This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
Before they disappeared into the mountains — before they broke the foremost rule of womanhood: Keep the children alive — Becky and Christine Vance lived together in Colorado Springs in the Windmill Apartments, a modest complex with a heated outdoor pool that looks like a large Days Inn. From the parking lot, you can see Pikes Peak rising from the plains like a mirage or a matador’s cape. The Vance sisters, as adults, did not go camping, nor had they ever climbed Pikes, though they had taken Becky’s son to the North Pole, an amusement park on its northeastern slope where you could ride the Candy Cane roller coaster and visit Santa’s Workshop.
The Vance sisters had lived together their entire lives except during two stints, each lasting less than a year, when one of them tried to move out. Becky was born in 1980, Christine in 1982, but Christine’s friends (Becky didn’t have friends) considered their relationship to be like that of twins. “You know with twins how there’s one that’s kind of more in charge?” one of those friends said. “Becky kind of seemed, like, more alpha.” Both sisters inherited their mother’s thick black hair, almond skin, and dark eyes, though Becky was leaner and taller, and she felt a peculiar, almost gladiatorial duty to protect her sister. This started, as far as anybody could tell, when Becky was 5 and Christine was 3 and their mother abruptly left their father, taking her children with her.
Seven years later, their mother remarried and the girls acquired a stepsister. Trevala, who was rowdy, blonde, and emotionally porous, was two years younger than Christine. In high school, those two hung out a lot, Christine accompanying Trevala as she stirred up conventional trouble — smoking weed behind the arcade, hooking up with boys in the utility elevator. Becky didn’t join. Becky worked at Papa Johns after school, then came home. Becky earned perfect grades, stood with perfect posture, kept her chin tilted up, and rarely spoke. At first, Trevala found her reserve intimidating. “Just the mysterious privateness of her,” Trevala told me. Becky “gave off this aura: ‘I’m not going to talk to you until I trust you. You better not be on my bad side.’ If you were on Becky’s bad side, you were on it for a while.”
The three girls shared the basement of the Vance family home, a ranch house on a leafy, modest Colorado Springs street. After graduating from Mitchell High School, Becky and Christine kept living there, working at Sears (Becky) and Taco Bell (Christine). In their early 20s, both sisters took jobs at Atmel Corporation, a semiconductor-manufacturing plant, in one of those clean environments where you have to wear a white smock, white shoe covers, a mask, and a hair net.
The PPE suited Becky. She didn’t want to be known. Christine, too, often met the world with what she called her self-protective “wall,” but she sometimes let it down, and when she did she was vulnerable and funny. Some days, after work, Christine would drive a friend home and they’d sit in the car, sing rock ballads, and cry. Other days, she got drinks and chicken quesadillas at the Hatch Cover bar. Christine’s friends respected her relationship with Becky. “She was gonna be there for her no matter what. She’s like, ‘That’s my No. 1. My sister is my No. 1, and I’m gonna support her, always, forever,’” Meagan Phillips, one of Christine’s girlfriends, told me. Meagan had two kids, a husband, a dog, and a mind of her own. She worried about Christine. Christine was so hard on herself — about her weight (she was listed on her driver’s license as 205 pounds), her attractiveness, her failure to quit smoking, her treatment of others. Was she kind enough? Did she deserve to be loved? “I would have to reassure her,” Meagan said. “Like, ‘Dude, you’re such a good person. Wait, you’re so beautiful. Just let people love you.’”
Becky and Christine’s mother worked a few different jobs: in the commissary at an Air Force base, then at a gas station and in retail. Their stepfather, Edward Kaskewicz, stayed home, where he drank (too much at times) and cooked: calzones, beef stew, baklava, and, on Halloween, Kitty Litter Cake. “Becky was really close to her mom, like, very, very, very, very close,” Trevala said. Their mother, Son Yup Kaskewicz, who’d emigrated from Korea as a teenager, was, like Becky, quiet and careful. She saved her loose change and gambled only that much at the casino in Cripple Creek. Still, she wished Becky would go out sometimes, make some friends. Then she got sick in 2006 — cancer, caught late. She died in 2007. Becky took her death hard. She felt guilty she hadn’t spent more time with her. She felt guilty she hadn’t given her mother a grandchild.
