The Last Hike of David Gimelfarb

For an idealistic Chicago man,
it was supposed to be one last adventure
before returning to graduate school.
He entered the Costa Rican
jungle here—and vanished.
The Last Hike of
David Gimelfarb
By Dave Seminara // Photography by DaniEl Shea
The bridge
to Las Pailas
Rincón de la Vieja National Park is a vast
wonderland filled with ancient trees, postcard-perfect waterfalls, and bubbling geothermal mud pits that can reach a skinscorching 200 degrees. Visitors flock here for the opportunity
to hike near an active volcano, which is often obscured by cloud
cover, lending the park a mysterious aura. Legend has it the volcano’s peak is haunted by an old witch who, in a Romeo and Juliet–style legend, became a recluse after her disapproving father threw her lover into the crater.
Listed as a “not to miss” site in The Rough Guide to Costa Rica, Rincón is exactly
the kind of lush, tropical destination that has helped establish the Central American
Gimelfarb in 2008
country as the ecotourism capital of the world. But despite the park’s wide appeal,
locals will tell you that it is unquestionably wild. Pumas, jaguars, and at least four
varieties of poisonous snakes lurk deep in the jungle. Some of the labyrinthine trails aren’t particularly well marked, and drug traffickers have been known to use them to smuggle narcotics into Nicaragua, just 25 miles to the north. And a section of the park was
quietly closed for several days in 2009 and again in 2012 after hikers were robbed at machete point.
with his parents, Roma and Luda Gimelfarb, a pair of Russian
émigrés who had settled in Highland Park and whose lives
had been shattered by the disappearance of their only child.
They had the hollow look and melancholy aura of souls who
had survived a terrible ordeal but still hadn’t recovered.
I was struck by the fact that they hadn’t given up hope. “We
believe David is alive,” said Roma, 66, his eyes searching mine
to gauge a reaction.
They told me that there continued to be sightings of a man
who resembled their slight, red-headed son. The latest report
had come last October from Limón, on Costa Rica’s Caribbean
coast, a five-hour drive from the national park. A man who
was dirty, disoriented, and unable to speak had walked into
a minimart there and gestured that he needed something to
drink. Recognizing him from a newscast they’d seen on TV
about David’s disappearance, a family took the stranger to a
local police station. But after a brief interview, the police let
him go without even snapping a photograph. The minimart’s
owners insisted that the man was the missing American hiker.
Was this David Gimelfarb? Or just another false glimmer of
hope for two grief-stricken parents
desperate for good news?
Luda and Roma Gimelfarb near
their Highland Park home
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THE SEARCH FOR ANSWERS
begins at the Hacienda Guachipelín,
a rustic 54-room motel-style complex
located on the lonely road that leads
to Rincón de la Vieja. I arrived after
dark this past February, making it
through the motel’s security checkpoint just before the guard went
home for the night. I was assigned
room 17, next door to the one where
David Gimelfarb had stayed.
He had been traveling alone, a last
hurrah before starting his fourth year
of graduate school. A doctoral student
at the Adler School of Professional
Psychology in Chicago, he volunteered as a therapist for the mentally
ill at a community health center on
the West Side, and he hoped to make
Hacienda Guachipelín,
where the hiker stayed
photograph: (TOP) COURTESY OF GIMELFARB FAMILY
Some 300 visitors from all over the globe were there on
August 11, 2009, the day a 28-year-old graduate student from
Chicago arrived. He walked into the visitors’ information hut
just before 10 a.m. and scribbled his name—David Gimelfarb—
into the guest book. He told the ranger in Spanish that he intended to take an easy three-kilometer loop called Las Pailas
(the Cauldrons), after the steaming pots that pepper the path.
Then the young man walked out of the hut, up and over a
rickety footbridge spanning the cool waters of the Colorado
River, and vanished.
Nearly four years later, I stumbled across a report about
the disappearance while researching a travel story about the
Rincón area. David’s tale resonated with me because I spent
much of my twenties traveling the world solo, often hiking
in wild places. And he had lived in Wrigleyville, just blocks
from the apartment I shared with friends when I was his age.
