Part 1: The Longest Night

Bend, Oregon, is deceptive. By day, it’s a paradise of jagged peaks, rushing rivers, and the kind of crisp, clean air that makes you feel invincible. It’s a college town, safe and sleepy, the kind of place where you leave your doors unlocked and trust your neighbors. 

 Kaylee and I lived in that bubble. She was twenty-three, a dental assistant with big dreams and a spirit that was equal parts ancient wisdom and chaotic, youthful energy. She was a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and she carried that heritage with a quiet dignity, even as she lit up every room she walked into. 

We lived near the Central Oregon Community College campus, in the Alpine Meadows apartments. It was a good life. Simple. We had our routine, our friends, and a plan for the future that seemed set in stone. Her parents, Jamie and Juli, treated me like family. We were solid.

Or so I thought.

July 23, 2016. 

 

 It was a hot Saturday, the kind where the heat radiates off the asphalt long after the sun dips below the Cascades. 

 Kaylee was buzzing with energy. She put on a black dress that hugged her frame and pulled on her favorite brown boots. 

 She grabbed her green purse—I can still see it sitting on the counter, vivid against the fake granite—and headed out for a bachelorette party downtown.

“I won’t be late,” she’d said, or maybe she didn’t. Memory is a tricky thing when you’re trying to reconstruct the last normal moments of your life. 

I stayed back. I wasn’t big on the downtown bar scene, and honestly, I trusted her. But as the hours ticked by, the unease started to creep in. You know that feeling in your gut? The one you ignore because you don’t want to be that guy—the jealous, controlling boyfriend? I pushed it down.

Around midnight, my phone buzzed. It was Kaylee. She was ready to be picked up.

When I pulled up to the curb downtown, the scene was chaotic. 

 Bachelorette parties are wild by nature, but something was off. A friend mentioned she’d seen Kaylee dancing with some guy. Not me. Just some random guy at the bar.

The jealousy I’d been suppressing flared up, hot and sharp. When she got into the car, the air between us was thick. She was tipsy, maybe a little defensive, and I was simmering.

“What were you doing?” I asked, my grip tightening on the steering wheel.

“I was just dancing, Cam. It’s a party.”

“It didn’t look like just dancing.”

We fought. It wasn’t a screaming match, not really. It was one of those tired, circular arguments where you talk past each other. I was worried about her reckless behavior; she felt suffocated. She’d been feeling down lately, telling her dad she was “in a bit of a hole,” and I think she just wanted to let loose. I didn’t get it. I just wanted her safe.

We pulled into our apartment complex at 12:14 a.m. The silence in the car was deafening.

“I need some air,” she said, opening the door before I’d even turned off the engine.

“Kaylee, just come inside. Let’s talk about this in the morning.”

“No. I need to cool off.”

She slammed the door. I watched her walk away towards the edge of the parking lot, her boots crunching on the gravel. It wasn’t the first time she’d done this. Kaylee was fiery. When things got heated, she walked. She’d loop around the neighborhood, breathe in the night air, and come back ten minutes later, ready to apologize or hug it out.

So, I let her go.

I went upstairs to our apartment, sat on the edge of the bed, and waited. 12:20 a.m. 12:24 a.m. 

The silence of the apartment started to press in on me. Ten minutes. That was her limit. She should have been back.

I went to the window. The parking lot was empty. The streetlights cast long, orange shadows that stretched out like grasping fingers. 

I grabbed my keys and ran downstairs. “Kaylee?”

Nothing. Just the distant hum of traffic on College Way. 

I texted her. Where are you? Please come home and talk to me.

No reply.

I got in my car and started driving. I drove slow, crawling along the dark roads near campus, scanning the sidewalks for that black dress. I texted again. We went back and forth, the digital argument continuing where the verbal one left off.

Please don’t do this to me, I typed, desperation leaking into my thumbs. I apologized for being upset. Just come back.

Then, at 1:00 a.m., her response came through. Cold. Final.

Goodbye, phone off.

I stared at the screen. Goodbye?

“Kaylee, please,” I texted back.

The message didn’t deliver. Her phone was dead.

I spent the next hour trawling the streets. I drove up to the college, down the back roads, circling our apartment complex like a shark patrolling empty waters. The darkness of Bend, usually so peaceful, felt heavy now. Every shadow looked like a figure. Every rustle of the wind sounded like footsteps. 

