2 of 7: La Búsqueda (The Search)

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This is part two of an on-the-ground investigation into the mysterious deaths of Chris Kramers and Lisanne Frone, two young women who died in the jungle of Panama in 2014. What happened to Chris and Lisanne? Was it a hiking accident, a double murder, or something else altogether? I'm Mariana Atencio. In this series, I travel to the small town of Boquete with Jeremy Kreit from The Daily Beast.

to reinvestigate this case eight years later. The official case file on Kristen Lisanne is delivered to our hotel in Boquete under cover of darkness. It comes in a rolling suitcase packed with five overstuffed manila envelopes. It's a doorstopper. A collection of maps, Xeroxed photographs, typed depositions, and handwritten notes.

that weighs in at nearly 3,000 pages. When we dig into the sprawling document with our pens and highlighters, there's one name that pops up again and again and again. Feliciano Gonzalez. Chris and the San were supposed to meet Feliciano for a tour on April 2nd, the day after their pianista hike. They never showed, and Feliciano reported them missing the same day. But this is also the same Feliciano who threatened Martina.

the Gabe Bugle woman who lives at the bottom of the pianista trail, not to talk about this case. So what's his story? We would have liked to interview Feliciano, but he has consistently declined to speak on the record with Jeremy. my colleague and our lead investigator, about the case because, in his own words, he dislikes Americans. He probably also dislikes Jeremy. As a reporter for the Daily Beast, Jeremy quoted some sources who cast suspicion on Feliciano.

While he never used Feliciano's name in his articles, the implication was clear. Feliciano may have had something to do with Chris in the Sands' deaths. I've talked to Feliciano a few times by phone, but he would never meet me for an interview. I've had sources say that he's the saint who did everything he could to help find Chris and Lisanne. And I've heard locals, including other guides, who believe he was in some way responsible for their deaths.

He's so close to this case, one of the last people to see the women alive, who also just happens to find their fragmented remains in the jungle. He might clear up so many questions if he would just sit down and talk to us. But for some reason, he never would. Feliciano insists he's just a concerned citizen who really wanted to help find Chris in the sand. I haven't made up my mind about Feliciano.

On the one hand, he seems like a conscientious tour guide who felt personally invested in bringing Kristen Lisanne home. But on the other hand, his figurative fingerprints are all over this case. Feliciano may just be a local busybody who likes to be at the center of everything. But at this point, it's impossible to know his true motives. Is he just being helpful, or does he have something to hide?

As we dig further into the file, we learn Feliciano is a far more important character in this case than he claims. He has a starring role in the initial investigation into Chris and Lisanne's disappearance, and he led the charge into the massive search that followed. And when precious little physical evidence was finally recovered in this case, their belongings, bones, and body parts, this evidence will be found by people connected to him, either employees or relatives.

practically in his own backyard. This is Lost in Panama. an investigative series about the mysterious deaths of Chris Kramers and the Sand Frone. I'm Mariana Atencio. This is Episode 2, La Busqueda. Subscribe to Cast Plus, where you can listen ad-free. And check out our Lost in Panama after-show episodes, where Jeremy and I sit down to dissect this case in far more detail than we're able to get into the main show.

There's so much more to talk about here. Rabbit trails we didn't have time for, and Jeremy and I dig deep in these After Show episodes. To listen to them, just go to castmedia.com slash castplus.

According to Feliciano himself, he's one of the last people to see Chris in the sand alive. He saw them at the language school in town on the morning of April 1st, the same day they went hiking on the pianista trail and didn't return. Here's some of the lengthy deposition he gave to investigators. A voice actor is reading the English translation of what Feliciano told police after Chris and Lisanne disappeared. I saw them Tuesday, April 1st of this year.

I saw them at the Spanish language school that day in the morning hours. That was the only time I saw them. After that, I didn't see them. He says he never actually spoke with Chris in the sand. No. Just a hello from afar. That was all. So later that day, on April 1st, Feliciano says he got a phone call. It was from the Spanish language school, where he'd briefly seen Chris and Lisanne earlier that day.

