On the morning of July 11, 1983, Maine State Police Detective Sgt. Ralph E. Pinkham got a call from a woman in Texas worried about her sister Jessie Albertine Hoover.
She hadn’t heard from her since May 16, when Hoover called from a Bangor motel. At the time, her sister said, the 54-year-old had only about $15 to $20, but intended to wire for money when she passed through towns along the Appalachian Trail, which she had come to Maine to thru-hike.
At Baxter State Park, Pinkham learned Hoover had talked with rangers about her hike plans and been turned away from summiting Mount Katahdin. She is believed to have started to hike south but northbound Appalachian Trail hikers coming through the Daicey Pond checkpoint hadn’t seen her at all.
In fact, it had been six weeks since anyone had.
Into the woods
When Hoover had stepped off a bus in Bangor in early May, she was bound for an adventure of a lifetime: hiking the Appalachian Trail. Yet she was neither an experienced hiker nor familiar with the North Woods, outside of an inspiring article in National Geographic.
Jessie Hoover. Courtesy of Mary Yadon
An investigation eventually mounted by the Maine Warden Service traced her to the trailhead of the 100-Mile Wilderness, south of Baxter State Park. It’s the most remote stretch of the entire Appalachian Trail, surrounded by about 15 million acres of lonely forest.
“It’s not a place to take lightly,” says retired game warden Dave Sewall, who led the investigation into her disappearance. “If you want to do it, do it prepared.”
By all accounts, the 5-foot-10-inch, 240-pound Hoover was dangerously unprepared. When she walked into the Maine wilderness, she was wearing blue jeans, a blue shirt, a blue windbreaker and heavy shoes, carrying a blue knapsack for the 2,180-mile hike to Springer Mountain in Georgia. She also was suffering from epilepsy, according to her family, and took regular medication.
Since her disappearance, Hoover’s name has been little more than a footnote in Maine history. Her name was forgotten for decades, and only listed recently in public missing person reports and unsolved case files.
Yet her family in White Settlement, Texas, still waits for an answer to a question first asked 32 years ago: What happened to Jessie Hoover? Did she really simply disappear without a trace?
In Texas, Hoover left behind a big family and many friends when she headed off on what was to be a bucket-list adventure. Her daughter Mary Yadon, now 55, still lives in the White Settlement home where her parents raised her and her brothers.
Hoover’s eldest son, Eugene Daniel Hoover, now 63, lives in Fort Worth, Texas, not far from the old family home.
For the family left behind, the last 32 years have been clouded with the uncertainty of what happened to their mother out there on the Appalachian Trail.
Born June 13, 1929, Jessie Albertine Bolen grew up outside Shreveport, Louisiana, not far from the state’s border with Texas.
In the 1940s, she met a young man named Eugene Vernon Hoover, an assemblyman at General Dynamics. They married Nov. 27, 1948, and two weeks later moved into a modest single-story home on Farmers Road in White Settlement, a suburb of Fort Worth.
The couple raised a family that grew to five kids -- four boys and daughter Mary, the youngest.
Jessie Hoover holds her daughter Mary Yadon in an old photo Yadon had in a family album. Courtesy of Mary Yadon
Mary Yadon said her mother was “a strong-willed woman” who was “always more comfortable in blue jeans.”
“She liked the outdoors,” Eugene Daniel Hoover said. “She was more or less a tomboy.”
When she was young, Jessie Hoover and her two sisters never shied away from rugged play, including jumping from high places. One time, Yadon said, Hoover and her sisters were on the roof of the family home outside Shreveport and the jump didn’t go quite as planned. Her mother suffered a head injury that Yadon believes caused the epilepsy she lived with the rest of her life.
This adventuresome spirit continued into her teens. When she was a teenager, her parents divorced. Her father’s job with Mobil took him to California while her mother stayed in Louisiana. Hoover’s sisters also moved out west after a couple years to live with their father. Even though Hoover continued to live with her mother, she regularly hitchhiked between Louisiana and California to spend time with both parents.
But once she settled in White Settlement with Eugene, Hoover rarely traveled, except to visit her mother back in Shreveport. Family commitments came first.
The Hoover family’s otherwise stable life would take an unexpected turn in early November 1982.
On Nov. 5, 1982, Eugene Hoover died suddenly when he was struck by a car while collecting returnable cans and bottles. Jessie Hoover was out of town at the time visiting her mother in Louisiana. Once word of her husband's death got to her, she cut the trip short and returned to Texas. Married for 35 years, his sudden death devastated her.
Mary Yadon stands in front of her home in White Settlement, Texas. Brandon Wade
“She was depressed,” Yadon said. “The loss of my dad was hard on her.”
