Leah Roberts

In March 2000, a twenty-three-year-old woman from Durham, North Carolina, packed up her white 1993 Jeep Cherokee, put her cat in the passenger seat, and set off across the country.

She left a note for her family. It explained that she was going on a journey. And to make sure no one misunderstood, she wrote a line that her brother and sister would remember for the rest of their lives: I’m not suicidal. I’m the opposite.

She was looking for something — freedom, meaning, the open road. She’d been reading Jack Kerouac. She drove west.

Five days later, her Jeep was found wrecked at the bottom of an embankment in the mountains of Washington State, three thousand miles from home. Leah was not inside.

She has never been found.

Leah

Leah Toby Roberts was born in Durham in 1976. She grew up with an older sister, Kara, and an older brother, Heath. She was bright, curious and creative, with a love of music, writing and travel. She studied Spanish and anthropology at North Carolina State University.

Her early twenties were filled with loss. When she was seventeen, her father was diagnosed with a serious chronic lung illness. During her sophomore year in college, her mother died suddenly. In the fall of 1998, Leah was badly injured in a serious car accident. In the spring of 1999, her father died.

By early 2000, Leah had dropped out of college, just months short of graduating. Her siblings worried about her. They thought she was grieving and searching. She told them she wanted to see the country and figure out what she wanted.

The Journey

According to bank records, Leah left Durham in early March 2000. She stopped at a motel near Memphis, then drove west along Interstate 40, and later north along Interstate 5 through California and Oregon. Shortly after midnight on March 13, she bought gas in the small town of Brooks, Oregon. Surveillance footage from the station showed her alone, and apparently fine.

Later that same day, she was in Bellingham, Washington, a college town near the Canadian border. A ticket stub later showed she went to see the movie American Beauty at a mall there.

Two people at a restaurant in the area later said they had spoken with her. One of them said she left with a man named Barry. No one else was ever able to confirm that.

The Jeep

On March 18, 2000, Leah’s white Jeep Cherokee was found at the bottom of an embankment off Canyon Creek Road, in the mountains east of Bellingham. It appeared to have crashed down the slope. Leah was not there.

What investigators found in and around the Jeep was very strange.

There was no sign that anyone had been injured in the crash. No blood. Blankets had been hung over the windows, as if someone had been sheltering inside. Some of Leah’s belongings — her passport, her guitar, her clothes — were scattered in the woods nearby. But other valuable things had been left behind in the Jeep: about $2,500 in cash and some jewelry. Under a floor mat was her late mother’s engagement ring.

Investigators came to suspect that the crash might have been staged — that someone had pushed or driven the Jeep off the road to make it look like an accident.

Leah’s cat, Bea, was never found either.

The Cut Wire

Searches in the area, with dogs, metal detectors and helicopters, found no trace of Leah. Because the Jeep was found on federal land, the FBI joined the investigation. But the case went cold.

Then, in 2006, detectives reviewing the case took a closer look at the Jeep. They discovered something that had been missed before: a wire under the hood had been cut, in a way that would have allowed the vehicle to accelerate on its own, without anyone in the driver’s seat. They also found a fingerprint under the hood that didn’t belong to Leah, and a male DNA profile on some of her clothing.

To investigators, it was strong evidence that someone else had been involved, and that the crash had been deliberately staged.

The fingerprint and DNA have never been publicly matched to anyone.

The Sister

Leah’s sister, Kara, has never stopped looking. In 2005, she joined with a search advocacy group, the CUE Center for Missing Persons, led by Monica Caison, and began a cross-country caravan retracing Leah’s route, handing out flyers and raising awareness along the way. It has become an annual tradition.

The case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries in 2001, and on the series Disappeared in 2011. In 2014, human remains found near the crash site raised hopes, but they were identified as belonging to someone else.

The Opposite

I keep thinking about the note Leah left. I’m not suicidal. I’m the opposite.

She wasn’t running away from life. She was running toward it. After years of loss, she wanted to feel free, to see the mountains and the ocean and the open road. She wanted to live.

Somewhere in the mountains of Washington, someone took that from her. And whoever cut that wire under the hood of her Jeep has kept the secret for more than a quarter of a century.