Aubrey Sacco Case | Chapter 2: Blank Space

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Up and Vanish presents this mini-season of Status Untraced.

Chapter 2 starts now.

To hear bonus episodes in the entire first season, go search Status Untraced in your podcast app.

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2010, Langtang National Park, Nepal.

But I feel like you guys

did a really great job with this Alexander gentleman.

That you need to know this.

You need to know that

there really is going to be an answer, okay?

I'm going to, there's no way I'm going to die without knowing what happened to our daughter.

There is no evidence whatsoever to lead us to believe she was murdered.

Nothing was found.

There's no clothing.

There's no, you know, her property or anything like that.

She had a camera with her journal and her backpack were left at the elite motel.

And that's what we had to

discover.

When we began our search, it was a terrible day to have to look at that stuff.

And then in her journal, you know, I open up the journal and the first page I break and open it.

See who says,

my dad is my hero.

I mean, just

the crazy shit that happened, you know, on this journey.

You know, because

dads are supposed to find

their daughters when they're in trouble.

They're supposed to help them.

They're supposed to be there.

And when I looked at that map of Nepal, I'm holding it up, of the length hanging hundreds of square miles of nothingness.

You know, where the hell is she?

It was like overwhelming.

It truly was overwhelming.

I'm Liam Luxon, and this is Status Untraced.

Our case, Aubrey Sacco.

Chapter 2, Blank Space.

Joining us this morning from Breeley, Colorado, are Aubrey's parents, Paul and Connie Sacco.

When you were just there searching for Aubrey, when you were on that trail in the area, what did you learn?

Well, the most important thing was that I learned that the trek is not as dangerous as a lot of people believe it is.

When people hear the word Himalayas, you know, they think of, you know, Mount Everest.

And really, it isn't as dangerous as we had previously thought, so it's very unlikely she had an accident.

When we last left off, Aubrey Saka was 23 years old.

trekking alone through Nepal's Langtang National Park.

On April 19th, 2010, she emailed her brother and called her parents.

Her last words to them, I love you.

The next morning, she set off.

When Aubrey didn't return, her parents Paul and Connie sprang into action, mobilizing a search from halfway across the world.

I've been digging through the coverage of her disappearance, the headlines, the details everyone heard.

But the more I looked, the clearer it became.

So much of Aubrey's story never made it in.

People are not talking.

We know that they know something, that they saw something, but they're not talking for fear of reprisal.

To fill in the gaps, I've been talking with Paul and Connie Sacco.

We hired many private agencies and entities to do their own searches.

And remember, we told you about this Tilly Lama, who was the first one that went up to check.

He put together a lot of searches on the ground that were just normal people, you know, going to villages, looking around to see if Aubrey was there.

Through family connections and a local NGO, they began piecing together her trail, doing anything in their power to find their daughter.

Occasionally, there was a villager who would serve us and say he knew something,

and then we'd follow that lead.

One of the fake leads from a crazy villager, we went all the way to the Annapurna

because it was said that Aubrey was buried there up in the Annapurna.

And we spent weeks hiking in the Annapurna

region.

And that turned out to be a false lead.

And the villagers were upset because they felt that we had cursed their village and that anything that went bad was because we've put a curse on them.

Paul and Connie were running into every kind of wall.

False leads, bad information, fear, and superstition.

And beneath beneath it all, the quiet truth,

they were foreigners, outsiders, which meant they were often kept at a distance or treated like a problem.

The dichotomy here was that, you know, we were very conflicted because we know that the villagers, and by the way, Liam, these people are really wonderful people.

I mean, for the most part, the culture, the society, they're just poor people and they're loving and they have a tourism industry that they want to protect and they don't want people to be murdered there, you know, or go missing.

So we were always conflicted about how much to press against these people, but we would question everybody at every tea house.

And we would also end up helping a lot of the villagers, like the one villager, the guy had a tooth abscess, you know, and one of us had some painkillers with us, you know, so there was this back and forth and us getting to know the villagers.