The Vance sisters continued living with their stepfather, and he remained devoted to them — cooking, sewing, doing their taxes, driving them places. In 2008, Becky got pregnant. The father was Eric Burden, a big, steady, handsome guy from work with two kids from a previous relationship. Becky was fine with his divided attention, more than fine. As she told Eric, she did not want a partner. She did not want a co-parent. She just wanted a piece of her mother back.
Few people knew Eric was Becky’s baby daddy. Still, Eric told me, the day after the child was born, “I get a text from my friend: ‘Hey, congratulations.’ ‘Congratulations?’ ‘Yeah. Congratulations — she had the baby.’” Eric drove to the hospital. The nurses, he said, looked at him “like, You’re late.” But Becky hadn’t called. She hadn’t even named Eric as the father on the birth certificate.
Eric lived with his parents and his two young children: Ashton, then 2, and Emma, then 4. His mother, Marilyn, did day care professionally. When the new baby, whom Becky named Talon, was an infant, Becky started dropping him off at the Burden home on her way to work. Marilyn, practical and spry, found Becky’s vibe strange, withholding. But Marilyn could handle that. “At the beginning, she’d call and say, ‘You can have Talon this weekend if you want,’” Marilyn recalled. Then Marilyn started asking if Talon could come over, not to be babysat, just to be her grandson. Marilyn had strong feelings about caretaking. She had raised a son, Tracy, with cerebral palsy. “I had people ask, ‘Why didn’t you put him in a home or something?’” Marilyn told me. “I had an aunt — every time she saw my mom, she’d ask, ‘Does she still have Tracy?’ You know, we had him until he passed.” He was 20. “I’m like, That’s my child.”
Talon and his half-brother, Ashton, shared a birthday. They shared a bedroom at the Burden house. They shared a love for Super Mario Bros. Everything seemed so normal at first. Talon dressed up as a bear cub for Halloween. Talon started preschool. Talon played T-ball, then he switched to soccer. Talon learned the recorder with his fourth-grade class. Talon wore rectangular glasses over his soft dark eyes. His smile spread across his face like an open staple — a straight line, the corners turned up. Talon earned straight A’s. He loved computers. He got annoyed when his father told him they were just going to run one quick errand and then that one errand ballooned into half the day. He preferred spicy food, especially bulgogi — the hotter, the better. He told his mom when he got into trouble at school (which was not often, but he did throw a snowball in third grade). He was acutely attuned to adult pain. Marilyn has struggled with lupus for decades. One day when Talon was 5, Marilyn said, “I’m getting him ready for school, trying to put his socks on, and he goes, ‘Grandma, is there a day when you won’t hurt? What day will you not hurt?’” None of her children or grandchildren had ever asked her this. Even playing Super Mario Bros., Talon wanted to take care of adults. “He’d go, ‘Grandma, wait, let me get you.’ I’d be Luigi or whoever, and he’d put me on his back and carry me in the game. Because he knows the areas that I would not do so well.”
In 2018, Talon, Becky, Christine, and Becky and Christine’s stepfather traveled to Disney World along with Marilyn, Eric, and Eric’s other two children. They stayed in different areas of the park. But in what seemed like a step toward closeness, they managed to function as an extended family.
The following year, Becky and Christine’s stepfather died from liver failure. The Vance sisters’ parental protectors were gone. And in May 2020, Talon received his fifth-grade-graduation diploma through the window of his mom’s 2006 blue Hyundai sedan, as the pandemic had closed his school.
That August, Becky called Marilyn to tell her she’d quit her job. “I was like, ‘Okay?’” Marilyn said. “‘What do you plan on doing?’” Becky said she was going to work from home, and she never told Marilyn, or anyone else, any more. “I just think COVID is what broke the camel’s back,” Trevala said. “I mean, everybody felt this negativity — the politics, the economy, all of it. She became much more secretive. Much more secretive.”
