The text message came just before she disappeared: “Off I go. The mountains are calling. Weather is perfect. Talk to you Sunday night.” It would be the last words anyone ever received from Amelia Turner.
Amy was 24, a passionate photographer and seasoned solo hiker who had built her young life around the grandeur of Wyoming’s Grand Teton Range. Friends remembered her as meticulous, deeply respectful of the wilderness—someone who didn’t take unnecessary risks. That is why her sudden vanishing in August 2023 made no sense at all.
On the morning of August 12, Amy parked her silver Subaru at the String Lake trailhead. It was a brilliant summer day. She shouldered her heavy Osprey pack and set off on the strenuous Paintbrush Canyon–Cascade Canyon Loop, a four-day trek she had carefully planned for weeks. Before heading out, she asked an older tourist couple to snap her photo—a radiant young woman, hair tied back, smiling against the backdrop of the jagged Tetons. That single photograph would soon appear on missing person posters across the country.
When Sunday passed without the promised check-in, her mother, Sarah Turner, tried to stay calm. But by Monday evening, dread had taken over. Amy was disciplined, responsible. She would never stay silent this long. At 7:15 p.m., Sarah dialed the Teton County Sheriff’s Office with shaking hands. Within hours, rangers confirmed her car was still at the trailhead. By nightfall, Amelia Turner was officially declared missing.
The search began at dawn Tuesday. Helicopters swept the skies, K9 units scoured the canyons, and dozens of rangers moved systematically along the rugged terrain. Hope rose briefly when they discovered Amy’s campsite at Holly Lake—her tent perfectly pitched, her sleeping pad laid out, her lighter daypack inside. But her main backpack and boots were gone. It looked as though she had geared up and walked away, leaving essentials behind in a way that defied backcountry logic.
A scent trail picked up by the dogs led away from the path, climbing a steep slope, only to end abruptly among boulders. It was as if she had been lifted into the air. Rangers pressed on, interviewing the Ohio couple who had taken her last photo. They recalled another hiker passing by that morning: a gaunt man with a military-style pack, his expression cold and unreadable. A sketch was drawn, but no identity surfaced.
For five days the mountains echoed with the sound of helicopters. Then a storm rolled in, obliterating every trace of her path. After ten days, the official search was suspended. The wilderness had swallowed Amelia Turner, and no one could explain how.
The official search was over after just ten days, but for Mark Turner, Amy’s father, it was only beginning. A retired land surveyor, Mark was quiet, methodical, and relentless. Each weekend, he drove hundreds of miles from Salt Lake City to the Tetons, his truck loaded with gear. Rangers began to recognize his presence at remote trailheads—always early, always late, always searching.
He built his own maps, overlaying satellite images with geological data, dividing the wilderness into grids. Where the official search teams had swept broadly, Mark searched inch by inch. He studied soil depressions, tangled undergrowth, and crevices no helicopter could see. He wasn’t hoping to find his daughter alive anymore. He just wanted to bring her home.
Meanwhile, Amy’s disappearance spread online. True-crime forums and hiking communities dissected every detail. Some believed it was an accident—she might have slipped from a ridge or vanished into a hidden crevice. Others speculated about animal attacks. A darker theory pointed to the mysterious gaunt hiker. He became known in online circles as The Teton Phantom.
For months, there was silence. Then, nearly a year later, a fragile lead appeared. A fisherman pulled a single trekking pole from Cascade Creek, wedged between rocks. It matched the one in Amy’s last photo. Investigators confirmed it was hers, but hydrologists warned it could have washed downstream from almost anywhere. It was a clue that led nowhere—painful evidence of her presence, but no direction forward.
The case seemed ready to fade into legend, just another unsolved disappearance in the vast, indifferent Tetons. But fate intervened in the form of Ranger David Chen, an ornithologist monitoring golden eagle nests high in the backcountry. In July 2024, Chen spotted unusual flashes of color woven into a nest perched on a remote cliff. Concerned about debris, he climbed to inspect it.
What he found chilled him to the core. Among the branches were scraps of turquoise nylon and a weathered piece of women’s underwear, trimmed in red. The colors were a haunting match to Amelia’s gear. Chen photographed the nest carefully and alerted investigators.
The discovery reignited the case. Golden eagles were scavengers. The presence of Amelia’s clothing in their nest meant one terrifying thing—her body, or what remained of it, was somewhere nearby. For the first time in eleven months, the search narrowed from hundreds of square miles to a single mountainside.
A recovery team of anthropologists, cadaver dogs, and search-and-rescue specialists was flown in. For two days they scoured the slope beneath the eagle’s nest, finding nothing. Then, on the third morning, a dog named Odin alerted at a thicket near boulders. Beneath disturbed soil, the team uncovered fragments of fabric and, finally, bone. Within hours, dental records confirmed the unthinkable: Amelia Turner had been found.
The relief of recovery soon gave way to horror. The autopsy revealed not an accident, but blunt force trauma—and evidence of sexual assault. Amelia hadn’t slipped, and she hadn’t chosen to disappear. She had been murdered.
When investigators announced Amelia Turner’s death was a homicide, the case shifted overnight from tragedy to manhunt. The only lead was the vague sketch of the gaunt man hikers had seen near her on the trail. For months it had been little more than a ghost on paper. Now, it was their only chance at justice.
The sketch was re-released, no longer as a possible witness but as a potential murderer. Days later, a motel clerk in Pinedale, Wyoming, recognized the face. His name, she recalled, was Robert Frasier—a seasonal worker who had rented a room the same summer Amy vanished. He had left suddenly, just days after her disappearance.
The FBI traced him to a ranch outside Billings, Montana. At dawn, heavily armed agents surrounded the property. Frasier, 42, was arrested without a struggle. In his shed, investigators pried open a padlocked trunk. Inside lay his grim trophies: women’s IDs, jewelry, locks of hair. At the bottom was Amy’s Nikon D750 camera. Its memory card contained the most damning evidence of all—photos that documented her final hours, from the moment she was unknowingly followed to the assault and her death.
Confronted with the images, Frasier broke his silence. His confession was chilling in its detachment. He admitted seeing Amy at the trailhead and stalking her to Holly Lake. He waited until she walked to get water, then ambushed her. “She fought harder than I expected,” he said flatly. He claimed he killed her only to stop her resistance. His final words to detectives carried the most horrifying justification of all: “She shouldn’t have been there alone.”
In court, the evidence was overwhelming. The jury deliberated only briefly before convicting him of kidnapping, sexual assault, and first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life without parole. The discovery of his “trophy box” also linked him to two other unsolved disappearances in Colorado and Idaho, finally giving closure to families who had waited years for answers.
For Amy’s parents, Mark and Sarah Turner, the verdict brought justice but not peace. At her memorial, held not in a church but on a Teton overlook, Mark stood before friends and family, his voice steady despite the grief etched into every word. “I just did what any father would do,” he said, speaking of his endless search. “I just wanted to find my little girl.”
Amy’s story became a caution carved into the soul of the Tetons. Her case proved that not all wilderness dangers are natural. Sometimes the storm, the fall, or the bear isn’t what takes you. Sometimes, it is another human being—walking the same trails, carrying a predator’s heart.
And though the mountains remain unchanged—majestic, eternal—their beauty now carries a shadow, the memory of a young woman who vanished into them, and the father who refused to let her be forgotten.