But she wasn’t there.

Eventually, logic tried to override panic. *She’s cooling off, 

 

 * I told myself. She’s stubborn. 

 She probably walked to a friend’s house or just found a spot to sit and ignore me. She’ll be back in the morning.

I went home. I didn’t sleep. I lay in our bed, staring at the empty space beside me, willing the front door to open. Willing to hear the jingle of her keys, the thud of her boots.

The sun rose on July 24th, bringing a harsh, unforgiving light. 

 The empty side of the bed screamed at me.

9:00 a.m. 

 

 I called her phone again. Straight to voicemail.

I drove to her best friend’s house. Her car, her beloved Subaru Impreza, was still parked there from the night before. But Kaylee wasn’t inside.

“She didn’t come here, Cam,” her friend said, confusion clouding her face.

My stomach dropped. Kaylee went nowhere without her car. If she had walked away from me, she would have come here to get her wheels.

I called her dad, Jamie. He was in church.

“Cam? Everything okay?”

“I can’t find Kaylee,” I choked out. “She walked off last night and she hasn’t come back.”

The panic in my voice must have been contagious because within an hour, the family was mobilizing. Kaylee and her mom, Juli, were close—tight-knit in a way that made a silent phone impossible. 

 Kaylee didn’t just disappear. She didn’t ghost her family. 

By early afternoon, the reality was undeniable. This wasn’t a cooling-off walk. This wasn’t a stubborn silence.

I dialed 911.

“Dispatch, can I help you?”

“Hi… um, I’m not sure if this is quite the right number to call,” I started, my voice trembling. “Last night, I got home from the bars with my girlfriend. She got upset at me and ran off. And I chased her and wasn’t able to find her and I still haven’t heard from her.”

I gave them the details. The fight. The black dress. The location—Alpine Meadows, College Way. 

“Any diagnosed mental or physical health issues?” the dispatcher asked.

“No, none that I know of.”

But her mom, Juli, knew better. When the police spoke to her, she mentioned Kaylee’s history of epilepsy. 

 It was a stretch—she hadn’t had a seizure in years—but Juli knew what I was just beginning to realize: we needed them to look now. We couldn’t wait 24 hours. If they thought she was at risk medically, they’d move faster. 

Juli’s instinct was terrifyingly sharp. She knew. Mothers always know. 

The police arrived. 

 

 They questioned me, hard. I was the boyfriend. I was the last person to see her. We had fought. I fit the profile perfectly. I sat there, answering every question, showing them my texts, practically begging them to treat me as a suspect if it meant they would find her.

“I just want her back,” I told Lieutenant Devon Lewis.

They ruled me out quickly. My grief was too raw, my desperation too real. They checked the guy she danced with at the bar—the stranger who had sparked our fight. He admitted to flirting but hadn’t seen her since she left with me.

Sunday turned into Monday. The timeline was closing in.

Kaylee was a dental assistant. 

 She loved her job. She was responsible.

“If she doesn’t show up for work tomorrow,” her dad said, his voice cracking, “we know.”

Monday morning, July 25th. The sun came up, indifferent to our nightmare. I waited by the phone. Her parents waited at the clinic.

Kaylee didn’t show up.

The silence from her phone was no longer just worrying; it was a deafening siren. My girl, the one with the green purse and the infectious laugh, had vanished into the thin mountain air.

And while we were paralyzed by the unknown, miles away, another woman was waking up to a nightmare of her own. Her name was Isabel, a rookie cop. And her husband, a campus security guard named Edwin Lara, had just told her a story that would shatter all of our lives.

He told her he had done something terrible.

Part 2: The Monster in the Uniform

While I was drowning in the deafening silence of Kaylee’s absence, staring at a phone that wouldn’t ring, the answers were already hiding in plain sight. They were less than a mile away, tucked behind the facade of a normal marriage, inside the mind of a man sworn to protect the very campus where we lived.

We would later learn that Sunday, July 24th—the day I spent driving in frantic circles—was a day of suffocating normalcy for Isabel Ponce-Lara. She was a rookie police officer, new to the force, eager to do good. Her husband, Edwin Lara, was a security guard for Central Oregon Community College. He wore a uniform. He drove a patrol SUV. He was the guy you waved to. The guy who was supposed to be the “reassuring presence.”

But that Sunday, the reassuring presence was cracking.

