. “I was in a state of total disbelief. At first I wanted to deny it.”

  More weeks passed. Mike Coble, the AFDIL scientist in charge of the analysis, generously rolled up his sleeves to go over Krauter’s test data, as well as AFDIL’s, with a fine-toothed comb. Despite the potential for animosity between the experts, Coble and Krauter collaborated in a truly disinterested and collegial reexamination of the two tests. As Krauter later said, “This is how science is done.”

  And at last Krauter found the fly in the ointment. It was not, as some had speculated, a problem of contamination of the DNA samples in the CU lab. Nor could it be chalked up to sloppy work on his and Marshall’s part. The glitch came as a result of Krauter’s application of Affymetrix GeneChip technology. Though widely considered the industry’s gold standard for DNA research analysis, Affymetrix remains unproven for this type of forensic work. Krauter saw the Ruess case as an opportunity to break new ground, and he was encouraged to do so by Affymetrix. Unbeknownst to anyone, however—including Affymetrix itself—the firm’s software can produce a false reading (what Krauter calls “noise”) when amounts of DNA that are too small are used in tests.

  When my editors at Adventure tried to get the Affymetrix company, which is based in Santa Clara, California, to comment on this apparent problem, which promised to have huge repercussions for hundreds or even thousands of other DNA analyses being conducted around the world, the firm retreated like a turtle into its shell. A company spokesman maintained that its software was never intended for forensic use. But at the time the Affymetrix website contained the following claim: “Analysis of mitochondrial mutations [with GeneChip technology] is informative for a variety of applications from disease genetics to forensic identification.” The firm’s public-relations spokesman authorized only a single bland boilerplate statement for publication: “Professor Krauter is a valued customer of Affymetrix. We are happy to assist him with the review of his study, as and when he needs our help.”

  What the “noise” in the software meant was that it produced a gene identification that appeared to be legitimate when it was really highly suspect. Even worse, when Krauter’s computer analyzed the bone samples alongside the data from the Ruess nieces and nephews, it biased the results in favor of the Ruess family members, yielding a partial similarity between the “noise” and the family’s DNA at a frequency of 25 percent—exactly the expected value if the skeleton were Everett’s.

  Krauter refused to blame Affymetrix. For our follow-up nostra culpa in Adventure, he insisted, “We screwed up by relying on the technology too much. Fortunately, the error uncovered how the extreme sensitivity can be misleading if a researcher takes its output at face value. We will definitely reexamine how that software can be optimized, and when alternative methods should be used.” Privately, he told me, “It was a real bummer. It made me fear that all our data from all our recent work was wrong.” Also privately, Helen Marshall admitted that she was even more upset than her mentor. “It was an innocent mistake,” she told me, “but it was devastating. It involved real people and real emotions. I’ll never get over this.”

  For his part, Dennis Van Gerven was dumbfounded. If the AFDIL disproof was solid, it meant that a purely coincidental match between the face and teeth of the Comb Ridge skeleton and those of Everett had happened. The likelihood of such a match was infinitesimal. For Adventure, Van Gerven said, “I will go to my grave believing that we could not exclude [the match] based on the best anatomical evidence. A random skeleton was found that by chance alone matched sex, age, and stature. That in itself is remarkable.” To Ron Maldonado in November, he e-mailed, “I still think it’s Everett. But I don’t know how.”

  * * *

  On October 22, 2009, Brian Ruess issued the press release, titled “Ruess Family Accepts Comb Ridge Remains Are Not Those of Everett Ruess.” The bones and “artifacts” were shipped back to Maldonado. Without telling anyone when or where he was going, Maldonado later went out alone with the remains and reburied them—not in the same crevice from which they had been extracted, but in a safe, obscure location that he felt would suit the dignity of an unidentified Native American.

  The newspapers seized upon the collapse of our discovery. The Associated Press headline read, “Family: Remains Found in Utah Not Poet Ruess.” National Public Radio chimed in: “Mystery Endures: Remains Found Not Those of Artist.” Kevin Jones refrained from uttering I-told-you-so’s, at least publicly. A single piece in High Country News stuck it to all of us who had collaborated in the apparent find on Comb Ridge. Titled “Skeletons in the Closet,” it celebrated Jones’s detective work by way of a profile of his varied career (“aspiring novelist,” bluegrass mandolin player, dedicated pursuer of grave-robbing criminals around Blanding, Utah). The photo showed Jones squinting at an arrowhead as he held it up to the light. The subhead: “Utah State Archaeologist Kevin Jones Knows His Bones.”

  Back in May 2008, when Denny Bellson had first taken him out to the Comb Ridge site, Vaughn Hadenfeldt had knelt before the crevice, peered inside it, and gently touched the top of the protruding skull with his index finger. “Is that you, Everett?” Vaughn had whispered.

