NEW SWEDEN — A family friend arrived at the Damron homestead Monday afternoon and parked his car at the end of a long dirt path that snaked through the woods. He locked eyes with the couple sitting beside a bonfire.

“I need to drive to New Hampshire,” Drew Losiewicz said. “I can’t tell you why.”

Lisa Damron immediately understood and asked, “Is it for real?”

Losiewicz nodded. “I think they know where Stefanie is.”

Lisa’s 13-year-old daughter went missing a year ago this week. Stefanie was last seen running into the dense North Maine Woods beside the Damron’s home in the tiny Aroostook County town of New Sweden, northwest of Caribou and 20 miles from the Canadian border.

The tip, one of many Losiewicz and the family have hunted down, seemed promising. So, he got back in his car, drove back through the woods and began a six-hour drive to southern New Hampshire to search for Stefanie. She wasn’t there.

Federal and state authorities have mounted a massive search in the last year, combing through more than 4,500 acres of thick backcountry forest on horseback, with packs of trailing dogs and a half-dozen helicopters. The only thing they have found is a single footprint thought to be Stefanie’s on the roadside near their home.

“It’s fixing to be one year and we know nothing,” Dale Damron, Stefanie’s father, said in an interview with the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram. “We haven’t had a chance to heal. We haven’t had a chance to process.”

Stefanie would have turned 14 on Oct. 6, two weeks after she went missing. Her parents described her as stubborn and often hard-headed, but intuitive and very loving of her siblings.

“She loved to play out here in the field, picking flowers and blackberries,” Dale said.

A state police spokesperson said this month that “the investigation remains active and ongoing,” but no new information has been released since May. Both authorities and the Damrons hope the one-year anniversary of Stefanie’s disappearance will bring renewed attention to the case.

“There’s nothing you can do but sit and wonder,” Lisa said, choking back tears. “I’ve still got three little ones who see me a lot less now … I walk away so they don’t see me crying.”

“I try to deal with it myself. But how can you deal with not knowing?”

SEPTEMBER 2024

The Damrons moved from Texas to northern Maine in 2020. Dale had been arrested a few years prior on charges of public intoxication and child endangerment. He was in jail for 30 days and his kids were in state custody for six months.

“My whole life got destroyed over smoking a joint,” he said.

The Damrons began looking for a place with legal marijuana where they could live a self-sufficient lifestyle. A friend had land for sale in New Sweden, so they traveled north to the town of less than 600 people deep in Maine’s logging country that last made national headlines more than two decades ago when 16 people got sick from drinking coffee at a local church that a parishioner poisoned with arsenic.

The family cleared trees on their property themselves and used much of the wood to build the yurt they live in. It’s a sturdy, hexagonal structure with four rooms protruding outward that they built with a kit and blanketed in billboard vinyl for waterproofing.

“We live this way by choice,” Dale said. “We literally built our own survival.”

The couple’s six kids, ages 12 to 22, have largely been homeschooled. Their chores include chopping wood and taking care of the family hens and dogs. Playtime often means running around the property or through the woods. The kids know the area well, Dale said.

“Our kids go in the woods and traipse on their own adventures. That’s normal for them babies. They were raised that way,” he said.

On the day Stefanie disappeared, her family assumed she ran into the woods to cool off after arguing with a sister, something she’d done before.

“She just never came home,” her father said.

The Damrons reported Stefanie missing early in the morning on Sept. 24. The investigation began that same day. Dozens of sheriff’s deputies, state troopers and eventually federal agents arrived and launched aerial and ground searches.

At the time of her disappearance, Stefanie was 5 feet tall and weighed 130 pounds. Her hair was brown and shoulder length, her eyes green. She was last seen wearing jeans and a blue long-sleeve shirt with black Harley Davidson hiking boots.

Maine State Police detectives repeatedly declined interview requests about Damron’s disappearance. Shannon Moss, the agency’s spokesperson, said state troopers, the Maine Warden Service and federal agencies have conducted a sweeping search “in Maine, across the country, and in Canada.”

Moss called the efforts extensive, but unsuccessful.