I couldn’t shake the chilling sense that what had happened to
the young hiker could easily have happened to me.
Three weeks before I left for Costa Rica, I drove up to the
Walker Bros. Original Pancake House in Wilmette to meet
that kind of work his career. Counseling was rewarding but
stressful, and David’s parents worried that he was having a
hard time coping with the recent loss of his beloved Russian
grandmother, Valentina, who had cared for him from birth
to kindergarten.
The trip had been hastily arranged only a few days before
David was to leave. One of Luda’s coworkers at Kraft Foods,
where she worked as a chemist, had recommended Costa Rica.
It seemed perfect for David, who was fluent in Spanish, liked
to hike, and needed to unwind. He was introverted, even a little
socially awkward at times, and he told his adviser at Adler that
the trip would be a way to build his confidence. “I told him I
worried about him,” recalls Janna Henning, a coordinator of
the school’s traumatic stress psychology program. “But he said
that he’d traveled alone before and would be fine.”
David had been shy and reserved since he was a child. When
the Russian-speaking boy had started kindergarten at Braeside
in Highland Park, his English had been poor. That early experience of feeling like an outsider had stayed with his son, says
Roma, a chemical engineer at Morton Salt.
But friends say that David came out of his shell at Beloit
College in Wisconsin, where he joined a fraternity, Phi Kappa
Psi. His wry sense of humor and enthusiasm for techno helped
him make friends, and though he never had a serious girlfriend, he wasn’t too shy to ask women out. “He had this theory
he called ‘positivity,’ ” explains Ben Clore, a fraternity brother.
“He’d give us these sermons about living positively and said
you could have a better outlook on life.”
Unlike most young men his age, David wasn’t timid about
baring his soul to his friends or voicing his questions about
death, love, and the meaning of life. In a private Facebook message he posted just 13 days before he departed for Costa Rica,
he wrote that he feared his own mortality and was grappling
with how to confront his future. “Life is finite,” he wrote. “We
must love it no matter what, so we can be satisfied with it when
we look back on it.”
Perhaps this quest to live a memorable life was what had inspired a recent case of wanderlust. In the past year, David had
traveled to Hawaii by himself to hike, and in his apartment he
kept a copy of the book Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to
the Art of Long-Term World Travel, which encourages the intrepid to take root and dig deep into local cultures.
But David must have known the risks of adventuring alone.
Just before his senior year at Beloit, one of his fraternity brothers, David Byrd-Felker, who was from Madison, disappeared in
southern Ecuador, likely while hiking by himself in a national
park. No one can recall specifically how the disappearance affected Gimelfarb emotionally, but his college roommate, Ian
Thomson, who is now an attorney in Milwaukee, says he can’t
help wondering if David considered his fraternity brother’s fate
when he decided to visit the park that morning in Costa Rica.
THE DAY I SET OUT TO RETRACE DAVID GIMELFARB’S
footsteps was warm and dry, and Rincón de la Vieja’s canopy of
majestic, twisting trees provided relief from the morning sun.
But following the same trail that he had supposedly hiked, I
had an uneasy feeling. It had started the night I checked into
the motel, and it persisted the next morning as I explored the
park. I finished the hike in less than two hours and walked
back toward the information hut to talk to the park’s rangers.
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The first ranger I spoke to was friendly enough—until I
pulled out the missing-person flier with David’s picture. Seeing his face, the ranger threw his hands up over his shoulders
and bolted. “I don’t know anything,” he said, quickening his
pace as I tried to follow.
Inside the hut, a second ranger, who was responsible for registering visitors, didn’t have the luxury of physically ducking my
questions. When I mentioned that some private guides had told
me there had been robberies in the park, he said there had been
“more than a few” but declined to elaborate. Later, Alejandro
Masís Cuevillas, the director of the provincial parks authority,
confirmed that sections of the park had been closed in 2009 and
again in 2012; he said the robberies had all been “nonviolent.”
