The narrow, rutted road leading into Imlil, the gateway town to Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains, usually rumbles with activity. On a typical day, sand-colored taxis bringing day-trippers up from Marrakech, 56 miles to the north, share the road with hulking tour buses and snub-nosed vans with Transport TouristiqueÌęwritten in script across their hoods. Taxis crammed with budget-minded backpackers trundle behind luxury SUVs from the nearby Kasbah Tamadot, Richard Branson’s luxury retreat, where rooms cost more than $600 a night. In warm weather, German motorcyclists riding BMWs laden with gearboxes zoom past cyclists in bright helmets powering up the twisty mountain road.

Imlil, the central town in a valley with around 10,000 inhabitants, was once a sleepy out-of-the-way place, little known even to Moroccans. In recent years, though, as more hikers attempt to summit 13,671-foot Mount Toubkal, northern Africa’s highest peak, ImlilÌęhas become something of an adventure travel hot spot. For residents, the regular hum of traffic is reassuring. It’s the sound of more people coming to spend money in a region where most locals now derive their income from tourism.

The town has undergone an astonishing transformation since the first time I visited, in 2006, when I was living in Morocco as a Fulbright fellow. Back then, the valley was adjusting to electricity, which it had just acquired for the first time. NowÌęit has well over 100 Airbnb listings. This spring, when I walked through Imlil with guide and guesthouse owner Mohammed Idhali, he pointed out the businesses that had opened since my last visit: the argan-oil cooperative, the orange-juice stand, the carpet shop, that guide outfitter, that other guide outfitter, the pizzeria-creperie. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű a tea shop, a half-dozen local guides wearing North Face jackets and secondhand boots awaited their clients, shouting out greetings to passing friends: Ya, Rashid! Ya, Omar! Muleteers let their animals graze the stray roadside grass before loading them up for treks into the mountains. “Everyone works, so it’s better now,” Hassan Azdour, another guide and guesthouse owner, told me. “And everyone works with tourists. Out of every 100 people in the village, only five don’t work with tourists.”

But on a winter day last year, all that bustling energy came to a sudden halt. On the morning of December 17, vehicles with government insignias sped along the road leading into Imlil, while the center of town remained eerily devoid of action. By midmorning, word of something terrible had begun to spread through the community: hikers—two young women, one from Denmark and the other from Norway—had been found dead on the trail leading up to Mount Toubkal, less than tenÌęmiles south of Imlil. Phones buzzed with rumors and assumptions. Perhaps, some people thought, the women had lit their camp stove in their tent and died of carbon-monoxide poisoning. But as more information emerged, it became clear that the deaths were not accidental. The women had died violently.

Four law-enforcement helicopters from Marrakech descended onto the rocky riverbed near the Toubkal trailhead. A team of investigators from the Central Bureau of Judicial Investigations (BCIJ), Morocco’s equivalent of the FBI, arrived on scene.ÌęClusters of Imlil locals watched anxiously. The dominant emotion was shock, with a strong undercurrent of fear. They said the kinds of things that people often say when their home is made strange by the sudden incursion of violence: How could this have happened here? Who could’ve done something like this? And what will happen now?

A month earlier, on November 21, Louisa Jespersen, 24, posted a question to her Facebook followers: “Dear friends, I’m going to Morocco in December. Any of you guys who’s around by then or any mountain friends who knows something about Mount Toubkal?”

Jespersen’s friends called her Lulu, a nickname that suited her playful personality and abundant appetite for life. Jespersen, who wasÌęfrom Denmark, described herself in a YouTube video as “very enthusiastic about outdoors and outdoor activities.” Her social-media presence bears this out: there’s Lulu doing a handstand on a beach, and hoisting an ice axÌęin the air, and pumping out push-ups, and whitewater kayaking, and diving off a rock into a blue pool of water. She liked to mug for the camera, sticking out her tongue and twisting her face into silly shapes; in photographsÌęshe’s often captured laughing in a wide-open way. Her former boyfriend, Glen Martin, who remained close with Jespersen even after they broke up, described her on social media as a “bundle of joy.” She was as tough as she was cheery. On a 2018 trip to Australia, she tried surfing for the first time. “I’m ready to fall a thousand more times on this board if it means that I one day will be able to stand on it,” she wrote on Instagram. The year before, Jespersen had applied to be part of a grueling polar expedition sponsored by Swedish apparel company FjĂ€llrĂ€ven. In her video application, she explains her hunger to experience “the magnificent, untamed Arctic.”

Like Jespersen, Maren Ueland wasÌęworking toward a degree in outdoor life, culture, and ecophilosophy at the University of Southeastern Norway, in Boe. Ueland was from a small lakeside town in Norway, where she spent her childhood immersed in the outdoors. Shy as a child, she grew into an adventurous, idealistic young woman who cared deeply about others. She lived her life “both spontaneously and purposefully,” her parish priest would say later. She dreamed of working in outdoor therapy, according to her mother, a career that would’ve engaged her interest in nature and nursing. (I reached out to friends and family members of Jespersen and Ueland, but they all declined to comment.)

Ueland didn’t careÌęmuch for Christmas—all that holiday materialism put a bad taste in her mouth—and often traveled over winter break. Morocco, with its winter sunshine and abundant trekking opportunities, was an appealing destination for the two frequent travelers and aspiring outdoor guides, who’d recently become friends. On December 8, Jespersen and Ueland arrived in Morocco. They planned to stay aÌęmonth.

In the past decade, Morocco has become one of the most popular tourist destinations in Africa. As other countries in the Middle East and North Africa have been riven by political conflict and instability following the Arab Spring, Morocco has traded on its reputation as a safe and tourist-friendly vacation spot. The country’s sporty 55-year-old monarch, King Mohammed VI, has prioritized tourism, and the country has set the ambitious goal of becoming one of the top 20 travel destinations in the world by next year. In 2018, more than 12 million foreign tourists traveled to Morocco, setting a new record. Most visitors stick to Morocco’s cities—Marrakech, FĂšs, Tangier—which are justifiably famous for their mazelike medinas and carpet-haggling opportunities. But over the past decade, as tourists have increasingly sought outdoor experiencesÌęand local culture, a growing number have also begun to visit Morocco’s countryside.

Like many outdoorsy adventurers, Jespersen and Ueland were drawn to Morocco’s High Atlas, or Idraren Draren—Mountains of Mountains—as they are known in the Berber language. The range extends from the Atlantic Ocean toward the Algerian border,Ìęand it’s rugged enough that Martin Scorsese used it as a stand-in for the Himalayas when he filmed his 1997 epic,ÌęKundun. The two-day trek up Toubkal is one of the most popular hikes in the region, not only because it offers peak-bagging bragging rightsÌębut also because it’s a nontechnical climb that’s accessible to fit hikers. Earlier this year, CNN deemed it one of the world’s best trails.

Jespersen and Ueland arrived in Imlil by taxi, according to local sources, and soon set off for the hike to the summit. They opted not to enlist a guide. “If you have considerable experience reading maps in mountain regions, you may not need a guide from a navigational point of view,” Lonely Planet Morocco advises, “but you should seriously consider engaging one anyway
 If for no other reason than to be your translator, your chaperone
 deal-getter and vocal guidebook
. If something were to go wrong, a local guide will be the quickest route to getting help.” That said, local guides told me that experienced, well-equipped hikers who were fit enough that they didn’t need a pack mule to lug their gear—hikers like Jespersen and Ueland—often opted to climb the peak unaccompanied.

In December, wind, snow, and below-freezing temperatures dissuade some visitors from the High Atlas, but Toubkal remains popular. After leaving Imlil, Jespersen and Ueland would’ve first ascended a narrow mule trail that crossed a rocky floodplain near the village of Aroumd, which marks the official start of the trail. From there, the path snakes steadily upward. Despite the sharp-edged mountain faces rising in front of them, the two friends likely wouldn’t have felt as though they were in a notably remote or desolate place. They shared the path with a number of trekkers, guides, and muleteers, several of whom later remembered the women as smiling and friendly. If they felt a sudden craving for a tin of Pringles or a package of wafer cookiesÌęor, for that matter, a Toubkal T-shirt, they could’ve stopped at one of the small shops—known as hanouts, in Moroccan Arabic—scattered along the lower elevations. After a couple hours of walking, they could’ve paused for mint tea at a cafĂ©Ìęin the small settlement of Sidi Chamarouche, where the trail briefly levels outÌęnear a series of cascading waterfalls. From there, the path continues another three and a half miles to the Refuge du Toubkal, a mountain hostel at 10,521 feet. Hikers typically spend the night there, taking advantage of its basic restaurant and hot showers, before waking up before sunrise to tackle the summit the next day.

Above the refuge, the hike gets more serious, with crampons a necessity well into April. In December, snow cover can make it easier to navigate Toubkal’s notorious scree slopes—dubbed “heartbreaking” and “awful” by one TripAdvisor reviewer—but biting winds make the winter journey more arduous than many expect, although presumably the conditions were nothing surprising for two Scandinavian women with glacier-climbing experience. The broad, rocky summit is often crowded with hikers taking triumphant selfies in front of the pyramidal peak marker. On a clear day, if you squint at the horizon, you might be able to spot the shining dunes of the Sahara Desert.

