For years, she was considered just another victim of Alaska’s wild nature. Then the Susettna River revealed what it had been hiding at the bottom. Her remains were found after a mighty spring flood plowed through the riverbed, lifting what had been buried under a layer of silt and gravel. Heavy stones were tied tightly to the skeleton’s feet. This was no accident.
It was a story that began with a routine tourist trip and ended as cold, silent evidence of a murder that remained unsolved for nearly a decade. It all began in July 2016. Jessica Lawson was 27 years old. She worked as a graphic designer in Seattle, loved hiking, and often spent her weekends in the mountains of Washington State.
Alaska had been her dream destination for a long time. She spent several months carefully preparing for the trip, studying maps of Denali National Park, buying equipment, and reading reports from other travelers. She was in good physical shape and considered herself experienced enough for a solo hike. Her plan was simple. Drive to the town of Talcetna, leave her car, and set out on a multi-day hike along the Susetna River.

She told her friends and parents about her plans and promised to check in after 5 days. This was standard safety protocol for anyone venturing into the wilderness alone. Jessica was last seen alive and unharmed at a gas station on the outskirts of Talquetna. This was the last place to stock up on fuel and essentials before civilization disappeared into the rear view mirror.
A surveillance camera captured her blue SUV pulling up to the pump. She got out, filled up the car, and bought a bottle of water and an energy bar at the store. The recording shows a man approaching her. He got out of an old black pickup truck parked nearby. The man was tall, dressed in a simple flannel shirt and jeans. They talked for only a couple of minutes.
Later, the cashier would recall that their conversation did not appear to be an argument or a conflict. It was more like a conversation between two strangers. The man pointed somewhere toward the road, perhaps giving directions or simply commenting on the weather. Jessica nodded, looking calm. Then she got into her car and drove off toward the national park.
The man stood by his pickup truck for a few more minutes, then drove away as well. No one thought anything of it. Taletna is a staging point for hundreds of tourists, and such brief conversations are common place. Two days after that conversation, Denali park rangers on a routine patrol came across her tent.
It stood about 400 yardds from the Susettna River in a small wooded area sheltered from the wind. The campsite had been wellchosen, but the tent itself was empty. The rangers looked inside. Everything was in its place. The sleeping bag was neatly spread out. Next to it lay a backpack containing her documents, wallet, and satellite phone, which was turned off.
The food supplies for several days of hiking were untouched. Her hiking boots stood on a small mat at the entrance, dry and clean. Everything looked as if she had stepped out for a moment, perhaps to walk to the river or take a stroll around the neighborhood, and was about to return. But she did not return.

At first, there was no panic. The rangers left a note asking Jessica to contact them when she returned. They assumed she might have gone on a day trip, taking only the bare essentials with her. But a day passed and the note remained untouched. That’s when a full-scale search operation was launched.
Jessica’s family in Seattle hadn’t heard from her in several days and was sounding the alarm. The time she had promised to get in touch had passed. The search began immediately. Dozens of people were involved. Park rangers, Alaska State Police, and volunteers from Talquetna. Helicopters were sent up to circle over the dense forest and along the winding Susetna River.
Dog handlers with dogs combed the area around her camp. The dogs picked up a trail that led straight from the tent to the riverbank. But at the water’s edge on the rocky beach, the trail ended. It could have meant anything. She could have gone to the water to fill her canteen. She could have slipped on the wet rocks and fallen into the fast current.
Or something else had happened here. Investigators began working through all possible scenarios. The first and most obvious was an accident. The Susitna River is mighty and unpredictable. The icy water flows so fast that it can knock a grown man off his feet in seconds. If she fell into the river, her body could have been carried miles downstream, caught on a snag, or sunk to the bottom.
The second theory was that a wild animal had attacked her. There were many grizzly bears in the area, but there were no signs of a struggle around the tent, no signs of a large predator. The food was untouched, which is entirely uncharacteristic of a bear. This version quickly faded into the background. And the third version, the most disturbing, is criminal.

