Searching for a seeker: The fearless life and tragic disappearance of Melissa McDevitt
Flitting about her apartment on Vancouver Island, Melissa McDevitt had already packed her bag in preparation for the long journey from Canada’s west coast back to Haywood County.
She was to spend a month over Christmas with her parents, Tom and Maggie, enjoying the traditions they all held so dear — basking in the seasonal bustle of Gatlinburg, driving spellbound through the holiday lights on James Island, admiring the fireworks in Charleston and visiting the family cemetery at the old home place in the Shenandoah Valley.
Melissa would have to wake up early the next day to take a taxi to a ferry to a bus to a train to the airport for her flight to Spartanburg, but as that December morning turned to afternoon there wasn’t much left for her to do.
With winter’s hasty dusk approaching she laid her passport down on the bed and headed out for one last Friday afternoon hike.
- Melissa McDevitt smiles in a rare selfie, taken at Mt. LeConte in August, 2022. Melissa McDevitt photo
She had always been a seeker, a climber of mountains, a runner of marathons, a skier of double Black Diamonds, an insatiable hiker, a voracious reader. Melissa McDevitt felt most comfortable in that solitary sort of solace that only those who crave it can know.
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“In that world, I’m just like everybody else,” she told her mother.
Born in West Palm Beach, Florida in 1983, Melissa was full-term, albeit at the dangerously low birthweight of 4 pounds. By her first birthday, she’d gained less than two more.
“She got off to a kind of a rough start in life by not thriving and that’s why we didn’t move here until she was one year old,” Tom said. “We didn’t want to move her away from her pediatrician.”
Melissa had a rare genetic disorder called trisomy X, affecting one out of every thousand females. While many are asymptomatic, others see the condition manifest itself in both physical and personality traits.
She had small hands and small feet. Even at the age of 38 her shoes were no bigger than a child’s. She had her own oblique way of doing things sometimes, and her mother thinks she may have had a mild form of Asperger’s Syndrome, making interpersonal relationships more difficult.
“She got bullied,” Maggie said. “She was called a ‘retard’ because she was different.”
Once, a jogger passing by Melissa went out of his way to stop, turn around, and shout to her that she was the ugliest thing he’d ever seen.
Melissa had a tough time in local schools. She spent part of her life in the developmental disability world and part of it in the so-called “normal” world but was a permanent resident of neither. Occasionally there was some compassionate student who’d join Melissa in the lunchroom, but other than that, she was largely alone.
“I always taught her, ‘You are yourself, be proud of who you are,’” Maggie remembers. “You are the most that you can be with what you have.”
Maggie said that academic advisors didn’t consider Melissa college material, but after graduating from Tuscola High School, Melissa left Haywood County to pursue studies in anthropology, ultimately earning her bachelor’s degree.
“All she wanted to do is to get away because of the bad vibrations,” Maggie said. “She went to university in Montreal, because she loved to travel.”
There, the professors adored her because she was studious and knowledgeable.
“She had a tremendous command of her diction,” Maggie said. “People were always shocked because of the stigma attached to Melissa that was given to them.”
After college, Melissa performed brilliantly during telephone job interviews, but had trouble in person. For years she bounced around to a series of jobs in the seasonal tourism industry, albeit always connected to the wild places she so fervently sought out.
She sold lift tickets, waited tables, made beds and took full advantage of exotic backdrops like Put-In-Bay, Carlsbad Caverns, Vail and Glacier National Park. At almost every one of them, Tom said, Melissa ended up doing something entirely different than the job for which she’d been hired.
“The supervisors would get frustrated with her and then the superintendent of the park would basically come down and say, ‘Look, we hired this lady. She’s not working out here. We need to find another place for her to work because we’re not we’re not going to fire her and send her all the way home,’” said Tom. “Not one ever offered her the opportunity to come back, because they couldn’t relate to her and her challenges. They only tolerated her because they offered her a position and she moved across the country for it. They honored their commitment.”
Melissa always checked in back home in Haywood County and had, over time, amassed a substantial collection of mementoes from her travels. Beach glass. Sand dollars. Various moths. Cool rocks. Shells.
