New Revelations: 5 chilling details are now surfacing about the last hours of Emily Pike after she was abducted in the Arizona desert

All 14-year-old Emily Pike wanted was to go home to her mother, grandmother, and her cat, Millie, on the sprawling San Carlos Indian Reservation in Arizona.

Instead, the Apache teenager spent the last two years of her short life in and out of group homes in Mesa, 90 miles away to the west, which she hated so much she once tried to hang herself rather than stay.

Emily was sensitive, spirited and rebellious, according to her family. Her mother struggled with drug addiction and her father drifted in and out of prison.

‘Home’ for her was a chaotic compound made up of several rundown shacks and a trailer where a number of lawless young men lived, some of whom were her relatives and one of whom allegedly sexually assaulted her in 2023.

She reported the assault that took place not far from her home, but police ultimately did not believe her, Emily’s relatives told the Daily Mail.

Instead, she was removed and placed in a group home, with the alleged perpetrator still living in the compound.

‘The sad part was that whenever we would go pick her up – her and her brother – to spend time with us, we’d find them with lice in their hair and no shoes again and just raggedy clothes,’ her aunt Carolyn Pike, who now lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, told the Daily Mail.

‘We wanted to take Emily to live with us but we were never able to.’

Instead, Emily kept running away from group homes, trying to get back to her family.

That last time, she didn’t make it.

After bolting, again, from her group home on January 27, 2025, her remains were found on Valentine’s Day in two trash bags tossed on a patch of dirt on a lonely stretch of high desert in the Tonto National Forest – five miles from the boundary line of the reservation.

She had been dismembered. Her arms were missing and have never been found.

The way she was chopped up was ‘almost professional,’ a person familiar with the case told the Daily Mail.

An autopsy determined that Emily’s cause of death was ‘homicidal violence with blunt head trauma’.

The murder is being investigated by a joint task force comprised of the Gila County Sheriff’s Department, the San Carlos tribal police, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the FBI – but her frustrated relatives, including her paternal aunt Carolyn, her paternal uncle, Allred Pike and others told the Daily Mail they never get any information about the case and worry the trail has gone cold.

More than a year later, they say they’re still waiting to learn who picked her up, how she traveled across miles of Arizona desert – and who left her there.

‘It was a little hard to hear about all those police looking for Nancy Guthrie in Tucson,’ Tao Etpison, vice chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, told the Daily Mail.

‘I understand that her daughter is famous but I wish we had even a fraction of that kind of attention paid to Emily.’

The agencies handling Emily’s investigation are tight-lipped but the Daily Mail can reveal there may be a person of interest on law enforcement’s radar.

There is also speculation from one law enforcement official that the person who took Emily might have been an older man based in the area around Globe, Arizona.

The San Carlos reservation is a fairly straight shot from Mesa along Highway 60 past the Superstition Mountains to Globe. You then turn onto Highway 70 to get to the reservation.

But whoever took Emily drove north from Globe, away from the main entrance to the reservation in an unincorporated area of Gila County.

‘It [the dismemberment] could have happened in a bathtub,’ the source told the Daily Mail.

‘There’s some thought it might have been an elderly person or a senior citizen. She had to trust whoever she went with.

‘But they may not have had the energy to drag her body far into the desert so they cut her up instead and just threw her off the side of the road. They may have taken her arms so nobody could get her fingerprints.’

There are others, though, who think she could have been murdered somewhere on the reservation and then dumped off it.

Emily was identified from dental records.

Her parents, Steff Dosela and Jensen Pike, who never married and split up when Emily was little, have sued the Mesa group home, Sacred Journey, where Emily had been living.

Jensen Pike is currently in jail again and has a history of drug and alcohol abuse, his family said.

Sacred Journey filed a response in Maricopa County Superior Court, calling the two ‘unfit, unresponsive and neglectful’, which is why Emily was placed in the group home.

Allred Pike and another tribal member, who is Emily’s grandmother’s boyfriend, warned against going to the compound where Emily’s mother lives on the reservation, claiming that the people who live there can be violent and unpredictable.

When a Daily Mail reporter visited the garbage-strewn address, which lies down a dirt road not far from a huge water tank memorial for Emily, one of her relatives came out screaming threats at the top of her lungs.

‘You’re just gonna bad talk us, get out of here now!’ she said.

Her mother, Steff Dosela, then appeared and also yelled angrily at the reporter to leave, refusing to say anything about her murdered daughter but not explaining why.

Two young men appeared menacingly with several dogs to back Dosela up.

Emily was deeply tied to the east end of the San Carlos Reservation, particularly the community of Bylas, where much of the Pike family is from.

The reservation stretches across roughly 1.8 million acres of rugged terrain, broken by mountain ranges and isolated communities.

‘We do live in a different world,’ said Allred Pike, 51, a former tribal council member who now works in construction and assists tribal members in court matters. ‘The reservation is totally different from living off the reservation.’

Emily was reported missing from the Sacred Journey group home three times in 2023 before her final escape in January 2025.

Harrowing police cam video from September 2023 show police locating her walking alone along a canal after running away from the group home that time.

Then only 13, Emily vehemently rejects the cops’ insistence that they take her back.

‘I’m not going to go to that f***ing group home,’ Emily tells the cops in the video. ‘I hate it there.

‘I just want to see my mom.’

Despite the turmoil she grew up in, Carolyn described Emily as a long-awaited girl in a family full of boys – named in tribute to her grandmother.

‘We were all excited for Emily to come into this world, because there are a lot of boys in our family,’ she said.

Family members crowded into the delivery room when she was born.

Carolyn, who grew up on the reservation, remembered cupcakes and birthday visits with Emily, who was a happy and lively girl before her home life began to take a toll.

‘Emily loved dressing up, dolls, makeup, and getting her nails done, her aunt said.

She liked to draw and was reportedly planning to go to college someday.

‘She had her crushes, she was excited… and that’s what makes me so angry.’

Going to the site where Emily’s remains were found was haunting, Carolyn said.

‘Making that drive was really hard,’ she said. ‘I was questioning, like, was she scared? Was she already gone? Was she hoping that somebody was gonna help her?’

Emily’s death has reverberated across tribal communities in Arizona.

Carolyn said she did not fully understand the crisis of what is known by the acronym, MMIW – or Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women – until her niece’s killing.

‘I didn’t know about MMIW,’ she said. ‘Emily… I feel… educated me more on it, because that’s what she woke the world up to.’

Though Emily’s parents have rarely talked about their daughter’s murder, Allred Pike said he is both astonished and heartened at the number of people who stop by Emily’s memorial just off Highway 70.

T-shirts and notes from well wishers dot the fence around the tank.

Emily’s face is painted on the tank, alongside a photo illustration of Geronimo, the legendary Apache warrior who used the San Carlos reservation partly as a base before he surrendered to US forces in 1886.

Supporters also constructed a tall white cross across from the water tank with the name of Emily’s cat Millie on it.

Family members say Emily’s case helped spur broader awareness and legislative efforts, including expansion of Arizona’s Turquoise Alert system for missing Indigenous persons.

‘You hear about missing or murdered Indigenous women all the time,’ Allred Pike said.

‘Emily is one – and at the very least I hope she remains a symbol that raises awareness for her and all of the rest of them.’