Episode 1 Version 2.3 Edited 9-11-2024mp3

Dr. Aaron Duncan recounts the mysterious disappearance of his high school friend, David Sneddon, who went missing while hiking in China 20 years ago. While the Chinese and U.S. governments claim that David died while hiking, his family and many experts believe he was kidnapped and taken to North Korea. The podcast aims to investigate and gather evidence to uncover the truth about David's disappearance. Despite the complexity of the case, Dr. Duncan is determined to shed light on this geopolitical mystery and the family's pursuit of the truth. And I remember exactly where I was standing. I remember exactly what direction I was facing. And David's mom calls me up and says, yeah, this is, you know, Captain Madden. And I'm like, oh, what can I do for you? She's like, George, when is the, like, have you, you know, have you heard from David? And that was it. It didn't take more than that question to let me know, like, my heart thundered so fast. Everyone has a mystery in their life, an experience you can't explain, a person from your past you still wonder about, a coincidence that seems too coincidental, some question you can't answer, some event you can't understand, no matter how hard you try, you just can't seem to wrap your head around it. My name is Dr. Aaron Duncan, and this is my mystery, a mystery involving international espionage, kidnapping, members of the U.S. Congress, an NBA Hall of Famer, the Mormon Church, and North Korea's Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un. At the center is my high school friend and classmate, David Sneddon. He disappeared while hiking in China 20 years ago. He remains the only American in modern history to be lost in China and never found. While the Chinese and U.S. governments both insist that David died while hiking, his family, many experts, including members of the intelligence community and foreign governments, believe something different altogether. They believe David was kidnapped and taken to North Korea, where he remains alive and held against his will. Twenty years after his disappearance, David's story is still a pressing enigma, not just because he was a beloved family member and friend, but because surrounding the circumstances of his disappearance is a swirl of historical and political intrigue, a secret campaign of kidnappings, a modern-day Underground Railroad, classified documents, discussions of obligations of the U.S. government to its citizens, and the inner workings of one of the most oppressive and impenetrable regimes in the world. At each and every turn, another rabbit hole opens up in this case, but we're determined to investigate. This is Fading Trails, the David Sneddon story. Just remember, for a moment, the United States, that we live in a pretty privileged bubble, because citizens from countries all over the world have been kidnapped by North Korea for a number of reasons, including training spies that speak like native speakers. So I just say that because something doesn't happen very often, it doesn't mean that it's impossible. I know there was a woman that was teaching English to Kim Jong-un's kids or something, and that kind of shit is just, you know, that's just nature. The evidence about North Korea's involvement in David's disappearance is circumstantial, but I think it's very powerful, and I do believe that he was kidnapped. My explanation right now is that David was targeted. People were, you know, angry and disturbed to think that something like this might have happened, and we're not able to find a resolution to it, find out, you know, what's true. Today, I'm a professor of communication studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and director of the School of Speech and Debate team. But in 1998, I was a junior enrolled at Lincoln East High School in Lincoln, Nebraska, and one of my friends was a senior named David Sneddon. After graduation, David left for Utah in his Mormon mission. I lost track of him. Before social media, there was no way to passively follow the lives of all the people I knew from high school. As life moved forward, old classmates and friends receded into the past. That is until the mid-2000s, when I joined a new website called Facebook. Suddenly, updates were pouring in about people I hadn't seen for years. Updates about their life, their kids, their travels, and in some cases, their tragedies. In 2012, I came across a post shared by a friend about David. Back then, I didn't know that after high school, David had enrolled at BYU, lived in South Korea, or traveled to China. I also didn't know that in 2004, David had disappeared. The post came from a Facebook group created by David's family called Bring David Sneddon Home. I soon learned that David had already been missing for eight years, and had disappeared while hiking alone in China's southwestern Yunnan province. It was wild to think that somebody I knew and was once friends with had been gone for eight years. I didn't know. It left me feeling cold, a feeling I still have when I think about David. At the time of his disappearance, David was 24 years old with a lifetime of promise ahead of him. Different theories floated about what happened to him. He had an accident, or he ran off with a woman, or maybe he was arrested in China for religious reasons. The official report following the investigation by the Chinese government concluded that David had fallen from the hiking trail into the gorge below and died. But searches of the area did not turn up his body or evidence of a fall. It was as if he disappeared into thin air. I gathered from Facebook that David's family was adamant they didn't believe he died on the hiking trail, and that there were inconsistencies in the findings of the official report. I figured this was a natural reaction from a grieving family without closure. But like many others, I presumed David was dead. I