Not long after her husband’s death, Hoover began to talk about hiking the Appalachian Trail -- something that had caught her interest years earlier when she read an article in National Geographic. She began to read everything she could about the iconic trail in anticipation of one day accomplishing the feat.
“Someday she was going to do it,” Yadon said.
Eugene Daniel Hoover said his mother had often talked about “going up to Maine and [hiking] that thing all the way to Georgia.”
The sudden death of her husband seemed to spur his mother into action, Eugene Daniel Hoover said.
“If she was going to do it before she died, she [must’ve] figured that was the time to do it,” he said.
Yadon said the whole family was worried about her decision, but her mother couldn’t be dissuaded. Hoover felt confident she could hike the trail. After all, she had hitchhiked between her parents’ homes as a teenager.
Hoover had crafted an itinerary of when she would arrive at major stops along the trail to pick up supplies and wire for money. She even made arrangements with the family doctor to get refills of her medication along the way.
“She had it all figured out,” her son said.
Meanwhile, the plan had an added benefit: It lightened the dark days for Hoover after her husband’s death, Yadon said.
“[The plan to hike the Appalachian Trail] kind of made her feel good,” Yadon said. “She had control of that at least.”
Though she wouldn’t change her mind about hiking the trail, Hoover did offer her family one concession: She would call if she thought she couldn’t go any farther.
When her departure day came, just after Mother’s Day, Yadon accompanied her mother to the Greyhound station in Fort Worth. Hoover had packed a stack of pre-addressed postcards to mail along the way, at least once a week, and an AT&T calling card. Yadon told her mother to call if she needed money along the way.
That was the last time she saw her mother.
A few days later, Hoover made her last call home.
Between 2 million and 3 million people hike the Appalachian Trail each year, according to a recent count by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. Of those, few attempt a thru-hike and most that do start in Georgia in the spring. Around 10 percent of thru-hikers start in Maine, usually in June when the weather has improved. Only one in four ever finish.
In May 1983, Hoover would have been one of the few hikers crossing the 100-Mile Wilderness, an area so remote that the Maine Appalachian Trail Club strongly urges hikers to carry at least eight to 10 days’ worth of food on this leg of the trail.
According to the warden service investigation report, all Hoover had was beef jerky. That report was written by Sewall, who in the summer of 1983 was assigned to her case.
As Sewall, who retired from the warden service in the 1990s, set out to pick up her trail, he found that Hoover had tried to climb Katahdin on May 20, 1983, but Baxter State Park rangers had counseled her on the difficulty of the task and turned her away because they felt she wasn’t prepared.
Back in 1983, hikers headed to and from the 100-Mile Wilderness had to pass through the old Abol gatehouse on the Golden Road, a private road built by Great Northern Paper Co. in the early 1970s to haul logs to local mills. Sewall’s search for Hoover led him there. He learned from a gatehouse attendant who remembered Hoover that she had passed the gate back in May in the direction of the trailhead of the 100-Mile Wilderness on the other side of Abol Bridge.
The entrance to the 100-Mile Wilderness is near Abol Campground on the Golden Road. Brian Feulner | BDN
Of the many people who daily passed through the gatehouse, the Texan had stood out to the attendant, who felt she was ill-equipped for a stay in the woods, Sewall said. The attendant reportedly had asked her if she had bug spray, but she didn’t even have that.
That was the first and last time the attendant saw her.
Since more than six weeks passed before state police and game wardens even heard that Hoover was unaccounted for, the trail had grown cold. There wasn’t much to report.
The odds of finding Hoover were against Sewall and the wardens. In a missing person case, time is a critical factor, especially the first 24 to 48 hours. As the clock ticks away, the chance of finding a missing person safe and sound dwindles.
A white blaze marks the trail along the 100-Mile Wilderness. Brian Feulner | BDN
And the potential search area was vast, encompassing 15 million acres and hundreds of miles of trail in which she could have become lost. Sewall estimated he had been involved in hundreds of searches over the years -- many of those in the same rough country in which he believes Hoover vanished.
“You could just wander and wander [until] your body deteriorates [on that section of trail],” Sewall said.
Just days before the call came in, Sewall had led a thorough search for another unprepared hiker on a section of the Appalachian Trail where he believes Hoover may have gone missing. That hiker eventually was found and taken out of the woods. But the wardens didn’t return to the 100-Mile Wilderness to mount a separate search for Hoover.
There was too much uncertainty.
“We didn’t know anything,” Sewall said. “Did she come out? Did she continue? Did she go north? South?”
Sewall believes Hoover succumbed to the elements. Hypothermia is a significant hazard to hikers that can strike even in the summer. New England in spring, which is when Hoover started her hike, can get chilly. Hoover was wearing jeans, a shirt and a windbreaker at the time.
