Disappearance of Leah Roberts

On March 13, 2000, Leah Roberts (born July 23, 1976), left a restaurant in Bellingham, Washington, United States, where she had driven from her home in Durham, North Carolina over the previous four days. There have been no reported sightings of her since then. On March 18, her car was discovered wrecked and abandoned at the bottom of a hill off a road in nearby North Cascades National Park. Several years after Leah's disappearance, police examined the car's starter motor and found that it had been tampered with, indicating the vehicle may have been crashed intentionally.

Roberts had left Durham unexpectedly, leaving only rent money and a note for her housemate suggesting she might return in a few weeks. She said she wanted to take a road trip like that of author Jack Kerouac, whose work she admired. Over the previous decade she had experienced the deaths of both parents and a car accident that almost took her own life. She dropped out of North Carolina State University a semester short of graduation. Her older siblings recall that she seemed lost and directionless at that point in her life.

Leah's disappearance has been covered on the television shows Unsolved Mysteries and Disappeared, but few leads have emerged. In the summer of 2005, volunteers from a North Carolina missing-persons awareness group organized a caravan across the country to raise awareness for Leah's case and others. The caravan has since become an annual event.

Background
Leah Toby Roberts was born on July 23, 1976 in the suburbs of Durham, North Carolina. She has a sister Kara and a brother, Heath. When Leah was 17, her father was diagnosed with a chronic lung illness. Roberts began college at North Carolina State University (NCSU) in nearby Raleigh, majoring in Spanish and anthropology.

Challenges during college
During her sophomore year, her mother died suddenly from heart disease. Soon after, in the fall of 1998, Leah was involved in a serious car accident that resulted in a punctured lung and a shattered femur. Surgeons implanted a metal rod next to her femur to help it heal. Leah later told her sister Kara that she felt "born again" after her recovery. In the spring of the next year, just three weeks before she was scheduled to leave for Costa Rica for a field program, Leah's father died. She decided to continue with the program. Since she was leaving the country and no longer had living parents, Leah granted Kara power of attorney over her bank accounts.

Leaving college
Against the wishes of her older siblings, Roberts dropped out of NCSU only months before completing her degree. Afterwards, Leah learned to play the guitar, took up photography, and adopted a pet kitten she named Bea. She also began spending time in local coffeehouses, writing poetry about the meaning of life, and making new friends. With one, Jeannine Quiller, and with her roommate, Nicole Bennett, Roberts discussed the idea of emulating Beat Generation novelist Jack Kerouac and going on a road trip to the West.

Disappearance
On the morning of March 9, 2000, Leah talked on the phone with Kara about her uncertain future plans. The conversation ended with the understanding that the two would see each other soon. Later, in the early afternoon, Roberts and her roommate Nicole agreed to do some babysitting together the next day. Nicole left for work and returned later, at which point she noticed that Roberts and her 1993 white Jeep Cherokee were missing. Because Roberts had not maintained a consistent schedule since she dropped out of school, Nicole was not initially concerned about Roberts's absence.

The next day, Roberts missed the babysitting appointment. By the end of March 11, Roberts was still absent, and her friends and family had been attempting to contact her. On March 13, Kara reported Leah missing to the Durham police.

Note, bank records, and security camera footage
On March 14, Roberts's sister Kara and roommate Nicole searched Roberts's room. Many of Roberts's clothes and her kitten, Bea, were missing. Kara and Nicole also found a note reading, "I'm not suicidal. I'm the opposite," that mentioned Jack Kerouac and included a drawing of the Cheshire Cat's grin. Along with the note, Kara and Nicole found a bundle of cash totaling approximately a month's worth of Roberts's share of rent and expenses.

Since Kara still had power of attorney over Roberts's bank accounts, she was able to access her sister's financial records. Kara discovered that Roberts had withdrawn several thousand dollars on the afternoon of March 9, and that her debit card had been used to pay for a motel room near Memphis, Tennessee. Later transactions were purchases of gas or food, their locations suggesting that Roberts was traveling west along Interstate 40, then north on Interstate 5 after she reached I-40's western end in California. The last activity on Roberts's bank accounts was a gas purchase shortly after midnight on the morning of March 13 in Brooks, Oregon. Police later recovered security camera footage from the gas station, which showed her alone and apparently in good condition, although several times she peered out into the parking lot while waiting for her transaction to be completed.

Discovery of vehicle
Early on the morning of March 18, 2000 in Washington State, a couple jogging along Canyon Creek Road, a side route of the Mount Baker Highway, noticed articles of clothing at the side of the road next to a slight curve at the top of a slope. Some pieces of clothing had been tied to the trees and branches at the roadside. In the woods below, at the bottom of a steep embankment, the couple discovered Roberts's severely damaged Jeep and called the police. Roberts was not present at the scene.

