Welcome back to The Pathwent Chili for this month's bonus Patreon minisode I'm Robin, I'm Jules.
And I'm Ashley. Let's dive right into this month's case.
April twentieth, nineteen eighty nine, McCone County, Montana. While driving on the wrong side of a rural highway, thirty seven year old Patricia Mihan gets into a collision with another car. After staring blankly at the other vehicle's driver, Patricia walks
out onto the prairie and disappears. During the next few months, there would be numerous sightings of a disoriented woman resembling Patricia, leading to speculation that the trauma of the car crash caused her to develop amnesia and forget who she was, But in spite of an extensive search, Patricia is never found.
After that The Path Went Chili. So today we are going to be covering a case which was featured on Unsolved Mysteries, the nineteen eighty nine disappearance of Patricia Mihan. This is considered to be one of the most haunting missing person's cases ever featured on the show because the
victim vanished under such unusual circumstances. After getting into an accident with another car on a rural highway, Patricia Mihan approached the other driver and gave her a blank stare without saying anything, before she walked out onto an open prairie. That in itself would be creepy enough, but what makes the situation even more unusual is that the accident took place nearly four hundred miles away from where Patricia lived,
and no one knows what she was doing there. To begin with, it seemed apparent that Patricia was suffering from some serious mental health issues at that time, and there was fear that the accident may have caused her to lose her memory and forget who she was. However, that also meant there was a possibility she was still alive
and aimlessly wandering around somewhere. While most missing persons cases have eyewitnessed sightings of the victim, the authorities in this particular case believed that the sightings of Patricia were very credible, so when the Unsaw Mystery segment originally aired, there was hope that Patricia might be watching the show and decide to come forward, but this never happened, and unfortunately, she has still never been found.
This one's really eerie because she's so far away from home. Four hundred miles is an incredibly long distance. And then we know that she was also suffering with mental health issues prior to the car crash, So then once she's in this car crash, it does make sense that that could exacerbate or worsen those effects. And like you said, Robin, that it makes it probable that she was struggling and couldn't remember maybe who she was. Maybe she's still alive
wandering around. But it also makes her an incredibly vulnerable victim for someone who might encounter her realized that she's not kind of in her own faculty, she's disoriented. It makes her very vulnerable to other people hurting her as well.
Robin, what was the case we just covered.
The name is eluding me right now, and it was the one where it was a truck driver and we theorized maybe there was a mental health condition, but he walked off into the woods and he was never found.
Uh.
Yes, that was Devin Williams. And he was a guy who was going on a cross country truck trip because he was a truck driver, but then came into this forest in Arizona that was way off his route, and he left the truck and was started acting very strangely in front of all these witnesses before he disappeared. And in that case, they did find a partial skull fragment, but they were unable to figure out how he died.
But it's been suspected that he had some sort of unexplained mental health issue that caused him to drive there before he disappeared and then died of exposure.
Our story begins in Montana in nineteen eighty nine. Our central figure is thirty seven year old Patricia Mihan, who originally hails from Pittsburgh but now lives in Bozeman and is employed as a ranch hand who works with horses. However, everyone who knows Patricia believes that she has become noticeably
depressed and withdrawn. Even though she loves children and initially planned to have a career in daycare, Patricia seems saddened by the fact that she's reached the age where it may soon wind up being too late for her to have children of her own. On April nineteenth, Patricia called her parents to tell them that she was under a great deal of stress and inquired about the possibility of moving back home to Pittsburgh to live with them for
a while. Her parents agreed to this, and Patricia scheduled an appointment with her psychologist for the morning of April twenty first, in order to discuss the whole change. Patricia did not like to fly, but her parents did not like the idea of her driving over eighteen hundred miles to Pittsburgh, and she agreed to talk about.
It with them.
After her appointment on April twentieth, Patricia called her landlord to say that she would be gone for a while before leaving her apartment in Bozeman, and he would later describe her as sounding very hyper and not making much sense.