At the same time Jespersen and Ueland were navigating the Toubkal trail, four men from the outskirts of Marrakech were approaching the peak from the opposite direction. At one of the mountain passes, the men crossed paths with Brahim Baakenna, a local guide who was accompanying two Danish tourists. The encounter seemed unremarkable at the time. Baakenna exchanged greetings with the men, who appeared to be in their twenties and thirties, then pointed out the path leading up to the refuge. Perhaps unprepared for the snowy conditions, the men didn’t make it to the refuge and remained on the lower-elevation trails. They had a brief, cordial conversation with a hanout owner (who asked to remain anonymous for this story) and, according to Moroccan security services, they also spoke with a British hiker, asking him if he was Muslim. He reportedly said that he was.

According to local sourcesÌę(who could not confirm whether the women summited), on their way down the mountain, the pairÌędidn’t pass by the refuge until sometime after 4 P.M., significantly later than most descending hikers. Guidebooks note that it takes around three or four hours to make it from the refuge back to Imlil, and starting early is particularly important in December, when the sun sets around 6:30. The man who runs the hanout closest to the trailhead shuttered his store around four, then headed home without having seen the women. By the time Jespersen and Ueland reached his shop, it would’ve been near sunset, if not already dark. If they had continued to walk another half-hour or so downhill, they would have reached the village of Aroumd, where they could’ve rented a room and eaten a hot meal. InsteadÌęthey opted to pitch their tent on a flat piece of ground next to the hanout and spend one more night on the mountain.

The men from Marrakech spotted them around 7 P.M., after the women had set up camp. They pitched their own tent a couple hundred feet downslope. They now numbered three, one member of their party having already headed back to the city in order to find a safe house, according to security officials. At midnight, the three men, armed with knives, approached Jespersen and Ueland’s camp. One of the women (authorities still haven’t said which) was stabbed to death in the tent and another just outside it. Shortly after the attack, the three men fled the scene, leaving their tent behind.

The next morning, two French tourists staying in Imlil set out for an early-morning hike. After about an hour, they reached the hanoutÌęand discovered the two bodies. They ran down the mountain to report the crime. “We saw a tent and that it was open, and we saw the two girls,” one of the hikers later told . “It was horrible. They were broken. We warned everyone we saw in Imlil not to go up there. I did not want more to see what we had seen.”

Soon the mountain was swarming with emergency medical technicians and forensic investigators. Residents of Imlil clustered near the trailhead, trying to make sense of what had happened. Some surmised that the killers had come from Sidi Chamarouche. The small community on the mountain is centered aroundÌęa shrine honoring a saint reputed to cure mental illness. Perhaps someone mentally unwell had caused what they were all starting to call, with horrific understatement, “the problem.” It was unthinkable to imagine that such a crime had been committed by a member of their close-knit community. An attack on a tourist was also an attack on the underlying economy of the entire valley. “You would rather hurt yourself than hurt a tourist,” Mohammed Idhali told me, “because if you hurt a tourist, you hurt everyone.”

By Wednesday, two days after the bodies were discovered, a disturbing video was circulating on Facebook. Over the course of its 76 seconds, it purportedly showed the stabbing and decapitation of one of the women. In the background, a man declares that the murders are revenge for ISIS defeats in Syria. When the video popped up on local guide Baakenna’sÌęfeed, he realized that he had met the killers on the hiking trails above Imlil. “I was crying,” he told me. “I was very afraid.”

Moroccans were stunned by the murders, which the prime minister called a “stab in the back of Morocco and Moroccans.” For some, they provoked flashbacks to the country’s last terrorist attack, a 2011 bombing at a popular cafĂ©Ìęin Marrakech’s central square that left 17 dead, most of them European tourists. “I was in Marrakech in the immediate aftermath of [the 2011 attack], and that was quite striking,”Ìęsays Amine Ghoulidi, a researcher at King’s College in LondonÌęwho focuses on geopolitics and security in North Africa. “The city was very much deserted, the hotels were empty, the mood was down. That was not a good sight for a city that’s usually pretty vibrantÌęand that’s very dependent on tourist activity.”

The Saturday after Jespersen and Ueland’s bodies were discovered, hundreds of Moroccans gathered for candlelight vigils outside the Danish and Norwegian embassies. In Marrakech, tour guides convened to collectively condemn the murders. (All this despite the fact that Morocco has had notably fewer domestic terror attacks than the U.S. or most EUÌęcountries.) Nonetheless, the gruesome details of the murders—and the visceral horror of the video—were fodder for racist agitators. On Ueland’s Facebook memorial page, some people uploaded photos of her bloodied body alongside comments advocating that all Moroccans be expelled from the EU.

Morocco’s security forces moved quickly in the wake of the attack. A few hours after the bodies were discovered, law enforcement arrested a 33-year-old plumber named Abderrahim Khayali in Marrakech. Three days later, three other suspects were arrested as they attempted to travel by bus out of Marrakech, with the murder weapons still in their possession, according to investigators from the BCIJ. They allegedly hoped to travel to Libya to join ISIS.

The four men, aged 25 to 33, lived in neighborhoods marked by high rates of poverty and unemployment on the outskirts of Marrakech. That city, Morocco’s biggest tourist destination, “is a victim of its own success,” Ghoulidi told me. “It attracts millions of people every year, and it’s become quite gentrified. Prices are not accessible to the average Moroccan, so families move more toward the periphery of the city, which creates more isolation and stimulates grievances that might have shaped these people’s perception of ‘the other.’”

The men had low educational levels and marginal jobs, , a Moroccan intelligence spokesman. Abdessamad Ejjoud, the alleged ringleader of the group, had previously been caught attempting to travel to Syria to link up with ISIS, and he spent a year in prison. Afterward, he became part of this plot closer to home, one allegedly targeting “security services or foreign tourists.” A week before the murders, the four men filmed themselves pledging allegiance to the Islamic State, although Sabik insists that they were “” who did not coordinate in advance with ISIS. (ISIS has not taken credit for Jespersen and Ueland’s murders, although the group doesn’t tend to claim attacks when the perpetrators are in custody.)

The men “were part of a terrorist cell meeting regularly to plan attacks in Morocco,” Abdelhak El Khiam, director of the BCIJ, told me. The group’s strategy allegedly included potential attacks against a synagogue in Marrakech and the Gnaoua World Music Festival, in the coastal city Essaouira. “But the four men decided to detach themselves from the rest of the group and take action immediately,” El Khiam says. The men suspected correctly that their group was being surveilled by Moroccan security services, and “Imlil was the perfect remote location to evade the surveillance and finally take action,” he says.

“We’ve already dismantled some terrorist cells that were much more dangerous and more organized, with many more resources than this one,” El Khiam says. “There is a change in the terrorist profile, not only here in MoroccoÌębut everywhere else in the world. They’re now taking action with only their own small resources. That was the case in Imlil—just four people and cheap knives.”

The three main suspects who were present for the murders admitted to the crime in a trial this spring. On , while Khayali, who’d reportedly left before the attack, was sentenced to life in prison. Twenty-one other Moroccans, allegedly part of the terrorist cell, remain on trial. The group includes a Spanish-Swiss citizen named Kevin Zoller Guervos. Guervos had a number of run-ins with the law as a teenager before converting to Islam in 2011. Guervos, who now goes by Abdellah and lives in Marrakech, was accused of recruiting the four men and teaching them how to use encrypted communications and fire a gun. According to investigators, he targeted “ignorant people who have nothing.” (Guervos .) In Denmark, 14 people—including two children under age 15—were charged for sharing the video filmed at the scene of the crime.ÌęThatÌęvideo,Ìę, was subsequently used as ammunition to condemn Islam and even to mock the victims’Ìętolerant views.

After the arrests, the murders continued to trouble the small community where they took place. The hanout owner, disturbed that his shop had been the site of such brutality, left it shuttered for more than two weeks. To guide and outfitter Mohamed Idhali, the valley he knew so well felt suddenly strange, full of unseen menace. For the first time in his life, he was scared to walk home in the dark. The fear coursing through the Imlil Valley wasn’t just visceral; it was also economic. A family from Denmark had reserved Idhali’s entire guesthouse for three days over New Year’s. After the murders, they cancelled, as did other groups. Imlil’s economy was increasingly entwined with tourism, and it seemed possible that the attacks, and the international publicity they received, could shatter the town. “I worried! I worried about the future,” IdhaliÌęsays.

He had reason to be concerned. “Tunisia used to be the example in the region, the ‘good student’ that everyone looked to,” Amine Ghoulidi told me. “The quality of hotels was outstanding, the service was impressive.” More than 400,000 British tourists visited Tunisia in 2014, but after a handful of widely publicized terrorist attacks, that number plummeted to just 28,000 in 2017. Egypt, where tourism was a cornerstone of the economy, saw visitation drop by two-thirds after the Arab Spring and subsequent political unrest. “Tourism is an extremely fragile industry,” Ghoulidi says.