read some of the posts in the Facebook group forging the seemingly unlikely theory that David had been abducted or made to disappear. Most of the posts included links to interviews with David's family members discussing their ideas, but as far as I could tell, there was no evidence to corroborate them. I felt for the Sneddons. Losing a child is an unfathomable tragedy. When I only began to truly comprehend when I became a father years later, I could understand how in the absence of a body and proof, they wanted to believe he was alive. But in the absence of evidence, I saw this story as a tragedy, not a mystery. Then, in 2014, ten years after David went missing, new articles and information started showing up in the group. This time it wasn't just David's family talking. Journalists, human rights advocates, and even foreign governments had all begun to cast out on the official report that David died while hiking in favor of a very different theory, that David was kidnapped and being held by the North Korean government. In the years that followed, more reports and evidence came from unnamed eyewitness sources who claimed David was alive in North Korea. The more I read, the more this impossible story seemed well possible. I haven't seen David for 20 years. After graduation, he and his family moved to Utah. Today, the family's investigation seems to have hit a wall. The case has gained little momentum in recent years. Still, I can't stop wondering what happened to him. It's hard to believe that the short kid with the big smile who sat next to me in class could be being held captive by a despotic leader in a foreign land. During the pandemic, I found myself thinking a lot about David's case. I messaged David's family on Facebook to ask about the status of the investigation. I started reaching out to journalists and politicians who were connected to the case. I sent public records requests to the State Department, the CIA, the Department of Defense, any other government agency I could think of. For the past four years, I've been wading through government documents, intelligence reports, and witness testimony, expert opinion, and putting it all together for this podcast. My goal with the podcast is to tell the story of David's disappearance and the investigation that followed. Building on the work of journalists, authors, the Sten family, I hope to gather the existing evidence and discuss what leads may still be able to point us to real answers. I want to be honest. I don't know what happened to David, and I don't know where this is going. It's highly unlikely that after 20 years we will find something new, and even less that we will find David dead or alive. But in this complex case, I don't know if anyone has ever compiled all the evidence, theories, and outside expert voices into one place to put all the pieces to this very large puzzle together. At times, I thought the story may have been too complex to tell properly, too circumstantial, too far away, too obscure by red tape. But I kept coming back to it because it's also the story of how a missing kid from my hometown has been swept up into a geopolitical mystery, and how a grieving family has tried to confront global superpowers to find the truth. It's difficult to say if this podcast will get us closer to that truth about David, but to understand what has fueled the mystery for two decades, we will talk to journalists, historians, politicians, government officials, as well as the people who knew and loved him. David and I are the same age. He was one grade ahead of me in high school. We had a couple of classes together, American Literature and Computer Applications, the latter a class that was as outdated then as it sounds now. We were friendly, but I wouldn't say we were close. He signed my junior yearbook, complained about our computer applications class, and mentioned a trip to St. Louis we planned but never took. I remember that David's family was big and that they were Mormon. Most of I remember that David was kind and smart and funny. When you imagine the quintessential image of a kind, Midwestern boy next door, David was that. If that sounds generic, I apologize. It's hard to summarize a young life in a few words. After high school, David embarked on a two-year mission trip like many Mormon men. He served his mission in Seoul, South Korea, where he became a fluent speaker of Korean and developed a passion for Asian culture and languages. David was fluent enough in Korean that the Mormon church extended his time in Seoul so he could stick around and help teach other incoming missionaries. When I started working on this podcast, one of the first people I wanted to track down was David's roommate in China, a man named George Bailey. He was the last person close to David to see him alive. I wanted to know what David was like at the time he disappeared, what he was planning, what he was thinking, how he seemed in the months and weeks beforehand. I asked George how he met David. David and I got to know each other the fall of 2003. At that point, I had been living in the foreign language student residency at Brigham Young University. David moved in. He was kind of fresh at Chinese, but I think he had already completed his first year. We hit it off. He's one of those guys who's just very easygoing. I'm kind of the same mold in that sense, not in other senses. We were definitely different people, but both of us were quite easygoing. We hit it off when he started talking about plans to go to China, and I started talking about plans to go to China. We thought like, oh, we should go together. When I spoke with George, it was easy to picture the funny, friendly kid I had known so many years ago. David just always had that kind of appealing personality, not just easygoing, but funny, witty, outgoing, very smart. He was a very quick learner on Chinese. I was a little bit jealous of that, actually. I think