DAVID GIMELFARB appeared contemplative,
perhaps a little sad, the morning he vanished, according to a
motel employee. He ate breakfast alone in the outdoor dining
room around 9 a.m., then left to make the five-kilometer drive
to Rincón de la Vieja in his rental car.
Something of a mama’s boy, he had called his parents the day
before, just like he did every day in Chicago. David told them
how he had met a girl at a nearby beach and hoped to rendezvous with her later. When his mother pressed for details—was
she a local?—he would only offer that she “seemed very nice.”
He told Luda he planned to hike the national park the following morning and complained that Hacienda Guachipelín was
too quiet and far from the beaches and the action. He intimated that he might not stay there for the entire six-day trip.
The evening of the hike, Luda grew anxious when she did
not hear from her son. At 10 p.m., she called his motel. He did
not answer.
The Rincón de la Vieja
ranger station
Gimelfarb’s signature in
the park visitor log
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The next morning, his mother tried the motel again. When
the front desk clerk said that David still wasn’t answering the
phone, his mother insisted that someone go inside his room
and check on him. “I told them, ‘If you don’t go in, I’m going
to call the police, and if anything happens to my son, you are
responsible,’ ” she says, still aggrieved by the memory.
Hours passed. That night, José Tomás Batalla, the owner of
the motel, called the Gimelfarbs. David, he said, hadn’t slept in
his bed the previous night. His suitcase was still in the room,
and his rental car had been found in the lot of the national park.
“My heart sank when he said that,” recalls Roma, who went
online and booked himself and his wife flights to Costa Rica.
By the time Luda and Roma arrived at the Liberia airport
on Thursday, August 13, several Red Cross volunteers were already searching Rincón on foot. So they headed straight to the
Hacienda Guachipelín, where the manager, Mateo Fournier
Palma, unlocked room 16 and let them in. (They would later
learn that Palma had already searched the room with two other witnesses who were never identified.)
The bed had been made, and David’s suitcase was still there.
Two books of poetry—by Pablo Neruda and Federico García
Lorca—were on a nightstand next to the bed. Palma opened
the room safe. Inside, the concerned parents found their son’s
passport, $600 of the $800 his father had given him in cash for
the trip, and his cell phone, which contained a few photos of a
beach he had visited the day before. “That didn’t make sense to
us,” Roma says. “Why bring so many things with you on a hike
but not the cell phone? There was no reception in the area, but
he always used it to tell time.”
Judging from the items that were missing, they determined
that David had likely carried with him his North Face backpack and his wallet, in which would have been his driver’s license, a few credit cards, and about $100. Missing, too, were
his journal and an inexpensive point-and-shoot camera.
Fearing that David had gotten lost or injured in the park,
they headed to Rincón to meet with rangers and Red Cross
volunteers, whose numbers would swell into the hundreds
that weekend. Luda’s boss at Kraft organized a committee
to hire a professional search-and-rescue team, while David’s
friends in Chicago started a Facebook group, Help Find David
Gimelfarb, which attracted more than 1,000 members in the
first days.
After Luda approached the U.S. Embassy in San José and
received a noncommittal response—“They said, more or less,
that he came here on his own,” she recalls, “so basically we
are on our own”—David’s friends in Chicago mobilized and
wrote letters to Mark Kirk, who was then an Illinois congressman, and other officials, urging them to pressure the embassy
to help find the missing American hiker. (In a written statement, John Whiteley, a State Department spokesman based
in Washington, D.C., said that the effort was “thorough and
professional” and emphasized that the U.S. government does
not have dedicated search-and-rescue personnel stationed at
embassies overseas.)
Over the next few days, hundreds of friends and classmates
staged demonstrations on the young man’s behalf at Daley Plaza
and in front of Chicago news stations. On August 19, the U.S.
military dispatched two helicopters with infrared sensors and
more than a dozen uniformed soldiers from Soto Cano Air Base
in Honduras to scour the park alongside a private helicopter pilot hired by the Gimelfarbs.
