Buried Beneath the River: The Vanishing of Linda Howard and Jonathan Mitchell

They vanished without a trace — two young lovers on a weekend trip to Yosemite.
For nearly two decades, no one knew what had happened to them.
But in 2013, when the Merced River dropped after weeks of flooding, the truth finally surfaced.
And what investigators found beneath the water proved that this was no accident.
It was a crime — cold, deliberate, and hidden for nineteen years.

The Disappearance (June 1994)

The summer of 1994 was bright and calm in Northern California.
Linda Howard, 22, a senior biology student at UC Berkeley, was planning a quiet weekend getaway with her boyfriend, 23-year-old Jonathan Mitchell, a computer repair technician from Oakland.

They’d been together for two years — a stable, affectionate couple. Friends described them as grounded, responsible, and always outdoors. Yosemite National Park had been one of their favorite places.

Their plan was simple: a three-day camping trip near Yosemite Creek. They’d set up camp, hike to Glacier Point, take photos, and be home early the next week. Nothing unusual.

On June 29, they packed Jonathan’s gray Ford Tempo with their gear — tent, sleeping bags, fishing pole, gas stove, food, clothes, and Linda’s small Canon camera. At 5:42 p.m., they stopped at a grocery store in Fresno, where a cashier remembered their cheerful energy. Linda bought bread, canned food, water, and matches — the kind of small details that would later become critical to reconstructing their final hours.

The next day, June 30, at 1:17 p.m., a camera at the entrance of Yosemite National Park captured the Ford Tempo driving through.
That would be the last official record of them alive.

At 4:24 p.m., Linda called her mother from a payphone at Yosemite Village.
Her voice was calm, ordinary. She said they’d already set up their tent and planned to make a campfire later that night.
The weather, she mentioned, was “a bit cloudy, maybe some wind.”
It was a conversation that lasted just fifty-three seconds.

It would also be the last time anyone heard from her.

The Vanishing

The next morning, Linda and Jonathan failed to meet two of Jonathan’s friends at a prearranged hiking spot.
When they didn’t return home by Sunday evening, calls went unanswered.

By July 2, Linda’s mother was frantic. She contacted park rangers — no record of the couple leaving the park, no sightings of their car.

On July 3, the families filed a missing persons report.
By July 4, search teams were combing the forest. Helicopters scoured the valleys. Dogs followed trails that led nowhere. The Ford Tempo was gone.

For two weeks, teams swept every campsite, riverbank, and overlook in Yosemite. Nothing. No tracks, no belongings, no witnesses who could say what had happened after that phone call.

By August, the case was reclassified as a “long-term disappearance.”

Theories floated through the air like ash from a fire.
Some thought they had slipped into the Merced River during the storm.
Others whispered of bear attacks, or a robbery gone wrong.
But as months turned to years, the mystery hardened into silence.

The forest had swallowed them.

The River Gives Back (April 2013)

Nineteen years later, the river spoke again.

In April 2013, after weeks of heavy rain, the swollen Merced River began to recede. Near Old El Portal Road, guides leading a tour group noticed something strange beneath the muddy current — a rectangular shape, unnatural against the rocks.

When divers arrived the next morning, they found a car — half-buried in silt, trapped between two massive boulders, four meters below the surface.

The current had shifted just enough to reveal it.
A gray Ford Tempo.

The license plate was almost unreadable, but the faint characters “4ABT…” matched the plate of Jonathan Mitchell’s car, missing since June 1994.

It took hours to extract the vehicle. The metal frame was crushed and rusted, the doors sealed by time and water.

When investigators finally pried open the trunk, what they found ended nineteen years of questions.

Two skeletons, side by side.
Bound together with a military belt.

Inside the trunk — silent witnesses to a night of violence — lay Linda Howard and Jonathan Mitchell.

The Crime Revealed

Forensic teams worked for days.
Linda’s bones showed multiple stab wounds to her ribs and pelvis.
Jonathan’s skull was fractured — consistent with a blow from a blunt object.

This was no accident. No car crash. No drowning.

They had been murdered.

And whoever killed them had gone to great lengths to hide the crime — sealing their bodies in the trunk, sinking the car, and letting nature bury the evidence.

But nature doesn’t forget forever.

Inside the car, investigators found a few surviving clues:

A flashlight without batteries

A plastic container

A torn scrap of paper with a hand-drawn route

A receipt from the Fresno grocery store dated June 29, 1994

And something else — traces of DNA.

Reopening the Past

Once the bodies were confirmed as Linda and Jonathan, the case was reopened by the Mariposa County Sheriff’s Department with FBI assistance.

The first step: rebuild the last 48 hours of their lives.

The 1994 records showed only one potential lead — a vague witness statement from another camper who claimed to see the couple talking near their campfire with a “tall man wearing a dark jacket.”