At around eight fifteen pm that evening, Patricia was driving east down Highway two hundred through McCone County, in a desolate rural area seven miles southwest of the small town of Circle. This location was nearly four hundred miles away from Bozeman, and Patricia was inexplicably driving on the wrong side of the road When another car approached her, Patricia nearly wound up having a head on collision with this vehicle,
which swerved out of the way. However, there was another car behind that one, and even though the driver tried to pull off the road, Patricia still wound up crashing into her. The driver was left dazed but not seriously injured, though she would end up witnessing a strange sight. After she exited her vehicle, Patricia emerged from her own car and walked towards the wreckage, where she proceeded to stare
down at the driver. She was described as having a blank look in her eyes and gave off no reaction to the situation at all. Without saying a word, Patricia walked away from the road, climbed over a fence, and stared aimlessly at the accident seen again. She then walked out into the open prairie and subsequently disappeared into the night.
This is a.
Tragic rea reality when you start thinking about that, she's basically begging her parents to let her come home at age thirty seven, So you know her struggle is real, it's heavy, it's deep. She has a plan and something she wanted to do with her life, which was work in childcare. It sounds like she also wanted to be a mom, but felt a lot of pressure of kind of her biological clock ticking. And so when she is talking to her parents and you're saying, I can't fly,
but I want to drive to you. I'm feeling significant distress. I'm going to go see my therapist. Could she have been getting into the car with this idea that she's driving to her parents' house and just kind of this desperate pursuit of that, and then you look at her
physical behavior and that blank stare. I don't know if you know listeners have ever dealt with someone with a severe mental health crisis, but I've seen in people that I love and care about and in people that I work with, where you'll see that stare where it's like you're.
Not present, you're catatonic.
Yeah.
Absolutely, they're looking through you. They're looking off past the reality of what's in their current view, and you can't connect to them. You can't get through to them into reality because they're so they're struggling so deeply in that moment. And so that sounds like what's happening here that she was a little chaotic when she's talking to her landlord, she's driving chaotically. Then you add a potential of some
kind of head injury here. It seems like she is truly disconnected from who Patricia really is, and she's almost caught up in this psychosis or episode that she's having.
I'm a little worried by the fact that she was described as being deeply depressed prior, and I'm obviously not trying to diagnose her here, but biblearr disorder is like a pendulum, and if you swing really far to one side, which is depression, you're often going to swing far to the other side, which would be a manic episode or
a hypomanic episode of your bipolar two. We have the landlord describing her as being hyper, and it's really tough to tell if it is like a manic episode or if it's just anxiety about having to travel home and that's manifesting as being hyper. But the catatonic stare is also troubling. That can be a byproduct of a manic episode. It's just not looking very good here. It seems like thirty seven would be an age where you would have already been diagnosed with this, But we also have to
consider the time period. A lot of people didn't seek mental health treatment like they do today. There was a
lot more of a stigma attached to it. So there is a very real possibility that there could have been other mental health episodes or manic episodes if she was indeed bipolar and she just wasn't treated for it and somehow managed to come out the other side and maybe had long periods of you mea where she actually felt, like i'll say in quotations, normal or typical, not depressed or manic, And so people maybe weren't aware that she was struggling so mightily with this.
Would you happen to know how much awareness there was about bipolar disorder back in nineteen eighty nine. Was this a time period when people would be diagnosed with it or was there just not much awareness about it at all?
Yes, you would be diagnosed with it, but it would take a lot more. I think it would have to be extremely severe. Like I'll just use my mother as an example, because she was diagnosed i think in nineteen eighty four. So you know, when I was like basically a baby, she had me and within six weeks she was in a full manic episode like psychosis.
It was really bad.
And luckily my uncle had gone to UBC med school and where we lived was hours away, but he pulled some strings, got her in with the best psychiatrists, and she was in there observation for six months until she was diagnosed and properly medicated. So that tells you kind of what it was the landscape was like in the eighties.
I think it depends if you were in a major metropolitan area, like say, if you're in a major city like you know, Los Angeles or New York, and you had the financial means or the connections to be able to secure the right type of treatment with professionals, then you're going to do a lot better. But I think in nineteen eighty nine you're a lot less likely to seek help, and even if you did seek help, you might not find the right professional who has either adequate
experience or is really great at spotting the signs. I think that there's so many variables that have to line up in order to get that appropriate diagnosis and to be put on the right medication, because it is trial and error with bipolar. What works for one person, what's the first line treatment like lithium may not work for another.