that he had already, from his missionary service, he had learned Korean because he had done missionary service for our church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in South Korea. In 2004, David and George decided to spend the summer in China. According to George, rather than sign up for a university program, they chose to travel to Beijing and immerse themselves in the culture and language of the people. They had already taken classes in Chinese and lived at BYU's Chinese Language House. At the time of their trip to Beijing, David was already learning and fairly fluent in Chinese. After the trip was over, David planned to see more of the country. George had initially agreed to go with him, but towards the end of the trip, he was running low on funds and decided it was time to go home. I said goodbye to him in Guilin. He went to the train station and I stayed in our hotel for a little bit longer because I had more time. And so then I went to Xiamen province, caught up with some friends there. I went back to Beijing, caught a plane, and went back to the United States. After parting ways with George, David continued on his journey towards Tiger Leaping Gorge. On August 10, 2004, he sent an email to his parents telling them he had arrived in a town named Lijiang in the western Yunnan province, and he was taking a bus that day to hike the Tiger Leaping Gorge. He was excited to be close to Tibet and, quote, I'm having a great time here, but nonetheless, I'm excited to come home. Remember this is 2004 when there were no smart phones with easy internet access and the average person didn't have access to a phone capable of international calling. David's only way to communicate with his family was through emailing them from internet cafes. Soon after, David set off for Tiger Leaping Gorge and then, well, no one really knows what happened. Chinese officials maintain that he never left the gorge, that his body was washed away by the raging rapids below. But David's family and many others believe he made it out of the gorge. Two weeks passed before David's family knew he was missing. Here's David's mother, Kathleen Sneddon, recalling the initial realization to Utah Public Radio in a 2017 interview. But those words meant to inspire hope would soon turn to be a foreshadowing of tragedy. Hoping to find a lead on David's whereabouts, Kathleen called George Bailey. I was in Vancouver, Washington. My parents had just moved there. And I was getting ready, I believe it was the next day or it may have been that day, who knows, but I was getting ready to get in my car and to drive back to BYU to start my master's degree. And his mom called me on the phone. I was in the basement office of my parents' home. And I remember exactly where I was standing. I remember exactly what direction I was facing. And David's mom calls me up and says, yeah, this is, you know, Kathleen Sneddon. And I'm like, hey, what can I do for you? She's like, George, when is the like, have you, you know, have you heard from David? And that was it. It didn't take more than that question to let me know. Like my heart thudded so fast because I knew I'm just like, that's not, parents don't call. So like it hadn't been a week or two or something like that since I'd seen David. Almost immediately, a search was underway in China. Local police investigate and communicate closely with U.S. consulate. Missing posters with David's face go up across the province. Search parties with more than 300 officers and dogs comb the area, while local authorities canvas the area, looking for any sign of David and speaking with other hikers and workers at popular tourist and hospitality establishments. David's family even posts a reward of 5,000 yuan for any information leading to David's whereabouts. At the same time as the Chinese were investigating, David's father and two of his brothers were rushing to get the necessary documents to travel to China. They spent two weeks searching the area. They walked the trail into Tiger Leaping Gorge that David walked, and they insisted it was easy, and that following would be difficult and unlikely. Wearing large photos of David placed on placards around their necks, they traveled with an interpreter arranged by the Mormon Church and looked for anyone who may have seen David. In total, they claimed to have found 12 eyewitnesses who interacted with David along the trail. Most importantly are the witnesses who claimed to have seen David in the town at the end of the trail, well past the gorge in the area where the Chinese officials theorized he fell and disappeared. It took months of intense pressure from the U.S. State Department to persuade the Chinese to interview these witnesses. But when they did, all 12 told a different story, and none of them could confirm they saw David. This seems like a big red flag to me. How could 12 people all say they saw someone and then suddenly not be sure? What was going on here? If David did make it out of the gorge, he would have needed some place to spend the night. But mysteriously, all the records for the Gus houses along the trail and at the end were confiscated by the Chinese government. And to our knowledge, no U.S. official or members of David's family was ever able to see them. Soon after, Chinese authorities concluded their investigation with the determination that David fell into Tiger Leaping Gorge and died. Despite not finding David's body or any proof that he fell, the U.S. government accepts this result. On October 15, 2004, a memo from the U.S. Consulate to Chinese officials obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, stated its belief that David had likely fallen into Jinsha River and died. The U.S. Consulate repeatedly thanked the Chinese officials for their efforts, thanked communication, and expressed hope that David's body would be found. It never was. Years went by without much progress. And in 