For Becky, now with ample time on her hands at the Windmill Apartments, the florid world of conspiracy theories opened up — dozens of options to bind and direct your fears. Just log in to a truther website like, say, Expanding Awareness Relations. There, a reader like Becky could learn the deep state was indeed trying to control people through a CRISPR-altered parasite called the “liver fluke.” Big pharma — why would anyone trust big pharma? It was part of a global transhumanist plan to merge men and machines. Or as Alex Newman, host of Behind the Deep State, explained, Klaus Schwab, António Guterres, Prince Charles, and other Davos types “came together” to say, “We’re going to have this wonderful Great Reset” — a plutocrat-backed initiative to increase global governance and remake the economy, post-COVID — and “You’re all going to be our slaves, and you’re going to have to eat bugs.”
Some sites specifically catered to mothers’ fears. The Survival Mom, for instance, provided nearly bespoke content for the parent of a tween son alone in her room. This site was the creation of Lisa Bedford, who offered to readers a photo of herself sitting on her porch, holding a cup of coffee, and saying, “Prep more. Worry less.” As she explained, she too had felt vulnerable and started poking around the internet. You, reader, could learn from her experience. You did not have to sit there, passive, getting freaked out, waiting for disaster. You could “be proactive and prepare for emergencies by doing what moms have always done — taking charge and getting things done!”
You just needed to work hard and be willing to cut ties. People, Bedford writes, tend to make two major mistakes when prepping for “The End of the World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI).” One, they wait for disaster to prepare for disaster, at which point it’s too late. Two, they share their plans. Sure, it may seem innocuous to tell one person. But then that person tells another person, and pretty soon, you’ll find yourself facing TEOTWAWKI needing to feed not just your family but also “the lonesome guy four doors down who suddenly craves foodstuffs he assumes you might have.” Or “your not-so-friendly garden variety drug-dependent thug.” Don’t do all this prep to protect your family only to attract predation and harm. “As distasteful as it sounds,” the Survival Mom writes, “I’m afraid that will include crimes against female members in your household. They run the risk of being taken away by said gang members for their ‘entertainment,’ being molested, or raped.”
When Talon’s school reopened for in-person learning in January 2021, he stayed remote. His body changed — puberty. “So I told Talon that he needed to take a shower tonight, and he’s like, ‘Why?’ and I say, ‘Because I sniffed your pitties,’ Becky wrote in her journal in her loopy print on January 23, 2021. “Then he’s like, ‘I know, I know, I wasn’t going to say it,’ like he’s proud of it.” Becky seemed to immediately feel nostalgic for her son’s younger self. “Last night I was calling him my little chinchilla and Talonchilla,” she wrote in the same entry. “I love my little Talon Chinchilla.”
Becky forbade social media. She would not buy Talon a phone. He hung out with his half-brother and half-sister at the Burden home. Sometimes the boy who lived behind them or the three young girls who lived down the street came over to jump on the trampoline or play Roblox. But, Marilyn said, “that’s the only interaction he probably had with kids, which I thought was not a good thing.” Talon did have an iPad, and he loved all his gaming platforms: Switch, Xbox, Cosmo, Wii U. But Becky prohibited him from messaging other players and checked his accounts to make sure he obeyed her. Once, she discovered a chat and called Marilyn right away. “She thought it was Talon, and I’m like, ‘No, no,’” Marilyn said. She explained that a visiting cousin had been using Talon’s iPad.
Talon turned 12 in June 2021. He was nearly the same height as Christine, who was only four-foot-11. How long until he was taller than his five-foot-three mom? The rules multiplied. One day, he arrived at the Burden home and told Marilyn, “I can’t have caffeine.” Marilyn asked why. Talon said his mom said so. She found some ginger ale.
Eric worried about his son’s isolation. He asked Talon if he wanted to start playing soccer again. Talon didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no, either. When Marilyn asked Becky if they should sign him up, she said he didn’t want to.
Trevala worried too. “Becky wanted to be with him 24/7. She was so loving, so sweet: ‘Oh, baby, it’s okay. You’re fine.’ She put on that mother voice. It was cute, but at the same time it was too much.” Even Christine voiced concerns. How would Talon lead a good adult life if he never learned social skills?
Then, in the fall of 2021, Christine called Trevala. “‘You would never guess what Becky wants to do,’” Trevala recalled Christine saying. “‘She wants to live off the grid.’ I’m like, ‘Wait, what? Are you kidding me?’”
