She was strong, smart, and solo. Amelia Amy Turner, a 24year-old nature photographer and avid hiker, set off to complete the stunning 20-mile Paintbrush Cascade Canyon Loop in Grand Teton National Park. It was her dream trip. She never came back. For nearly a year, no one found a single clue. No body, no backpack, just silence.
Then one morning, high at top a cliffside, a ranger studying eagle nest spotted something red and blue tangled in the sticks. When he climbed up, what he found would unlock one of the darkest mysteries in park history and lead investigators straight to a killer hiding in plain sight. This is not just a missing person’s case.
It’s a story of obsession, survival, and a father’s relentless search for truth. Welcome to Echo Stories. Subscribe and hit the bell icon for more stories. Part one, Amy’s Last Track. August 12th, 2023. A bright, clear morning. Amy Turner arrived at String Lake Trail Head with her gear camera, GPS, satellite phone, first aid the works. She was prepared.
She’d done tougher tres before. Her social media was filled with mountaintop sunrises and canyon time-lapses. That morning, she even asked a couple to snap a photo of her at the trail head. Smiling arms raised the Tetons rising behind her. That would be the last verified image of her alive. Rangers say she checked in.
No red flags. But when she didn’t return the next day, her dad, Mark Turner, sounded the alarm. Search crews were dispatched. Helicopters scanned the range. Dogs tracked her scent for miles. They found her tent pitched neatly beneath tree cover. Food tucked in bearproof bags. Notebook open on a rock sketching wild flowers.
But her boots and backpack were gone, which made no sense. She wouldn’t have wandered far without her gear. Her trail stopped. Literally. Dogs lost the scent in a stretch of granite boulders halfway into the loop. It was as if she had vanished into thin air. Some thought accident, others wildlife. But Mark Turner knew his daughter, and he believed someone took her. Part two.
The man with the military pack. In the weeks following Amy’s disappearance, Grand Teton became a hive of activity. Volunteers scoured every canyon. Helicopters hovered for hours. The park had seen missing hikers before, but nothing like this. What bothered investigators most was the lack of any sign of distress.
No blood, no torn fabric, no signal from her satellite beacon. Then a tip surfaced. A middle-aged couple hiking the same trail remembered something odd. A man alone dressed in muted greens, military-style backpack, boots too stiff for the trail. They said he passed them without a word, just a nod, sunglasses, shaved head, cold stare.
He didn’t carry a water bottle. And when they turned to look back, he was gone. That was two hours after they had seen Amy. They told Rangers a sketch artist was brought in, but with no name, no registration at the trail head, the lead went cold. Theories spread online. Some said Amy staged her own disappearance.
Others believed she was attacked by a bear or fell into a ravine too deep to search. But Mark Turner refused to believe any of that. He sold his small home in Oregon and moved to a cabin near the Tetons. Every day he hiked a new segment of the canyon loop. He mapped, measured, took notes. Someone knows something he told local reporters.
I just have to outlast the silence. By month seven, even the news had stopped covering her story. Until month 11, when a young ranger named David Chen, studying eagle nesting patterns, spotted something that shouldn’t have been there. A strip of nylon, red and blue, woven into a bald eagle’s nest high on a cliff. He climbed up.
Inside he found a torn strap with the brand Amy always used and wrapped deep beneath the twigs, a piece of women’s clothing. Part three, the nest in the clue. The object was unmistakable. A scrap of nylon webbing torn at one end faded but still stitched with the words granite pro 60. That was Amy’s backpack model. And deeper in the nest tangled in twigs and bones was something worse.
A pair of women’s underwear, a vibrant red lace trim Amy had once posted in a what’s in my hiking bag video. David Chen, the ranger who found it, alerted search and rescue immediately. The nest was 120 feet up a sheer cliff wall, nearly inaccessible to hikers. But eagles don’t fly into tent zippers.