One of the school employees called to make a last-minute appointment for Chris on the Sand to tour a local farm. They called me to tell me that two young women I had seen at the school wanted to go to Mr. Philo's farm in Alto Quiel.

I didn't have any commitments the next day, so I told her I'd pick them up at 8 in the morning at the school. That's what we agreed on. This is the infamous appointment that Chris on the Sand didn't show up for. The whole reason they were reported missing in the first place. But reading over the case file now, this phone call strikes me as odd. So by the time this appointment was made, Chris and San were long gone in their pianista hike, never to return.

So the language school scheduled this tour for Chris in the Sand but never actually told Chris in the Sand about it. Did they not try to get in touch with them to let them know they had an 8 a.m. appointment the next morning? Or did their confirmation somehow fall by the wayside? It's just weird. But Feliciano showed up, as promised, the next day at the language school at 8 a.m. He was greeted by one of the school employees, Eileen Widdick, who wanted to tag along on the farm tour.

I arrived at school at eight in the morning. The German girl was standing outside the school waiting for me, ready with her little backpack. We talked for a few minutes, maybe five minutes, and she told me, these girls aren't coming. They're usually on time. And as a joke, not thinking they would be missing for long, I told her, they might usually show up on time, but they can't be as punctual as you Germans. She told me, no, they are usually on time. Chris and San were late.

Then they were really late. Feliciano and Eileen started to get worried. Then they decided to go looking for them. Feliciano knew exactly where Chris and the Sand were staying, his friend Miriam Guerra's house. She lived a block from the language school and often provided homestays for tourists and students. It was a symbiotic business arrangement for all involved. Travelers would come to the Boquete, study at a language school, sightsee with Feliciano.

and stay at his friend's house down the street. Feliciano and Aileen arrived at the house looking for Chris in the sand. He knocked on the door. No answer. Then he called his friend Miriam. She told me there was a key in the garden. She told me where it was so I could open the front door and get into the room. She told me to knock first and if no one came out, to go ahead and open the door. We did as she told us and to our surprise, we found some things on the beds.

A backpack and some sandals falling onto the floor. Chris and Lisanne weren't there. Feliciano called his friend again to let her know. She was very surprised. She had been waiting until 11 o'clock at night to have dinner with them and after some time she decided to go to sleep because she had to get up early the next day for work She thought the girls would come back home later

Mrs. Miriam told us she had prepared breakfast for them and left it on the table. She also thought if they had come home late, they would also wake up late. At this point, it was clear Chris in the sand hadn't come home for the night.

Feliciano wanted to report them missing right away. But according to Feliciano, Aileen thought it best to wait, see if they turned up. Maybe they were out partying with friends, stayed the night somewhere, lost track of time. She said maybe they run into some problems Or they were with friends at night and didn't come back for whatever reason And they'd most likely come back during the day I told her we should tell the police She told me if we were in Germany

We would have to wait 24 hours. I told her that in Panama, it was practically the same system. Feliciano wound up taking Eileen to the farm anyway for their scheduled tour. They asked park rangers along the way if any of them had seen Chris and Lisanne. Back in town, they checked to see if the women had come back to the house or the school and then parted ways. I told the German girl to keep an eye out for anything.

and to call me for anything. Before they split up, Aileen mentioned something interesting. She said she'd seen Chris and Lisanne checking out a trail map of the pianista the day before. So maybe that's where they went. But hours later, Chris and the fans still hadn't returned. The German girl called me at five in the afternoon to tell me there was no news about the young Dutch women. I told her to wait at the school so that we could go to the police. That's what we did.

That evening, Feliciano and Eileen went to the police station and finally reported Kristen Lassan missing. Twelve hours had elapsed since Feliciano first suspected Kristen Lassan were in trouble. It would be another 12 hours before search operations could begin the following morning. It was a delay that would dog the investigation. By this point, if Chris and Lisanne were still alive, they'd been stranded in the jungle for 48 hours, and efforts to locate them had been pushed back an entire day.