Isabel later recounted how quiet he was when he came home from his night shift. They went to church, they went to Pizza Hut, they watched Netflix. It sounds mundane, doesn’t it? Domestic. But fear lives in the details.

They went for a drive that afternoon, and Edwin did something he never did. He kept the windows of the car cracked open. It was hot—stiflingly hot—but he wouldn’t roll them up. He wouldn’t turn on the AC. He said he just wanted the air.

I imagine the smell he was trying to escape. The metallic tang of fresh blood. The scent of a crime he couldn’t wash off his hands.

Monday morning broke the dam.

While Kaylee’s dad and I were staring at the clock, realizing she wasn’t at work, Edwin Lara was unravelling. He couldn’t hold the darkness in anymore. He turned to his wife, this woman who had pledged to uphold the law, and he shattered her world with a single, horrifying confession.

“I hit someone,” he told her, tears streaming down his face. “With the patrol car. It was an accident. I panicked. I hid the body.”

Isabel froze. Hid the body?

Why would you hide a body if it was an accident? Why wouldn’t you call 911? She was a cop; she knew the procedure. Panic is one thing, but hiding a victim is a conscious act of concealment.

Before she could process the enormity of what he was saying, Edwin did something that signaled this was no accident. He didn’t ask for a lawyer. He didn’t ask her to drive him to the station.

He took her service weapon.

And then he drove off.

Isabel was left standing in the wreckage of her life, terrified that her husband was going to hurt himself. At 11:52 a.m., driven by duty and a gnawing dread, she walked into the police station. She didn’t go to protect him. She went to report him.

That was the domino that toppled everything.

The police swarmed the Lara home. They didn’t know yet that this was connected to Kaylee. They thought they were investigating a hit-and-run, a panic-induced cover-up. They headed for the shed in the backyard, the place Edwin had been so protective of.

When they opened the door, the heat inside must have been suffocating. And there, sitting in the gloom, was a trash bag.

Inside was a purse. A bright green purse.

The moment they radioed that in, my world ended for the second time. I knew that purse. I had seen it a thousand times. I had watched her grab it off the counter Saturday night.

But the purse wasn’t just sitting there. It was soaked in blood.

And next to it? Clumps of blonde hair. Matted. Torn.

And a rock. A heavy, jagged rock, stained deep red.

The “accident” story evaporated instantly. You don’t hit someone with a car and then bludgeon them with a rock. This wasn’t a panic. This was a slaughter.

The investigation pivoted instantly from a Missing Person to a Homicide. The man we were looking for wasn’t a scared security guard who made a mistake. We were hunting a monster.

As detectives dug into Edwin Lara’s life, the picture got darker. He wasn’t just a guard. He was a criminal justice student. He studied murder. Inside that shed, propped against a wall like a grotesque trophy, was a college project he’d made. It was a poster about the “Railroad Killer,” a drifter serial killer from the 90s who hopped trains and bashed his victims’ heads in with rocks.

Lara had decorated the poster with red paint to mimic blood spatter. He had pasted graphic images of victims on it. It was a shrine to brutality, hidden in his backyard. The parallel was chilling. He hadn’t just studied the killer; he had emulated him. He used a rock. He targeted a woman alone.

But where was he?

Edwin Lara was gone. He had a head start, a police-issued pistol, and a desperation that made him infinitely dangerous. He knew the police were coming. He knew his life was over. And a man with nothing to lose is the most terrifying thing on earth.

He didn’t stay in Bend. He ran.

The manhunt exploded outward, crossing city lines, then county lines. While I was sitting in an interview room, numb and broken, trying to process that Kaylee’s purse was found covered in blood, Lara was already hunting his next victim.

He made it to Salem, Oregon, a few hours north. He was prowling the parking lot of a Ross Dress for Less, watching the shoppers. He was looking for someone specific. Later, he would admit it: he was looking for someone “weak.” Someone he could dominate.

He found Andrea Mays.

Andrea was nineteen. She had just finished a twelve-hour shift. She was tired. She sat in her car, checking Snapchat, taking a moment to breathe before driving home. She had her window down.

Suddenly, a man in a bulletproof vest with a backpack appeared out of the darkness. He shoved a gun—Isabel’s gun—through her open window.

“Drive,” he commanded.

Andrea froze. The terror must have been absolute. This stranger, sweating and manic, jumped into her passenger seat. He told her exactly who he was. He didn’t hide it. He bragged about it.