Trevala and Christine texted all the time — about diets, relationships, birthdays, quitting smoking, and Becky.
CHRISTINE: Oh my gosh, she is so judgy!!!
TREVALA: maybe you should tell her you don’t like what she’s doing
CHRISTINE: I will be fine.
CHRISTINE: Haha
Trevala had endured a lot: addiction, pregnancy at 16. Her abusive first husband OD’d on the day of her stepmother’s funeral. Trevala lived across town with her third husband, Tom Jara, in a home with a sign on the door that read AN OLD BIKER AND THE RIDE OF HIS LIFE LIVE HERE. Their house was stuffed with drawings of wolves, family photos, a Native American headdress, Betty Boop figurines, ashtrays, weed, houseplants, swamp coolers, urns. For Christine, the chaos was comforting, a much-needed contrast to Becky’s ascetic tendencies. Becky didn’t think Christine should drink. She didn’t think Christine should smoke. She didn’t think Christine should date guys who ghosted her and “borrowed” money they did not pay back.
CHRISTINE: omg!!!! I dont want to go home until Becky is sleeping.
And another time:
CHRISTINE: It got a little frustrating in the car earlier. She kept telling “no drinking.” I simply told her I felt like a rebelling teenager … Haha think it worked.
Trevala also did a lot of pushing back against Christine’s negative self-talk.
CHRISTINE: I’m a UFO!!
TREVALA: What
CHRISTINE: ugly, fat and old!!!
CHRISTINE: Were you not amused? Haha
TREVALA: Lol not really … it’s clever but not true
Christine didn’t want Becky to move off the grid. She didn’t want to go herself, she didn’t want to be left behind, and she didn’t want Becky to take Talon without another adult. But at the beginning of 2022, Christine’s fear of Becky trapping her in that bind seemed to fade. In February, Becky signed a contract for 15 more months at the Windmill Apartments, as the extended term meant their rent wouldn’t go up.
CHRISTINE: So she is at least saying we are going to release for that long!!!
TREVALA: Wow that’s a good thing you were worrying too much about nothing all turn out good see positivity
The next few months were volatile. Christine turned 40, which she did not take well.
CHRISTINE: I’m a COW!!!. Cranky, old woman🤣😀🤣😀
She lost 14 pounds, which seemed to make her happy, but by June she had joined Becky in talking about living off the grid. She told Trevala that she really should look into Schwab, Prince Charles’s Great Reset, and the New World Order, and also stop taking any and all medications because that’s how the government gets the biosensors inside you. Neither Vance sister would tell Trevala or Tom where they planned to go. Neither would accept Trevala and Tom’s offer to live on some undeveloped land they owned because the plot had a mailing address. Trevala knew Christine was depressed from their text exchanges. “It amazes me how many people are not ok,” she wrote in one. “Is anyone really happy? It’s so hard and sad to think about.”
Still, Trevala argued, now was not the time to leave. Life felt hard, yes, but you go on. If Becky and Christine really insisted on moving off the grid, they should at least wait until things were truly dire. Like, Trevala said, after “there’s a whole bunch of people with guns in front of your yard or, you know, a friggin’ comet came down.”
Tom, who worked as a trucker, understood his sisters-in-law’s mentality. He knew plenty of people who wanted to get away from society. All his friends were bikers. He had Native American ancestors, long graying hair, and a low, world-weary voice. “I believe Becky was more worried about someone coming and finding them and forcing them back” than anything else, he told me one afternoon out on his porch. As he understood it, Becky’s mindset was: “The world is going to pieces. I’m going to survive, get a head start on it. Be unseen. Not be a prisoner of this decaying world.” His argument to Becky and Christine was much like Trevala’s: There’s no rush. What was so different about now? The apocalypse always seems to be coming. “The end of the world in my lifetime has come five times,” Tom said. “You wake up the next day.” The few details Becky and Christine shared about their off-grid preparation alarmed him and Trevala. Becky “would be like, ‘Well, I just bought new boots,’” Trevala told me. “I was like, ‘Okay, that’s all good. But what if you get a hole in your boots?’” Christine would then answer, “Well, hopefully by then, we know how to make boots out of the land.”
