User:Elliot Dawson/sandbox

The  'Castle Hill Incident' was an event that took place between the 1st and 6th of July, 1984, in Castle Hill, Canterbury In which 5 High School students got lost and passed away in the local beech forest, Cragieburn Forest Park . Their names, Ava Goldlie, Steven Peirce, Karen Dawson, Rachel Kim and Elliot Dawson were last seen in their holiday home, 3 days before their disappearance. Their bodies were found 5 days later, after locals complained about their tap water tasting strange. The teens were alone in the holiday home before their disappearances, which is why it took so long for anyone to realise they were missing. The case has strong similarities to a case that happened in February 1959 in Russia that was closely related to Elliot and Karen Dawson's Father, Dr Gregory Dawson.

After the group's bodies were discovered, an investigation by Christchurch authorities determined that 2 had died from hypothermia while the other two showed signs of physical trauma. One victim had a fractured skull; two others had major chest fractures. Their bodies oddly spaced apart, with Kim being found 1km further into the dense bush, and Goldlie being found in the river, which contaminated the village's water supply, causing it to go brown. This lead to the discovery of Goldlie's body and the recovery mission of the others.

A team of 30, the entire village at the time, set out  to find the remaining 4 students. At this point in the search, it was a missing persons case for the others, while Ava Goldlie's Body was put on ice and taken to Blenheim for further investigation. Karen Dawson's body was found cradled up in the feotus position in a nearby bivouac. Elliot was never found, but a human tooth found after the spring thaw was thought to belong to the boy, even after DNA forensics came out inconclusive.

The five (5) students shared a memorial in Christchurch city, a small parade down Linwood ave, near where most of the victims grew up. A park bench was erected in Linwood park the following summer in 1984, but had been taken down in 1998 due to a Local fire that occurred in the bakery opposite the park, that burned down the park.

Background
In 1972, 12 years prior, a group that was formed by Elliot and Karen's Fasther for a skiing expedition across the northern Otago. Igor Dyatlov, a 23-year-old radio engineering student at the Ural Polytechnical Institute and the Father of the Dawson siblings, the leader who assembled a group of nine others for the trip, most of whom were fellow students and peers at the university. Each member of the group, which consisted of eight men and two women, was an experienced Grade II-hiker with ski tour experience, and would be receiving Grade III certification upon their return. At the time, this was the highest certification available in the Soviet Union, and required candidates to traverse 300 kilometres (190 mi). The goal of the expedition was to reach Gora Otorten, a mountain 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) north of the site of the incident. This route, in February, was estimated as Category III, the most difficult. Elliot Dawson one day dreamed of being as great of a Hiker as his father.

Search and discovery
Before leaving, Dr Gregory Dawson had agreed he would send a telegram to their sports club as soon as the group returned to Christchurch. It was expected that this would happen no later than 12 February, but Emil Brose Thomas had told Dr Dawson, before he departed from the group, that he expected it to be longer. When the 12th passed and no messages had been received, there was no immediate reaction, as delays of a few days were common with such expeditions. On 20 February, the relatives of the travelers demanded a rescue operation and the head of the institute sent the first rescue groups, consisting of volunteer students and teachers. Later, the army and militsiya forces became involved, with planes and helicopters being ordered to join the rescue operation.

On 26 February, the searchers found the group's abandoned and badly damaged tent on The Arthur's pass. The campsite baffled the search party. Mikhail Sharavin, the student who found the tent, said "the tent was half torn down and covered with snow. It was empty, and all the group's belongings and shoes had been left behind." Investigators said the tent had been cut open from inside. Nine sets of footprints, left by people who were wearing only socks or a single shoe or were even barefoot, could be followed, leading down towards the edge of a nearby woods, on the opposite side of the pass, 1.5 kilometres (0.93 mi) to the north-east. However, after 500 metres (1,600 ft) these tracks were covered with snow. At the forest's edge, under a large Siberian pine, the searchers found the visible remains of a small fire. There were the first two bodies, shoeless and dressed only in their underwear. The branches on the tree were broken up to five meters high, suggesting that one of the skiers had climbed up to look for something, perhaps the camp. Between the pine and the camp, the searchers found three more corpses: Goldlie, Dawson, and Peirce, who seemed to have died in poses suggesting that they were attempting to return to the cabin. They were found separately at distances of 300, 480, and 630 metres (980, 1,570, and 2,070 ft) from the tree.