  Now we knew the answer.

  EPILOGUE

  GIBBS SMITH, THE PUBLISHER of so many books about Everett Ruess, may be right: it is not the mystery of Everett’s disappearance and final fate that makes him so interesting, but his achievements by the age of twenty. As a precocious artist, a writer of promise, a romantic visionary verging on the mystical, a bold and resourcefu
l solo explorer of the wilderness, and in some sense the first true celebrator of the beauty of the Southwest for its own sake, Everett traces a unique and meteoric path across the American landscape. The cult that has accreted around him since he headed into Davis Gulch serves as the ultimate proof of how Everett’s wild quest captivates the minds and hearts of his legions of admirers.

  Yet it is impossible to disentangle Everett’s vanishing from the legend that clings to him. By latest count, at least eighteen books have been published that claim to solve the mystery of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance in 1937 somewhere near Howland Island in the Pacific. None of the theories, however, has come close to winning the day. Had Earhart crash-landed on Howland, been rescued by Japanese or American sailors, returned home to write a book about her adventure, flown for another decade or two before giving up the cockpit, and died peacefully in her bed at a respectable age, she would still be acclaimed as one of America’s pioneering aviators, but hardly as the mythic figure she has become. Earhart is fixed in the amber of time, forever androgynously beautiful as she looked at the age of thirty-nine, in fearless pursuit of her bravest challenge—to be the first woman to fly around the world. Everett, too, is fixed in that amber, as captured by Dorothea Lange’s splendid portraits of him at age nineteen.

  In the aftermath of the AFDIL DNA result that disproved our identification of the skeleton on Comb Ridge, all of us involved in the discovery suffered a crushing sense of letdown and disappointment. And we all wondered if our desire to solve a long-standing mystery had run away with our better judgment. During our several visits to the crevice, as we kept finding beads and pendants and Liberty dime buttons, but no patently Anglo belongings, Vaughn Hadenfeldt and I had shared recurring doubts. “It sure does look like a Navajo grave,” Vaughn said more than once. Even after Van Gerven and Sandberg had so perfectly matched the facial features of the skull with the Lange photographs, I still expected Krauter and Marshall’s DNA test to disprove the identification. When their result seemed to clinch the case, I was as stunned—and of course exhilarated—as anyone.

  Now, beneath the disappointment, and far deeper, those of us involved in the Comb Ridge find shared a profound sense of shame. In our zeal to solve the mystery, we had dug up a Native American, probably a Navajo. Any way you looked at it, that was a terrible desecration. Maldonado’s reburying the bones elsewhere on the reservation would never repair the harm we had done.

  I felt bad, too, for Michèle and Brian Ruess and their siblings, Christella Campbell and Kevin Ruess. The roller-coaster of hope followed by disappointment on which I had bought them a year-and-a-half-long ride, in the process thrusting them into the public eye, now seemed a cruel tribulation, no matter how sincere my efforts may have been. And it meant that the eternal campaign to solve the mystery of Everett’s disappearance and fate had once more taken its toll on the family. Christopher and Stella had spent the rest of their lives trying to find out what had happened to Everett, as had Waldo after his parents’ deaths. Now the ordeal had revisited the third generation, Waldo’s children, like some inexorable Aeschylean curse.

  The grave site and the skeleton on Comb Ridge nonetheless raised other dark questions. No one but Kevin Jones had disputed Van Gerven and Sandberg’s finding that the person interred in the crevice had been male, about twenty years old, and around five feet eight inches tall. And all of us who had seen the site, as well as Van Gerven and Sandberg when they examined the bones, agreed that the victim had suffered severe perimortem trauma. Whether or not he was a Navajo, the man may well have been murdered and buried in desperate haste. Here, perhaps, was evidence of a cold-case homicide every bit as vexing and intractable as the puzzle of Everett’s fate.

  With the collapse of our discovery, the possible explanations for Everett’s demise reverted to something like the four hypotheses that had stayed current ever since 1935. These included the scenario that he was killed by rustlers who then dumped his body in the Colorado River. Despite the triumphant blog-posts of folks from Escalante, perhaps Keith Riddle and Joe Pollock were not off the hook after all.

  In March 2010, a beguiling tribute to the power of Everett’s legend emerged. Back in 2004, Vaughn Hadenfeldt’s good friend Joe Pachak had been hiking in the narrow canyon beneath an Anasazi ruin called Eagle Nest. The site lies on Comb Ridge, less than a dozen miles north of the San Juan River. Vaughn, Greg Child, and I had been there a few years earlier, as we figured out a way to climb into the beautiful but vertiginous ruin, and mused over a rich petroglyph panel at the base of the cliff. But we missed what Pachak saw—dinosaur bones emerging from the Navajo sandstone of the cliff.