She covered nearly every shelf and wall in her bedroom with them.
“It’s filled with things that she’d rescued. Butterflies that would have died alone,” Maggie said.
“She brought them home.”
They were more than just mementoes to Melissa. They were an enduring connection to the places she’d escaped to, the places no one else had ever been, the places where she could feel just like everybody else.
“She spent all of her adult life searching for friendship. She wanted to have friends like everybody did but she had extreme difficulty in making friends, and even greater difficulty maintaining them. She was quite lonely,” said Tom. “Other than her mother and I, she lived a very isolated life. She was searching for something that was just very elusive to her, and that was somebody just to accept her for who she was. That is what I feel drove her more to nature.”
- “Frozen trees, beautiful snow and glorious Rainier. I am always happy when I’m in the presence of this beautiful mountain. It wasn’t until the very end of the day that the mountain decided to present herself, though for a very short time.” Melissa McDevitt photo
Around 11:30 that Friday night, Tom called Melissa for their regular update.
It would be 8:30 p.m. for Melissa, and she was probably taking it easy in her condo, getting ready for a cross-continental journey early the next morning, starting with a taxi. She didn’t answer. He called back three more times over the next three hours, and finally went to bed feeling uneasy. When he called her that morning, Saturday, it went straight to voicemail. Eventually Tom reached an emergency contact at Melissa’s condo complex who confirmed that Melissa’s car wasn’t in its assigned parking place.
Tom then got ahold of a neighbor, who went over and knocked on Melissa’s door. Finding it unlocked, the neighbor let himself in. Melissa’s passport was still sitting there on her bed. The ferry service confirmed that Melissa never showed. The airline said the same thing. Tom called the police, convinced that something wasn’t right.
“I know where she is,” he told them. “She’s going to be in Sooke.”
Sooke is a town of about 15,000 located on the southeastern tip of Vancouver Island 25 miles from Victoria, the capital of British Columbia. Much like Haywood County, Sooke is known for being a scenic gateway to imposing wilderness trails.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police located Melissa’s car in a parking area near the Sooke Potholes, a popular destination riddled with stony swimming holes. The operator of a fish hatchery captured Melissa with his security camera, walking onto a trail at 1:55 p.m. the previous day under overcast skies, with the temperature hovering in the mid-40s.
“It gets very dark out there by 4:15,” Tom said. “She didn’t have on a hat, she didn’t have on gloves. She did not have a heavy coat on, she just had a little fleece jacket. She had her leggings on and she had hiking sneakers, not hiking boots, so she wasn’t dressed in a manner in which she was going for some kind of extended hike.”
Later that day, the temperature dropped into the 20s as winds picked up and heavy rain came down. The RCMP, he said, went into full-scale emergency mode, searching for the seeker. A command center had been set up over that weekend, and volunteers came from across Vancouver Island and the Pacific Northwest.
“I told Maggie, I can’t stay here, I have to go out there and do whatever I can do,” Tom said. “I can’t have my daughter missing and not be out there trying to find her, not that I was much help. Those people are skilled, trained, physically fit, all the things that I’m not.”
Tom arrived in Victoria on Monday and had to break into Melissa’s car.
“She had all of her heavy winter gear, her other pants, her vest with the water bottle, her snack bars, that little silver blanket for if you get caught in the cold, she had everything. I mean, she had everything,” Tom said. “But it was in her car.”
The Juan de Fuca Search and Rescue team soon became involved. Similar to the Haywood County Search and Rescue, they’re all highly experienced and work as volunteers under demanding conditions, looking for hikers who become lost or injured. Together, they came up with a logical methodology, noting natural obstacles and trouble spots. First, it was a mile radius. Then, it was two. Then, it was five.
“They feared that she got disoriented, potentially hypothermic, and was not rational in what direction she was walking and could have been walking absolutely the wrong way to try to get out,” Tom said.