2011, the Students receive a phone call that turns the case on its head, proposing a theory that sounds straight out of a spy novel. The phone call comes from a man named Chuck Downs, a former Pentagon official. Downs isn't just anyone. Following his work for the Pentagon for 20 years, he's also the head of an important non-government agency advocating for human rights in North Korea. He's the first person to suggest that David was kidnapped and taken to North Korea. And the theory, while not having much proof at the time, does have some logic to it. North Korea has a history of kidnapping foreign nationals that is well documented. And there are reports of North Korean operatives operating in China around the time of David's disappearance. But still, at this point, it's just a theory. Downs doesn't have any significant evidence or knowledge of David's case to prove that he is alive in North Korea. Downs is a credible expert, but the theory itself seems outlandish, the kind of thing you might find on a Reddit board filled with conspiracy theories. But over the next few years, things change. More sources come forward with claims about David being alive in North Korea, first in Japan and then South Korea. The information is primarily coming from non-governmental organizations or NGOs who work with escapees from North Korea and, through intermediaries, also have contacts with people living inside the regime. According to these sources, David is still alive in North Korea. He is being forced to teach English to North Korean spies, and according to at least one report, he is the personal English tutor of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. The sources claim to have specific information. They claim David's new Korean name is Yoon Bong-soon, that he's married to a woman named Kim In-ha, and they have two children, a boy and a girl. The Japanese government even goes so far as to tell the Wall Street Journal that they believe David's abduction is, quote, most probable. A theory that I once dismissed as fringe was now being debated in the halls of Congress. In 2016, the U.S. House and Senate both introduced a resolution urging the State Department to investigate the possibility David was kidnapped in a time when members of Congress seemingly agreed on nothing. This resolution passes unanimously. Finally, it seems as if something is going to happen in this case. And then nothing. As far as we know, the State Department found no new information, and it was unable to confirm the reports from the Japanese and South Korean sources. This is where we find ourselves today. A cold case that heated up a few years ago only to go ice cold again. U.S. and Chinese government stances really haven't changed in the past 20 years. They believe David fell and died. They might feel that all the important questions have been answered, but I don't. If anything, the more I looked at this case, the more I was overwhelmed by the questions I had. Questions like, is the trail along the gorge dangerous, like the Chinese officials contend, or easy, as David's family described? Have other people died or gone missing along the trail? If David died, what happened to his boss? Could he have fallen all the way into the river below? What about the evidence from the family's investigation that points to David making it out of the gorge alive? Was David's family overly optimistic when talking to these 12 witnesses? Or did those witnesses have reasons to change their mind? Why did the Chinese officials confiscate all the guesthouse logbooks along the trail and not share them? Is it really possible that the North Korean government could kidnap David and smuggle him out of the country? Why would they want to? Could an American be living in North Korea and the U.S. government not know? And what about these reports from Japan and South Korea saying David was alive and teaching English in North Korea? The U.S. government seemed quick to dismiss them, but why? I desperately want to find out what happened to David. But I don't know how a middle-aged dad in Nebraska working out of his basement is supposed to solve a mystery that began in a remote area of China 20 years ago, and today involves one of the most despotic and secretive regimes in the world. It's clear that I'm going to need help. A lot of help. Perhaps this is why it's taken me four years to make this podcast. This case is daunting. I'm not a journalist or an investigator. I'm a college speech and debate coach. I don't have government connections or vast resources, but I'm not without options. One thing being a speech coach has taught me is how to research, and another benefit is that in my 20 years of coaching, I've gotten to work with a lot of really exceptional, smart, and thoughtful people. Unlike big sports teams, speech and debate teams don't have huge budgets. We can't afford charter buses or private planes. So over the years, I've logged tens of thousands of miles, driving big university vans to exciting places like Peoria, Illinois, and Manhattan, Kansas. On these long van rides, we discussed a lot of topics, including this case. Two students on my team who took a particular interest in this case also happen to be two of the smartest and most tenacious people I know. Their names are Reese Ristow and Grace Sullivan Pfeiffer. They graduated in 2015 and 2016 from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln right when David's case was garnering renewed interest from the reports coming from South Korea and the congressional resolutions. We've kept in touch over the years, and when I mentioned I wanted to start a podcast about David and didn't know where to start, they left it the chance to help. They'll be with us on the season, both as voices on the podcast and behind the scenes, helping with research, writing, and to produce the podcast. Today, Reese works in public relations, but before then, he was a