Summary: On March 9th, 2000, Leah Roberts left her home in Raleigh, North Carolina. A note to her sister suggested she was going on a free-spirited road trip. But three days later, her credit card would be used for the final time in Brooks, OR (about an hour south of Portland) and then her Jeep Cherokee would be found on March 18th, in Northwestern Washington, badly damaged, but with no evidence that Leah or her cat were in the vehicle at the time of the crash, in fact, not evidence anyone was inside at the time of the crash. Later evidence would reveal that Leah drove I40 to Los Angeles, then I5 to Bellingham, a strange route considering her destination, and possibly rigged her car to crash on its own.
Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Leah_Roberts
Unsolved Writeup: https://unsolved.com/gallery/leah-roberts/
Overview of the Route:
Bank card evidence shows that Leah took I40 from Raleigh, North Carolina, to its terminus near Los Angeles, California. While her exact route isn't known, we know that she then took I5 to Brooks Oregon, which would be the last time her cards would be used. It is assumed she took I5 to Bellingham, as on March 13th, she purchased an afternoon movie ticket there and was seen having lunch by two men. This is a trip of ~3,800 miles, which was completed in less than 4 days.
Timeline:
March 9th, 2000: Leah leaves Raleigh in the early afternoon. She purchases a motel room in Memphis Tennessee. She covered about 750 miles the first day.
Midnight March 12th/March 13th, 2000: Leah's bank card is used a final time in Brooks, OR. Security camera footage shows her seemingly healthy, albeit watching something or someone in the parking lot.
March 13th, 2000: according to a ticket found in her vehicle, Leah saw a matinee showing of American Beauty, and according to eye witnesses, she ate a meal in Bellingham WA.
March 18th, 2000: Leah's vehicle is found in Canyon Creek, Washington. There is a semi-credible claim that Leah was seen in a disoriented state at a gas station in Bellingham.
Context from Leah's Life: Leah had lost both her parents before graduating college, been in an injurious crash that damaged her leg, and dropped out of college the spring before she would have graduated (it's not clear to me if she attended the spring semester partially or not at all.) After dropping out, she hung out at a local bookstore and became fascinated with the Beat Generation, in particular, she was inspired by Jack Kerouac's road trips through the west, and his stint at the Desolation Peak Lookout (fire tower.) After she left, her sister found a note that said "I’m not suicidal. I’m the opposite. Remember Jack Kerouac.” Her family believes that she was going to Desolation Peak as a way to connect to his experience. They also believed, until the discovery of her vehicle, that she intended this to be a free-spirited roadtrip, lasting about a month (based on the fact she gave a housemate money to cover her share for about that length of time.)
Problems with the Timeline:
Author butting in here; as a westerner, I do a lot of long trips, and I used to do a multi-day trip 8-10 times a year. I'm typically able to average about 50 to 55 miles of progress each hour I'm actively traveling. For instance, if I leave my morning location, and arrive my evening location 10 hours later, I will have, at maximum, traveled 550 miles from my starting point. The speed limit might be as high a 75 or 80, but due to stops, slow downs, construction, and congestion, I only make 50-55 miles of progress. Once in a while I can get it up to 60 miles per hour of travel, but that's rare. In the right vehicle, in the right places, it's possible to make better average time, but Leah's vehicle was a 1993 Jeep Cherokee. Oddly enough, I've known two people who owned this vehicle, and both said that they were not good highway cars as they vibrate at higher speeds, and really prefer to cruise at a lower speed, say 60-65. Jeeps also suffer from something called a Death Wobble that slows them down. Anyway, back to Leah's timeline problems:
The first day is a long day of 12-15 hours driving. But the next two days would be utterly breakneck travel, as she covered ~2700 miles in less than 48 hours. This gives her an average speed of almost 60 miles per hour, which as I state above, is difficult to do. If she stopped for even a short break of 6 hours, her average speed would have been a 67 miles per hour. More realistically, the vehicle was traveling almost the entire time, averaging closer to 55 miles per hour. I've done 16 hours of driving in a day. It's exhausting. I've never done 18 that I recall. Not by myself. To do a 12-15 hour day sucks a lot, but then it seems feasible she slept it off in Memphis. But then she got up and did nearly non-stop driving in unfamiliar country, for nearly 48 hours, with any rest apparently being in her car.