On January 21, Maren Ueland’s funeral was held at her hometown’sÌęlocal parish church in Norway. Her family’s dog, an enormous Leonberger named Alf Herman, sat quietly in the front row.ÌęThe country’s minister of health, Bent Hoie, addressed the gathering. “We must continue to climb the mountains and paddle in the rivers,” he said. “We must continue to move freely and fearlessly into the world
like Maren did.”

By April—high season in the High Atlas—fears of a decimated tourism industry seemed unfounded. The Berber Family Lodge, Idhali’s guesthouse, was at capacity, and its owner bustled around the living room, stressed but smiling, a man keenly aware that he was at the mercy of TripAdvisor reviews. His guests that week included a pair of fit, efficient Germans; two Romanians working in Canada; and a Russian “digital nomad” who, after living in the Yucatán for the past five years, now identified as Mexican. Most of them had booked their trips before Jespersen and Ueland’s murders.

“Bad things happen all the time,” says Octavian Grecu, one of the Romanians. But he also admitted that he’d become preoccupied with the women’s murders. “I started reading a lot about terrorist cells and ISIS,” he says. “It got stuck in my head a little.” He’d decided to bring his bear spray with him from Canada to Morocco “for people, not bears. It’s good to have it on me. It makes me more relaxed.”

Grecu and several others had planned on hiking Toubkal the next day without a guideÌęand were alarmed when Idhali informed them that they would not be allowed to climb the mountain without official accompaniment.

“It should be free, it’s an open mountain!” Grecu said.

“An open mountain
with cutthroats,” another guest chimed in darkly.

“But if you want to dare it,“ Grecu replied.

Idhali shook his head. There were officials stationed at all the mountain approaches, he explained. Everyone in the village knew one another. If the guards saw an unaccompanied foreigner, or a Moroccan theyÌędidn’t recognize, they’d call the gendarmerie. A guide was an absolute necessity.

“Since when?” Grecu asked.

“Since
the problem,” Idhali said.

In recent years, Morocco has responded to threats against tourists by ramping up security. The police’s Brigade TouristiqueÌę, checking identity cards and arresting Moroccans for public drunkenness, theft, begging, and not having a guide license.ÌęAfter the murders in Imlil, authorities decreed that any foreigners who wanted to walk the Toubkal path would have to enlist a guide, even for short day hikes. There are now four checkpoints along the trail to the summit, mandatory stops where a uniformed official records your passport information and confirms your guide’s credentials. It’s also no longer possible to sleep in a tent on the mountain as Jespersen and Ueland did.

The strictness isn’t limited to Toubkal; there’s a new police checkpoint on the road leading into town, where gendarmes hand outÌętickets to people who aren’t wearing their seat belts. The stepped-up police presence has made Moroccans more conscientious about conforming to local laws lest they face hefty fines.ÌęThe new requirements were causing headaches, with many more visitors than available guides. That night, Idhali was on the phone for hours, attempting to line up a guide for Grecu and the others. (He finally found someone at 10 P.M.)

Generally speaking, the residents of Imlil preferred not to discuss the murders that had shaken their small community. “We try all the time to forget,” guide Lahcen Amerda told me.ÌęEven if it wasn’t spoken of, though, Imlil has changed in other, more subtle ways since “the problem.” Locals admitted to feeling a new wariness toward unfamiliar Moroccans. “It’s like we were sleeping before,” saysÌęAmerda. NowÌę“if you see someone and he is not from the valley, you see where he is going. If you see something that’s not normal, you can call the police.” I heard a story about a couple of Moroccan men on motorbikes who stopped a local man. They explained that they didn’t have the proper registration for their bikes and wanted to know if there was a way to evade the checkpoint at the entrance toÌętown so they wouldn’t get a ticket. The local man demurred. When the strangers were out of sight, he called the cops on them.

On a bright spring day, I traced Jespersen and Ueland’s steps from Imlil to Sidi Chamarouche. As per the new regulations, Idhali agreed to act as my guide. The path was packed with hikers of various ages and abilities, as well as mules laden with bags of gravel—construction materials for another new police checkpoint being erected along the trail.

There was no marker or memorial commemorating the place where the women had been killed, just a few tables where a handful of hikers sat drinking orange juice and looking out over the valley where birds swooped down between very old mountains. Idhali chatted with the hanout owner as I sat and thought about the last time I had been on this path. In 2007, when I was the same age as Jespersen, I spent a year living in Morocco. The most eventful moment of my hike up Toubkal that summer was when my two friends and I witnessed the birth of a baby goat. We rushed ahead to alert the goatherd, who seemedÌęamused at our wonder. I remember the slowly dawning realization that goat births were not as momentous for Moroccan goatherds as they were for American tourists. It was one of those travel moments when the world, in all its mundane dailiness, seemed suddenly new. Sometimes it felt as though I spent that whole year learning over and over again that I knew less than I thought I did.

Idhali stood up, ready to press on down the path, but I wanted to stay and think a little bit longer about Jespersen and Ueland—how open they seemed to the world, and how the saddest legacy would be if their deaths left the world more rigid, more suspicious, and more unlike them.

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The 911 call came in at 5:55 p.m. on September 29, 2012. A woman had fallen from a ledge in Rocky Mountain National Park; she was alive but unconscious. “I need an alpine mountain rescue team immediately,” said the woman’s husband, a slight quaver in his voice.

A middle-aged couple from the Denver area, Harold and Toni Henthorn had been celebrating their anniversary with a weekend trip to Estes Park when their afternoon hike turned tragic. As Harold’s cellphone battery dwindled, the dispatcher coached him through CPR protocol. Harold was calling from a remote location on the park’s Deer Mountain, about 2.5 miles from the trailhead and at the base of a roughly 150-foot cliff.

While he waited for first responders to reach him in the backcountry, Harold built a small fire and began texting family friends, according to , a 2017 book about the incident: Urgent
Toni is injured
in estes park
Fall from rock. Critical
requested flight for life. Emt rangers on way. At 6:25 p.m., he sent an update: Pulse 60, Resp 5. One hour later: Can’t find pulse.

It was close to 8 p.m. and dark by the time park ranger and EMT Mark Faherty neared the couple’s location, according to court documents. He picked his way over boulders and downed pines until he finally saw Harold feebly attempting chest compressions on his wife. When Faherty examined Toni, her pupils were fixed and dilated, and she had no pulse. Faherty convinced Harold to hike out with him that night, promising that the other rangers who had by this point arrived at the scene would stay with Toni’s body until daylight, when it could be safely removed. It took the two men—the grieving husband and the ranger—a little over two hours to make their way back to the trailhead.

At first, the accident seemed tragic in a routine way; many people fall to their deaths in national parks every year. But over the next few days, as Faherty dug deeper into the case, several things struck him as strange. For instance, the timeline Harold gave didn’t line up with the evidence. And other details seemed off, too, like how Harold insisted he’d given his wife CPR, but Faherty recalled that her lipstick had been unsmudged when he arrived on scene. Faherty asked Harold about his previous marriage. His first wife had died in an accident, Harold said. He was reluctant to talk about it.

Around the same time, Rocky Mountain National Park and other law enforcement agencies started getting letters and phone calls about Toni’s death. Some were anonymous, others came from people who identified themselves, but all made pretty much the same point: there was something suspicious about Toni’s death. Harold’s first wife had also died in an incident in a remote area, to which he’d been the only witness, some writers pointed out. “Sadly, there are many similarities to these two accidents,” one unsigned note read, according to the 2017 book . Thanks to generous insurance policies, Harold had been awarded more than half a million dollars after his first wife’s death. Toni was even more heavily insured. In Harold’s car, which had been impounded right after the accident, an investigator found a park map with the Deer Mountain trail highlighted and an X marking the spot where Toni fell.

The case had just gotten a lot more complicated. This was a suspicious death in the backcountry. Any day now, the area would get its first major snowfall, rendering the possible crime scene inaccessible for months. So Faherty called in the (ISB).

The elite special agents assigned to the ISB—the National Park Service’s homegrown equivalent to the FBI—are charged with investigating the most complex crimes committed on the more than 85 million acres of national parks, monuments, historical sites, and preserves administered by the National Park Service, from Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve to Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. They have solved homicides, tracked serial rapists hiding in the backcountry, averted kidnappings, and interdicted thousands of pounds of drugs. They’ve busted a reality TV host who and infiltrated theft rings trafficking in looted Native American artifacts. But the ISB remains relatively unknown to the general public and even to fellow law enforcement. Local cops and FBI agents are sometimes baffled when Yosemite-based ISB Special Agent Kristy McGee presents her badge in the course of an investigation. “They’ll say something like, ‘What do you guys investigate? Littering?’” she told me recently. Ìę

There’s a pervasive idea that crime doesn’t happen in our national parks, that these bucolic monuments to nature inspire visitors to be more noble, law-abiding versions of themselves. But parks are filled with people, and people commit crimes. Millions of visitors pass through national parks every year (Yosemite alone saw over 4 million visits last year), and despite the trill of birds and the majesty of the redwoods, they misbehave in ways that would be familiar to any big-city detective: they drive drunk, they rape, and they assault. “People who abuse their kids at home come to the park and they abuse their kids here,” McGee says.

