She was young, athletic, and fearless.
A dedicated runner who vanished without a trace in one of America’s most unforgiving mountain ranges.
No foul play, no screams, no clues, just silence.
For 6 years, her disappearance haunted investigators and tore a family apart.
Until one day, a chilling discovery deep in the wilderness rewrote everything we thought we knew.
What really happened to Amy Row? This is the mystery that still echoes through the Wind River Range.
Amy Row was everything Wyoming dreams were made of.
24 years old, bright, ambitious, athletic, and beloved.
A small town girl with Olympicized dreams burning in her chest.
Amy was the kind of person who ran toward life.
Fast, focused, fierce.
She held the University of Wyoming record in the 3000 meters, a record that still stands today.
While other women her age were figuring out their careers, Amy was mapping her route to the 2000 Olympics.
She had this fire inside her, friends would say, like she could outrun anything.
Then there was Steve Bechal, rising star in the climbing community.
Rugged, devoted, adventurous.
He owned the kind of quiet confidence that made people trust him instantly.
When Amy met him in college studying exercise physiology, it seemed like fate.
They were Wyoming’s golden couple, the kind of pair that made other people believe in love again.
After graduation, they moved to Lander together, a tight-knit mountain town where everyone knew everyone, where people left their doors unlocked and trusted their neighbors.
In June 1996, they married.
Amy was ready to conquer the world.
Steve was ready to conquer mountains.
But imagine if the person you trusted most in the world was hiding something darker than you ever imagined.
Thursday, July 24th, 1997.
A scorching heatwave had settled over Wyoming like a suffocating blanket.
Both Amy and Steve had the day off from their part-time jobs at Wild Iris Mountain Sports.
Amy had planned to drive to her parents’ place in Powell to pick up furniture.
At the last minute, she canled.
Too much to do in Lander, she told her mother.
If only she had made that drive.
Instead, Amy made a to-do list.
13 items.
Simple errands before heading out to map a 10k race route she was organizing.
She envisioned runners climbing rugged hills.
Finishing at Fry Lake where they could jump in to cool off.
Steve took their dog and met a travel rider friend from Jackson.
They drove to Dub Boyce, 70 mi away, to scout climbing routes up Cartridge Creek.
No cell phones in 1997.
No way to reach each other once they separated.
Amy taught her usual youth weightlifting class at the Wind River Fitness Center.
The owner, Dudley Irvine, said she was in a good mood, nothing out of the ordinary.
She made phone calls, prepared for their move to a new $90,000 house they just bought.
Life was moving forward.
Around 2 p.m.
, Amy visited Camera Connection on Main Street.
Owner Johnstrom noticed her jogging outfit, yellow shirt, black shorts, running shoes.
She went upstairs to Gallery 331 to see Greg Wagner about framing photos for a contest.
Wagner remembered Amy glancing at her watch.
Brief encounter, nothing unusual.
She left around 2:30 p.m.
The last confirmed sighting of Amy Robal.
What happened next would haunt an entire state for over half a decade.
Steve returned home around 4:30 p.m.
earlier than expected.
The climbing route never panned out and rain had started.
Phone records show he made a call from their cottage at 4:43 p.m.
At first, Steve wasn’t worried.
They didn’t leave notes for each other.
Neither owned a cell phone.
Amy was independent, strong, capable.
By 8:00 p.m., concern crept in.
The Skinners, their landlords and friends, invited Steve to see Conair at 8:45.
Steve declined, too worried about Amy.
It was funny.
Steve would later tell Runner’s World, “It’s just a normal day.
Get unpacked, feed the dog.
Then I start wondering, where is she?” That incredible anxiety builds up.
You’re just worried.
I hope she didn’t break her ankle.
I hope she didn’t run out of gas.
I hope my wife wasn’t grabbed by some psychopathic serial killer.
By 10 p.m.
, Steve was calling Amy’s parents, the local hospital.
Nothing.
At 10:45 p.m., Steve called the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office.
Amy was officially missing.
When the Skinners returned from the movie around 11 p.m, they volunteered to search.
They drove the Loop Road, a 30-mile backcountry route through Shosonyi National Forest.
Around 1:00 a.m., they found Amy’s white Toyota tersil at Burnt Gulch.
The car was unlocked, keys on the passenger seat under her to-do list, four of 13 items checked off, her expensive sunglasses folded neatly nearby, but her Green Eagle Creek wallet was gone.
Amy never took it running.
What you need to understand is this.
Amy had run this trail before.
She knew every switchback, every rocky outcrop.
But this time, something was waiting.
The search continued.
It became one of the most intensive missing person searches in Wyoming history.
Within hours, 200 professional searchers scoured the area.
The mission expanded from a 5m radius to 20 m, then 30 m.
Multi-jurisdiction teams, trained tracking dogs, horses, TVs, helicopters with infrared heat seeeking technology.
The National Guard was called in.
Civil Air Patrol provided aircraft.
If Amy was lost or injured, they would have found her.
Period.
But the terrain was unforgiving.
Thus, deceptive.
The kind of wilderness that could swallow a person whole and never give them back.
Lead investigator Dave King told media, “We have 50 activations a year.