The next morning, Feliciano rallied friends and fellow tour guides to help find the missing tourists. Aileen from the language school said Chris on the sand might be on the pianista. Police also found internet searches for El Pianista on the language school's computer. It was their best and only lead. Being an experienced guide, Feliciano knew about the unmarked trail beyond the Mirador and how dangerous that trail could be for two tourists exploring on their own.

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The initial investigation of these two young women was not in the hands of professionals. That's Jose Donderiz. He's a man with 35 years of experience in search and rescue and the former national head of CINEPROC. CINEPROC is essentially the FEMA of Panama, a government organization that does search, rescue, and disaster relief.

They got involved in the search for Chris on the Sand on April 3rd, the morning after Feliciano reported them missing. Jose is retired now. His tenure as Cineproc's top boss didn't begin until after Chris on the Sand disappeared in the jungle. But he personally participated in the operations, and the case clearly still haunts him. When we speak to him in our hotel room in Boquete, his voice is heavy with regret.

Personally, I can tell you, I would have done a much more thorough intelligence investigation. He says the investigation got off to a slow start and never fully rebounded, costing search teams and the missing women precious time. The first hours of a disappearance, or the first hours when a disappearance is reported, are crucial and essential to initiate operations.

The investigation was a disaster. Despite Feliciano and Eileen's hot tip that Chris and Lisanne were most likely on the pianista, Cineproc didn't want to rule out other possibilities in the early days of the search. What happened was many people began to explore the possibility that they were in different areas around the mountain range. This was a huge mistake.

Crucially, investigators could not conclude for a fact that Chris in the sand had entered the pianista until they interviewed witnesses who lived near the trail. And that was several days after the search began on April 3rd. By that point, days and resources had been wasted, scouring every single hiking and walking trail in Boquete by helicopter and by foot. But all the initial search efforts came up empty.

Some began to speculate that perhaps Chris and Lisanne weren't in the jungle at all. When you don't get favorable results in the first hours, people start making assumptions. Many didn't take it seriously that two 20-year-olds were missing. Many thought either jokingly or seriously they were at a party. They kept dismissing them, devaluing them, until things got more serious. Meanwhile, the missing Dutch women, or the Holandeses, as they would become known, were the talk of the town.

Boquete residents put up missing posters and flyers asking witnesses to come forward. Scores of volunteers joined the search effort. We spoke with George, a Boquete resident who's also an American expat, about what it was like in Boquete when news broke about the missing women. Well, I lived not too far from the trail where it started. All the people in town were talking about it pretty much 24-7. George says the early days of the search were hampered by terrible rain. When the search started...

They hit it pretty hard, but the weather, our rainy season usually starts in April. But this particular year, it started a little early. The first storms of the rainy season were so severe, they made foot searches incredibly difficult. We just hiked the pianista ourselves, and it was scary to see rain and mud accumulate on the trail. It wasn't even raining that hard. I can't imagine being out there in a real storm, in the cold and punishing rain.

George remembers being especially concerned that nothing turned up after a few days. Not a scrap of clothing, not a footprint, no hint of Chris on the sand. Usually when people get lost... They find them or they find something. But after days we kind of knew that something really bad happened. I knew.

that, you know, they were in serious trouble. A lot of people were really scared and really concerned that we're going to find these two young girls alive. Ground searches went on, even in the torrential rain. Feliciano, the tour guide who reported Chris in the Sand missing, let us search down the exact trail Chris in the Sand took beyond the pianista. His team covered the entire six-hour hike from Boquete to the Rio Culebra, up the pianista, past the mirador, and down the other side.

He actually searched the pianista twice. He went as far as the Mirador on April 3rd and hours beyond it to the Rio Culebra on April 5th. Both times, Feliciano's search turned up nothing. Here's a clip of Feliciano talking to a TV reporter back in 2014, expressing both surprise and suspicion that no trace of Chris in the sand was found.

In my opinion, it would have taken no more than a week to find them, because those girls could have been in an accident or been attacked by wild animals. And then you would have seen the presence of black vultures circling. Then we would have found them, or at least part of their belongings. But we would have found them. I think it is suspicious.