“I’m the guy from the news,” he said, his voice dripping with a twisted pride. “I don’t know if you heard what happened to the girl I just killed.”

He told her about the pregnant woman he’d approached earlier, how she’d brushed him off. “Little does she know what I could have done to her,” he sneered.

He handcuffed Andrea to the gear shift of her own car. He forced her to drive him south, deeper into the night. He was paranoid, watching the sky for helicopters, convinced the entire world was closing in on him.

For hours, Andrea was trapped in a rolling cage with a man who had just bludgeoned my girlfriend to death. He played mind games with her. At a motel in Southern Oregon, he handcuffed her to the bedframe. He forced her to swallow sleeping pills.

Can you imagine the horror? Fighting to stay awake, terrified that if you close your eyes, you’ll never open them again? Terrified that he’ll do to you what he did to the girl in Bend?

Andrea survived by her wits. When her phone alarm went off, startling him, she lied. She told him she had a medical condition, an STI, and she needed her meds. It was a brilliant, desperate lie to keep him from touching her. And it worked.

But Lara was unravelling fast. The sleeping pills, the paranoia, the running—he was a live wire snapping in the wind.

He dragged Andrea back to the car. They kept moving. California. He was crossing state lines now, turning a local tragedy into a multi-state federal case.

In Yreka, California, his desperation turned violent again. Andrea’s car was failing; it was leaking oil. He needed a new vehicle.

He spotted an older man, Jack Levy, in a motel parking lot. Jack was a wildlife photographer, there to take pictures of butterflies. A gentle soul in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Lara burst into Jack’s room, dragging Andrea with him like a human shield. He demanded the keys.

Jack refused. He yelled for help.

Lara didn’t hesitate. He raised Isabel’s gun and fired.

Jack fell, shot in the gut.

Lara didn’t even blink. He grabbed Andrea and ran, leaving Jack bleeding out on the linoleum. They sprinted to a nearby gas station. Lara was frantic now. He needed wheels. He needed to disappear.

He saw a family. A seventeen-year-old boy, his grandmother, and his little brother. They were just getting gas.

Lara threw Andrea into their car and leveled the gun at the teenager’s head.

“Drive or I’ll shoot.”

The boy drove.

This was the monster who had taken Kaylee. A man who would shoot a grandfather, kidnap a teenager, terrorize a family, and brag about murder to a nineteen-year-old girl.

Back in Bend, the news was filtering in. “Suspect sighted in Salem.” “Shooting in California.” “Carjacking.”

It felt like the world was burning down around us. Every report was a blow. This wasn’t just about Kaylee anymore. She was the first domino in a chain of agony that was stretching down the West Coast.

And the worst part? We still didn’t have her. We had her purse. We had her blood. We knew she was gone. But we didn’t have her.

Lara was speeding down the highway at 120 miles per hour, Andrea trapped beside him, a police chase forming behind them like a storm gathering strength. He was cornered. He was armed. And he had nothing left to lose.

I sat in the police station, staring at the wall, and I prayed. I prayed for Andrea. I prayed for the family in the car.

And I prayed that before this monster went down, he would tell us one thing.

Where is she?

Part 3: The Silence of the Pines

The end of the manhunt played out like a movie scene I never wanted to watch. While I was frozen in time in Bend, Edwin Lara was hurtling down a California highway at 120 miles per hour, a trail of terror in his wake.

He had released the family—Nema, his grandmother, and little brother—on the side of the road, a rare mercy in a day of cruelty. But he still had Andrea. She was his shield, his hostage, his leverage.

But the police were close. A California Highway Patrol officer was on his tail.

Inside the car, the dynamic shifted. Lara called 911 himself. He wasn’t screaming. He wasn’t raging. He was calm, eerily conversational, talking to the dispatcher as if he were ordering a pizza, not confessing to a multi-state rampage.

“I’m wanted for the death of Kaylee Sawyer,” he told the operator, his voice flat. “It was an accident. She was really drunk… I ran her over. She was screaming, so I decided to silence her forever.”

Silence her forever.

Those words would haunt me for the rest of my life. He didn’t say he “panicked.” He said he decided to silence her.

The dispatcher, a hero whose name I’ll never forget, stayed on the line. She kept him talking. She humanized him, humanized Andrea. She promised him he wouldn’t be hurt if he surrendered. She talked him down from the ledge of suicide-by-cop.

