Aubrey Sacco Case | Chapter 2: Blank Space

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1:25Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence. Le Monstre, Season 2, coming October 31st. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Up and Vanish presents this mini-season of Status Untraced. Chapter 2 starts now. To hear bonus episodes and the entire first season, go search Status Untraced in your podcast app.

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2:272010, Langtang National Park, Nepal. I feel like you guys did a really great job with this Alexander gentleman. You need to know this. You need to know that there really is going to be an answer. There's no way I'm going to die without knowing what happened to our daughter. There is no evidence whatsoever to lead us to believe she was murdered. Nothing was found. There's no clothing. There's no, you know, her property or anything like that. She had a camera with her journal and her backpack were left at the elite motel. And that's what we had to discover when we began our search. It was a terrible day to have to look at that stuff.

3:24And then in her journal, you know, I open up the journal, and the first page I break in, open it to, it says, my dad is my hero. I mean, it's just the crazy shit that happened, you know, on this journey. You know, because dads are supposed to find their daughters when they're in trouble. they're supposed to help them they're supposed to be there and when I looked at that map of Nepal I'm holding it up of the length hanging hundreds of square miles of nothingness you know where the hell is she? it was like overwhelming it truly was overwhelming

4:30I'm Liam Luxon, and this is Status Untraced. Our case, Aubrey Sacco. Chapter 2. Blank Space. Joining us this morning from Brealey, Colorado are Aubrey's parents, Paul and Connie Sacco. When you were just there searching for Aubrey, when you were on that trail in the area, what did you learn? Well, the most important thing was that I learned that the trek is not as dangerous as a lot of people believe it is. When people hear the word Himalayas, you know, they think of, you know, Mount Everest. And really, it isn't as dangerous as we had previously thought. So it's very unlikely she had an accident.

5:16When we last left off, Aubrey Sacco was 23 years old, trekking alone through Nepal's Langtang National Park. On April 19, 2010, she emailed her brother and called her parents. Her last words to them, I love you. Next morning, she set off. When Aubrey didn't return, her parents Paul and Connie sprang into action, mobilizing a search from halfway across the world. I've been digging through the coverage of her disappearance, the headlines, the details everyone heard. But the more I looked, the clearer it became. So much of Aubrey's story never made it in. People are not talking. We know that they know something, that they saw something, but they're not talking for fear of reprisal.

6:05To fill in the gaps, I've been talking with Paul and Connie Sacco. We hired many private agencies and entities to do their own searches. And remember we told you about this, Tilly Lama, who was the first one that went up to check, he put together a lot of searches on the ground that were just normal people, you know, going to villages, looking around to see if Aubrey was there. Through family connections and a local NGO, they began piecing together her trail, doing anything in their power to find their daughter. Occasionally there was a villager who would service and say he knew something, and then we'd follow that lead.

6:46One of the fake leads from a crazy villager, we went all the way to the Annapurna because it was said that Aubrey was buried there, up in the Annapurna. And we spent weeks hiking the Annapurna region, and that turned out to be a false lead. And the villagers were upset because they felt that we had cursed their villages and that anything that went bad was because we put a curse on them. Paul and Connie were running into every kind of wall, false leads, bad information, fear, and superstition. And beneath it all, the quiet truth, they were foreigners, outsiders, which meant they were often kept at a distance or treated like a problem.

7:40the dichotomy here was that you know we we were very conflicted because we know that the villagers and by the way liam these people are really wonderful people i mean for the most part the culture the society they're just poor people and they're loving and they have a tourism industry that they want to protect and they don't want people to be murdered there you know yeah go missing. So we were always conflicted about how much to press against these people, but we would question everybody at every tea house. And we would also end up helping a lot of the villagers, like the one villager, the guy had a tooth abscess, you know, and one of us had some painkillers with us.

8:26You know, so there was this back and forth and us getting to know the villagers and always lurking in the background was this terrible conflict between the kindness of the people and the warmth of these people and the mystery that these are people that may have murdered our daughter.

8:57It was never reconcilable, just never, no matter how good they were, we trusted them, we loved them. And then we'd be going to sleep that night thinking, oh my God, I wonder if one of these guys was lying and either knows what happened to Aubrey or did something to her. All Paul and Connie really had to go on at this point was what they knew for certain. Aubrey had made it to the Llama Hotel and locals remembered her vividly, ordering pizza, sipping a Coke, reading a book, and talking to three men who said she insisted that she would continue on alone. But further details about this story gave way to fear.