The baroque, headache-inducing way jurisdiction functions in the United States means that, generally speaking, when crimes are committed on Park Service land, the county sheriff or local cops may not be in charge; the park service would be. There are more than a thousand park rangers with law enforcement training who handle most of the day-to-day trouble, but when a case gets serious, the ISB steps in. Sometimes their work is akin to that of the FBI: investigating crimes committed by some of the millions of park visitors. In other cases, the work is more like that of a small-town sheriff’s department: tips whispered at the grocery store, agents arresting people whose kids attend the same day care as theirs. “Yosemite is a small town,” ISB agent Steve Kim, who’s based in the California park, told me. “Which means it’s a minefield. And it helps knowing where the mines are.”

ISB agents face other challenges non-park cops don’t. While an FBI investigation can draw from a force of about 35,000 special agents, intelligence analysts, IT experts, and forensic technicians, there are precisely 33 ISB agents covering the entire United States. While frontcountry criminals usually have the courtesy to break the law indoors, the ISB’s crime scenes may be at the bottom of a steep cliff or in the middle of a rushing river. The perennial underfunding of the Park Service means that while FBI agents dress in sharp suits and travel to crime scenes in huge vans stuffed with high-tech equipment, ISB agents often have to lug their not-quite-state-of-the-art gadgetry through the woods on their backs—sometimes at night, in the rain.

But while the scrappy nature of the ISB is one of its major challenges, it is also, its agents insist, an advantage. “We have the best job, because we get to put all the pieces together,” McGee says. “If you’re working for the FBI, you might have a piece of the puzzle, but someone else might go do the interview, and someone else might do some other part [of the case]. That’s more efficient—you can get things done faster that way—but we just don’t have those resources. You go over the initial report. You’re involved with the evidence. You’re involved with each step of the investigation.”

As suspicion mounted around Harold Henthorn, the ISB’s regional office in Colorado took charge of the investigation. There are so few ISB agents covering so much ground that most of them work solo. In this case, the ISB “office of one” assigned to Rocky Mountain National Park was Beth Shott, a 20-year Park Service veteran with a graying ponytail, freckled arms, and a reassuring air of competence. Shott grew up in Long Island, went to art school, and got a job in advertising. When she became extremely stressed while working on a Teddy Grahams commercial, she decided it was time to make some drastic changes to her life. Shott bought a truck, moved out west, and eventually began picking up seasonal Park Service work. “Every six months it was a new park, a new adventure,” she said. Shott quickly realized that the best way to guarantee that she got to work in the backcountry was to take a law enforcement job, which meant getting certified at the federal law enforcement training facility in Georgia. “I asked myself, can I wear a bulletproof vest? Can I shoot someone if I need to? And the answer was yes.”

During her career as a law enforcement ranger, Shott discovered that she had a particular aptitude for investigations and applied for a job with the ISB. That’s how, more than 20 years after that Teddy Grahams commercial, she found herself retracing a dead woman’s steps along the Deer Mountain trail.

Harold had told Faherty that he and Toni had planned to hike to Bear Lake, a popular half-mile loop with a gentle grade. It was the couple’s 12th anniversary, and they were staying at the posh —the place that inspired Stephen King to write The Shining. But Bear Lake had been too crowded, Harold claimed, so they made a last-minute decision to hike Deer Mountain instead. This struck Shott as odd. Deer Mountain was a very different trail, a 6-mile out-and-back hike with more than 1,000 feet of elevation gain. As Shott would learn later, Toni had bad knees and wasn’t particularly outdoorsy; friends described her as more of a walker than a hiker.

The couple then made another strange, spontaneous decision. According to Harold, when the trail plateaued after a mile and a half, he and Toni veered into the woods in search of privacy for, “romantic time,” as prosecutors would later call it. A few days after Harold told this to Faherty, Shott thrashed her way through the underbrush, following their path as best she could. Clearly, this was not some unmarked but common alternative route; it was studded with stumpy pine trees, and the terrain made for hard going. Shott tried to imagine herself in Toni’s place: a woman in her fifties, married for more than a decade, suddenly so overcome by lust that she absolutely needed “romantic time” on this extremely uncomfortable ground. Shott hadn’t gone far before the trees closed in behind her and she could no longer see the trail.

Next, Shott scrambled up a slope to the rocky shelf where Harold claimed he and Toni had stopped for lunch. The trailless exploration was difficult and Shott moved gingerly over lichen-spotted boulders. Harold had said that, after lunch, Toni spied a flock of wild turkeys she wanted to photograph. Toni had allegedly picked her way down a channel full of loose rocks, so Shott did, too.

At the bottom of the slope, Shott found a small, flat stone outcropping with enough room for one person to stand comfortably. Like a crow’s nest, she later thought. In front of her, the sheer cliff face dropped about 150 feet, but the platform felt safe enough, with a short rocky ledge serving as a kind of barrier from the sheer drop. Harold’s story was that Toni had been posing for a picture, then toppled backward to her death. Peering over the edge where Toni fell, Shott felt dizzy. She’d later find the dead woman’s blood still visible on the ground below. According to the coroner, Toni had sustained a number of injuries serious enough to kill. “She fell so hard she punctured her breast implant,” Shott told me later. “She lacerated her liver. She was basically scalped. She had a cervical fracture that could have affected her breathing. Her head wound was massive. Do you know what exsanguinated means? She bled out. The coroner, when he did the autopsy, had a hard time getting a blood sample off her because she had no blood in her system.” The coroner estimated that Toni had died between 20 minutes and one hour after impact.

When Shott first heard Harold’s version of how his wife died, she was skeptical but thought that, despite the incongruities of his story, there was a slight chance things had happened the way he claimed. But after she followed in the couple’s footsteps, she made up her mind. The terrain was so unforgiving, the couple’s decisions so inexplicable, the story so improbable, that she was convinced: Toni didn’t fall. She was pushed. Shott just had to figure out how to prove it.

The ISB’s roots can be traced back to on Memorial Day weekend 1970 at Stoneman Meadow in Yosemite National Park. At the time, rangers were thought of as generalists, equally comfortable with enforcing rules, building trails, and leading nature walks. But when the hippies congregated in the meadow—getting naked, playing tag, doing drugs, camping without permits—the rangers realized they were in over their heads. On July 4, park officials put up signs announcing the closure of the meadow at 7 p.m. “due to extreme litter and noise.” But the crowds didn’t disperse.

It was two months to the day after the , and tensions in the park—and the nation—were running high. At the designated time, the rangers, who had little experience or training in dealing with crowds, charged in on horseback. They tackled protesters and beat them with batons; the crowd flung glass bottles back at them. A cloud of tear gas settled over the meadow. Eventually, the rangers retreated and called for backup from neighboring police departments. It was a high-profile debacle, and it left Park Service higher-ups convinced that the agency needed a more professional law enforcement presence.

Over subsequent decades, the NPS enlisted a growing number of armed law enforcement rangers charged with keeping order in the parks. But these rangers were largely the equivalent of city beat cops; they didn’t have the time or training to solve complicated cases. In 1976, Yosemite and Olympic National Park hired the Park Service’s first criminal investigation specialists. As crime rates on public land continued to rise, other parks began to hire their own special agents who worked cases, but only cases that took place in those specific parks. In 2003, the NPS decided to put all these new special agents under one roof, enabling them to travel across the country and assist with cases wherever they were needed. And so the ISB was born.

Today, the 33 special agents travel to any National Park Service area that requests their help; I witnessed one very patient ISB agent coach a rookie ranger through the procedure for handling a stolen wallet. Depending on the complexity of the case, ISB agents may partner with other federal agents—often from the FBI—or with other law enforcement rangers. Because Park Service land is federal, prosecutions that result from ISB investigations are mostly handled through the U.S. Attorney’s office.

Last August, I traveled to Yosemite National Park to meet up with Shott’s colleague, ISB special agent Jeff Sullivan, an affable, self-deprecating, 35-year veteran of the Park Service. Sullivan has played a role in investigating nearly every major crime and mystery that’s taken place in Yosemite over the past quarter-century, which made him the ideal guide for a tour of the shadowy side of America’s fifth most visited national park. See that grassy expanse, dotted with wildflowers? That’s where park visitors discovered the skull of a still-unidentified young woman, a murder claimed by the prolific serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. That lush meadow? Once, someone found a dead bear there, its head neatly severed from its body. (The ISB sent the bear’s remains to the park’s wildlife lab in Oregon, hoping to discover clues about who’d poached it. The lab called back a few weeks later: The poacher you’re looking for is a mountain lion.)