On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court released the Dobbs decision. Meagan, Christine’s independent-minded friend from work, started having panic attacks. “It was terrifying. Terrifying. Like, to your soul it was terrifying,” she told me. “Like we don’t have control over our decisions — our lives, our bodies, and our children.” Especially on the heels of COVID, when the government was “telling you when you can go out, where you can go … and then they’re saying, just to women alone, ‘You don’t have control for your decisions, either.’”
The morning after the Dobbs ruling, Christine texted Trevala to suggest she read up on Vyacheslav Krasheninnikov, a Russian boy who died of leukemia in 1993, five days short of his 11th birthday. Some regard him as a prophet. In the 1980s and ’90s, when Krasheninnikov was a child, he warned that, in the future, leaders would try to implant microchips in people’s bodies.
CHRISTINE: A lot of things you do have to research yourself but there are more links attached to this as well. The government has admitted to certain things such as Tuskegee syphilis, project orange, Wo2020060606. Look up the world economic forum.
TREVALA: Ok sounds good 👍
Leaving was simple. Christine told her co-workers, “I’m quitting my job and moving.” She didn’t say more. She sent a close work friend a playlist of her favorite music (Three Days Grace, other ’90s and aughts rock) and asked him to send a photo of himself. “I assumed she just wanted to start a new life and try to make something better for herself,” that friend, Quenten Jackson, told me. He felt unnerved that Christine wasn’t taking her phone, but maybe that was part of a self-reinvention strategy? He asked if he could stay in touch through Becky. Christine said no.
Quenten sensed that Christine wanted people to ask questions, “like, ‘Why are you leaving? Where are you going? What are you doing?’” he told me. “But then she was always saying, ‘But I can’t say anything.’” By their last conversation, Quenten said, “I was like, ‘Oh, okay, well, I guess I hope I hear from you at some point in the future.’”
The last week of July, Christine made spicy Korean pickles for Meagan. She dropped the urn with her mother’s ashes at Trevala’s house. She tried to find a home for Oreo, her cat. Her communication grew plaintive and banal.
CHRISTINE: Do you like cream cheese? I have a couple extra boxes that won’t get used
After cutting her own hair:
CHRISTINE: it is extra puffy and probably really crooked but who cares. Haha
Trevala worried about her.
TREVALA: all i ask is please watch how she treats you and don’t let her manipulate you as much you can live your own life
CHRISTINE: no. it’s cool. But you know that’s a different kind of love and all.
The night before they left, Trevala texted Christine:
TREVALA: I just want to say once again before I lose communication with you guys since you are leaving tomorrow I love you and Becky and Talon and please be safe.
That same night, Christine texted Meagan:
CHRISTINE: I’m moving. I’m gonna go with Rebecca. And that’s all I have to say about it.
Becky sent a final text to an acquaintance:
BECKY: They really want to merge man with machine, and I refuse to let them do that to me or my son … I don’t know when all of this will happen, but I think it’s important for people to get out while they still can. 💐🌹🌺🌹💐
On August 1, 2022, at 11 a.m., Becky and Talon stopped by the Burden home. Eric was at work, as Becky knew he would be. Marilyn was in the backyard. “Initially, I thought she said, ‘Can Talon stay?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah,’” Marilyn recalled. “Then she said, ‘We have to move to be safe.’” Becky handed Marilyn a small plastic storage box. Inside were three T-shirts Talon had outgrown (“I’m not sure why those, unless they meant something to him,” Marilyn said), school photos, a stuffed animal from a recent trip to the Colorado Springs aquarium, and a flowerpot with a footprint that he’d made for Mother’s Day. Becky said they were moving to West Virginia to be near her father. Marilyn couldn’t understand why. In the 13 years she’d known Becky, Becky had never mentioned her dad.
Did Talon have everything he’d need? Was Becky going to bring his iPad?
Becky said no: Where we’re going, there’s not very good internet.
What about their stuff?
Well, we just took what we could take.
Where’s the cat?
We gave it to Trevala’s neighbor.
Christine didn’t come inside. She stood by the Hyundai. Just before Marilyn gave Talon a hug good-bye outside the front door, at the top of the stairs, Becky whispered to her, “He doesn’t know anything.”
Marilyn thought, Okay, and neither do I.