I don't know what to make of Feliciano. Sounds like Feliciano's suspecting foul play here, but we learn that he allegedly threatened Martina not to tell anyone she saw Kristen Lisanne on the pianista. Why? He seemed concerned enough to go looking for Chris and Lisanne when they missed their tour appointment, but couldn't that have been a great excuse to remove or tamper with evidence in their room before police arrived?

And now he's leading search teams down the very trail Chris and the San were on, calling the lack of findings suspicious. What's up with this guy? It's possible he kept himself close to the search to keep tabs on how it was progressing.

Or he was just a really concerned citizen. In any case, he's everywhere. But let's pause on Feliciano for a second. If his team really walked the entire trail on April 5th. from the pianista to the mirador to the rio culebra, and truly didn't see Chris in the sand, it tells us something important. It means that by this point, fairly early into their disappearance,

Chris and Lisanne were off the trail. And that turns out to be the problem, according to Jose. From his time with Cineproc, Jose knows all too well the dangers of the Panamanian jungle. The trails are challenging, but if you're off trail, the jungle is borderline impassable. Steep grades, loose rocks, deep mud, vegetation so thick you can't see more than a few feet in front of you.

Plenty of places to fall and hurt yourself. Even brushing a hand or a leg on the wrong kind of plant could draw blood, and Chris and Lisanne were wearing shorts and tank tops. And let's not forget the wildlife. Poisonous snakes, spiders. Big cats too. And this is key. If you go off trail for any reason, even for just a few seconds, it can be extremely difficult to find your way back.

Being able to cross a tropical humid forest is complicated if you don't have a machete. You can stray 12 meters from a path in the jungle and not realize that the path is going up and you are walking down. This is where Jose gets really upset about the inadequacies of the search for Chris in the sand. He says it was obvious early on that the girls had ventured off trail.

After all, the trails were searched and Chris and Lisanne weren't on them, so the next logical step would have been to comb the jungle, divide it up by sections, and search them one by one. When you do a search operation, you make a plan and you divide it into quadrants. You don't go back to the same quadrant. You keep going until you find something. But that's not what happened.

For reasons Jose can't fathom, Cineproc never searched the jungle, the real jungle. Jose says they just searched the trails, the same trails over and over, expecting to magically find Chris in the sand. To do the same thing that was done in previous days, you aren't going to find them. They only searched the trails. You aren't going to find someone who's missing on the trails. How is this a search operation if they're just looking at the trails?

If Chris and the San were off trail, and it sure sounds like that was the case, then they didn't have a prayer of being found by Cineproc. Because Cineproc never left the beaten path. In the absence of evidence or any trace of the women, rumors swirled in Boquete. Here's George. People saying there was cannibals out in the jungle. Then I heard they just found their skeletons. They were hugging together. I've heard that.

Other people were out there waiting for him and took him into a drug trafficking ring and things like that. George dismissed these rumors as just that, rumors. But as the days wore on, it did start to look like something really bad had happened to Chris in the sand. I still think they should have turned up or they should have found something. My feeling is... That somewhere along that trail, later that day, they came across somebody. Either one person or more than one. That's my gut feeling.

No evidence of foul play had surfaced. But on April 5th, the same day Feliciano's team walked the full trail a second time, Cineproc logged a report of women screaming near the Mirador. A 28-year-old German named Marcus told investigators he heard women crying for help and saw two men hiding in the trees. He ran away, fearing for his life.

But when police returned to search the area Marcus had described, they found nothing save for the water bottle Marcus had dropped when he fled. By mid-April, with no investigative leads, awful weather and no progress being made on the ground, Cineproc made the decision to scale back the search. If Kristen and the Sand were still out there, they were likely near death or had already succumbed to the elements.

The rain alone would have made survival in the jungle difficult. Think hypothermia and flash floods, not to mention the compounding effects of hunger, exhaustion, and possible injuries. With rainy season a full swing, Cineproc officially called off the search on April 14th, just shy of two weeks after Kristen Lisanne disappeared. Jose says this decision was an outrage. They stopped the search when there was still a chance the young women were alive.