Sullivan and I drove up to Glacier Point, where he told me about the rockslide in 1996 that killed one and injured at least 11. The dust cloud it kicked up was so massive it blocked out the sun; until Sullivan arrived on the scene, he’d been sure there would be dozens of casualties. Next to us, a bored teenager flung a water bottle into the abyss. Watching it fall seemed to cause Sullivan physical pain. He leaned in close and flashed his badge at the kid. “Don’t throw water bottles,” he said quietly.

Yosemite’s ISB headquarters are located in an imposing stone building nicknamed the Fort. It’s one of the few ISB offices that houses multiple agents, who work in a cluttered office down the hall from the park’s 20-bed jail. The walls are decorated with taxidermied deer heads, evidence tags dangling from their antlers; they’re souvenirs from a decade-old poaching case.

ISB agents are a strange breed. They require a high tolerance for time alone in the backcountry—but because solving crimes typically comes down to getting information from people, they also need social skills. “I look for people who can talk to anybody,” Sullivan told me. Each of the half-dozen agents in the office was drawn to the job for different reasons. Kristy McGee, a petite blonde wearing cowboy boots, specialized in violent crime. “I had a very chaotic childhood. I was exposed to a lot of adult-natured things—drugs, abuse,” she told me. “I found a place where I can use that to relate to people.”

Steve Kim, who has salt-and-pepper hair and a degree in wildlife ecology, told me about how he had spent the summer of 1995 living the life of a dirtbag climber, when Yosemite put out a call asking climbers to help with a death investigation. While rappelling off the east ledges of El Capitan, looking for clues, Kim discovered that ISB work suited him—“It’s probably my obsessive-compulsive tendencies”—and never looked back.

Cullen Tucker, the office’s youngest agent at age 30, was born into the business; his dad is a former deputy chief ranger at Yosemite, and his mom was one of the park’s first female investigators. Thirty years ago, the case of the dead girl in the meadow (the one whose murder was claimed by Henry Lee Lucas) had been assigned to Cullen’s mom, Kim Tucker. With very little to go on, she hadn’t been able to identify the body. “I’ve never given up thinking about it,” she told me. Sullivan recently reassigned the cold case to her son.

Over the years, Sullivan has gone undercover as a sheep hunter to infiltrate a smuggling ring that was digging up Native American burial sites. He’s done backcountry stakeouts, waiting for the marijuana planters who hide their crops among the lush growth of Whiskeytown National Recreation Area. He’s hopped on a horse and spent a week looking for poachers in the farther reaches of Yosemite. He’s interviewed Yosemite serial killer Cary Stayner and mentored young special agents navigating their way through their first thorny criminal case. He’s clearly a man who loves his job. But Sullivan freely admits that being a special agent in the Park Service can have its downsides. The work of an ISB agent is often solitary; there’s a lot of paperwork and plenty of time spent steeped in humanity’s ugliness. An ISB agent died by suicide in 2010. “It threw us all for a loop,” Sullivan said. “We worry about that a lot. It’s a stressful job.”

The winter of 2012 descended on the Rockies a few weeks after Shott’s first hike up the Deer Mountain trail. Until the spring thaw made the putative crime scene accessible again, she had to work the case’s indoor angles. In April 2014, after working with a handful of other partners, she teamed up with Jonny Grusing, a lanky FBI agent. Together, they made a classic odd-couple team. “I’m from New York. He’s from Texas,” Shott told me when I met up with the two of them last year. “I curse; he doesn’t. I drink; he doesn’t.”

“I drink!” Grusing protested. “Sometimes I have a glass of wine after work!”

Together, they interviewed people who knew the Henthorns. From the outside, the relationship seemed almost flawless. Both Harold and Toni were well-off professionals—he was an entrepreneur who raised money for churches and charities; she was an ophthalmologist from an oil-rich family. They met on a Christian dating site in 1999. At the time, Toni was in her late thirties and eager to have a child. In Harold, she believed she’d met a hardworking man who shared her faith and her desire for a family. They married quickly and had a daughter in 2005. Friends and members of the family, many of them also devout Christians, told Shott that Harold was a devoted churchgoing man.

But when Shott pulled Harold’s tax records, she discovered that he hadn’t had a job or any steady source of income for well over a decade. She couldn’t find a website for his so-called business, or any clients, or any evidence that he’d ever done any consulting work at all. His career was apparently a fabrication. So where was he going, then, when he went on business trips? Shott got a warrant for records from Harold’s cellular provider and Grusing found that his phone regularly pinged a cell tower a few miles down the road from his house. “We took a map—this is just good old-fashioned police work—and we’re like, well, what’s there?” Shott told me. They zeroed in on a shopping center called Aspen Grove. Several people had already told Shott and Grusing that Harold loved Panera, so the sandwich chain was one of their first stops when they visited the mall. Sure enough, the restaurant’s former manager recognized a photograph of Harold right away. He’d eaten there often and usually stayed until closing, typing away on his laptop. She told the agents that he was such a difficult customer that she made sure to always take his order herself. “The other Panera people were scared of him,” Grusing told me. “He didn’t feel like he had to order. He would just show up and say, ‘I’m here,’ and they would run and find Kristine.”

The fake job was the first sign that Harold’s life wasn’t as idyllic as it seemed. Another one was the insurance money. Harold had claimed that both he and Toni had $1 million life insurance policies, with any proceeds earmarked for a trust in their daughter’s name. But when Shott sent a warrant to the insurance companies, she discovered that Harold had taken out two additional $1.5 million life insurance policies on Toni, listing himself as the beneficiary or trust administrator, without her knowledge. According to the paperwork, each was supposed to replace a previous policy—insurers won’t generally allow multiple policies on one person’s life because, as an expert said in Harold’s eventual trial, people with a lot of insurance tend to die—but that original policy had never been canceled. All told, Harold had $4.5 million in life insurance policies on his wife. But that wasn’t the only insurance surprise. Shott discovered that Harold had also taken out a secret $450,000 policy on his former sister-in-law—the ex-wife of his first wife’s brother—with himself as the beneficiary.

As the investigation progressed, Harold seemed to the investigators to grow more agitated. “He’s nothing more than a Barney Fife. He probably puts out fires and writes parking tickets,” he complained, according to The Accidents. But as the investigation uncovered more about Harold’s deceptions, some friends who had initially supported him slowly began to open up to Shott. They described a deeply controlling relationship—Toni, they alleged, couldn’t talk to her parents on the phone unless Harold was also on the line. They shared stories that struck them as sinister in hindsight and that they later testified to in court—such as how, a few months before Toni’s death, the couple had been working on their cabin in Grand Lake when Harold seemed to drop a huge beam on Toni, resulting in a traumatic back injury. If I hadn’t bent down after I walked outside, the beam would have killed me, Toni had told her mother at the time.

And then there was the story of Lynn Rishell, Harold’s first wife. After receiving the anonymous notes, Shott requested the case file from the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office. She learned that in 1995, Rishell had been helping Harold change a tire on a rural stretch of road when the car slipped off the jack and crushed her. She died later in the hospital. Harold was the only witness. He received more than $600,000 in life insurance, some of it taken out just a few months before. The county sheriff ruled Rishell’s death accidental, and her family had remained close with Harold. But after Toni’s death, the sheriff reopened the investigation. “The baffling circumstances surrounding Toni’s death gave us a strong sense of dĂ©jĂ  vu,” . “As the investigation into Toni’s death progressed, it became clear that Harold Henthorn was not the man we thought we knew, and that he had in fact been lying to us for many years.”

But the evidence against Harold was still almost entirely circumstantial, which Shott knew would make for a challenging trial. So, in the fall of 2014, once the scene was clear of deep snow, the FBI sent evidence response and special project teams to help Shott document the area for the investigation and for what they hoped would be the eventual trial. They loaded a pack of llamas with several hundred pounds of gear—water, hammocks, and the agency’s expensive laser camera—and trekked up Deer Mountain to set up camp near the crime scene.

“I think there were more FBI agents up here than there needed to be, just because they all wanted to come camp,” Shott told me. Some, she said, had never spent the night outside before. (“How do we eat?” Shott recalls one of them asking.) During the day, they used the laser camera to create a 3D model of the scene. But the computerized recreation looked like an image from a video game; it didn’t have any of the rugged drama of the actual location. Shott worried that a jury wouldn’t understand just how unlikely Harold Henthorn’s story was.

In November 2014, after a two-year investigation that was still ongoing, Henthorn was indicted on first-degree murder charges. He was taken into custody, and his daughter was sent to live with longtime family friends.

Shott began to prepare for what she knew would be a high-profile trial. “This is the kind of case you wake up in the middle of the night obsessing about. It’s all-consuming,” she told me. “How do we prove it? And how do we boil it down to a three-week trial?” She consulted with a forensic anthropologist to see if there was any way to determine from Toni’s injuries whether she’d fallen or been pushed. What if they tossed a dead pig off the cliff so they could study its injuries?Ìę(“A pig we didn’t like,” Grusing joked. “Not a nice pig.”) But the anthropologist didn’t think it would be helpful. Instead, Shott hiked the Deer Mountain trail over and over again—with her FBI partners, with the federal prosecutors assigned to the case, on her own. She took three trips using GoPros to gain new perspectives. She got a special permit for an operator to fly a drone in the park to further document the site. On one visit, the winds were so strong that she and another park ranger with her had to turn back for fear that they’d get blown off the ledge. She couldn’t shake the gnawing worry that she’d missed something, some crucial clue, some path through the woods that the defense would present at trial, blindsiding her. Overall, Shott made at least 15 trips over three years, picking her way up and down the scree slopes, trying to imagine what Toni had been thinking and feeling that day. She never once made it to the summit.

