August 12, 2025 • 41 mins
In this episode of the Navigating Advocacy podcast, the story of Megan Piper Trussell, a bright and artistic 17-year-old from Boulder, Colorado, whose mysterious disappearance and death in February 2025 left her family and community searching for answers. Despite Megan’s promising future and close family bonds, her case was quickly ruled a suicide by authorities, even though evidence raised serious questions. The episode highlights the family’s relentless pursuit of justice, the shortcomings of the investigation, and the broader need for improved campus safety and victim advocacy. Listeners are encouraged to support Megan’s family, share her story, and help seek the truth behind her untimely death.
Support Megan's Family by donating to her GoFundMe.
If you have any information about Megan, please send all tips to trusselltips@vigilante-pr.com
Support the podcast by leaving us a 5 star review on your favorite podcast platform.
Support Megan's Family by donating to her GoFundMe.
If you have any information about Megan, please send all tips to trusselltips@vigilante-pr.com
Support the podcast by leaving us a 5 star review on your favorite podcast platform.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
You're listening to Navigating Advocacy, the podcasts where we center
victims and their families, amplifying stories that matter, especially the
ones that have gone unheard for too long.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
I'm Melissa.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
And I'm Whitney. Today we are Navigating Advocacy in Volder, Colorado,
to share a young woman named Megan hyper Trussel's story.
And while the details of her death are complicated and painful,
we're not starting there. Were starting with the story of her.
Who Megan was, the laughter she brought, the art she made,
and the family who adored her, Because to truly understand
(01:09):
what was lost, we have to feel the weight of
who she was and the light that she carried.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Megan Trussell was born on September twelfth, two thousand and six.
This is just four days after my own son, Lucas
was born, so this one has me in all the fields.
She was born in Denver, Colorado. She was raised by
her parents, Vanessa Diaz and Joseph Trussel, alongside her older sister, Lindsey.
(01:42):
Megan was deeply bonded with her family, and even though
Vanessa and Joe divorce, they continued to co parent closely
and lovingly. It wasn't unusual to see the whole family
traveling together packed into a Volkswagen van road tripping from
Canada to Baja Mexico, and that really tells you something
(02:02):
about this family. They were adventurers, lovers of life, curious souls,
and Megan, well, she was the best of them all.
She had this quiet charisma, a kind of charm that
made you feel like you were the only person in
the room when she was talking to you. Her dad
called her a prodigy smartass, as it was the most
(02:26):
affectionate title you can imagine. Megan had that rare mix
of razor sharp wit, deep empathy, and this uncanny ability
to make people laugh even in the most tense, awkward,
or dull moments.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
She was an artist. She had sketch books full of
drawings of her life, her friends, the world around her.
She was a musician too. She played bass guitar and
had a wildly eclectic taste in music. She loved her
dad's nineties grunge collection just as much as she loved
Yako Pastorius and TV Girl. She curated her own CD collection,
(03:07):
proudly calling it vintage, which makes me hurt a little
bit because I learned that anything that's over twenty five
years old is considered vintage now, and that really just
makes me.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Feel dated, because we are vintage.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Yes, music and art weren't just hobbies. They were extensions
of her identity, expressions of how she saw the world.
Megan was bilingual, fluent in both Spanish and English. She
had an ear for language and a knack for mimicry.
Once in seventh grade she played a Russian character in
(03:43):
a school play and her accent was so good that
people genuinely believed she was Russian for the rest of
the school year. So that's really impressive in my mind,
especially in seventh grade. Agreed. Agreed, she had this incredibly
sharp mind. Her vocabulary tested in the one hundredth percentile statewide.
(04:04):
But she wasn't just brainy. She was cool effortlessly so.
Her mom, Vanessa, described her as compassionate with that emotional
intuition that made her just the perfect friend. She just
got people. She made everyone around her feel like they belonged.
She was close with her sister, her uncle, her cousin Isabella,
(04:25):
and she loved pop culture, especially mysteries and who Done Its?
So she's just a girl. After my Own Heart Knives Out,
Scott Pilgrim, Clue Death on the Nile were her favorites,
but she also had a soft spot for campy comedies
like The Birdcage and So I married an ex murderer.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
She seems like she has so many hobbies, and you know,
as a person that literally always tries to find the hobby.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
I really loved it about her.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
It's true, and I can just I feel like if
you walk into her room, it would be just stuff everywhere,
but it'd be like bright, artsy, you know, just a
little bit of everything exactly.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
That's that's how my mind goes as well. Megan and
her dad would watch movies together from the time she
was about five years old, and when she told him
she wanted to study film, they spent a summer binging every.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Classic he can think of.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
That was kind of like their thing to do together,
which is so cute. Megan would end up graduating from
Northfield High School and then she enrolled at the University
of Colorado at Boulder to study film and she loved it.
She loved her classes. She was making new friends, she
was reconnecting with old ones, and she was kind of
(05:47):
fully stepping into herself. I mean, we have to remember
she's just seventeen at this point, which is still very young,
but she's she's kind of coming.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
Into her own.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Just days into her first semester, she texted college rules.
She was ready to explore the world. She wanted to study.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Abroad in Spain.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
She had a favorite Pina Colada in Panama when they
went there one time. She could do these flawless impressions.
She had a moral compass that really pointed true north,
and like this sense of justice that wouldn't let her
look the other way when someone was hurting. So she
knows who she is at seventeen, which I want to
(06:33):
say ninety five percent of seventeen year olds do not
have a clue. But I feel like I just get
this from her. She knew who she was.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
I agree. I didn't know who I was until I
was thirty three. I mean, agreed, Come on, Samesy's it
took me a long time to figure that out. And
she I feel like she was unapologetically herself. She loved,
she loved beg, she stood up for the people that
needed it. She was the good that you hope to
see in the world. Agreed, Meghan lived brilliantly. On Wednesday,
(07:08):
February twelfth, twenty twenty five, Vanessa and Joe realized that
they hadn't heard from Meghan in days, not since the
Saturday before. There were no calls, no texts, no reactions
to messages, no post It was incredibly out of character.
Joe had even texted Meghan asking if she wanted to
meet up for dinner sometime soon, but never received a response.
(07:30):
The day before this, Vanessa had sent a picture of
her beloved cat to Meghan, and that message was left unread. Vanessa,
being the vigilant mother that she is, she checked Megan's
cell phone records and her heart sank. The last activity
on Megan's phone was Sunday, February ninth, at eight forty
(07:52):
five pm, and that's when she knew that something had
to have gone terribly wrong.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Yeah, because there's no way any teenager is going from
the ninth of February all the way till the twelfth
without anything happening on their phone. That's not gonna happen exactly.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Vanessa immediately begins calling and texting every number in Meghan's
call logs, which this is brilliant to me. So she's
pulling up these phone records and she's just going line
it on by line, Adam, have you talked to Megan?
Have you seen Megan? Because I'm sure there's people on
her golf logs that Vanessa's never met before. She's just
went on to college, she's making new friends exactly, and
(08:36):
the people.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
That she talked to closest around that time of her
disappearance would be the ones that could know something. They
talked to her last, so you would want to get
that information as quickly as possible. A complete genius of
her mom to do this.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
One by one, she tracked down these friends, acquaintances, really
anyone who had seen or maybe have seen or spoken
to Meghan, but no one had. Lindsay lived just a
few blocks from campus, and she rushed over to Meghan's dorm.
Her roommate answered the door and told her that she
hadn't seen Meghan since Sunday night either, and she hadn't
(09:13):
told anyone because she didn't really know what to do.
Vanessa and Joe jumped in the car and drove to Boulder.
Once they got there, they joined Lindsay at the campus
and attempted to report Megan missing to the campus police,
but they brushed them off. As we see so much
in these young adult really any teenage to thirty year old,
(09:36):
I feel like it's very much a they'll come back.
