Couple Vanished on a Rocky Mountain Road Trip in 1993 — Clue Found By FBI in 2024 Shocked Everyone | HO!!!!

BOULDER, Colo. — For more than three decades, the disappearance of Megan Doyle and Ryan Strickland haunted Colorado’s high country. In the summer of 1993, the young couple vanished en route to a weekend hiking trip in the Rockies. Their rental car, a white Ford Tempo, never turned up. No bodies were ever found. The case grew cold, then colder, until it faded into the long shadow of the mountain’s unsolved mysteries.

But in August 2024, a devastating wildfire swept through Grand County, exposing a long-sealed mineshaft and reopening a case that had long been presumed unsolvable. What investigators found inside would not only rewrite the story of Megan and Ryan’s disappearance, but reveal a horror that stretched far beyond one lost weekend.

The Last Road Trip

Megan Doyle, 24, was a preschool teacher with a sun-bleached ponytail and a silver nose ring. Ryan Strickland, 26, was a graduate student in environmental science. They were, by all accounts, the kind of couple who lived for adventure—road trips, camping, and spontaneous hikes. On August 21, 1993, they left Boulder for a two-night stay at a remote cabin near Mirror Lake.

Their last known stop was a gas station in Granby, where a receipt timestamped 11:27 a.m. confirmed they bought fuel and snacks. After that, there were no sightings, no phone calls, and no sign they ever reached the ranger station where they were supposed to check in.

The case file, inherited by Detective Aaron Vance in 2021, was thin. “It always nagged at me,” Vance recalled. “No history of risky behavior. No reason to run. It just didn’t fit the usual pattern of hikers lost in the backcountry.”

The Breakthrough

On August 18, 2024, wildfire crews clearing scorched forest near Little Elk Creek stumbled on something strange: a warped steel hatch, half-buried in a collapsed ridge. Faded yellow stenciling read: MCC No. 12. Closed 1966. It was a mine entrance not listed on any modern maps.

With the help of the State Mining Bureau, the crew pried open the hatch, releasing a foul breath of decades-old air. Just inside, they found a plastic grocery bag, perfectly preserved, containing a red wallet. The Colorado driver’s license inside belonged to Megan Doyle.

For the first time in 31 years, there was physical evidence of what happened after the couple vanished.

Down the Shaft

Detective Vance was on scene the next day. The air was thick with smoke and the acrid tang of burned pine as she navigated the charred access road. The mineshaft, hidden for decades, now lay exposed.

A blue canvas backpack was recovered about 30 feet down, containing a rusted flashlight, a compass, and a corroded 35mm camera. The film inside was still sealed in its plastic canister—a small miracle.

But the most chilling discovery came from a remote camera lowered deeper into the shaft. There, wedged in the darkness, was the shattered, burned-out frame of a white Ford Tempo. The passenger door was ripped off, a strip of fabric still clinging to the seat.

“This wasn’t a hiking accident,” Vance said. “This was a burial. Someone tried to erase them.”

The Camera Never Lies

Back in Boulder, the film was painstakingly developed by the police department’s photographic technician. Against all odds, six images survived.

The first showed Megan and Ryan smiling in front of their car, the forest behind them. The second: a selfie, Megan’s face sunlit and carefree. The third: a rusted trail sign, spray-painted “DANGER: Shafts Unmarked. Entry Illegal.” The fourth image stopped Vance cold—Ryan, sitting on a rock, his brow furrowed, looking off-camera at a shadowy figure just out of frame. A long-armed silhouette, barely visible.

The fifth photo was nearly black. After digital enhancement, Megan’s terrified face emerged, half-lit by flash, a hand pressed against the window behind her. The sixth was a close-up of metal grating—bolted steel, like a gate.

“These weren’t just vacation photos,” Vance said. “They were a record of something going terribly wrong.”

The Man in the Shadows

With the case reopened as a homicide, Vance retraced Megan and Ryan’s last known movements. At the Granby gas station, the owner recalled a local drifter from the ‘90s who wore surplus forestry gear and bought camera film—known only as “Boon.” He lived in a trailer near Little Elk Creek, close to the rediscovered mine.

County records revealed that Boon T. Ledbetter, a former hunting club member, had filed complaints about trespassers near the mine in the early ‘90s. A 1998 ranger report flagged him for sealing off a shaft—MCC No. 12—without a permit.

“He had means, motive, and opportunity,” Vance said. “And he disappeared right after Megan and Ryan did.”

A Pattern Emerges

As the investigation widened, search crews found a hidden bunker near the mine, marked by old trail signs and a camouflaged trap door. Inside were survival supplies, a Polaroid of Megan in captivity, and a crude notebook with chilling entries:

August 23: She stopped crying today. He says that means we’re making progress. August 25: The boy keeps coughing. He says he wants to go home. I told him he doesn’t have one anymore.

Among the items was a bird-shaped pendant Megan was known to wear and a second Polaroid from 1998—another young woman, hollow-eyed, wearing the same necklace.

Vance’s team ran the image through missing persons databases. A match came back: Hannah Clare, age 22, vanished in 1998. She, too, was never found.

The Ledger and the Pattern

Back at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, a battered ledger recovered from the mine revealed a horrifying list: 23 code names, each paired with a year. “Bird 1993,” “Maple 1996,” “June 1998,” “Sparrow 2003.” Only four were matched to real missing women. The rest remained unidentified.

Handwriting analysis confirmed that the last entries were not Boon’s. Another hand had continued the log, under the name “Emory.” Property records linked Emory Talcott, a reclusive local cited for illegal hunting in 1992, to a parcel near the Rock Valley Game and Gun Club—the same club Boon belonged to.

Inside Talcott’s abandoned cabin, investigators found another basement chamber, restraints, and Polaroids tacked to the wall—each signed with the initials “ET.”

The Survivors

A breakthrough came when Vance traced a 1998 pay phone call from a woman claiming to be safe, placed three weeks after Hannah Clare vanished. A wildlife rescuer remembered sheltering a young woman with a broken wrist, who left behind a wooden bird pendant. “If anyone comes asking about me, tell them I got out, but I’m not free,” she’d said.

It was proof that at least one victim had survived.

The Final Confession

Excavation of the shaft revealed more Polaroids, journals, and a microcassette labeled “M 8.28.93.” On it, Megan Doyle’s voice: “If someone is hearing this, I don’t know how much time I have…If this tape survives me, please find my mother. Her name is Lillian Doyle. Tell her I didn’t forget her, not even once.”

The tape was authenticated. Megan had left a record of her captivity and a final plea for justice.

The Arrest

Following the paper trail, Vance and her team tracked Emory Talcott to a remote hunting cabin. Inside, they found a missing 17-year-old girl, alive, and Talcott himself, arrested without resistance. “She sang,” he muttered. “She wouldn’t break.”

The evidence—DNA, journals, photographs—linked Talcott and Ledbetter to a string of abductions and murders spanning three decades. The FBI called it “one of the most significant cold case breakthroughs in Colorado history.”

The Legacy

Megan Doyle’s body was never recovered, but her voice, her courage, and her determination to document the truth broke a cycle of silence that had lasted for years. The case forced a reckoning in Colorado, prompting new protocols for missing persons and cold case investigations.

At a memorial in Boulder, Megan’s mother, Lillian Doyle, placed the recovered cassette beneath a plaque that read: “She sang louder than the silence.”

The pattern was broken. The girl who sang in the dark would never be forgotten.