9:39There was a history of people reporting crimes and then becoming framed as the criminal, so people started to pull back. And the first person to do so was a teenager, the chef at Lama Hotel. Tasi Guru was one of the guys. because he knew his village was being threatened by the police, and he had been told, I think, by other villagers not to talk to the police and all that. So that really stands out as a story for a long time. I believe that he and a couple of other guys that he kind of palled around with at the Lama Hotel may have, you know, done something terrible to Aubrey. But the longer the story went on, the longer the investigation went on, the more it focused away from them.

10:36Originally, it was this chef who remembered Aubrey sitting down and speaking with the three men. But later, when asked again, he denied ever seeing her at all. Which meant the only lead now, the only lead still intact, was the three men themselves. Tenzing Lama, 24, and two older men, Galsing Tamang and Asi Tamang. Individuals Paul and Connie wouldn't come face to face with until a year later. 2011, Langtang National Park, Nepal. So we went a year later, Paul, myself, and our youngest son, Morgan, and we tracked up to Llama Hotel. And it just so happened that this Tassi guy was there and he could speak some English.

11:31We talked to him about Aubrey and he said, if I would have known she was going missing, we would not have let her go. Like, okay, I get that. And when we left Llama Hotel and we were hiking back down and we so happened to come upon one of the other three guys. And somehow our guide knew him. And he said, oh, this is so-and-so because he knew we were looking to speak to him. And he says the same damn thing. So it was really hard. I had known, if we had known she was going to go missing, we never would have left her leave. And so I said, who told you that? Who told you to say that? And I don't remember the answer, but it was like, oh my God, what is going on here?

12:20And so this is during the time that they're saying that they had never seen Aubrey. First, they said they'd seen Aubrey. Then they hadn't. When police brought them in, they cooperated, even agreed to polygraph tests, which they all passed. But by then, their story had shifted back to, yes, they had seen her. But for Paul and Connie, it was beyond murky. They weren't given insight of what was asked, what was answered, or how the men behaved under pressure. Just a vague assurance that the men were innocent. It was just conclusory. There was no details about what they said. What we know is that Aubrey arrived at the Llama Hotel around midday.

13:04The next leg of the hike was a steep one. A 980-meter ascent, over 3 ,400 meters of ground. The trail follows the Langtang River, winding through forests of hemlock and maple, past mule loading stations, and across a suspension bridge. The guide estimates four to five hours, but she was only planning to hike 45 minutes to the next resting lodge. She could have easily made it before sunset. And while it's unclear how far she actually made it, what caught the Saco's attention was actually another spot, called Gota Tabla, About 3 ,000 meters in, a quiet outpost with a checkpoint run by the Army. At Lama Hotel.

13:49Because we knew that something happened shortly thereafter, right? But the more we knew, the more we investigated, the more we worried about the Army.

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16:03so Aubrey went missing in April that summer we'd gotten a call from the embassy and they said they you probably want to hear this story and one of the embassy employees had gone hiking on his day off or whatever and he was up in Kanjengopa and these three French women were on the trail and these three or four army guys had tried to assault them and so he came upon the girls and they were all frantic he actually helped them get down to Kathmandu and helped them get a report filed There's all kinds of stories, reports to the embassies, all kinds of things, where they're really, really abused by these army people.

16:55It's routine. I mean, can you imagine that? I mean, you know, I'm thinking the army is protecting this place in Langtang. Had I known that, never, we would never have allowed her to go up there. Because although the Army is officially entrusted with the security of the National Langtang Park, what they really do is there are a bunch of guys, early 20s, that live up in the mountains, and they frequently assault women. frequently, either verbally, physically. Had they pointed their finger at the army, they were worried they were going to get killed. Yeah. They really were. I found in 2017, The Guardian reported that the UN had called on the country to investigate the gang rape and torture of a woman attacked by soldiers during the Civil War.

17:58While official documentation of rape during the conflict is limited, the UN and Human Rights Watch have reported that these crimes were likely widespread. Even today, during peacetime, stigma, fear of retaliation, and a lack of legal recourse keep many survivors from ever coming forward. And that's when we started discovering the history of the military and what they had done to many, many travelers. We looked into another murder. There was a murder of a young woman in 2012, and that was widely believed to have been involvement from the military.

18:412012, Langtang National Park, Nepal. Debbie Maveau was 23, a Belgian traveler hiking solo in the summer of 2012. She'd been missing for 10 days when they found her. Her body was badly decomposed. And her head, they said, was lying 13 inches from the rest of her body. There were no leads, no suspects, just a brutal scene with no real explanation. And according to the lead inspector, it probably wasn't robbery. Her camera and 8 ,000 rupees were still there. But there were many reports coming in of females that were being hassled by the military along these same trails that Aubrey had traveled. The military was very suspicious.