They're crashing in of friends, they might have run away.
You can't really know they're missing yet. They're grown ups,
you know. They really try to push off the responsibility
of these missing persons reports, which just drives me insane.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
It does, I.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Mean, but I can only imagine how many calls they
get because a parent didn't hear from their child for
a few hours and they're freaking out. Me knowing all
the Facebook groups I am on right now with some
of them are a bit extreme and they are wanting
to do every single thing for their kid, So I
can only imagine if they don't get in contact with them.
(10:19):
Police probably hear about a lot of kids, and ninety
nine percent of the time they're found within a day.
But it's cases like Megan's that are you know, need
to be investigated as quickly as possible.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
Absolutely, and I agree, but I also feel that they
should take every phone call serious and investigate every call
they get to the full of their to their capacity,
like They absolutely need to check into all those things
because you never know that it could be a situation
like this exactly.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
I one hundred percent agree they should be doing that.
At the very least, take the report, go do some surveillance,
try to figure out, you know, ask a few questions,
so at least you have a timestamp on what is happening,
and any crucial evidence is going to be preserved.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
A small start of the timeline you have created a
this is the spot where someone realized she's missing this
point specifically, it creates that paper timeline that hard stop
if something is wrong right here.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Yes, So, as the hours pass was still no sign
of Megan, no movement on her bank account, no phone activity,
no messages. The university police finally began to listen. By
the next day they were taking things more seriously somehow,
which this never happens right at the beginning, but I'm
(11:41):
so glad it was. The FBI was brought in with
access to security footage, cell phone records, dorm key card data,
which is amazing because I mean, this is twenty twenty
five guys. Everyone knows where you're at usually at all times,
and I love that that is a security feature they
can tell when you checked out, when you came into
(12:03):
your room, when you left, that kind of thing all
by your keythob. So they also were gathering witness statements
and this timeline of what happened to Megan that on
the ninth started to take shape, and here is what
they've found. On the night of Sunday, February ninth, Megan
(12:23):
had her boyfriend over in her dorm room. Her roommate
was at work at this point. This really wasn't unusual
because they'd been dating since just January, but they had
started talking that fall. So, I mean they've been talking
for a couple of months and he would come over occasionally.
Then something strange happened. Around nine pm. Meghan's roommate suddenly
(12:46):
left work on her break, which apparently she never did.
She returned to the dorm room, Megan and the roommate
got into an argument. The boyfriend was there and the
roommate wasn't happy about it. So don't ask me why,
but this roommate and Megan didn't get along. Boyfriend is
over there, this is causing some issues. So the tensions
(13:11):
between these two have really been going for a week
since she really moved in, they're just kind of they
weren't meshing. Well, you could say Meghan had grown uncomfortable
because the roommate was allowing someone else to live in
the dorm room really unofficially and something Megan didn't want.
But apparently Megan wasn't even allowed to have her boyfriend
(13:32):
over when the roommate wasn't there, which does not seem
fair in the least. So after this argument, the roommate
went back to work. Okay, so we're probably getting all
this information directly from the boyfriend because he's there through
this whole argument and everything. So the boyfriend, he's in
the middle of all of it. He told Meghan like, hey,
(13:55):
I don't want to deal with this drama, and kind
of thought that they should take a break. So, I know,
so seems like really escalation of this. I'm sorry, girls
are petty sometimes, and there's an argument going on with
the roommate. Why would that mean they have to take
a break.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
But also, the boyfriend should have manned up a little
bit here, and I hate saying that, phreeze, but he
should have supported his girlfriend in the situation. She's obviously
uncomfortable with the roommate. Bringing in people unofficially living in
her space as well, and yeah, the boyfriend doesn't lack that,
or the roommate doesn't like that the boyfriend's there. But
(14:30):
suck it up, Buttercup, you're doing things wrong too. He
should support He should have supported Megan through that entire conversation.
It might have been awkward for him, and he may
not want to deal with drama, but when you got
a girlfriend, especially a teenage girlfriend, you got to just
deal with it.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Bro exactly.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
It seems very weird that he just like break up
with her over this. So apparently at nine seventeen, he
leaves the door and according to his mother, he was
home by nine point thirty. I don't know why that
makes me get gold because I'm like, he's young, dude,
he might be a commuter, and he doesn't live in
his dorm and actually arrived home, and that's his alibi
(15:07):
for this situation, was his mom our. Next thing we
know is at nine thirty six pm, Meghan leaves her
dorm at Haulitt Hall and was seen walking alone on campus.
She was wearing white platform tennis shoes, red pants, a
black short sleeved t shirt, and a light denim style
(15:31):
jacket and it was kind of just slung.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Over her shoulders.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
She had her favorite purse with her, which was a round,
blue and pink crossbody bag with a star on it.
It was actually hand made by her mom, Vanessa. Apparently
it was modeled after the one from Scott Pilgrim Versus
the World, and Meghan called it her security blanket. I'm like, well,
(15:57):
first of all, her mom's amazing for being able to
make her handmade number one, and you can just tell
the kind of relationship she had. She wasn't into, Oh,
let me go get a Coach bag or a Louis Vuitton.
She's carrying her mom's handmade bag. I just just like,
I don't know, it's like so adorable but also heartbreaking
(16:18):
at the same time.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
It is, and I know that this is one of
her all time favorite movies and the character that carries
that bag in that movie in which I think I've
seen before, but Megan loved her, which is exactly why
Vanessa made her this bag. Because you can't, just like
you said, you can't just go out to Coach buy it.
It is custom made for cosplay, if you will. But
(16:40):
it's just it shows how much Vanessa loves Meghan to
go out of her way to build this amazing thing
for her, and for Megan to cherish something like that
also shows maturity in my eyes.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Agreed, Agreed.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
So this particular night, it is February, so it was cold.
We've got temperatures in the twenties. Megan wasn't wearing a coat.
Her family believes that she wasn't going to go very
far because if she was, she probably would have dressed
a bit warmer. So we have the last confirmed sighting
(17:14):
was at nine fifty two PM, and that was on
campus near Champions Center, just the north of her dorm.
She's walking for less than twenty minutes where she's last
scene after that just vanishes, not another sighting of her
at all.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
There.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
There is a theory that Megan may have been walking
towards her sister Lindsay's apartment, which was just a few
blocks north, or possibly to this gas station that's also
right off campus, but really no additional camera footage has
ever surfaced to trace her further. The FBI used steamray technology,
(17:58):
so it's apparently a surveillance method that mimics a cell
tower to track devices. This revealed two critical pings after
she was last seen. The first ping came at ten
forty five Okay, so we about an hour after her
last confirmed sighting. And this was near Eben g Fine
(18:20):
Park and it's kind of at the start of Boulder
Canyon Drive. And this really would take about fifty two
minutes to walk there from Megan's dorm. I guess she
could have because it was just about an hour.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Yeah, So this is where the timeline is so critical
because you have to think of all the factors. It's
cold outside. Could she be walking faster or slower, maybe,
but if it is on the average a fifty two
minute walk, she could have made it there by then,
close enough for a king to come off of this tower.
So yeah, I mean she could have.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Oh wow, Okay. At first I was like, oh, there's
no way, but really it's like, right, if she would
have just kept walking at a decent pace, she could
have done this.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
So the second ping came at eleven fifty five PM,
so this is even further into the canyon, and this
was near the forty mile marker. And then after that
there's nothing. It's either her phone died or it was
turned off.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
Another thought behind. This is if she were picked up,
it would have been significantly less time if she was
at vehicle.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
That's very true.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
So in my mind, she's likely walking or on foot
that portion. Otherwise it would have been a significantly less
amount of time if she was in a vehicle. Let
me paint a picture a little bit seeing you. Boulder's
Campus sits on the western edge of town. North of
it is a Rapahoe Avenue. Then you hit Boulder Canyon Drive,
(19:54):
which is this windy mountain highway that follows Boulder Creek
into a remote for a sted canyon. There is a
narrow bike path alongside it, but it's not really summer.
