SHE DISAPPEARED, PAPER IN HAND LOOKING TO THE SKY (THE KARLIE GUSE’ STORY)

On a cold October morning in 2018, three witnesses watched a teenage girl walking along Highway 6 with a mysterious piece of paper in her hand, gazing at the sky – it would be the last time anyone ever saw Karlie Gusé.

(As heard on the #WeirdDarkness episode: “BEFORE THEY LOCKED THEIR DOORS: The True Story of the Shell Lake Murders”)

Karlie Gusé has not been seen since October 2018, when she grew extremely paranoid after smoking marijuana, and walked away from her home in Chalfant Valley, California.

Karlie Gusé sounds like an ordinary teenage girl. She had a boyfriend, enjoyed hanging out with her brothers and liked scary movies. But in October 2018, her life took what seemed to be a tragic turn. She left her family’s house and walked into the frozen desert nearby.

The previous night Karlie attended a party with her boyfriend and some other friends. She’d smoked marijuana, which induced a paranoia response so severe that her father and stepmother thought it might have been “laced” with something. Afterward, however, her family got her home and settled in bed, and she slipped out the door.

She hasn’t been seen since.

“We are not going to give up on finding Karlie,” said Sean Ragan, special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Sacramento field office, referring to the case’s open status. “People don’t just vanish into thin air.”

Karlie Lain Gusé was born on May 13, 2002, and led a pretty normal life until her disappearance. Her parents divorced when she was two, and after living with her mother, Lindsay Fairley, for an undisclosed period, Karlie moved in with her father Zachary and his wife Melissa in Bishop, California.

“So sweet and quiet,” her classmates at Bishop Union High School said, according to a 2019 Fox News report. She was popular at school, and to most people in her life, there were no apparent signs of any personal struggle.

Looking back, though, there were some troubling things about Karlie Gusé’s life in the days and weeks leading up to her disappearance.

For one thing, she’d experienced a few bad reactions to smoking marijuana. And Karlie had reportedly exhibited signs of paranoia, telling friends she feared being “tracked” on her phone.

And on the evening of Oct. 12, 2018, everything felt normal. She then went to a small party with her boyfriend, Donald Arrowood III. But by around 8 p.m., things became alarming.

On the final night Karlie Gusé was seen alive, she called her stepmother in a panic and asked to be picked up at a party. She had used marijuana and apparently had an adverse reaction to it. Arrowood later recalled that she was frightened of the music, and frightened of him.

“She was in a panic,” Melissa Gusé later told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “She wanted me to come take her.”

Melissa showed up to retrieve her stepdaughter, only to discover that Karlie had already left the party. The teenager was running down a dark lane, and was still acting paranoid when Melissa spotted her and got her into the car. Fox News reported that she told Melissa numerous times that she was scared, switched seats several times within the vehicle, and kept saying that the car would kill her.

At home, Karlie appeared so paranoid that her father suspected that the marijuana she had smoked had been spiked with another drug.

He and Melissa videotaped what they could of his conversation with Karlie, hoping to explain the next day, when she woke up, how drugs could be dangerous. The conversation, which is recorded and runs eight minutes and 45 seconds, serves as evidence of how paranoid Karlie was that night.

“I screwed up big time today,” Karlie says at one point, and Melissa says in response: “We all do things in life that we regret. Drugs especially.”

In another, Karlie blasts her stepmother for wanting to kill her. When Melissa says that’s “preposterous,” Karlie sobs: “I’m just thinking all this demonic stuff. I can’t help it.”

As SF Gate noted in 2021, the timeline from here gets a little murky.

From the start, Melissa had said to the press that she’d last seen Karlie at 5:45 a.m. When she returned around 7:15 a.m., the girl was missing. Melissa later revised this narrative, saying that she had actually stayed the whole night in Karlie’s room. When she woke around 7 a.m., Karlie was gone from her bed.

When they discovered Karlie Gusé wasn’t at home, Zachary and Melissa immediately searched their house and nearby neighborhood. After two hours of searching, Zachary informed his ex-wife of what had happened, and filed a missing persons report with the Mono County Sheriff’s Office.

Investigators quickly responded to the scene and began searching for the missing teenage girl. Fortunately they’d uncovered a few witnesses who’d seen her that morning.

The first, a neighbor of the Gusés, recalled seeing her walking with a piece of paper in her hand, gazing skyward. Another observed her strolling toward Highway 6, and noted that she was also carrying a piece of paper in her hand. The third and last witness noticed her standing by some sagebrush off of the highway, which is where search dogs lost her scent.

So what happened to Karlie Gusé?

She may have died in the desert, where mornings can be bitterly cold and the days swelteringly hot. At the time of her disappearance, Karlie was wearing sweatpants or jeans, a white T-shirt, and Vans. She might well have trekked deep into the desert where no one would find her and died of exposure.

Some theories hold that somebody may have given her a ride if she was walking on the road. Others accuse Melissa Gusé, because of inconsistencies in her story. And Karlie’s mother, Lindsay Fairley, actually posited in 2019 that Karlie may have died from an overdose — and that Melissa and Zachary cleaned it up.

But a polygraph test has cleared the couple. And police found no evidence that Melissa and Zachary Gusé were involved in Karlie’s disappearance.

To this day, no one knows for certain what happened to Karlie Gusé. She simply walked out of her home that October morning and disappeared into thin air, apparently wracked with paranoia and fear.

“My whole body and soul. “I’d trade it all,” her father Zachary said in an interview with the FBI. “Just to have her home safe.”

SOURCES: https://disappearedblog.com/karlie-guse,https://allthatsinteresting.com/karlie-guse, https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/kidnap/karlie-lain-guse,https://thecinemaholic.com/karlie-guse-found-or-missing-is-she-dead-or-alive, https://charleyproject.org/case/karlie-lain-guse