And always lurking in the background

was this terrible conflict

between

the kindness

of the people and the warmth of these people

and

the mystery that these are people that may have murdered our daughter.

It was never reconcilable, just never.

No matter how good they were, we trusted them, we loved them.

And then we'd be going to sleep that night thinking, oh my God, I wonder if one of these guys is lying and either knows what happened to Aubrey or did something to her.

All Paul and Connie really had to go on at this point was what they knew for certain.

Aubrey had made it to the Lama Hotel, and locals remembered her vividly, ordering pizza, sipping a Coke, reading a book, and talking to three men who said she insisted that she would continue on alone.

But further details about this story gave way to fear.

There was a history of people reporting crimes and then becoming framed as the criminal, so people started to pull back.

And the first person to do so was a teenager, the chef at Lama Hotel.

Tasi Guru was one of the guys.

He knew his village village was being threatened by the police.

And he had been told, I think, by other villagers not to talk to the police and all that.

So

that really stands out as a story for a long time.

I believe that he and a couple of other guys that he kind of palled around with at the Lama Hotel may have, you know, done something terrible to Aubrey.

But the longer the story went on, the longer the investigation went on, the more it focused away from them.

Originally, it was this chef who remembered Aubrey sitting down and speaking with the three men.

But later, when asked again, he denied ever seeing her at all.

Which meant the only lead now, the only lead still intact, was the three men themselves, Tenzing Lama, 24, and two older men, Gao Seng Tamong and Asi Tamong.

Individuals Paul and Connie wouldn't come face to face with until a year later.

2011, Langtang National Park, Nepal.

So we went a year later, Paul, myself, and our youngest son, Morgan, and we trekked up.

to Lama Hotel and it just so happened that this Tassi guy was there.

And we, and he could speak some English.

We talked to him about Aubrey.

And he said, if I would have known she was going missing, we would not have let her go.

Like, okay, I get that.

And when we left Llama Hotel and we were hiking back down, and we so happened to come upon one of the other three guys.

And somehow our guide knew him.

And he said, oh, this is so-and-so, because he knew we were looking to speak to him.

And he says the same damn thing.

So it was really hard.

I had known, if we had known she was going to go missing, we never would have left her leave.

And so I said, who told you that?

Who told you to say that?

And I don't remember the answer, but it was like, oh my God, what is going on here?

And so this is during the time that they're saying that they had never seen Aubrey.

First, they said they'd seen Aubrey.

Then they hadn't.

When police brought them in, they cooperated, even agreed to polygraph tests, which they all passed.

But by then, their story had shifted back to, yes, they had seen her.

But for Paul and Connie, it was beyond murky.

They weren't given insight of what was asked, what was answered, or how the men behaved under pressure.

Just a vague assurance that the men were innocent.

It was just conclusory.

There was no details about what they said.

What we know is that Aubrey arrived at the Lama Hotel around midday.

The next leg of the hike was a steep one, a 980-meter ascent over 3,400 meters of ground.

The trail follows the Langtang River, winding through forests of hemlock and maple, past meal loading stations, and across a suspension bridge.

The guide estimates four to five hours, but she was only planning to hike 45 minutes to the next resting lodge.

She could have easily made it before sunset.

And while it's unclear how far she actually made it, what caught the Sacco's attention was actually another spot called Gota Tabla,

about 3,000 meters in, a quiet outpost with a checkpoint run by the army.

Okay, at Lava Hotel.

Because we knew that something happened shortly thereafter, right?

But the more we knew,

the more we

investigated,

the more we worried about the Army.

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So Aubrey went missing in April.

That summer, We had gotten a call from the embassy and they said they you probably want to hear this story.

And one of the embassy employees had gone hiking on his day off or whatever, and he was up in Kanjan Gopa.

And these three French women were on the trail and these

three or four army guys had tried to assault them.

And so he came upon the girls and they were all frantic.

He actually helped them get down to Kathmandu and helped them get a report filed.