The description was useless at the time — no name, no face, no follow-up.

But now, with new forensic technology, investigators had something they didn’t in 1994: DNA extracted from the seat fabric and belt.

Two profiles matched Linda and Jonathan.
The third… did not.

It belonged to an unknown male.

That DNA was entered into CODIS, the national database. Weeks later, a match appeared.

David Harris.

The Friend

In 1994, David Harris had been a familiar face.
He was a family friend — a quiet young man who helped Linda’s parents around the house, fixed things, and often joined group outings. He was also close to Jonathan.

But there had been something uneasy about him.
Linda’s college friends remembered her mentioning that he “could be intense,” sometimes overly attentive.

When Linda began dating Jonathan, Harris grew distant, though he continued visiting her parents. He even knew about the Yosemite trip — her mother had mentioned it casually.

When questioned in 1994, Harris had provided a solid alibi: he was helping his uncle in Sacramento that weekend. Two friends confirmed it.
He was cleared.

For nineteen years, no one looked at him again.

But in 2013, everything changed.
His DNA was in the trunk.
His handwriting matched notes scribbled on a map found in the car:

“Check gas. Leave by 7.”

The writing was partially his — confirmed by forensic graphology experts.

And when investigators reinterviewed one of the men who’d vouched for Harris’s alibi in 1994, he confessed:
“I lied. He asked me to say he was with us.”

The other man who’d confirmed the story was now dead.

Everything began to collapse.

The Arrest

January 2014. Sacramento.
Before dawn, sheriff’s deputies and FBI agents surrounded a quiet suburban home.

At 6:35 a.m., David Harris — now 42, married, two children — opened the door in disbelief.
He didn’t resist as he was handcuffed and led to a waiting cruiser.

In the interrogation room, he was calm, polite — almost detached. He denied everything.

Yes, he had been in Yosemite that summer, he said, but only to fish.
Maybe he’d helped Linda and Jonathan set up their tent, maybe he’d touched something — that’s why his DNA was there.

Investigators pressed harder. His DNA wasn’t just on the tent. It was in the trunk. On the belt that bound the bodies.

Harris changed his story.
He said he’d intervened when Jonathan became violent with Linda.
He claimed there had been an argument, a scuffle, and that Jonathan had fallen and hit his head.
Panic, he said. He didn’t mean to kill anyone.

But the evidence said otherwise.
Linda’s wounds — multiple, deliberate stabs.
Jonathan’s skull — shattered by a blunt instrument.

The story of an “accident” didn’t hold.

By March 2014, prosecutors had enough to charge David Harris with two counts of murder.

The Trial

The courtroom in Mariposa County was silent when the details were read aloud.
The evidence was overwhelming:

DNA from Harris found on the belt and inside the trunk.

Partial handwriting match on the note found in the car.

Witness testimony placing a man matching Harris’s description at the campfire that night.

False alibi corroboration.

The prosecution presented a chilling theory.

David Harris had loved Linda — obsessively.
When she began dating Jonathan, he couldn’t let go.
He stayed close to her family, pretending to be a friend.
When he learned of the couple’s camping trip, he followed them to Yosemite.

That night, June 30, 1994, he approached their campsite under the pretense of visiting.
A confrontation erupted — jealousy, rage, violence.
He struck Jonathan with a metal pipe.
Linda tried to flee, but he stabbed her repeatedly.
Then he tied the bodies with his own military belt, loaded them into the trunk, drove the car to the Merced River, and pushed it into the current.

For nineteen years, the water kept his secret.

But the river never forgets.

In June 2015, the jury found David Harris guilty of two counts of first-degree murder.
He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Aftermath

When the verdict was read, Linda’s mother wept silently.
Nineteen years of waiting — and finally, an answer.

For the families, closure came not with peace, but with clarity.
They finally buried their children.
Linda was laid to rest in Oakland beside her grandmother.
Jonathan was buried in Sacramento, in his family’s plot.

Two separate ceremonies, united by shared grief.

In her victim impact statement, Linda’s mother said softly:
“For almost twenty years, I woke up every morning not knowing where my daughter was.
Now I do. And that’s both a blessing and a curse.”

Jonathan’s father spoke next.
“The hardest part was not being able to say goodbye. Now we finally can.”

Legacy

The case became a textbook example of how modern DNA technology could unearth the truth decades later.

Without it, David Harris might have lived out his life as a free man — the secret of what happened that June night forever buried beneath the river.

But fate, water, and science aligned to tell the story Linda and Jonathan couldn’t.

Their love ended in tragedy.
Their silence became a mystery.
And their discovery — a reminder that even after twenty years, the past always finds a way to surface.

Because the river remembers.
It always remembers.