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Some names and details in this story have been changed to preserve anonymity and confidentiality.

Not all the photographs are of the actual scene.

Late in the afternoon of September 14, 2011, Linda Gale, 61, and her 27-year-old grandson, Edward Blair, were driving home on Route 26.

Their black SUV cut through the dense fog of the Mount Hood National Forest with its headlights and disappeared without a trace.

On the third day of the search, at 3:15 p.m, rescuers spotted an injured person on a sharp bend near the White River.

At the bottom of a deep rocky ditch was a wrecked car.

The airbags had deployed.

The windshield had been blown off and the driver’s and passenger’s seats were covered in blood.

The doors were wide open.

Dog handlers found no bodies or traces of injured people within a radius of several kilometers.

The two people simply vanished from the wrecked car, leaving the police alone with a bloody puzzle that would prove far more terrifying than the accident itself.

September 14, 2011.

It’s late.

Autumn in Oregon always brings with it thick, impenetrable fogs that spread in a dense layer over the wet asphalt.

Highway 26, which winds through two grim, ancient forests of the Mount Hood National Forest, is considered one of the most dangerous stretches of road in the region.

It was the route followed by Linda Gale, 61, and her grandson Edward Blair, 27.

They were driving a heavy black Mercedes GLE SUV, cutting through the thick darkness with powerful headlights.

The last confirmed stop for the family members was at the Ospray Piner roadside cafe in the small town of Sandy.

CCTV footage from a gas station across the street shows his car slowly entering the parking lot at 12:25.

The restaurant waitress, Marian Roberts, gave a clear account of the events of that night during her official interrogation.

According to her, an older woman and a young man ordered two portions of meat pie and a large pot of hot coffee.

They seemed quite relaxed, smiled a lot, and talked about their plans for the following weekend.

At 25, Linda paid in cash, left a generous tip, and they left the establishment.

There were no alarming calls, no nervousness, and no messages to the family about the change of route.

His route was supposed to be a direct trip to Portland, which usually takes no more than an hour and 40 minutes.

But they never made it home.

The next day, on September 15 at 10 a.m.

, Linda’s daughter contacted the Portland police.

His mother’s phone was out of coverage and Edward had not shown up for work at a local engineering firm.

At 2:30 p.m.

on the same day, the patrol officers officially registered a missing person report.

Given Linda’s age and the absence of any economic or personal reasons for her voluntary disappearance, the police immediately launched a large-scale search operation.

The search involved local forest rangers, 45 volunteers with tracking dogs, and a state patrol helicopter.

During the first two days, search teams covered more than 60 km along Route 26.

The weather deteriorated sharply with persistent fog that hampered visual inspection of the roadside verges from the air.

Temperatures dropped to as low as 40 degrees Fahrenheit at night, leaving critically low chances of survival in case of serious injuries.

The rescuers examined every ravine and every abandoned forest road.

On September 17, the third day after the disappearance, at 7:40 a.m, a patrol observed a suspicious deformation of a metal stop on a difficult and steep curve near the white river.

They stopped the car and the officers approached the edge of the precipice.

The ground and the dense bushes of wild blackberry were roughly crumpled, forming a clear trace of the huge object falling at an angle of almost 45 degrees.

The rescue team arrived at the scene at 8:15.

The descent to the bottom of the rocky trench, which was more than 150 feet deep, required the use of special climbing equipment and winches.

What they saw below looked like a scene from a violent thriller.

The black Mercedes had become a twisted piece of metal wedged between two centuries-old pine trees.

The force of the impact was so powerful that the enormous engine was pushed into the passenger compartment and the windshield was completely crushed.

The six of them hung normally, dangling from pieces of dirty white cloth.

However, it was something else that impressed the forensic team the most.

When the detectives approached the wrecked interior, they saw a significant amount of blood.

Dark red stains covered the driver’s and passenger’s seats .

The dashboard was wrecked and even the roof of the SUV was crumpled.

A woman’s purse containing cash and undamaged credit cards was perfectly positioned in the back seat.

The doors on both sides were wide open, as if someone had gotten out of the car in a state of deep shock.

But there was no body inside.

The investigation team immediately established a headquarters on the ground.

The trainers with search dogs began combing the dense undergrowth surrounding the accident site, trying to follow the trail of the injured.

A diving team searched twice in the cold, rugged bed of the White River for 3 miles downstream, assuming the victims might have fallen into the water in a state of disorientation or painful shock.

The result was null.

The dogs lost the scent literally 6 meters from the wrecked car, as if the smell dissolved in the cold morning air.

The bloodstained stains on the ground ended abruptly at the foot of a steep cliff, leaving no clue as to the direction of travel.

Linda and Edward disappeared without a trace, leaving behind only broken metal and bloody seats.

The case quickly reached a dead end , becoming one of the most mysterious secrets in the history of the local police department.

Journalists stopped writing about the incident after a few weeks, and thick folders of investigative material were added to the file of unsolved crimes.

It seemed as if the dense Oregon forest had swallowed its victims forever.

But a discreet fact recorded by the coroner in his report obsessed the chief detective.