Based on the path that the car had taken through the trees and the extent of damage to the vehicle, investigators from the Washington State Patrol determined that the Jeep had been traveling at nearly 40 mph when it went off the road and down the slope. The contents of the vehicle were tossed around inside, consistent with a multiple rollover. Investigators found no blood or other signs of injury to an occupant inside the vehicle, such as shatter on the glass or stretching of the seatbelt. Investigators concluded that no one had been inside the Jeep when it crashed, suggesting that the accident may have been staged.

Blankets and pillows were hung inside the windows of the Jeep, suggesting that it may have been used as a shelter after being wrecked. Roberts's passport, checkbook, driver's license, clothes, guitar, CDs, and other belongings were found scattered in the surrounding woods. Bits of cat food and a small cat carrier were found in the vehicle, confirming that Roberts had taken Bea on the trip with her, although the cat has never been found. Valuables, such as $2,500 in cash and jewelry, were also left behind, suggesting that robbery had not been the reason for the accident.

Search efforts and witness statements
Kara and Heath Roberts flew to Bellingham to assist investigators. They visited the crash site, and, with the assistance of the sheriff's office, created a flyer that they posted around town in Bellingham. They also went into local businesses to ask if business owners and customers had seen Leah. Among Leah's belongings, her siblings found a box of mementos from the trip that established more clearly when Leah had arrived in the city: a ticket stub from a March 13 afternoon showing of American Beauty at the theaters in Bellingham's Bellis Fair shopping mall. This ticket suggested that Leah may have spent a few hours in the city after arriving at the beginning of the day following the five-to-six-hour drive from where she had bought gas in Oregon.

Near the theater was the mall's only sit-down restaurant, where Heath and Kara believed that Leah might have gone for a meal. In the restaurant, police interviews with two customers yielded information about Leah. Both men indicated that they had met Leah in the restaurant on March 13, where they had sat on each side of her at the restaurant's counter. The men recalled talking with Leah about Kerouac and her planned road trip. One of the men claimed that Leah had left with a third, whom he heard her call Barry, and provided a description for a police sketch of the man. However, neither the other man nor any other customer who had been in the restaurant at the time could corroborate the third man's existence.

A few days after the Jeep was discovered, a man called the Whatcom County sheriff's office to report a sighting. He claimed that his wife had seen Roberts, disoriented and confused, wandering around a gas station in Everett, closer to Seattle. After disclosing this information, he seemed to panic and hung up before identifying himself. Police nevertheless consider the tip credible.

For two weeks in April 2000, police searched for Roberts near her Jeep's crash site. Dogs trained to sniff for corpses, metal detectors that could find the metal rod in her leg, and helicopters were used in the search but no new evidence was discovered.

Examination of vehicle
Investigators continued to examine the Jeep, joined by the FBI, who had become involved because Roberts had crossed state lines. They found her mother's engagement ring, which Roberts wore constantly, under a floor mat inside the vehicle. Roberts's friends in North Carolina said that she treasured the ring for the connection it offered to her late mother and that she would never have taken it off voluntarily. After this discovery, the investigation stalled.

In 2006, Mark Joseph of the Whatcom County sheriff's office, the detective who had originally investigated the case, passed his files on to two younger detectives. While reviewing the case, one of them noticed that the car and its contents had not been fully processed for evidence when it was originally brought in. After deciding to re-examine the vehicle, investigators pried open the Jeep's hood and found that a wire had been cut, allowing the car to accelerate without anyone having depressed the gas pedal. This discovery confirmed early suspicions that no one had been in the car when it left the road, and thus it had been purposely wrecked. The detectives also found a fingerprint under the hood of the Jeep and male DNA on an article of Leah's clothing.

These new leads led investigators back to the man who had claimed Roberts left the Bellis Fair restaurant with the third man she called "Barry." As no one could corroborate this witness's statements, police fingerprinted and DNA tested him to rule out his involvement in her disappearance. The witness's fingerprint was not a match for the one discovered under the hood of the Jeep, but the results of the DNA sample have not been disclosed.

Case coverage and awareness
In 2001, the Lifetime television series Unsolved Mysteries ran a segment on the case that generated some new tips for investigators and reports that Roberts had been sighted elsewhere in the U.S., but nothing that proved credible.

In 2005, Monica Caison, a Wilmington woman who had helped other families find missing loved ones after cases had gone officially cold, became involved in Leah's case after being contacted by Kara. Caison, with the help of a network of volunteers called Community United Effort, specializes in keeping cases alive in the media after official efforts have exhausted all leads. On the fourth anniversary of Roberts's disappearance, Caison organized a caravan across the country, following her route west to Bellingham, to raise awareness about not only the Roberts case but other disappearances. It has become an annual event.

Caison and Kara appeared on CNN's Larry King Live in 2005. "I really don't know how I would have made it through the past five years without her," Kara told the host. "We're just trying to, you know, keep Leah's face out there as much as possible." Investigation Discovery Disappeared aired an episode on the case in 2011.