Highway 95 at the Idaho-Oregon line. (Google Maps image)
Nine months after an Idaho woman went missing, her remains have been found — thanks to a stranger who scoured aerial images of Oregon’s high desert.
Gwen Brunelle was 27 when she drove away from her Boise home on June 26, 2023. She told her family she was going to California for a meeting related to her hobby of breeding and showing rabbits, and she took 11 rabbits with her. Four days later, her van was found abandoned in a pullout off an Oregon highway, the Malheur County sheriff’s office said.
After extensive searching by law enforcement agencies and volunteers, Brunelle’s family hired a drone operator to take images of 4,000 acres of rugged high desert near the Oregon-Idaho line. In March, those images were given to Aloft Drone Search, a nonprofit group focused on missing-person cases, the sheriff’s office said.
On April 7, one of the group’s volunteers who was examining the drone images reported something that may have been human remains. The Malheur County sheriff was notified, and the following day deputies found the body at those coordinates — 2 miles from where Brunelle’s van had been. The sheriff’s office credited the family and Aloft Drone for “truly a remarkable find.”
On April 29, the identity was confirmed through dental records.
A cause of death was not announced. Brunelle’s family has said they do not suspect foul play. “We feel she suffered from an undiagnosed psychotic illness. We believe these factors may have created a state of anxiety and confusion in her final days and ultimately contributed to her passing,” the family says on their Find Gwen website.
The indication that Brunelle was in an unsettled mental state is supported by what is known of her whereabouts after leaving Boise on the morning of June 26, a Monday.
She had said she would be driving to the Fresno area, about 700 miles, and might stop for the night in Reno. The person she claimed to be meeting in California later reported no knowledge of the visit, and her family and boyfriend were not able to contact Brunelle by text or phone call after she left, the Malheur Enterprise reported.
She was last seen around noon on Tuesday, June 27, in Jordan Valley, Oregon — only 80 miles drive from Boise.
She then apparently backtracked. When it was found on Friday, June 30, her 2008 Honda Element was 20 miles closer to Boise. It was unlocked, the windows were down, and her keys and wallet were inside. Five of the rabbits had died from the heat. Brunelle’s uncle told the Malheur newspaper that the odometer had logged 300 miles for the trip.
A sheriff’s deputy came across the van while checking vehicles parked along a road used by ranchers and recreationers heading into the Owyhee Mountains. He ran its license plate and saw that Brunelle had been reported missing by her parents that Tuesday.
The search ended up involving several agencies and more than 100 people on the ground and in the air. When the official search was suspended on Sept. 23, it had turned up only a shirt and boots belonging to the missing woman. Her family and friends continued the search efforts.
Originally published at Bay Area News Group