Their Missing Son
When she answered the call, she had never expected to hear the voice on the other end. Her jaw dropped, and she signaled for her husband to come closer.
She was not expecting them to mention her son let alone that he was in North Korea. They hadn't seen their son, David, for the past seven years. He had gone missing.
Love For Other Cultures
David Sneddon was a Brigham Young University student who dreamt of living an adventure-filled life. As much as he loved his home in America, he was fascinated with learning about other cultures. In 2004, he had the opportunity to visit the east of China.
He recalled his experience of traveling to South Korea and thought he had experienced enough to make it through his next trip. But he couldn't have been more wrong.
Southeast China
David's father, Roy, shared with The Washington Post that his son had finished his coursework. "He wanted to celebrate by touring in southeast China before he returned home."
But what happened to David on his trip became such a puzzling mystery that even the highest government officials couldn’t unravel it.
A Sinister Joke
David often corresponded via email and told his parents that he would use the three weeks to travel before returning home. He thought a brisk journey through southern China would suffice for some "hard-core traveling."
He continued in the email and joked that they should look for his body in the western Yunnan Province of China or the Yellow Mountains of Anhui if they never heard from him again. They breathed a sigh of relief when he said he was joking and "really so excited." But his joke would soon not be taken so lightly.
The Li River
It was the 5th of August, on a Thursday, when David and his roommate, George Bailey, decided to go hiking. There was a backpacker town along the Li River which they hiked and biked through.
They enjoyed the weekend together but would soon move in different directions. George was meeting friends in the northern region, and David was heading to Yunnan in the west.
Saying Goodbye
David knew he needed to catch the bus on Monday morning, so he was ready to leave in the early hours. The noise woke George up he was making, but he was happy to see the smile on his friend's face as he waved goodbye.
George had no idea that when David yelled, "See you soon!" those would be the last words he would ever hear from him. They had planned to meet in Provo, but David would be elsewhere.
No Show
When David's family hadn't heard from him in a while, they grew worried. But they calmed themselves down and considered the possibility that their son was having too much fun in China to email them all the time. Or perhaps he didn't have a steady internet connection to message them.
But there was no stopping the worry when he didn't meet with his younger brother, Michael, in Seoul as they had planned.
Shocking News
David had wanted to hike the Leaping Tiger Gorge Trail, where he had disappeared. There was no trace left behind that even suggested he had been there.
David's parents were shocked by the news when the Chinese officials finally got a hold of them. However, the parents couldn't help but feel something was off.
Something Strange About The Story
The Chinese government had shocking news to share with Roy and Kathleen Sneddon. They told them their son had suffered a fatal fall, but they could not retrieve the body.
But the Sneddons were strangely calm. They didn't believe the story they were telling and felt something strange was going on, but they couldn’t put their finger on what it was.
He Was Capable
Kathleen explained that David would have been the only American since World War II who's body had gone missing. "I couldn't believe they didn't know where his body was," she said.
David's parents knew their son and what he was capable of. They did not doubt his hiking capabilities and knew that he would have been smart about things while he was on a trail in a different country.
Searching
Roy was determined to find out what had really happened to David, so he enlisted the help of two of his other children, Michael and James. Together, the boys traveled to Yunnan to try and find their missing brother.
A month after David had disappeared, they reached the Leaping Tiger Gorge, where they were met with a suspicious sight.
Putting On A Show
"It was ridiculous," Michael Sneddon said. When they reached the area, the hiking trail was crawling with policemen and their K-9 units, putting on a desperate show for the benefit of the two brothers.
"We just laughed and said thanks," Michael added. But, while David was nowhere to be found, the brothers did come across a valuable piece of the puzzle.
Clues
At the Leaping Tiger Gorge, a tour guide told the siblings that he’d known David personally. In fact, he’d walked with him along the entire trail! This story was then corroborated by a hostel owner at the end of the hike.
Apparently, David had stayed there. The clues were all pointing to the fact that David had walked the trail successfully, but where was he now?
Determined
The Sneddon family kept searching for something… anything… that would indicate that David was alive. They showed the locals pictures of him, and wherever they went, they found more clues that David had been there.
A cafe owner in Shangri-La said he’d met him and could even describe him, but that’s where the trail suddenly grew cold.
Witnesses
All the witnesses who told David’s parents about having seen their son, including the mentioned cafe owner and a Tibetan hiker, later said to the Chinese police that they couldn’t be sure about what they said.
In other words, they refused to appear as formal witnesses in front of Chinese law enforcement. But why could that be?