There's all kinds of stories, reports to the embassies, all kinds of things, where they're really, really abused by these army people.

It's routine.

I mean, can you imagine that?

I mean, you know, I'm thinking the army is protecting this place in Langtang.

Had I known that, never, we would never have allowed her to go up there.

Because although the Army is officially entrusted with the security of the National Langtang Park.

What they really do is

they're a bunch of guys,

early 20s,

that live up in the mountains, and they frequently

assault women.

Frequently.

Either verbally, physically.

Had they pointed the finger at the army, they were worried they were going to get killed.

Yeah.

they really were.

I found in 2017, the Guardian reported that the UN had called on the country to investigate the gang rape and torture of a woman attacked by soldiers during the civil war.

While official documentation of rape during the conflict is limited, the UN and Human Rights Watch have reported that these crimes were likely widespread.

Even today, during peacetime, stigma, fear of retaliation, and a lack of legal recourse keep many survivors from ever coming forward.

And that's when we started discovering the history of the military and what they had done to many, many travelers.

We looked into another murder.

There was a murder of a young woman in 2012,

and that was widely believed to have been involvement from the military.

2012, Langtang National Park, Nepal.

Debbie Mabeau was 23, a Belgian traveler hiking solo in the summer of 2012.

She'd been missing for 10 days when they found her.

Her body was badly decomposed, and her head, they said, was lying 13 inches from the rest of her body.

There were no leads, no suspects, just a brutal scene with no real explanation.

And according to the lead inspector, it probably wasn't robbery.

Her camera and 8,000 rupees were still there.

But there were many reports coming in of females that were being hassled by the military along these same trails that Aria traveled.

The military was very suspicious.

Just a few months earlier, along the same stretch of mountains, an American woman was hiking alone.

when a knife-wielding masked man stepped out of the trees.

He threatened her, tried to assault her.

She got away.

A week before that, in the same region, a South Korean woman, also alone, was attacked and tragically, didn't survive.

There's a huge tension in the country between the police and the army.

We spent weeks and weeks and months and months developing assets and contacts within the military so that we could determine who was even there at the time Aubrey was there.

Ultimately, we got to the bottom of that

because there were military hiking up the trail when Aubrey went up and some coming down on or about the same time Aubrey was on the trail.

So they had to be identified and investigated.

And then there was, of course, the military base needed to be investigated.

And so in order to do that, you needed to know some really high-ranking folks.

You know, guys were not happy about talking to us.

This checkpoint along the trail is just a small outpost.

Likely a couple men in uniform, clipboards, a dusty logbook on the table.

And like Paul hoped, you'd think their presence meant safety.

That if something went wrong, there'd be a record, a system, a response.

But here's the truth.

A lot of these posts exist for other reasons.

One is revenue stream.

You can't hike without the right paperwork and park fee, and these stops are there to make sure you've paid.

But the fact they're not run by tourism officials and instead manned by the Nepal Army tells you something else.

Their job isn't to help hikers, it's to show presence.

They're not trained in search and rescue or even basic trail safety.

And despite claims of a database, many don't even ask who you are or where you're going.

So when someone disappears, when a woman passes one post but never reaches the next, there's no flag, no follow-up, no one to hold accountable.

What you're left with isn't a timeline.

It's a blank space.

One Paul and Connie hoped they could fill in.

The investigation was dying down a little bit because, you know, the embassy changes people every two years.

That first trip lasted three weeks.

A year later, they returned, this time to turn up the pressure.

And we felt that police, embassy, and all that were not doing an adequate job.

We would be a catalyst to getting them to work harder.

Paul and Connie also set up a reward, 20 grand, for any real lead on what happened to Aubrey.

In a place where most families live on 60 bucks a year, that kind of money doesn't just turn heads.

It changes lives.

So from the beginning, we had posted rewards.

We were told, we were counseled by the embassy, it can't be too high because no one will believe it, and it can't be too low because no one will be motivated to try to give us information.