You'd expect someone to walk alone, especially an eighteen year
old girl. It's dark, and on top of that, Megan
was afraid of the dark, which I get it. Girl,
(20:15):
I dankster wouldn't be walking out there in the Colorado
wilderness because she definitely was not dressed for that kind
of trip. She didn't tell anyone where she was going.
I feel like when she was upset and left the dorm,
it was going to be a short trip, whether that
was the short trip to Lindsay's like you said earlier,
to the gas station. She was smart enough to know
(20:37):
that it's going to get cold, especially after dark, to
bundle up before going an extended distance, agreed, And as
her parents have pointed out in the past and in
other interviews, Boulder Canyon isn't just isolated. It's known for
its unhoused population, drug acti and there's a general reputation
(21:03):
as a place to avoid, especially for young women after dark.
It's well known that you shouldn't walk along this path
at night, and Megan's smart enough she wouldn't have done that.
When authorities learned where her phone last pinged, the Boulder
County Sheriff's Office joined in the investigation further, park rangers,
dive teams, dog search and rescue dogs, drones. All of
(21:26):
that they brought in the full force of the searches,
but they didn't find her, at least not at first.
She was missing for six days, and on February fifteenth,
twenty twenty five, Megan was found. Six days after she
was seen. Park rangers returned to that forty mile marker
along Boulder Canyon Drive. The day before, an officer had
(21:47):
located a backpack and a prescription pill bottle in the area.
This bottle was later confirmed to be Megan's. It was
her adderall that she was prescribed, but in a devastating oversight,
the original officer had misread the label and he thought
that the name on it was the prescribing doctors, not Megan's.
So there was a little bit of time where this
(22:08):
was not connected to Megan's disappearance. And that was in
my mind, that's a big oversight, completely.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
Agree, and it really it wasted time, for sure.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
It did. It delayed everything. Rangers had to go back
out to that area, and on that Saturday they looked
down the steep embankment leading to the creek and that's
when they saw her.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Meghan's body was lying on snow covered rocks, partially buried
under two to three inches of fresh snow. There was
no flat ground where she lay, just kind of like
jagged boulders and ice. Her body was found about ten
yards from a large culvert that runs beneath the road,
(22:53):
a culvert that really is known to house a camp
for unchiltered people. She was lying on her back, her
left arm was outstretched, her right arm tucked inside her jacket.
Her red hair red pants should have stood out, should
have been seen by one of the many searchers that
were out there who had scoured that area, but somehow no.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
One saw her until that day.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
To reach her, rescuers had to repel down the rocky slope.
There was a broken stick near her right side. Her
left hand and fingernails had visible dirt and debris. She
was wearing the same outfit that she had been seen
in on the trail, except for her right shoe was missing.
(23:41):
That foot was covered by a torn black sock. Her
jacket was buttoned, but the left side was all bunched.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Up around her torso.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Her left arm was outside the sleeve, ripped as if
something had kind of yanked it. On her right hand,
there was a fingerless black glove. It was turned inside out.
This glove her parents didn't recognize. Beneath her body was
a pair of gray pants that no one really could explain. However,
(24:14):
there is an encampment of end house around there, so
it totally could have been someone else's, totally not connected
to her case. Her parents had said they had never
seen of before, and no one really.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Knows where they came from.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
One responding deputy noted something else.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
He wrote in his report.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
That it appears Megan had been covered by a tarp
or a blanket, but Boulder County Sheriff's Office would later
deny that. They said there was no such material ever recovered,
so it was possibly in one report and not anything else,
which is very unusual because that's something they would definitely
(24:56):
want to take as evidence, but very weird that now
they're saying that is not that didn't happen. Still, Megan's
family can't shake the uncertainty was something or someone hiding
her Because her body was found within Boulder County limits,
the Boulder County Sheriff's Office took over the investigation.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
This whole scenario really makes me question the police work
in this investigation, because we all know if evidence isn't
properly collected, then that can ruin the entire case. It
can mess up everything from timeline to evidence being tainted,
to who did it, to a million different things. And
(25:43):
this is twenty twenty five. This is not nineteen thirty
when they didn't know people were walking all over the
crime scene. This is twenty twenty five. They know better.
Even if you weren't properly trained layman like us know
that you are not supposed to walk through the crime
scene but also collect literally everything around a person. And unfortunately,
(26:04):
this is just one of the many questions that arise
in Meghan's story, because it's just going to get more
confusing from here. Meghan's family was told early on that
there were no signs of trauma to Meghan, that there
was just a scratch on her leg, But when the
final autopsy report came in, it said something different. The
(26:25):
report revealed that there were multiple bruises and abrasions, contusions
on her arms, her back, her hip, and her chest.
She had scrapes on her hands and knuckles. You already
talked about the dirt and debris under her fingernails. She
had abrasions on her face, her feet, even her scalp.
There was broken teeth, and her jacket was torn. She
(26:47):
had injuries on her left side, which is the exact
same side she always wore her purse. Oh also that purse,
it's missing, so is her phone. And there's even one
more disturbed detail on this autopsy report. Inside her stomach.
They found a soft fall sized mass of undigested pill material.
(27:09):
Her parents were shocked. I feel like shocked isn't even
a good enough word for this. What is this pill material?
Where did it come from? Did they test it? What
even is it? Nobody knew, No one knew.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
When I was doing this research, I kind of assumed
it had something to do with the pill bottle that
they had found, but that would have been an easy
thing to check off.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
Was it this?
Speaker 1 (27:33):
But it's like, oh, they have no clue, So in
my mind, it's not that. But I really honestly don't
even know if they tested that.
Speaker 3 (27:41):
They didn't. Vanessa and Joe waited for weeks for the
results of the toxicology report. They were told the tests
weren't ready, and it took until May fourth, just days
after the spring semester ended, for investigators to call with
those results. Megan had nineteen hundred nanograms per millimeter of
(28:02):
amphetamine in her blood, likely from adderall this is a
high dose, but it's not fatal. So let me give
you some context here. Amphetamine related deaths usually involve levels
of nine thousand nanograms per milli liter or more. Megans
were well below that. Now. I don't know if this
(28:24):
was within her prescription range, but again, if she has
it in her system, let's go back to that pill
bottle that they misrepresented. Where's the connection. Whose backpack is
this that has this pill bottle in it? Where we
need to go back to the pill bottle? But we
don't know. The coroner rolled Megan's death a suicide. The
(28:47):
cause of death the toxic effects of amphetamine with hypothermia
as a contributing factor. But again, that pill material, that
mass in her stomach never tested. How can a death
to be ruled of suicide based on pills that were
never identified? They went solely off the toxicology report that
is non fatal levels.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
Yeah, this is just like blowing my mind. Why would
they not test that? I think it just seems like asinine,
Like that would be your first step, that's your first clue.
Here we go.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
Agreed, and I just don't see how you can say
suicide when she has Okay, maybe she fell and that's
where all the abrasions came from. She fell down the
side of this hill. Okay, But if you're saying she
died by suicide, she took a bunch of pills. She
walked out in the middle of nowhere and was waiting
(29:44):
for them to take effect. But she didn't even take
a fatal level of these pills. I just don't see
how you can prove or how can you choose suicide
as the cause of death when and there's not enough
there to support it.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Completely agree?
Speaker 1 (30:04):
And why not just test within her stomach?
