It’s Been 20 Years Since Renee Yeargain Disappeared From A Wyoming Rest Stop

Renee Yeargain was 24 when she disappeared from her Torrington, Wyoming, home in August 2004.

At the time, she was living with her four children and fiancé, Josh Minter, with whom she shared her youngest child. The couple planned to marry, but Yeargain vanished 12 days before the wedding day.

Minter told police that the two had gotten into a fight and that Yeargain left the night of Aug. 9, 2004, with a grocery sack of clothing. She didn’t tell him where she was going, but earlier had stated that she could make some money inking bikers at Sturgis as a budding tattoo artist.

Two days later, however, Yeargain’s abandoned Subaru station wagon was found at the Meriden rest area on U.S. Highway 85 halfway between Cheyenne and Torrington. The windows were rolled down and the keys were in the ignition, according to authorities.

Also in the vehicle were her cellphone and purse, including wallet, check book and driver’s license. No money was found nor were Yeargain’s tattoo kit and clothing in the vehicle.

Responding officers also found a burned area in the rear of the vehicle, as if someone had burned a photo album inside.

Filling In Holes

What happened that night remains a mystery that Jess Oaks, managing editor for the Torrington Telegram newspaper and Yeargain’s longtime friend, has worked for 20 years to try to solve

She’s pushed law enforcement and has done her own weighty investigation, including recently unearthing a 2018 search warrant shared with Cowboy State Daily that helps fill in some holes.

Oaks shared details in a recent first-person accountof her relationship with Yeargain and Yeargain’s family, and her experience tracking the investigation that has since been turned over to the cold case team at the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI).

Yeargain is one of 96 missing people listed on DCI’s database, dating back to 1974.

Ryan Cox, DCI commander and head of the cold case team, confirmed the agency took over the case from the Torrington Police Department at the department’s request in December 2021.

Cox further said that it’s an “active investigation” with “several leads that need to be followed up on” but declined to specify, citing an open investigation.

Advocate For Yeargain

Oaks, now 41, has never stopped looking for her friend. She met Yeargain when the two were young mothers in their early 20s working at a now defunct supper club on the Nebraska/Wyoming state line.

They worked together for about three months, Oaks said, and instantly bonded over their shared interests.

After the club shut down, the two stayed in loose touch, but their lives kept them both busy.

Shortly before Yeargain disappeared, Oaks recalled running into her downtown at which point Yeargain spoke about how well her life was going and how eager she was to marry Minter.

In the past, Yeargain had struggled with addiction that at one point prompted the court to take away her children. But in recent years prior to her disappearance, Yeargain told Oaks that she’d worked hard to get sober and get her children back.

Still, those past scars likely worked against her when she disappeared, Oaks believes, because she feels Yeargain’s absence wasn’t at first taken seriously by police.

Left On Her Own

The first impressions of responding Torrington Police Detective Lt. Jeff Lamm were that Yeargain had willingly left her children.

In a May 2005 article in the Casper Star-Tribune, Lamm noted that Yeargain had “a history of taking off,” but had always returned and kept in touch with her family during her absence. Lamm also said Yeargain has a history of mental illness and had been diagnosed as bipolar.

When asked if Lamm suspected foul play, he said: “I think she left town on her own … but I’m not sure what happened when she got to the rest area.”

Minter told police the couple’s argument was over Yeargain wanting to bring a rat and snake into the home, according to news reports from the time, and that she’d mentioned wanting to hook up with some bikers at Sturgis to make extra money tattooing.

He said she was wearing jeans and a black tank top with a red heart and bug in the corner.

The next day, Minter reportedly asked friends and acquaintances if anyone had seen Yeargain.

‘Tough Girl’

Minter reportedly told Yeargain’s mother Diane Van Horn a different story.

According to reporting by the Casper Star-Tribune, Minter told Van Horn that her daughter had left on foot that night but returned home Aug. 10 to get her car.

He further told Van Horn that he’d gotten rid of all of Yeargain’s belongings by Aug. 13, when Van Horn came to Torrington from her home in Douglas to investigate her daughter’s whereabouts.

“Why did he do that?” Van Horn is reporting asking in the Star-Tribune article. “Things just don’t add up, and I’m very scared something horrible has happened. I have a bad feeling about all of this.”

Minter further blamed the couple’s disagreements about their wedding plans, according to the article, because he said she wanted to have a big wedding he couldn’t afford and didn’t like his idea of a quickie, cheaper wedding in Las Vegas with a larger one to follow later.

He also told the reporter that she was having a hard time at work and had recently gone back to drinking and drugs, but said the wedding was the tipping point.

“That really bugged her,” he said. “I guess she just wanted the big wedding.”

He told the reporter that Yeargain was a “tough girl.”

“I’m sure she’s OK. She just doesn’t want to deal with anything right now,” he was quoted as saying.

Multiple Cowboy State Daily attempts to reach Minter for this story were not returned.

For her part, Van Horn vehemently denied that her daughter was using drugs, drinking or having problems at work, and told the reporter there was no way Yeargain would have voluntarily left her children after fighting so hard to get them back.

‘Creepy Loner’

Oaks knew Minter from high school and described him as a “loner who frequently wore a dark trench coat and hung out with another student her peers called “creepy,” she said.

She questioned his actions following Yeargain’s disappearance, including his placing Yeargain’s three children, ages 9 and younger, into the Department of Family Service’s custody one day after she disappeared and before her vehicle was found abandoned.