A sweeping view of the
34,800-acre national
park and its volcano
The effort lasted three days. Since Rincón de la Vieja opened
in 1972, other hikers had gotten lost there, but all had eventually been found. A visitor had even fallen off one of the volcano’s
craters and spent two nights clinging to a ledge before being
rescued by a helicopter.
The team considered that David had perhaps changed his
mind and, instead of taking the three-kilometer trail, attempted the more arduous journey up to the crater. That risky hike,
now off-limits because of recent seismic activity, takes eight
hours roundtrip. In this region, the sun sets at around 6 p.m.
in August, so it would have been inadvisable for the young
American to start out on the trail as late as 10 a.m.
The helicopters searched the crater extensively, and Roma
himself made the grueling ascent with a park ranger. The
wind was so fierce at the summit that they had to tie a rope
around each other’s waists to stay on their feet. Meanwhile,
Luda visited every hospital and jail in the area but found
no clues. She even consulted a series of psychics, one of
whom shared a dark vision: “He’s in the volcano. Go and live
your life.”
THE GIMELFARBS SPENT COUNTLESS sleepless
nights pondering what other misfortunes could have possibly
befallen their son. Had he been attacked by a jaguar or bitten
by a snake? Investigators all but ruled out those theories after
no trace of his remains was found.
His parents’ best hope was that David had experienced some
sort of mental breakdown and was perhaps wandering in a
fugue state, which can occur when a person cannot process a
stressful situation and forgets his identity. This temporary amnesia could have been triggered by a physical injury, such as a
fall or a concussion.
A local resident brought Luda a megaphone, and the 63-yearold woman spent several days hiking the serpentine trails calling her son’s name. “We thought that if he had gone through
Geothermal mud pots
line the trails.
some sort of traumatic experience, like a breakdown, that
hearing my voice would be soothing to him,” she recalls.
Larry Maucieri, a neuropsychologist who was one of David’s professors at Adler, says that the fugue state scenario is
highly unlikely—that such events are so rare they usually become the subject of academic studies. “One-in-a-million-type
cases,” he explains.
The Gimelfarbs established a $10,000 reward (later upped to
$100,000) and distributed thousands of fliers bearing a photo
of David, along with a computer simulation of what he’d look
like with long hair and a beard. With the money serving as an
incentive, leads began to trickle in. One farmer said that he
saw a disheveled hiker who, when confronted, had darted into
the forest.
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The family contacted Sarah Platts, a
professional dog handler from Virginia,
who in late September volunteered to
fly to Costa Rica with her eight-year-old
German shorthaired pointer, Jack, to join
the search effort. Jack showed no interest in the trail to the volcano but seemed
to pick up David’s scent near where the
farmer had reported seeing the man flee.
(The trail went cold when Jack fell into
one of the volcanic mud pots and burned
a paw.) Another dog team they hired to
sniff for dead bodies found no evidence
of a corpse in the park.
THE
GIMELFARBS
COULDN’T
ignore a darker possibility: that their
son had been the victim of a robbery—or
worse. While the vast majority of the two
million tourists who visit Costa Rica annually return home safely, crime is a serious concern. (The country of 4.7 million
reported 525 homicides in 2009, giving
it a per capita murder rate lower than
Chicago, which reported 459 that year.)
In the four years since David vanished, at least eight foreigners have
gone missing in Costa Rica, and 19 U.S.
citizens have been murdered there since
2011. (In May 2011, the British Home Office issued a travel warning flagging the
rising crime rate in the country.) Only
two of the missing-person cases have
been resolved: In 2011, about a year after a pair of Austrian expats disappeared
in the remote Osa Peninsula, their bodies were found on a beach there. Investigators determined that they had been
robbed and bludgeoned to death.
What if David had seen something in
the park that he wasn’t supposed to?
Drug smugglers, maybe. Or poachers.
Perhaps he had left the park, headed
back toward the motel, and somewhere
along the way fallen victim to a con. One
tip came in that the American hiker—
who friends say did not use alcohol or
drugs—had been spotted the evening after the hike at a bar in Liberia, about 30
minutes from the motel. “It turned out
to be a whorehouse,” says his mother,
who went herself to investigate. “But I
showed all the girls his photo and nobody remembered him.”