Perhaps her disappearance is connected to someone she met. The investigators returned to Taletna and began questioning everyone who might have seen Jessica. That’s how they found the gas station attendant and obtained the surveillance camera footage. The face of the man who spoke to her was blurry. He was standing sideways to the camera and wearing a baseball cap.
But his pickup truck, black, an older model with minor dents on the back, was visible. Unfortunately, the license plate was dirty and unreadable. The police sent out a description of the pickup truck throughout the state, but it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. There are thousands of such vehicles in Alaska.
Days turned into weeks. The search operation was gradually wound down. The helicopters stopped flying and the volunteers returned to their daily lives. Only a small group of investigators remained active. They combed the shore repeatedly interviewing hunters and fishermen who had been in the area, but it was all in vain.
There were no traces, not a scrap of clothing, not a single item dropped. Jessica Lawson had vanished. Over time, the case was classified as cold. The official version, which was accepted for reporting purposes, stated, “Missing, presumed dead, presumed drowning.” For her family, it was the worst possible outcome.

No answers, endless waiting, and hope that faded with each passing year. They were left alone with their grief and complete uncertainty. For 7 years, Jessica Lawson’s case gathered dust in the archives. For seven years, the Susettna River kept it secret. And then in the spring of 2023, that secret began to surface. The winter was unusually snowy and spring came abruptly and warmly.
The snow melted rapidly in the mountains and the water level in Susettna rose to record highs. When the ice broke up on the river, it was not just an ice drift. Massive multi-tonon ice flows like bulldozers plowed through the riverbed with a roar, shifting boulders that had lain there for decades and lifting tons of silt, sand, and gravel from the bottom.
The river changed its course right before our eyes. One day in late April, when most of the ice had already passed and the water began to recede little by little, two residents from Taletna went fishing. They were boating along the shore, looking for new promising spots that the recent flood might have created.
In one such place, where the powerful current had eroded the old bank and exposed a section of the riverbed that was usually underwater, they noticed something strange. Something that looked like a bone was sticking out of the wet sand and small stones. At first, they didn’t think much of it. Bones from moose, deer, or bears are found all the time in these parts.
But something about its shape made them take a closer look. One of the men poked at the object with the end of his ore, and then from under a layer of silt, something appeared that made both men’s blood run cold. It was the remains of a sturdy hiking boot still firmly attached to a shinbone. These were human remains.

The fishermen immediately contacted the state police. The site was cordoned off that same day. An investigative team and forensic experts arrived on the banks of the Susitna. The work was slow and painstaking. The remains had to be dug out of the dense riverbed. The experts worked with brushes and small shovels like archaeologists at an excavation site.
The more they cleared away, the more sinister the picture became. It was almost a complete human skeleton. It became clear that the current had not simply carried the body away. It had been lying in a natural depression at the bottom between several large underwater boulders. Over 7 years, it had been completely covered with silt, sand, and small pebbles.
The river itself had created a grave for it. Only this year’s extreme ice drift acted like an excavator, tearing away this protective layer and exposing the terrible find. When the skeleton was removed entirely from the riverbed, all doubts about the cause of death were dispelled. An old faded climbing rope was firmly tied to the bones of both ankles, and at its ends hung two large, smooth riverstones, each weighing at least 15 to 20 lb.
The knots were tied skillfully and very tightly. It was an evident and gruesome weight added for one purpose only to prevent the body from ever floating to the surface. The accident theory, which had been the official version for 7 years, crumbled to dust. Now, it was a murder case. The search team found several other items near the remains.
a half decayed dark blue raincoat, the same one that was on Jessica’s equipment list, and a metal thermos covered with numerous scratches. It was impossible to tell whether these scratches were the result of 7 years at the bottom of a turbulent river or whether they appeared at the moment of the attack.
The remains were immediately sent for forensic examination in Anchorage. Identification did not take long. First, Jessica Lawson’s dental records matched the condition of the teeth found in the skull. Second, there was another irrefutable fact. Jessica’s medical records showed an old healed fracture of the femur, which she had sustained in her youth after falling off a bicycle.
An examination of the skeleton revealed the same characteristic mark from a healed fracture on the femur. There was no doubt it was Jessica. But the examination yielded another far more critical conclusion. On the same femur, just above the old fracture, a fresh post-mortem or nearmortem fracture was discovered.
The nature of the injury indicated that it was caused either by a severe fall from a height or by a blow with a heavy blunt object. Given the stones tied to her legs, the fall theory seemed unlikely. Investigators were now sure that Jessica had been struck before she died. The case of Jessica Lawson’s disappearance was officially reclassified as a murder and taken out of the archives.
Now, the investigators had a body and evidence of a violent death. But the main question remained unanswered. Who did it? All the threads led back to the past to July 2016. And the most crucial thread was that blurry recording from the surveillance camera at the gas station in Taletna, the mysterious man in the black pickup truck.

