11 years of absolute silence.
Imagine what that means.
Three people set out on a route and disappeared.
Nothing remained.
No bodies, no equipment, not a single clue.
They were wiped off the face of the earth.
And then 11 years later, in a dirty shed 600 km from where they were last seen, a passport is found.
It is tattered and stained with water.
On one of the pages is a dark, barely visible stain.
An examination reveals that it is blood.
The blood of one of the missing persons.
This is a story about how someone else may have taken them and that someone remained silent for 11 years.
It all began in 2012 for three tourists from Austria, Andreas, Marcus, and Clara.
It was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime.
All three were experienced hikers, not noviceses.
Andreas, who was 34 at the time, had already hiked in the Himalayas.
Marcus, his peer, was a photographer who dreamed of capturing the untouched nature of Patagonia.
Clara, who was 29, worked as a medic and was responsible for the group’s safety.
They were not reckless adventurers.
They had been preparing for this trip for almost a year.
They studied maps, bought the best equipment, and read reports from other groups.
Their destination was Argentine Patagonia in the province of Rioenegro.
It is a wild, beautiful place, utterly indifferent to human life.
Their route ran through the Nahuel Huapi National Park with an ascent of Mount Trespicos.
It is not the most challenging route, but it is very isolated.
You can walk there for weeks without meeting a single soul.
They left the small town of Elbolson, leaving their excess belongings at the hotel and informing the manager of their approximate return date, which was 2 weeks later.
The first four days went according to plan.
They made contact twice via satellite phone, short messages to their families in Austria.
The first day is behind us.
Everything is great.
The views are incredible.
Day three.
We made it to the lake.
a little tired, but everything is fine.
The messages were calm and mundane.
No cause for alarm.
On the fifth day, the last message arrived.
It was addressed to Andreas’s brother.
The text was simple.
Approaching the foot of Trespicos.
The weather is starting to deteriorate.
No communication for 3 or 4 days.
Don’t worry.
See you soon.
After that, silence.
At first, no one was concerned.
They had warned that there would be no communication.
But when four days passed, then five, then six, and there was still no news from the group, the families in Austria began to worry.
They contacted the hotel in El Bulon.
The manager confirmed that the tourists had not returned at the appointed time.
A couple more days passed and it became clear that something serious had happened.
The family sounded the alarm and contacted the Austrian embassy in Buenosiris.
The story began to gain momentum.
On March 28th, 2012, a formal search and rescue operation commenced.
It involved the Argentine jearm, rescuers from the national park, and volunteers from the local mountaineering club, Club Andino Baraloce.
First, they tried to determine the last known location of the group.
Thanks to their previous message, this was not difficult, the foot of Mount Trespicos.
Helicopters took to the air to survey the area from above.
But, as Andreas had warned, the weather had taken a turn for the worse.
Low, heavy clouds clung to the peaks.
Strong gusts of wind blew and snow began to fall.
For the end of March, which is autumn in the southern hemisphere, such weather is typical.
But for a search, it was a disaster.
The flights had to be postponed.
All hope rested on the ground teams.
Dozens of people combed the area sector by sector.
They followed the group’s presumed route, straying hundreds of meters from the trail in both directions.
They searched gorges, forests, and the banks of glacial rivers.
The rescuers were experienced people.
They knew what to look for and where to look.
Footprints, scraps of clothing, abandoned equipment, a place to rest, anything.
But they found nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
It was as if three people with all their equipment, a tent, backpacks, sleeping bags, had vanished into thin air.
Soon, investigators gained access to the cloud storage where Marcus’ camera had automatically synced.
At the same time, he had access to the network.
There, they found the last photo taken on the morning of the fifth day, shortly before the previous message was sent.
The picture was clear.
It showed Andreas and Clara standing in front of the Trespicos Mountain.
They looked tired but happy.
There was no trace of fear or anxiety on their faces.
They were dressed in good, warm clothes.
Behind them, the edge of their bright orange tent was visible.
This photo was the final proof that they were alive and exactly where they claimed to be.
It also made their disappearance even more mysterious.
if they had had an accident, if they had fallen off the slope or been hit by an avalanche, where were the traces? Why had the rescuers who had combed the area thoroughly found no tents, backpacks, or bodies? The search continued for over a month.
With each passing day, hope faded.
The weather worsened and heavy snow fell in the mountains.
It became almost impossible to comb through the area.
At the end of April 2012, the active phase of the search was called off.
The official version was predictable, an accident.
Most likely, the tourists were caught in an avalanche or fell into one of the numerous glacial gorges where their bodies were forever hidden under tons of ice and snow.
It was a logical assumption, but one that lacked support from any evidence.
The lack of traces did not give peace to the rescuers, let alone the families of the missing.
The relatives of Andreas, Marcus, and Clara refused to give up.
