GLYNN WASHINGTON, HOST:
Now, we're going to start off today's episode with a piece from a woman who can find paths that no one else can see. SNAP JUDGMENT's Anna Sussman has the story.
ANNA SUSSMAN, BYLINE: In the still, early hours of the morning, in the Cottonwood Campground deep in the Colorado Desert, a tiny 9-year-old girl named Mandy quietly pulled on her sandals, opened the door to her family's camper and tiptoed out into the vast desert. When the family woke up, they had no idea where Mandy was. All they saw was sand.
HANNA NYALA: Everything in me stopped. Everything goes empty. I felt a deep, empty dread - and especially for a child.
SUSSMAN: Hanna Nyala was the first person to respond from the Joshua Tree search and rescue team.
NYALA: We got the knock on our door. I got sent immediately to the campground to try to secure the scene, to try to figure out if we could get a footprint, to do all the basics things that you have to do to try to lock it down.
SUSSMAN: The first thing Hanna did was talk to Mandy's mom and sister about Mandy's shoes. What size were they? What did they look like? Hanna was able to find an imprint of Mandy's shoe pretty easily near their camper. She drew a picture of it, measured it and then went searching for a trail of these tiny footprints to lead her out of the campground.
NYALA: I went alongside the main road of the campground, about 30 feet out. Time felt split. It was absolutely racing like a freight train on the one hand, with me being behind Mandy and not having a good track yet. And then the other piece of it, time was passing excruciatingly slowly while I was looking for that first footprint.
SUSSMAN: It took less than an hour for Hanna and the tracking team to find Mandy's trail outside the campground. Hanna circled the first footprint with her tracking stick, a sawed-off golf club. And then she followed little Mandy into the desert step by step.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS IN SAND)
NYALA: As the hours passed, we were aware of the time. What I think about in the desert is temperature first. It's going to start dropping quickly. That's foremost on my mind more than anything else, is we've got to get to this child before she's facing hypothermia. After more than an hour of working the track itself and on her trail, we then had one helicopter in the air. And there was a fixed wing as well, which also was crisscrossing the area. They built a search base, emergency operations vehicles, a fuel truck. People were bringing meals in. It was a big effort. There were a lot of people. There will well over a hundred.
SUSSMAN: And are you building a relationship with her in your head as you...
NYALA: You do. I build a relationship from the beginning. By the time I found the first footprint, I was as connected to Mandy as I could get to a person. And when I started calling her name - you're calling her Mandy, Mandy. She was not my daughter, but I felt about her as if she were my family. I was that focused on bringing her back.
SUSSMAN: Here's where Hanna's story becomes incredible because her actual family, her son and daughter, were missing.
NYALA: By the day that we started this search for Mandy, my daughter and son had been missing for well over a year.
SUSSMAN: Before she ever became a search and rescue tracker, Hanna led a very different life. She owned a retail home decor shop in Oklahoma, and she was in an abusive marriage. For years, she endured brutal violence at the hands of her husband until the night she had had enough.
NYALA: He choked me into unconsciousness. Now, he had done that before. But this time, it hit me really hard that my two children were in their bedrooms, in that house with him, and that I was dying. And they would have nobody then.
SUSSMAN: One day later, Hanna hurried her son and daughter into her car with a backpack full of clothes and drove away into hiding.
NYALA: I did not expect us to survive. I believed that it would just be a matter of time until he caught up with us and did what he had always said he would do if I ever left.
SUSSMAN: So Hanna sought protection from police, family service agencies, private security guards. But she says her husband found them over and over again. She says he hunted them.
NYALA: At several points and four different states, we had the police involved and had police protection. And the officers put me in a Kevlar vest, a bulletproof vest. They had a person stationed outside the house and inside the house, outside the door of the bedroom that my children and I slept in.
SUSSMAN: Her ex-husband did get the kids. A judge allowed him contemporary custody. She says the judge argued that wife abuse was irrelevant to child custody. He took the kids, and he didn't bring them back. He'd have her daughter call Hanna and then snatch the phone away and say, you'll never see your kids again. Hanna moved from state to state and eventually moved to the middle of nowhere, here to the desert.
NYALA: The desert at first was off-putting because it was so forsaken. And I did not really know why I had chosen this.
SUSSMAN: She started to work as a volunteer park ranger. But it turns out, as a survivor of abuse she was particularly well-suited to tracking missing persons. So she was invited to join the Joshua Tree search and rescue team.
NYALA: As a battered woman and someone who's actively being stalked still, there are certain things that I pay more attention to than you would. So you don't necessarily need to see if there are footprints around your house, coming to your house at night. The level of vigilance that you have to have in order to stay ahead of somebody who's stalking you gives you really good skills, actually, for being a tracker. That kind of vigilance doesn't let a lot of stuff slide.
SUSSMAN: When Hanna and her kids would come home at the end of the day, she would search the ground around her house for tracks.
