The writings of novelist and poet Jack Kerouac remain popular nearly fifty-five years after his death. The Beatnik pioneer and progenitor of the hippie movement advocated a world in which the spiritual is emphasized over the materialistic.

Many people have at one point fantasized, at least temporarily, of living like Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s seminal work On the Road. The duo abandon their responsibilities at home and embark on an extended road trip across America. For most, the thought of crisscrossing the country carefree remains only a fantasy.

Leah Roberts, however, appears to have embarked on her dream only to have it end in a mystery. Inspired by Kerouac’s writings, the twenty-three-year-old North Carolina State University student, without telling anyone, departed her Raleigh dorm room for life on the road on March 9, 2000.

Nine days later, Leah’s damaged car was found off the road nearly 3,000 miles away in Bellingham, Washington. Leah was nowhere to be found and few clues have surfaced regarding her fate in the ensuing twenty-four years.

Leah Roberts

The youngest of Stancil and Nancy Roberts’ three children, Leah grew up in Durham, North Carolina. For Leah, the prior three years were somewhat akin to a real-life Leminy Snicket, as she experienced a series of unfortunate events which changed her outlook on the world.

After her mother died unexpectedly from an undiagnosed heart disease in 1997, Leah dropped out of college. Shortly after she returned to N.C. State the following year, she was involved in a car accident leaving her with a punctured lung and a severed femur requiring the insertion of a metal rod to heal.

As Leah neared full recovery in 1999, her father succumbed to congenital lung disease.

Leah Loses Her Parents

By 2000, Leah’s injuries from the accident had healed and she was on track to complete college.

Inexplicably, however, she again dropped out in February, only three months before she was slated to graduate with degrees in Spanish and Anthropology.

Leah Leaves School

Kara Roberts spoke to her sister on the morning of March 9, 2000. That afternoon, Leah and her roommate, Nicole Bennett, made plans to babysit the following day, but Leah did not arrive at the scheduled time and had not returned home by evening. No one saw or heard from her the following day either. Here cat, Bea, was also missing.

In searching Leah’s room on March 11, Kara found her sister’s closet nearly empty of clothes. She also found several $100 bills rolled into a note left on Leah’s dresser. The letter read, in part, “This [the money] is to cover bills while I’m gone. Remember, everyone is together in thoughts and prayers. And time passes quickly. Have faith in me, yourself, everyone . . .”

The Note Left By Leah

The note and the amount of money left seemed to indicate Leah expected to return to North Carolina in roughly one month.

No longer hindered by classes and homework, and having inherited a substantial amount of money following her parents’ deaths, Leah apparently felt the timing was perfect for an extended road trip.

Hitting The Road

On March 14, after not hearing from her sister for five days, Kara filed a missing person’s report. A check of Leah’s bank records found her little sister had made a long journey across America.

Leah had withdrawn several thousand dollars on the afternoon of March 9, the day she was last seen. She then used her debit card to pay for food and gas in Morganton, North Carolina, and Lebanon, Tennessee, and then for a motel room near Memphis, seven-hundred-fifty miles from Raleigh. Several subsequent purchases of gas and food indicated she was traveling west along Interstate 40, and then north on Interstate 5 when she reached I-40’s western end in California.

Over the following four days, Leah’s debit card was used for additional food and/or gas transactions in North Little Rock, Arkansas; Okemah, Oklahoma; Shamrock, Texas; Tucumcari, New Mexico; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Holbrook, Arizona; Kingman, Arizona; Lancaster, California; Mojave, California; Modesto, California; Medford, Oregon; and the final transaction shortly after midnight on March 13 in Brooks, Oregon, in the northwestern part of the Beaver State.

No activity was found on Leah’s accounts thereafter.

Leah’s Trek West

Five days later, on March 18, two joggers in Mount Baker National Forest, at the foot of the Cascade Mountains near Bellingham, Washington, only twenty miles from the Canadian border, noticed a piece of clothing dangling from a tree branch. As they made their way to the tree, they saw a jeep SUV plunged over an embankment just off the Mount Baker Highway, near Canyon Creek, a tributary of the North Fork of the Nooksack River.

When investigators arrived at the scene, they found numerous clothing items scattered throughout the inside of the vehicle. Robbery seemed unlikely as money and jewelry were also strewn amongst them and $2500 in cash was found in a pair of pants.

Clothing Scattered Throughout The Car . . .

A guitar, several computer discs, a checkbook, and a passport bearing the name of Leah Roberts were also inside the crashed 1993 Jeep Cherokee SUV with North Carolina license plates. The vehicle was confirmed as hers.

The engagement ring of Leah’s mother was found under a floor mat; friends say she always wore it.

. . . Confirmed As Leah’s

The road where her jeep was found is a side route of the Mount Baker Highway that serves isolated residences and logging camps in and around Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. Because the car had wrecked so close to the road, investigators doubted Leah had wandered into the woods.

Ground and aerial search and rescue teams found no trace of Leah or any evidence that any person had recently been in the area.

No Leah

The investigation yielded several contradictory aspects to the crash scene.

From the path taken through the trees and the extent to which the car was damaged, investigators believe the vehicle was travelling at approximately forty miles-per-hour when it plunged over the embankment. This, along with the amount of damage incurred and the scattered items inside the car, indicated a multiple rollover.

Anyone inside the vehicle would almost certainly have been seriously injured or possibly killed. Yet no blood or other signs of injury were found, such as shatter marks on the glass or stretching of the seatbelt, nor did anything in the surrounding area suggest anyone had been injured.

These findings led police to question whether the SUV was occupied when it went over the edge. That scenario, however, is also problematic as nothing was found indicating it was pushed off the road and no marks were found on the back bumper suggesting it had been pushed to wear it was found.

