The Unknown
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There are some cases so infamous that we have all heard about them. But some of the coldest cases, the most mysterious, are the ones that you've never heard of before. I'm Ashley Flowers, and every Wednesday on my show, The Deck, I dive into the coldest of cold cases. Many of these victims didn't get the press coverage they deserved during the initial investigations, but I'm sharing what our reporting team has found on these stories in hopes that someone listening may have the information needed

to bring answers to light. And that listener could be you. Listen to The Deck now, wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra. And this episode is the second of two we decided to give you guys on the same day.

This case and the one you heard before are still both unsolved, and despite happening in two very different places at two very different times, they have a lot of similarities. This episode takes place in the Chiricahua National Parkland in Arizona. To help me tell the story of what happened to National Park Service Ranger Paul Fugate, who was working there in January 1980, I enlisted the help of his wife, Dodie.

I asked Dodie to join me for this episode because her husband's case is the longest running missing persons case in the state and one of the oldest open cases for a missing staff member in National Park Service history. After exchanging emails and phone calls for a few weeks, we decided the best way to give you guys all the information I could was to include Dodie's interview in this episode. So are you ready? Because this is Park Predators.

On January 14, 1980, Dodie Fugate gets a call from the superintendent at Chiricahua National Monument. The supervisor tells Dodie that her husband, Paul, was missing from his permanent post at the park, and he hadn't been seen since the day before. He asked her if she'd heard from him, and she replied, no. Paul was on a 10-day stretch of being stationed at the park before he was supposed to return home to Tucson, where Dodie and him lived.

They lived 110 miles away from the park. The superintendent tells Doty to stay put in Tucson and wait there to see if Paul returns. Meanwhile, he would call the police and get a search underway. And then he hangs up the phone. I just stood there by the telephone, sort of staring at the wall, thinking, what on the earth had just happened here?

And so I walked out of that room and started into the bedroom and glanced at the mirror at the end of the hall. And just suddenly everything just went weird. And I walked back into the room, sat down on a big Navajo rug there and just shrieked for some time. It's just a good thing the ladies next door were deaf.

Dodie was worried to the point she became physically ill. She knew her husband. They'd been married 15 years, and this was not like him. I could not imagine what could have happened to Paul. And somehow I just knew that this was not good. If Paul was on the parts, we were going to have a terrible time finding him because...

Two days pass after she gets that phone call from the superintendent. And by Wednesday, July 16th, she's called the park superintendent back and she's telling him she's driving to Chiricahua National Monument. She's going to help in the search for her husband. She couldn't take sitting around and waiting by the phone any longer.

When she arrives to the park, she meets with the investigators from Cochise County Sheriff's Office and the National Park Service. They tell her that around 2 o'clock in the afternoon on Sunday, January 13th, Paul had been working in his ranger shift at the Monuments Visitor Center. He had a scheduled break in the afternoon and was last seen going for a hike on a designated park trail.

According to the New York Times, Paul was headed out to check on trails leading to Faraway Ranch, which was a 400-acre parcel of land that had been recently acquired by the Monument Grounds. Paul left instructions with a seasonal employee at the visitor's center, who was the only other person working there that day. He said if he didn't return by 4.30 in the afternoon to start closing up the facility without him. After that, Paul reportedly just vanished.

Detectives tell Doty that her husband was last seen wearing his Ranger uniform. It had the NPS logo with that trademark arrowhead patch on the upper shirt sleeve. He was also wearing his gold-colored National Park Service Ranger badge over his heart. That would have been on the left breast pocket of his shirt.

Because Paul was a permanent staff member at the park, he had an apartment at the Monument site, as well as a full-time home he and Dodie shared in Tucson. He split his time in weeks-long increments between Tucson and staying at the park in a cabin. Investigators and Dodie determined that the only things missing from either of those locations were Paul's clothes and Paul himself.

The only tangible clues that the MPS found was his portable radio and a set of keys that had been left behind at the visitor center. The problem at first was we couldn't believe what was happening. It was so surreal that we just all kind of stared at each other. And one of the problems was that...

was not the kind of a person that this sort of thing would happen to. It's just that was the first reaction of everybody who knew Paul was, look,

Paul is not the kind of person who gets into trouble like this. Doty, Cochise County Sheriff's deputies, and Paul's fellow NPS rangers, along with Border Patrol agents and the U.S. Forest Service, were all dispatched throughout the surrounding trails and areas multiple times. But not a trace of Paul ever showed up.