Speaker 3 (30:08):
And she wasn't that far down the mountain, Like, it's
not like she was like, I'm gonna jump off the
side of this cliff, you know, yes.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Like in my mind, it didn't sound like it could
be a fatal fall. So let's just say she walked
up there and completely fell off. I mean they said
it was a they had to shell down, but or
was pushed. Yes, So how can a young woman with
no history of suicidal thoughts, someone who was thriving in school,
(30:35):
excited about her future, end up bruised alone.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
And partially buried in snow?
Speaker 1 (30:41):
And how does a law enforcement agency close a case
without finding out what that pill material even was? These
are the questions Megan's parents have been asking ever since.
In the days after Megan's body was found, her family
discovered that her phone and purse had gone missing. Obviously,
(31:02):
no one found it when they were out there. Authorities
never even mentioned this until ten days later, so Vanessa
and her friends really began searching on their own because
they're assuming it's not out there. They don't know where
it's at. They learned about Eco ATM kiosks that buy
used electronics. Well, Vanessa filed the claim and the phone
(31:26):
was found, but it had been wiped. Someone who had
her phone turned it into this kiosk. I don't know
if you guys have seen the seen them around.
Speaker 3 (31:35):
Yeah, they're in every Walmart in the intin way to
every Walmart, and Vanessa did file the claim. And I
find this so interesting how Vanessa learned about these kiosks,
because I know they're there, but I never really think
about them, or I've never used one before. I see
it next to the key machine, like where you get
a key mate, and just like carry on about my day,
never think about all the things that could work with these.
(31:58):
Vanessa's friend spent time around the Boulder area speaking to
a bunch of people in the unhouse community to learn
about their behaviors, their actions, what they do, what maybe
someone saw something saw Megan, She specifically asked what would
happen if they found a cell phone, Like, what is
the usual thing you do if you find a cell
phone out here? If someone drops it? Whatever? What do
(32:19):
you usually do. And one person is like, oh, if
you have an ID, you can go cash it in
at these eco ATMs. And because you have to put
your ID and I'm sure it has to do with
stolen property and things like that, well, yeah, Vanessa files
the missing phone report. That's the kind of claim that
she filed, and then notified that ECOATM company and said, hey,
(32:40):
I found my daughter's phone's missing. Here's the information needed.
I'm sure it's like a serial number or something along
those lines. And in two days ECOATM was like, hey,
we found it. It was turned into us. Here it is,
you know, And that's when she found out everything I've
been wiped off of it.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
All they have to say is Vanessa is like a
crazy private detective all on her own, right from the
cell phone records, right when her daughter goes missing, to
reporting this phone stolen or missing, contacting this ECOATM is
absolutely amazing that she's doing everything she possibly can. She's
(33:19):
doing the detective's job in this regard.
Speaker 3 (33:23):
Right.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
So this phone was sold by an unhousedman named Elliot
who had ties to this that culvert that I was
talking about, this colvert camp near where Megan was found,
Elliott claimed he'd been given the phone by another man
named Travis. Well turns out Travis was really a man
(33:44):
named Alexander. So essentially Elliot says, hey, this dude, Alexander
gave me the phone. He said he had found Megan's
purse at the encampment days later, and then he just
dumped it along the bike path miles away. Elliott was
arrested and charged with theft and false declaration to a
(34:05):
pawnbroker because obviously he had to sign and say that
it was his phone. But neither man was really ever
considered a suspect in Meghan's death.
Speaker 3 (34:15):
And I will say that they were, in my opinion,
properly cleared because this Alexander dude was in jail during
the time Meghan disappeared, so obviously you can't fake that
either you were in jail or you weren't in jail.
He did say that he found her purse out in
the open and that he took it with him and
then later left it on the bike trail, but he
(34:35):
also claimed that he had no knowledge of this phone.
Even though Elliott says he gave it to him, he
did admit to taking her ved fen though, so he
admitted to taking something, and he admitted to disposing of
her purse, but he didn't agree that he took the phone.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Originally, investigators stated both had no known contact with Meghan.
But so Megan's purse was eventually found on March fifth,
like miles away, just like Alexander had said, it was
torn open. This was something that really upset Vanessa deeply
(35:13):
because this was Megan's pride and joy.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
It was like her security blink.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
The fact it was so far away from her that
would that's just depressing. She had reinforced the clasp by
hand because Meghan loved that purse, she never would have
left it behind. But I mean, like they said, if
the guys are telling the truth, they could have found
it and then did away with it later on, just
took out whatever was valuable, right.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
But I think what concerns Vanessa most about this is
because yes, Meghan loved that purse dearly, and yes she
hand sewed it, so she knew how hearty of an
item she created. Reinforcing these clasps and all these pieces
that are likely to tear if it was torn open,
was there a struggle? Does that mean what that's what
this is. There's a sign of a struggle. Is their
(36:02):
fingerprints on this? This should be evidence. Now has anyone
looked at it? Because to me, if someone grabs her
purse and it's trying to mug her and she holds
onto it tightly and it rips the seams, that's not suicide.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Agreed, Agreed. They should have tested it at the bare minimum.
In my mind, I'm just thinking it's one of the
guys like ripping it open, trying to see what's in it.
But it also could be, like you said, a struggle.
Like you just there's there for every one situation you have.
In that situation where it could have easily happened a
completely different way, which is mind boggly that it wasn't
(36:40):
properly investigated. If it was, then we would probably have
answers to a lot of these questions. We have some
idea of why the purse got where the purse ended up.
Even more troubling, her shoe. It was never found that
the shoe is still missing to this day, and there's
(37:00):
no indication that police ever actually searched for it or
if they were concerned about it. But you have to
like think where is the shoe. Things don't just disappear.
If I'm sure she was wearing a shoe when she
was walking, she has to be the shoe has to
be there somewhere if she died by suicide.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
More concerning the sock is ripped, There's so many things
that lead more towards the foul play than not. At
this point, in my opinion.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
I completely agree.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
There's just so many things unaccounted for that you can't
explain without somebody else being a part of the situation.
On March tenth, Megan's parents met with the sheriff. When
they asked about the injuries, the purse, the missing shoe,
the sheriff replied, and I quote, sometimes weird things happen
(37:52):
in an investigation and we never find out why.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
End quote. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
It's your job to find out why the weird stuff happened,
if it's weird, like, that's your whole job.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
But I can't even imagine approaching a family member and
saying that within months of their daughter dying.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
Oh completely agree, Like where's his empathy? Two days later,
Boulder County officials ruled out foul play, and they were done.
They're just like, oh, this is a suicide. We're closing everything.
We don't care about the shoe, we're not testing what
was in her stomach. We're done.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
So Meghan's case has now closed. They had no further questions.
They rolled out the foul play. They listed it as suicide.
And I don't know what you're gonna say, but Witney,
you only cover missing and unsolved cases. We don't believe
that proper investigation was completed on Meghan's case, and especially
to completely roll out homicide. And her parents feel the same.
(38:56):
So we're standing with her parents on this. There's no
way Megan would have completed suicide. And this is not
because her parents are in denial. This is not because
they're clinging to hope, but because there are too many
loose threads. There's too many contradictions, there's too many questions
that never got answered, and there's too many tests that
have been left undone. Megan didn't have a history of
(39:19):
suicidal ideation. There was no note. She was excited about
her future, she was enjoying college, she was living life.
Her death didn't match her life, and the evidence, the
broken teeth, the missing items, that massive pills in her stomach,
it deserves more scrutiny. There's more things needed to have
been done before closing this case.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Meghan Trustle deserves a full investigation. Her family deserves the
truth because a closed case doesn't mean a case solved,
and as suicide ruling doesn't always.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Mean there wasn't foul play.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
If you where someone you know has any information about
Megan's death, where she went on February ninth, or how
her phone, purse and choose ended up where they did,
please send tips to Trustle tips at Vigilante dashpr dot com.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
There are rewards available.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
Meghan's family does have a GoFundMe currently running to help
pay for various services. We're gonna link it in the
show notes and we'll share it on social media. And
that's really our call to action here. This is our
advocacy piece. Help them raise the funds, help them be loud,
help them try to get this case reopened. There's no
reason it should have been closed in the first place.
