The Disappearance of Misty Copsey and the ongoing push for justice in indigenous communities

11 Nov, 2026

this is a repost from my serious blog at cultnorthwest.com , feel free to read other articles if you enjoy

Nov 10, 2026 · Desmond Mason

Why this case

Misty Copsey was 14 when she vanished walking home from the Puyallup Fair on September 17, 1992. More than 34 years later, no one has been charged, her body has never been found, and the men who drew the most suspicion have never been cleared or convicted.

In crisis work with Tulalip families, missing-person calls are not rare events. They arrive in the middle of ordinary weeks, and the first hours decide a lot: who takes the report seriously, who starts calling around, who gets told to wait. That is what drew me to Misty's case. Her disappearance is a near-perfect record of what goes wrong when a missing girl is treated as a runaway by default.

It also turns out to be closer to home than most people realize. The Doe Network lists Misty as a member of the Cowlitz Tribe, a Southwest Washington nation. Her case is rarely discussed as a Native case, which is itself part of the pattern this piece is about.

Having worked similar cases alongside native families, this one hits close to home. There are so many parallels to what is still happening today on and near our reservations. This could have been my own daughter. This could have been yours.

The night she disappeared

Misty was last placed in downtown Puyallup around 10 p.m. on Thursday, September 17, 1992, walking toward the Highway 512 on-ramp, eight miles from home in Spanaway. She had no money on her. She never arrived.

By every account Misty was a good student and athlete, with no drug use and no history of running away. Both of her parents passed polygraphs and are not suspects. Her mother died in February 2020 without answers; her brother Colton Smith now carries the family's search.

How police failed her in the first months

Puyallup police treated Misty as a runaway, closed the case on thin evidence, and did not interview the last two people who saw her until five months later. Those lost months are the single biggest reason this case is still open.

• The runaway default. One classmate claimed Misty called to say she was okay; another thought she saw her on September 21. Both barely knew her. On that basis police closed the case and told the media she had been found, which was false. They refused to reopen it for weeks.
• Foul play acknowledged only in December 1992, nearly three months in.
• Key witnesses ignored. Trina and Rheuban Schmidt were not formally interviewed until roughly February 1993. By then memories had faded and stories had hardened.
• The family and civilians did the searching. Misty's clothing was found by a private search party, not by police, in an area suggested by a member of the public.
• Evidence was lost. Three red paint chips recovered from her jeans, potentially from a vehicle, were later lost.

Her mother said from the first night that Misty had no reason to run. In 1996, a King County homicide detective, Jim Doyon, publicly said he believed she was very likely dead and that someone was getting away with murder. Her own father was still telling reporters he hoped she had run away. That split in the family reflects how much damage the early "runaway" label did.

The South Sound in 1992: a decade of missing girls

Misty disappeared at the end of a decade when girls and young women in the Seattle–Tacoma corridor went missing and turned up dead with terrible regularity. By late 1991, the Seattle Times counted 40 unsolved murders in the region since 1984 alone, not counting the Green River victims. Seattle's violent crime rate peaked in 1990 at roughly 1,500 reported violent crimes per 100,000 residents.

The Green River Killer. Starting in 1982, girls and women began vanishing from Pacific Highway South, the "SeaTac strip." The first body found, 16-year-old Wendy Coffield, had last been seen in Tacoma. Gary Ridgway was not arrested until 2001; he eventually pleaded guilty to 49 murders committed between 1982 and 1998. Many of his victims were teenage runaways or sex workers, and police were widely criticized for treating their disappearances as low priority.

Tacoma's parks, 1986. Twelve-year-old Michella Welch was abducted from Puget Park in March 1986 and killed. Five months later, 13-year-old Jennifer Bastian vanished on a bike ride in Point Defiance Park. For 30 years people assumed one killer; DNA later proved there were two. Robert Washburn was charged in Bastian's murder in 2018 and Gary Hartman in Welch's, both found through genetic genealogy.

Highway 410, the same ground as Misty's clothes. These cases sit closest to Misty's:

DeLange and Chebetnoy were found within about 100 feet of each other, and Misty's clothes were roughly a ten-minute walk away. In 1996, King County detective Jim Doyon pointed out that exactly two years and one month separated each of the three disappearances, and said the link was too obvious to ignore. Investigators still believe the cases may be connected; none of the three has been solved.

This was the world Misty's mother was raising a 14-year-old in: working nights, no car available to her daughter, buses that stopped running, and a region where a missing girl was too often treated as a girl who chose to leave.