The doors of the wrecked car, which were wide open, had no traces of blood on the exterior handles, as if they had not been opened by the bloodied victims from inside, but by someone passing unnoticed outside in the thick darkness.

October 2013.

Exactly two years have passed since the fatal Route 26 incident.

Portland was shrouded in a bone-chilling autumn drizzle that turned the streets into deserted concrete canyons.

At 2:15 in the morning, a police patrol was making a routine round through the southeast district of the city.

His route followed the bike path of the Springwater corridor.

This gloomy area, hemmed in between abandoned industrial zones and dense thickets, had long been known for its terrible reputation due to the large number of spontaneous encampments of homeless people; the rain was getting heavier and heavier and the patrol car’s windshield wipers
could barely clear the jets of water from the windshield.

Suddenly, in the bright light of the police headlights, a solitary figure emerged from the thick darkness.

The woman walked slowly along the embankment, completely oblivious to the icy wind and the jets of water falling beneath her feet.

The officers stopped the car following the standard protocol for checking suspicious people at night.

According to the official report by patrolman Mark Davis, at first they assumed they were dealing with a typical homeless person with a serious drug addiction who had lost her way.

The woman looked terrible, exhausted to the point of physical depletion, her face covered in deep wrinkles and dirt, and she wore soaked, baggy clothes that were too big for her.

Her gray hair was in a messy tangle.

However, it was his eyes that most impressed the experienced police officers.

They were completely empty, glassy, ​​and devoid of any meaning or reaction to the blinding light of the tactical flashlights.

When the officers tried to talk to her and asked her name, she didn’t even flinch.

Instead of answering, the woman continuously whispered fragmented and logically incoherent phrases.

The police report carefully recorded his incoherent muttering, which monotonously reduced to three terrifying words: a roar, a laugh, and an order not to look down.

He had no documents or personal belongings with him.

The woman was taken to Portland’s central police station for identification and a basic medical examination.

At 3:00 a.m, she was taken to the detainee processing room and subjected to the standard electronic fingerprinting procedure.

The detective on duty sent the fingerprints to a national database, expecting to see a long list of minor offenses or the status of chronic homelessness.

The information processing took about 20 minutes.

When the system finally gave a positive result and the photo appeared on the monitor, the agent froze, unable to believe what he was seeing .

The program had correctly identified the unknown person.

It was Linda Gale, the same woman who had been officially declared dead in the impenetrable forests near the White River exactly 24 months earlier.

She was alive.

The woman found was immediately transferred to the closed psychiatric ward of the city’s state hospital for an in- depth examination.

A detailed medical scan revealed traces of severe old trauma to the skull and numerous scars of unknown origin on the body.

After a series of tests, a team of psychiatrists diagnosed the patient with an extremely severe form of retrograde amnesia combined with dissociative fugue.

This rare condition was triggered not only by physical brain damage, but also by a profound psychological shock that forced the individual to completely block out the past in order to survive.

The police began to meticulously unravel the chronology of his movements and soon a surprising fact emerged .

During those two years, Linda had not wandered through the thick forest of the mountain range.

The researchers consulted the archives of local clinics and found records that confirmed the incredible story.

Just two days after that fatal accident, an ordinary truck driver picked up a completely disoriented and bloodied woman on the shoulder of the road.

This happened 60 km from where the black SUV crashed.

The driver took her to Portland and handed her over to the doctors.

Without memory, without papers, and without recollections of her past, she entered the state system with the faceless name of an unknown person.

Linda bounced between the Burnside Crisis Center’s crisis shelter and cheap state psychiatric wards.

The trauma had acted as a perfect eraser.

He had erased his own name, information about his family, and worst of all, he had completely erased from his mind any memory of his grandson Edward.

The detectives were standing in the clinic hallway, holding printouts from the database and a new medical history.

Understanding the situation gave me chills.

If an elderly woman with a hole in her head was able to walk 40 miles over rough terrain on her own, fleeing from a wrecked car, what exactly made her move forward with such desperation? If he had survived and fled the scene of the accident.

Where was young Edward? healthy and physically strong all this time.

And whose was that unsettling laughter that Linda kept fleeing from her crippled mind every time she closed her tired eyes? Dear friends, before we continue to unravel this bloody case, I have a small request for you.

Please subscribe to the channel, like this video, and leave your comments.

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Let’s go back to the story.

Linda’s appearance forced Portland police to immediately reopen the investigation.

The case was no longer considered a dead end .

Lead detectives filed an official request to have the remains of the black car removed from the impound lot.

The goal was to conduct a much more in-depth examination using the latest technologies that were not available at the time of the accident.

Forensic experts used ultraviolet radiation and laser scanning of the wrecked car body.

What they found in the deeply crumpled rear bumper radically changed the course of the investigation.

Laser scanners revealed microscopic particles of a hard polymer coating that had rubbed against the metal during the impact.

Laboratory tests confirmed that it was a high-resistance matte paint for cars, known in restricted circles as Raptor.

This specific material is commonly used to coat heavy trucks and off-road vehicles specially prepared for extreme off-road use.

The nature and angle of deformation of the metal provided the police with irrefutable evidence that this was not an accident due to driver fatigue or slippery roads.