Complicating the search was the dense undergrowth. Tom recalls one of the searchers tripping off into the brush just a few feet from the trail and disappearing until he popped up, somewhat embarrassed, amid the chest-high ferns. Melissa, Maggie said, stood only 5 feet tall.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, a helicopter utilizing heat sensors was deployed, but failed to locate anything promising. On Thursday and Friday, the park was closed so canines could do their work without distraction. They met with similar results.
“The worst goes through your mind and about being injured and lying there for hours and days until the elements, you just succumb to them,” Tom said. “Did she get someplace and fall off a cliff and just break her leg or something and couldn’t walk? It was just such an unforgiving environment, and then not being dressed to be doing that.”
Melissa’s disappearance made little sense — an experienced backcountry hiker on a trail she’d hiked before, racing against the setting winter sun in the brutal Canadian wilderness, with potentially lifesaving equipment sitting in the back seat of her car in the parking lot.
Tom remains open to the possibility that something more sinister occurred.
“I told my wife, it’s not that I’m just hoping that there’s some kind of miracle ending, but maybe some nutcase abducted her and she escapes, or he gets remorseful,” he said, citing Salt Lake City teen Elizabeth Smart, who was kidnapped in June 2002 but located in relatively fair condition nine months later.
On Monday, Dec. 19, nine days after Melissa was to begin her Christmas journey home to Haywood County, the search ended. Volunteers from as far as 400 miles away had amassed more than 7,000 hours looking for Melissa in what’s being called the largest search and rescue operation in the history of Vancouver Island.
“These people were treating Melissa like she was their family,” Tom said.
The only things they ever found were a chewed-up, sun-faded water bottle that looked as though it had been in the woods for quite some time and a single glove, far too large for Melissa’s tiny hands.
- “First light warming the earth.” Melissa McDevitt photo
It must’ve been a cruel Christmas for Tom and Maggie in their handsome mountaintop home, hoping for a visitor who would never come.
They’re still waiting for some of Melissa’s presents to be delivered, and still surrounded by all the things she loved about the holidays. In the living room, an understated Christmas tree poses in a corner, its frosted tips shining in the bright orange sunlight streaming in from across the cove. On the mantle above the fireplace, nutcracker figurines interlaced with strands of lights proudly guard a carpet of fluffy fake white snow.
Down in Melissa’s bedroom, two small trees guarding the foot of her bed like loyal companions await the day they will again shine their sparkly lights upon her.
Maggie and Tom still turn them on each night, just to feel Melissa’s presence; they listlessly twinkle on her beach glass and sand dollars and moths and rocks and shells.
There would be no trip to Gatlinburg, no lights on James Island, no fireworks, no visit to the old Shenandoah home place or the family cemetery where Melissa’s grandmother once played.
“I told her on one of those trips,” Tom said, “we need to go by the monument company, I need to pick me out a monument and go ahead and prepay it and have it organized so you and your mother don’t have to deal with this stuff. Melissa looked at me and she said, ‘Well, if you and Mommy are going into the family cemetery, how do I get in there? You’re going to be gone. I’m going to be here by myself.’”
Tom told her he’d handle that. Feeling connected to her family was always important for Melissa.
Soon, Tom and Maggie will offer a reward for information about Melissa in case she’s been abducted, but they also hope that one day, it might lead to her eventual recovery one way or another, so they can bring her home like the wounded butterflies that she wouldn’t let die alone.
“Within a year we’ll put a headstone up. Most likely it will be for the three of us. Of course, right now, there’s nothing but the monument to be a remembrance of her unless we happen to have somebody find her,” Tom said. “That would be extremely meaningful if that happened.”
They’ll return to Victoria in May. If there’s any comfort to be found in the next few months, it may be that Melissa McDevitt’s fearless spirit still lingers in the only place she ever really wanted it to be.
“Nature loved her, and she loved nature. She saw beautiful things and took beautiful photographs. She was surrounded by it, and it never let her down. It never judged her,” Maggie said. “She spent her whole life searching — everybody searches for some happiness — and it just wasn’t meant to be.”
Anyone with information on the whereabouts of Melissa McDevitt is encouraged to contact Victoria Police at 250.995.7654.