That spring was no exception. According to the National Weather Service, between May 16 and May 21, temperatures in the Millinocket area routinely hit lows deep in the 40s and 30s. When Hoover started her hike on the morning of May 20, it reached a high of 72 degrees, warm enough for the unseasoned hiker to break a sweat.
The weather service also reports that a light rain had set in midday, and by nightfall the temperature descended nearly 30 degrees. The rain continued into the next day and the temperature on May 21 peaked at 59 degrees.
But while Sewall thinks it’s likely that Hoover died in those remote woods, he still has no idea where.
If the warden service had known about Hoover sooner, Sewall said they could have diverted resources from the search for the other lost hiker to look for her.
But no body, clothes or blue knapsack was ever found. And though Baxter State Park rangers at Daicey Pond questioned northbound Appalachian Trail hikers all summer, none said they had ever seen the Texas hiker on the trail.
Sewall said he believes that had there been any trace of her to be found, it would have been uncovered when the wardens conducted the other search.
“We went over [the woods] with a fine-tooth comb” before the warden service learned about Hoover, he said. “If she was there, we would have found her. We don’t ignore people in the woods.”
A rare case
As a 12-year-old Boy Scout from Rye, New York, Donn Fendler (above) lost his way while hiking with other scouts on Mount Katahdin. After wandering aimlessly for eight days, he made it out alive. John Clarke Russ | BDN
When 12-year-old Donn Fendler became lost on Katahdin in 1939, the search for the New York boy was almost immediately front-page news across the country. And when Geraldine Largay went missing on the Appalachian Trail in 2013, news crews scrambled to the scene and reporters documented the search for the Tennessee woman daily.
Hoover’s disappearance, however, received little media attention.
Newspaper archives from 1983 don’t report a missing hiker on the Appalachian Trail. It wasn’t until 2009 that her name first appeared in a BDN report about Maine’s missing persons, but contained little more than a mention of her disappearance.
In 2010, Mary Yadon added her mother to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System database, a unit of the U.S. Department of Justice. NamUs lists 28 other open missing persons cases for Maine, dating from 1971 to 2013. The Maine State Police lists 13 open missing person cases.
Of the cases listed by NamUs and the state police, only one other person went missing on the Appalachian Trail: Geraldine Largay.
One of the last photos of Geraldine Largay before she vanished in the 100-Mile Wilderness. Photo provided by Maine Department of Public Safety
Largay, whose trail name was “Inchworm,” had hiked more than 1,000 miles from Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, before she disappeared between July 22 and 24, 2013, on the trail not far from Sugarloaf Mountain. After an extensive search over several weeks with at times 130 volunteer searchers and game wardens, no trace of her surfaced.
Unlike Hoover, Largay was reported missing within 24 hours of missing a rendezvous with her husband. Still, despite 15 separate searches over two years, she hasn’t been found.
Whether any other hikers have gone missing on the trail in its 78-year history isn’t clear. NamUs only lists Largay and Hoover. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which is charged with the management of the trail by the National Park Service, doesn’t have information about missing hikers, aside from Largay, a representative said.
But cases like those of Largay and Hoover are rare, even among non-hikers. According to a 2012 warden service search and rescue report, only 1 percent of all people who go missing in the Maine woods never are found. Why and how people fall into the 1 percent aren’t easy questions for the searchers or the families.
Sewall recalls very few cases from his tenure in which game wardens failed to find someone lost in the woods. Of those, the only case that has stayed with him is Hoover’s.
In the years after Hoover went missing, Sewall stayed in touch with her family in Texas, always asking whether they had heard from her. They never did.
Had he known she was coming to Millinocket to hike the trail, Sewall said he would have done everything to persuade her to not go on the hike, a plea he has made to more than one ill-prepared would-be hiker.
Questions still linger for her children. Even though he has come to terms with his mother’s disappearance, Eugene Daniel Hoover can’t shake the feeling, though the chances are slim, that maybe she’s out there somewhere.
The summer her mother went missing, Mary Yadon had a dream. Her mother was on her hike, and with her was her husband, Eugene.
“I had a vision of them walking hand in hand,” she said. “I knew [then] wherever she was, he was with her.”
But years later, there are far more questions than answers. What happened to Hoover? Does anybody know anything they haven’t shared already?
Some questions don’t come with convenient answers, Yadon has learned. More than three decades later, Mother’s Day is particularly tough since it falls close to when she last saw her mom and is a reminder of what she lost.
“My faith keeps me strong,” Yadon said. “I know one day I’ll see her.”
Copyright 2015 BDN Maine
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