Silence
"We were, I suppose, naive," Roy told the media. "We had all these sightings we felt good about and went to Shangri-La … we said, hey, we have all this information they haven't shared with the police.”
"It became evident they weren't going to do anything. The Korean cafe was about 100 meters from a police station, all they had to do was walk down the street, and they didn't do it for six months. The Chinese police are not incompetent." But that’s not all.
Terrified
Kathleen, David’s mother, went even further. She said that those witnesses were “terrified” of what might happen to them if they spoke about the issue.
It became clear that David’s parents couldn’t count on the Chinese government to help them find their son. However, they weren’t willing to give up. But what could they do now?
Helpless
Roy got the U.S. State Department involved. But, as far as the department was concerned, David had met his end in the Gorge.
They believed what the Chinese government told them. Roy and Kathleen’s hands were tied. It was only in 2011 -- seven years after David’s disappearance -- that they got a bizarre call.
A Theory
The man on the end of the line was Richard Craft, an expert on North Korea and a formidable attorney. He told Kathleen that all the details about David’s disappearance, in his experience, pointed to North Korea.
He’d been studying the pattern of typical North Korean government kidnappings, and all the clues fit. Kathleen couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
It Wasn’t The First Time
The North Korean government has a history of kidnapping foreign nationals who venture into areas near its borders. The Japanese government is particularly concerned with this.
It has been happening since the 70s. Most of the people abducted by the North Korean government are yet to be found. Nothing is known about their whereabouts or even about whether they’re dead or alive.
17 Victims
Many Japanese citizens disappeared during the 1970s and 1980s, and the Government of Japan has so far identified 17 Japanese citizens as victims of kidnapping.
Five of them returned home in 2002, but nothing has been heard from any other abductee. Among the missing Japanese citizens is Megumi Takuya, a 13-year-old girl who disappeared in 1977 and was allegedly enslaved as a language teacher for a high-ranking North Korean official.
Enslaved
Apparently, most of these Japanese citizens were kidnapped and forced to teach North Korean officials about the Japanese language and culture or had their identities stolen so agents could masquerade as Japanese for espionage aimed mainly at South Korea.
In September 2002, North Korea admitted that it had abducted Japanese citizens and apologized while promising to prevent any further recurrences. However, there are reasons to believe that this promise wasn’t kept.
Secrecy
After admitting to the abduction of 13 Japanese nationals, North Korea allowed five to return home. It said eight others had passed away and denied that any other missing Japanese citizens had entered its territory.
The North Korean government promised to conduct an investigation but never announced the results.
Complete Silence
According to Japan, North Korea hasn’t released the other victims of abduction out of fear about what they might divulge about the inner workings of the North Korean government.
To this day, there are four Japanese citizens that went missing during the 70s and 80s, the whereabouts or fate of which are unknown by anyone except North Korea. But that isn’t all.
Charles Jenkins
Before David went missing, another American citizen disappeared and only reemerged years later: it was US Army Sergeant Charles Jenkins.
As it was proven, he had been kidnapped by North Korea and enslaved for 40 years, during which he had to teach English to North Korean spies. Jenkins was released just a few months after David vanished.
Kept Hostage
Jenkins recalls having been interrogated for 10 days and then transferred to a house with two other Americans where he was a hostage for decades.
"I suffered from enough cold, hunger, beatings, and mental torture to frequently make me wish I was dead," he recounts. Was that what happened to David? Had he been kidnapped by the North Korean government?
More Evidence
"I just thought it was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard," Kathleen recalls. But Melanie Kirkpatrick, a North Korea expert, believed otherwise, "If you know the history of North Korea's kidnappings of foreign nationals, it's not so crazy," she explained.
So, what had really happened to David? And where was he now? Could he have been abducted by the North Korean government?
It Made Sense
Melanie combed through the evidence, and everything made perfect sense. "We know that North Korean operatives were active in that region [Yunnan] around the same time David was there—with China's full permission," she said in a shocking statement.
But that wasn’t all there was to it. She had even more evidence to support her theory.
Abducted
Melanie claimed that Japanese politician Keiji Furuya told her, "It is most probable that a U.S. national has been abducted to North Korea," back in 2013. But the most convincing evidence only surfaced in 2016.
An informant had come forward with new information, according to a South Korean organization that specialized in North Korean kidnappings.
Wild Claims
Some sources inside Japan made some wild claims about David's whereabouts, namely that he had been kidnapped by North Korean officials and forced to teach Kim Jun-un, the infamous president of North Korea, English!
This information was even corroborated by Choi Sung-Yong, who was the head of the Abductees' Family Union in Seoul. Could these claims possibly be true?
