Stacy was 14 when she went on a horse pack trip with her dad and seven other people in the Sunrise Meadows area up in Yosemite, and what happened was her dad, her and this group of people, all got on horses and they rode for six, seven miles into the back country. They stopped at a series of small cabins. And they all got out, and went in, cleaned up. Stacy cleaned up and she told her dad she was gonna go outside and take some pictures with her camera. There was a 71 year old man that was on the trip that was sitting on a boulder about 100 feet away, and she told her dad 'hey, I'm gonna go sit with this man and take pictures of the view out over this lake.' Her dad and everybody there saw her go walking over to this boulder with the man, take these pictures, and she told the man she that was gonna walk down the hill 100 yards to the lake and take some pictures of the lake and be right back. And everyone saw her leave the man, the man continued sitting there, they were at about nine, ten thousand feet in elevation, she walks down this boulder field into this tree-lined area around the lake, and that was the last time she was ever seen. She never came back. And there was an absolute massive, massive search for the girl.
So the search, all they found, is they found the lens cap from her camera, just inside the tree line from where she walked in to the area by the lake. And I spoke to her uncle, who went to the scene and assisted in the search, he said 'hey Dave, it was comprehensive, it was intense, it went on formally for 10 days, informally for 2 weeks, they brought in helicopters with forward looking infrared radar, they brought in umpteen, dozens and dozens of professional search and rescue people, they found nothing.' He said 'the only thing we found was that lends cap, there were no other tracks, there was nothing. It's like she vanished.'
So there was essentially nothing about that case for 25, 30 years. I made a request on it through Yosemite for the freedom of information act, to get a copy of the report. A special agent for the parks service named Yu called me, and asked me why I wanted the report. And I explained that we were doing some research on search and rescue and we were specifically looking into people who disappeared at Yosemite and we wanted to see what in the report that was there, and he said there was nothing there. And I said 'well are there any suspects, is it a criminal case?' He said 'nope. It's a missing persons case.' I said 'Has anybody looked at it in the past 10 or 20 years?' He says 'not that I can think of.' And I said 'so there's no suspects, there's no work done on the case, she hasn't been found?' 'Correct' And I said 'okay well, could you send me a copy of the case?' And he said 'nope.' I said 'why not?' He says 'because it's an open case, and you'll never see it.' And I said 'but we've gotten dozens and dozens of missing persons cases from the parks service. Why not this case?' He goes 'you'll never see it.' And we got off the phone. I went to my local congressman Ian Campbell, I appealed through him, his representative in Washington DC went and met with the representative from the department of the interior, and I got an answer back saying they won't release the case. The family of Stacy got a hold of me, they publicly asked for the case, it was denied. They made an appeal through the parks service, so the family could read the case, and this has dragged on I think for two or three years, and they still haven't seen the case. So what happened to Stacy? Don't really know. But according to the freedom of information act, and what the law is intended to do, is give us access to information that our government has. This isn't a criminal case, there are no suspects, there's no crime that is thought to have occurred. Nobody can explain to me or that family why we can't see that case.