They searched this parkland so extensively that they even stumbled upon some undiscovered caverns and artifacts while looking for him. Some of those guys came down fingertip to fingertip on ropes at one point in some of the rougher areas. And they were good, I'll tell you. They just...

took everything apart. But they could not find him and I think the main thing there is that

Now, this search in Chiricahua was not easy. The park itself is over 12,000 acres, and the terrain in that part of Arizona has a lot of canyons and steep-sided gullies known as arroyos and narrow, winding river gorges known as barrancas. Search teams utilized dogs and helicopters to aid the rangers in this massive search.

Investigators with the NPS quickly suspected foul play might be involved because if Paul had become lost or fallen while hiking, he would have had the proper training to know how to signal for help or find his way to a nearby populated area.

It's not uncommon for a ranger to be on solo patrol in a remote area like Chiricahua. If he or she fails to return to their post or check in, the incident is usually resolved quickly. National Park Service search and rescue protocols fall into place, and it's the assumption typically that a ranger who's lost or stranded, or even possibly injured, can be rescued.

Even in cases where rangers were found to have died or were attacked by animals or fell to their death, their remains are usually found within a few days, weeks, and months. There have been a very small number of cases where remains were located years after a ranger disappeared.

So authorities believed, based on a number of circumstances in Paul's case, that he truly was missing and that something bad had happened to him. The fact that they weren't finding any trace of him within the park grounds was not a good sign. Doty came to this same conclusion and began asking authorities to widen their search and canvas towns outside of Chiricahua Monument. But she got pushback. Superjudices at the park would not really...

pay a lot of attention or was not interested in looking for Paul off of his part.

The NPS took the stance that they felt certain the key to finding Paul was inside of the park. Doty says they didn't want to stop searching there until the superintendent felt positive Paul wasn't just lost. This decision would soon be clouded in doubt, though, when an eyewitness comes forward with a story that would change the entire course of this investigation.

There are some cases so infamous that we have all heard about them. But some of the coldest cases, the most mysterious, are the ones that you've never heard of before. I'm Ashley Flowers, and every Wednesday on my show, The Deck, I dive into the coldest

And that listener could be you. Listen to The Deck now, wherever you get your podcasts.

A few days after Paul Fugate was reported missing from his shift at the monument, a park employee told authorities that on January 13th, he and his wife were working several miles away from the visitor's center, and they'd seen Paul late in the afternoon that Sunday. This co-worker says when he saw Paul, the ranger was still wearing his NPS uniform. Mrs. Horton was looking into the glove box of the car.

And Mr. Horton said, "Oh look, that was Paul Shugate without his glasses." And Mrs. Horton looked up and said, "Oh, you know, Ray, everybody looks like Paul Shugate without his glasses." And he said, "No, he was in uniform." And they went on home and didn't think about it again.

until they were starting, you know, we were hunting. And suddenly, boink, everybody said, oh, look, we saw him with two guys in a pickup truck, and he didn't have his glasses, and he was kind of slopped down. And that's very odd because, one, he was in uniform.

which he would not do under most circumstances. If he were leaving the park with somebody, he would change clothes. He wouldn't wear his uniform. And secondly, Paul couldn't find his nose without his glasses on.

Investigators know this lead is important, and they decide to use the technique of hypnosis to get a better description from this witness on what the truck and men inside of it with Paul looked like. While under hypnosis, this co-worker says the truck was green, shiny, and had a camper shell on the back of it. It also had equipment on the top of it, maybe for a CB radio, and had an Arizona license plate.

Authorities put a bolo out for this type of vehicle, but they got no leads. The sighting was a quick glimpse, and according to Doty, the NPS superintendent didn't think it was credible enough to stop looking into other theories on what happened to Paul. A theory the investigators quickly developed right out of the gate was the idea that perhaps Paul was just unhappy in his marriage to Doty, and he just decided to walk away from it all.

Paul and Dodie didn't have any children, and in the last three years leading up to 1980 were living long distance. They saw each other just on the weekends. They had actually made plans, though, for Dodie to move to Paul's living quarters at the Monument Grounds in September, but that all fell apart after he vanished in January. Did you feel that the Park Service believed that Paul just abandoned his marriage and abandoned you and abandoned his job?

I think the Park Service hopes that was the case. It would have been the simplest, easiest thing for the Park Service if that was the case. The trouble with that would be

It was a question the NPS couldn't answer looking at the evidence. Clues at the scene that didn't support this idea Paul just walked away from his life were that he left his wallet behind for one thing, and it had several hundred dollars in it. His ID was also left behind, his credit cards, checks, and other personal items that Doty says meant a lot to him.

For example, Paul had a very large antique gun collection, thousands of dollars worth of photography equipment, a telescope, and an antique car he was restoring by himself. It made no sense that he would abandon all of this and his wife just to take off into the mountains. Despite all of this evidence staring the NPS in the face, they stood by the argument that Paul had just walked away. They said they had proof of this because Paul had a secret only a few people knew about.