Jose believes Chris and Lisanne were likely alive for days, even weeks, after they disappeared. Clean drinking water is abundant in the jungle, Jose says, and the women could have found shelter to stay out of the cold and the rain. He's adamant that if the women had the strength and resolve to find their way out, they would have kept walking, kept fighting, to the end. These were strong young women.

We're not talking about a kid or an older adult. They had the ability to defend themselves if anyone tried to hurt them. They could have been walking in circles or trapped inside the jungle. They would have been able to walk for a long time. I always presumed that they, in the late afternoon, they took a wrong turn they thought would lead to Boquete, and they went the opposite way. Because of that, there was no way to help them.

No hubo manera, entonces, de auxiliarla. Jose's frustration is obvious. He firmly believes Chris and Lisanne were alive in the jungle, doing their best to survive and waiting to be rescued. He says Cineproc failed them in multiple ways. They took too long to focus on the pianista and the trail beyond the mirador. They didn't bother to leave the trails and canvass the actual jungle.

And they called off the search too early. They gave up on Chris and Lisanne. In my 35 years, I have never abandoned anyone and I've never had a case like this. I have never left anyone behind. Just 11 days after it began, the search was suspended. Chris and the Sand, if they were still out there, were left for dead. Chris and the Sand vanished as if the mountain itself had swallowed them.

But then, more than two months after they disappeared without a trace, a major clue would emerge. Two months passed after Chris in the Sand disappeared in the jungle. The official search was over, but the incident left a pall over the town. Two tourists vanished without a trace, no leads, no explanation. But then, on June 12, 2014, two and a half months after Kristen Lisanne went missing, a phone call came into the Boquete police station.

We found an internal memo logging the call in the sprawling case file on Chris and Lisanne. Here's a voice actor reading the memo. At 8.25 o'clock in the morning today, I received a telephone call from a man who identified himself as José Domingo González Balistán. He informs us that he has a friend in the sector of Gulebra, a place known as Alto Romero.

His wife was in the Changuinola River when among the undergrowth and stones, she found a small backpack. That's a lot of place names. But Alto Romero, that's the Ungabe Bugle village deep in the heart of the jungle. where the trail from the Mirador eventually ends. And now, here's the bombshell. Among the belongings found by his wife in the Changinola River, there was a card with the name of Lisanne Froon. It's a brief memo?

but it's earth-shattering news. Someone found Lisanne's backpack with a bunch of her stuff inside. The backpack was found on a riverbank near the village of Alto Romero, roughly... 10 hours by foot from the mirador. The Gabe Bugle woman who found the backpack is named Irma Mirando.

She says she and her husband, Risa Tencio, were renting a rice paddy by the river where the backpack was found. In the police report, there's a photo of Irima pointing to the spot by the river where she found the backpack.

in an eddy trapped between some logs and a boulder. To make sense of the report and learn more about the backpack, we meet with a local private eye named Martin Ferrara. Martin has been investigating this case since the beginning, and he says the backpack is a huge piece of the puzzle that doesn't make any sense. He tells us more about what happened.

referencing Irma and Luis's depositions in that big old case file. Irma indicates she was in the river washing at 6 p.m. and she looks towards the river. And underneath some rocks, she sees something that looks like trash. And she gets close to take a look at the trash. And it turns out it wasn't trash. So she showed the backpack to her husband Luis. She tells him, look, I found this backpack.

And when they open it, they find the Dutch woman's belongings. But something bugs Martin about Luis and Irma's depositions. They don't match. There are discrepancies in two versions, in two versions from two people that were in the same moment, in the same place, that see the same thing. So he was either at the house or he was by the rice paddy. Okay, so Irma says her husband was at home when she found the backpack and she went home to show him.

But Luis says he was right there, at the rice paddy right next to the river. Sounds like a minor detail, right? Well... From the river where the backpack is found to Alto Romero, where Irma's house is, it's a tower walk. This is a pretty big discrepancy. A two-hour walk is hard to forget. If Luis was at home two hours away when Irma found the backpack, why did he say he was out tending the rice paddy with her?