Also really hard too, is if you think back to like when we were teenagers, if you were talking about certain careers or having different dreams and aspirations. You were encouraged not to seek mental health help because it would be part of your medical record and you wouldn't be
allowed to pursue any of those goals. So someone who might want to go into the military, or might want to go into law enforcement or federal government, if you had a health record with mental health anxiety, depression by polarism, you were kicked out of those jobs, right or you were told hey, that's a red flag. It creates a harder barrier for you to get those careers. And so I remember, you know, struggling with anxiety and depression as
a teenager. My dream was to be in the FBI, and I was like, oh I got to this is I knew what I had to do, how many push ups, what my health had to look like. And so I remember thinking I can't ask for help, like I just need to talk to my parents and I just need to have my girlfriend help me. But I mean, I
still struggle with anxiety and depression. So back then it was a shield of like don't don't get help unless you really have to, and it was almost a source of shame, like you couldn't handle your emotions by yourself. So even if it wasn't by polar as a mental health in general, I think was just viewed so differently with such a negative lens. At the time.
When the mcconne County Sheriff's Office were notified about what happened and arrived to the scene, they searched Patricia's car and noticed some clothes and other items inside. This suggested she was in the midst of taking a trip somewhere, and the only item Patricia would have had on her
when she left was her purse. The police searched the prairie and about three quarters of a mile from the crash scene, they were able to find a trail of size six tennis shoe tracks, which probably belonged to Patricia, but these tracks soon came to an end. For the next five days, an extensive ground and air search was conducted of the area, but other than her shoe tracks,
no trace of Patricia could be found. It was established that a hay truck had been parked about a half mile away from the accident scene before it was driven away a short time later, so it was theorized that Patricia might have stowed away on the truck without the driver's knowledge, or that she was picked up after hitching a ride somewhere.
I almost feel like it would be more the hitch hiking route for me. The landscape kind of hard to wrap my head around. It said she walked off into this almost prairie like open field kind of area, so there's not a whole lot of places for her to quote, disappear into if she's just wandering around aimlessly, which leads you to think something like the truck or getting someone to pick her up would be possible. But remember the
state that she's in. If you were picking someone up and you drove around and this person really is not connected to reality, is as someone that you would feel safe getting into your car or feel like there might be a problem down the road if you give this person a ride.
Yeah, And another possibility which you brought up in the opening is if it could have been someone with nefarious intentions who saw that she was a vulnerable person to be taken adage of, so as possible that if she hitched a ride with the wrong person, she could have become the victim at foul play. At some point, when Patricia's family was contacted by the authorities about her disappearance, They had no idea why she was driving nearly four
hundred miles away from Bozeman. While it was possible she was heading towards Pittsburgh, her parents ru under the oppression that she would not be traveling to see them until
after her appointment with her psychologists the following day. Regardless, Patricia's parents and brother would spend the next few months traveling around the Pacific Northwest in order to distribute over two thousand Missing Persons flyers, and it wasn't long before reported sightings of Patricia started popping up all over the place.
Many of the alleged sidings of Patricia took place at truck stops in Montana or Washington State, but it seemed like whenever the authorities or her family were notified about them, she would hitchhike out of the area before they could arrive at the scene. But the most consistent detail from these sidings was that Patricia looked confused and disoriented. Initially, it was suspected that she might have fled the scene of the accident to avoid potential legal trouble, but the
accounts of these sightings told a different story. For example, on May fourth, two weeks after the accident, a police officer believed he saw a woman resembling Patricia at a Harty's restaurant in Laverne, Minnesota, where she reportedly sat in a booth drinking water for five straight hours until the
restaurant closed. Afterward, the woman then walked to a nearby twenty four hour diner, and when the officer approached her and tried to question her, she would not give her name, though she did claim she was from Colorado before then saying she was from Israel.
And the problem there is that law enforcement also did not have tools and still doesn't have the tools needed to help someone who they believe is struggling with a
mental health crisis. There's such limited resources of what you do when you suspect someone is struggling, right when you don't have proof and you don't have documentation, and then you don't have community resources to refer them to because it's kind of out of his person you especially back in the eighties and nineties, that law enforcement didn't really
handle mental health right. They handled criminal behavior that came as a result of mental health, but weren't in the position to assist in that scenario and so oh man, it's like Patricia's almost just one step ahead of everybody, and yet she's not even quite sure where she's stepping to, Like she's not aware of who she is or where she's at in this whole process.
