The New Yorker:

Severin Beckwith and Anna Brettmann, a young couple from Ithaca, New York, have been hiking from Georgia to Virginia on the Appalachian Trail since late September. In western North Carolina, after a few days of hard rain and little sleep, they decided to take a break from the woods. A shuttle delivered them to the Lodge at Fontana Village Resort, a rustic retreat two miles off the trail, where they ate lunch and lay down for a midday nap. Knocking awoke them. There was a muffled voice outside their door. It burst open before Beckwith could unlock it.

“Next thing I see is a bunch of guys with riot shields with ‘U.S. Marshals’ written on them,” Beckwith said. “Handguns pointed at my face.” Brettmann was still in bed. A marshal helped her get dressed as they handcuffed Beckwith, still in his underwear, and took him out to the hallway. He had a hunch why this was happening. “I really hoped I was right,” he said.

Beckwith resembles Brian Laundrie—the fugitive and person of interest in the killing of his fiancée, Gabby Petito—in the way that most white male long-distance hikers resemble Laundrie: skinny and pale, with a shaved head and a beard. The preponderance of such men, perhaps, has made the Appalachian Trail a locus of the manhunt among the amateur set. There’s also the fact that Laundrie has been known to hike the trail, and that it is regarded, mostly by those who’ve never hiked it, as a place to go if you want to disappear. An engineer from Florida was “99.99 per cent sure” that he saw Laundrie looking “wigged out” near the trail.

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