We have specialists in steep angle searches, swiftwater searches, cave rescues.
We have trackers, air spotters, and cadaavver dogs.
Yet, after 5 days of searching, they found nothing.
No clothing, no blood, no tracks, no signs of struggle.
If Amy had been attacked by a bear or mountain lion, the dogs would have alerted.
Searchers would have found remains or torn clothing.
The horrible realization settled in.
This wasn’t an accident.
Someone had taken Amy.
After 8 days, the search was called off.
The missing person case became a criminal investigation.
More than two dozen FBI and Wyoming division of criminal investigation agents arrived.
They set up shop in the sheriff’s office, stuck pins in a map, questioned everyone.
The FBI obtained NASA’s satellite images of the area.
They came to nothing.
Months later, they turned to Russia when they learned the mere space station had also photographed Wyoming that day.
Cloud cover made those images useless, too.
But investigators were developing a theory, and it centered on one person, the husband.
Steve’s alibi seemed solid.
His friend Sam Lightner vouched for him.
They were together in Duboce most of the day.
Records showed they bought a hammer at a store, though the owner didn’t remember them.
Still, detectives couldn’t verify every detail.
No third-p party witnesses placing them in Duboce.
minor timeline discrepancies.
The phone call to the hospital that night couldn’t be confirmed.
Steve was leading search groups, putting up missing posters, willingly participating in interviews for sessions with investigators by his count.
But on August 5th, everything changed.
FBI agent Rick McCulla attempted to strongarm Steve, a common interrogation tactic.
We have evidence you killed Amy,” McCulla said.
Steve figured he was bluffing, but it freaked him out enough to lawyer up.
He hired Kent Spence, son of famed attorney Jerry Spence.
The firm advised all clients to refuse polygraph tests because they were unreliable, inadmissible in court, and prone to false positives.
Steve was quoted as saying, “The polygraph is like one of those monkey traps.
Anybody who needs me to take that test, I don’t need them in my life.
But refusing the polygraph raised red flags.
Amy’s brother Nells pressed Steve to take one.
He never did.
A search warrant was obtained in early August.
Steve’s home was thoroughly searched along with his pickup truck.
Cadaavver dogs smelled nothing.
Luminol tests for blood came back negative.
No incriminating evidence was found.
But investigators discovered something that chilled them to the bone.
Steve’s old journals.
Dark poetry about power, death, and killing.
Violent fantasies about women, specifically about his wife.
Steve claimed they were song lyrics written in high school for his punk band long before he met Amy.
But the damage was done.
The town split down the middle.
Amy’s family grew suspicious.
Steve came off as cocky, arrogant.
Hiring a high-profile lawyer didn’t help his image.
His climbing friends defended him fiercely.
“They were the sweetest couple I ever ran across,” said Todd Skinner, their landlord and friend.
“But doubt had been planted, and doubt, once seated, grows like a weed.
” “If a man’s wife disappears mysteriously,” said Detective Sergeant Roger Rizzer, “you don’t clam up.
You don’t refuse to cooperate with the cops.
Steve became Wyoming’s most hated man or its most misunderstood victim.
The question haunted everyone.
Could a loving husband really be a cold-blooded killer? While investigators laser focused on Steve, they missed something crucial, something that would later terrorize the entire state.
His name was Dale Wayne Eaton.
And in 1997, he was camping in the wilderness near Burnt Gulch.
Dale’s brother, Richard, called Fremont County detectives during the investigation.
He suggested Dale might be involved with Amy’s disappearance.
Richard said he and Dale often hunted and fished in the Burnt Gulch area, and Dale was camping there in summer 1997.
Few people camp in that remote area.
Even fewer know it exists, but the tip was ignored.
Authorities believed Richard was motivated by the $100,000 reward, not justice.
They were convinced Steve was their man.
I think our detectives were so adamant that it was Steve that they weren’t looking in other directions, Sergeant John Zurggo would later admit.
Meanwhile, Dale Wayne was getting into trouble.
In late 1997, just months after Amy’s disappearance, he was convicted of attempting to kidnap a family that had broken down on an isolated highway in the Red Desert.
After serving just 99 days in jail, Dale was arrested again near Duboce on July 30th, 1998 for violating parole.
While being held, he killed his cellmate in a fit of rage.
Then authorities learned something that made their blood run cold.
DNA samples linked Dale to the 1988 cold case rape and murder of Lisa Marie Kimmel.
A search of his property in Monetta turned up Kimmel’s buried car, women’s clothing, purses, and newspaper clippings about murdered and missing women.
Some authorities believe Dale is the Great Basin serial killer responsible for at least nine women’s deaths across Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada between 1983 and 1997.
Steve asked to see the items found at Dale’s property, hoping to identify anything belonging to Amy.
He was denied.
Had Amy crossed paths with a monster? And had the answer been ignored for years? The investigation spiraled into chaos.
No lead was too wild to follow.
Psychics insisted Amy was alive in a cave.
Divers plunged into icy waters.
Cadaver dogs sniffed around Lewis Lake.
A woman reported seeing a light blue pickup just like Steves, speeding through a campground with a blonde woman inside around 5:00 p.
m.
on July 24th.