(40:46):
Thank you to Meghan's family, Vanessa, Joe, and Lindsay for
allowing us to share meghan story. This episode was researched
by Hailey Gray Research, produced and edited by us. If
you would like To support the podcast, please leave us
a five star review on your favorite podcast platform.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
Learn more about our advocacy efforts at navigating advocacy dot com.
You're listening to Navigating Advocacy, the podcasts where we center
victims and their families, amplifying stories that matter, especially the
ones that have gone unheard for too long.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
I'm Melissa.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
And I'm Whitney. Today we are Navigating Advocacy in Volder, Colorado,
to share a young woman named Megan hyper Trussel's story.
And while the details of her death are complicated and painful,
we're not starting there. Were starting with the story of her.
Who Megan was, the laughter she brought, the art she made,
and the family who adored her, Because to truly understand
(01:09):
what was lost, we have to feel the weight of
who she was and the light that she carried.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Megan Trussell was born on September twelfth, two thousand and six.
This is just four days after my own son, Lucas
was born, so this one has me in all the fields.
She was born in Denver, Colorado. She was raised by
her parents, Vanessa Diaz and Joseph Trussel, alongside her older sister, Lindsey.
(01:42):
Megan was deeply bonded with her family, and even though
Vanessa and Joe divorce, they continued to co parent closely
and lovingly. It wasn't unusual to see the whole family
traveling together packed into a Volkswagen van road tripping from
Canada to Baja Mexico, and that really tells you something
(02:02):
about this family. They were adventurers, lovers of life, curious souls,
and Megan, well, she was the best of them all.
She had this quiet charisma, a kind of charm that
made you feel like you were the only person in
the room when she was talking to you. Her dad
called her a prodigy smartass, as it was the most
(02:26):
affectionate title you can imagine. Megan had that rare mix
of razor sharp wit, deep empathy, and this uncanny ability
to make people laugh even in the most tense, awkward,
or dull moments.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
She was an artist. She had sketch books full of
drawings of her life, her friends, the world around her.
She was a musician too. She played bass guitar and
had a wildly eclectic taste in music. She loved her
dad's nineties grunge collection just as much as she loved
Yako Pastorius and TV Girl. She curated her own CD collection,
(03:07):
proudly calling it vintage, which makes me hurt a little
bit because I learned that anything that's over twenty five
years old is considered vintage now, and that really just
makes me.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Feel dated, because we are vintage.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Yes, music and art weren't just hobbies. They were extensions
of her identity, expressions of how she saw the world.
Megan was bilingual, fluent in both Spanish and English. She
had an ear for language and a knack for mimicry.
Once in seventh grade she played a Russian character in
(03:43):
a school play and her accent was so good that
people genuinely believed she was Russian for the rest of
the school year. So that's really impressive in my mind,
especially in seventh grade. Agreed. Agreed, she had this incredibly
sharp mind. Her vocabulary tested in the one hundredth percentile statewide.
(04:04):
But she wasn't just brainy. She was cool effortlessly so.
Her mom, Vanessa, described her as compassionate with that emotional
intuition that made her just the perfect friend. She just
got people. She made everyone around her feel like they belonged.
She was close with her sister, her uncle, her cousin Isabella,
(04:25):
and she loved pop culture, especially mysteries and who Done Its?
So she's just a girl. After my Own Heart Knives Out,
Scott Pilgrim, Clue Death on the Nile were her favorites,
but she also had a soft spot for campy comedies
like The Birdcage and So I married an ex murderer.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
She seems like she has so many hobbies, and you know,
as a person that literally always tries to find the hobby.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
I really loved it about her.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
It's true, and I can just I feel like if
you walk into her room, it would be just stuff everywhere,
but it'd be like bright, artsy, you know, just a
little bit of everything exactly.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
That's that's how my mind goes as well. Megan and
her dad would watch movies together from the time she
was about five years old, and when she told him
she wanted to study film, they spent a summer binging every.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Classic he can think of.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
That was kind of like their thing to do together,
which is so cute. Megan would end up graduating from
Northfield High School and then she enrolled at the University
of Colorado at Boulder to study film and she loved it.
She loved her classes. She was making new friends, she
was reconnecting with old ones, and she was kind of
(05:47):
fully stepping into herself. I mean, we have to remember
she's just seventeen at this point, which is still very young,
but she's she's kind of coming.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
Into her own.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Just days into her first semester, she texted college rules.
She was ready to explore the world. She wanted to study.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Abroad in Spain.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
She had a favorite Pina Colada in Panama when they
went there one time. She could do these flawless impressions.
She had a moral compass that really pointed true north,
and like this sense of justice that wouldn't let her
look the other way when someone was hurting. So she
knows who she is at seventeen, which I want to
(06:33):
say ninety five percent of seventeen year olds do not
have a clue. But I feel like I just get
this from her. She knew who she was.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
I agree. I didn't know who I was until I
was thirty three. I mean, agreed, Come on, Samesy's it
took me a long time to figure that out. And
she I feel like she was unapologetically herself. She loved,
she loved beg, she stood up for the people that
needed it. She was the good that you hope to
see in the world. Agreed, Meghan lived brilliantly. On Wednesday,
(07:08):
February twelfth, twenty twenty five, Vanessa and Joe realized that
they hadn't heard from Meghan in days, not since the
Saturday before. There were no calls, no texts, no reactions
to messages, no post It was incredibly out of character.
Joe had even texted Meghan asking if she wanted to
meet up for dinner sometime soon, but never received a response.
(07:30):
The day before this, Vanessa had sent a picture of
her beloved cat to Meghan, and that message was left unread. Vanessa,
being the vigilant mother that she is, she checked Megan's
cell phone records and her heart sank. The last activity
on Megan's phone was Sunday, February ninth, at eight forty
(07:52):
five pm, and that's when she knew that something had
to have gone terribly wrong.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Yeah, because there's no way any teenager is going from
the ninth of February all the way till the twelfth
without anything happening on their phone. That's not gonna happen exactly.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Vanessa immediately begins calling and texting every number in Meghan's
call logs, which this is brilliant to me. So she's
pulling up these phone records and she's just going line
it on by line, Adam, have you talked to Megan?
Have you seen Megan? Because I'm sure there's people on
her golf logs that Vanessa's never met before. She's just
went on to college, she's making new friends exactly, and
(08:36):
the people.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
That she talked to closest around that time of her
disappearance would be the ones that could know something. They
talked to her last, so you would want to get
that information as quickly as possible. A complete genius of
her mom to do this.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
One by one, she tracked down these friends, acquaintances, really
anyone who had seen or maybe have seen or spoken
to Meghan, but no one had. Lindsay lived just a
few blocks from campus, and she rushed over to Meghan's dorm.
Her roommate answered the door and told her that she
hadn't seen Meghan since Sunday night either, and she hadn't
(09:13):
told anyone because she didn't really know what to do.
Vanessa and Joe jumped in the car and drove to Boulder.
Once they got there, they joined Lindsay at the campus
and attempted to report Megan missing to the campus police,
but they brushed them off. As we see so much
in these young adult really any teenage to thirty year old,
(09:36):
I feel like it's very much a they'll come back.
They're crashing in of friends, they might have run away.
You can't really know they're missing yet. They're grown ups,
you know. They really try to push off the responsibility
of these missing persons reports, which just drives me insane.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
It does, I.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Mean, but I can only imagine how many calls they
get because a parent didn't hear from their child for
a few hours and they're freaking out. Me knowing all
the Facebook groups I am on right now with some
of them are a bit extreme and they are wanting
to do every single thing for their kid, So I
can only imagine if they don't get in contact with them.