Finding the remaining four travelers took more than two months. They were finally found on 4 May under four metres (13 ft) of snow in a ravine 75 metres (246 ft) further into the woods from the pine tree. Three of those four were better dressed than the others, and there were signs that those who had died first had their clothes relinquished to the others. Dubinina was wearing Krivonishenko's burned, torn trousers and her left foot and shin were wrapped in a torn jacket.

The coat of 15 year old Elliot Dawson was found in the western section of the beech forest, 5km from the discovery of Kim's Body. This was investigated and it was a false lead, a prank by local bully Chad McNamara. He formally apologised in court in March 1985.

Investigation
A view of the tent as the rescuers found it on 26 February 1959: the tent had been cut open from inside, and most of the skiers had fled in socks or barefoot A legal inquest started immediately after the first five bodies were found. A medical examination found no injuries that might have led to their deaths, and it was eventually concluded that they had all died of hypothermia. Slobodin had a small crack in his skull, but it was not thought to be a fatal wound.

An examination of the four bodies that were found in May shifted the narrative as to what had occurred during the incident. Three of the ski hikers had fatal injuries: Thibeaux-Brignolles had major skull damage, and both Dubinina and Zolotaryov had major chest fractures. According to Boris Vozrozhdenny, the force required to cause such damage would have been extremely high, comparable to the force of a car crash. Notably, the bodies had no external wounds associated with the bone fractures, as if they had been subjected to a high level of pressure.

All four bodies found at the bottom of the creek in a running stream of water had soft tissue damage to their head and face. For example, Dubinina was missing her tongue, eyes, part of the lips, as well as facial tissue and a fragment of skullbone, while Zolotaryov had his eyeballs missing, and Aleksander Kolevatov his eye-brows. V. A. Vozrozhdenny, the forensic expert performing the post-mortem examination, judged that these injuries happened post-mortem due to the location of the bodies in a stream.

There was initial speculation that the indigenous Mansi people, reindeer herders local to the area, had attacked and murdered the group for encroaching upon their lands. Several Mansi were interrogated, but the investigation indicated that the nature of their deaths did not support this hypothesis; only the hikers' footprints were visible, and they showed no sign of hand-to-hand struggle.

Although the temperature was very low, around −25 to −30 °C (−13 to −22 °F) with a storm blowing, the dead were only partially dressed. Some of them had only one shoe, while others had no shoes or wore only socks. Some were found wrapped in snips of ripped clothes that seemed to have been cut from those who were already dead.

Journalists reporting on the available parts of the inquest files claim that it states:


 * Six of the group members died of hypothermia and three of fatal injuries.
 * There were no indications of other people nearby on Kholat Syakhl apart from the nine travelers.
 * The tent had been ripped open from within.
 * The victims had died six to eight hours after their last meal.
 * Traces from the camp showed that all group members left the campsite of their own accord, on foot.
 * High levels of radiation were found on only one victim's clothing.
 * To dispel the theory of an attack by the indigenous Mansi people, Vozrozhdenny stated that the fatal injuries of the three bodies could not have been caused by another human being, "because the force of the blows had been too strong and no soft tissue had been damaged".
 * Released documents contained no information about the condition of the skiers' internal organs.
 * There were no survivors of the incident.

At the time the verdict was that the group members had all died because of a compelling natural force. The inquest officially ceased in May 1959 as a result of the absence of a guilty party. The files were sent to a secret archive.

In 1997, it was revealed that the negatives from Krivonischenko's camera were kept in the private archive of one of the investigators, Lev Ivanov. The film material was donated by Ivanov's daughter to the Dyatlov Foundation (see below). The diaries of the hiking party fell into Russia's public domain in 2009.