It was never confirmed.
Gunshots echoed near Lewis Lake the night Amy disappeared.
Found nothing.
A suspicious smell in the woods turned out to be a dead deer.
A message in a bottle was discovered floating in the middle Popo Ay River.
Help! I’m being held captive in Sinks Canyon.
Amy hope flared until handwriting analysis proved it wasn’t hers.
Possible sightings poured in from Salt Lake City, Florida, New Mexico, Colorado.
All dead ends.
The FBI followed stalker angles, investigating men from Amy’s past who were obsessed with her.
One man had even moved to Lander to be closer to her.
But the most reliable clues came from eyewitnesses who confirmed Amy had driven to burnt Gulch and started jogging.
At the bottom of her to-do list, investigators found milepost descriptions Amy had written while referring to her odometer.
She was mapping the first section of her planned 10k route.
Amy had made it to the trail head.
She planned this run.
It wasn’t an abduction before she arrived.
A county mechanic remembered seeing a female jogger on loop road switchbacks that day.
So did a surveyor.
Jim and Wendy Gibson, owners of Pongghorn Lodge, recalled passing a slender blonde woman in dark shorts, jogging swiftly in the hills.
Amy was there.
She was running.
Then she vanished like smoke.
6 years later in 2003, a chilling discovery resurfaced.
A hikers found a watch up the middle fork of the Popo Ay matching the description of the one Amy was wearing when she went jogging the day she vanished.
Bones found nearby were proved to be from an animal and police could not determine whether the watch was really Amy’s.
And just like that, it fizzled out.
Sergeant Zurga, who took over the cold case in 2010, became increasingly convinced Dale Wayne was involved.
He tried to visit Dale Wayne in prison, but the serial killer refused to see him.
In 2012, Zerga spoke with Richard again.
Dale’s brother reiterated his conviction that Dale was camping in the area when Amy vanished.
So, Zurga tried once more in 2013.
He traveled to Death Row to confront the monster face to face.
It was a short meeting.
Dale Wayne cursed Zerga and told him where he could go.
When just a word, even from a hardened killer, could have set a family free, Dale Wayne gave nothing.
Dale Wayne knew something about Amy’s disappearance.
There’s a good reason to believe Dale was involved, Zurga told reporters.
But he’s taking his secrets to the grave.
In 2023, Dale Wayne’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison.
He will never be executed.
He will never talk.
Meanwhile, Steve had moved on.
He declared Amy legally dead in 2004, remarried, had children, built a successful climbing gym in Lander.
I believe it was a homicide.
Detective Sergeant Roger Rizzer maintained in 2007.
In my mind, there is only one person I want to talk to, only one who has refused to talk to law enforcement, and that’s her husband.
Two suspects, one killer, zero answers.
It’s been 10,220 days since Amy didn’t come home.
She would be 52 years old today.
Amy belongs to a horrific statistic.
Fewer than 1% of missing adults are never found.
She vanished in an age before cell phones, security cameras, GPS tracking.
An age when someone could disappear completely.
On average, 500,000 to 700,000 people are reported missing every year in the US.
About 77% of those are found within 24 hours and 87% within 2 days.
Only 3% of adults will be missing for longer than a week.
In this day and age with webcams, cell phones, and other technology, it is difficult for someone to just vanish.
But that is exactly what Amy Rochel did in 1997.
For her family, the worst part isn’t death, it’s the not knowing.
Killers like Dale Wayne Eaton take lives.
But they also steal something else.
Closure.
The case went cold.
Posters faded.
The reward hotline closed.
The website shut down.
In 2016, Steve granted his final interview about Amy.
He hadn’t spoken to his lawyers in a decade.
Hadn’t talked to Amy’s family in 15 years.
So, what really happened on July 24th, 1997? Did Amy encounter Dale Wayne Eaton on that remote trail? Was she the victim of a serial killer who spent decades terrorizing the American West? Or did something darker happen? Did the man who promised to love and protect her become her destroyer? Maybe Amy discovered Steve’s violent fantasies weren’t just poetry.
Maybe she threatened to leave.
Maybe he snapped.
Or perhaps it was something else entirely.
A stranger abduction.
The stalker.
A crime of opportunity in the vast Wyoming wilderness.
The truth is buried somewhere in the Wind River Range.
Along with Amy, three key facts remain.
Amy made it to the trail head and started running.
Someone took her wallet but left her sunglasses.
No trace of her has ever been found.
Someone knows what happened.
Someone is keeping that secret.
In a world where we can track a cell phone to within inches, where cameras capture every movement, where DNA solves decades old crimes, Amy Rochel remains a mystery.
While the above image is merely a visual representation of the horror that goes on deep in the forest, this is more than a missing person case.
This is a story about truth, justice, and the price of silence.
Amy Rochel deserves better than to be forgotten.
She deserves better than to exist as a ghost story, a cautionary tale, a mystery that gets discussed and dismissed.
She was a daughter, a sister, a wife, a friend.
She was a record-breaking athlete with Olympic dreams.
She was a woman who ran toward life with everything she had, and she deserves to come home.
What do you think happened to Amy Beal?