The drive from Colorado Springs to Gunnison is beautiful and long, three and a half hours, mostly west. The Vance family in their Hyundai likely skirted around Pikes Peak, then drove over the Front Range into the Rocky Mountains. Black-eyed Susans and billboards of perfect-looking families line the road, promising deliverance through rafting and mountain biking, imploring fellow travelers to CAMP MORE, WORRY LESS.
Gold Creek Campground is at 9,990 feet. There is no campground host, no overnight fee. Heading northwest, you can take the South Lottis Trail or Lamphier Lake Trail into the Fossil Ridge Wilderness. Or you can stay put and choose one of six campsites, each appointed with a picnic table and a fire ring. The Vance family might have stayed there for a night or two, exploring their surroundings, searching for a spot not too far from their car where they could set up a permanent yet hidden camp. They found one by going first down a trail along the creek behind campsite No. 5, then across the water on a big log, through a stand of Douglas firs and a marsh of tall grass lined with hot-pink fireweed, and finally into some open forest on higher ground. Here, Talon would not get corrupted. Here, Talon would not get microchipped. Here, Talon would not grow up and leave. Here, you might convince yourself Talon would not grow up at all.
When it is warm, or warm enough, the site is gentle, a haven. The pine-needled woods spill out into a grove of quaking aspens and, beyond that, another clearing. You can lie back and feel your body sink into the earth. You can watch the aspen leaves catching light like sequins. You can feel the sun on your face. You can track the cadence of the busy woodpeckers. You can hear the creek beneath the marsh grass. You laugh at the silliness of the cow-parsnip blooms. You can watch the bugs riding the wind. Your fellow man, the government, Klaus Schwab, the Dobbs ruling — their tentacles of harm and control feel very far away.
Marilyn tried to reach the family. She left voice-mails. “I thought if anything, she could call me back and say, ‘Hey, we’re here. We’re fine.’ That’s all she would have to say.” Nobody thought to file a missing-person report. Nobody thought to call Child Protective Services — Becky had always been a good, if overprotective, mom.
But life is hard in ranch country at 10,000 feet. When the Survival Mom says, “You can become that mom! Decisive, empowered, confident when your family faces a threat,” she is not talking about alpine camping. To filter parasites from the water, they brought two LifeStraws, products REI advertises as “ideal for backup filtration, emergency use, and ultralight treks” and that reviewers note are damaged by freezing, though if they do freeze, “there will be no indication whether it is still safe to use; instead, you’ll just have to wait for the giardia to hit in a week or two.” If they did not use the LifeStraws assiduously, or if they kept using them once those straws got damaged, they were certain to get giardiasis. Its hallmark is intense GI distress: stomach pain, chronic diarrhea, an inability to absorb nutrients, malnutrition.
They put a tarp down under the tent but did not bring proper ground pads, essential not only for comfort but for insulation. Instead, they just spread a blue quilt beneath their sleeping bags.
They started building a shelter: cutting down two-to-three-inch-diameter tree trunks, sawing them into six-to-eight-foot lengths, and lashing them together next to a hole they dug out in a hillside to form a sidewall and roof. The shelter was less than four feet high, just tall enough to sit beneath.
In October, Becky, Christine, and Talon drove into Gunnison, 45 minutes away. They called Becky and Christine’s father, Donald Vance, and asked him to wire them $500 — which he did, no questions asked. They likely spent some of that at the Gunnison Walmart on a Solo Campfire Stove, a device that efficiently burns sticks and leaves, spitting out lots of heat and very little smoke, and some on food, batteries, matches, and toilet paper. Then they drove back out through Quartz Creek Valley, the seven miles on the dirt road, past Last Chance Gulch. They returned to their nylon tent, their half-built shelter. They didn’t call Trevala or Meagan or Quenten or Marilyn. They didn’t allow themselves to be loved or cared for.
Snow started accumulating for the season in late October. By November 16, the low temperature was one degree below zero.
On November 25, the United States Forest Service noted that a car had been abandoned in Gunnison National Forest “off FSR 771 (Gold Creek).” The incident report notes: “Searched area … UTL [unable to locate]. CSP Dispatch tried two phone numbers to both registered owners … Both disconnected. Attempting welfare check.” On November 28, the car was towed. Marilyn kept trying to call, but Becky’s phone no longer worked.