What if he had been robbed on the way
back to the motel? Or abducted and his
organs harvested? It sounds far-fetched,
but the black market for donor organs
is a growing problem in Costa Rica and
Nicaragua (and was the subject of an investigation by the Mexican newspaper El
Universal earlier this year).
The list of frightening scenarios was
endless. To investigate every credible
one, the Gimelfarbs hired four private
detectives, both in Costa Rica and back in
the States. Vugar Askerli, a former military intelligence officer from Azerbaijan,
spent a month in Central America looking for David and came away believing
that the young man left the park and was
killed near the motel.
Initially, three motel employees
had claimed that they saw the American back at the Hacienda Guachipelín
around 2 p.m. the day he vanished. (Two
employees later changed their stories.)
Given that information, Askerli supposes that the perpetrator drove the
car back to the park to make it look like
David went missing while hiking. “It
would be easy to cover up a crime like
this in that area,” contends the investigator. “The rivers are filled with crocodiles. No one would ever find the body.”
Another private investigator suspects
that David got (continued on page 105)
The Last Hike
(continued from page 96) lost after sunset, wandered onto private property on
the edge of the park, and was mistaken
for a poacher or a thief. He could have
been shot dead and his body disposed of,
either in the jungle or in a river.
The Organismo de Investigación
Judicial—Costa Rica’s equivalent of
the FBI—conducted its own investigation. Agents interviewed motel employees and park rangers but, according to
the final report, failed to talk to other
Hacienda Guachipelín guests or hikers
in the Rincón area.
What’s more, they did not conduct a
forensic search of David’s room or rental
car. (The lead investigator on the case,
Luis Guillermo Fonseca, agreed to answer questions but never did so, despite
repeated requests.)
On November 6, 2009, the OIJ closed
its investigation without a conclusion.
Translated into English, the report ends
by saying: “All our efforts have come
up empty.”
“We just want a complete and thorough
investigation,” says Roma, who estimates
that he and his wife have spent $300,000
on their search. “We’ve never had that.”
TICOS, AS COSTA RICANS ARE
called, can be fiercely patriotic. And they
don’t like to consider the possibility that
something bad happened to a tourist
in their country. Sitting at a table in his
motel’s open-air restaurant with the panoramic view of the verdant, mountainous
landscape behind him, José Tomás Batalla,
the fit, deeply tanned Costa Rican who
owns Hacienda Guachipelín, waves the
crime theory away. “You can get mugged
anywhere,” he says when I ask about
the machete attacks in the park. “Rome,
Amsterdam, Paris—even Chicago. The
Gimelfarbs are channeling their grief
against Costa Rica, trying to link every
robbery that occurs to their son.”
Batalla believes that David is alive and
living the life of a hermit somewhere,
perhaps even on a Nicaraguan beach not
far from the park. (Neither Nicaragua
nor Costa Rica strictly enforce their immigration laws, so foreigners can easily
live in the area without a visa.)
“A lot of people assumed that he was running away from something in the States,
trying to hide or escape,” said Laurens
Alvarado Hidalgo, a guide I met at Rincón.
Nicaragua is a cheaper alternative to
Costa Rica, so if David had wanted to disappear, it would be a logical option.
Intrigued by a lead from a local man
who told OIJ investigators that he
had smuggled someone who matched
David’s description across the border, I
showed the missing-person flier to dozens of people at hostels and expat hangouts in San Juan del Sur and Granada.
I encountered nothing but curiosity
or indifference.
Rob Thomas, a 50-something Vermont
native who moved to San Juan del Sur
in 2006 to open a café, smiled when I
asked him if David looked familiar. “I
can’t say I remember the face,” he said,
studying the flier. “But a lot of people
come down here to get lost.”
David’s closest friend from Adler,
Christine Shaw, scoffs at the notion that
her classmate traveled to Costa Rica to
fall off the grid. The night before he left,
she says, he called to confirm dinner
plans they’d made for the Sunday night
after his return.