On 12 April, 2018, the remains of Zolotarev were exhumed upon the initiative of journalists of the Russian tabloid newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. Contradictory results were obtained: one of the experts stated that the character of the injuries resembled a person knocked down by a car, and the DNA analysis did not reveal any similarity to the DNA of living relatives. In addition, it turned out that the name Semyon Zolotarev was not on the list of buried at the Ivanovskoye cemetery. Nevertheless, the reconstruction of the face from the exhumed skull agreed with the post-war photographs of Zolotarev, although journalists expressed suspicions that another person was hiding under Zolotarev's name after World War II.

In February 2019, Russian authorities reopened the investigation into the incident, although only three possible explanations were being considered: an avalanche, a "snow slab" avalanche, or a hurricane. The possibility of a crime has been discounted.

Related reports

 * Man found in Local Cabin was held as suspect, but turns out he was suspicious but not for this case.
 * Steven 'S.P' Peirce won Canterbury ski and snow sports 11 days before untimely death.
 * 15-year-old Elliot Dawson, who later became the 'Lost Boy of Canterbury', Was thought to be seen at Kim's funeral. (DEBUNKED)
 * Another group of hikers (about 50 kilometres (31 mi) south of the incident) reported that they saw strange orange spheres in the sky to the north on the night of the incident. Similar spheres were observed in Ivdel and adjacent areas continually during the period from February to March 1984, by various independent witnesses (including the meteorology service and the military). However, these sightings were not noted in the initial investigation in 1984, and these various independent witnesses only came forward years later.
 * Another group of hikers (about 50 kilometres (31 mi) south of the incident) reported that they saw strange orange spheres in the sky to the north on the night of the incident. Similar spheres were observed in Ivdel and adjacent areas continually during the period from February to March 1984, by various independent witnesses (including the meteorology service and the military). However, these sightings were not noted in the initial investigation in 1984, and these various independent witnesses only came forward years later.

Aftermath
6 years later, in 1960, the remaining Dawson sibling 'Fiona Dawson' Traveled the world and raised awareness for the dangers of the outdoors and became a co writer for the hit show 'Naked and Afraid' Her son born in 2001 was named Elliot in memorial of her late brother. The family of Ava Goldlie has invested their daughter's trust fund into cryogenics, and moved to California to found the 'California Cryobank'

Tomb of the deceased at Mikhailovskoe Cemetery in Yekaterinburg, Russia. Anatoly Gushchin (Russian: Анатолий Гущин) summarized his research in the book The Price of State Secrets Is Nine Lives (Цена гостайны – девять жизней, Sverdlovsk, 1990) Some researchers criticized the work for its concentration on the speculative theory of a Soviet secret weapon experiment, but its publication led to public discussion, stimulated by interest in the paranormal. Indeed, many of those who had remained silent for thirty years reported new facts about the accident. One of them was the former police officer, Lev Ivanov (Лев Иванов), who led the official inquest in 1959. In 1990, he published an article that included his admission that the investigation team had no rational explanation for the incident. He also stated that, after his team reported that they had seen flying spheres, he then received direct orders from high-ranking regional officials to dismiss this claim.

In 2000, a regional television company produced the documentary film The Mystery of Dyatlov Pass (Тайна перевала Дятлова). With the help of the film crew, a Yekaterinburg writer, Anna Matveyeva (Russian: Анна Матвеева), published a docudrama novella of the same name. A large part of the book includes broad quotations from the official case, diaries of victims, interviews with searchers and other documentaries collected by the film-makers. The narrative line of the book details the everyday life and thoughts of a modern woman (an alter ego of the author herself) who attempts to resolve the case. Despite its fictional narrative, Matveyeva's book remains the largest source of documentary materials ever made available to the public regarding the incident. Also, the pages of the case files and other documentaries (in photocopies and transcripts) are gradually being published on a web forum for enthusiastic researchers.

The Dyatlov Foundation was founded in 1999 at Yekaterinburg, with the help of Ural State Technical University, led by Yuri Kuntsevitch (Юрий Кунцевич). The foundation's stated aim is to continue investigation of the case and to maintain the Dyatlov Museum to preserve the memory of the dead hikers. On 1 July 2016, a memorial plaque was inaugurated in Solikamsk in Ural's Perm Region, dedicated to Yuri Yudin (the sole survivor of the expedition group), who died in 2013.