Harold Henthorn went on trial for Toni’s murder in September 2015 at the federal courthouse in downtown Denver. There was still no physical evidence that could establish that Toni was pushed, so the prosecution’s case hinged on proving to the jury that Harold was a man with a secret life, who was financially dependent on the wife he’d been lying to for years.

Shott took the stand toward the end of the trial. She’d testified a half-dozen times before, but this was her first murder trial, and it felt different, heavier. The jury had already heard most of the state’s case against Harold by this point. Shott laid out various pieces of the puzzle: her assessment of the scene, the time stamps on the digital photographs Harold took, and the text messages he sent. The jury was allowed to pose questions, and they learned that another place Harold claimed to have had “romantic time” was on the rocky crow’s nest. One jury member wanted clarification: Really? There? Yes, Shott said.

On September 21, the verdict came back: guilty of first-degree murder. As Harold was led out of the courtroom, Lynn Rishell’s brother, Eric, , “Goodbye, Harold!”

The following year, then–Attorney General Loretta Lynch presented Shott and the other key players in the case with a , the second-highest honor given by the Justice Department for employee performance. “Due to their dedication, painstaking work and powerful trial presentation, the recipients did what many thought was impossible by obtaining a conviction in this difficult and wholly circumstantial case,” the citation noted.

By the time the award was presented, Shott was back to her regular ISB work, sifting through hard drives and recovering deleted files. One child pornography case that took place in Grand Canyon National Park was particularly soul-demolishing; something in her gave way and it became clear that she could not look at one more image of a child being violated. In January 2017, she left the ISB for a new job as deputy chief of the National Park Service’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

In August 2017, though, Shott agreed to return to her old stomping grounds to hike the Deer Mountain trail with me. FBI agent Grusing came along, too, and so did two of the assistant U.S. attorneys who prosecuted the case. It was something of a valedictory hike; on July 26, a federal appeals court affirmed Harold’s conviction. Later, in 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court would decline to hear Harold’s appeal for a new trial, meaning that, barring some extraordinary circumstance, he’ll be in federal prison for the rest of his life.

We were all breathing hard by the time we turned off the main trail and headed into the woods. We picked our way through the scrub, passing the flat spot where the FBI agents had camped out, and then the lunch spot, where the views Toni and Harold had enjoyed were spectacular. Grusing played us all a voicemail he’d received the day Harold Henthorn was found guilty, left by then–FBI Director James Comey: “Hey, Jonathan, this is Director Comey calling
I wanted to thank you for an extraordinary piece of work, so extraordinary it makes me proud to be working at the FBI, because we’re doing that kind of quality work.”

“Oh my God, that’s so cool,” Shott said. “I thought you were bullshitting. That was really Comey.”

Then we scrambled down the slope, and I found myself in the narrow space where Toni Henthorn had stood five years earlier. “So this is the fall spot,” Shott said briskly. “Well, she falls into a tree, and there’s blood and hair in the tree, and the branches are broken. Be really careful here,” she warned me. I’ve never been particularly afraid of heights, but I could bring myself to peek over the edge only briefly; I couldn’t stop imagining what it might’ve felt like when Toni toppled over the edge. It made my head spin.

It was a relief when we reversed course and began to make our way back to the main trail. Shott started telling me about how, on some of her trips out to the site, she’d think about what she might have asked Toni: You’re a smart, beautiful, accomplished woman, she’d imagine herself saying, and this man was such a liar, such a bully. You must have seen that. Why didn’t you leave? She began answering her own questions—they had a daughter; Toni already had one failed marriage; Harold was supremely manipulative—but then she stopped herself. Too much speculation about things you’ll never know can drive you crazy, as any ISB agent could probably tell you. But as we picked our way among the fallen trees, away from the forlorn spot where a man had shoved his wife off a cliff, I understood why someone like Shott might keep asking. When your job takes you deep into the woods, of course you’re always looking for a path that might lead you out.

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The thing to drink at , a sprawling, partially subterranean, cavelike bar in the Chihuahuan Desert at the edge of Texas’s Big Bend National Park, was the Mind Eraser. A concoction favored by the owner, a 50-year-old former engineer named Glenn Felts, the Eraser consisted of “hefty portions of vodka and Kahlua topped with club soda,” according to La Kiva’s website. It was to be “inhaled through a straw from the bottom up as fast as possible.” It was a fitting cocktail for Terlingua, a former ghost town turned ramshackle tourist paradise.

The town, which sits at the southernmost tip of one of Texas’s largest and least populated counties, 12 miles from the Rio Grande and the Mexican border, flourishes during the high season from November to March, when most of the park’s 340,000 annual visitors pass through. But Terlingua’s year-round population is well under a thousand—the 2010 Census put it at just 58—a small clutch of raft guides, seekers, and lost souls looking for a new start. They chose a good place for it. Most people don’t ever get to see the Milky Way smeared across the sky; in Terlingua, it greets you almost every night.

La Kiva’s staff rule book included a joking reminder that servers should cut off Felts, their boss, after ten Mind Erasers. Felts had spent several years more or less on the wagon, but in recent months he’d begun drinking regularly again—especially on slow nights, when the tourists were gone. February 3, a cold Monday following the Super Bowl, was such an evening. The half-dozen people clustered around the bar were his friends and employees, and Felts was “fired up,” recalls one friend, who asked not to be named. Felts’s girlfriend, Rachel Manera, an artist living in the nearby town of Alpine, had just agreed to move in to his apartment behind the bar, and he was planning on gathering up her stuff in his pickup truck the next morning.

At some point in the night, Felts started throwing down shots with another of his buddies, a 37-year-old river guide named Tony Flint. The two men were physical opposites: Felts was a slight, wiry man with a wide, elfin grin and a mop of curly blond hair, while the thickly bearded Flint had the kind of build that regularly got him compared to a teddy bear. Felts was a generous host, and his friends often drank for free. According to a witness, a cell-phone video that’s now in police custody shows the two men drinking together that night. According to the person who saw the video, the two men are drunk, loud, affectionate, physical with one another. “I love you, man,” Felts reportedly tells Flint. When the bartender and cook left, not long after midnight, the two men were still at the bar together.

Early the next morning, a La Kiva employee named Jill Jones showed up to start a fire in the barbecue pit and noticed a man sprawled facedown near the bar’s entrance. This didn’t strike her as particularly remarkable; she assumed he was a regular who had gotten too wasted to walk home. Inside the bar, the lights and music were still on, and Felts was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t until she looked for him at his house and noticed that his bed hadn’t been slept in that she realized something was wrong. She went back to check the man in the parking lot. It was Felts. He was shirtless, and his skull was crushed.

A few hours later, the Brewster County sheriff’s office and the Texas Rangers who investigated the incident determined that Felts’s death . They arrested Tony Flint and charged him with first-degree murder.

Terlingua was founded as a quicksilver mining town in the 1880s, but by 1942, both the mines and the town were abandoned. The rare, intrepid tourist still sought the place out for its miners graveyard, which features tin-can funeral wreaths and rough wooden crosses.“In a landscape which wind and weather have ravaged and the sun of thousands of years has bleached to the color of pepper, this is a place of roofless adobe houses, abandoned machinery and a cemetery,” one visitor wrote in 1956. “From Terlingua the vast solitude goes on for some hundreds of miles.”

These days the town has two tiny grocery stores, one gas station, and four bars. Few people in town have TVs, cell-phone signals falter, and the nearest Target is 250 miles away. Terlingua isn’t on the way to anywhere, and a partial list of local hazards includes the menacing afternoon sun, inch-long mesquite thorns, tarantulas, scorpions, vinegaroons, camel spiders, rattlesnakes, abandoned mine shafts, alcoholism, poverty, and the border’s potential for sudden violence.

But despite—or perhaps because of—its forbidding aspects, the area has a certain allure. Tourism is the major industry. Visitors come to Big Bend National Park to canoe the Rio Grande, hike in the Chisos Mountains, or just sit around getting acquainted with the constellations. Most people pass through briefly, but some find that they are unwilling or unable to leave.

Terlinguans are daytime drunks, artists, retirees with tricked-out RVs, Vietnam vets, mountain bikers, river guides, amateur geologists, paranoiacs, straw-bale builders, and park rangers. There are probably several hundred actual residents, give or take, depending on the season. (Certainly, no one agrees with the 2010 Census population figure of 58. Census takers, like all government workers, have a tricky time in Terlingua; in 2000, a woman collecting census data was bitten by a resident’s pet javelina and reportedly quit on the spot.)