journalist. Yeah, so after graduating with a journalism degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I worked for a couple of different newspapers, including the Tulsa World and the Omaha World Herald. In the summer of 2016, while working at the Omaha World Herald, there was lots of chatter about David's case and his disappearance. At the time, it would have been 12 years later, and there was still a lot of interest in the fact that we had all these unanswered questions about what happened to David. So I ended up reaching out to his family to talk to them 12 years later. We did a couple of interviews, and it was fascinating to hear their perspectives and to understand the great work that they had put in to do their own investigation and try to get answers. So, Reese, what was it like talking to David's parents, Roy and Kathleen Sneddon? Yeah, they were very generous with their time, and it was clear that while they were heartbroken to have still had no answers about David's disappearance and what happened to him, they were also very driven and motivated to continue investigating, to continue answering questions, to try to get answers to what happened to their son. After graduation, Grace won a Fulbright scholarship that took her to Cyprus. She then spent time working education in Lebanon. After returning to the U.S., she became a language teacher here in Nebraska. So my earliest memories of this case are probably from some van ride between here and Salina, Kansas, which is pretty typical of how we got from speech tournaments to our back and forth from speech tournaments from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln every weekend. And so during that time, once we've run out of show tunes, that's usually when you start talking about stories, things you've experienced, people you've known, and so I'm sure at that point, I don't know if I have a specific memory of the first time you brought it up, Duncan, but I'm sure that that's where you first told Reese and I about this connection. I've been staring at the timeline for months. I realize the reason that that probably was on your mind is that 2014 is when the Chris Vogel piece in Outside Magazine first was published that sort of lended a new level of detail and insight to the theory that David did not, in fact, die on the hiking trail. So even at the time, it was kind of just a gripping hometown tragedy that I certainly thought of over the years. I think I told people about it over the years. And then since you reached out to me and Reese to help dig deeper into this case and try to do a further retelling of it, I mean, the fascination and the tragedy and all of the different stories that go into this story of the history and the region, it just feels like there's no end to how much digging you can do. You're right. And it was that 2014 story in Outside Magazine by the reporter Chris Vogel that really triggered this to the forefront of my mind. And for a while, it was kind of all I could talk about. And I'm sure that that was one of the things we discussed in those long band rides. I guess it's still something I always come back to. I also think my first question was, well, why are we telling this and who is it benefiting? And I accept that we're probably not going to find David in the course of these episodes more and more. It doesn't seem like anyone's put it together in this exact way. And I think that the chronology and the digging and the people we're talking to are answering questions and bringing up some new ones. Yeah, I think we can answer some questions, like do we think the U.S. government did its job? And I think these FOIA documents provide a really telling litany of ways that they took specific actions and give us hard facts to make that determination. Or do we think the Chinese were fully cooperative? And so I think you're right that we may not get to the big answer, but there are answers along the way that might be just as intriguing. Yeah, well, barring us being able to go to the gorge, I think the best way for us to get a sense of this and to give listeners a sense of this, I think we have to go to Chris Vogel. Because he's the one we know who has retraced the steps and, from a journalistic perspective, tried to piece together the events of what happened to David in the days and even hours before he disappeared. And the story of his encounter with people who seem like they still have a story to tell is one of the most gripping things that first brought me into the story. It seems like as the podcast moves forward, we have so many questions that maybe the way we want to handle this is devote each podcast to one or two main questions. So we start with, did David have fun in the gorge? And did anyone see him make it to the end of the gorge? Next time on Fading Trails, the David Smith story. And I was always keenly aware of a couple of men that I'd see everywhere I went. But I was attuned to the idea of certainly them being monitored and being around. And honestly, as soon as I mentioned, David said, and she turned ghostly pale and told us to leave at once. This is a very narrow gorge, very high, very rugged area. They have a lot of tourists who go through the area. But if somebody went off wandering over to check out the view from the edge and peered over the rocks, there's a good possibility that somebody could have, that there could have been an accident. I've spent a chunk of my life studying a situation where a whole bunch of people who were in North Korea or were rumored to be in North Korea really were in North Korea. And so, you know, sometimes the weirdest explanation is the truest one. It happens. This episode of Fading Trails is written by Grace Solomon Pfeiffer and Aaron Duncan. Executive Producers Reese Ristow, Grace Solomon Pfeiffer and Aaron Duncan. Music provided royalty free by Pixabay. Sources and information can be found in the episode shown.