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07-21-2026, 06:29 PM
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 ★ ★ GENERAL ★ ★ Poster Rank:41 male Join Date: Oct 2006 Posts: 35,992
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The Disappearance of Karlie Guse
Just after dawn on October 13, 2018, a handful of people going about their morning in the high desert north of Bishop, California, saw the same thing. A tall, slender teenage girl with long hair, walking alone near Highway 6. One of them, a retired sheriff's deputy, said she was looking up, looking around at the sky. Nobody stopped her. By the time anyone understood what they had seen, Karlie Lain Guse was gone, and she has not been seen since. Who She Was Karlie Lain Guse was 16, born in May 2002. She was 5 feet 7, about 110 pounds, with dark blonde hair and blue eyes. She lived with her father, Zachary Guse, and her stepmother, Melissa Guse, in Chalfant Valley, a scatter of homes about 10 miles north of Bishop in eastern California. Her biological mother, Lindsay Fairley, lived across the state line in Nevada. Karlie had two younger brothers, 9 and 10 years old at the time. By every account she was an ordinary teenager with an ordinary teenager's life. The Party, and the Morning After On the evening of October 12, 2018, Karlie told Melissa she was going to a high school football game. She went to a party instead, with her boyfriend, Donald Arrowood III, and there she smoked marijuana. Something about it hit her hard. She became frightened and paranoid, and her boyfriend later described it in plain terms. "She got scared of the music," he said. "She got scared of me." Her stepmother came and picked her up from the party. Back at the house, Karlie stayed distressed. Melissa sat up with her through the night, and at one point recorded a few minutes of audio of Karlie talking about what the drug had done to her. By her own account, Melissa fell asleep beside her around 5:45 that morning. She woke somewhere between 7:15 and 7:30, and Karlie was gone. She had left the house without her phone, without her glasses, and without the cash she had on her. The Search What followed was one of the largest searches Mono County had ever run. For roughly a week, teams worked the high desert with multiple helicopters, upward of 60 people on the ground, and about half a dozen scent dogs. They found no trace of her. Deputies later set up a checkpoint on Highway 6 and stopped around 50 drivers who had passed through on October 13. Not one of them remembered seeing her. A few people had, though, earlier that morning. Three witnesses reported a young woman matching Karlie's description walking toward Highway 6 not long after sunrise. Richard Eddy, a retired Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy who lived nearby, saw a tall, slender female with long hair, and said she was looking up, looking around at the sky. Kenneth Dutton, another neighbor, saw her holding a piece of paper in her hand. A third man, a firewood cutter, saw her near White Mountain Estates Road and Highway 6. The FBI examined the phone Karlie had left behind and combed her social media accounts. The Evidence and Its Gaps For all of that, the case produced almost nothing to work with. The lead investigator, then Sergeant and later Lieutenant Seth Clark of the Mono County Sheriff's Office, put it about as bluntly as an investigator can. "The biggest clue," he said, "is that there is no clue." There were not even cameras to fall back on. In 2018 there were no security cameras watching northbound traffic at the California agricultural inspection station on Highway 6, so anyone who might have driven Karlie north out of the valley would have passed unrecorded. Not everyone was satisfied with how the search was run. Michael Boone, a private investigator hired by Karlie's biological mother, argued the sheriff's office had failed to follow proper protocol. He said Karlie's bedding was never taken and analyzed, and that no search warrant was served on the family's cars. Those are Boone's claims, made for the family, not the findings of any court. The Investigation The Mono County Sheriff's Office interviewed the three eyewitnesses, searched the Guse home, and questioned Melissa and Zachary Guse more than once. It found no evidence to implicate Karlie's father or her stepmother, and no one has been charged in connection with her disappearance. The sheriff has also been careful not to say more than the evidence allows. "Nobody's been cleared of anything," Sheriff Ingrid Braun said. "Right now I don't even have a crime to clear them of." There was one arrest in the story, and it is easy to misread, so here it is exactly. In January 2019 an 18 year old named Jaymes Dulin was convicted after pleading guilty to contributing to the delinquency of a minor, for providing the marijuana Karlie smoked at the party. That is the whole of it. His case had nothing to do with where she went, and no fact has ever tied him to her disappearance. The FBI's Sacramento field office worked the case alongside the sheriff. In October 2020, on the second anniversary, the two agencies tried something unusual to keep it alive. They released a 12-part video series called "The Things They Carry," one short film posted each day from October 13 to October 25, featuring Karlie's family, her friends, a witness, and members of the community, all of them asking whoever knew something to come forward. By then the case had already reached a national audience, through a May 2019 episode of Dr. Phil, an appearance on Nancy Grace, a People Magazine Investigates segment, and NBC News' "Missing in America." The Theories No one has been charged in this case, so everything past this point is a theory. Each one has been floated by someone with a name and a reason, and none of them has been proven. Investigators have considered the plainest possibility, that Karlie simply walked off into the desert on her own and died of exposure. They have also called it a long shot. The high desert around Chalfant is open and unforgiving, but dozens of searchers and half a dozen dogs covered it for the better part of a week and found nothing, and a body in that terrain tends to be found. The family has also raised, and the Dr. Phil show discussed, the possibility that Karlie got into a vehicle somewhere along Highway 6, willingly or by force, and was carried out of the valley. Some commentators think an abduction is the more likely explanation, if only because a search that size turned up no remains at all. Karlie's biological mother, Lindsay Fairley, has never accepted the account of that night. On the Dr. Phil show in May 2019, she said she believed her daughter "had a fatal drug overdose" at the house before dawn. A year earlier, on a Nancy Grace podcast in October 2018, she had questioned what she called the stepmother's shifting account of the morning. Fairley's belief is exactly that, a grieving mother's theory and a dispute inside a fractured family. It is not evidence of a crime by anyone, and the sheriff's office has said it does not have one. Where It Stands Now Years on, the case is still open and still unsolved. Investigators say there is no evidence a crime ever occurred, no one has been arrested over the disappearance itself, and no remains have been found. Karlie has not contacted her family or her friends since that October morning. In 2023 a new lead surfaced and then went quiet. Someone matching Karlie's description was reportedly seen in Tonopah, Nevada, a small town about 100 miles away, and investigators were said to have located a vehicle that may have driven her from Highway 6 to Tonopah. Nothing about that lead has been confirmed. No further details about the vehicle, or any testing tied to it, have come out. The FBI is offering a reward of up to $5,000 for information that leads to Karlie's location. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Mono County Sheriff's Office at (760) 932-5678.
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