It was a deliberate attack.

The experts recreated the exact model of the collision.

Someone in a very solid car overtook your car at a speed of over 60 km/h.

The unknown driver coldly performed a professional police maneuver, ramming the SUV hard into the rear fender and literally pushing it into a deep abyss.

Meanwhile, investigators hired the best forensic psychiatrists in the state.

Her enormous task was to carefully extract the blocked memories from Linda’s traumatized mind.

The sessions took place in a specially equipped room under the supervision of the profilers.

During one of the light hypnosis sessions , the old woman suddenly began to scream frantically.

The psychological barrier collapsed and memories of that fateful night surfaced in torrents.

Linda remembered a terrible, deafening crash at the rear of the car, the sensation of freefall in complete darkness, and the eerie scraping of metal against tree trunks.

According to his testimony, recorded on audio tape, he regained consciousness in the passenger seat.

The cabin was thickly filled with smoke.

Edward was sitting next to her.

He was completely unconscious and his pale face was covered in blood from a huge head wound.

Panicked and disoriented, the old woman managed to kick open the stuck door.

He emerged from the wrecked interior and, his fingernails bleeding from the rocks, crawled up the extremely steep slope to the road and asked for help.

When Linda, bleeding, finally reached the cold asphalt of the road, she saw no transients or patrol cars with flashing lights.

Instead, a huge truck with its headlights completely off was located a few dozen meters from the edge of the cliff.

A tall man stood motionless at the edge of the precipice.

In his hand he held a powerful tactical flashlight.

The man methodically projected a bright ace downwards, right towards the broken-down SUV, and laughed.

In the sepulchral silence of the night forest, that sound was incredibly eerie.

It was the hysterical and completely unhealthy laughter of a psychopath who sincerely enjoyed the destruction and pain of others.

At that moment, Linda’s mind was pierced by a paralyzing terror.

He instinctively realized that he was not witnessing an accident.

I was looking at a brutal killer who had just tried to take their lives and now I was just coming to admire his work.

Realizing that any sound or movement would betray her presence and make her an easy target, Linda made the only possible decision.

He looked around in silence and, gathering his last bit of strength, started running down the dark track in the opposite direction.

The woman ran through the thick Oregon fog, feeling no cold, until finally her consciousness faded from physical exhaustion and blood loss.

He saved his life by fleeing from the maniac.

But in the investigator’s office, upon hearing this horrifying recording of the hypnotic session, the experienced detectives paled as they realized an obvious fact.

If Linda had fled that night and never returned to the wrecked car, where the bloodied and unconscious Edward had disappeared, whom she had left in the passenger seat with her own hands.

The realization that the Route 26 accident was not just a tragic accident, but a cold-blooded and carefully planned assassination attempt, completely changed the scope and direction of the investigation.

The Portland Local Police Department, realizing the unprecedented seriousness of the situation, quickly handed over all the material collected on the case to the regional office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The agency’s top analysts received an incredible order: to retrieve from dusty paper files and digital databases absolutely every traffic accident report involving a single vehicle in the entire state of Oregon over the past 5 years.

What at first seemed like a boring and routine administrative job soon turned into a real systemic nightmare.

The team of analysts, working tirelessly around the clock , discovered a terrifying and perfectly calibrated pattern that sent chills down the spines of seasoned researchers.

Fourteen highly suspicious incidents were documented within a radius of about 300 km.

Most of them are on the more remote and winding stretches of highways that closely surround The Shuts and Willamet National Forests .

In all these cases, the vehicles left the road and fell into deep ditches.

They crashed into centuries-old trees at high speed or plunged down rocky cliffs tens of meters high.

The vast majority of these cases were officially filed away by local sheriffs as trivial accidents, supposedly caused by extremely bad weather conditions, significant speeding, or tired drivers falling asleep at the wheel.

However, the testimonies of the few survivors recovered from the forgotten files contained the same repetitive, blood-curdling details.

In their initial statements, given in their hospital beds, in a state of deep shock, the victims recalled the blinding light of abnormally powerful headlights in their rearview mirrors that suddenly appeared from the completely black night.

A few seconds before completely losing control of the vehicle, they invariably encountered a loud and resounding impact on the rear bumper, which literally threw their cars into the abyss.

To create an accurate psychological portrait of the unknown driver, the top profilers from the special behavioral analysis department were immediately involved in the case.

After thoroughly studying the geography and nature of the night attacks, the experts reached an unequivocal and terrifying conclusion.

The investigation was dealing with an extremely dangerous and rare type of serial offender that in the highest circles of forensic science is classified as aimless chaos.

Unlike the vast majority of maniacs, this man was not driven by the classic motives of investigation.

He was not seeking any financial gain, he was not trying to take revenge on specific people for past grievances, and his destructive actions had no sexual connotations.

For this nonconformist psychopath, the mere process of driving at night on deserted, unlit roads, the deafening sound of metal creaking, and the knowledge that he was irrevocably ending human lives with just a slight m
ovement of the steering wheel.

the ultimate and probably the only form of self-affirmation and perverse entertainment.

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