Paul had a lover. He had begun a relationship with another woman while living in his apartment inside of the park. An investigative report later released by the NPS stated that Paul's lover was a young woman who was a former Park Service employee, and their affair began just prior to 1980.

Investigators used that as a potential reason Paul would want to leave his wife and start a new life. They also discovered that this woman had been hiking inside of Chiricahua the same day Paul disappeared. But the problem with that salacious theory, though, is that the young woman returned from her hike, cooperated with police, and revealed that her and Paul's affair was not a secret. Paul had had an affair with a young woman for two summers.

And the infidelity part is kind of difficult because he asked me ahead of time if he could do it. Okay? And so it was not a case of I didn't know about it. None of it made sense if you looked at it because we were not separated.

Paul was at the park. I was in Tucson. Those type of things happen occasionally. Doty says the woman Paul had an affair with remained at the monument grounds the entire time searches were going on for him. She and Doty actually roomed together at Paul's cabin and became friends.

As the days turned into weeks with no sign of Paul, the young woman revealed some really surprising news to Dodie. One day we had a chance to sit down and have a talk at the kitchen table, literally ask her if she was pregnant. And she looked at me like I had lost my mind. And then she looked at me like maybe I hadn't lost my mind. And so, uh,

Did she think it was Paul's child? Sure, you know.

The revelation that Paul's lover had become pregnant, possibly with his child, didn't bother Dodie. She cared for the woman, and not long after revealing her pregnancy, this woman chose to get an abortion. The NPS interviewed her four times, and she even took a polygraph test and passed. She was eventually cleared as a suspect. And clearly, she didn't run off with Paul.

Dodie and the Fugate family looked past his affair and continued to put up money to match the NPS reward, eventually growing that pot of funds to $20,000. They wanted answers, answers they felt had nothing to do with Paul's marital decisions, but they wanted to know what really had happened to him while out on that hike.

In the weeks after his disappearance, per NPS policy, Doty was given partial salary payments for the rest of 1980 once Paul was officially declared missing.

Now, according to reporting by the New York Times, a year into the investigation of what happened to him, the director of the NPS's Western Region decided that the missing ranger had voluntarily abandoned his post in life, which meant that they had to ask Doty to return all of the nearly $7,000 she'd been given for her missing husband's salary plus interest.

The NPS later worked out a deal with her just requesting that they could put a lien on Paul's retirement fund.

This action was really hurtful to Dodie, but she said that she understood and just moved on. She was more worried about finding out what happened to her husband. According to the Arizona Daily Star, in July 1983, three years after he'd gone missing, an official with Cochise County Sheriff's Office announced that Paul was a victim of a homicide and that an arrest for more than one person was going to happen, except no one was ever arrested or charged.

And by 1985, the NPS was facing a lot of public scrutiny and a lot of frustration from the Fugate family about this case. So they brought in two investigators to reexamine the information and evidence. One of these investigators was a man named Pete Nye. He was a tenured criminal investigations detective from the NPS's own Investigative Services Bureau.

The other guy was an investigator from the Arizona Department of Public Safety. Now, these two men spent months reviewing all of the files on Paul's case. They were going through every scrap of paperwork, and that included witness statements and search and rescue results. After all of that work, they determined for certain that Paul did not walk away from his family and job.

They felt that the initial assessment of the evidence back in 1980 was flawed. When he had first disappeared, the initial investigators for the NPS stated that the keys and the portable radio Paul had left behind at the visitor center were clear signs that he abandoned his post and left his life behind. If he didn't have any keys, he couldn't get into any outbuildings or check any properties while on patrol. And

and it meant that the Keys not being with him proved he just intended to never do anything productive on his hike. However, Paul's co-workers said that it was not uncommon for him to go on a hike without his radio. He often left it behind.

In an affidavit, one other co-worker testified that Paul would also carry two sets of keys on him. One was his personal set and one was a master set for the park. This co-worker said that the keys that had been left behind at the visitor center were Paul's personal keys. He would have had the NPS master set on him when he left for his hike, meaning that he did intend to do something productive while out on patrol.

A solid theory these detectives in 1985 came up with was that maybe Paul stumbled upon a drug smuggling or illegal activity operation in the park, and whoever was a part of that had to keep him quiet. By this time, Dodie also suspected that this could have been what happened. She believed that it was very likely Paul was out on his hike and accidentally walked into a drug deal or people transporting drugs.

