Michelle Vanek (35) vanished on September 24, 2005 while hiking in Colorado. Her remains were found in 2024 and identified in 2025. The searchers who found her have said that a dream led to their discovery.
Michelle Rae Cheeney was born on February 5, 1970.
She met Ben Vanek while they were working as lifeguards at a rec center in Lakewood, Colorado in the summer of 1986. Michelle was 16 and Ben was 18. Ben had just graduated from high school and Michelle was entering her junior year at Lakewood High.
Michelle was very athletic – when she was a teenager, she was described as a fiercely competitive swimmer with a wicked sense of humor. “She was tall, slender, blonde, and just amazingly gorgeous to me,” recalled Ben. “When I met her, I was like, ‘I’ve got to marry her at some point.’”
The two began to date until Ben left for college at Colorado State. When he returned two years later, he caught up with Michelle and she told him she was pregnant with another man’s baby. She was a high school graduate by this time.
In October 1988, Michelle gave birth to a son that she named Michael Ryan. Ben and Michelle got married in 1992 and Ben adopted Michael. He was in dental school at this point and Michelle was working on obtaining an accounting degree.
After she graduated, Michelle worked for an accounting firm in Denver. She gave birth to her second child, a son Grant in 1995. In 1998, her daughter Ali arrived.
Michelle quit her job to become a stay-at-home mother.
“I remember just always being at sports with my mom,” recalled Michael. “Ever since I was little, she was pretty much at every game. She was always helping out, running on the field, doing whatever, always very active. It’s kind of what you want a mom to be. One of the best things ever was to have your mom always around.”
The couple had another daughter Haley in 2003.
Following the birth of her final child, Michelle began training for triathlons and working on her fitness. Michelle started to hike.
A family friend named Eric Sawyer offered to lead Michelle on her first big mountain hike. Eric suggested that they head to Mount of the Holy Cross and Michelle agreed as she was familiar with the general area.
Mount of the Holy Cross is 14,005-foot (4268.80 m) high.
Reports indicate that Eric picked Michelle up in the early morning hours of Saturday September 24, 2005. They drove from Denver, Colorado to the Half Moon Campground – around 2.5 hrs drive away – to begin their hike. They started the ascent at around 7am.
They ran into trouble soon into their journey. A few miles in, they realised they had taken the wrong route.
This info is from a 5280.com article about the case:
Instead of climbing the standard 11-mile North Ridge trail, they’d followed the Halo Ridge Route, a more difficult 15-mile trail around the south side of the mountain that traverses three thirteeners on the way to the summit. They likely got on the wrong path at the parking lot, where construction of pit toilets may have made pinpointing the right trailhead tricky. It would be too complicated to turn back, they decided. They were behind schedule and hoped to make up time. So they kept climbing.
When they neared the summit, Michelle told Eric that she was very tired. They had gained more than 5,000 feet of elevation by then. He told her that he wanted to summit and for her to wait for him. He said he would be right back. According to the CBI, Eric said he told Michelle that if she did want to head back down the mountain, to follow the trail and that he would catch up with her.
Eric reached the peak at 1.42pm, called his wife from the top and then left to find Michelle.
Michelle was not waiting where he had left her. Eric started to call her name. Some other hikers heard the commotion and came to help. Nobody had seen Michelle. Eric headed down the trail and called 911.
The search for Michelle began that night. Dog teams and volunteers combed the mountain until 2am when they had to stop and rest.
The search for Michelle became the largest for a missing hiker in Colorado history. Authorities used planes, helicopters, horses and dogs. 850 volunteers combed the area with no luck.
The search was called off after snow began to fall. By the eighth day when the search ended, there was two feet of snow. “We ended up the last day with not a clue, not a gum wrapper, not a boot print, absolutely nothing,” wrote searcher Tim Cochrane in his report to the sheriff. “How can anyone just vanish into thin air?”
As the interest in true crime began to grow, so did the online speculation about what happened to Michelle. “Eric Sawyer murdered Michelle Vanek…plain and simple,” someone wrote on Reddit’s Unsolved Murders forum in 2020.
Ben spoke about his feelings “I could be walking down the street and see someone with a similar profile and double-take: Was it her?” he said. “Because nothing was found, your brain goes to the oddest things: Was she kidnapped? Was she killed and buried?… We knew that she would have never left the family. She was too proud of all she accomplished. She just loved her kids, me, her nieces and nephews.”
In 2022, 17 years after Michelle disappeared, a man and his son were bouldering in the area and they came across a Sorel Asystec hiking boot on a rock. The man called in the coordinates of the boot to the sheriff and Ben later confirmed that the boot had belonged to Michelle.
Dogs were taken to the area but nothing else turned up. The boot had been found on the other side of the mountain to where Eric had left Michelle and in the opposite direction from where the original search had occurred.
Scott Beebe, a Lutheran pastor and a member of the Vail Mountain Rescue group was always on the look out for Michelle. He said that in Fall 2023, Michelle visited him in a dream.