(10:19):
Police probably hear about a lot of kids, and ninety
nine percent of the time they're found within a day.
But it's cases like Megan's that are you know, need
to be investigated as quickly as possible.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
Absolutely, and I agree, but I also feel that they
should take every phone call serious and investigate every call
they get to the full of their to their capacity,
like They absolutely need to check into all those things
because you never know that it could be a situation
like this exactly.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
I one hundred percent agree they should be doing that.
At the very least, take the report, go do some surveillance,
try to figure out, you know, ask a few questions,
so at least you have a timestamp on what is happening,
and any crucial evidence is going to be preserved.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
A small start of the timeline you have created a
this is the spot where someone realized she's missing this
point specifically, it creates that paper timeline that hard stop
if something is wrong right here.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Yes, So, as the hours pass was still no sign
of Megan, no movement on her bank account, no phone activity,
no messages. The university police finally began to listen. By
the next day they were taking things more seriously somehow,
which this never happens right at the beginning, but I'm
(11:41):
so glad it was. The FBI was brought in with
access to security footage, cell phone records, dorm key card data,
which is amazing because I mean, this is twenty twenty
five guys. Everyone knows where you're at usually at all times,
and I love that that is a security feature they
can tell when you checked out, when you came into
(12:03):
your room, when you left, that kind of thing all
by your keythob. So they also were gathering witness statements
and this timeline of what happened to Megan that on
the ninth started to take shape, and here is what
they've found. On the night of Sunday, February ninth, Megan
(12:23):
had her boyfriend over in her dorm room. Her roommate
was at work at this point. This really wasn't unusual
because they'd been dating since just January, but they had
started talking that fall. So, I mean they've been talking
for a couple of months and he would come over occasionally.
Then something strange happened. Around nine pm. Meghan's roommate suddenly
(12:46):
left work on her break, which apparently she never did.
She returned to the dorm room, Megan and the roommate
got into an argument. The boyfriend was there and the
roommate wasn't happy about it. So don't ask me why,
but this roommate and Megan didn't get along. Boyfriend is
over there, this is causing some issues. So the tensions
(13:11):
between these two have really been going for a week
since she really moved in, they're just kind of they
weren't meshing. Well, you could say Meghan had grown uncomfortable
because the roommate was allowing someone else to live in
the dorm room really unofficially and something Megan didn't want.
But apparently Megan wasn't even allowed to have her boyfriend
(13:32):
over when the roommate wasn't there, which does not seem
fair in the least. So after this argument, the roommate
went back to work. Okay, so we're probably getting all
this information directly from the boyfriend because he's there through
this whole argument and everything. So the boyfriend, he's in
the middle of all of it. He told Meghan like, hey,
(13:55):
I don't want to deal with this drama, and kind
of thought that they should take a break. So, I know,
so seems like really escalation of this. I'm sorry, girls
are petty sometimes, and there's an argument going on with
the roommate. Why would that mean they have to take
a break.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
But also, the boyfriend should have manned up a little
bit here, and I hate saying that, phreeze, but he
should have supported his girlfriend in the situation. She's obviously
uncomfortable with the roommate. Bringing in people unofficially living in
her space as well, and yeah, the boyfriend doesn't lack that,
or the roommate doesn't like that the boyfriend's there. But
(14:30):
suck it up, Buttercup, you're doing things wrong too. He
should support He should have supported Megan through that entire conversation.
It might have been awkward for him, and he may
not want to deal with drama, but when you got
a girlfriend, especially a teenage girlfriend, you got to just
deal with it.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Bro exactly.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
It seems very weird that he just like break up
with her over this. So apparently at nine seventeen, he
leaves the door and according to his mother, he was
home by nine point thirty. I don't know why that
makes me get gold because I'm like, he's young, dude,
he might be a commuter, and he doesn't live in
his dorm and actually arrived home, and that's his alibi
(15:07):
for this situation, was his mom our. Next thing we
know is at nine thirty six pm, Meghan leaves her
dorm at Haulitt Hall and was seen walking alone on campus.
She was wearing white platform tennis shoes, red pants, a
black short sleeved t shirt, and a light denim style
(15:31):
jacket and it was kind of just slung.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Over her shoulders.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
She had her favorite purse with her, which was a round,
blue and pink crossbody bag with a star on it.
It was actually hand made by her mom, Vanessa. Apparently
it was modeled after the one from Scott Pilgrim Versus
the World, and Meghan called it her security blanket. I'm like, well,
(15:57):
first of all, her mom's amazing for being able to
make her handmade number one, and you can just tell
the kind of relationship she had. She wasn't into, Oh,
let me go get a Coach bag or a Louis Vuitton.
She's carrying her mom's handmade bag. I just just like,
I don't know, it's like so adorable but also heartbreaking
(16:18):
at the same time.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
It is, and I know that this is one of
her all time favorite movies and the character that carries
that bag in that movie in which I think I've
seen before, but Megan loved her, which is exactly why
Vanessa made her this bag. Because you can't, just like
you said, you can't just go out to Coach buy it.
It is custom made for cosplay, if you will. But
(16:40):
it's just it shows how much Vanessa loves Meghan to
go out of her way to build this amazing thing
for her, and for Megan to cherish something like that
also shows maturity in my eyes.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Agreed, Agreed.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
So this particular night, it is February, so it was cold.
We've got temperatures in the twenties. Megan wasn't wearing a coat.
Her family believes that she wasn't going to go very
far because if she was, she probably would have dressed
a bit warmer. So we have the last confirmed sighting
(17:14):
was at nine fifty two PM, and that was on
campus near Champions Center, just the north of her dorm.
She's walking for less than twenty minutes where she's last
scene after that just vanishes, not another sighting of her
at all.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
There.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
There is a theory that Megan may have been walking
towards her sister Lindsay's apartment, which was just a few
blocks north, or possibly to this gas station that's also
right off campus, but really no additional camera footage has
ever surfaced to trace her further. The FBI used steamray technology,
(17:58):
so it's apparently a surveillance method that mimics a cell
tower to track devices. This revealed two critical pings after
she was last seen. The first ping came at ten
forty five Okay, so we about an hour after her
last confirmed sighting. And this was near Eben g Fine
(18:20):
Park and it's kind of at the start of Boulder
Canyon Drive. And this really would take about fifty two
minutes to walk there from Megan's dorm. I guess she
could have because it was just about an hour.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Yeah, So this is where the timeline is so critical
because you have to think of all the factors. It's
cold outside. Could she be walking faster or slower, maybe,
but if it is on the average a fifty two
minute walk, she could have made it there by then,
close enough for a king to come off of this tower.
So yeah, I mean she could have.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Oh wow, Okay. At first I was like, oh, there's
no way, but really it's like, right, if she would
have just kept walking at a decent pace, she could
have done this.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
So the second ping came at eleven fifty five PM,
so this is even further into the canyon, and this
was near the forty mile marker. And then after that
there's nothing. It's either her phone died or it was
turned off.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
Another thought behind. This is if she were picked up,
it would have been significantly less time if she was
at vehicle.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
That's very true.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
So in my mind, she's likely walking or on foot
that portion. Otherwise it would have been a significantly less
amount of time if she was in a vehicle. Let
me paint a picture a little bit seeing you. Boulder's
Campus sits on the western edge of town. North of
it is a Rapahoe Avenue. Then you hit Boulder Canyon Drive,
(19:54):
which is this windy mountain highway that follows Boulder Creek
into a remote for a sted canyon. There is a
narrow bike path alongside it, but it's not really summer.
You'd expect someone to walk alone, especially an eighteen year
old girl. It's dark, and on top of that, Megan
was afraid of the dark, which I get it. Girl,
(20:15):
I dankster wouldn't be walking out there in the Colorado
wilderness because she definitely was not dressed for that kind
of trip. She didn't tell anyone where she was going.