Without much help or interference from the institutions of mainstream society, Terlinguans have a long tradition of managing—and entertaining—themselves. For fun they host Chihuahua races or build giant volcanoes with propane-fueled lava flows. Most parties are costumed. If you want to be left alone, it’s a good place for that, too: while Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was hiding out in a Montana cabin in the eighties, his brother, David, slept in a hand-dug hole while building a cabin in Terlingua, his own sanctuary from the fallen world.

Despite Terlingua’s outlaw reputation, locals are protective of their home and of each other. I asked Betty Moore, 71, who’s been a Terlingua resident since the early eighties, if Felts’s death had changed her feelings about the town. “This has always been a safe place,” Moore said as we talked in the bookshop of the Terlingua Trading Company, which she manages. “Nobody here locks their doors. I never thought about the possibility of harm coming to me here. That’s one reason people are so heartbroken. It wasn’t supposed to happen here.”

In the late seventies, a handful of people began reoccupying the ghost town’s ruins. One of the early arrivals was Gil Felts, Glenn’s uncle. Gil was a visionary, a former social-studies teacher, and an Army vet who came to Terlingua to build the bar of his dreams in the middle of the desert.

He wore showy hats and walked around town with a scarlet macaw perched on his shoulder. The bar he created was as odd and compelling as he was, with cauldrons of cow bones in the corner and a huge cast-iron pot in place of a urinal. West Texans like to cultivate their eccentrics, so La Kiva quickly became the place to exchange news, have a beer, and scrub the Chihuahuan Desert dust off your skin. For a few years, La Kiva had the only showers in town.

For his famous Halloween parties, Gil would somehow convince his staff to don scandalously small feather costumes. At a going-away gathering for a park ranger known for his dreadlocks and cutoff shorts, everyone showed up with mops on their heads and their jeans shorn at the knee. The only band in town was the Terlingua All Stars, who played an incongruous banjo-infused reggae that people would dance to all night.

When Gil died in 1989, Terlinguans expected La Kiva would be sold. But then Glenn, Gil’s nephew, an electrical engineer from Dallas, stopped by to get a taste of the place. “He saw what a good time we were having, so the family decided to keep it,” explains Paul Wiggins, 65, a silversmith who moved to the area in the 1970s. At first, Terlinguans were skeptical—Gil was an especially hard act to follow, and Glenn sounded like an emissary from the straight world. He had attended MIT, after all. In photographs from those days, his hair is office-job short, and he has the innocent, open face of someone who has no idea what he’s getting into.

But it didn’t take long for Glenn Felts to endear himself to the community. Once the engineering job was behind him, he quickly transitioned to full dropout mode, growing his curly hair long and adapting to the Terlingua lifestyle. “I think he liked it because he could be himself, and because he could do whatever he wanted,” says Manera, his girlfriend. He put his engineering skills to work tinkering with La Kiva.

Aesthetically, Felts kept La Kiva much as his uncle had left it—although “there weren’t as many bones as there used to be,” Moore says. Felts retained his uncle’s beloved Penisaurus erectus, a skeleton of a fictitious creature with a prominent erection. A music fanatic, Felts brought bands from as far as Russia and instituted a popular weekly open mic. His happy hours were a seven-days-a-week tradition for many Terlinguans. “He felt like his mission in life was to provide a space for people to have a good time,” Manera says. That included much more than just running the bar. Felts also hosted events, helped people build their houses, and made regular donations to feed hungry local families—in short, he served as a generally benevolent and consistent presence in an often transient community.

Over the years, the world shrank and more visitors came to Terlingua. Some residents complained that the ghost town was starting to feel like a Looney Tunes version of the Wild West. But La Kiva, a few miles up the road from the Terlingua Ghost Town, the area’s tourist epicenter, remained a refuge for locals. The bar was also an economic hub for the community; nearly everyone I spoke with in the two weeks I spent in Terlingua this winter had worked there at some point, whether for a week or for years.

La Kiva was never a strong moneymaker, but increased tourism meant that Felts’s finances had improved enough in recent years that he could finally treat himself to a vacation last summer. He visited Europe and became smitten with Wimbledon. Back in Terlingua, he made plans to build a tennis court in the desert scrub behind the bar, jokingly soliciting charter members for the La Kiva Country Club. Manera, a fiercely independent artist, finally agreed to move in with him—a major decision, since she hadn’t lived with a romantic partner since the nineties. “When I hooked up with Glenn, my life was catapulting in a different direction than I’d ever experienced,” she says. “I didn’t want to be one foot in, one foot out. I wanted to commit to it.” In photographs from months before his death, Felts sports the blissed-out grin of a guy who is exactly where he wants to be.

When Tony Flint took a seasonal job in 2009 as a river guide at , a well-regarded Terlingua-based outfitter, he quickly became one of La Kiva’s regulars. Friends estimate that he was at the bar at least five nights a week.

Flint grew up in Missouri, where he was famous among friends and neighbors for building elaborate treehouses. Flint attended Missouri State on a football scholarship, but his sports career was derailed by a shoulder injury. He graduated with a degree in geology but was uninterested in a desk job, so he opted for the nomadic life of a professional river guide, spending summers on the Salt in Arizona and winters along the Rio Grande.

Flint was known for his size—friends called him Big Tony or Big T—his giant beard, and his equally large sense of humor. He was recalled fondly by many people who had spent time on boats with him, including a commenter on the Tony Flint Support Group Facebook page named Raiffie Bass, who said he took a four-day raft trip on Colorado’s Green River with Flint in the summer of 2013.

“Hands down the most magnetic, fun loving guide on the trip was Tony Flint,” Bass posted following Flint’s arrest. “Every day when we would pick our rafts, all the kids would fight to get into Tony’s. He was a big kid in his element. He taught them about the river, ecosytem, geology, plants, fish, and wildlife. He taught them about petroglyphs and ancient cultures. He taught them about life. He worked his ass off to make our family trip a memorable experience.”

Like many of his fellow guides, Flint’s home in Terlingua was ad hoc. Officially, he lived in a tent behind Far Flung’s office, but he spent many nights crashing on other people’s couches or staying at a friend’s house in the old mining claim.

River guides’ erratic schedules, peripatetic lifestyles, and occasional brushes with death create a special kind of camaraderie. “Those people are like my family,” says Jenny Schooler, 32, a fellow Terlingua river guide. “Or closer even, because there are things I told them that I’d never say to my family.”

The rafting family’s living room was the bar at La Kiva, where they drank Mind Erasers, told stories, and got rowdy and, occasionally, naked. “That’s just the culture that we were in. Just stupid drunken belligerent dumbness,” Schooler says. “But it was always in good fun. If anyone tried to start trouble, we always had each other’s backs.”

That kind of freedom is seductive, but it can also become its own kind of trap. Poverty-level wages, a hard-drinking culture, and rootless living can start to wear after a while. Last fall, Flint was offered a job as operations manager, which meant that he would serve as a liaison between management and guides. It wasn’t exactly his dream job, but he signed on anyway, even though it meant spending more time in the office than on the river. “He was looking for a different thing in his life,” Schooler says.

On the morning of February 4, word spread quickly through the tight-knit community: Glenn Felts was found dead in front of his bar. Within 15 minutes of the news breaking, more than 300 people vented their shock, horror, and disbelief on . When Flint was arrested and charged with first-degree murder later that day, it was another blow. “I didn’t think this could get any worse. Tony is a friend to many of us who loved Glenn,” an anonymous Terlinguan told Marfa Public Radio that day. “I just keep hoping this is all a bad dream.” La Kiva immediately closed for business and is currently up for sale by Felts’s family.

The details of what happened the night of February 3 are still unclear, and much information will stay under wraps until a grand jury meets to decide whether to indict Flint. That could happen as soon as this month; if Flint is indicted, a trial won’t happen for months. Flint made bail with a $200,000 bond on February 25. According to the conditions of his release, he must wear an ankle monitor and refrain from drugs and alcohol. He is not allowed within 30 miles of the U.S.–Mexico border, which effectively bans him from Terlingua. The Houston Chronicle that he is working at a ranch near Fort Stockton.

According to a couple of La Kiva staffers who worked the night of Felts’s death, at midnight the two men were happily drinking together. Flint later admitted to deputies that both he and Felts had gotten exceedingly drunk—so much so that he’d had to help Felts out of the bar. According to the probable-cause affidavit, Flint said that both men had fallen down outside La Kiva’s entryway and that Flint had hurt his right hand and the left side of his face. Flint claimed he then drove home, leaving Felts on a rock there.

But according to deputies, there are problems with Flint’s story. The injuries to his face and hand were “consistent with being involved in a fight,” deputy Sean Roach wrote in the affidavit. Flint’s account of what he was wearing that night differed from other witness statements. And the area outside the bar where Flint said Felts fell looked like the “location of an obvious altercation,” according to the affidavit.