And if he was at the rice paddy, why did Irma say she walked all the way home? Why don't Luis and Irma's stories line up? But that's not the only detail that puts Martín on edge. Makes him think there's something amiss. It's the phone call reporting the backpack to the authorities. The phone call the Boquete police got the next morning. It didn't come from Luis. It came from someone else. A man named Domingo. José Domingo González, brother to Feliciano González. Feliciano's brother.

Luis es en el pluggio José Domingo González. It's important to know that Felicianones family own land near Alto Romero. They employ several of the Ungabe Bugle villagers. Irma's husband Luis, for example, works for Feliciano's brother Domingo. When Irma and Luis found the backpack, that's who they called. I wonder why he called José Domingo González if he was not the authorities. He should have reported it to the authorities. But I can speculate.

that these instructions were given to him by Jose Domingo Gonzalez, and he's always been his boss. Keep in mind that Alto Romero is a rather remote community. There's no electricity in the village. Most folks don't have cell phones. Villages are reluctant to engage with the outside community, and especially police. So when Luis found the backpack, he contacted his employer, Domingo, who then placed the call to the cops. At least that's the story he told. But Martin thinks the whole thing stinks.

This backpack is found in a rice paddy. Supposedly. And I say supposedly because that's what they are saying. And I don't believe them. I'm going to tell you Feliciano González, Domingo González, Luis Atencio. Irma Miranda. My theory. They conspired together to create a scene that resembled an accident.

They planted it there. Our guide, Tony Quiroz, owns a ranch near Alto Romero. To get a better sense of the community where the backpack was found, we asked Tony about Feliciano and his ties to Alto Romero. We've been neighbors all our lives. He's had his farm for a long time. I lived in Alto Romero when there were only three houses. Folks worked with him and his brother. As Feliciano grew his farm, more people started working for him.

Tony tells us Feliciano is a wealthy landowner by Panamanian standards with a lot of influence and power, especially over the Ugabe Bugle residence he employs. The local indigenous people feel scared when they are threatened, and even more so because they work inside of the community for him. He didn't have any sort of authority he lorded over them until now, after what happened to the Dutch women.

Tony adds that Feliciano desperately wants to keep this case quiet, that Feliciano tells everyone in Alto Romero not to talk about it anymore. Seems like Feliciano threatening Martina, the woman who spotted Chris in the sand hiking the pianista, wasn't just a fluke. He talks about this case to other people. Supposedly it should have been resolved already.

It was an accident and folks shouldn't have to give declarations. If he has nothing to fear, why is he threatening others not to talk? We asked Tony if he thinks Feliciano had anything to do with the backpack. If he planted it, anything like that. He's not sure. Tony was on his way to Alto Romero when he got word that the backpack was found. When he arrived at the village, he didn't see Feliciano there. I only saw this person. They told me his name was Luis.

Luis was the one who called for the authorities to come and look at the backpack but the one who found the backpack was his wife. He was waiting for the helicopter to arrive with the authorities. When the helicopter arrived, he led them to where the backpack was. Tony followed, and then he saw the authorities open the backpack. The backpack was a Burton Day hiker pack.

in plaid blue. A run-of-the-mill pack, as far as backpacks go. Relatively sturdy, but not designed to be waterproof against full-on immersion in a lake or river. Tony says, Despite the backpack being obviously wet, it was in pretty decent shape, having ostensibly been exposed in the jungle for 10 weeks. It had held up. It was damaged, but intact. And it had plenty of stuff inside. I saw when they took out the cell phones and money, all those things. They were full of water.

They took them out of the bags, plastic bags, and they were full of water. I'm not too familiar with camera systems, but I think they were functioning because the photos inside of the camera came to light after. So, what was in the backpack? A Canon PowerShot camera, along with its battery and memory card in a camera bag. Chris's iPhone. Lisanne's Samsung Galaxy, both sealed in plastic bags. Lisanne's passport and credit card.

exactly $87 in cash and another $1.30 and change, two pairs of sunglasses, two bras, a small padlock and key, a water bottle, and two seashells. likely taken from the fairy tale island of Bocas del Toro, just before Chris in the Sand came to Boquete and their story became a nightmare. I'm struck by what wasn't in the backpack.