A New Name
Sung-Yong then went on to provide more information, stating that David had changed his name and now went by Yoon Bong Soo and that he had also married a woman named Kim Eun Hye.
Could that be why nobody could track David down? Had David gone native in North Korea? This is what David’s mother said about this possibility after a conversation with Sung-Yong:
Part Of Their Plan
"It should be emphasized that that is part of the North Korean plan," Kathleen said. "If North Korea captures you, they're going to give you a wife; you have children, so you settle down and like it there, and you enjoy it and give them your best."
"We in our hearts think he's alive. We think he's probably teaching English. That's the most likely thing to use him for." There was one problem with this theory, though…
Not 100% Sure
Sung-Yong's information came with a caveat: he was only about 50% certain that the information was reliable.
"To us, the ideas are not new," Roy Sneddon said. "We have no proof that it's reliable, to be honest," said David’s mother. So it wasn’t like they could trust 100% what Sung-Yong said; despite all the coincidences and North Korea’s history, it was just a hypothesis until new evidence surfaced.
Just A Possibility
So David's parents couldn't afford to get their hopes up just to discover that none of the information about their son was true. It was just another possibility, but they had to wait for more evidence.
And besides the unreliability of the information, there was something else that complicated the issue further; it was something that involved the Japanese government.
Ulterior Motives
Some officials in Washington believed that the Japanese government had an ulterior motive when it came to David, the missing U.S. citizen.
They believed that Seoul's Abductees' Family Union was only raising suspicions about kidnapped Americans and drawing attention to David's story so that the United States would intervene—and help abducted Japanese citizens in the process!
Not Credible
The U.S. State Department then said that all the evidence that had been uncovered in David's case was purely circumstantial and not conducive to any definite, certain conclusion.
The U.S. State Department said there was "no credible information to substantiate the idea that he has been abducted." So in the meantime, until there was more information, David's parents were left in the dark. What could they do now?
Other Theories
Now, the Sneddons were stuck with evidence that they felt was convincing enough for them to believe that David's disappearance did indeed have something to do with North Korea.
"My thought initially," Roy Sneddon said, "is they [North Koreans] mistook him for someone who was trying to move North Koreans out." Had that been the case, David’s fate would have probably been a grim one.
Never Giving Up
The Sneddons weren't about to give up the search for their missing son, though. They decided to take another step forward and try to get help from the House of Representatives.
In June 2017, Utah Senator Mike Lee and Representative Chris Stewart, who had been in contact with the Sneddons, urged the U.S. president to find some definitive answers.
Finding Comfort
But while the Sneddons waited and prayed for a break in the case, they took comfort from wherever they could.
"If my son has a part in helping North Koreans have a normal life in any way, I would just be thrilled," Kathleen said. But still, day and night, they were tortured by the same thought: would they ever hear from David again?
“I Want An Answer”
“I want an answer to what happened,” says Jenny Sneddon Reuel, David’s younger sister. “I lost a confidant and a best friend. That longing never goes away. There are moments when I will do something or hear a song that reminds me of Dave,” she said.
In 2019, State Department spokeswoman Katina Adams spoke about the issue after talking to Japanese, South Korean, and North Korean officers. This is what she said:
Adams’ Declarations
“While we did not receive an official response, the DPRK government publicly denied claims that Mr. Sneddon is living in Pyongyang,” she said.
“Thus far, we have not been able to verify any information suggesting that David Sneddon was abducted from China by North Korean officials or is alive in North Korea, but we will continue our efforts to search for any verifiable information.”
Do They Even Care?
“We understand that this might not be the top of the American priority. We recognize that the denuclearization negotiations are paramount,” said Bailey, the friend who accompanied David across China.
“But if Trump is going to go and meet with Kim Jong Un, there is a real question as to whether he is going to bring this up. No one knows if Trump has even heard about this case. I’m not sure if people even care,”
No Comment
During his term in office, Donald Trump made no public mention of David’s disappearance. Current president Joe Biden hasn’t made any public comments either.
However, the Japanese prime minister has mentioned some recent talks with Biden where the president expressed his support on the issue of the abductions of Japanese citizens. Will the president speak on David’s vanishing sometime, though?
Waiting For News
In the meantime, David’s family is still waiting for any news on the case. “I still don’t have an answer to what happened to my brother,” his sister said.
“I know that there is nothing verifiable, but why was there no body or clothes or anything? Even if someone showed me a T-shirt, that would mean something.”
In order to protect the privacy of those depicted, some names, locations, and identifying characteristics have been changed and are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblances to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.