{"id":40235,"date":"2026-06-13T20:15:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T01:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/unitedresourceconnection.org\/cannon-ball-nd-58528\/the-girls-wyoming-lost\/"},"modified":"2026-06-13T20:15:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T01:15:20","slug":"the-girls-wyoming-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unitedresourceconnection.org\/cannon-ball-nd-58528\/the-girls-wyoming-lost\/","title":{"rendered":"The girls Wyoming lost"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Sharon<\/a><\/p>\n

Sharon Bald Eagle<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

A two-part investigation by Cowboy State Daily has reopened Wyoming\u2019s oldest wounds, tracing the state\u2019s long, troubled history with missing girls back to Rawlins in 1974, when four children disappeared in a way that left a shadow over Carbon County and set the pattern for the cases that followed. Those girls, Jaylene Banker, Christy Gross, Carlene Brown and Deborah Meyer, vanished under circumstances that shook the community and left behind questions that would linger for generations. Two were later found murdered in shallow graves; two were never found at all, their absence becoming a permanent reminder of how quickly a child could disappear in a place where the distances are wide and the systems meant to protect them were often slow to respond.<\/p>\n

Investigators now understand that these cases were never isolated tragedies. As Cowboy State Daily reported, the same vulnerabilities that shaped the Rawlins disappearances, the transient workforce, the long haul trucking routes, the carnival circuits, the lack of communication between counties, created an environment where predators could move freely and where patterns went unnoticed for far too long. Retired investigator Janet Franson, whose decades of work on Wyoming\u2019s unsolved cases have made her one of the few people capable of seeing the full picture, has helped reveal how these disappearances fit together, how they echo one another, and how they point to a larger truth the state is only now beginning to confront.<\/p>\n

\"Royal<\/a><\/p>\n

Royal Russell Long<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

It was into this landscape, still marked by unresolved loss, that another pair of girls entered Wyoming a decade later, traveling west from South Dakota after leaving a boarding school. They were young, they were trying to get home, and they were moving along the same corridors where other girls had vanished, unaware that the dangers of the 1970s had not disappeared with time.<\/p>\n

One of those girls was Sharon Bald Eagle, twelve years old, Lakota, and far from home.<\/p>\n

Along the way, the girls encountered Royal Russell Long, a long haul trucker and carnival worker whose movements had drawn the attention of investigators in multiple states, a man whose history stretched far beyond Wyoming. Long had been tied to disappearances at the Oklahoma State Fair, where two girls vanished after being approached by a man offering them jobs, a case that collapsed only because their bodies were never found, and he had surfaced as a possible suspect in unsolved cases in Colorado and Missouri, states where his work routes and carnival circuits placed him in proximity to other missing girls. He had also lived and worked in the Rawlins area during the summer of 1974, the same period when four young girls disappeared there, a detail that later investigators would view as part of a broader, overlooked pattern. By the time he crossed into Wyoming a decade later, he was already a man who moved through the cracks of jurisdictions, a man whose pattern of targeting young girls had gone unrecognized because the states he traveled through never compared notes, never connected the timelines, and never realized they were perhaps all looking at the same predator.<\/p>\n

Long took the girls to his home in Evansville, just outside Casper, where he restrained them and assaulted them, repeating a pattern he had already carried out elsewhere. One of the girls escaped and ran for help, giving law enforcement a clear description of Long, his truck and the house where she had been held. But by the time officers arrived, Long and Sharon were gone.<\/p>\n

Long fled across state lines, eventually being arrested in Albuquerque, but Sharon was no longer with him. His shifting explanations were inconsistent and unsupported by evidence, and investigators came to believe he had killed her somewhere along the route between Wyoming and New Mexico. Without a body, prosecutors accepted a plea deal on kidnapping charges, and Long died in prison in 1993, taking with him the truth of where he left Sharon and why she was never found.<\/p>\n

For my grandfather, Taylor Bald Eagle, this was not a case file or a headline; it was the loss that shaped the rest of his life. He carried Sharon\u2019s absence with a quiet endurance that never demanded attention but never faded either, and he spoke of her in the same steady way he carried her memory, gently, without embellishment, and with the clarity of a man who had lived with the same unanswered questions for decades. When he gave me the name An\u00fa.kasan H\u00f3pa, he did not present it as a ceremony or a burden; he simply offered it in the quiet way Lakota men of his generation often did, trusting that its meaning would reveal itself in time, the way truth does, the way grief does, the way a family\u2019s history eventually rises to the surface whether you are ready for it or not.<\/p>\n

Now, as Wyoming revisits its cold cases, reopening files, re examining suspects and acknowledging the investigative failures that allowed predators like Long to move through the state unchecked, the hope shared by all these families is not that the past can be undone, but that the truth, however long it takes, will finally be brought into the light. The families of the Rawlins girls, the families whose children vanished along the highways and the families whose cases were overshadowed by jurisdictional confusion all carry the same quiet wish: that the truth will prevail, and that the girls who were lost will not remain lost forever.<\/p>\n

And if these renewed investigations bring answers at last, then my grandfather Taylor may finally have the peace he waited for all his life, knowing that his daughter\u2019s story helped illuminate the mysteries that haunted so many other families.<\/p>\n

(Contact Ernestine Anunkasan Hopa at editor@nativesunnews.today)<\/span><\/p>\n

The post The girls Wyoming lost<\/a> first appeared on Native Sun News Today<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Visit Original Source<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/span><\/div>

Sharon Bald Eagle A two-part investigation by Cowboy State Daily has reopened Wyoming\u2019s oldest wounds, tracing the state\u2019s long, troubled history with missing girls back to Rawlins in 1974, when four children disappeared in a way that left a shadow over Carbon County and set the pattern for the cases <\/p>\n

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Shared by Native Sun News Today<\/a> June 13, 2026<\/p>\n

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