The FBI is offering a reward of up to $5,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of any one involved in the disappearance of a Mount Rainier park employee.
Sheila Ann Kearns, 43, a concessions worker at the park, has been missing for nearly three weeks. Investigators fear she might have been abducted.
“There are some suspicious circumstances surrounding her disappearance,” FBI spokesman Ray Lauer said Tuesday.
He noted that investigators had found the 43-year-old woman’s car and other possessions undisturbed at her Longmire home.
Co-workers last saw Kearns at the National Park Inn at Longmire about 6 p.m. Oct. 4. Three days of searching by park rangers and others failed to uncover clues to her whereabouts.
While it’s possible Kearns was abducted, Lauer said all other possibilities remain open.
In the fall of 1996, the season at Mount Rainier was winding down. Seasonal employees were settling in, preparing for the winter months with just a skeleton crew staff. Sheila Kearns was among the employees preparing to stay through the winter.
Sheila was 43 when she was hired to work at the Paradise Inn in August 1996. Coworkers later said she stood out quickly, reliable enough that park officials asked her to remain after the season ended. Stay over also meant she would move into new employee housing.
On October 4th, park staff gathered for a traditional end-of-season celebration.That night, Sheila mentioned to a coworker that she was looking forward to staying on through the winter and excited to move into her new employee housing. When she didn’t report for work on October 6th, coworkers checked her room and found all of her belongings inside, but no sign of Sheila herself.
A multi-day search of the park turned up nothing. As the weeks passed, weather closed in, and sizable amounts of fresh snow soon made further searching impossible. The following spring, after the thaw, a volunteer working near the old Longmire campground came across remains scattered over a wide area, roughly a mile from the inn. They were later identified as belonging to Sheila Kearns.
Nearly three decades later, the circumstances surrounding Sheila’s disappearance remain unresolved. Investigators have explored multiple possibilities and theories in the years that followed, but to this day no suspect has ever been named.
What happened to Sheila after that October night has never been clearly understood, leaving a span of time between her last sighting and where she was later found that no one has been able to explain.
