When a National Park Service Ranger vanishes from his post in the Arizona Mountains, he's never seen again.

Questions endure in the strange and controversial case of the only National Park Service Ranger to ever go missing and never be found in this episode of Last Seen Alive.

So, Thanks for listening to Last Seen Alive.

I'm your host, Leah, crime analyst by day and true crime

storyteller by night. And as always, I'm your coach, Scott. Paul Fugate was last seen alive on January 13th,

1980. He was 41 years old at the time and lived and worked in southeastern Arizona, not far from the

Mexican border. Specifically, he worked at Chiricahua

National Monument, a beautiful place that the U.S. National Park Service describes as a wonderland of

rocks and one of its hidden gems. It's not technically a national park, but it's a park owned and run

by the National Park Service, so it's very similar, but it doesn't receive

as many visitors as officially designated national parks. It seems like a bit pointless bureaucracy to

me to operate it and run it, but not have it be a national park. Imagine that there's lists

of the parks in the U.S. Like celebrity lists.

A national park would be an A-list celebrity, and a park like this would be a B-list celebrity.

No offense to any of the B-list parks because they're all A's in my book.

Raised in Texas, Paul worked at Chiricahua as a park ranger.

According to an excellent article on the case by Brendan Borrell for Outside

magazine, his duties there included answering visitors questions, curating exhibits, and putting

together trail guides and plant lists. Whatever or whoever you picture when you think of a

National Park Service ranger, though, Paul was not it. In order to understand Paul, all preconceived notions of what it

means to uphold order in a national park must be discarded, because Paul, a formerly trained

naturalist, was not your typical park ranger. He wore the green and gray uniform of the National

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