Karlie Gusé

Case background and investigation

Karlie Lain Gusé was 16 when she disappeared from Chalfant, a small high-desert community in Mono County, California, about 11 miles north of Bishop. The Mono County Sheriff's Office said she was last seen in the early morning of Saturday, October 13, 2018, in the White Mountain Estates neighborhood, on Ponderosa Street near White Mountain Estate Road, walking toward U.S. Highway 6.

According to a Las Vegas Review-Journal account, Karlie told her stepmother, Melissa Gusé, on the evening of October 12 that she planned to attend a football game at her high school in Bishop. She instead went to a house party, where she smoked marijuana with her boyfriend and another teenager. She became frightened and called her stepmother, who picked her up and took her home. The newspaper reported that Melissa Gusé spent the night trying to calm the teenager, who moved between lucidity and paranoia, and recorded about eight minutes of their conversation.

Melissa Gusé woke on the morning of October 13 to find Karlie gone. Her cellphone had been left on the kitchen counter. Melissa and Karlie's father, Zachary Gusé, searched the neighborhood and then called 911, the Review-Journal reported. The Sheriff's Office said Karlie left without personal belongings or a phone and might be disoriented; a later release said she was possibly wearing a white T-shirt and gray sweatpants.

Three witnesses told investigators they saw someone matching Karlie's description that morning. Two neighbors described a tall, slender girl walking past around daybreak holding a piece of paper, heading toward the highway. A third, unnamed witness reported a girl standing in the sagebrush near Highway 6, the same area where tracking dogs lost her scent, according to the Review-Journal.

The Sheriff's Office said it used helicopters, scent dogs, search and rescue teams and off-road vehicles to search the neighborhood and surrounding desert, interviewed family and friends, and examined her social media and electronic devices. On October 31, 2018, it said there was no evidence of an abduction or any other crime but that all possibilities were being considered. The FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children assisted. The Review-Journal reported that cellphone data corroborated the accounts given by her father, stepmother and the two teenagers from the party, and that a search of the home and of Karlie's devices produced no incriminating evidence.

In October 2023 the Review-Journal reported that the Sheriff's Office had received a call in March 2021 from a witness who claimed to have seen Karlie at a party in Tonopah, Nevada, roughly 100 miles away, and that investigators had located a vehicle that may have been used to pick her up beside Highway 6. Sheriff Ingrid Braun confirmed that the lead was being actively investigated with the FBI. No arrest has been announced and Karlie has not been found.