Geri seemed to have a clean record, but Neil had a child molestation case in his record.

"I almost fell out of my chair, ” Levin recalled, ”when I read that one of the complaining witnesses had mentioned that Rein's brother, Neil had told her about killing a man and burying him in his mother's yard. The Tacoma Police detective who did his child molestation investigation never followed up on the 'murder' story. ”

Joe and Rein worked well together in his meat business in Anchorage, so well that he announced one day that he was giving her half interest in Alaska Meat Provisions. She didn't even have to put any money into the company; he was happy to give her what he felt was her share.

Joe bought prime meat wholesale from a ranch in Colorado. He was able to selk some of it in sides and quarters. He and Rein rewrapped and packaged smaller quantities in the office, which wasn't really legal with the permits they had but wasn't a major infraction either.

Geri Miller got a job as a saleswoman at a Lamonts department store, and both women lived quite comfortably. Whether Joe asked to move in with them in the Jewl Lake house is unknown but he never did live there, staying instead in his barren small office quarters.

Strangely at one point the two women invited another man to move in with them. Rein always chafed at the idea of being totally bound to one man. She met a German national named Kert Winkle in a Greek restaurant called Andres in Anchorage where she worked part time as a hostess. Kert was an accomplished chef and appeared to have money.

Kert was about thirty in 1976. He was much shorter than Joe Cruz, and not nearly as handsome, but Rein was attracted to him and they dated. According to Winkle they eventually became lovers.

Joe probably suspected that there was more than friendship between the two, but Rein said a long time later that he never confronted her about it.

*When the gun was located, Diane Darnell wanted to return it to Gypsy Cruz. Still, the discovery of his long-lost gun came with no new information on who had killed Joe. Johny Rojas learned a little more about Joe's background when she got a phone call from Gypsy. Gypsy called from her new home in Hawaii and was surprised to learn that it had been difficult to locate her. She wanted to stay in touch in case there were ever any human remains located where Rein Curtis and her mother had once lived.

Although it was clear that Gypsy loved her father and worried about him, there were many things she didn't know about him, and their contact had been infrequent after he moved to Alaska with Rein.

Fifteen years after her father vanished, Gypsy no longer knew where Rein Curtis and her mother lived; they had moved often after they vacated the old blue house. Still, she was encouraged to hear how positive Johny Cruz was when she said she believed that she could find Joe Cruz.

*Perhaps he didn't know. Kert soon got a job with Campo Pacific, a company that offered catering service to workers in remote location across Alaska. The pipeline provided hugh paying jobs to thousands of them, and seeing to their needs meant more jobs for those who had flocked to Alaska and the pipeline. It wasn't that different from the Alaska gold rush hundred years earlier.

Kert worked eight to nine weeks up on the North slope at a stretch, and then had two weeks off. At least he was supposed to work that rotation, but if hus replacement didn't get offthe plane, Kert had to stay until they could fill that job. Often, Kert was gone from Anchorage for fourteen or fifteen weeks.

Joe of course traveled much of time. He drove his white truck from Anchorage ti Fairbanks and back, going up the eastern highway and returning along the western route. It wouldn't have been too difficult for Rein to keep the two men from confronting each other. Neither of them spent much time in Anchorage.

Rein reportedly became engaged to Kert Winkle . Years later, Rein said she broke up with Kert when she found out he had slept with one if her female relatives.

That may or may not have been true. One thing is certain, however. Rein Curtis life was always full of drama, usually centered around her relationship with men.

Gypsy and her sister, Jina remained convinced that Rein had something to do with their fathers disappearance. They had no idea how difficult that would be to prove.

Gypsy tried nto file a missing report with the Pierce country sheriff office, and asked for a meeting with then sheriff Mack French.

"He wouldn't see me, ” Gypsy recalls. " I actually had to get a county commissioners to intercede and I finally got French to talk wit me. All I asked was would they just reinterview Rein Curtis. He wouldn't even agree to do that! ”

In reality, Pierce country investigators never interviewed Rein and no missing report was ever filed in their jurisdictional. Sheriff's Mack French retired under a cloud that centered in his alleged interest in pornography and had nothing to do with Joe Cruz, it was not French's detectives fault that they hadn't acted on Gypsy Cruz report they weren't aware of it.

Gypsy was extremely frustrated. Both she and her younger sisters, Jina and Rosey, would slip into depression every year as summer drifted into fall and their father was still missing.

"We felt that was the time when out father died, Gypsy remembers. And no one seemed to care enough to investigate what had happened to him. So our brother Dinn came up with an idea. We all got together and made up a story that Dad had left an insurance policy where the proceeds would go to Rein Curtis and to Din. So Din called her, and we taped the call. She was very interested at the thought that she might get money from an insurance policy, but she sounded baffled that "She kept saying, 'Well, I'll be darned,' as if she was surprised that my dad hadn't shown up somewhere. But she didn't want the insurance money enough to admit that to investi- my dad was still missing. our dad was dead."

Eventually, of course, Gypsy and Jina had found detectives who would listen to them at the Topeka Police Department and at the Queen Country Sheriff's Office. And, finally, in 2007, in Pierce Country. By the time Sergeant David Levin became the lead investigator on the case of the unidentified bones, Pierce Country had a new sheriff, Paulo Swift and things were very different there. Levin wanted to talk to Rein Curtis, but he needed to find out as much about her as he could before he con- fronted her. Gypsy Cruz had never stopped looking for her father. She even bought a book on how to find a missing person and tried some of the techniques suggested there. if she had to do it all by herself, she was prepared to do that. Gypsy is an upbeat, attractive woman with thick black hair, and her career is an unusual choice for a female; she is a merchant mariner and is often out at sea for months at n time, stopping in exotic ports of call, Occasionally, she will be the only woman on board. Wherever she was, Gypsy thought of her dad, deter- mined not to give up her search for him as decades passed. "Whenever I thought of him," Gypsy recalls, "I always pictured Lake wood and 104th. I recalled walking that long driveway to the house that was at the back of the lot. That would have been in 1990, a dozen years after he dis- appeared. I knew my dad was there somewhere. It was like a chain reaction-it all fit together. But I couldn't prove it, and I couldn't find him." And she was right. She had gone up that driveway and felt so very close to Joe. She felt his spirit, but she still didn't know where he was. That year Gypsy tried, in vain, to request a presumptive death certificate for her father from the medical examiner of Pierce Country. One of the medical investigators wrote back to her: "We are not insensitive to your situation. However, we cannot issue a presumptive death certificate at this time. Mr. Cruz was last seen in this county," he wrote. "However, the only evidence that he is dead is the length of time since he has been seen.