Yeah, that's the thing. Like, this woman had not broken any laws, and she did not appear to be a danger to herself, So there was really nothing else that the officer could do besides ask her a few questions.
And of course, this is one of those sightings that took where the officer did not realize it could have been Patricia Actil after the fact, because at the time he questioned this woman, he had not heard about her case, and it was only after he saw a photo of or a short time later that he realized this might be the same woman I saw.
The day after the sighting in Laverne, a woman matching Patricia's description was seen at a trust and Sioux Falls, South Dakota, drinking coffee and laughing at herself. A female truck driver crossed paths with her in the restroom well, she was staring at herself in the mirror, and when the driver asked the woman her name, she replied, quote,
I don't know. Later that night, Patricia was spotted at another truck stop over two hundred miles away in the town of Murdo, South Dakota, but this time she was arguing with a male companion. The most interesting sighting occurred on May nineteenth, when Patricia was seen by two waitresses at a Perkins restaurant in Bozeman, only a few miles from where she lived. She came in at around eight thirty am to order coffee in a cinnamon roll and told the waitress she was in a hurry because she
needed to go shopping. But then she remained in the restaurant for around two hours and spent most of her time either talking to herself or just staring blankly. When she left, she paid the two dollars tab entirely in change. In addition to circulating her photograph, Patricia's family also brought a video time of her with them to show people who had seen her. When the waitress and Bozman watched the tape, they were very certain the woman they saw was Patricia.
This case is very much different than other missing person cases because where you do have eyewitnesses and everyone knows our concerns with eyewitnesses. You usually have one or two that say they sell someone similar to her, and we talk about confirmation bias and these kinds of things. But here you have people from all over the country who are almost following a trail of her behavior and her whereabouts, and they're all very consistent. They're all describing a catatonic stare.
They're describing someone whose words don't match her behaviors, like I'm in a hurry, I have to go, But then she sits there for two hours, she's talking to herself. She isn't rational or making any sense when people confront her. And so when you look at this, to me, it's kind of crazy how many people, even new to come forward and share these stories. They're pretty convincing.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that not all of them were Patricia, because I'm kind of skeptical that she traveled two hundred miles in the same night from Sioux Falls to Murdo, South Dakota. So possibly one or both of them are mistaken. But it is quite interesting that they're also consistent, because it's one thing if you just see someone from a distance and think they look like a missing person, but when they're exhibiting strange behavior, they're going to leave more
of an impression. And then you hear about a missing woman who had also been beheating strangely before she disappeared, and then you can understand why it seems like such a compelling match.
I don't know if either of you or the listeners have ever known somebody when they're in a state like this, they are so incredibly vulnerable. So it really worries me knowing you know, from like a lot of the truck stop murders that have happened, and a lot of sex work and drugs that goes on at these different truck stops, how vulnerable Patricia would be if she was in a state where she it was basically, had had a psychotic break, if she had amnesia, if she was having a manic episode.
Any of these things would leave her open to those with nefarious intentions. And if any of these sightings are her, I'm just so worried for whomever came across her and if they had good intentions or not, especially when.
All these reports talk about her were like staying in places like coffee shops and truck stops for hours at a time, just sitting there. So if someone was in there with the nefarious intentions just saw this woman just talking to herself, staring blankly in a booth, they would probably say, well, maybe I'll offer this woman a ride,
and then they would take advantage of the situation. The sightings would continue for over a year, and an interesting development occurred in August of nineteen ninety when a transient woman with a strong resemblance to Patricia was arrested for littering in Idaho. The officer who arrested her was initially certain that she was Patricia, so much so that one newspaper prematurely purported that it was her her. However, a fingerprint check soon confirmed that the woman was someone else.
But if some of the other sightings were accurate and Patricia was out there somewhere in a disoriented state, how could this have happened. Well, given that Patricia had been going through a very stressful time in her life, this letter psychologist to theorize that the accident had caused her
to develop amnesia and forget who she was. Either she suffered a head injury or the trauma of the incident and the fear that she might have killed someone in the crash triggered something in her brain and caused her to deliberately block things out. This meant she was now wandering the country as a transient with no memory of her past life.
