ELK PLAIN, Wash. — Forty-five years ago, a woman seemingly vanished from Mount Rainier National Park.
The disappearance of 24-year-old Elaine Robertson is one of the oldest unsolved cases in Pierce County.
"It's one of those cases where literally, the person, for lack of better, walks off the face of the Earth," Detective Sergeant Lynelle Anderson with Pierce County Sheriff's Department said.
Over Memorial Day weekend in 1979, Robertson traveled from California to western Washington in a VW camper van with her two dogs in tow.
There is not much known about Robertson or the case. Detectives do know she recently went through a breakup and was in the process of obtaining a master's degree at the time of her disappearance.
"But otherwise, [she] was described as just somebody who liked adventure and she was coming up to Washington to visit a friend and just do some travel," Anderson said.
The last reported sighting of Elaine Robertson
On May 26, Robertson abandoned her van on Mountain Highway in Elk Plain, Washington.
"From there, the story takes an interesting turn in that eventually it is found that she had been seen at Mount Rainier by two campers at Sunshine Point," Anderson said.
Sunshine Point is more than 40 miles from where her van was found by law enforcement.
"She arrived at the campground on foot with two dogs, wet and cold, asking if she could get some assistance. They loaned her a tent. And when they wake up in the morning, she's gone. She's left her belongings behind and both she and her dogs are now just vanished," Anderson said.
Investigators have a limited amount of information about the case and Robertson herself. The Unsolved Northwest team found only two articles on her disappearance.
There's no mention of ever finding a trace of her or her dogs after the final sighting at the campsite. The articles did detail the large search that ensued after she was reported missing. About 100 people, a helicopter, canine and search crews all scoured the area where she was last seen.
Then, over 25 years after she disappeared, so did the campsite where she was last seen.
In November 2006, nearly 18 inches of rain fell in Mount Rainier National Park, causing the Nisqually River to overflow. The Sunshine Point campground was washed away. Campers were disappointed to hear this popular spot was gone and so were investigators.
"As the detective, you want to be able to go back a lot of times to revisit the crime scene; well, the crime scene may not exist any longer. So that's a challenge," said Lindsey Wade, a former detective from Tacoma.
Where does the case stand now?
Investigators have several theories about what may have happened to Robertson.
"We presume that she is deceased. But in this amount of time, we also have not found her remains at Mount Rainier and they've done a considerable amount of construction in the park," Anderson said.
One theory is that Elaine could have been the victim of a serial killer.
"Sometimes people refer to the 1970s as, like, the golden age of serial killing. And to some degree, I think that's true because there were quite a few known serial killers operating in Washington back in the 1970s," Wade said.
Anderson said they doubt she was killed by an animal or an accidental fall because they believe they would have found at least one of her dogs or her remains.
No one has seen Robertson in 45 years. Detectives have received no tips that have panned out, which contributed to the fact that not much progress has been made in solving her case.
Now, time is running out for her family to finally get some closure.
"We're approaching that time if we don't reach out to people and ask if anyone remembers or ever heard anybody say anything about picking up a young woman and driving her into Mount Rainier. We're going to lose a generation that would have that information and it will be completely unsolvable," Anderson said.
Anderson says this is the kind of case that could be brought to the forefront again if people come forward with information about her whereabouts that Memorial Day weekend in 1979.
"I think people are reluctant to come forward sometimes because they think that their information might not be important or it's silly or maybe they heard it wrong," Anderson said. "In this case, none of those things are valid. Everything that somebody could bring forward could be the piece that allowed us to put this puzzle back together."
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