On the fourth day, she's up an at it early enough to be in town for a matinee movie. I'll be honest, if I'd just driven non-stop for 2 days, had a short rest, and then done almost 8 more hours of driving, all I want to do is sleep, and a movie theatre isn't a cheap or easy place to do that.
I think it's safe to say, Leah was really hauling ass.
How did Leah achieve this aggressive travel schedule and still arrive well-rested enough to apparently enjoy a movie, and not seem worn out on security footage? And why, on a supposedly free-spirited roundtrip meant to last a month, was she hauling ass?
Personally, I think there's really only three good explanations for this rate of speed:
Leah was using substances to stay awake and alert.
Lead was experiencing mania that was allowing her to stay awake.
There was a second driver.
Of these options, I personally feel that only the second driver makes sense. I believe any drugs she may have taken to stay awake and alert would have probably led to erratic or dangerous driving that would have LIKELY attracted notice on these busy routes. If she was experiencing mania, I believe it's even more likely she would have driven erratically. But we don't have records of police stops. I also think if she were on drugs or experiencing mania she'd have gotten off the main road, spent money, or stopped to pass out somewhere along the route.
I also think her stop in Memphis suggests a second driver. While again, a 12 hour day of driving is a lot of driving, especially for someone who seems to have not done a lot of long haul driving, it's still very doable for a solitary driver. She stopped at a reasonable point and rested on a reasonable human schedule. Her pace only picks up to non-stop after Memphis. Put a pin in this, as a second driver also helps with the next problem.
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Problems with the Route:
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I40 makes sense for a bit, being a direct route west until reaching Nashville but taking it all the way to California added 1000+ miles to the trip. 1000 miles of some extremely repetitive driving, too. It's possible that she wanted to stay off more northerly routes to avoid late season storms, but I80 or I70 would have still been southerly enough to benefit from most of the route experiencing spring. There's only a limited section of possibly dicey driving on that route during the spring, but it seems like if she was on some sort of schedule (and from her non-stop driving habit, it seems she was), it seems like that possibility would have been worth shaving off nearly 20 hours of travel time. But she still took I40 to I5.
Before we argue that it's 2000 and there's no Google Maps, Mapquest existed, as did atlases. Furthermore, road signs would have guided her on a more direct route if that was all she was following. Nothing would have "chosen" this route for her if she was looking for instructions.
The other issue with the route is that if she had intended for it to be a pilgrimage out west, I40 isn't really the classic route for someone headed to Oregon, and then Washington. But, the western portion I40 does overlap significantly with route 66, which may have been her intention. While I think of I70 having the classic pioneer landmarks and stops, the western portion of I40 does have a lot of cachet and charm. But if her intention had been a free-spirited roadtrip on either of these routes, why not you know, stop and enjoy the scenery instead of barreling through like a rocket sled on wheels?
Why did Leah choose this southerly route? And why, if she was on a free-spirited roadtrip that overlapped with famous Route 66, did she never seem to stop to take it in?
Personally, I think this route may have been selected because it was absolutely free of snow, and with a second driver, it could still be accomplished in a tight timeframe. This route also may have suited the second driver. It stands to reason that the second driver appears after the stop in Memphis, but not in Memphis (if they had joined in Memphis, I don't think she would have stopped for the night, because they already planned to swap in and out of driving duties.) I would argue that they joined the trip within 10-12 hours of departing Memphis, because that seems to be when she's too tired to drive again, and if she were alone, she would have again stopped to rest.
It's also possible that this route accommodated the second driver's destination, which may have been in California, or Southern Oregon. Because they didn't report any belongings in the Jeep that didn't belong or feasibly belong to Leah, and Leah appears to have taken a sleep break between March 12th and March 13th that indicated she was again a solitary driver, I think it's safe to say this second driver got out before the Brooks-to-Bellingham leg of the trip. Also, at this point the police mention that if she did have traveling companions at this point, they didn't feel they were in the car with her.