I feel like when she was upset and left the dorm,
it was going to be a short trip, whether that
was the short trip to Lindsay's like you said earlier,
to the gas station. She was smart enough to know
(20:37):
that it's going to get cold, especially after dark, to
bundle up before going an extended distance, agreed, And as
her parents have pointed out in the past and in
other interviews, Boulder Canyon isn't just isolated. It's known for
its unhoused population, drug acti and there's a general reputation
(21:03):
as a place to avoid, especially for young women after dark.
It's well known that you shouldn't walk along this path
at night, and Megan's smart enough she wouldn't have done that.
When authorities learned where her phone last pinged, the Boulder
County Sheriff's Office joined in the investigation further, park rangers,
dive teams, dog search and rescue dogs, drones. All of
(21:26):
that they brought in the full force of the searches,
but they didn't find her, at least not at first.
She was missing for six days, and on February fifteenth,
twenty twenty five, Megan was found. Six days after she
was seen. Park rangers returned to that forty mile marker
along Boulder Canyon Drive. The day before, an officer had
(21:47):
located a backpack and a prescription pill bottle in the area.
This bottle was later confirmed to be Megan's. It was
her adderall that she was prescribed, but in a devastating oversight,
the original officer had misread the label and he thought
that the name on it was the prescribing doctors, not Megan's.
So there was a little bit of time where this
(22:08):
was not connected to Megan's disappearance. And that was in
my mind, that's a big oversight, completely.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
Agree, and it really it wasted time, for sure.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
It did. It delayed everything. Rangers had to go back
out to that area, and on that Saturday they looked
down the steep embankment leading to the creek and that's
when they saw her.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Meghan's body was lying on snow covered rocks, partially buried
under two to three inches of fresh snow. There was
no flat ground where she lay, just kind of like
jagged boulders and ice. Her body was found about ten
yards from a large culvert that runs beneath the road,
(22:53):
a culvert that really is known to house a camp
for unchiltered people. She was lying on her back, her
left arm was outstretched, her right arm tucked inside her jacket.
Her red hair red pants should have stood out, should
have been seen by one of the many searchers that
were out there who had scoured that area, but somehow no.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
One saw her until that day.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
To reach her, rescuers had to repel down the rocky slope.
There was a broken stick near her right side. Her
left hand and fingernails had visible dirt and debris. She
was wearing the same outfit that she had been seen
in on the trail, except for her right shoe was missing.
(23:41):
That foot was covered by a torn black sock. Her
jacket was buttoned, but the left side was all bunched.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Up around her torso.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Her left arm was outside the sleeve, ripped as if
something had kind of yanked it. On her right hand,
there was a fingerless black glove. It was turned inside out.
This glove her parents didn't recognize. Beneath her body was
a pair of gray pants that no one really could explain. However,
(24:14):
there is an encampment of end house around there, so
it totally could have been someone else's, totally not connected
to her case. Her parents had said they had never
seen of before, and no one really.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Knows where they came from.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
One responding deputy noted something else.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
He wrote in his report.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
That it appears Megan had been covered by a tarp
or a blanket, but Boulder County Sheriff's Office would later
deny that. They said there was no such material ever recovered,
so it was possibly in one report and not anything else,
which is very unusual because that's something they would definitely
(24:56):
want to take as evidence, but very weird that now
they're saying that is not that didn't happen. Still, Megan's
family can't shake the uncertainty was something or someone hiding
her Because her body was found within Boulder County limits,
the Boulder County Sheriff's Office took over the investigation.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
This whole scenario really makes me question the police work
in this investigation, because we all know if evidence isn't
properly collected, then that can ruin the entire case. It
can mess up everything from timeline to evidence being tainted,
to who did it, to a million different things. And
(25:43):
this is twenty twenty five. This is not nineteen thirty
when they didn't know people were walking all over the
crime scene. This is twenty twenty five. They know better.
Even if you weren't properly trained layman like us know
that you are not supposed to walk through the crime
scene but also collect literally everything around a person. And unfortunately,
(26:04):
this is just one of the many questions that arise
in Meghan's story, because it's just going to get more
confusing from here. Meghan's family was told early on that
there were no signs of trauma to Meghan, that there
was just a scratch on her leg, But when the
final autopsy report came in, it said something different. The
(26:25):
report revealed that there were multiple bruises and abrasions, contusions
on her arms, her back, her hip, and her chest.
She had scrapes on her hands and knuckles. You already
talked about the dirt and debris under her fingernails. She
had abrasions on her face, her feet, even her scalp.
There was broken teeth, and her jacket was torn. She
(26:47):
had injuries on her left side, which is the exact
same side she always wore her purse. Oh also that purse,
it's missing, so is her phone. And there's even one
more disturbed detail on this autopsy report. Inside her stomach.
They found a soft fall sized mass of undigested pill material.
(27:09):
Her parents were shocked. I feel like shocked isn't even
a good enough word for this. What is this pill material?
Where did it come from? Did they test it? What
even is it? Nobody knew, No one knew.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
When I was doing this research, I kind of assumed
it had something to do with the pill bottle that
they had found, but that would have been an easy
thing to check off.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
Was it this?
Speaker 1 (27:33):
But it's like, oh, they have no clue, So in
my mind, it's not that. But I really honestly don't
even know if they tested that.
Speaker 3 (27:41):
They didn't. Vanessa and Joe waited for weeks for the
results of the toxicology report. They were told the tests
weren't ready, and it took until May fourth, just days
after the spring semester ended, for investigators to call with
those results. Megan had nineteen hundred nanograms per millimeter of
(28:02):
amphetamine in her blood, likely from adderall this is a
high dose, but it's not fatal. So let me give
you some context here. Amphetamine related deaths usually involve levels
of nine thousand nanograms per milli liter or more. Megans
were well below that. Now. I don't know if this
(28:24):
was within her prescription range, but again, if she has
it in her system, let's go back to that pill
bottle that they misrepresented. Where's the connection. Whose backpack is
this that has this pill bottle in it? Where we
need to go back to the pill bottle? But we
don't know. The coroner rolled Megan's death a suicide. The
(28:47):
cause of death the toxic effects of amphetamine with hypothermia
as a contributing factor. But again, that pill material, that
mass in her stomach never tested. How can a death
to be ruled of suicide based on pills that were
never identified? They went solely off the toxicology report that
is non fatal levels.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
Yeah, this is just like blowing my mind. Why would
they not test that? I think it just seems like asinine,
Like that would be your first step, that's your first clue.
Here we go.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
Agreed, and I just don't see how you can say
suicide when she has Okay, maybe she fell and that's
where all the abrasions came from. She fell down the
side of this hill. Okay, But if you're saying she
died by suicide, she took a bunch of pills. She
walked out in the middle of nowhere and was waiting
(29:44):
for them to take effect. But she didn't even take
a fatal level of these pills. I just don't see
how you can prove or how can you choose suicide
as the cause of death when and there's not enough
there to support it.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Completely agree?
Speaker 1 (30:04):
And why not just test within her stomach?
Speaker 3 (30:08):
And she wasn't that far down the mountain, Like, it's
not like she was like, I'm gonna jump off the
side of this cliff, you know, yes.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Like in my mind, it didn't sound like it could
be a fatal fall. So let's just say she walked
up there and completely fell off. I mean they said
it was a they had to shell down, but or
was pushed. Yes, So how can a young woman with
no history of suicidal thoughts, someone who was thriving in school,
(30:35):
excited about her future, end up bruised alone.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
And partially buried in snow?
Speaker 1 (30:41):
And how does a law enforcement agency close a case
without finding out what that pill material even was? These
are the questions Megan's parents have been asking ever since.