The drug dealers may have been spooked by Paul's NPS badge and mistook him for a police officer, so they abducted him. And there he was with his badge and no firearm. You know, he's just checking out an eighth trail. And that's all it took was somebody seeing a badge and a uniform and they're doing something I don't know what.

And that was it. Paul did something, and somebody killed him. A close friend of Paul's, a man named Steve McLaughlin, publicly voiced this same theory. Steve started a group to raise money for more searches for Paul and even hired a private investigator. The group's name was Friends of Paul Fugate, and in the years after his disappearance, members held yard sales to raise funds, and they even created bumper stickers that read, Where is Paul Fugate?

Steve openly scolded the NPS for not conducting search and rescue operations outside of the National Monument grounds. Steve and Doty were firm believers that Paul had stumbled upon drug dealers while on his hike.

The area where he would have been walking is roughly 50 miles from the Mexico border. There are many dirt roads and unpaved areas that someone trying to cross the border illegally could use. At the time, Doty says these trails had a history of being used for drug deals, drug smuggling, and other illegal activity. Law enforcement in Arizona were aware of that, but still, the authorities didn't feel that they had enough evidence to prove that Paul had been abducted and murdered.

Do you think if Paul was transported out of the park either alive or dead, do you think he was taken further into the United States or potentially over the border?

On top of that, there was also again that testimony from Paul's colleague, the Hortons, who had seen him riding with two men in the pickup truck leaving the park.

NPS investigators always questioned that story because they weren't sure if the eyewitness could be positive about what he saw. They doubted the story because the witness was driving by the vehicle going 50 miles per hour or more, and the sighting wasn't as credible due to the speed of the vehicles and the witness only catching a glimpse of Paul. Steve and Dodie, though, wanted the FBI to come in and reevaluate everything around Paul's disappearance, but that never happened.

The FBI said in 1981 that after reviewing the case and circumstances, they didn't feel there was reason enough for them to have jurisdiction. Every few years, the FBI would be asked again and again to help on the case, but each time the answer was no. The FBI just stated there was no evidence of foul play, and they refused to conduct any investigation or interviews related to the case.

Now, there's also another theory that the NPS looked into, which I don't feel holds much weight at all, but I'll mention it just because it was brought up.

Paul was known throughout his career with NPS to be a bit of a button pusher in terms of how he didn't like conforming to NPS's grooming standards. He was known for having a somewhat burly appearance, and at the time of his disappearance, he had long graying hair and a pretty full scraggly beard. He was not the clean-cut ranger you might see on a pamphlet for the agency.

On one occasion in the 1970s, he was actually fired for showing up to work with long hair and a handlebar mustache. He also challenged how some supervisors and colleagues operated. He disputed his dismissal from his job, and in 1976, the NPS actually reinstated him with back pay and benefits. Paul had been fired by the Park Service earlier, mainly because he had...

blowing the whistle on some people that didn't like it very much. I'm sure that those people were not happy that Paul got his job back. And so when Paul disappeared, it seemed to them a good time for those particular people to just take the low road and find some way that the whole thing was Paul's fault.

And blaming the student's victim is a very common thing. Because Paul was already noted by the NPS as being somewhat of a rebel, they argued that maybe he just decided to leave his employer because they were too conservative for him. But there again, that didn't explain why he left his wife and all of his belongings behind. If you're going to quit your job, that's one thing. If you're going to quit life, that's very different.

By January 1985, the second review of Paul's case had wrapped up, and a 63-page deposition from a Cochise County Sheriff's detective was filed in federal court. This deposition documented the lengths the missing person's investigation had gone to to find Paul. The details in this detective's testimony would reveal just how close authorities were to finally getting some answers.

There are some cases so infamous that we have all heard about them. But some of the coldest cases, the most mysterious, are the ones that you've never heard of before. I'm Ashley Flowers, and every Wednesday on my show, The Deck, I dive into the coldest

In his affidavit in 1985, the Cochise County detective who had worked on the case revealed that he knew what had happened to Paul.

He testified that after following up on 400 leads, which took him from Alaska to the Florida Keys, he'd found no evidence suggesting that the missing ranger had disappeared on his own free will.

This detective said that in 1983, he had gotten word from another law enforcement agency in Arizona that they had a man in custody who told an undercover informant that he, quote, shot, killed and buried a law enforcement officer in Arizona in 1980.

This detective knew that there weren't any missing or killed law enforcement officers that particular year in Arizona. So he got a sinking thought that some other people in this case had had before, which was maybe Paul had been mistaken for a law enforcement officer and harmed. The detective following up on the lead went to talk to this alleged murderer at least five times,

but funding for his trips dried up and eventually a new officer took over the case and never interviewed that guy. The detective later told the Arizona Daily Star that based on his investigation, it was entirely possible that Paul had come upon drug dealers and they mistook him for a police officer and that's why they would have killed him. At the time Paul disappeared, the NPS had received reports of possible marijuana grow operations in the boundary of the park.