The men around Misty

Three older men drew police attention, and one, Rheuban Schmidt, has remained a person of interest for more than three decades. None has ever been charged in connection with Misty's disappearance, and what follows is what has been reported publicly, not a finding of guilt.

Rheuban Schmidt, 18

Schmidt was the ride Misty tried to get that night, and the person her mother specifically told her not to rely on. Reporting on the case describes him as four years older than Misty, a regular presence at her house when Diana was at work, and attracted to her.

• The gas story. He said he couldn't come because he lacked gas, even after Misty offered him money from her house. His roommate told police Schmidt left shortly after the call and assumed he was going to get her. Schmidt denied it.
• The blackout. When finally interviewed months later, he said he had suffered blackouts most of his life, remembered nothing after Misty's second call, and woke up alone the next morning at his grandmother's farm near Enumclaw. Asked whether he could have blacked out and hurt her, he reportedly said he didn't know.
• "Six miles." Several people told police Schmidt said he knew where Misty's body was, about six miles from where her clothes were found. His grandmother's farm is about six miles from that ditch. He admitted saying it but claimed he invented it to get people off his back.
• Polygraphs. His first was inconclusive, and investigators believed he tried to manipulate it. He passed a second.
• Later history. In 1996 one of Misty's friends accused him of rape, then declined to pursue charges two weeks later. He was convicted of theft in 2000. In 2006 his wife obtained a domestic-violence protection order, alleging he threatened to kill her and burn down her house.

The 2025 investigative podcast Who Took Misty Copsey? spent much of its run on Schmidt, including allegations from a woman connected to his family. Those allegations are unproven, and he has never been charged.

Michael Rhyner, 23

Rhyner was Trina's boyfriend. Trina first told police she walked home; she later admitted Rhyner picked her up. She said she offered Misty a ride with them, but Misty didn't trust him and refused. As a 16-year-old, Rhyner had been accused of abducting and raping an 11-year-old at knifepoint, though no charges were filed. Police theorized he went back for Misty; he denied it, passed a polygraph, and was eliminated.

Cory Bober

Bober was a local man obsessed with the Green River case who contacted Misty's mother soon after the disappearance with his "two years and one month" theory. He stayed in touch for years and it was his suggestion that sent searchers to the Highway 410 area where the clothes were found. That behavior made both police and Diana suspicious; he agreed to a polygraph and then canceled it. He is not considered a serious suspect: he had a partial alibi, is agoraphobic, and has never held a driver's license.

The open thread: DNA

In 2009, DNA testing on Misty's jeans produced a profile from an unidentified man. It has not been publicly matched to anyone. Combined with the genetic genealogy that cracked the 1986 Tacoma cases, that profile is the most concrete reason this case is still solvable.

Where the case stands in 2026

The case is open and, by recent accounts, active, but there is still no arrest, no body, and no public match for the male DNA on Misty's jeans. Puyallup police renewed their call for tips on the 34th anniversary in September 2026.

• Diana Smith's fight. Misty's mother said from the first night that her daughter was dead, pushed police for months to treat it as a crime, and spent more than 27 years searching. She died in February 2020.
• Colton Smith, Misty's brother, now speaks for the family and has said the case needs to be solved for both his sister and his mother.
• 2017: Puyallup police ran a one-day social media campaign telling the story in Misty's own voice, which brought in new tips.
• 2025: Who Took Misty Copsey?, an eight-episode podcast from ID and ARK Media hosted by cold case investigator Sarah Cailean, put the case back in front of a national audience. A follow-up episode reported a new detective on the case, a previously silent witness agreeing to talk to police, and Misty's father, Buck Copsey, speaking publicly.
• Captain Jason Visnaw of Puyallup police has worked the case for years and has said publicly he hoped to solve it before he retires.
• Death certificate: issued by the Pierce County Medical Examiner in May 2000.

What Diana never got back. Everyone else in Misty's story got to keep living. The teenagers and young men who were around her that night grew up, married, raised kids, and built lives decades long. Diana never saw her daughter graduate, never met a son-in-law or held a grandchild, and never even got to bury her. She spent the rest of her life waiting on a phone call and a case file, and she died in 2020 still waiting. That imbalance, a whole life for everyone else and a 34-year-old question mark for Misty's family, is what an unsolved case really costs.

Anyone with information: Puyallup Police tip line 253-770-3343 or tips@puyallupwa.gov

How much safer the region is now

By almost every long-term measure, the Seattle–Tacoma area is far safer than it was when Misty disappeared. Seattle's violent crime rate in recent years has run at less than half its 1990 peak, and property crime in the 2010s was well under half its late-1980s high.