So this one woman gets ruled out as not being Patricia, right, even though this officer is pretty certain. But we do know established mental health of Patricia, and again, she was struggling mightily. Before she got in that car. She was asking her mom and dad, can I drive back to you? And they're like, I don't know if she needs to be driving. She needs to fly, but she's scared to fly, And so there could have been that just kind of panic where she got in her car and she said,
I have to get to my parents. They don't understand. They don't want me to get in the car, but I have to. And so even when people are warning her like these behaviors aren't safe for you, I'm worried for you, I feel like in that moment, she was making plans erratically to get out of her current situation and make her way back to her parents, which is
why this is so heartbreaking. She knew where she needed to be to be safe, and it's like she was just trying to get there, and that crash, like you said, stimulated something, It activated something. Did it make what she was already experiencing worse? Did it give her timbering amnesia? Did it give her a concussion? What was it that might have exacerbated her already desperate mental health situation?
And it makes me wonder what she was going to do if she had not gotten into a crash at that particular spot, Because if she was traveling to Pittsburgh, was she really planning to drive the full eighteen hundred miles without stopping? Because I could actually see someone in a manick state doing that where they just feel they have to get there as quickly as possible, that they will drive all night if they have to in order to arrive at their destination.
Well, no one could ever track Patricia down. The number of reported sightings of her in the years following her disappearance would reach five thousand. Another interesting development occurred in twenty eleven when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police released a composite sketch of an unidentified female victim whose partial skullf fragment had been found near a creek in Mission, British Columbia.
In nineteen ninety five, DNA testing would link the skullf fragment to human remains discovered on the farm of notorious Canadian serial killer Robert Picton. When the sketch of this victim was shared on the Webslooth's forum, some posters thought that she bore a striking resemblance to Patricia Mihan, and given that she went missing in the Pacific Northwest, they wondered if perhaps she crossed the border into Canada and cross paths with Picton. A tip was submitted to the RCMP,
but it doesn't look like the lead ever went anywhere. Unfortunately, in spite of all the sightings of Patricia, she has still never been tracked down or confirmed to be alive, and her current whereabouts continue to remain unknown.
So I guess you could say the path went Chile.
So, Robin, you deal a lot with these missing person cases and unsolved cases. Is five thousand a lot of reported sightings to see for someone. I just feel like, when you look at the span of space and time for someone who is has gone missing, five thousand reported sightings, that seems like a really high number of people knowing of her case, understanding that there's an issue, and then making a report that they feel like they interacted with her.
That does seem like a large amount. Yes, I mean, I know that missing persons cases are going to get a lot of like useless tips that wind up being ruled out, where someone will say I saw such and such walking down a street in the distance, and I think it might have been this missing person, but there's
nothing to work with. But I would be curious to know, like what percentage of these five thousand sightings involved someone who recalled seeing a woman who appeared to be in a vulnerable condition, who was staring blankly or talking to herself, because that just seems oddly specific if you have that many sightings of some of a woman matching Patricia's description acting strangely a short time after she got into that car accident and may have triggered something in her head.
So that's why I, even though in a lot of these missing persons cases I rule out eyewitness sightings, this one I just cannot be sure, just because of like the specific details these witnesses have provided.
I kind of discount the idea that she would be in Canada unless somebody smuggled her across the border. Anybody has ever gone by car across the border from the US to Canada. It's not exactly an easy thing to do, and you're certainly not going to be able to do it without a passport.