In the days after Megan's body was found, her family
discovered that her phone and purse had gone missing. Obviously,
(31:02):
no one found it when they were out there. Authorities
never even mentioned this until ten days later, so Vanessa
and her friends really began searching on their own because
they're assuming it's not out there. They don't know where
it's at. They learned about Eco ATM kiosks that buy
used electronics. Well, Vanessa filed the claim and the phone
(31:26):
was found, but it had been wiped. Someone who had
her phone turned it into this kiosk. I don't know
if you guys have seen the seen them around.
Speaker 3 (31:35):
Yeah, they're in every Walmart in the intin way to
every Walmart, and Vanessa did file the claim. And I
find this so interesting how Vanessa learned about these kiosks,
because I know they're there, but I never really think
about them, or I've never used one before. I see
it next to the key machine, like where you get
a key mate, and just like carry on about my day,
never think about all the things that could work with these.
(31:58):
Vanessa's friend spent time around the Boulder area speaking to
a bunch of people in the unhouse community to learn
about their behaviors, their actions, what they do, what maybe
someone saw something saw Megan, She specifically asked what would
happen if they found a cell phone, Like, what is
the usual thing you do if you find a cell
phone out here? If someone drops it? Whatever? What do
(32:19):
you usually do. And one person is like, oh, if
you have an ID, you can go cash it in
at these eco ATMs. And because you have to put
your ID and I'm sure it has to do with
stolen property and things like that, well, yeah, Vanessa files
the missing phone report. That's the kind of claim that
she filed, and then notified that ECOATM company and said, hey,
(32:40):
I found my daughter's phone's missing. Here's the information needed.
I'm sure it's like a serial number or something along
those lines. And in two days ECOATM was like, hey,
we found it. It was turned into us. Here it is,
you know, And that's when she found out everything I've
been wiped off of it.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
All they have to say is Vanessa is like a
crazy private detective all on her own, right from the
cell phone records, right when her daughter goes missing, to
reporting this phone stolen or missing, contacting this ECOATM is
absolutely amazing that she's doing everything she possibly can. She's
(33:19):
doing the detective's job in this regard.
Speaker 3 (33:23):
Right.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
So this phone was sold by an unhousedman named Elliot
who had ties to this that culvert that I was
talking about, this colvert camp near where Megan was found,
Elliott claimed he'd been given the phone by another man
named Travis. Well turns out Travis was really a man
(33:44):
named Alexander. So essentially Elliot says, hey, this dude, Alexander
gave me the phone. He said he had found Megan's
purse at the encampment days later, and then he just
dumped it along the bike path miles away. Elliott was
arrested and charged with theft and false declaration to a
(34:05):
pawnbroker because obviously he had to sign and say that
it was his phone. But neither man was really ever
considered a suspect in Meghan's death.
Speaker 3 (34:15):
And I will say that they were, in my opinion,
properly cleared because this Alexander dude was in jail during
the time Meghan disappeared, so obviously you can't fake that
either you were in jail or you weren't in jail.
He did say that he found her purse out in
the open and that he took it with him and
then later left it on the bike trail, but he
(34:35):
also claimed that he had no knowledge of this phone.
Even though Elliott says he gave it to him, he
did admit to taking her ved fen though, so he
admitted to taking something, and he admitted to disposing of
her purse, but he didn't agree that he took the phone.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Originally, investigators stated both had no known contact with Meghan.
But so Megan's purse was eventually found on March fifth,
like miles away, just like Alexander had said, it was
torn open. This was something that really upset Vanessa deeply
(35:13):
because this was Megan's pride and joy.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
It was like her security blink.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
The fact it was so far away from her that
would that's just depressing. She had reinforced the clasp by
hand because Meghan loved that purse, she never would have
left it behind. But I mean, like they said, if
the guys are telling the truth, they could have found
it and then did away with it later on, just
took out whatever was valuable, right.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
But I think what concerns Vanessa most about this is
because yes, Meghan loved that purse dearly, and yes she
hand sewed it, so she knew how hearty of an
item she created. Reinforcing these clasps and all these pieces
that are likely to tear if it was torn open,
was there a struggle? Does that mean what that's what
this is. There's a sign of a struggle. Is their
(36:02):
fingerprints on this? This should be evidence. Now has anyone
looked at it? Because to me, if someone grabs her
purse and it's trying to mug her and she holds
onto it tightly and it rips the seams, that's not suicide.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Agreed, Agreed. They should have tested it at the bare minimum.
In my mind, I'm just thinking it's one of the
guys like ripping it open, trying to see what's in it.
But it also could be, like you said, a struggle.
Like you just there's there for every one situation you have.
In that situation where it could have easily happened a
completely different way, which is mind boggly that it wasn't
(36:40):
properly investigated. If it was, then we would probably have
answers to a lot of these questions. We have some
idea of why the purse got where the purse ended up.
Even more troubling, her shoe. It was never found that
the shoe is still missing to this day, and there's
(37:00):
no indication that police ever actually searched for it or
if they were concerned about it. But you have to
like think where is the shoe. Things don't just disappear.
If I'm sure she was wearing a shoe when she
was walking, she has to be the shoe has to
be there somewhere if she died by suicide.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
More concerning the sock is ripped, There's so many things
that lead more towards the foul play than not. At
this point, in my opinion.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
I completely agree.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
There's just so many things unaccounted for that you can't
explain without somebody else being a part of the situation.
On March tenth, Megan's parents met with the sheriff. When
they asked about the injuries, the purse, the missing shoe,
the sheriff replied, and I quote, sometimes weird things happen
(37:52):
in an investigation and we never find out why.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
End quote. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
It's your job to find out why the weird stuff happened,
if it's weird, like, that's your whole job.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
But I can't even imagine approaching a family member and
saying that within months of their daughter dying.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
Oh completely agree, Like where's his empathy? Two days later,
Boulder County officials ruled out foul play, and they were done.
They're just like, oh, this is a suicide. We're closing everything.
We don't care about the shoe, we're not testing what
was in her stomach. We're done.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
So Meghan's case has now closed. They had no further questions.
They rolled out the foul play. They listed it as suicide.
And I don't know what you're gonna say, but Witney,
you only cover missing and unsolved cases. We don't believe
that proper investigation was completed on Meghan's case, and especially
to completely roll out homicide. And her parents feel the same.
(38:56):
So we're standing with her parents on this. There's no
way Megan would have completed suicide. And this is not
because her parents are in denial. This is not because
they're clinging to hope, but because there are too many
loose threads. There's too many contradictions, there's too many questions
that never got answered, and there's too many tests that
have been left undone. Megan didn't have a history of
(39:19):
suicidal ideation. There was no note. She was excited about
her future, she was enjoying college, she was living life.
Her death didn't match her life, and the evidence, the
broken teeth, the missing items, that massive pills in her stomach,
it deserves more scrutiny. There's more things needed to have
been done before closing this case.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Meghan Trustle deserves a full investigation. Her family deserves the
truth because a closed case doesn't mean a case solved,
and as suicide ruling doesn't always.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Mean there wasn't foul play.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
If you where someone you know has any information about
Megan's death, where she went on February ninth, or how
her phone, purse and choose ended up where they did,
please send tips to Trustle tips at Vigilante dashpr dot com.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
There are rewards available.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
Meghan's family does have a GoFundMe currently running to help
pay for various services. We're gonna link it in the
show notes and we'll share it on social media. And
that's really our call to action here. This is our
advocacy piece. Help them raise the funds, help them be loud,
help them try to get this case reopened. There's no
reason it should have been closed in the first place.
(40:46):
Thank you to Meghan's family, Vanessa, Joe, and Lindsay for
allowing us to share meghan story. This episode was researched
by Hailey Gray Research, produced and edited by us. If
you would like To support the podcast, please leave us
a five star review on your favorite podcast platform.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
Learn more about our advocacy efforts at navigating advocacy dot com.
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