In a setting of beauty and grandeur, a twisted soul was on the loose, a murderer who revived gnawing fears that our national parks are no longer safe. New evidence reveals the confessed killer's tortured past—and his bizarre obsession with Bigfoot.

By Joshua Hammer

The charred section of woods near Crane Creek where the body of Joie Ruth Armstrong was found

In two and a half years of working in Yosemite, Kidd had helped rescue a number of hikers who had lost their way, but before he headed out of Yosemite Village in a convoy of four-wheel-drive vehicles toward the nearby hamlet of Foresta, he learned that this search was different. Five months earlier, three female tourists had vanished from their hotel room at the Cedar Lodge, near Yosemite's entrance, and had been found a month later, brutally murdered. Now, Kidd was told, another young woman had disappeared. Joie Ruth Armstrong, 26, an ebullient, strawberry-blond naturalist at the nearby Yosemite Institute and a casual acquaintance of Kidd's, had been planning to spend the weekend visiting friends in Sausalito. Armstrong had never shown up, and her friends feared something had happened to her.

Turning left off the main Yosemite highway, Kidd steered his Jeep down an unmarked road into Foresta: 30 cabins, inhabited mostly by park employees, scattered across the bottom of a wooded glen. A forest fire had roared through this area in 1990, and many of the pine trees here were still blackened and skeletal. For the past year, Armstrong had lived with her boyfriend, another Yosemite Institute naturalist, along with a second roommate, in a green cabin set by itself at the edge of a golden meadow. Rangers had cordoned off the area around Armstrong's secluded house with yellow police tape. Her white pickup truck was still parked in the driveway, packed with luggage for her trip.

Having decided to begin their search in the immediate area, the squad split up into five groups. Kidd and four other members of the search party walked the woods along Crane Creek. Beneath the hot noonday sun, they bushwhacked through dense brush, watching for rattlesnakes and looking for signs of the missing woman. After only a few minutes, they spotted footprints, broken saplings, trampled ferns and grass—all evidence of a recent run, perhaps a chase, through the woods. Suddenly one of the rangers noticed something metallic. "What's that?" he asked.

In a narrow ditch filled with three feet of still water, Kidd spotted a key ring glinting in the sun. Just beyond it lay something else: a woman's body, clad in a white T-shirt and blue jeans. As Kidd drew closer, he noticed something that nearly made him gag. "Jesus," he said, and ran back to the ranger in charge. "We have an 11-44," he said, using the police code for a dead body. "And she's been decapitated."

Photo: Timothy Archibald