In September 2012, 23-year-old Asha Baduri stepped into the vast Utah wilderness to chase a dream of solitude and adventure. A meticulous planner, she had reviewed maps with her father, Kalin, packed perfectly, and promised to send a simple text—”all good”—every 72 hours. The texts never came.
Her rental car was found locked and undisturbed at the trailhead. After an exhaustive search yielded nothing but fallen leaves, the official effort was called off as the first snows began to fall. Asha Baduri had stepped off the path and vanished into silence.
For six years, that silence was all her family had. Her case file, #1067M73, gathered dust, another tragic story of a hiker claimed by the unforgiving wild. Then, in June 2018, a 19-year-old fisherman on a remote mountain lake saw a flash of yellow in the clear water below his boat.
It was a sleeping bag, swollen and grotesque, intentionally weighted down with barbell plates and bound with rusted wire. When a dive team hauled it to shore and cut it open, the discovery sent shockwaves through the law enforcement community. The body inside was not Asha’s. It was a man.
The sleeping bag, however, was hers. That single, horrific link between a dead man in a lake and a long-lost hiker didn’t just reopen a cold case; it violently fused it with another, exposing a dark story of crime and cruelty that began far from any hiking trail.
The body was identified as Milo Ratic, a 24-year-old from Arizona who had also been reported missing in late September 2012. The two had never been connected. Now, they were bound by the same terrible fate. The case was handed to Detective Gene Hackett, a no-nonsense cold case expert who began stitching together the last days of two young people who seemingly had nothing in common.
The first break came from a place no one had thought to look: inside one of Asha’s hiking maps, preserved for six years by her grieving father. A tiny, torn scrap of a business card fell out. On it was one word, “Light,” and a partial Utah phone number.
Hackett’s team traced it to the Starlight Motor Inn, a crumbling, forgotten roadside motel hunched beside a dusty highway, far from where Asha’s trek was supposed to begin.
In a moldy back room, detectives unearthed a warped guest register from 2012. The entry for Room 7 was under the name “John Smith,” but a handwritten note in the margin provided the first real clue: “Silver sedan. AZ plates.” Milo Ratic had driven a silver sedan with Arizona plates. They had found the place where the story turned dark.
The true horror of what happened in that motel came from a former housekeeper named Beatrice Row. When shown a photo of Asha, Beatrice’s hand began to shake. “She was too nice for that place,” she whispered. She remembered the girl, and she remembered the nervous boy with her, Milo. But she also remembered a third person: an older, terrifying man she called “the mean one.”
One night, while rolling her cart past Room 7, Beatrice heard a violent argument—a scared young man’s voice, a calm and cold deeper voice, and then a sickening, heavy thud. Then, silence. You didn’t call the police at the Starlight.
A day or two later, she saw “the mean one” loading a long, heavy object wrapped in a blanket into the silver sedan’s trunk. And Asha was there, standing nearby, pale and hollow. “She looked like a ghost,” Beatrice recalled, “like whatever was inside her was gone.” He barked an order, she got in the car, and they drove away. It was the last time anyone saw Asha Baduri alive.
The theory had irrevocably shifted. Asha hadn’t gotten lost. She was a witness to a murder. Hackett’s team turned their focus to Milo, digging into his life and uncovering a secret. His bank records showed a pattern of suspicious cash deposits. He wasn’t just a hiking enthusiast; he was a courier, using remote wilderness trips as cover to move illicit goods. The burner phone he used consistently pinged off the same towers as another phone, one belonging to a ghost in the criminal system: Dante Voss.
Voss, 54, was a professional with a long history of assault and extortion charges that never stuck. He was the “mean one.” He was the killer. After locating him living under an alias in Boise, Idaho, detectives brought him in. In the interrogation room, faced with a mountain of evidence—the motel register, the witness statement, the phone records—Voss didn’t deny it. He confessed.
Milo had been his courier and had gotten scared, wanting out. He had foolishly brought Asha along to their meeting at the Starlight for moral support. “She thought she was going camping,” Voss said coldly. “She walked into a war zone.” He admitted to beating Milo to death in Room 7, then forcing the terrified Asha to help him clean up the scene. He drove her and Milo’s body to Silus Lake, where he made her seal her fellow hiker into her own sleeping bag and sink him to the bottom. Then, he kidnapped her.
When Hackett asked where Asha was, Voss took a pen and drew a crude map leading to a cluster of rocks in the desolate Great Basin Desert. There, in a shallow grave, search teams found her remains.
Dante Voss was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. For Kalin Baduri, there was no true closure, but there was an end to the not knowing. He brought his daughter home. In the years since, he has channeled his grief into action, creating The Asha Initiative, a nonprofit that uses digital forensics to aid in missing person cases. Their motto, printed on bracelets worn by volunteers, is taken from Asha’s last text message to her father: “Starting now.” It’s a legacy rewritten—a reminder that even when a trail goes cold, there are always people who will never stop looking.
