More Evidence Found During Intense Search For Gillette Man Missing Since June

GILLETTE — It was just before 7 a.m. Monday and the clock was ticking.

Stacy Koester squinted in the sun, tracking the procession of the dozen or so vehicles slowly winding up the dirt road in a shroud of dust.

She balanced a cardboard box of walkie talkies on her hip, taking a final drag on her Marlboro Light while she ran the numbers in her head — how many teams, how many grids and how much ground they could cover this morning before everyone had to head home.

Admittedly, she had been hoping that the daylong, large-scale search the day before — and her most expensive to date at nearly $6,000 — would have yielded something more than sunburns and sore muscles.

Koester heads up WyoFind Search, Rescue and Recovery, a Gillette-based nonprofit dedicated to finding missing persons and supporting their families.

Now, they are looking for Derek Schaff, a 43-year-old local man who vanished two months earlier in the Weston Hills Recreational Area about 30 miles north of Gillette, where Koester and her crew have set up incident command for the day.

The vehicles headed her way were filled with more than 20 search-and-rescue volunteers from across two states and southcentral Wyoming who drove several hours one way to be here.

This includes the Badlands Search and Rescue out of North Dakota, Carbon County Search and Rescue West Division, and four Colorado-based cadaver dog teams from the Search and Rescue Dogs of the United States (SARDUS).

That’s more manpower than WyoFind has ever had for a search in its four years of operation, so there was a lot of optimism going into it, which had to be weighed against the challenges at hand.

Looking for anything out here in the sprawling roughly 3,000 acres of rugged terrain with steep cliffs and deep draws clogged with pine and scrub brush is akin to the proverbial needle in a haystack.

But this is part of the challenge that inspires folks like Koester, who are intent on solving puzzles and bringing the missing home.  

Little did she know they were about to get a huge break.

Trail Ends Here

The vehicles arrived, parking in an orderly row as doors swung open in a flurry of activity as searchers strapped on backpacks, tested crackling walkie talkies and bent over smartphones to study the latest iteration of their CalTopo map that captured the all the searchers and dog teams’ tracks in colorful squiggly lines that belie the toughness of the terrain.

The search team debates potential routes Schaff could have followed, their eyes scanning for anything unnatural in the landscape — a scrap of fabric, a misplaced tool, footprints and any sign of human passage.

Their maps are layered with the history of Koester’s earlier efforts, marked with the paths taken by her crew, including Ashley Means, Bobby Koester, Matt Hughes, Dan Stroup, Dan Smith, Kyle Powell and volunteers from South Dakota and a dog team from Idaho.

Most critically, the maps bear notations from Sgt. Gary Sams of the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office, confirming Schaff’s presence in this area between his last sighting in Gillette on June 12 and when his girlfriend reported him missing on June 19 after he failed to return home.

On June 17, Schaff’s work truck was found high-centered and stuck on a dirt road above a steep cliff dropping into pine trees.

Downhill from the recovery site, the sheriff’s office found Schaff’s cellphone and other personal items.

This means he was definitely here at some point.

The last pings on Schaff’s phone place it where it was found. Beyond that, there is nothing.

No sightings, no trail, no sign that he walked out of the Weston Recreational Area or got a ride. No sign that he didn’t, either.

For now, the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office is working with what it has, and what it has ends here, said Sgt. Sams.

Family Worried

Schaff’s family does not believe he’d go off the grid for this long and are worried sick about him, said his sister-in-law, Melissa Schaff.  

“It is difficult to put into words what it is like to have someone you love missing,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “The not knowing is something we carry with us every day.”

The only bit of relief, Melissa added, is having people like Koester and these volunteers who are willingly giving up their time and resources to go out searching for him.  

“That feeling gives us renewed hope and strength to keep moving forward and searching for the answers our family so desperately needs,” she said.

It’s A Science

That morning, searchers had roughly two hours to search before the Colorado dog teams would begin peeling off to make the long drive home.

The question was where they planned to focus their final hours as Travis Bateman, head of the Badlands crew, stepped up to give a give a recap, and with Koester, assign volunteer teams route locations.

He’s a seasoned search-and-rescue leader with a passion that matches his athleticism.

