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StrangeOutdoors 1/11/18 StrangeOutdoors 1/11/18

The strange disappearance of Ranger Paul Fugate from Arizona’s Chiricahua Monument

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Paul Fugate, disappeared January 13, 1980, Chiricahua Monument, Arizona.

Revised July 2024

The mysterious disappearance of Paul Fugate is another story about a Park Ranger who vanished while working. See also the article about Randy Morgenson, who worked in Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Park, who left his station on July 21, 1996, and was never seen alive again. The disturbing disappearance and death of Ranger Randy Morgenson in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks

About 2-3 pm on Sunday, January 13, 1980, law enforcement ranger Paul Fugate, 41, left the Visitor Centre to "check the nature trail" in the Chiricahua National Monument in Arizona and was never seen again. What happened to Paul? Did drug dealers murder him, or did he voluntarily disappear? Did something stranger happen at the Monument?

Faraway Ranch Chiricahua National Monument

Who was Paul Fugate?

Paul was a monument naturalist who answered visitors’ questions, curated exhibits and put together trail guides and plant lists. He stayed on site for two weeks in a basic cobblestone cabin. He was anti-authority, a rebel.

He graduated with a biology degree in Arlington in 1963 while doing quality-control work for a flour-milling company. After graduating, he considered using his science skills at Utah’s Dugway Proving Ground, an Army test site for biological and chemical weapons but decided to apply to the National Park Service instead.

Paul married Dody on December 11, 1964, and five months later, he went to work at Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. After that, the Fugates were stationed in the canyons of Arizona’s Navajo National Monument, home of the Betatakin cliff dwelling.

Paul didn’t like being bossed around at the Navajo Monument by the monument’s superintendent, Jack Williams. In 1967, Williams disciplined Paul for his laziness and his appearance. “If you want to look and live like a hippie, that is certainly your prerogative, but not here at Navajo National Monument,” he wrote. Williams was annoyed that the NPS couldn’t fire him: “I do not understand the ‘breed’ now coming into the NPS,” he wrote to the regional director.

The Park Service transferred Paul to Chiricahua National Monument in Arizona in 1970. Dody and Paul’s marriage involved an open relationship, and they had affairs with women like Becky Orozco, who was 19 and working as a park aide. Becky said, “Dody would be very angry with me if Paul and I talked about emotional stuff”. But Dody had no doubts about Paul’s spiritual commitment to their marriage, even if he slept with other women.

Paul had a mustache, which the Park Service cited as a violation of its grooming standards when he was fired in 1971. The NPS referred to his “negative personal attitude” and “abuse of government equipment,” including allegations that he stole hay for Dody’s horse.

Paul and Dody moved to Tucson, where they began graduate studies at the University of Arizona. With help from a civil rights lawyer named Edward Morgan, Paul spent the next five years waging a legal battle to get his job back.

When Paul was finally reinstated to the NPS job at the Chiricahua monument in 1976, Dody kept the job she’d found as a scientific photographer in Tucson. Paul was also awarded back pay minus any income he had earned from research stipends and student teaching, which meant that the Park Service only had to pay the couple a few thousand dollars as part of the settlement.

In the following years, Paul visited Dody in Tucson every few weeks, but she stayed away from the Monument.

The disappearance of Paul Fugate

He was the only permanent staff member at the Monument on duty that day, and Paul left instructions with the only other member of staff, a seasonal employee, that if he wasn’t back before 4.30 pm, to begin to shut down without him.

Fugate walked down towards the Monument entrance to check trails leading to Faraway Ranch, a 400-acre piece of land recently acquired for the Monument and was never seen again. The Faraway Ranch preserves an area associated with the final conflicts with the local Apache, one of the last frontier settlements. Paul left his radio and key behind in the Ranger Station.

What is the Chiricahua National Monument?

Chiricahua National Monument is part of the National Park System and is located in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona. The Chiricahuas are part of a chain of isolated “sky islands” that rise more than 5,400 feet above the Sonoran Desert floor. The monument was established on April 18, 1924, to protect its extensive eroded tuff spires known as hoodoos and balancing rocks and is named after the Chiricahua Apache, whose leader, Cochise, waged a long war with the U.S. government in the late 1800s.

It is located approximately 36 miles (58 km) southeast of Willcox, Arizona, and it preserves the remains of an immense volcanic eruption that occurred many millions of years ago.

The monument has just an eight-mile-long, dead-end road, a single campground, and a system of trails that can be hiked in a single day.

Chiricahua National Monument balanced rock

The search for Paul Fugate

That weekend, Paul had another seasonal employee staying with him, and when he didn’t return after dark, she grew concerned. Earlier that day, Paul had driven her up to the Massai Point Trailhead so she could hike downhill to the visitor center. At about 8 p.m., she went to see Ted Scott, the monument’s superintendent, who, together with two other Monument employees, headed out to look for Paul.

The following day, January 14, Ted Scott contacted the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office, which sent a search and rescue team, putting 22 people on the ground plus one dog. By Tuesday afternoon, January 15, the National Guard had a helicopter overhead, and 16 volunteers from the Southern Arizona Rescue Association were using the visitor centre as a base.