They scavenge, which meant somewhere near that cliff, there had to be a body. A forensic recovery team arrived within 48 hours. Drones scanned the slope below the nest, narrowing in on a narrow scree chute littered with small rocks disturbed soil. in one key thing, a shallow grave roughly three feet deep, hidden beneath a scatter of stones and broken pine boughs.
Inside were skeletal remains, pieces of torn outdoor clothing, and a titanium ring on the right hand engraved with the initials at Amy Turner had been found, but how she was found would change everything. An autopsy confirmed blunt force trauma to the skull, defensive wounds to her forearms, and disturbing traces of sexual assault.
This wasn’t an accident. It was a murder. The FBI was called in and Mark Turner, when told his daughter had been buried like a secret, broke down in a way no camera could ever capture. I knew he whispered. I knew she didn’t just disappear. But finding Amy was only half the battle. Now they needed to find who did this.
And one name buried deep in Ranger Station logs was about to light the match. Part four, the ghost at the trail head. When investigators re-examined the trail registry, one thing stood out. A scribbled name from the morning Amy began her hike. R Frasier. No contact info, no car plate recorded, just a name and an arrow pointing toward the same trail Amy took Cascade Loop.
The handwriting was crude like someone trying to fake neatness. The couple who saw the mysterious man with the military backpack. They reviewed the Ranger sketch again, and this time one of them whispered, “That’s him. I’m sure of it.” A background search pulled up a Robert Frasier 44 Drifter, dishonorably discharged from the military, known for changing states and using aliases.
He had stayed at a cheap lodge just outside Jackson Hole during the same week Amy vanished, then abruptly checked out the day she was reported missing. Worse, his room had been rented under Kchi and a fake ID, but they had enough to track him. 12 days after Amy’s body was found, US Marshalss caught up with Robert Frasier in Callispel, Montana, living in a trailer under a different name.
Inside the trailer, they found a bloodstained hiking shirt, a Nikon DSLR camera registered to Amy Turner, and a locked metal trunk. Inside that trunk, multiple photos of female hikers taken from a distance, many of whom were never aware they were being followed. And in one horrific folder, Amy, images of her camping, changing, climbing until the last picture blurred in dark.
Amy running. Frasier didn’t deny anything. He said one sentence to the agents. She shouldn’t have been out there alone. No remorse, no hesitation. Just cruelty. But his arrest cracked open more than Amy’s case. Because inside that trunk were clues that would connect two more missing hikers from two different states.
Amy Turner’s murder was no isolated event. Frraasier had done this before. Part five, justice in the father who never quit. Robert Frasier was charged with the kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder of Amelia Turner. Evidence from his trailer also tied him to two other unsolved cases. Lily Sue 26 missing from Olympic National Park. Generas, 30, vanished hiking solo in Arizona.
The common thread, all were experienced hikers. All were women traveling alone, and all had been photographed without consent before vanishing. Frasier had built his sick ritual over years following solo hikers watching from the woods and striking in remote places where help was far. He plead guilty to all charges in exchange for life in prison without parole.
At Amy’s memorial service, her father Mark stood before a gathering of friends, rangers, and fellow hikers. He held up her camera. “She used this to show people the beauty of the wild,” he said, his voice steady. “Not the danger, not the monsters, but the wonder.” Then he added, “If an eagle hadn’t seen something we couldn’t, we’d still be searching.
” A bird did what we couldn’t broke the silence. Amy was buried beneath the Tetons. A plaque now marks the String Lake Trail Head in her honor. Amelia Turner Explorer, artist, daughter, found. And David Chen, the young ranger, now leads a wilderness safety initiative to educate solo hikers and track unregistered individuals. Because this wasn’t just about Amy.
It was about every woman who walks a trail and feels eyes watching. If you believe Amy’s story matters, share it. Let the world know what her father never forgot. That determination, truth, and love can bring light back to even the darkest places. Subscribe to Echo Stories for more true accounts of bravery, heartbreak, and the fight for justice.
Because sometimes even nature remembers.