Hypothermia — caused by a body losing heat faster than it can be produced — leads, at first, to shivering, mild disorientation, and clumsiness. As the condition progresses, the brain gets too cold; slurred speech, stiff muscles, and hallucinations ensue. Your blood pressure drops, your lungs fill with fluid; some people feel an urge to take off their clothes. Your heart stops, and you die.
Starvation, too, makes you slow, delirious, weak, and cold. At some point, Christine chopped her hair off. By the end, the Vance family decompensated so fully from the giardiasis, the freezing temps, all of it, that they started shitting just outside their tent.
Likely, Talon died first and the sisters moved his body to where he was found: out of the tent, but not very far, to the other side of the tree. Becky probably died next, on the side of the tent closest to Talon, her ribs showing and her ankles bony. Christine zipped herself up in her sleeping bag and waited for the end.
When the bodies were found, they were very skinny and long since dead. A man hiking with his family on the evening of July 9, 2023, noticed a gray nylon tent in the trees below Fossil Ridge. He walked over and found what he described to the Gunnison County Sheriff’s Office as an old “squatters camp.” He also found, he told the dispatcher, “a Mummy laying in the camp.”
The next morning, a couple of inspectors from the Gunnison County Sheriff’s Office drove to Quartz Creek Valley, seven miles up a dirt road from Ohio City, an old mining town with a population of around 115 people, not a city at all. They crossed Gold Creek on the large, worn log, walked up a berm and across the marsh. The “Mummy” was wearing two pairs of gray sweatpants and a black sweatshirt over a red undershirt, no socks, no shoes. He had long black hair and was lying on his side in something like the fetal position, a green rosary around his neck. The inspectors called for support. A team of six from Western Search and Rescue and the Gunnison County coroner joined them at the site. The coroner noted the Mummy’s “pelvic/femur bones palpable through the sweatpants.”
The crew took forensic photos, then unzipped the gray tent. Inside were two more bodies: Becky and Christine. Becky was lying on top of a black sleeping bag, wearing a black sweatshirt and black sweatpants, no socks, no shoes, a wooden cross and a survival whistle around her neck. Christine was zipped up entirely inside a blue sleeping bag, wearing gray sweatpants, a gray sweatshirt, long underwear, a magenta beanie, no socks, no shoes.
Trash sat piled up around the bodies. Mounds of toilet paper and shit ringed a nearby tree. The other artifacts on the site included sunflower seeds, Emerald Oak lettuce seeds, Kentucky wonder-pole-bean seeds, long-reach matches, lighters, various colors and gauges of polypropylene cord, hand shears, a headlamp, a flashlight, a small shovel, a handsaw, two water-purification straws, a Solo camp stove, cans filled with burnt twigs, backpacks of extra clothes (hats, gloves, scarves, underwear, outerwear), Band-Aids, a Swiss Army knife, a blue stuffed raccoon, a red FAMILY-FUN ticket stub from Manitou Springs (a resort town outside Colorado Springs), a lightweight green towel, a laundry bag, a fishing pole and fishing tackle, two pairs of light hiking boots, a pair of low-top Adidas sneakers, one Teva sandal, several pairs of soiled women’s underwear (strewn around the camp), Chapstick, Vaseline, and empty water bottles. There was an insulated bag that seemed to be filled with urine; wrappers for Nature Valley Granola Bars, Clif Bars, and Rx Bars; wrappers for instant Thai jasmine noodles, a Souper 6-Pack of Shrimp Maruchan ramen, as well as various other flavors of ramen; empty bottles of Mott’s apple and Simply Orange juice; empty cans of Vienna Sausages, Chunky Soup with Sirloin Burger, and Dinty Moore Stew; a pile of dark, matted eight-inch-long human hair still gathered in a hair tie; a blue blanket with images of yellow fish on it (used as a ground pad); $35 in cash; and keys to a 2006 Hyundai.
Besides a few reference works related to foraging, the family had two books — The Complete Apocrypha, a collection of ancient religious texts written after the Old Testament and before the New Testament, and the Magick Box of Choose Your Own Adventure Stories, the cover of which reads THIS BOX CONTAINS 101 POSSIBLE ENDINGS!