And then the other thing we said in the posters is that we would ensure the

safe travels out of the country for anyone that did report Aubrey's disappearance to us.

And we felt too that we needed to keep it alive in the media and felt like we needed to make ourselves more visible.

It wasn't until year three, when Paul and Connie were back home, that things finally shifted.

A developing story: The Associated Press is reporting police in Nepal have arrested two men in the disappearance of this Colorado woman.

August 2013, Denver, Colorado, USA.

Seven News reporter Lindsay Sablon just spoke with Aubrey's mother.

Lindsay joins us now from the newsroom.

And Lindsay, she tells you that they haven't heard anything official.

Bertha Aubrey's mom, Connie, says they first heard of the arrest early this morning when a media outlet in the U.S.

called them.

Denver 7 was the first to break the news.

And a day later, they followed up with another report.

Today, the State Department confirming three men have been arrested in connection with her disappearance.

News outlets in Nepal are reporting Aubrey was murdered, but her parents have received no official word.

And for now, they're holding on to that hope.

That was it.

No names, no explanation of who these men were, why they were arrested, or why the case was now being labeled a murder.

It was just a brief report and then nothing.

I couldn't find an update, so I asked Paul and Connie what actually happened.

This is a good example of how crazy shit is up there.

The three men that were arrested are completely different from those three guys at the Lama Hotel.

And here's how that comes into play.

There was a

sort of a bar situation going on where

men are sitting at a bar.

And there was a police officer in this bar.

And the cop happened to be sitting there and overheard three men at the bar

talking about what they did to Aubrey having killed her buried her

etc all the nastiest stuff you can imagine

so

this guy immediately informed police

I think they kind of just became friends with him.

They became like incognito.

They didn't share that this person was a cut

and just tried to gather more information and get to know them better.

So it became kind of a sting operation then.

They told me it started with one man.

Police arrested him, then marched him to the next village where they picked up the two other suspects.

So while they did this, they ended up getting the attention of all the villagers

because there ended up being a parade of these guys and villagers collecting these guys and then bringing them back down to kathmandu where they were put in jail for 30 days and questioned

here's what i keep thinking about why would a group of random villagers three years after the fact start talking so openly about aubrey's murder bragging about committing it That kind of thing doesn't happen unless there's some truth to it.

It's happened in the States before.

Cases that break wide open because a killer had one too many drinks, got too comfortable, and started running their mouth.

So maybe this wasn't just a rumor passed around over a beer.

Maybe it was exactly what it sounded like.

And yet, after 30 days in custody and no hard evidence, they let these men go.

And the assumption was, if you believe they were not guilty, the assumption by the police is that they might have been just bragging to try to get the reward.

But I mean, wouldn't that be stupid?

You

think you're going to get the reward, so I'll tell him I killed him.

This was the leading theory.

The suspects in the story that made the most sense.

But Paul and Connie didn't stop there.

They kept coming back to Nepal, searching for answers, trying anything they could.

First, they raised the amount of the reward, hoping it might shake some people loose.

For them not to come forward

is just remarkable.

Along the way, they shook hands with just about everyone who mattered.

Politicians, detective units, trekking agencies, and even the top general in the country.

And in the end, as Paul puts it,

If you want a one-sentence answer, it was to push those people to do their fucking jobs.

Yeah.

And

that was it.

That was the reason we were going because obviously we're not adept at being spies and

foreign assets, developing connections and that sort of stuff.

But all we could do at the end of the day was to get their best people to try to do their jobs.

Through it all, another theory came forward.

One that gave them pause.

It called into question everything.

The previous arrests, the suspects, the story they'd been told.

Because if this new version was true, they'd been looking in the wrong direction.

I'll just be honest with you.

I go back to the information that several different groups told us.

Both, you know, people that really knew the mountain, really knew the villagers, really knew the mischief of the military,

that only the military could murder someone and adequately dispose of the body.

That was the information that kept coming up over and over again.

So

what is the thought correlation with the military?