That decline is real but not a straight line. Washington's violent crime rate rose over the past decade, and by 2022 it was roughly level with the national rate after decades of running well below it. Even so, it remained about 12% below 1985 and far below the early-to-mid-1990s peak.

The bigger change is in the tools, not just the numbers:

• DNA and genetic genealogy. The Welch and Bastian murders sat unsolved for 32 years until genealogy databases narrowed the suspects. Tracy Whitney's 1988 killing near Sumner was solved the same way. Misty's case has an unidentified male DNA profile waiting for that kind of work.
• Jennifer and Michella's Law (2019) expanded Washington's DNA collection and closed loopholes that let profiles sit out of the national database.
• Faster alerts. AMBER-style alerts, highway message signs, phone alerts and social media can put a missing child's face in front of millions within minutes. In 1992, Misty's case got a false "she's been found" announcement instead.
• Dedicated Indigenous systems. Washington now has the nation's first Missing Indigenous Person Alert and a state cold case unit for Indigenous victims (both covered below).
• The Green River lesson. The region learned, painfully, what happens when disappearances of "runaways" and marginalized women are dismissed. That lesson is not fully absorbed, but it is now widely acknowledged.

What Misty's case should have taught us

The core lesson is simple: treat every missing child as at risk until proven otherwise. Nearly every failure in Misty's case traces back to the opposite assumption.

1. Take the report seriously on day one. Misty had no runaway history, no money, and a mother sounding the alarm immediately. The "runaway" label cost months.
2. Listen to the family. Diana knew her daughter. Families, especially mothers and grandmothers, are often the most accurate early witnesses, and the most often dismissed.
3. Interview the last people who saw her within hours, not months. Five months let stories shift and memories fade. Trina's account changed; Schmidt's became a blackout.
4. Verify "she's been seen" tips before closing anything. Two classmates who barely knew Misty were enough to close the case and publicly declare her found.
5. Don't leave the searching to families and strangers. A small private search party, not police, found her clothes.
6. Protect the evidence. Paint chips that might have pointed to a vehicle were lost.
7. Look at patterns across jurisdictions. DeLange, Chebetnoy and Copsey disappeared from Puyallup and ended up in King County's backcountry. Cases split across agencies are cases nobody fully owns.
8. Watch the people closest to the child. The men who drew suspicion were not strangers; they were in her social circle, and her mother had already flagged one of them.

In crisis work, these are the same principles in practice: write down everything, start calling right away, push the agency for a case number and a named contact, and don't let anyone tell the family to wait.

Other missing and murdered Indigenous people in the region

Misty is one name in a long local list. These are some of the most prominent Seattle-area cases, and the pattern is familiar: late reports, families doing the searching, and unanswered questions years later.

Mary Ellen Johnson-Davis (Tulalip), 2020. Mary, 39, was last seen on November 25, 2020, walking on Fire Trail Road on the north end of the Tulalip Reservation, texting a friend that she was almost to the church where he'd pick her up. Her phone later pinged near Oso and then Marysville. She wasn't reported missing until December 9, two weeks later, by her estranged husband. Her sisters, Nona Blouin and Gerry Davis, kept her case alive through a billboard on I-5 and the documentary Missing From Fire Trail Road, which premiered at Tribeca in 2024. Human remains found June 13, 2025, in a remote part of north Snohomish County were confirmed by DNA as Mary's in October 2025. Cause and manner of death are undetermined, the investigation is active, and the Tulalip Tribes and FBI offer a combined $60,000 reward. Her disappearance helped drive the creation of Washington's Missing Indigenous Person Alert.

Misty Upham (Blackfeet), 2014. An actress with roles alongside Benicio del Toro and Ewan McGregor, Upham went missing in Auburn in October 2014. Her friends and family, not police, organized the search on the Muckleshoot Reservation that found her purse and then her body below an embankment along the White River about ten days later. The medical examiner could not determine whether the fall was accidental, and her family has long criticized the police response.

Renee Davis (Muckleshoot), 2016. Davis, a mother of three who was five months pregnant, was shot and killed by King County sheriff's deputies who had been sent to her home on a welfare check. Her name is carried at nearly every regional MMIW event, a reminder that the movement is about violence against Native women from every direction, including the systems meant to help.