On Aug. 11, 2004, Minter called a DFS case worker to turn over Yeargain’s three children, according to an affidavit in support of a warrant filed by the Torrington Police Department on June 25, 2018, but kept the 1-year-old boy the couple shared in common.

He repeated the story to the case worker that the couple had gotten into a fight the night of Aug. 9, and that Yeargain had taken off in the middle of the night, leaving him with the children. The children were then put into foster care while the youngest child remained with Minter.

Also suspicious to Oaks is the fate of Yeargain’s car after it was discovered abandoned. According to the affidavit, the Subaru was turned over to Minter before being inspected by police.

Prior to the inspection, Lamm had asked Minter if he’d gone through the vehicle, to which he responded he hadn’t, though he did notice that Yeargain’s tattoo kit was missing. The vehicle was then inspected by Lamm on Aug. 23, at which point her purse was recovered along with her cellphone, according to the affidavit.

Since disappearing, Yeargain’s Social Security and other information had been run through the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) yearly since her disappearance with no hits so far, court documents state.

DNA samples from Yeargain’s children have since been entered several national databases in 2009 in the event that human remains are found.

Burnt Clothing And Women’s Shoes

In between, police have pursued many leads, conducted interviews and other investigatory measures, “but nothing has been located as to Renee Yeargain’s whereabouts,” according to the affidavit.

Then, 13 years after Yeargain disappeared, Torrington Police Detective Douglas Weeks paired up with Goshen County Search and Rescue to search for human remains on the property on Road 61 near Huntley, about 10 miles from Torrington, where Minter was living with his mother, Cathy.

Weeks first went to the property to ask Minter for permission to search July 15, 2018, according to the affidavit. Minter told police that “he did not mind,” and a search date was set three days later.

When they returned with cadaver dogs, they noticed a burn pit about 16 feet by 10 feet in which appeared to be singed women’s clothing and a pair of women’s shoes, along with a stack of burned newspapers and magazines that were still smoldering.

It was later learned that Cathy Minter had called in the day prior to the search.

Jerry Numon of Goshen County Search and Rescue was one of the handlers on site that day along with his nationally certified cadaver dog, Pax. As noted in the affidavit, cadaver dogs can locate human remains in all stages of decomposition in both water and beneath ground up to 200 years old.

During the search, Pax alerted twice on the southeast corner of the burn pit, which was located north of a metal Quonset building on the property out of view of the family’s home, court documents state.

Per protocol, once a cadaver dog hits, a second team is brought in to verify that dog’s hit. The detectives procured permission from Minter to return the following day with a different set of dogs.

Minter agreed, court documents state, though called Weeks on the phone two to three minutes after they’d left to warn him unprompted that he’d burned “a couple dogs, possums and possibly a raccoon in the fire pit,” which struck Weeks as suspicious since Minter had been inside during the search.

The following day, four dog teams from Capital City Canine searched the property and also alerted on seven spots near the fire pit area, with one alerting on the exact same spot that Pax had.

Based on cadaver dog alerts and other evidence, police asked the Goshen County Circuit Court for a search warrant to return to the property to potentially exhume human remains, which was granted June 25, 2018, to be executed at any time — day or night — over the next 10 days.

It’s not clear from court documents when or if that third search happened, though an inventory receipt dated June 28, 2018, for about 25 miscellaneous unidentified bones was sent to the DCI lab for testing.

The bones were determined to be those of an animal, DCI’s Ryan Cox told Cowboy State Daily on Friday.

Mystery Remains

Oaks distinctly remembers the two-day preliminary search on the Minter property.

She stood across the road and watched dozers and excavators dig up muddy ground in the pouring rain. It was the first activity she’d seen on the case in years and had been hopeful for any type of answers.

Over the years, she’s seen the case change hands through at least five Torrington Police Department detectives until finally being turned over to DCI.

Cox acknowledged that though the case is very much active, his agency’s resources are limited because the cold case detectives do that work on top of their regular caseloads.

A bill brought by the Wyoming Legislative Judiciary Committee had initially been drafted to include funding for DCI to create a cold case database and hire two retired peace officers to exclusively work on cold cases was watered down to only including funding for the database.

For Oaks, though the lack of activity on Yeargain’s case is frustrating, she’s not ever going to give up, she said.

She understands the difficulty in solving the case at this point given the way it was initially handled from the start had investigators listened to Yeargain’s mother and family who all said she would never take off and leave her children, but that Yeargain’s past worked against those claims being taken seriously.

“Over the 20 years, I have slowly lost faith in a lot of things that I don't understand,” she said. “But it has been very frustrating for me to sit here and wonder where Renee would be, where her kids would be had this handled or had this case been handled appropriately from the beginning.”

Today, people disappearing under mysterious circumstances are handled much differently than in 2004, Oaks noted, which she’s happy to see.

And despite the years of no answers, Oaks feels a certain nudge when she starts to give up that she firmly believes is from her friend, encouraging her on.

“I'm a firm believer that somebody in this community knows something, and one of these days, the guilt is going to get to them, and they're going to tell the truth,” she said. “And I just hope that it's a time where Rene's family can feel not only the justice end of that, but the closure that they've been desperately looking for 20 years.”

Jen Kocher can be reached at jen@cowboystatedaily.com.