The Desert Grave of a Fugitive
After shooting his divorced wife in a fit of violence, a man vanished into the thick sagebrush of the Yakima Valley, only to be found dead weeks later by searchers who had walked right past him.
The body of Hans H. Favor was found in the sagebrush about 400 yards east of the place he shot his divorced wife the night of April 23. In all probability, his suicide followed immediately after the team left, bringing his wife's body to town. The searchers had been all over the adjacent grounds and must have passed within a few feet of where the body lay, but the sagebrush in that vicinity is so thick and high that it would be impossible to see a body any distance away.
“The searchers had been all over the adjacent grounds and must have passed within a few feet of where the body lay.”
While the Yakima Valley has seen massive landscape changes and land clearing in the century since this murder-suicide, the dense, rugged nature of the remaining high desert brush remains a landscape where one can easily disappear. This story highlights the dark side of the era's homesteading boom—the isolation of life on the sagebrush frontier.
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