Hey, everyone. I first heard this week’s Mystery Monday years ago on the television show Unsolved Mysteries. You may or may not have heard of this story, but it is an intriguing mystery.
Glen and Bessie Hyde met in 1927 while traveling on a passenger ship to Los Angeles. They married on April 10, 1928, one day after Bessie’s divorce from her first husband was finalized.
Glen Hyde was from Twin Falls, Idaho and had some experience with river running. The couple went to Green River, Utah with the idea of running the Green and Colorado rivers as a honeymoon trip. Glen built his own boat, a twenty-foot wooden sweep scow. He and Bessie departed Green River on October 28.
Twenty-six days later, they arrived at Bright Angel Trail in the heart of Grand Canyon where they met famed photographer Emory Kolb. Supposedly, Bessie was tired of the trip. Kolb asked them to stay with him through the winter and warned then of the dangers ahead.
Glen refused to heed any warnings and declined the loan of Kolb’s life jackets. November 18, 1928, was the last time anyone saw the couple.
Weeks later, when the couple failed to appear, a search team was organized. They located the boat floating intact near an area called Diamond Creek. Bessie’s diary was inside, with the last entry made on November 30. Nothing indicated the couple was in distress. A more extensive search yielded no clues. The search team never located their bodies.
That’s when speculation began. Some claimed Bessie killed Glen because she was unhappy and wanted to get out of the trip.
In the early 1970s, a group rafting down the Colorado stopped for the night near Diamond Creek. The guide relayed the story of Glen and Bessie. An older woman claimed she was Bessie and that she killed Glen. She later recanted the story.
After the death of Emory Kolb in 1976, a man’s skeleton was found in his boathouse. Many thought it to be Glen Hyde and that Kolb killed Hyde because he was in love with Bessie. But experts compared the skull to a photograph of Glen and determined the skeleton didn’t belong to him.
In 1992, a famed rafter named Georgie Clark passed away. Friends discovered her first name was Bessie, and she had a copy of Glen and Bessie’s marriage certificate. However, Georgie Clark had no resemblance to Bessie Hyde. It’s unclear why she had these items.
The mystery of the Hyde’s disappearance will likely never be solved, but it does make for a good story. Especially if rafting along the Colorado River and stopping for the night at Diamond Creek.
Joan Hall 
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