Day 97: Inspired, high-tech sleuthing solves 75-year mystery of Everett Ruess

Everett Ruess. Credit: Dorothea Lange, probably

If you’re a person who loves the American West, you’ve probably had the impulse to just go get lost in it.

I mean, for a long time.

As in: forget the job, and any notions of a home or marriage … just walk, across deserts and through dusty Indian towns, down into canyons, to the tops of ridges where painted desert views lead to horizons sporting tiny bluish mountain ranges, shimmering like little mirages in the distance.

If you’re a person who loves the American West and is given to such impulses, you’ve no doubt heard of Everett Ruess, because he did that, more or less — until he disappeared.

Ruess, a 20-year-old artist and writer, wandered the Southwest in the early 1930s on a burro. For 75 years, no one has known what became of him. His legacy has traveled as a folk story through generations of backpack adventurers, passed along over campfires and between adventure-loving friends in reverent tones. Many people, like me, have toted the paperback about the mystery on their own backpacking trips.

Mystery solved. 

Researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder, with the help of the National Geographic Society, embarked on a CSI-style hunt to identify the remains of the lost wanderer, based on the memory of a Navajo man who remembered seeing him murdered. The man, Aneth Nez, told his granddaughter in 1971 that he witnessed the murder of a young white man near Bluff, Utah, in the 1930s by Ute Indians. Nez told her he buried the body in a crevasse on nearby Comb Ridge.

Last May, Nez’s relatives located the burial site, then searched Google for missing persons reports, easily turning up the story of Everett Ruess.

Enter David Roberts, the investigative reporter whose article appears in the April/May issue of National Geographic Adventure. He first teamed up with a Navajo Nation archaeologist to try to match an initial DNA sample from the remains with several of Ruess’ surviving relatives. The results were inconclusive.

CU-Boulder anthropology Professor Dennis Van Gerven, center, and Navajo Nation archaeologist Ron Maldano, right, at the Utah site where the remains of Everett Ruess were discovered in 2008. Photo courtesy Paul Sandberg, University of Colorado

Roberts then enlisted Dennis Van Gerven, a CU Boulder anthropologist.  Van Gerven traveled to the site with doctoral student Paul Sandberg using National Geographic Society funds, excavated the remains, and returned them to CU Boulder with the permission of the Ruess family.

An analysis of teeth and bones by Van Gerven and Sandberg were used to determine the sex, age and stature of the person. Wisdom tooth eruption, pelvic structure, bone growth markers and femur length indicated it was a male roughly 20 years old and about 5 feet 8 inches tall — a virtual match for Ruess, said Van Gerven.

The CU-Boulder researchers began a painstaking reconstruction of the fragile facial bones, stabilizing them on a ball of clay. Sandberg used Adobe Photoshop to superimpose photos he took of the remade face onto a frontal portrait of a smiling Ruess and a profile portrait of him, both taken in the 1930s by American documentary photojournalist Dorothea Lange.

“The next step was to match two points on the photos of the bones to their respective positions on the portraits,” Sandberg said. “If the other anatomical points did not match, we could exclude Ruess. But all the points fell into place. The jaw fit, the curve of the nasal bones fit, the rim of the eye orbit fit and the bridge of the nose fit.”

The most compelling piece of evidence was the teeth, he said.

“Once a single tooth was scaled into position, the size and shape of the other teeth, as well as the morphology of the face above the teeth, matched the portrait. The correspondence was striking,” Sandberg said.

Additional CU Boulder researchers were called in to confirm the findings with more sensitive genetic testing, between the remains and Ruess’ relatives.  They got an undeniable match.

“The combination of the forensic analysis and the genetic analysis makes it an open and shut case,” said Kenneth Krauter, a CU Boulder DNA expert. “I believe it would hold up in any court in the country.”

Source: Eurekalert. Read an excerpt from David Roberts’ investigative article in National Geographic Adventure.