19:29Just a few months earlier, along the same stretch of mountains, an American woman was hiking alone when a knife-wielding masked man stepped out of the trees. He threatened her, tried to assault her. She got away. A week before that, in the same region, a South Korean woman, also alone, was attacked and tragically didn't survive. There's a huge tension in the country between the police and the army. We spent weeks and weeks and months and months developing assets and contacts within the military so that we could determine who was even there at the time Aubrey was there. Ultimately, we got to the bottom of that because there were military hiking up the trail when Aubrey went up and some coming down on or about the same time Aubrey was on the trail.

20:26So they had to be identified and investigated. And then there was, of course, the military base needed to be investigated. And so in order to do that, you needed to know some really high ranking folks. You know, guys were not happy about talking to us. This checkpoint along the trail is just a small outpost. Likely a couple men in uniform, clipboards, a dusty logbook on the table. And like Paul hoped, you'd think their presence meant safety. That if something went wrong, there'd be a record, a system, a response. But here's the truth. A lot of these posts exist for other reasons. One is revenue stream.

21:10You can't hike without the right paperwork and park fee, and these stops are there to make sure you've paid. But the fact they're not run by tourism officials and instead manned by the Nepal army tells you something else. Their job isn't to help hikers, it's to show presence. They're not trained in search and rescue or even basic trail safety. And despite claims of a database, many don't even ask who you are or where you're going. So when someone disappears, when a woman passes one post but never reaches the next, there's no flag, no follow-up, no one to hold accountable. What you're left with isn't a timeline.

21:51It's a blank space. One Paul and Connie hoped they could fill in. The investigation was dying down a little bit because, you know, the embassy changes people every two years. That first trip lasted three weeks. A year later, they returned, this time to turn up the pressure. And we felt that police, embassy, and all that were not doing an adequate job. We would be a catalyst to getting them to work harder. Paul and Connie also set up a reward,$20 ,000, for any real lead on what happened to Aubrey. In a place where most families live on$60 a year, that kind of money doesn't just turn heads. It changes lives.

22:39So from the beginning, we had posted rewards. We were told, we were counseled by the embassy, it can't be too high because no one will believe it. And it can't be too low because no one will be motivated to try to give us information. And then the other thing we said in the posters is that we would ensure the safe travels out of the country for anyone that did report Aubrey's disappearance to us. And we felt, too, that we needed to keep it alive in the media and felt like we needed to make ourselves more visible. It wasn't until year three, when Paul and Connie were back home, that things finally shifted.

23:23A developing story. The Associated Press is reporting police in Nepal have arrested two men in the disappearance of this Colorado woman.

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25:297 News reporter Lindsay Sablon just spoke with Aubrey's mother. Lindsay joins us now from the newsroom. And Lindsay, she tells you that they haven't heard anything official. Bertha, Aubrey's mom Connie says they first heard of the arrest early this morning when a media outlet in the U.S. called them. Denver 7 was the first to break the news. And a day later, they followed up with another report. Today, the State Department confirming three men have been arrested in connection with her disappearance. News outlets in Nepal reporting Aubrey was murdered, but her parents have received no official word.

26:04And for now, they're holding on to that hope. That was it. No names, no explanation of who these men were, why they were arrested, or why the case was now being labeled a murder. It was just a brief report and then nothing. I couldn't find an update, so I asked Paul and Connie what actually happened. This is a good example of how crazy shit is up there. The three men that were arrested are completely different from those three guys at the Llama Hotel. And here's how that comes into play. There was a sort of a bar situation going on where men are sitting at a bar. And there was a police officer in this bar.

26:54And the cop happened to be sitting there and overheard three men at the bar talking about what they did to Aubrey, having killed her, buried her, etc. All the nastiest stuff you can imagine.

27:16So this guy immediately informed police. I think they kind of just became friends with him. They became like incognito. They didn't share that this person was a cunt. And just tried to gather more information and get to know them better. So it became kind of a sting operation done. They told me it started with one man. Police arrested him, then marched into the next village, where they picked up the two other suspects. So while they did this, they ended up getting the attention of all the villagers because there ended up being a parade of these guys and villagers collecting these guys and then bringing them back down to Kathmandu where they were put in jail for 30 days and questioned.

28:07Here's what I keep thinking about. Why would a group of random villagers, three years after the fact, start talking so openly about Aubrey's murder, bragging about committing it. That kind of thing doesn't happen unless there's some truth to it. It's happened in the States before. Cases that break wide open because a killer had one too many drinks, got too comfortable, and started running their mouth. So maybe this wasn't just a rumor passed around over a beer. Maybe it was exactly what it sounded like. And yet, after 30 days in custody, and no hard evidence, they let these men go. And the assumption was, if you believe they were not guilty, the assumption by the police is that they might have been just bragging to try to get the reward.