I mean, I know that security was a lot more laxed back in nineteen eighty nine, and you could cross the border without one sometimes. But if Patricia's acting strangely, then I guess she would capture the border guard's attention and they might ask for identification. But I haven't heard much of any eyewitness sightings of Patricia in Canada or
British Columbia. They've mostly been relegated to the US, so I do tend to agree that this skull fragment that was found in British Columbia does not belong to her anyway. If you ask any Unsolved Mysteries fan about the Patricia Mean segment, the first thing that will probably pop into their head is her self portrait, which is one of
the most iconic images ever featured on the show. After she went missing, Patricia's family found a role of undeveloped film in or camera and after developing the photos, discovered a self port Patricia had taken of herself in a mirror, which I guess would be the nineteen eighty nine equivalent of a selfie. It's a pretty haunting photograph, and when you look into Patricia's eyes, you can only imagine what
was going on in her head at that point. Apparently she had a similar look in her eyes, which she stared at the other motorist before disappearing. But as memorable as this segment is, the reason we couldn't devote a longer two part episode of the case is that there really isn't too much to analyze. We know that Patricia got into an accident, wandered off, and disappeared, but the
only unanswered question is what happened to her. It's pretty clear that Patricia was suffering from depression and dealing with serious mental health issues at this time. I'm also pretty certain she was single, as some of the articles about her case reference an ex boyfriend who lived in Spokane, Washington and became actively involved in the search for though I don't know any details about the relationship or how
long they had been broken up by this point. But even though Patricia's psychologists seemed to think the accident triggered her amnesia. Something was definitely off long before the accident recurred. There has never been any explanation to account for why Patricia was driving on a rural highway nearly four hundred miles away from her home, though since she had clothing and other items in her car, she might have been attempting the eighteen hundred mile cross country trip to see
her family in Pittsburgh. Or it's even possible that she lost her memory before she crashed her car and had no idea where she was going. Let's also not forget that Patricia was driving on the wrong side of the road, and you could assume that perhaps Patricia was attempting suicide
by deliberately causing a head on collision. Whatever the case, even though it was never officially confirmed if Patricia suffered her head injury in the accident, something was clearly wrong with her when she wandered out onto the prairie.
I tend to lean against suicide because I feel like Patricia simply wasn't present in her mind, Like I think she was so oh so depressed, so caught up in whatever distress she was feeling, that she simply wasn't conscious of what was going on around her like, you know when you get into a car and you drive and you don't remember how you got from point A to point B, but somehow you're safely in your driveway. I
feel like that's what she was doing. She was on autopilot, in distress, and she, in my mind, said, I have to get to my parents. They said, that's a good plan. That's what I'm going to do. They don't want me to drive. I'm going to do it anyway. And she makes those plans with her landlord to get out of town. And so for me, I feel like driving on the wrong side of the road.
The accident.
All of that is because she's not actually focused or visually present when she's behind the wheel of her car.
So there are really only two possibilities here. This took place on a very cold night, so either Patricia died of exposure on the prairie and her remains have never been found, or she did manage to get a ride out of the area and spent the next little while wandering around the country as a transient. We've mentioned numerous times on this podcast that is very common for people to go missing in remote areas with their remains never
being found. Even after an extensive search effort. You could easily compare this story to another case we covered on a previous minisode, and that's the death of Don Kemp, who vanished under similar circumstances on a remote prairie in Wyoming. Much like with Patricia's disappearance, an extensive ground and air search was conducted of the area, but Don's remains were never found until a completely random person just happened to stumble upon them three years later.
And how many cases have we talked about, or do you guys know about where you have people that go out on these ground searches and there are extensive hunts to recover their body or to locate them alive, and it's months years later where someone says, we searched this area, and yet months day, years later they're actually found in
that same search location. So it's not unheard of that people do go and they look for their remains and they're actually discovered later in a place that was quote searched. Things like an animal pulling, you know, a piece of clothing somewhere that makes it more visible, whether changing making
something more present or more visible. So many different explanations for why that happens, but it's not uncommon to say we searched the area, didn't find anything, and yet doesn't mean she wasn't there.
And that's the thing with the Don Kemp case, like, this wasn't a wooded area with a lot of foilage or anything. This was an open prairie where you would think that if you search hard enough, you're eventually going to find his body or some skeleton remains. Yet they still managed to miss him. So even though they did the same thing with Patricia, That's why I don't discount the idea that she did die of exposure on the prairie and they just have never found her remains.
What's that case in the desert?
The guy's name is Daniel and he goes missing after having what appears to be a mental health issue for crisis.
Are you talking about one that we've covered or a different case?
No, no, no, it's rather it's rather recently.
Oh, that Daniel Robinson case.
That's yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, that one was similar, right.