In the immediate aftermath of Flint’s arrest, many Terlinguans assumed Felts’s death was an accident. But as rumors circulated about the details of the crime scene, Flint lost sympathy in town. According to court documents, when deputies found Felts his face was smashed, his shirt was missing, and his body had been dragged more than 100 feet through the dirt. Felts’s shirt was found with blood on it at the house where Flint was staying, which prosecutors cited as evidence of an attempted cover-up. Perhaps, several people theorized to me, a too drunk Felts said or did something that triggered a too drunk Flint, causing him to snap.

When I spoke with sheriff Ronny Dodson, he told me that Flint “claimed that he was blackout drunk and had no recollection” of how the night ended. That defense hasn’t won him sympathy with his neighbors. “Half the town is drunker than snot 24 hours a day, and they don’t kill anybody,” said Debra Reynolds, a middle-aged Terlinguan transplant from Kentucky.

Terlinguans tend to be fairly police averse, but shortly after the incident some called up the prosecution and recounted times when Flint’s behavior had been concerning. Others wondered whether they had missed warning signs. “He was a man we had befriended and indulged a little bit,” one Terlinguan, who wishes to remain anonymous, told me. “He had a troubled side, but he always seemed to keep it in check.”

In the weeks after his arrest, more accounts of that troubled side began to emerge. A Marfa resident who attended a raucous bachelor party in Terlingua in 2012 recalls Flint showing up with friends and a jar of homemade blueberry vodka. As the night wore on and everyone got progressively drunker, Flint became aggressive to the point that he was asked to leave. “He was just big and booming, you know?” recalled the Marfan, who also asked to not be named. “He definitely felt threatening.”

Rob Carpenter, 45, a Terlinguan transplant from Kansas City, had an encounter with Flint about a month before Felts’s death. One crowded night at La Kiva, Carpenter was using the urinal when he was shoved from behind. He turned, expecting to see a friend, but instead saw Flint, whom he hardly knew. When Carpenter returned to his table, Flint followed him, pulled up a chair, and stared him down “with a big shit-eating grin on his face,” Carpenter recalls. “I’ve been a bouncer at some of the biggest bars in Kansas City, and I know what bar fights look like. This guy was trying to pick a fight. He had a chip on his shoulder and was just waiting for someone to knock it off.” But before anything could happen, one of Flint’s friends approached. Within minutes the two were engaged in a drunken tussle by the bar.

After Flint’s arrest, Carpenter posted his account on Facebook. “I must say! Tony was NOT a gentle giant! He is a bully!” he wrote. Carpenter says he has since been approached by a few other Terlinguans who had experienced or witnessed minor acts of bullying by Flint—how he got drunk and inappropriate with a woman at the bar, how he smacked someone’s pet puppy. “But they’re all too scared to come out and say anything,” Carpenter says.

Another Terlinguan who asked to remain nameless recalled seeing Flint outside a party: he was kicking a plastic trash can with such force that it crumpled. “To have witnessed such an intense flash of anger against the backdrop of music and laughter was unsettling, but I figured that it was better to strike out at an inanimate object than to butt heads with whoever or whatever had caused this emotional reaction,” she said in an e-mail. “When I heard that Tony had been arrested for the murder of Glenn Felts, it took me back to that moment.”

Of course, the gulf between drunken micro-aggression and murder is a big one. A strong and vocal part of the community, mostly consisting of Flint’s river-running coworkers, continues to support him. Most maintain that Felts’s death must have been an accident. They know Big Tony well and had never seen a hint of malice in his behavior before.

In the days after Flint’s arrest, his friends and family initiated an online campaign to raise money for his defense. The is full of hundreds of messages from fellow guides, former clients, and elementary-school friends. A typical one calls Flint “a beautiful human being with a good heart who happens to be in a difficult situation.” Flint couldn’t access the Internet from jail, so his sister printed and mailed them. Several of his fellow rafting guides, most of them women, drove up to Alpine a few days after his arrest to visit him in jail. They even lifted their shirts and gave Big Tony a “12-titty salute” to cheer him up.

Two weeks after Felts’s death, the Brewster County district attorney, Rod Ponton, visited Terlingua’s Family Crisis Center for a Far West Texas version of a press conference. A slow-speaking man in a gleaming, dust-free white cowboy hat, Ponton mostly just said that he couldn’t say anything; his investigator, in an equally bright good-guy hat, lingered silently in the doorway.

If Flint does get indicted, he will feature in the biggest murder trial in Brewster County history. Conscious of the power of gossip in a small community, presiding judge Roy Ferguson had already issued a protective order instructing the prosecutors and the defense to keep a tight lid on information relating to the trial. “We’re not here to talk about who did or did not do a particular thing,” the Crisis Center’s director, Mike Drinkard, carefully told attendees. The dozen or so Terlinguans who showed up hoping for answers drifted out of the room. Half an hour later, Ponton was gone and a larger crowd gathered, drawn by rumors of pizza.

The happiest dogs in the world live in Terlingua. As they trotted around us, Drinkard’s son, Clayton, a Crisis Center volunteer and self-described full-time revolutionary, told me that what has happened in his town is a classic example of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock: “Glenn getting killed, La Kiva getting shut down, a lot of people losing their jobs—it’s an entire restructuring of the community,” he says. No surprise, then, that people are reacting with shock, confusion, and anger.

Mike Drinkard says that, in the past, deaths in the community have brought people together. “The ones that don’t like each other remember they do like each other, and petty differences don’t matter anymore.” But in the weeks after Felts’s death and Flint’s arrest, the community fractured. For some, supporting Flint felt like betraying Felts. Others saw abandoning Flint to the justice system as a betrayal of the community’s ethos of mutual support.

“The desert eats violent people,” Paul Wiggins had inquiring about the Unabomber’s brother. When I asked Wiggins if he still believed that to be the case, he sighed. “This was a hard place to live in 1968. You had to figure out where the other human beings were and how to get along with them,” he said. “Now it’s turned into kind of a scene. The mainstream is getting closer, it’s getting easier to be here, and that’s changing the place, bringing the best and worst of what dense human society has to offer. We’re a little unprepared for that.”

The last night that Rachel Manera spent with Glenn Felts, they took a sunset walk along the edge of La Kiva’s property. Manera spotted an unusual piece of debris blown up against the fence; it turned out to be an old sign dating back to La Kiva’s earliest days. SLOW, it said, in the bar’s signature red wooden letters. It seemed beautifully appropriate, the universe instructing Manera to take time to savor what she’d found in this seemingly inhospitable place. Manera loaded the sign into her truck, along with a few cottonwood stumps and some rock and plaster debris from La Kiva’s former showers; she planned to use them all in an installation. Now they sit in her studio. So far she hasn’t been able to bring herself to touch them.

Manera spent Valentine’s Day at the Brewster County Courthouse in Alpine, listening to the judge spell out the conditions of Flint’s possible release on bond. She knew she might be called to the stand to argue against allowing Flint to return to Terlingua. “I didn’t really want to have anything to do with the hearing,” she says. “But I thought, if the situation were reversed, what would Glenn do? Glenn would go there.”

That day was the first time Manera had seen Flint since Felts’s death. “There was a part of me that wanted to see him eye-to-eye, to be a physical presence of what’s left,” she says. When he entered the courtroom, the shackled, clean-shaven Flint stared straight ahead, making eye contact only with the judge. As Manera listened to the lawyers parse out the case in their oddly formal language, the reality of what had happened hit her: “I just sat there thinking, This isn’t my life—and then remembering, No, it is. You’re here because Glenn was murdered.”

With La Kiva shuttered and no one knowing when or if it will reopen, the bartenders and waitstaff are scrambling to find new ways to make ends meet. Despite the sudden chaos and grief, they’ve managed to keep the community’s vital traditions going. One La Kiva regular has created his own approximation of the bar’s beloved happy hour, hosting private sunset gatherings at the Passing Wind, an open-air speakeasy near the old ghost town that looks like a desert-beached pirate ship. There, as the afternoon sun tints the mountains red, Terlingua’s dogs race in joyful circles and friends of Felts and friends of Flint and friends of both Felts and Flint cautiously come together to discuss things they might have talked about before—bike rides, gossip, plans for future parties.

In late February, La Kiva’s bartenders and staff ducked under the crime-scene tape blocking off the bar’s entrance to clean the place up. It was time for the Terlingua family to throw Glenn Felts one last party. The whole town showed up, as did people who hadn’t been seen in years. Felts’s parents and sister were in town, too. “They are one of those rare things,” Manera says. “A very loving, very functional American family.”

Everyone brought food and did their part to drink up the bar’s remaining alcohol stores. A dozen bands and musicians came and played, and as the sun dipped low the sound of music drifted out across the Chihuahuan Desert. Terlinguans and former Terlinguans and wannabe Terlinguans stood talking under the cottonwood trees that Gil Felts planted when he settled in this hard country 30 years ago. “It was a party—the last hurrah. There were so many people there. It was the last time [La Kiva] would be in a Glenn-spirited fashion,” Manera told me. Then she got quieter. “But it was bittersweet. People getting drunk—it’s too much for me right now.”

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