They had also received reports of sketchy people sighted in a section of the grounds known as Faraway Ranch. Now, Faraway Ranch is a deserted house with historic outbuildings, and that was one of Paul's favorite places to hike to in the park. And I had mentioned to Paul the day that he left Tucson that he should tell the superintendent that there were people down there around Faraway Ranch who were doing God knows what.

possibly having a picnic. I don't know.

Paul often patrolled Faraway Ranch and even asked his supervisor if he could live in one of the buildings to keep a closer eye on things. But his boss said no. The detective in 85 who uncovered all of this information about the alleged confession from the jailhouse informant in 83 said that he tried to provide his findings to the director of the NPS's Western Region.

That guy had reviewed Paul's case in the beginning, but that director didn't take the lead seriously and just sort of brushed it off. Even some of Paul's own co-workers said the director's handling of the new information was both unprofessional and dismissive.

And the years just rolled on. The National Park Service refused to officially declare Paul deceased, and the Cochise County Sheriff's Office said they believed he was dead, but the NPS was the agency that made that final ruling.

It wasn't until 1988 that Paul was finally legally declared dead. He was the oldest of six children, and Dodie says his mother died without ever finding out where her son's body was or what really happened to him. The fact that I cannot find Paul's body is very difficult for me and for his family. I have great hopes that we might be able to find his body. I've reached the stake for...

I do not care if whoever killed him is ever arrested. I just want my husband back, so to speak, so we can give him his burial. All of us, his brothers and sisters and I, and all of his friends can have some sort of closure about where he is.

Dodie now lives in New Mexico, and even in her old age, she says she often returns to Chiricahua to search for Paul. She believes his remains may still be hidden somewhere in the park or the surrounding mountains.

In 2010, she held a 30-year anniversary vigil for him at the monument, and there they dedicated a memorial plaque in his honor. They also planted an apple tree. Now, this apple tree was significant because during his time at his post, Paul had befriended a small pig to which he fed apples. It sort of became his park pet, and the two would often be seen walking near faraway ranch together.

In August 2018, the cold case got a little bit of new life when the Arizona Star reported that two human bone fragments were found in a remote area in the Coronado National Forest, which is in the Chiricahua Mountains. A spokeswoman for the Cochise County Sheriff's Office wouldn't say at the time who the bones belonged to or even what kind of bones they were, but a larger search got underway to comb that area for more clues in skeletal remains.

They announced later that day that the sheriff's department didn't find any more bones and that the discovery of the bone fragments didn't indicate any link to Paul Fugate's case. It seemed like a letdown, but thankfully the case didn't completely stall out there. A few months later, in December 2018, medical examiners in Tucson began testing the bones that had been found. They were trying to pull a DNA profile from them.

This team of scientists was tasked with finding out who the bones belonged to. Pulling a DNA profile and comparing it to Paul would be the only way to know for certain if the bones belonged to him or not. The fragments went to the University of North Texas in Fort Worth, where the Center for Human Identification is.

They worked closely with the National Missing and Unidentified Person Database, which is overseen by the United States Department of Justice. Once they isolated a DNA profile, according to Doty, it wasn't a match for Paul. I had talked to the sheriff's department up there, and some of my friends who are in forensics, and the bones that they found were of a young woman who had wandered off at Russell Park and died.

Right around the time all of this testing was going on and the bones were discovered, the National Park Service announced that their investigators were renewing interest in Paul's case. And the agency tripled the existing reward for information to $60,000.

This announcement from the NPS came after Rangers said they had new information which was prompting them to join forces yet again with the Cochise County Sheriff. They wanted to renew a request for the public's help in solving this 40-year-old mystery.

But what will happen next in this case, and the answer to if Paul Fugate's life came to an end because of an unforeseen encounter with the drug underworld, may never be known. It's a mystery as jumbled as the rocks in the mountains of Chiricahua.

Park Predators is an AudioChuck original podcast. This series was executive produced by Ashley Flowers. Research and writing by Delia D'Ambra with writing assistance by Ashley Flowers. Sound design by David Flowers with production assistance from Melissa Gastola. You can find all of our source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

There are some cases so infamous that we have all heard about them. But some of the coldest cases, the most mysterious, are the ones that you've never heard of before. I'm Ashley Flowers, and every Wednesday on my show, The Deck, I dive into the coldest

And that listener could be you. Listen to The Deck now, wherever you get your podcasts.