DECEMBER 2024

The Damrons’ property is accessible only via a winding backcountry trail that branches off from a dirt road and cuts through miles of Aroostook County wilderness. All of that dense underbrush and thick growth has hampered search efforts.

Jose Guillermo Rodriguez-Aguilar, an FBI special agent who is assisting state police, said it was pivotal for searchers to start quickly.

“We only had two to three months before the ground would be frozen and snow would start to fall,” he said.

The FBI called in its Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team, which investigates cases where a child has been taken by someone other than a family member, though neither state police nor federal investigators have answered questions about whether they believe Stefanie was abducted.

In the first month after she disappeared, the agencies spent hundreds of hours canvassing the area and following up on leads. At a Dec. 2, 2024, news conference, Major Scott Gosselin with the state police said there had been “no credible information or sightings.”

Family and members of the community gathered at a vigil for Stefanie that month inside a small New Sweden church. More tips began rolling in after the FBI upped its reward for information to $15,000, Rodriguez-Aguilar said, but few proved credible.

Stefanie’s disappearance soon attracted international media attention. True crime podcasters and internet sleuths latched onto the case, theorizing about the girl’s whereabouts and what happened to her. For the Damrons, that speculation has cut nearly as deep as their daughter being missing.

“It didn’t take a week for the Facebook groups to start attacking my family and my wife,” Dale Damron said. “It’s been a year. The entire family has been polygraphed. Every inch of our property has been searched 10 to 15 times.”

“We’re wasting time looking at us and not at her.”

MAY 2025

Once the snow melted this spring, authorities resumed the search with “K9 teams, horses, ground searchers, aircraft, drones, and computer modeling to identify the highest probability search areas,” Moss said.

The most recent ground search was held in May. More than 65 people took part. But like the others before, it concluded with no sign of Stefanie.

After that point, searchers began following up on tips and leads rather than scouring the woods, said Rodriguez-Aguilar, the FBI agent. As Stefanie’s story gained traction in the media, more tips came in from across the country.

“We’ve been trying to, as time goes on, run down all the leads that come in,” Rodriguez-Aguilar said. “And no geographic area is too far away for us.”

It is standard procedure when a child goes missing to investigate their parents. Federal guidance encourages families of missing children to cooperate with police interviews and polygraphs, which the Damrons say they’ve done. But as authorities quieted about the investigation, rumors about the Damrons intensified online and in Maine.

“I’ve got three babies in school and they’ve got to hear all these rumors every day. My 12-year-old’s classmates tease her, saying, ‘They fed your sister to the hogs!'” Lisa Damron said. “I asked for help. We have all these people looking for her. And all we get is shit talk.”

SEPTEMBER 2025

It’s easy to get lost in Maine’s vast wilderness. It’s much harder to be found.

There are about a dozen active missing persons cases in the area.

In 2023, 37-year-old Graham Lacher fled the grounds of a Bangor psychiatric center and hasn’t been found. Two years prior, Paul Colucci, 60, disappeared while hiking in one of the most remote areas of Baxter State Park. Attiin Shaw, who went missing in 2021, was last seen at her home in Washburn just 10 miles from the Damrons’ property.

About 90% of Aroostook County is blanketed in conifer trees and thicket that make even warm weather searches difficult. In the winter, when 100 inches of snowfall or more blankets the ground, it’s no easier.

Cell service is unreliable and Stefanie did not have a phone with her when she disappeared. The woods immediately west and south of New Sweden also lack mobile broadband, which have complicated efforts.

In the absence of credible leads, the Damrons often seek them out themselves, as they did last week.

“I’ll be driving down the road and see a young girl, think, ‘That looks like Stefanie,’ turn around and go back. And then you go back and it’s not her,” Lisa Damron said through tears.

She still believes Stefanie is alive. She has to believe that.

“Until they show me a body, I’m not stopping,” the mother said.

Anyone with information about Stefanie’s whereabouts or disappearance is urged to contact the Maine State Police Houlton Barracks at 207-532-5400 or the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI and tips.fbi.gov.