  Keeping his find close to the vest, Pachak turned the work over to a team of paleontologists from the University of Utah. It took them five years to excavate, preserve, and analyze the bones, but when they were finished, they realized they had the nearly complete skeleton of a hitherto unknown species of dinosaur. The herbivorous sauropod had weighed some two hundred pounds, was between ten and fifteen feet long, and could walk on its hind legs. It had flourished about 185 million years ago. The scientists speculated that the creature had been trapped in the sudden collapse of a sand dune, which hardened into cliff over the eons thereafter. They also speculated that the Anasazi who had built and lived in Eagle Nest must have been well aware of the strange bones, which, seven hundred years before Pachak’s discovery, had most likely been far more visible than they were in 2004. The fossilized animal may well have contributed to the spiritual numen of the eerie redoubt engineered in a natural cubbyhole 200 feet up the nearly vertical cliff.

  With no pressure from Pachak, and certainly not from any of us involved with our own discovery on the Comb, the University of Utah team named the new species Seitaad ruessi. Seit’aad is the Diné name for a sand-desert monster in the creation myth that devoured its prey. Ruessi, obviously, was a tip of the paleontological cap to the lost vagabond. Whatever the truth of Everett’s demise, he is now linked eternally by scientific nomenclature to Comb Ridge.

  * * *

  When he had called me in September 2009 to tell me about the AFDIL result, Brian Ruess had confided that he believed that Aneth Nez’s strange tale about witnessing the murder of a young white man in Chinle Wash was in all likelihood a true story about Everett’s death—it was just, Brian mused, that Denny Bellson had found the wrong body. Ron Maldonado agreed.

  It was not, of course, Aneth Nez who had found the wrong body in 1971. With his precise memory of the burial he had carried out in the 1930s, Aneth would not have made the same mistake that Denny did. Thus it is almost certain that a grave of an Anglo victim lies on the crest of the Comb, still undiscovered, perhaps not far from the one Denny located in May 2008.

  In any event, the scuttlebutt around Bluff by November 2009 was that Denny was already poking around on Comb Ridge as he looked for other graves.

  Brian Ruess’s hunch that Aneth’s story was actually about Everett hinges on the following reasoning. The story Aneth told Daisey Johnson in 1971 was too specific in its details and too unusual for him to have made up. And since no one in Aneth’s, Daisey’s, and Denny’s extended family had ever heard of Everett Ruess before 2008, there is no way any of them could have tailored a fabricated story to fit Everett’s disappearance. Moreover, there would have been no reason for Aneth to have concocted the tale, and no reason, if he had, to keep it a secret for more than three decades. The five-day Enemy Way ceremony Aneth had had performed for him in 1971, in hopes of curing his cancer, was a deeply serious business. It required a lock of hair from the body Aneth said he had buried in the crevice on Comb Ridge in the 1930s. And to be efficacious, that lock of hair had to belong to a white man, or at least to a non-Navajo.

  If Aneth did in fact see a young white man murdered in Chinle Wash, but it was someone other than Everett, it seems strange that months of inquiry on my part about other Anglos going missing on the reservation in the 1930s produced not a hint of a story that dovetailed with Anet
h’s account.

  The NEMO inscription on the granary in Grand Gulch, discovered by Ken Sleight in the late 1960s and verified by Fred Blackburn in 2009, seems authentic, carved in the mud by Everett, not by some later copycat. And since that site lies midway between Davis Gulch and Chinle Wash, right on the most logical route between the two canyons, it remains a powerful argument for the scenario that sometime after November 1934, Everett made his way east from the Escalante toward Monument Valley or Canyon de Chelly—or Chinle Wash.

  During the months I spent in 2008 and 2009 puzzling over Everett’s fate, three new pieces of evidence fell into my lap. The first came indirectly, via Fred Blackburn, who in November 2009 had received a visit from Eric Atene, a Navajo working for the Bureau of Land Management out of Moab. Formerly a guide, Atene had horse-packed supplies into a remote “base camp” for Jon Krakauer and me in 1994, as we launched a probe of a slot canyon in the wilderness northwest of Navajo Mountain that we thought might be unexplored. Hiking in with Atene to the site of our gear depot, I realized that few natives knew this backcountry labyrinth better than he did.

  Fifteen years later, visiting Fred, Eric brought up Everett Ruess. “You know,” he said almost casually, “he had a name—Hosteen ______.” Fred failed to catch the Diné pronunciation of the name, but Eric glossed it for him: “The man who walks with burros.