They flew to Argentina, hired private climbers, and offered a reward for any information leading to the capture of the fugitives.
But it was all in vain.
Private searches also yielded no results.
Years passed.
The story of the three Austrian tourists gradually faded into one of the many legends of Patagonia.
This vast wild land knows how to keep its secrets.
The case was closed and archived.
For 11 years, no one remembered this tragedy.
In 2023, in a dusty shed 600 km from Trespicos, the police made a discovery that turned the cold case of the disappearance into something much more sinister.
And this discovery forced everyone to ask a new question.
What if the mountains had nothing to do with it? For 11 years, the case lay in the archives labeled accident.
For 11 years, the families of the missing lived without answers.
And then in 2023, reality shattered.
The story continued where no one expected to find it.
Not in the mountains or the glaciers, but in a small unremarkable village in the province of Chubot, 600 kilometers south of Mount Trespicos.
This is an entirely different landscape.
Dry, sunscched Pampas, where the wind blows dust across endless plains.
Here, unlike in touristy Rioenegro, life flows slowly and harshly.
A man named Santiago Vargas lived in this village.
He was a local shepherd about 50 years old.
He was unsociable, silent, and on bad terms with all his neighbors.
He lived alone in a small house on the outskirts of town, earning a living by hurting sheep.
And as it turned out, not only his own.
Several local farmers filed a complaint with the police, accusing him of stealing livestock.
The evidence was convincing and in August 2023, Vargas was arrested.
It was a typical case, almost routine for these parts.
The court ruled that his property should be confiscated to pay for the damages.
Two police officers arrived at Vargas’ house to make an inventory.
The house was run down, and it smelled of dampness and age.
But the most interesting thing awaited them, not in the house, but in the shed.
It was a dilapidated structure made of corrugated iron and planks filled to the brim with all kinds of junk.
Old canisters, rusty tools, coils of barbed wire, broken furniture.
The police officers, two young men, began to sort through the debris without much enthusiasm.
The work was dirty and dull.
One of them, Corporal Romero, rumaging through a pile of old rags in the corner, stumbled upon something hard.
He pulled it out into the light.
It was a small book with a dark burgundy cover.
At first, he didn’t know what it was.
The cover was swollen from moisture and had dried out, becoming hard and warped.
He struggled to open it.
On the first page was the emblem of the European Union and the word rise pass.
A passport, a foreign one.
Romero called his partner.
Together they began to examine their find.
The passport was in terrible condition.
Many of the pages were stuck together.
The photograph of the owner, a young man with short hair and a serious expression, was blurred with water stains around the edges.
Name: Marcus Grunvald.
Nationality: Austria.
The date of birth confirmed that he was 34 years old at the time of his disappearance.
The police officers exchanged glances.
The surname and country meant nothing to them, but finding an Austrian passport in the shed of a shepherd who stole sheep was strange to say the least.
The senior police officer who had been serving in the area for a long time vaguely recalled an old story.
Wait a minute, he said.
10 years ago or more, they were looking for some tourists here.
I think they were also from Austria.
They disappeared in the mountains in the north.
The find was immediately seized as evidence and sent to the station.
There, they ran Marcus Grunwald’s name through the database.
A few minutes later, information about the 2012 case appeared on the computer screen.
Three Austrian tourists, Andreas, Clara, and Marcus, missing in the Trespicos Mountain area.
Search is unsuccessful.
Case closed.
The cold, dusty case suddenly became hot.
Vargas, who was already in custody for cattle theft, was immediately questioned.
This time, the questions were completely different.
The investigator placed a passport in a plastic bag in front of him.
“What is this, Senor Vargas? And how did it end up in your barn?” The shepherd looked at the passport without any interest.
His face was expressionless.
“I found it,” he muttered.
Where did you find it? asked the investigator.
By the road.
It was just lying in the mud.
When did you find it? I don’t remember.
A long time ago.
5 or 6 years ago.
In 2017, the investigator clarified.
Maybe.
Vargas shrugged.
What difference does it make? His answers were provocatively implausible.
He couldn’t or wouldn’t specify the exact location where he found the passport or the circumstances of the discovery.
Why had he kept it all these years? Vargas smiled at this question.
I threw it in the shed and forgot about it.
What was I supposed to do with it? He behaved as if he were being asked about a stone he had found, not a missing person’s document.
He was either incredibly stupid or hiding something.
The investigators leaned toward the latter.
The area where he grazed his sheep was far from tourist trails.
Most importantly, the area where he lived and worked was not even included in the search zone in 2012.
It was too far south.
The passport was sent for forensic examination in Buenoseris.
The experts worked on it very carefully.
First, they confirmed the obvious.
The document had been exposed to moisture for a long time and then dried out.
It may have been lying on the ground or in the open air.
However, an expert examining the pages under ultraviolet light noticed something on the inside page next to the visa stamps.