Food wrappers, changes of clothes, a flashlight, a compass, rain gear, camp gear. Nothing to indicate Chris in the sand planned to be out for more than a few hours. Then there's the $87. It's not a fortune, but... It does seem to imply Chris in the Sand were attacked for money. Would an attacker have taken their valuables? I guess a smart criminal would have thought of that and left the money alone to make it look like an accident.

But here's the real question. Why was the backpack in such good shape after being in the river for two plus months? It should have been falling apart. It should have already fallen apart. It's not just the backpack itself. Sunglasses were not shattered. Neither were the cameras and the phones. The screens were intact. The devices were water-damaged, but not destroyed. For local expat George... The blue backpack's condition was a huge red flag. It was too convenient to find, too inexplicable.

George doesn't see how a backpack could be out in the open during Boquete's rainy season and not completely disintegrate. Our rainy season, we get 25 to 30 inches a month. So 60 days being out in the rain, heavy rains. I think that was an interesting find. It was too good to be true. Way too late. Way too late.

George says, too late to answer questions that may have helped narrow the search. Too late to save Chris in the sand. And there were more questions, like, where was the backpack all this time? Stuck in the same eddy in the river? And where were Christina Sam? And what was on the phones and the camera? The photos that were in the camera were very interesting.

There was a lot of rumors for a long time, but once they found the backpack, it really got interesting. Which brings us to one of the most mysterious aspects of this case.

The data from the phones and the camera. All the devices found in the backpack were water damaged, but investigators were able to extract data from the phones and, crucially, the camera's SD card. Up to this point, investigators had very little to go on. No idea what happened to Chris in the sand. But soon, they would know that Chris in the sand made phone calls.

lost service, and turned their phones on and off for more than a week after they went missing. And the SD card had hundreds of photos the friends had taken on their trip. And these photos would give a terrifying and bewildering picture of Chris in the Sands' last days in the jungle. That's next time. That's a very, very strange picture to take.

Who would take a picture of their friend like that? They were taking these photos a week after they disappeared. You know, you get lost, you try and hike out, you get busted up. I mean, no one wants to just sit there and die. Even if they screamed for help, I don't know that anybody out here would hear them. I mean that's just, still though, how are they out here after a week and they're not seeing anybody else.

Lost in Panama is hosted by me, Mariana Atencio, with original reporting by Jeremy Kreit and Mariana Atencio, written by Jeremy Kreit and Trent K. Maverick. Chief investigative correspondent, Jeremy Kreit. Produced by Trent K. Maverick. Executive producers, Colin Thompson and Julianne Favre. Supervising producer, DJ Lubel. Co-producer, Mona Hassan. Associate producer, Lenora Quiñones. Translator, Lenora Quiñones. Editing by Stephen Perez, Anton Doughty, and Alex Gonzalez.

Mixing and Mastering by Matt Zul. Travel and Logistics Coordinator, Brooke MacArthur. On-site audio recording by Richard Carlos. On-site photography by Luis. Iga Garza. Original music written by Colin Thompson. Orchestration, arrangement, and additional compositions by Andrew Gerliger and Jesse Houdin. Music recorded at the resort studios. Music engineered by Caleb Morris. Assistant engineer, Jordan DiDonato. Instrumentalists, Matt Ordaz, Phil Glenn, Laura Bedall.

Jennifer Wu, Jean-Paul Barjon, Sam Solorsano, Jesse Houdin, and Trevor Gomez. Additional music from Ludot Sessions and APM. Cover art by Paula Henches. Special Assistance by Elizabeth Muñoz, Martín Eduardo Ferrara O'Donnell, Pamela Soledad Adaro, Mayra Alejandra Madrid Rodríguez, Antonio Quiroz, Balbino Samudio. Max de Arles Rovira, and Atmet Villarreal. Special thanks to Peisha Eaton, Natalie Gregory.