The National Park Service, the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department, the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, the Southern Arizona Search and Rescue Association, and Paul’s friends and family helped in the search. They scrambled over rocky ridges and scoured every square inch in a 0.5-mile radius from the visitor center and even rappelled into the impassable Organ Pipe Formation.

Some footprints were found until they realized they’d been made by another searcher coming in another direction.

The only solid lead was provided by an acquaintance of Paul, Dick Horton and his wife Joy, a Park Service volunteer in his fifties, who described seeing him on the afternoon of his disappearance, wearing his uniform and slumped unconscious between two men in a pickup truck.

Under hypnosis at the end of January 1980, Detective Craig Emanuel, the acquaintance, described the truck and the men. Horton recalled that Paul looked “sad and dejected.” The pickup was dark green with a camper shell. The driver, he said, was in his thirties, had a Kenny Rogers beard, and was wearing a black, white, and red plaid shirt. The second man wore a green jacket, perhaps the one Paul had left the visitor center with.

The acting director of the Park Service's Western Region, Jack Davis, dismissed this, saying it ''would have to be questioned because of the speed,'' since the vehicles passed each other at 50 miles per hour, ''and the fleeting nature of the glimpse.'' But others working in the monument reportedly saw vehicle spinout tracks on a dirt road near the Faraway and signs of a scuffle.

A search of Fugate’s home showed he had left behind his wallet, $300 in cash, a valuable gun collection, expensive camera equipment, and a truck he was restoring. This discounted the theory that he had run off to start a new life somewhere else. However, there was some persistent speculation that he had followed a pregnant girlfriend to a new city.

The official search lasted just over two weeks, and then groups of volunteers spent their spare time checking trails, off-trail areas, and even abandoned mines over the next few years.

Reports that Fugate was alive and murder claims

He was reportedly seen three years later, in 1983, in Bend, Oregon. In July 1983, based on new leads, a Cochise County Sheriff's Office official announced Fugate had been murdered and that the arrest of "more than one person" was imminent. However, no one was ever charged.

Dody Fugate and Park Service Controversy

Following his disappearance, the Park Service declared Paul was officially missing and posted a $5,000 reward for information. His family matched that sum. The service also started making partial salary payments to his wife, Dody, a scientific photographer at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

In early 1981, Howard Chapman, director of the Park Service's Western Region, reviewed the case and decided that Fugate had voluntarily ''abandoned his position.'' Paul was dismissed from his role, and his wife was asked to return the $6,900 paid to her, plus 11 per cent interest. Later, the demand for repayment was changed to a deduction on his retirement fund.

Dody was told that no appeal was possible because a termination hearing must be requested within 20 days, and the dismissal had been made retrospectively until early 1980. It emerged that on another occasion, in late 1970, Paul had been dismissed for having long hair and a handlebar mustache. After a dispute with the service, Fugate was reinstated in 1976, and his back pay and benefits were restored.

For six years the National Park Service refused to list him as deceased and his widow was unable to collect benefits. In 1986, the NPS and an Arizona investigator re-examined the case and confirmed his death. Dody was finally able to claim full financial support. Not the park service's finest hour!

What happened to Paul Fugate at the Chiricahua National Monument?

After thorough searches of the Monument, it was clear that Fugate was probably not there. Investigators found an unfinished life insurance application at Paul’s cabin.

Back then, in 1980, Cochise County, which shares 80 miles of border with Mexico, and the Chiricahua Corridor, a historic immigration route for undocumented farmworkers from Mexico, were just starting to be used by drug mules. Illegal drug activity happened every day in the locality of the Monument at the time.

In 2014, a Park Service employee named Karen Gonzales was assaulted and nearly killed at the Faraway Ranch by an alleged drug smuggler from Mexico. Human bones have also turned up in the surrounding Coronado National Forest, where on separate occasions, both in 2015, two adults had gone missing under suspicious circumstances.

Perhaps his wife Dody was involved? She didn’t go to the Monument until four days after Paul’s disappearance, her residence was never searched, and she was never asked to provide an alibi. She had visited a therapist friend and then went to work on the day she heard the news about Paul's disappearance, stating she stayed in Tucson in case she was contacted for a ransom demand. When she arrived at the Monument, she found out that Paul’s “girlfriend” was pregnant, a pregnancy that was later terminated. A check was found in Paul’s cabin that Dody had written to Paul from their joint bank account, reportedly in preparation for her to join Paul in June of that year. According to Dody, the couple had discussed occupying an old bunkhouse near the Faraway so Paul could better keep an eye on things.

To this day, no evidence of Paul Fugate's disappearance has been found, and speculation has mounted that drug traffickers murdered him in the area and that his body was taken out of the park and buried elsewhere, never to be seen again. Brian Miers, a former Drug Enforcement Administration investigator, had a theory that Fugate either had come face to face with drug smugglers or was himself involved in a drug deal that went wrong.

In June 2018, the NPS announced it had discovered new information about Fugate’s case and, together with the Cochise County Sheriff's Department, asked for help from the public in solving the mystery. The NPS also announced it increased the reward for solid leads from $20,000 to $60,000. There is no further information on what prompted the case to be reopened.

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