That's when I get into things that we really can't discuss.

It has to be off record.

It has to.

Okay.

Yeah, here, let me just stop recording really quick, too.

I turn off the recorder, and Paul leans in slightly and lowers his voice.

What he tells me next isn't something I can repeat because the story isn't fully settled.

But here's what I can share.

Over a decade, Paul built relationships, not just with villagers and guides, but with the kind of men who don't usually talk.

Men in the military.

For reasons we can only guess, maybe they'd seen too much.

Maybe they felt for Aubrey or maybe they believed Paul couldn't do anything about it.

But they opened up.

And what they told him has left Paul with one clear suspicion: that some individuals tied to the Nepali military may know far more than they've admitted.

Here's what he's willing to say on record:

The country of Nepal is very corrupt, and so

their main source of income is you know foreign aid from the U.S.

government and the tourism business.

So,

when you negatively impact the tourist business by saying it's dangerous and women disappear and things like that, you get some serious pushback from the top.

And

these guys, imagine, you know, you know what a military guy's salary is, right?

I mean, in our country, in Nepal.

These guys were sending their kids to Ivy League colleges in the U.S., okay?

And they had, you know, summer homes, you know, like in the, in France and on the East, you know, Martha's Vineyards.

So

it was clear, clearly something

was going on there that was being protected.

To what extent we don't know.

We may never know.

But it was very sad that all roads led to something

or somebody that people have a great desire to protect.

And that always comes down to money and power.

2025, today,

Colorado, USA.

There's not much else we know for sure.

The only place left to search was inward, into Aubrey herself, her choices, her mindset, the way she might have felt that morning, that afternoon, that final stretch of trail.

I've done that kind of work before, pieced together the life of someone I never met.

It's agonizing.

You study their writing, listen to old videos, look for patterns in texts.

You try to imagine how the world looked through their eyes.

But doing that as a parent, tearing through memories just to find something you missed, I can't imagine the toll.

Because you turn over every stone hoping for insight.

But mostly,

you just end up with bruises.

This is important to know about Aubrey, very important.

She was reading Osho

and Muji.

Two Eastern philosophers, okay,

that

had this theory that in order to become self-actualized as a human being,

you had to leave your family behind.

Now,

I don't think for a minute our daughter would ever do that.

I don't.

But one of the investigators

told us, your family will surprise you.

So don't ever forget those words.

Your family will surprise you.

It is possible for a young woman that absolutely loves her dad and mother and was not abused.

It is possible for her to say, I want to leave this world behind.

So we kind of go back and forth as a family, like,

could she be somewhere?

You are home.

says Mooji.

Your home's just an idea of yourself.

During her travels, Aubrey wrote blogs and journal entries, small windows into how she saw things, and I've been grateful to read a few.

At home, there are all of these people that tell you that you are like this and you are like that, and now you are away from them and you do not have anyone to tell you who you are.

But you are home.

Remove the mental representation of yourself and come home into consciousness of the whole.

Some of her writing leaned into the spiritual, into disconnection, stillness, the search for something bigger.

But others, they felt closer to the ground, honest, full of warmth.

You could feel her heart in them, the kind of light people remember long after it's gone.

I pick up the book Silence by His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Garuji, and opened to a random page.

A poor man celebrates the new year once a year.

A rich man celebrates it every day, but the richest man celebrates it every moment.

I chose to flip through that particular book because it was my 23rd birthday.

I shut my eyes and let Guruji's words touch my heart.

Why only one day a year to celebrate ourselves?

Why only one day a year to celebrate each of those so dear and close to us?

Her final blog read like a poem.

Even the title felt like one last reflection, one last offering, before she disappeared.

It ends on those words.

As our Jeep creeped up the windy pass, I watched out the back window.

The road was barely one lane and ran alongside a steam toy train.

The trees have gone from tropical or mountainous, palm to pine.

The air is fresh.

The faces are at ease and the trash is seldom.

As each small town passes, I can't help but feel that I am getting closer and closer to the perfect place for me.