It was a small, barely discernible, irregularly shaped stain that had soaked into the paper.
They took it for analysis.
A few weeks later, the results came back, completely reversing the case.
The stain on the passport page was blood.
Human blood.
The lab requested DNA profiles of the missing tourists relatives, which had been kept on file since 2012.
The comparison left no room for doubt.
The DNA from the bloodstain matched that of Marcus Grunvald’s parents with a probability of 99.
9%.
Now it was no longer just a passport.
It was evidence, direct proof that at some point Marcus had been injured and bleeding, and his passport was nearby.
The find in the shepherd’s barn was no longer a strange coincidence.
It became a sinister link between this man and the missing tourists.
The disappearance case was immediately reopened, but with a new classification, suspicion of murder.
And the only suspect was the silent shepherd Santiago Vargas who claimed that he had simply found the passport on the road.
However, no one believed that version.
Now the question was, did he act alone? And where were the bodies of the other two tourists? Marcus’ blood on the passport found at Vargas’ place turned everything upside down.
Now the police had not just a witness but the main and only suspect.
The theory of an accident in the mountains fell apart.
Investigators began working on a new terrifying version.
The three tourists did not die in an avalanche or a fall.
They encountered a man on their way.
And that encounter proved fatal for them.
A new search operation was immediately organized.
However, this time the epicenter had shifted 600 kilometers to the south.
Dozens of police officers and forensic experts surrounded Santiago Vargas’ house and property.
They combed every inch of his land.
They used ground penetrating radar in the hope of detecting disturbances in the soil layers that might indicate a possible burial site.
Dogs trained to search for human remains sniffed every bush and every stone on the vast area where the shepherd had grazed his sheep.
They tore up the floors in his house, checked an old well, and dug through all the rubbish behind the barn.
They were looking for anything, bones, scraps of clothing, pieces of equipment, a tent, backpacks, boots, anything that belonged to the Austrians.
The search continued for several weeks, but just like 11 years ago in the mountains, they found nothing.
Emptiness.
Apart from that single passport, not a single item was found, nor was there a single trace linking Vargas or this area to the missing tourists.
It was inexplicable.
If he had killed them here, where were the bodies? Where were their belongings? The Patagonian step was not a glacier.
It could not simply swallow three human bodies and all their equipment.
Vargas was questioned again and again.
He was shown the results of DNA tests.
This is the blood of Marcus Grunvald, said the investigator slowly and clearly.
It’s on the passport you hid in your shed.
Explain that, Vargas.
But the shepherd was like a stone.
He sat staring at one spot and repeated the same thing over and over.
I found him.
I don’t know anything else.
He didn’t shout, didn’t try to justify himself, didn’t panic.
He just kept silent.
It was either a sign of absolute innocence or incredible cold composure.
The investigators were at an impass.
They had evidence that screamed of a crime.
A passport with the victim’s blood in the suspect’s house is very significant.
But it wasn’t enough.
There was no direct evidence of murder.
There was no murder weapon.
There were no witnesses.
And most importantly, there were no bodies.
Legally, without bodies, it is almost impossible to prove murder.
It can be proven that Vargas found the passport.
It can be proven that Marcus’ blood was on the passport.
But it was impossible to prove that Vargas was the cause of that blood.
The prosecutor in charge of the case was faced with an impossible task.
He could not charge Vargas with murder because such a charge would have collapsed in court and it was illegal to keep him in custody indefinitely solely on suspicion.
After several months of fruitless searches and interrogations without any new facts, the authorities were forced to make a decision.
Santiago Vargas was released.
He served his sentence for cattle theft and was set free.
The case of the disappearance of Andreas, Marcus, and Clara remained open, but once again reached a dead end.
Now there was a sinister shadow in the form of a shepherd, but nothing more.
A new theory emerged.
Perhaps the whole story of the disappearance in the mountains was deliberate misinformation.
What if the tourists had successfully descended from Trespicos? What if they were walking along the road trying to reach the next town and ran into Vargas or someone else? Maybe the tragedy didn’t happen in the wilderness at all, but on the side of a dusty road.
Perhaps they were robbed and something went wrong.
This version explained why the passport was found so far away, but it didn’t explain where the rest of their belongings were and most importantly, where the people themselves were.
Today, Santiago Vargas lives in the same village.
His neighbors look at him with fear and suspicion.
The police keep an unofficial eye on him, but he is free.
He is the only one who could tell the truth, but he remains silent.
A story that was once considered a tragic accident for 11 years has evolved into an unsolved mystery with a living and silent suspect.
A single passport with a small blood stain destroyed the simple version of events, but provided no answers.
It only gave rise to new, even more terrifying questions.
What really happened to the three tourists in Patagonia? And what secret does the old shepherd keep who one day found their past on the road? We don’t know and we may never