“She told me she wanted to be found by a team of women,” he says.
“Every guy I’ve told about the dream tells me I’m nuts. Every woman, they all say, ‘Yeah, of course.’ ” Scott. One man who didn’t think he was crazy? Ben Vanek. His wife was a deeply spiritual, religious person, he says: “For her to come to Scott Beebe and say that—that was her.”
Scott told the women in the Vail Mountain Rescue team about his dream. In October 2023, team member Emily Brown got in contact with all of the women in the group (17 out of 75 members) and they decided to form an all-female search group.
“The Michelle Vanek case had historically been dominated by males,” she wrote. “The initial eight-day search…and every effort in between has only been run by males. Personally, I don’t think Michelle wants to be found by a man.”
Six women agreed to go and they planned to start in August 2024, when snow would be at a minimum.
Erika German, one of the team members, said “I spent over 20 hours going over all the files, basically putting everything into one big map.”
This info is from 5280.com:
Another member of the team, Megan Twohig, works for the mapping company CalTopo and helped German use its software. They sorted previous search paths by date, digitized hand-drawn maps, and placed coordinates for where the initial rescuers had brought in dog teams and helicopters. On the screen, the women saw gaps in the initial strategy: a series of couloirs on the north and northeast side that had barely been searched. “When Emily and I initially looked through all the information, it didn’t feel like there was much in there,” German says. “But when you put it all in a map, it gets really interesting.”
Beebe thinks that the 2005 rescuers never looked in those areas because they never deviated from their original plan, something he now attributes to the way the male-dominated search was run—i.e., driven by a single leader. “In mountain rescue, we have what’s called the Mattson consensus, which is basically that if you’re searching and can’t find what you’re looking for, you bring everyone together, so everyone has a chance to chime in,” Beebe says. “That’s standard protocol, but that didn’t happen on that search.”
The women have said they also tried to understand what Michelle may have been thinking. “Humans tend to behave very similarly when they’re lost,”Emily said. “They go downhill to water and to shelter.”
Emily also said she had never experienced a sixth-sense until they arrived at Holy Cross. “We went and sat at the edge. The wind came up, and we were all like, ‘She’s down there, I can just feel it.’ ”
The group visited the area multiple times, to get ideas of where they could safely search.
In September 2024, while they were searching, the women came across a piece of fabric that matched the description of a red shirt Michelle had been wearing. In nearby rubble, they found a battered ski pole that had a blue mitten attached to it. This was similar to one seen in the last photo taken of Michelle. A backpack and a camera were also recovered.
The group took photos of everything, including a tiny fragment that would later turn out to be a cochlear bone.
They contacted the sheriff who told them to collect any physical belongings but to leave any human remains.
When the group got back to the ranger station, they examined the contents of the backpack. Info again from 5280.com:
A crushed Nalgene, a digital camera, car keys, and a shriveled-up GU gel packet that matched what Eric had given Michelle when they’d separated. The last item they shook out was the one that elicited the most emotion: the blue knit hat Michelle had been wearing the day she went missing.
A team went back in October to recover evidence that would lead to DNA identification. “One of the first things they found was her intact spine, sitting at the mouth of a cave,” Scott. They discovered more bones, including a scapula with a lavender beaded necklace wrapped around it. They sent a picture of the jewelry to Ben Vanek, who recognized it immediately—he’d bought it for Michelle on a vacation to Las Vegas. “When we saw that,” Scott said, “we all started bawling.”
Authorities confirmed that the remains did belong to Michelle and they also quashed some rumors. Her body was discovered only a half-mile from her last known location, and authorities were confident there was no foul play. A forensic anthropologist reported the fracture on the spine was consistent with a fall.
Michelle was out of water and had been hiking for hours. Rescuers think she started heading for the lake, not aware that the meadows abruptly end in sheer, 30-foot drops. Their best assumption is that she started downclimbing, desperate for water, and fell. It was likely a tragic accident.
“It feels like peace,” Ben says. “I don’t try to use the word closure—that means the end. She will always be a part of our lives, but this is a chapter we can now close for Michelle. It feels like a cloud was lifted around our house and family.”
In addition to Vanek lending her own ghostly hand, Scott credits female intuition for Vail Mountain Rescue’s success after nearly two decades of failure. Emma isn’t so sure: “I truthfully think that if a group of boys did what we did, they could have found the same results.” But she concedes their approach was different. They were thoughtful and analytical. They also checked their egos and took time to listen to each other, considering every instinct. “A huge part of putting the puzzle pieces together was having a lot of communication and running through the theories and bouncing ideas off each other,” Emma says.
“We let men look for 19 years,” Scott said. “Women found her in less than three weeks.”
SOURCE LIST
https://apps.colorado.gov/apps/coldcase/casedetail.html?id=1155
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/287834060/michelle-rae-vanek