MAR 12, 2021
Idaho man vanished near Craters of the Moon, still missing | Idaho Statesman
On a Sunday in November 1996, Richard Willis Bendele borrowed a shotgun to hunt pheasants at the lava-encrusted desert north of Kimama near the Laidlaw Corrals area.
Bendele’s family and girlfriend never saw the 29-year old Burley native again.
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Bendele, a J.R. Simplot Co. supervisor, was estranged from his wife and going through a divorce. He was living with his girlfriend and, by all family accounts, seemed happy and at a relatively good place in his life.
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Later that day, he called his mother using a bag-style cellphone that plugged into a cigarette lighter that he kept behind the seat for emergencies. He said his pickup had broken down and he asked her to come and get him.
“He was uneasy,” his mother said. “He thought someone else was out there and had messed with his truck.”
Richard Bendele told his mother he was going to mark a nearby turnoff so she could find him. Searchers later found an empty beer box and cans that they thought he’d used to mark the road.
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Six inches of snow fell that night, covering the roads and any traces that may have been left by the missing man. Search and rescue found his pickup in Blaine County the next morning.
The case was then transferred to the Blaine County Sheriff’s Office.
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A few other clues surfaced. A leather glove. A fryer glove, the kind used at the potato processing plant where he worked. One of his new black tennis shoes.
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The battery for his truck was turned over and a truck window was smashed with glass on the ground, Sandy Bendele recalled.
They also found the cellphone and the shotgun inside the truck.
“He would have never left his dad’s shotgun,” Sandy Bendele said. He always brought it right back to her house after he borrowed it.
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Police told the family that the search dogs lost his scent by the road as if he’d gotten into a vehicle and left.
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Scenarios repeated in his mother’s mind. Did he walk in the wrong direction during the dark desert night and fall into a lava fissure? Or did someone sinister follow him out there and harm him?
“You wait and you wait, and you cry,” she said. “I still have a hole. I would just like to know what happened before I’m no longer here.”
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When Richard Bendele first disappeared, there was no reason to believe that anyone would have harmed him, Kowitz said. But, as the months went, by rumors — true or not — started to surface. Bendele had affiliations with drug dealers before she’d met him, which some said played a role in his disappearance.
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Seven years after he disappeared, Bendele’s estranged wife had him declared dead. His mother, however, continued to hold hope that he was alive while steeling herself for the possible news that his remains have been found.
Several years ago, Sandy Bendele gave a DNA sample to an officer and she got a copy of her son’s dental records — just in case the records could identify his remains.
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At some point prior to 2010, he said, the sheriff’s office lost the original reports for the case. They were possibly lost when the sheriff’s office moved, he said, but no one knows for sure.
Investigators have rebuilt as much of the case file as possible.
Fruehling said the case remains active although there has not been any new activity on it since 2014 when requests for the DNA samples were made.
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Reminding the public about missing people can pay off and help solve cases, Fruehling said.
“Sometimes it sparks someone to come forward,” he said.
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Anyone with information about his disappearance should contact the Blaine County Sheriff’s Office at 208-788-5555.
. I hope they get that miracle before too much longer.
