In 2012, 23-year-old Asha Baduri set out on a solo trek through Utah’s Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, chasing the solitude she had always dreamed of. Her father, Kalin, had watched her prepare for months with meticulous care: gear lists, maps, GPS coordinates, and contingency plans. Asha was careful, almost obsessive about safety, and she promised her father that every three days she would send him a simple text that read, “All good.”
But on the third day no message arrived, and by the fourth, Kalin’s concern turned into dread. His calls went unanswered, and the last photo he had of his daughter—smiling confidently on a wooden bridge in a purple shirt with her canary-yellow sleeping bag strapped to her pack—suddenly transformed from a cherished memory into evidence of what would become one of Utah’s most haunting mysteries. Police were called, and within hours search and rescue teams swarmed the wilderness. Asha’s locked car was found at the trailhead, but the forest offered no clues. Helicopters scanned the trees for any trace of her bright clothing or gear, yet nothing appeared.
No footprints, no campsite, no discarded items—she had vanished without a trace. Weeks passed before the official search was called off. For Kalin, grief reshaped his world; Asha’s room remained untouched, her scent lingering on her belongings, maps still pinned to the walls. He called the sheriff’s office week after week, his hope slowly eroding as months turned into years. By 2014, her case was considered cold, one more name lost in the long list of people who disappeared into the American wilderness. Detective Miles Corbin eventually picked up her file. Known for his patience and ability to see patterns, he found nothing pointing to an accident or animal attack.
Something about Asha’s case troubled him—she had been too careful to simply vanish. Digging into her digital life, he discovered her posts on a niche hiking forum where she had exchanged messages with a user named Karen Wraith, who promoted a philosophy called “ghost hiking”—erasing all traces and living in the wild as if invisible. Wraith’s last message to Asha read, “The Uintas are a good place to practice becoming a ghost. I can show you paths not on any map.” Corbin traced the account to a university student in Australia, eccentric but harmless, who had never been to Utah. The lead went nowhere, and the silence returned. Then, in June 2018, everything changed.
Tyler Sims, a local teenager fishing on Silus Lake miles from Asha’s planned routes, spotted something yellow deep beneath the surface. It was a waterlogged bundle wrapped in chains and wire, unmistakably shaped like a human body. Authorities retrieved it and found Asha’s sleeping bag, but inside was not Asha. Instead, it held the decomposed body of a young man identified as 24-year-old Milo Radic, who had gone missing from Phoenix, Arizona, during the same week Asha vanished. Suddenly, two cold cases separated by hundreds of miles were linked by the most chilling coincidence imaginable. Detectives now had to ask not only where Asha was but how her sleeping bag became the shroud of a murdered stranger.
Detective Gene Hackett took over a joint task force. While reviewing Asha’s belongings, investigators uncovered a forgotten clue: a torn business card from the Starlight Motor Inn, a rundown motel off a lonely Utah highway roughly halfway between where Asha’s and Milo’s cars had been found. Searching the motel’s old records, they found an entry for “John Smith” in Room 7 with Milo’s silver sedan on September 23, 2012. After weeks of tracking down former staff, investigators located Beatrice Row, a cleaner who remembered a young couple—Asha and Milo—staying there, but she also recalled a third man, older and menacing, coming and going.
She described hearing a violent argument, a heavy thud, and later seeing Asha, hollow-eyed and terrified, being forced into Milo’s car by the older man in the early morning hours. Investigators then dug into Milo’s past and uncovered a darker truth: beneath his carefree hiker persona he was a courier, secretly moving stolen goods. Phone records revealed a burner number that tracked his movements, which was linked to a violent career criminal named Dante Voss. His description matched Beatrice’s memory exactly. Months later, authorities found Voss living under an alias in Boise, Idaho. At first, he refused to cooperate, but when confronted with the evidence—the motel records, the witness testimony, and the phone records—he confessed.
Voss admitted Milo had been his mule but wanted to quit. In the motel room, Milo tried to back out, and Voss killed him in a rage. He forced Asha to help clean up, wrap Milo’s body in her sleeping bag, and dump it in Silus Lake. He confessed to sexually assaulting her before driving her into the Nevada desert, where he killed her and buried her in a shallow grave. Voss even drew a map, and days later Asha’s remains were found beneath a cluster of rocks, her purple shirt still visible after six long years.
Voss was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault, sentenced to die in prison. For Kalin, justice was bittersweet. He was finally able to bring his daughter home for burial, but the brutal truth had replaced the faint hope he had carried for years. Asha’s story stands as a grim warning: even the most careful plans can be undone by evil. Her final journey, meant to celebrate independence and courage, was twisted by violence, but her father’s love and the persistence of determined investigators ensured she was not forgotten. In the end, she was no longer just a ghost lost in the wild—the truth, however painful, brought her home.