“Don’t hurt Andrea,” she pleaded. “She’s a nice girl.”

“I won’t,” Lara said. “I’m actually calling my family just to say bye… then I’ll turn myself in.”

At 7:01 a.m. on Tuesday, July 26th, the tires screeched to a halt. Lara stepped out of the car, hands up, walking backward toward the officers. They cuffed him. Andrea, terrified and traumatized but alive, was finally safe.

The rampage was over. But for me, the nightmare was just entering its darkest chapter. Because Lara was in custody, but Kaylee was still missing.

Detectives flew down to California to interview him. They needed one thing: a map.

Lara played games at first. He tried to spin the “accident” narrative again. He sat in that interrogation room, looking small and pathetic, telling them he hit her with his bumper, that she was screaming and he just wanted her to stop.

But the detectives—God bless them—didn’t buy it. They picked apart his lies.

“Why did you take her purse?” they asked. “If it was an accident, why take her phone and her purse?”

Lara stumbled. “To stop her from calling 911.”

“So you decided to silence her before you killed her?”

The trap snapped shut. He wasn’t a panicked man; he was a predator. He had picked her up, trapped her in the cage of his patrol car—a vehicle she trusted because it looked like safety—and drove her into the dark. When she refused his advances, he snapped.

Finally, under the weight of the guilt or maybe just the desire to control the narrative one last time, he broke. He asked for a map.

He drew a circle on a stretch of highway in Oregon. “She’s there.”

Police sped to the scene. It was a ravine off a highway, a place where people toss trash and forget about it.

On July 26th, two days after she walked away from me, they found her.

They told me they found a body. They told me they believed it was her. But they also told her parents, Jamie and Juli, not to look. The condition of her body was… they used the word “horrific.” Blunt force trauma. The rock.

My beautiful, vibrant Kaylee. The girl who loved to dance, who dreamed of healing people, who was the “shining light” of her family. She had been discarded in the dirt like she was nothing.

The grief hit me like a physical blow, a cave-in of the chest. It wasn’t just sadness; it was a fury so white-hot I thought it would burn me alive. I wanted him dead. Her father wanted to kill him with his own hands. We all did.

But we had to trust the system.

The trial was an endurance test of pain. Lara pled guilty. He stood there, in his orange jumpsuit, listening to the list of his atrocities. Aggravated murder. Kidnapping. Carjacking.

He tried to apologize. He wrote letters. “I’m sorry to her dad… I’m sorry to her mom… I’m sorry to my wife.”

Sorry? Sorry is for spilling coffee. Sorry is for being late. You don’t get to be sorry for extinguishing a sun.

He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Then he got another life sentence for what he did to Andrea. He will die in a concrete box, forgotten by the world. It is the only justice we could get, but it feels hollow. It doesn’t bring her back.

In the years since, the silence has changed. It’s not the terrifying silence of a missing person anymore. It’s a heavy, solemn silence.

But we filled it. Her family—warriors, every one of them—fought back. They pushed for “Kaylee’s Law.” It passed in 2019. It ensures that campus security guards in Oregon can never play cop again. Their vehicles can’t look like police cars. Their authority is checked. Background checks are stricter.

They made sure that no other girl would see a uniform and think “safety” when she was looking at a predator.

I still think about that night. I think about the fight in the car. I think about the ten minutes I waited upstairs. If I had gone down at 12:15 instead of 12:24, would I have seen her? Would I have stopped him?

Those “what ifs” are ghosts that will haunt me forever.

But I also think about who she was. I think about the green purse, the brown boots, the laughter that could crack you up in the middle of a serious conversation. I think about her warrior spirit. She fought him, I know she did. She didn’t go quietly.

Kaylee Sawyer walked into the darkness, but she left a light behind that refuses to go out. She taught us that safety is an illusion we have to fight to maintain. She taught us that evil can wear a friendly face, a uniform, a smile.

But mostly, she taught me that love doesn’t end when the heart stops beating. It changes. It becomes memory. It becomes legacy. It becomes a law that saves the next girl.

I still drive past Alpine Meadows sometimes. I look at the spot where she walked away. And I whisper into the cool night air, hoping that somewhere, somehow, she can hear me.

“I’m sorry. I love you. We got him.”

And finally, the silence doesn’t feel so empty anymore.