Finding Leah’s Car

Raises More Questions than Answers

Adding to the intrigue were the blankets and pillows placed in the shattered windows seemingly indicating someone had used the vehicle as a shelter after it wrecked.

The Crashed Car Appeared To Be Used For Shelter

When police searched the jeep, they found a fuel purchase receipt dated during the early morning hours of March 13 from a gas station in Brooks, Oregon, three-hundred miles south of where Leah’s jeep was found and the last locale where she had used her debit card.

Security camera footage from the gas station showed Leah alone inside the store. The cashier said she was in good spirits, although she is seen several times peering into the parking lot while being waited on. It is unknown as to what she was looking at; the gas station did not have outside video cameras.

Brooks, Oregon, Gas Station Footage

Also found inside the jeep was a ticket stub for a 2:10 p.m. showing of the film American Beauty at the theater in Bellis Fair Mall in Bellingham, Washington, near where her car was found.

No one at the matinee recalled seeing Leah.

Not At The Movie Theater

On March 25, one week after the discovery of Leah’s car, a man called police saying he and his wife believed they had seen her at a Texaco gas station in Everett, Washington, eighty miles south of Bellingham and thirty miles south of Seattle. The caller said she appeared to be confused and disoriented. Before police could get more information, the man abruptly hung up without identifying himself.

The call, along with the lack of blood at the crash site, suggested Leah could have suffered an internal injury such as a concussion or other debilitating trauma to the head. She may have left the area confused, perhaps having lost her memory. Because no one had recently been admitted with such injuries to any area hospitals, Leah may have encountered someone with sinister motives.

Or, even if she had survived the accident relatively unscathed, she may have tried to hitch a ride which would also have presented an ideal target for a killer.

Despite repeated pleas, the caller did not phone again. Police could find no one to corroborate his claim of seeing Leah.

A Sighting Of Leah?

In 2006, six years after Leah Roberts’ disappearance, a re-examination of her car showed a wire to the starter relay under the hood had been cut. Mechanics say this would have allowed the car to accelerate without anyone pressing the gas pedal, likely confirming suspicions that no one had been in the car when it plunged off the road and had been purposely wrecked.

A fingerprint was also found under the vehicle’s hood and traces of DNA were lifted from articles of Leah’s clothing found in the car.

New Evidence Found

Two men had told police they had seen Leah eating lunch at an Italian restaurant in Bellingham’s Bellis Fair Mall shortly before her van was found. One man claimed she had left with another man whom she had called “Barry,” but the other man said she had left alone. Authorities say the individual who says he saw Leah leaving with the man told several stories and acted strangely when questioned. They suspected he had, for unknown reasons, made up the “Barry Tale.”

Following the findings gleaned from the re-examination of Leah’s car, this man became a person of interest because he had previously worked as a mechanic and has a military background. Investigators re-interviewed him and say his behavior was still strange. He now lives in Canada, but he has not been publicly identified.

In 2011, the fingerprint found under the hood in Leah’s car was found not to match this man’s. I have not found anything stating if the DNA on Leah’s clothing has been matched to the man or conclusively been deemed not a match.

Composite of “Barry”

But Does He Actually Exist?

Leah Toby Roberts has been missing for twenty-four years. She was last confirmed seen in Durham, North Carolina, on March 9, 2000, but she is believed to have traveled to the Bellingham, Washington, area where she disappeared between March 13-18. Her cat, Bea, was also never found.

At the time of her disappearance, Leah was twenty-three-years-old, five-feet-six-inches inches tall, and weighed one-hundred-thirty pounds. She had sandy blonde hair, blue eyes, and both her ears had multiple piercings. Leah had a beauty mark above the upper corner of her right lip, a surgical scar on her right hip, and a metal rod inside her femur resulting from injuries sustained in an automobile accident.

A committed vegetarian, Leah smoked cigarettes, spoke with a strong southern accent, and spoke fluent Spanish.

Leah Roberts would today be forty-seven-years-old. If you have any information on her whereabouts, please contact the Whatcom County, Washington, Sheriff’s Office at 360-778-6600, or contact the Whatcom Communication Dispatch Center at 360-676-6711.

Questions Abound

Answers Elude

Repeated searches with dogs trained to sniff for corpses and for metal rods in the area where Leah’s car was found have so far failed to discover anything new.

Searches Continue

Leah Roberts’ cross-country trek in an apparent effort to “find herself” ended in mystery. Her presumed destination was Desolation Peak in the north Cascade Mountains of Washington state. She had told friends of her wanting to visit the locale.

In the margin of her note left for her roommate, Leah had written “I’m not suicidal, I’m the opposite. Remember Jack Kerouac.”  Following her accident and the death of her parents, Leah’s friends say she had developed a fascination with the noted author and his novels On the Road and, even more so, with the 1958 sequel, The Dharma Bums, in which Kerouac encourages readers to leave behind the materialism of modern life. Part of the novel is set in a forest fire along Desolation Peak.

Kerouac had for a time worked as a U.S. Forest Service fire lookout on Desolation Peak in 1956 and was profoundly affected by the beauty of the landscape.

Leah Became A Kerouac Fanatic

Bellingham, Washington is roughly sixty-five miles from the mountain also written about by Kerouac in his novel Lonesome Traveler.

Leah Roberts, aside from her cat, Bea, had made the nearly 3,000-mile trek from tobacco road to the Pacific Northwest alone. She is, however, believed to have fallen just short of her destination of Desolation Peak.

Desolation Peak

SOURCES:

• Charley Project
• Doe Network
• Durham Herald-Sun
• Facebook page “Help Find Leah Roberts”
• People Magazine
• Seattle Times
• Unsolved Mysteries
• WRAL-TV Raleigh, North Carolina