Yeah, it is where he just kind of disappears and abandons his car and they still haven't found him. And the one I was thinking of was the David Stone case. Which we did on a minisod recently, where he also wandered around the desert and they searched for him, but they didn't find his remains. For a couple of years now, there were around five thousand eyewitness sightings of Patricia after
she vanished, and that's an awful lot. But once again, we frequently mentioned on this podcast how common it is for eyewitnesses and missing persons cases to be mistaken and proven wrong. However, in this particular case, I think there's a decent chance that at least some of these sightings might be accurate. When you watch the Unsolved Mystery segment and read the original news articles about this case, it's interesting how the word confirmed it specifically used to describe
some of these sightings. I mean, I am pretty certain that these witnesses saw a woman who looked a lot like Patricia, but I don't know how the authorities could one hundred percent confirm it was her unless the witnesses shared some specific details which were not released to the public. But it is interesting how there are multiple sightings of a disoriented looking woman resembling Patricia in different places like Montana, South Dakota, and Minnesota, and the descriptions of these sightings
sound fairly similar. The siding at the restaurant in Bozeman is definitely the most credible since it was Patricia's hometown and the two witnesses who identified her also watched a videotape of Patricia. This is quite different than simply looking at a photograph, since they can study Patricia's mannerisms in the video and how she talked and compare it to
the woman they saw. If this woman was Patricia, I have to wonder if there was something in the back of her mind which made her think that she might be from Bozeman, but the symptoms of amnesia prevented her from figuring out who she really was.
That is really interesting that they would say confirmed. It's not as if Patricia had a really prominent facial figure or characteristic or let's say, a tattoo or something like that that made it, Oh my gosh, that's definitely her, right. We saw the large birthmark, we saw the eye deformity or whatever it is. Patricia's very normal looking. When you google a picture of her, there's nothing that stands out.
She's very average for She's just a girl, and so there's nothing profoundly unique about her face, her hair, her body. That would make it where I could tell you I saw this person and you would say, one hundred percent
confirmed that it was her. I do love this idea that you have two waitresses who were able to watch a video that the family provides and they can say, oh, my goodness, that's her, because you do see different things when you see facial expressions, when you see hand motions and all of these different kind of physical behaviors in a video. To confirm that, yes, we saw some of those similar mannerisms, it is a very promising lead. And then again you go, well, then what right they everywhere
they went and heard that Patricia had been there? Then what where do you go from there? That's what her poor family and law enforcement were dealing with.
And that's why I'm intrigued by the idea that maybe she had something in the back of her memory which made her think that Bozeman was a part of her life. And as you recall, when she first went into this diner, she said that she was in a hurry and she'd only be there a short time. But then she stayed there for the next two hours. And you wonder, is there something triggering her memory here, making your think this
place looks familiar, this city looks familiar. Maybe I once lived here, but she just didn't have enough in her memory to figure out who she really was.
All that being said, remember the false lead with the woman who was arrested in Idaho in nineteen ninety even though Patricia, she apparently had such a strong resemblance to her that it convinced the arresting officer and many other people until a fingerprint check was performed. So it's easy to see how all these witnesses, even those who were one hundred percent certain, could have seen another woman who
looked a lot like Patricia and been mistaken. But overall, well, I do think there's a good chance that Patrician never made it off the Montana Prairie and died out there. I also believe that this might be one of those rare missing person's cases where the victim was still alive
for a period of time after they vanished. That's why when Unsolved Mysteries originally aired, Robert Stack sent out a public plea for Patricia to come forward if she was watching, and even assured her that no one was harmed in the car accident and she wasn't going to face serious legal trouble.
We do have.
Cases where we hear, you know, years and decades later, this person realizes, oh, that that person I'm looking for is me. But like you said, Jules, it's incredibly rare. It's more likely that Patricia met to me with foul play, and that after she was struggling and making her way from different points to different points, someone said, Wow, that
girl's really vulnerable and they took advantage of her. To me, at this point, someone would say, Hey, that girl that we know as Sarah really resembles this girl Patricia, and Sarah doesn't really know much about her background. Like I feel like at this point, if Patricia was still alive, someone or herself would eventually come to terms with that is very strongly related to me or this friend that
I have. Just doesn't seem like she could survive without eventually having to get a job, have to find someone to bring her into their home, or to love her in some way where she wouldn't have to work. It just you couldn't just stumble around forever in the way that Patricia was doing.
Yeah, Sadly, even though I do think it's possible that Patricia might have lived for a little while after the accident. She probably never regained her memories, and it seems unlikely that she is still alive today. It's possible that she could still be living as a transient out there somewhere, but it's difficult to be able to maintain that lifestyle for nearly thirty five years, and given the amount of
hitch hiking Patricia would have had to do. It's also possible, like you said, that she could have met with foul play by an unknown party. I still remember browsing the web slues forum when that lead came up in twenty eleven, involving the skull fragment for the Jane Doe in British Columbia. I was intrigued by the possibility that Patricia could have crossed the border and become a murder victim of Robert Pickton,
but the odds of this are not high. However, if Patricia is still alive out there somewhere, she would currently be seventy two years old today, so I guess it's not completely impossible. So if you happen to have any information about her whereabouts, please contact the McCombe County Sheriff's Office at four oh six four eight five three four zero five. That's four oh six four eight five three four zero five, Jules Ashley, any final thoughts on this case?
