Remains found mistakenly reported to be of missing Native American teenager
By Arielle Zionts
Rapid City Journal
RAPID CITY, S.D. (AP) — For the past 35 years, Taylor Baldeagle has received letters and phone calls from strangers giving him tips and false hope about his daughter Sharon, who went missing in 1984 at the age of 12.
That false hope went public and viral in January after a Wyoming website and podcast, plus a South Dakota newspaper, said human remains found in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, might be Sharon.
As the stories began spreading on social media, Taylor — an 84-year-old from Eagle Butte who doesn’t use the internet — suddenly began receiving phone calls from friends and family members telling him about the news, asking if it was true and sharing their condolences.
“I heard they found my sister,” Taylor remembers his son telling him on the phone.
But law enforcement never contacted Taylor and the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office soon released a statement saying the bones are unlikely to belong to Sharon.
“This isn’t the first time” people have speculated about finding Sharon, Taylor told the Rapid City Journal during a recent interview in Rapid City where he was visiting his grandchildren. “But this is the first time that it went through Facebook and things like that, it went viral.”
Taylor — a supreme court justice for the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe who also assists Lakota speakers involved in tribal court cases across the state — says he wants people to remember his missing daughter and pass on any serious tips to law enforcement. But he also wants the public and media to be sensitive and fact-check when reporting and sharing information.
“I was hurt knowing that that went viral and it was printed without me knowing it,” said Taylor. “To me it’s all hearsay unless I hear it in a confirmation from the FBI.”
Sharon ran away from the now-closed Brainerd Indian Training School in Hot Springs on Sept. 18, 1984, according to Journal archives. She and a friend from Hot Springs made their way to Casper, Wyoming, where they hitched a ride from Royal Russell Long. But instead of taking them to their destination — Taylor said his daughter was probably trying to visit old classmates in Idaho — the 49-year-old took them to his home in nearby Evansville. There, Long pointed a gun at the girls and tied them up.
The other girl, who had been raped, escaped but when she took police back to Long’s home, he and Sharon were already gone. Law enforcement arrested Long a week later in Albuquerque, but Sharon was still nowhere to be found. Long pleaded guilty to the kidnapping of the two girls and the aggravated assault of the Hot Springs girl. He died in 1993 while serving two life sentences and maintaining he had dropped Sharon off with a trucker who took her to Texas.
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False hope
This incident began after County10 — an online media outlet covering Fremont County, Wyoming — published a Jan. 10 article that cited an anonymous source connected with the neighboring Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office who said officials found the remains of a teenage Native American girl near a power plant and her bones had been there between 20 and 30 years.
The article, which does not list an author, also quoted Scott Fuller — host of the “Dead & Gone In Wyoming” true-crime podcast published by County10 — who said “there’s a remote possibility these remains might be Sharon’s.”
The anonymous source is a volunteer cadaver dog trainer/handler with the sheriff’s office, Fuller said in his Jan. 21 podcast episode.
“Generally speaking, this might be Sharon Baldeagle” but “I’m being very careful with this not to get anybody’s hopes up that this is specifically Sharon,” he said.
Fuller said he contacted Taylor to let him know about the find and how providing a DNA sample may help confirm if the bones are Sharon’s.
The “Teton Times,” a newspaper that serves the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Reservations, published an article — also with no listed author — based on County10 and Fuller’s reporting in its Jan. 15-22 edition.
Two days after Fuller’s episode aired, the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office released a statement saying Fuller and County10’s source was wrong.
“It appears that the remains are that of a younger female of either European or Native American descent and are, more likely than not, prehistoric in nature,” the news release says.
The sheriff’s office said the bones are being tested to confirm their age but “at this time we do not have reason to believe that the located remains are those of Ms. Baldeagle.”
Fuller published a follow-up podcast that same day to update listeners on the statement. He said the sheriff’s office and other agencies “were contacted” before the article and podcast were published but “there was no objection to the information” shared with them. He also said he contacted Taylor to share the update and apologize for providing him with any false hope.
But Taylor told the Journal that Fuller never contacted him for the podcasts episodes. Fuller confirmed that he wasn’t able to find Taylor’s contact information so got in touch with a South Dakota journalist and asked him to pass on the information to Taylor.
“Regardless of my original intentions, I feel terribly about the evolution of the situation,” Fuller told the Journal. “I’d meant to raise awareness of Sharon’s disappearance in a positive and productive way, as I have while working directly with dozens of other families who are enduring similar uncertainty and tragedy. That Mr. Baldeagle has been caused distress by this is something I will forever regret. He has been an inspirational advocate for his daughter and for this issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in general.”
The spokesman for the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office told the Journal that County10 didn’t contact its office before publishing the Jan. 10 story. But the website’s publisher told the Journal that staff left multiple messages with the sheriff’s office over an 11-day period and never heard back from anyone. He said the website published the story since they trusted their source and since no one from the sheriff’s office called back to say their information was wrong. Fuller said he contacted Wyoming state detectives but also never heard back from them.
“I don’t even know what a podcast is. I stay away from electronic communicative devices,” Taylor said. “Quit these troublemaking devices they use to let out false rumors and false hopes and tormenting a guy. They don’t know how tough that is on a person.”
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We’ll meet again
“It hurts to even talk about it,” Taylor said when asked what it’s like to live without knowing what happened to Sharon for more than three decades. “She’s in my prayers every meal and she’s traveling with me. I got her picture on my dashboard in my car, in my truck, she’s with me” he said of the small, faded photo of Sharon taped inside his vehicle.
“I never will forget her,” Taylor said as his eyes welled up.
Taylor raised Sharon and her three younger brothers as a single father. Sharon attended schools in Eagle Butte and Idaho. She then briefly attended the Hot Springs school before running away.
“She was the lady of the house and she was daddy’s girl,” Taylor said.
He said Sharon loved to sing, play the piano, do art projects and participate in powwows. She also helped take care of her younger brothers and was a talented young chef.
Christmas and Sharon’s birthday’s are especially difficult days for Taylor, a Korean War veteran and cancer survivor. He has few photos of his time in the military or of Sharon and her brothers since a tornado destroyed his house when he was living in Oglala in the early 1990s.
Taylor says he’s aware of and happy about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement’s ability to raise awareness about new and old cases like Sharon’s. “I went looking my own self” for Sharon when there was no MMIW movement and Amber Alert system, he said.
After learning his daughter was kidnapped and missing, Taylor immediately drove to Casper to meet with Sharon’s friend and plead for Sharon’s release on local TV and radio stations, according to Journal archives. He then spent two months looking for her by driving or hitching rides, reaching as far south as Arizona. Throughout the years he’s also spoken with media outlets, including the Journal in 2013 and West River Eagle, to raise awareness about his daughter.
Taylor said he believes Sharon is still alive and being held against her will. And he says he knows they’ll be reunited someday.
There’s no word for ‘goodbye’ in Lakota since “goodbye is final,” he said. “We say ‘to?ks?a’ which means ‘later, we’ll always meet later again no matter what.’”
