EP 7: The Baffling Disappearance of Brenda Byman

[00:00:01] - Cassie
Welcome back to mishaps and mysteries. I'm your host, Cassie.

[00:00:05] - Nina
And I'm your host, Nina.

[00:00:08] - Cassie
Our podcast explores stories of misadventures in the wild landscapes of British Columbia, Canada. This episode covers particularly heavy topics, including violence involving minors, extreme physical abuse, and loss of life. We don't get into any quarry details, but please take care of yourself while listening. Episode seven, The Baffling Disappearance of Brenda Byman.

[00:00:42] - Nina
On Mother's Day in 1961, the Byman family experienced every parent's worst nightmare when their daughter went missing in the East Kootenai Hills. Born 03/10/1949, Brenda Byman was 12 years old in 1961.

[00:01:01] - Cassie
She was white with strawberry blonde hair. We read that she either had blue or brown eyes, so that's not super helpful. But the official RCMP dossier states that her eyes were blue. She weighed about ninety pounds at the time and was under five feet tall. Brenda lived in Dry Gulch, which in the nineteen sixties was a very small community between Radium Hot Springs and Invermere in the East Kootenays.

[00:01:28] - Cassie
But residents were all very connected to other surrounding small communities. Today, it's a scattering of homes, but it is largely known for its provincial park of the same name. Brenda's parents were Hilda and Ingvar Byman, and her four siblings were Audrey, Verna, Doreen, and Albert. She was very sweet. She was known to be so helpful with her baby brother Albert when he was born.

[00:01:53] - Cassie
She loved to show him off. She was described as a homebody who was shy and didn't have a lot of friends. Brenda was afraid of the dark.

[00:02:03] - Nina
This story takes place on the weekend of May sixth and seventh in 1961 in the area around the town of Wilmer, BC and the nearby Lake Enid, or at least it's generally believed that that's where it took place. See, what makes this story at Lake Enid really stick in our minds is the different versions of events that were as baffling sixty five years ago as they are today. It's a complicated mix of retellings rather than a linear story.

[00:02:31] - Cassie
So what we're gonna do is set the scene, tell you the most simple and widely shared version so that you have that as a basic understanding of the story, and we'll also discuss the search and rescue efforts when Brenda went missing. Then we're going to go back and revisit the story with more detail, each telling a different account from those involved in the story of the baffling Brenda Byman disappearance. Today's

[00:02:57] - Nina
case takes us to the Wilmer and Lake Enid region tucked into the Southern Rocky Mountain trench. Picture the terrain, small hills, and scattered lakes closer to town, squeezed between the towering Purcell Mountains to the West and the Rockies to the East. With warm summers and heavy winter snow stretching from November through March, it's classic Kootenai wilderness. Lake Enid itself is an idyllic getaway. A quiet lake surrounded by thick forest.

[00:03:28] - Nina
Popular for hiking, fishing, and camping. But as we know on mishaps and mysteries, idyllic places often carry heavy secrets. Brenda was down at her grandma's house in Wilmer for

[00:03:42] - Cassie
the weekend. Grandma's name was Evelyn. Brenda stayed overnight at the Barrett's house, who are neighbors of Evelyn, on the night of Saturday, May 6. The two Barrett sisters were around her age. She goes hiking the next day with four teens to Lake Enid.

[00:04:00] - Cassie
One of them is the older Barrett sister, Vivian. Two of the teens leave first. Brenda is still there with two boys. She realizes that she's going to be late to meet her family who are coming to pick her up. She heads in the wrong direction and the boys try to tell her, but she doesn't hear them.

[00:04:19] - Cassie
She's never seen again.

[00:04:22] - Nina
On the day of the hike, Brenda was said to be wearing a white blouse, gray and black slacks, a faded out purple and blue parka jacket. We understand it was kind of a dyed blue and purple and it had a fur lined pink hood. A yellow scarf with flowered four inch border and blue and white saddle type shoes, size six. Half an hour ish later after the supposed last sighting of Brenda by the boys, Brenda's uncle Ron came across the boys as her family was already looking for her. They told him she was behind them going in the wrong direction, but they cannot find her.

[00:04:59] - Nina
Sniffer dogs, hundreds of searchers, search planes, scoured the area for sixteen days. It was cold at night. The search was very intense and thorough. The weather was often cold with heavy rain.

[00:05:12] - Cassie
Girl's shoes were found, but they weren't hers. Hunting knives and weapons too. A skull from a previous missing person's case from the nineteen thirties was even uncovered. His name was Konstantin Kostalevskiy. He was an engineer who disappeared near Lake Windermere in November 1931, and he had left a note saying, quote, he was going off to die in the mountains, end quote.

[00:05:39] - Cassie
That's how thorough the search was that another missing person was found. And that was something. Some answers were found for someone's family. That mattered. But for the Byman, there were no clues.

[00:05:54] - Cassie
Nothing.