The Gunnison County Sheriff’s Office Offense/Incident Report, Complaint No. 2023-1181GSO, strained to find meaning in what the Vance sisters had done. “The fact that the tent, that a simple nylon dome tent was standing leads this officer to consider that the victims may have been alive for a good portion of the winter and it is only a theories [sic] that they would have had to be knocking the snow accumulation off to keep the tent from collapsing … The choice they made of their camp location also indicates that the victims had little practical experience in the art of bush craft.”
On July 11, the Gunnison coroner started making calls. “Is this Trevala Jara? I don’t like to make calls like this,” he said. She knew before he said it. Tom wrapped his arms around Trevala to keep her from falling to the ground.
Trevala did not know Eric’s last name, so it took the coroner two weeks to find him. Eric learned of Talon’s death from the same friend who’d first congratulated him on Talon’s birth. “He said, ‘I’m so sorry for your loss, bro.’ I was like, ‘Oh, who passed away?’” Eric told me. “Then he sent the article and I seen it was Rebecca, Christine, and Talon.”
The Vance family’s autopsies were released on August 28, 2023. The cause of death for them all: malnutrition and hypothermia. Becky’s autopsy states, in its tender, official language, “The vena cavae are unremarkable … The epicardium of the heart is smooth and unremarkable … the great vessels arise in the usual manner.” She weighed 100 pounds. Christine weighed only 96 pounds. Her autopsy notes her freckles along with “Wischnewski’s ulcers,” small erosions in the stomach that are a sign of hypothermia.
Talon’s body was 63 inches long, the same as his mother’s. His corpse weighed 40 pounds. His autopsy is unbearable. “The body is that of a normally developed, thin male who appears appropriate for the reported age … There is marked autolysis” — decomposition. “The lungs are absent … The heart is absent … The brain is absent.”
The Burden family home is all love and chaos. Nala, the chocolate lab, doles out slobbery kisses and tries (often successfully) to sit on everyone’s lap. Marilyn knows well that life is painful, that the natural order implodes, that parents outlive their children. Still, she cannot integrate Talon’s death. “Our close friends know, but a lot of people who knew Talon don’t know that he passed,” she told me. The story drew a lot of press, but the news reports did not mention Talon, a minor, by name. “How do you — how do you explain? What do you do when they go, ‘Where’s your grandson?’” Marilyn saw her eye doctor this fall. “And she asked me how we were doing with the kids, and I said, ‘Well, I’ll let you know Talon passed.’ And she goes, ‘What?’ And I go, ‘Did you see any articles in the paper about campers?’ Everybody’s seen the articles.”
The Burdens haven’t planned a funeral. They don’t know where to start. Friends tell Marilyn, “Just find a venue.” “And I’m like, ‘You have to understand, he was a child.’ They say he was 14, but he was 13 when he passed. He didn’t even make it to 14.”
Eric, too, strains to make a cogent narrative of Talon’s death. “You kind of, like, you got the beginning of the story, and you have the end.”
The coroner thinks the family had died by late December. Marilyn’s mind can’t settle to mourn. “What was Talon doing during the day? At night? I’ve been camping. You know — after a while, you go to bed.” Snow pants. Did he have snow pants? He’d outgrown the ones she bought him. “Talon was warm-blooded, but everyone gets cold, eventually.”
Why go in August? Were they planning on doing something different if they made it through the winter? Was this murder-suicide? “If you’re gonna do something like that, then … I don’t know, maybe I’m crude, but just do it. Why suffer that much?”
Talon’s ashes are in a black box in the Burdens’ living room. Beside the box is a painting by Talon’s half-sister, Emma: a Mario with wings. A Mario action figure stands in front. The stuffed blue raccoon rests on top.
We have stories for men who leave the world behind: the Desert Fathers, the Unabomber, Into the Wild. The deprivation is monastic, the radical run at self-sufficiency heroic, even if it’s born of mental illness, even if it results in death. Who is the woman who leaves? The woman who, in trying to protect her child from the world, hastens that child’s demise?
She is unthinkable. And she is terrified. She already believes that she stands to lose it all.
