Remains of lost American explorer identified by DNA

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SALT LAKE CITY -- One of Utah's most enduring mysteries has been solved. DNA evidence released Thursday confirms that a young man, who became a legend and a folk hero after he disappeared, was actually murdered, and his body was carefully hidden for 75 years.

The secret was hidden in a crevice of rock, apparently known to only a single Navajo man for decades. Eventually he shared the secret with his granddaughter, and last year she shared it with her brother. He spoke in a telephone news conference Thursday.

"I looked in the crevice and I saw the top of the skull there," Denny Bellson explained.

That's very near to the end of the story. The beginning was in 1934 when Everett Ruess disappeared. He was a 20-year-old artist and poet who had spent four years exploring the canyons with his burros.

"[He] wrote magnificent letters about his impressions of the red rock country," said W.L. "Bud" Rusho, author of "Everett Ruess, A Vagabond for Beauty."

Rusho wrote the book about the vanished vagabond 25 years ago. Diane Orr made a movie called "Lost Forever, Everett Ruess" about the search for Ruess 10 years ago.

"What drives the search for Everett Ruess is the search for the spirit of the wilderness, the fact that he had this incredible ecstatic experience of the landscape, and people want to share that," Orr said.

Ruess disappeared in the canyons south of Escalante and was never heard from again. According to the Navajo siblings who found the bones, their grandfather claimed to have seen two Ute Indians chasing a white man in 1934.

**Who is Everett Ruess?** ![](http://media.bonnint.net/slc/1105/110567/11056718.jpg)Everett Ruess was a young artist and adventurer who set out alone to explore and experience the American West during the 1930s. In November 1934, at the age of twenty, Everett disappeared near Escalante, Utah, and was never seen again. His disappearance remained a mystery until his remains were found this year. Ruess is well-known for his collection of letters, essays, and poems, drawings and paintings of the west.

The story is told in the latest issue of National Geographic Adventure by reporter David Roberts. "The Utes knocked him off the burro and killed him, and the grandfather carried the body up to the crest of comb ridge and buried it in a rock crevice," Roberts explained.

In that same phone conference, scientists explained how the bones matched up perfectly with old photos of Ruess taken by famed photographer Dorothea Lange. They also obtained DNA from the bones.

"The DNA evidence is irrefutable that the bone is a close blood relative of the nieces and nephews who are surviving," said Dr. Kenneth Krauter, of the University of Colorado.

"They're probably right, much as I hate to say it," Rusho said.

Rusho and Orr are having trouble swallowing the solution to the mystery. Ruess's bones were found 60 miles from where he disappeared, across some of the most rugged land on the planet, the opposite direction from where Ruess told his family he was heading.

"It's very puzzling. Bud's right, it opens new questions," Orr said.

Another puzzlement is the so-called "burro problem." Searchers recovered Ruess's burros shortly after he disappeared. So whose burros did he have, 60 miles away, on the day he was murdered? A mystery this good isn't giving up its answers easily.

E-mail: jhollenhorst@ksl.com