These are the worst kinds of cases when you talk about the risk of criminality and you talk about the family's grief. They don't know what happened to their loved one, right And like you said, Patricia be seventy two years old today, it's likely that parents and siblings are also up in age or deceased at this point. But throughout their lifetime they were wondering what happened?
Where is she?
And is she still alive? Is she being her?
Is she safe?
And so I think when you talk to survivors of missing persons and homicides and cold case murders, they'll tell you worst case scenario is that our loved one would be missing and we wouldn't have a chance to bury them, we wouldn't have a chance to bring them home and heal them, and we wouldn't have a place to go to honor them because we don't know if they're alive or deceased. And so my heart breaks that throughout their lifetime, Patricia's family never had answers. It's also so disheartening to
know that Patricia wanted so badly to be better. She was aware that she was struggling with her mental health. She was seeking help at a time where that wasn't actually as common as it is now, and she was seeing a therapist. She was trying to make plans to get home to her family because her parents had created that healthy, safe environment for her, and so it's just devastating.
I think she got in that car that day and said, I will be at my parents' house whether they want me to drive or not, and she never made it.
Yeah, this case really breaks my heart because I know what it feels personally to be going through mental health crisis, being that I am bipolar to you, and having that
feeling that you're losing control and needing that help. And Patricia reached out to her parents and was going to put herself in a safer situation where she would be under the watchful eye of her parents, and I'm sure that they could intervene and get her the right care that she needed, because being accountable to yourself at that time is something that feels impossible and we don't know exactly what she was struggling with, but we can speculate based on the behavior here.
And it's just.
Heartbreaking that her family doesn't have her remains. They don't know what happened. There's five thousand sightings to parse through, and I agree with both Robin and Ashley. I think
that she likely was. I think there's a strong probability that she was alive for a period after her disappearance, because some of these sightings are so specific and just the details are quite granular, and they seem to be able to fit a woman who would have amnesia, who had had a car crash, who felt that connection to Bozeman, and I just don't think there would be that many other people out there who also match her description. So
it is a really intriguing sighting. And I think after a certain amount of time, the more people that she would expose yourself to in a situation like hitchhiking in places like truck stops, the greater the probability that you were going to come across somebody who has nefarious intentions.
So I think there is a strong likelihood that Patricia's was foul play, and unfortunately, without somebody coming forward, or without somebody giving more information or her remains being found, we just don't have those answers.
Yeah, I actually remember watching this case back on Unsolved Mysteries when originally aired. I think it was a couple months less than a year after Patricia went missing, And I was always haunted by the re enactment of the accident where they showed an actress playing Patricia walking over to the other driver and then just staring at her before walking out into the prairie in the middle of
the night. And I was also haunted by the aforementioned self portrait of Patricia taking a photograph of herself in the mirror with that blank look on her face. And at the time, there was a sense of urgency to this story because they felt this is one of the few missing persons cases we profiled where there is a legitimate chance that she's still alive out there somewhere. So they're hoping that an eyewitness or perhaps even Patricia herself would be watching and be able to direct the authorities
to find her. But unfortunately that just didn't appear to be the case, and no one knows what happened to her. Like we said, the chances of her still being alive today are pretty much very minuscule. But even though in the vast majority of these cases where someone wanders off into a remote area, I do believe that they likely died of exposure and the remains were not found, but
this is the exception. I do think that she probably hitched a ride at some point, and that a lot of the witnesses who did see her did genuinely did see her. They were credible, and Patricia was just wandering out somewhere with no memory of who she was. It is also possible that even if she wasn't murdered, she could have died of natural causes and could be a Jane Doe somewhere lying in a morgue just completely unidentified,
or maybe buried in a potter's grave somewhere. So I do hope that they have her DNA on file and that if she did die while she was out there living as a transient, they're able to get a match for her someday, because her family definitely deserves answers.
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