For a long time, she was certain that
her friend was still alive. Now, she says,
her voice cracking, it is “just too hard for
me to keep believing.”
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Ben Clore, the fraternity brother, says
that, early on, he thought it possible that
David had decided to live in the forest
for a while. But he now fears the worst.
“He was a free spirit,” says Clore. “I
could see him disappearing for a year,
maybe. But four? No. As time goes on,
that theory becomes less realistic.”
Then there’s Sean Curran, a detective with the Highland Park Police
Department, who was brought on to
the case when the Gimelfarbs reported
their son missing to U.S. authorities.
(The FBI typically takes on overseas
missing-person cases only if the host
country requests agency assistance.)
After combing through David’s belongings, reading his journals, talking to his
friends and teachers, and examining his
financial situation, Curran says there is
little evidence that would point to a conscious decision to disappear.
Only two clues give him pause: the
copy of Vagabonding, which is the book
about long-term travel that he found in
David’s apartment, and a series of maps
he discovered during a search of the
graduate student’s laptop. On the night
before David was to leave for Costa Rica,
he had examined maps of Nicaragua,
Honduras, Colombia, Peru, and Chile—a
curious detail, since his trip was to last
only six days.
But David’s bank account was not
touched after he left the United States,
and he never applied for any additional
credit cards. And his adviser at Adler
provided a psychological profile attesting to the fact that the young man
seemed mentally strong and highly unlikely to abandon his family and clients.
Sitting in a conference room at the police department on a gloomy day in late
April, Curran, a father himself, said the
case remains troubling. “I don’t think he
intentionally did this to his parents.”
I SPENT THE BETTER PART OF
six months trying to untangle the mystery
of what happened to David Gimelfarb. I
interviewed dozens of friends and people
familiar with the case, sifted through reports from investigators, and spent hours
with his parents. In the end, I don’t believe
that this young man chose to disappear.
But he may have been more emotionally fragile than anyone realized. In the
confessional he penned on Facebook two
weeks before his trip, David said that he
sometimes loved the “adventure of being
single” but also suffered through “excr-
ciating loneliness.” And that the experience of losing his grandmother brought
the idea of his own mortality closer. “I will
die someday,” he wrote. “There is no way
to know what the future holds, and it really never comes exactly as we envision it.”
The odds are that David Gimelfarb is
dead. But we may never know for sure.
Mike Byrd and Maggie Felker, the parents of David Byrd-Felker, the other
missing Phi Kappa Psi, ultimately came
to peace with the idea that they’ll likely
never find out what happened to their
son. “Western society is enamored with
the concept of closure,” says Byrd, who
founded David’s Educational Opportunity
Fund to help young Ecuadorians go to
school. “But there is ambiguous loss all
around us. I’m probably better off not
knowing what happened.”
For the Gimelfarbs, the search goes
on. Roma says he was too consumed by
the search to be useful to his company,
so he retired. Luda also left her job; she
says she has tried therapy but found it
too painful.
Each August, Roma and Luda return to Costa Rica on the anniversary
of their son’s disappearance to chase
leads and to press for a renewed investigation. Every time there is another
sighting, they pursue it.
Earlier this year, a family friend,
Nicolas Bridon, volunteered to travel
to Costa Rica to investigate the tip
from the minimart in Limón. Bridon
met with the family who had taken the
dirty, disoriented mute to the police,
and he interviewed the officer who had
been at the station. The family seemed
sincere, and the police officer insisted
that the young Caucasian he encountered was indeed the same man as on
the flier.
While these people could be mistaken,
it’s clear that David Gimelfarb, with his
pale skin, red hair, and freckles, would
stand out in a crowd in Costa Rica.
“We look at every face that could be
David and wonder, Could that be our
son?” says Luda, measuring her words,
trying not to break down.
Every day, rain, snow, or sleet, she
leaves her home on a quiet street near
Ravinia and walks to Rosewood Park,
where she always sits on the same
wooden bench facing Lake Michigan.
There she talks to her son.
“I tell him what’s going on,” she says.
“I tell him I love him. And I ask him
questions. But he never answers.”