But let me ask the question that isn't directly related to the problems with the timeline or the route, but is tangled up with both:
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Why does Leah seem to be on a schedule?**
I don't have any explanation for why she might have been on a schedule. At best I can say that maybe she wanted to get there fast and then do a slow route home, but that doesn't pay well with the route problems. If there was a second driver, it's possible their own needs contributed to the sense of needing to be as fast as possible, but once Leah dropped them off (which seems to have been in the early hours of the 12th) Leah had no need to maintain the breakneck pace, and yet, she did not stop to enjoy the new Beatnik scene in Portland Oregon, which seemed like it would have been a draw, nor did she enjoy the Columbia Gorge, the Pacific Northwest coast, or anything else, instead beating a fast path to her final destination, only to stop and see a movie when she was less than an hour away from her final destination (and where her vehicle would be found.) I can't say this makes sense to me.
Post Road Trip:
Personally, I feel that if we could answer why Leah chose the route she did, why she took it so fast (and how) that we'd understand where her story seemingly ends. So I think my other questions are more important. But we do have a final sighting, and a vehicle to contend with.
On March 14th, Leah was supposedly seen in Bellingham by two men at a lunch counter. (This is the same day of the movie ticket.) One man claimed he'd seen her but not spoken with her. The other man said that they spike about Jack Kerouac, and that she had a travel partner named "Barry." The police find this man suspicious because the other man claimed that Leah was alone. I'm not sure I find that so odd -- in this subreddit I think we all know that eye witness testimony has flaws, and there's a variety of reasons the man may have believed Leah to be traveling with a partner; Leah herself may have made "Barry" up as a safety mechanism. He may have mistaken the Barry in her story to be the other man at the counter, too. While the man who claimed Leah was traveling with Barry has since left the country, I'm not sure we should consider this as suspicious as some investigators do. (More in a moment.) Investigators still had a sketch artist work up a sketch of "Barry." The sketch is of a remarkably generic white guy. (Does he look like the first guy?)
Could "Barry" have been her second driver?
On March 18th, clothes were found in a tree branch, and further inspection revealed broken branches where Leah's car had darted off the road and tumbled down an embankment. Her clothing, wallet, and jewelry were found in the vehicle. Blankets covered the broken windows as though someone had been staying in the vehicle or protecting the contents. But Leah and her cat were missing.
Why leave money, important mementos, and everything else she'd so carefully chosen to come with her in the car?
The "Accident":
There was no blood inside the vehicle as would be expected after an accident of such scale. A man's fingerprint was found in the vehicle, as was DNA, but the fingerprint did not match the man the police found suspicious. When the case was reopened, the Jeep was reviewed, and it was determined that the Jeep had been "rigged" to accelerate on its own, which suggested that the accident was not an accident. But as Leah's body was not inside, it wasn't an accident that was seemingly designed to cover up a murder or be an actual murder. This also would have required some mechancial know-how, know-how that seems unlikely to have come from Spanish and Anthropology major.
Who rigged the car? If Leah agreed to dump the car, why? Is it possible that this is actually the result of damage the accident caused, and not deliberate?
"Conclusion" and Final Questions:
I believe that Leah was on a schedule of some kind, and I believe she had a second driver who may have added schedule pressures. I believe, however, something happened on the 14th; either she met her schedule or she blew it completely, and that's why she went to a movie. I also believe she temporarily had a second driver, and I'm willing to guess that this was a man. If that's so, she had to have felt safe enough having him driver her car with her asleep, and not deviate from the plan. Either she's very trusting, or she knew him well enough. It's possible the second driver was also female, but that wouldn't play well with the "Barry" detail, nor the male DNA found in the car. (Implied to be spit, but I'm not sure.) I don't know if I think Leah is dead. Honestly, I don't. But I don't know how she could "become" someone else in this day and age, especially since it seems she had neither money nor valuables to sell.