I can't help but not feel that I am on the verge of falling in love.

So, now here I sit on a balcony overlooking a vast green valley of tea plantations and rooftops lined with Tibetan prayer flags.

Below me lie rows of curving alleyways situated along homes and markets.

Tibetan monks fill the roads and nearby monasteries and chanting can be heard off in the distance at almost all hours of the day.

Ponies are a common means of transportation and the clouds are so close you can hold them in your hands.

It is on this balcony that I have this thought.

Perhaps it is that we are all citizens of this earth, but come from different places we call home.

But in some sense, there are special places far away from the ones we love and the towns we know so well that may feel very much like home.

And although we may be alone in these places, in our hearts, we know the land.

We know the streets.

We know the faces and feel comfort and perfection as we gaze off into truly unknown territory.

It is in this moment, on this perfect balcony with this perfect pot of tea that I have truly followed the map of my heart to the land in the clouds

while paul spent the last decade retracing steps through nepal that place high up in the clouds has come to mean something else to connie that's what paul tells me anyway

You can tell they've had the conversations, the ones you only have when the mics are off.

And maybe it's just too hard for her to say out loud that in her heart, Aubrey might still be out there, living quietly, healing, learning,

taking her time.

Aubrey's story has reached far beyond the mountains.

Songs have been written in her name.

Other podcasts produced.

Her nickname was Glitter, and it was bestowed on her due to her habit of carrying around a physical bottle of glitter and sprinkling it on people and throughout different places that she's been to and people that she met just to remind them to live life to the fullest.

There's been a rock painted in her memory.

I like that name, the glitter rock.

There's only one thing more colorful than the Aubrey Bob.

It's the Aubrey Rock.

Through that paint, what we're called, we're naming it the glitter rock.

Friends and family created Aubrey's closet to honor her love of flowing dresses.

Her art, her paintings, and photography still live online.

And her father, alongside four others, formed a band called Five Month Journey, carrying her spirit into every song.

For me, traveling is literally also getting to know and feel the energy of the locals.

And not only

how blue the ocean is or how beautiful the lake is or how the beautiful the view is.

No, it's not like that.

It's all also about the people that you meet along the way.

I keep coming back to my conversation with Lana, my friend the solo traveler you heard at the beginning of the previous episode.

She talked about what it really means to leave home, to move through this world as a woman, alone, without a safety net.

That it's not about the perfect views or postcard moments.

I always encounter beautiful and inspiring people like you, you know?

And it will keep you humble.

Solo traveling kept me humble in life.

Like it made me realize that I'm just a small part of this whole universe and collective and the world

because we're just all the same thing.

We're all just trying to survive.

Solo travel humbles you.

It asks you to be brave, to be quiet, to trust strangers, to let go of control.

I wish the world was a safer place because yes, sometimes it is risky.

But maybe the greater risk is never doing it at all.

Aubrey understood that.

She chased the experience, the light, the beauty.

She opened herself to the world.

So if you're going to carry anything with you, let it be that version of her.

Not the ending, but the leap.

If you have tips or information on the individuals in this podcast that you'd like to share, please email us at statusuntraced at gmail.com or leave us us a message at 507-407-2833.

Status Untraced is a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with Odyssey.

I'm your host, Liam Luxon.

Executive producers are Alex Vespested, Donald Albright, and Payne Lindsay.

These episodes are written by Alex Vespested and myself.

Our editor is Tristan Bankston.

Research provided by Jamie Albright.

Publishing by Jordan Foxworthy.

Original music by Makeup and Vanity Set.

Our theme song is Colder Heavens by Blanco White.

Artwork by Trevor Eiler.

Mix by Cooper Skinner.

A heartfelt thank you to our voice actor Victoria Lynn Carroll, who brought Aubrey's journals to life with such care and authenticity.

Special thanks to the Sacco family and CrimeCon.

For more podcasts like Status Untraced, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app or visit us at tenderfoot.tv.

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