7 years ago, he was just a passer by, a possible witness. Now he was the main and only suspect. Investigators with renewed vigor took up the old case. They understood that a lot had changed in seven years. Witnesses may have forgotten details and evidence may have been lost. But now they had a goal. They began to study the footage again, frame by frame, using modern software to improve the image quality.
They dug up lists of all black pickup trucks registered in Alaska during those years. Trying to find any match. The investigation, which had been considered hopeless for many years, had been given a second chance. And now the entire burden of the inquiry rested on identifying the person who had last spoken to Jessica Lawson before she disappeared forever into the Alaskan wilderness.
In 2023, technology has evolved significantly since 2016. The old grainy recording from the gas station surveillance camera was sent to the FBI’s forensic laboratory in Quantico. Specialists used the latest neural network-based software to process the video. Frame by frame, pixel by pixel, the program removed digital noise, increased sharpness, and restored details that 7 years ago seemed lost forever.
After several weeks of painstaking work, they got a result. The man’s face was still not clear enough for identification, but now it was possible to make out his features. But the main breakthrough was the license plate number of his black pickup truck. In several frames where the car was pulling away, the program was able to restore almost all of the characters.
Dirt and the angle of the shot hid one or two of them, but that was enough. The investigators obtained the partial license plate number and make of the vehicle, an old pickup truck of a specific model and year. They ran a search of all the Department of Motor Vehicles databases, checking all possible combinations of the missing characters.

The list was long, but not endless. They began checking each owner, and after a few days, they had a match. A black pickup truck with a very similar license plate number registered in Montana had received a parking ticket in Anchorage just a week before Jessica’s disappearance. The owner of the car was listed as Brian Rhodess, a 42-year-old resident of Billings.
Brian Rhodess’s name was immediately run through all criminal databases. The investigators immediately realized they were on the right track. Roads had a criminal record. 10 years earlier, he had been convicted of secondderee assault. He had attacked a female tourist on a hiking trail in Montana, beaten her, and tried to drag her into the woods.
The victim managed to escape and call for help. Roads served several years in prison and was released. His record indicated that he had no permanent residence, lived off odd jobs, and often left for seasonal work in other states, including Alaska, where he worked on fishing boats. He fit the profile perfectly.
A man prone to violence against women, familiar with the wilderness, with no permanent social ties, capable of easily disappearing. Investigators in Alaska immediately contacted the Montana police and obtained a warrant for his arrest for questioning, but then they hit another dead end. Brian Rhodess was nowhere to be found.

He hadn’t been seen at his last known address in Billings for many years. His relatives, who were contacted, said they had lost all contact with him around 2017. He had vanished. Investigators began checking his financial records, credit card use, and social security contributions. Everything came to a halt at the end of 2016. Roads had vanished into thin air.
It was then decided to check border control records. And that’s where the next important clue was found. In March 2017, about eight months after Jessica’s disappearance, cameras at the border crossing recorded Brian Rhodess’s black pickup truck crossing the US border and entering Canada.
There was no record of his return to the US. He left the country and never came back. The request was immediately sent to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Our Canadian colleagues checked their databases. The response they sent a few days later put an end to the investigation, but not in the way the investigators had hoped. Brian Rhodess was dead.
His body was found in 2019 in a cheap motel room in a small town in British Columbia. The local coroner examined the scene and found no signs of foul play or a struggle. The cause of death was ruled suicide. Since Roads was not of particular interest to Canadian authorities at the time, the case was closed and sent to the archives.

For investigators in Alaska, it was both a breakthrough and a disappointment. They had found Jessica Lawson’s killer. The chain of circumstantial evidence was irrefutable. He was the last person to see her. He had a history of violence against women. He fled the country shortly after the murder, and he ultimately took his own life.
But it was now impossible to bring him to justice. There was no chance of questioning him or obtaining a confession. What’s more, after 7 years in the river, no traces of DNA remained on Jessica’s rope or clothing that could be matched to Roads’s samples if they had been available. There was no direct, irrefutable evidence that could be presented in court.
The Jessica Lawson case was officially closed. The investigator’s final report stated that the prime suspect, Brian Rhodess, had died before his guilt could be established in a court of law. The cause of the tourist’s death was finally changed from accidental to homicide. 7 years of uncertainty for the Lawson family came to an end.
They got an answer to the question, “What happened, but never got an answer to the question, why?” Justice in this story has never been served. The killer took the motives for his crime to his grave, leaving behind only a cold skeleton at the bottom of an Alaskan river and a case closed due to the death of the suspect.