NYALA: This is the house.
SUSSMAN: So the roads become, like, a single track...
NYALA: Yep.
SUSSMAN: Rutted pavement. And there was a dead coyote in the middle of the road. And here there's just telephone poles and sand. And that's the house?
NYALA: That's the house.
SUSSMAN: Oh, it's a nice little house.
NYALA: It is easily driven around before you come in. You can see tracks and footprints all the way around. This fence was...
SUSSMAN: Looking for a footprint on hard-packed, gravelly sand takes a mind-boggling attention to detail. Looking on the desert floor, all I saw were sticks and pebbles.
But kind of right - in this two square feet in front of us, what do you see?
NYALA: Well, at least six different people have passed through here. You can see that people have stepped on - see this little stick right here and rock? - that's been stepped on.
SUSSMAN: I have to say, I see nothing where you're pointing right now. I just see dirt.
NYALA: OK, you have part of a shoe here. And now - I mean, a grain of sand just fell down from it.
SUSSMAN: Did you say a grain of sand just fell off of that rock?
NYALA: Yeah, it did.
SUSSMAN: You saw a grain of sand fall of?
NYALA: Yes. (Laughter). Yes, I did. That's the kind of detail...
SUSSMAN: It seems to be, to me, an awfully exposed place for a vulnerable person to go.
NYALA: It is extremely exposed. But when you are in a place like this, it is not easy to come upon me unawares. I see you coming from a long ways away (laughter) in the desert. And it provided me safety at a level that I'd never had.
SUSSMAN: But she wasn't entirely safe. She still couldn't protect her kids from everything. And even in the desert, her husband would manage to get the kids again. At one point, he took them from a court hearing and disappeared. There was a nationwide manhunt for her son and daughter.
NYALA: As ironic as it seems, when somebody leaves on foot from a place, I'm good at that. I can get out there, and I can follow them. And I would have a chance at finding them. When somebody drives off in a vehicle down a four-lane highway with two children in the car, you have absolutely no easy way to follow them and know where they are going. I was sad for them all the time. No matter what I was doing, I was absolutely broken and sad and scared for what was happening to them. For the duration of that search for Mandy, for example, it became - she was their child, technically. But in a way, the stakes are as high as if it were my daughter out there missing and I was looking for her.
(SOUNDBITE OF HELICOPTER HOVERING)
NYALA: I probably had been going maybe three hours. We hadn't been getting detail for a while. We were in a really sandy area. And she was doing a lot of weaving in and out and around, and so the direction was changing quite a lot.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS IN SAND)
NYALA: Crossing washes and turning back on herself and all of that kind of thing - she was getting tired and confused.
SUSSMAN: And then she looked at the wash to see a little 9-year-old girl trotting towards her.
NYALA: I heard her say, I'm Mandy. And she came into view. (Laughter). We - there was a general huzzah across the desert from people all over the place. I was just immediately swept up in that she's safe. She's safe.
SUSSMAN: But when Hanna walked back to her home that night, she was still without her kids.
NYALA: It didn't help my children a bit what I did that day. And my children were still not out of danger. And I had not one whit of skills more to be able to get them out of danger.
SUSSMAN: Eventually, her husband dropped her kids off at her door, only to take them again years later. The last and final time he took them, local detectives in the sheriff's office issued an interstate APB for her missing kids. While police across the country were searching for her son and daughter, Hanna waited by the phone.
NYALA: It was a chilly day here in the high desert. I had not been able to focus very well with the children being gone. I got a phone call from the investigator's office that they had located my ex-husband in another state. And they arrested him and then went in, and the children were not there. Always before, when my children had been missing, I felt that they were alive in the world. When I got that phone call that he had been found and they had not, I did not have that feeling. I was completely empty. And I went outside in the desert. I stood there. I listened. I sat for long hours just on the ground - just sat down on the ground. I didn't track. I didn't think about tracking. I was just empty 'cause I couldn't feel them anymore. It was a message on my answering machine. And the blinking light on my answering machine always signaled terror to me. But it took me some time to get to the machine and actually press the button and to listen to it. And they had left a message from the district attorney's office and the investigators saying, we found your children. We found your children. They were alive. And I just stood there, empty and weeping. If this were some versions of Hollywood, it would have been tracking that brought my children home. The kind of tracking that I do is very simple, very down to earth. It is step-by-step. But none of those skills except the practice of tracking itself helped me with my children. The practice of tracking kept me alive and gave me hope.
WASHINGTON: Big thanks to Hanna Nyala West for sharing her story with a snap. And if you're wondering, Hanna's children are all grown up now. And they're all relatively safe. Read all about Hanna's amazing story on her website. We'll have a link at snapjudgment.org. And heads up, Hanna's website has links to resources for people suffering from domestic abuse. That piece was produced by Anna Sussman with sound design by Renzo Gorrio. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.