His group had recently returned from a recovery in North Dakota, where they located the deceased body of a 37-year-old man who had gone out hiking in the rugged Theodore Roosevelt National Park on a day where temperatures hovered above 100 degrees.

Though recoveries can be rare in this line of work, Bateman noted they were encouraging — and this one had given hiscrew renewed momentum heading into the Wyoming search.

For his crew, this terrain is not as challenging as it for some of the others.

“We’re used to it,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “It’s like the Badlands at a slightly higher elevation.”

Bateman laid out the methodical science behind the search.

It was dictated by patterns of missing persons, the ground already covered, and previous alerts from the dogs — all of which could be thrown off by a shift in wind or weather.

So far, the dogs hadn’t given a solid hit, though a few areas warranted a second look.

“There’s a rhyme and a reason to how we do this,” Bateman said. “We take pride in that discipline (and) not just showing up and trampling the scene.”

He and Koester pored over maps of earlier search tracks and locations where the dogs had paused, charting that day’s routes.

The morning helped: cool air, a steady westerly wind. It would give the dogs a clean few hours to work, ideal for catching the scent of remains.

Hope And A Prayer

Mike Lujan, head of the Carbon County Search and Rescue West division, had driven from the Rawlins area with a handful of other volunteers to help Koester’s crew.

He had a hunch and wanted to go back to search the area where the cellphone was found, which was inarguably the worst of the terrain.

But he’d also said a prayer and felt a divine pull tugging him back there. One of his team members questioned whether he was out of his mind.

“She said, ‘I think you got the worst of it going into country,’” Lujan said with a laugh. “I probably did, but I wanted to go back.”

This terrain at the Weston Hills Recreational Area was unlike anything they dealt with back in Carbon County, he said.

The steep cliffs and loose rock — the kind that sends a person sliding downhill on their bottoms — was as bad as anything he’s ever done in his 36 years of search and rescue.

He liked to thoroughly cover the ground, even if it meant going over more than once because it’s easy to miss things.

A distracted eye scanning for rattlesnakes or concentrating too hard on footing is likely to walk right past a vital clue. It’s like looking for a tennis ball in an empty stadium, he said.

It might be tucked under a seat, hidden in the grass, or even right out in the open where someone may have walked past. That’s why you go slow. That’s why you do it twice.

He joked about some of the falls he’d taken the day prior. But he had a gut feeling that they’d missed something the day before.

Lujan, a dog handler, had Meshach with him.

The moment the dog was let out of the pickup, she began circling and whimpering, straining toward the work ahead.

Bateman assigned Gus Nelson and Alex Anderson to flank Lujan while Donna Pipher, the incident command leader, noted their names and departure time in her log.

More Evidence Found

The morning was about to unravel.

Within five minutes of setting out, Lujan’s voice crackled over the radio: he and Meshach had found something partway down the sloping cliff, tucked into scrub brush.

A few steps farther, another item lay out of place. Then another.

Lujan radioed for Koester, who contacted Sams and his evidence tech.

There was an air of excitement among the searchers as they waited for the sheriff’s evidence van to arrive and collect what was later confirmed as Schaff’s belongings.

Lujan’s hunch had paid off, and he said he was honored to have done his “small part.”

Sams publicly expressed his thanks to Koester and the volunteers in a statement released Friday thanking them for working “tirelessly over very rough and steep terrain” in support of the investigation.

Likewise, Schaff’s family was equally grateful to law enforcement and the volunteer search groups, as well as the community.

“To law enforcement, every search team that has helped along the way, our community, and everyone who has prayed, shared Derek’s story, or stood beside our family: thank you from the bottom of our hearts,” Melissa Schaff said.

There’s still more work to be done, Koester said.

“It’s another piece of the puzzle,” Koester said. “But we’re a long way from done.

“We still need to bring Derek home.”

Another search is already in the planning for September, she said, as Bateman said his group is excited to come back to join.

WyoFind has launched a GoFundMe to help pay for the out-of-state searchers gas, hotel rooms and meals.

Anyone with information about Schaff is asked to contact the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office at 307-682-7271 or 307-687-6176. Tips also can be submitted on WyoFind’s website, which will be turned over to law enforcement.

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