[00:05:56] - Nina
The family stayed at grandma Evelyn's house and the men would go out and search all the time for Brenda for weeks. Lake Enid was dredged, and we saw in our research that either another nearby lake, Munn Lake or the Columbia, or both were dredged. One thing to note is I couldn't find Munn Lake on Google Maps. Wetlands and creeks were searched regularly in the year after her disappearance. Not a single piece of evidence surfaced.

[00:06:30] - Cassie
So as promised, let's now go through in detail the versions of what happened. I'll tell you one, and Nina will tell you the other. So make sure to pay close attention. Here we go. Brenda was staying down in Wilmer with her grandmother Evelyn for the weekend.

[00:06:49] - Cassie
She was invited over by the neighbor kids, the Barrett's, to play. They were having a game of cards and needed another person. Brenda's grandma thought that this would be nice for her, so she let her go. One of the Barrett daughters later called back and asked if Brenda could stay the night. Grandma said yes.

[00:07:09] - Cassie
Note, it wasn't a call from Brenda.

[00:07:13] - Nina
The sleepover was always planned between Brenda and Connie, the younger of the Barrett sisters at age 11. That's a big reason Brenda was down in Wilmer at her grandma's.

[00:07:25] - Cassie
The next day, Brenda was invited on a hike with Connie Barrett's older sister Vivian and three boys from town to go to Lake Enid and go swimming, which personally seems cold in early May for me, but it is a small lake. So the makeup of the hiking group was Vivian Barrett, 15. Edward Carson, 15. John Carson, 17. He and Edward were brothers.

[00:07:52] - Cassie
And Elwood Goldline, 13. And of course, Brenda. We know that at about 02:30PM, Vivian and Edward left the group. They were dating. Three remained, Brenda, John, and Elwood.

[00:08:07] - Cassie
At about 04:30PM, Brenda realized that she would be late to meet her family as they were coming from Dry Gulch to pick her up, and all to go out for a mother's day dinner. Brenda left the boys and they called her to tell her that she was going in the wrong direction, but she didn't hear them. They then heard voices and the slamming of a car door in her direction.

[00:08:28] - Nina
John, who was 17, admitted to the police that he had sex with her. He said it wasn't the first time. He said that he asked if Elwood could too. She said no and ran away from the boys. They chased her but lost sight of her East of Lake Enid.

[00:08:44] - Nina
That is all incredibly upsetting to hear and to think of shy young Brenda probably quite scared in this situation. See, John would go on to claim that it was consensual, but this doesn't sit well with many. Brenda was just 12 years old, incredibly shy. She was well under the age of consent, and this is a big age gap at that age. Absolutely gross, and it's obvious he preyed on her.

[00:09:09] - Nina
It was absolutely a power imbalance and SA. We can't actually say the word out, so we just hyphenated it there.

[00:09:18] - Cassie
Yeah. That definitely makes my stomach turn. In the recountings, the boys insisted that she was walking in the wrong direction. And there's four versions of this moment. First, she ignored them.

[00:09:33] - Nina
She was running away from them, like in the version I just shared.

[00:09:36] - Cassie
She didn't hear them say she was going the wrong way.

[00:09:40] - Nina
She told him to shut up and was storming away, but her family insists she would never talk like that. She was so very shy, she could hardly look someone in the eye,

[00:09:48] - Cassie
let alone yell at them to shut up. Police focused on John and Elwood. John was held in a cell and would be taken out to join the search party. Elwood too was forced to search, and they would rough them up and shove them at holes and dens and ask if that's where they had buried Brenda. Vivian was never questioned.

[00:10:09] - Cassie
She apparently always had a note from a doctor that said she could not be interviewed regarding Brenda Byman.

[00:10:15] - Nina
Others say that Vivian was questioned without her parents consent in the back of a police car. And that's all we know from those early days in Brenda's disappearance. Let's discuss the most prominent theories of what happened to Brenda. And then we'll tell you about the aftermath of this case. The first theory is that she did wander off and got lost and succumbed to the elements.

[00:10:38] - Nina
Eventually, nature would have taken over. But wouldn't she have been found? Remember, the search was incredibly thorough. Second, she did wander off and was attacked by an animal. But animals don't hide evidence, And there would have been a scattering of her effects like ripped clothing and also blood.

[00:10:55] - Cassie
Third, that she did wander off and that she was picked up by someone. This would explain why no evidence would ever be found. Interestingly, a light blue sedan or station wagon with a white top was reported on side roads near Lake Enid in the days after her disappearance with a man driving and a girl in the passenger seat. Another theory, John and Elwood or both or even all four of the teens killed Brenda, perhaps even as an accident and hid the body. See, a big part of suspicion is why John admitted to police about what he called sex and what we'll call SA.

[00:11:38] - Cassie
They figure it's because he worried about Brenda being found and there being evidence of the assault. But if the boys had killed Brenda, how did they hide her body so well? Did the parents help cover it up? According to one of the very experienced trackers, he insisted that there were no tracks in the area East of Lake Enid. The tracker said that the morning following Brenda going missing, quote, the shake and sawdust pile in Barbara's farm was burning.