Adre'Anna Jackson, 2005. The 10-year-old disappeared in Lakewood and was later found dead. FBI archives identify her as Native American. After Lakewood police exhausted their leads, the case went to the state Attorney General's MMIWP Cold Case Unit in 2024.

Misty Copsey (Cowlitz), 1992. The Doe Network lists Misty as a member of the Cowlitz Tribe, while most official posters record her race only as White. That gap matters: when Native identity isn't recorded, a case disappears from the very data used to show the scale of the crisis.

Why Indigenous cases still aren't taken seriously

The runaway default that failed Misty in 1992 still lands hardest on Native women and girls. In Washington, Native Americans are about 2% of the population but nearly 6% of missing-person cases, according to the State Patrol.

In 2018 the Seattle-based Urban Indian Health Institute surveyed 71 U.S. cities and found 506 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Seattle had the most of any city (45) and Tacoma ranked seventh (25); Washington had the second-highest total of any state. The researchers called it an undercount, partly because the Seattle Police Department sent them two different lists of names.

Why cases still fall through:

• Jurisdiction. Tribal, county, state and federal agencies may each have a piece of a case, and time is lost establishing who owns it. Tulalip police themselves have called tribal-member investigations complicated for this reason.
• Late reports and quiet dismissal. Mary Johnson-Davis wasn't reported for two weeks. Advocates say life struggles are still used to downplay disappearances, the same move as calling Misty a runaway.
• Misclassification. Native victims are often recorded as White or "other," which erases them from the data.
• Families still do the searching. A State Patrol tribal liaison said in 2022 that families are still primarily the ones out looking. That was true for Misty Copsey, Misty Upham and Mary Johnson-Davis alike.
• Unequal attention. When Gabby Petito's case dominated national news in 2021, Mary Johnson-Davis's family pointed out that nothing comparable had happened for their sister.

What Washington has changed

• Missing Indigenous Person Alert (MIPA), July 2022. The first statewide alert of its kind in the country, sponsored by Rep. Debra Lekanoff and signed at Tulalip. As of April 2026, the State Patrol had issued 220 alerts: 203 people recovered, 12 still missing, 5 found deceased.
• MMIWP Task Force (2021) under the Attorney General's Office, bringing together families, tribes, advocates and law enforcement.
• MMIWP Cold Case Unit (2023), the first in the nation. It made its first arrest in 2025 and secured its first conviction in December 2025, in a Port Angeles case. It takes cases at the request of local or tribal agencies: 1-844-770-7900 or crjmmiwp@atg.wa.gov.
• A 2025 toolkit for families and friends on what to do when a loved one goes missing.

These are real gains. But an alert only works if someone reports quickly and an agency asks for it, and a cold case unit only helps after a case has already gone cold. The work Misty's mother did alone in 1992, insisting her daughter was in danger, is still being done today by Native families, advocates and crisis responders. The goal is a system that does it for them.

I'm not a cop. I rarely work with cops. In fact, I am very ACAB coded. But when those who work to protect us and investigate the very cases that cause such heartache to our communities do not do their jobs, it leaves a massive grey area in society where our loved ones can be taken without a care.

Sources

• The Charley Project: Misty Donna Copsey
• Doe Network: Misty Donna Copsey
• Seattle Times / AP (1996): Did Misty Copsey run away or run into foul play?
• KING 5: Misty Copsey disappearance unsolved for decades
• KIRO 7: Puyallup Police ask for tips (2025)
• NewsBreak: Puyallup Police seek information (Sept. 2026)
• Who Took Misty Copsey? podcast
• Seattle Times (1991): Forty unsolved murders, via WA Mysteries
• Seattle Times (2003): Ridgway's list of victims
• KIRO 7: DNA and genealogy in the Michella Welch case
• NIJ: Jennifer and Michella's Law
• FOX 13: DNA cracks 1988 Tracy Whitney case
• Seattle Times: crime rates vs. the '80s and '90s
• Axios Seattle: Washington's violent crime rate (2023)
• KUOW: Mary Johnson-Davis remains identified (2025)
• Everett Herald: Film on Mary Johnson-Davis
• CBS News: FBI reward in Mary Johnson case
• Auburn Examiner: Misty Upham and Renee Davis
• Yahoo / News Tribune: Adre'Anna Jackson case to AG cold case unit
• Seattle Times via Sen. Cantwell: UIHI report on MMIWG data
• OPB / KUOW: Two years of Washington's MIPA alerts
• ICT News: Washington MMIWP Task Force at five years
• Washington AG: MMIWP Cold Case Unit