[00:12:08] - Cassie
Barbara's farm to our understanding was what you would walk through if going from Wilmer to Lake Enid. And at dawn that morning, one of the Carson brothers and their mom were at the search meeting point, and the pile was later a big fire. And the tracker went to the fire and noted a bunch of shoe tracks around it. The fire apparently always bothered the tracker.

[00:12:31] - Nina
The Carson and Barrett family said their theory was that Inger, Brenda's dad, looked for Brenda, found her, and killed her out of rage. But I don't know what kind of reasoning or evidence they did have for this. To paint the father of a missing daughter like this seems particularly cruel. And finally, Brenda never went to La Quinta. She was killed or died by accident at the Barrett home.

[00:12:56] - Nina
This was Brenda's sister's theory because Brenda never asked her grandma if she could go on a hike, and I guess I wasn't like her. This means that all four kids and the Barrett parents would have had to be lying and all kept a secret for decades.

[00:13:10] - Cassie
So those are all the different theories on Brenda's disappearance. To this day, we still don't have any solid answers. Tensions with the families were high, and sixty five years later, they remain so. In her book, Old Case BC, Eve Lazarus titled the chapter on Brenda, a town divided, the search for Brenda Byman. And we feel that that title really captures the legacy of Brenda's disappearance on this small East Kootenai's community.

[00:13:43] - Cassie
Remember that this was and is a small town. Yes. While Brenda lived in Dry Gulch, it's very close and everyone knew everyone around here. Brenda's aunt Mary and Ina Barrett, Connie and Vivian's mom, were longtime friends. Some believe that the Barrett family had covered up Brenda's death and that maybe even Brenda had never been out on the hike.

[00:14:07] - Cassie
So her aunt Mary went to the Barrett house and searched the wood furnace ashes for bone fragments after the disappearance. Of course, the friendship was over after that.

[00:14:17] - Nina
The Byman family also went to the Carson house and searched the deep freeze. The three men involved were polygraphed thirty years later, but that led nowhere. John and Elwood kept trying to clear their names. They paid for an excavation at the Byman home because, like we said, their theory was that Brenda's dad, Ingvar, killed her and said Brenda must be there. Forty years after her disappearance, a man came forward and said when he was a kid playing in the area, he and a friend came across skeletal remains.

[00:14:49] - Nina
But they weren't supposed to be out there, so they agreed to keep it a secret. But as a grown man, he realized the importance of this. Of course, by then, he couldn't remember any specifics as to where

[00:15:01] - Cassie
it was. Brenda's family never gave up searching for her. In 1981, her dad Ingvar died young at age 59. Her mother died in 2016 at the age of 89. Her siblings have continued to look for her and speak out.

[00:15:19] - Cassie
The brother she absolutely adored, Albert, said he lived with lifelong anxiety because of Brenda's disappearance. But everyone in this story is aging. Of those fourteens on the hike that day in 1961, most have passed away. If Brenda had lived, she would be 77 years old today.

[00:15:38] - Nina
Time for our safety discussions. This was a small close lived community. Everyone knew everyone. Brenda's family had no reason not to believe she was safe that weekend. Sure.

[00:15:49] - Nina
We can say this was a different time and a different place, but let's share some tips for child safety from this story. Teach your kids to stay together in a group. Teach them about consent and body safety. Be a safe place for them to come to you. Only have them stay with people you absolutely trust and of course, not to accept rides from just anyone.

[00:16:09] - Nina
Though like we say in Brenda's case, there was no reason that if someone picked her up, that she didn't already know them. And then if something else happened to her, there was no reason she wouldn't have been safe at the Beards house or out for a hike at Lake Enid.

[00:16:23] - Cassie
We can't give up hope on finding out what happened to Brenda. There's advances in technology that are making huge leaps. There's the National Center for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains that is always working to find matches. Maybe there will be a match one day, and you never know if someone may stumble upon a clue. We've put the written description of what Brenda was wearing in our show notes so that you can review to keep an eye out.

[00:16:51] - Cassie
Brenda could be somewhere in the Wilmer region, or if the theory that she was abducted by Carr is true, she could be anywhere. So always keep your eyes peeled. As the four other teens grew up, they each left the area. They were haunted by Brenda's disappearance for the rest of their lives. But they got to have careers and families.

[00:17:15] - Cassie
If they were guilty of her disappearance, they stole that kind of life from Brenda. If not guilty, then they lived with the tragedy of being the last people to see a little girl that never came home. And they spent their whole lives in a serious ongoing cloud of suspicion. Most of them moved away from the East Kootenays because of this. Secrets can be uncovered at any time, and we can only hope that one day the truth of what happened to Brenda is revealed so that her surviving family members can get closure.

[00:17:46] - Nina
If you have any information on Brenda's disappearance, reach out to the Columbia Valley RCMP detachment at (250) 342-9292 or by calling Crime Stoppers at 180222 or visiting bccrimestoppers.com. Thanks for joining us for this episode. You can reach out to us at info@mishapsandmysteries.ca. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe and leave us a rating and a review. It really helps new people find us.

[00:18:19] - Nina
And also, please share with your friends. Be safe and never stop exploring.