Forest rangers with the state Department of Environmental Conservation responded to three search-and-rescue missions in the past week for lost people in the Adirondack wilderness. Two were found cold but alive, but one hunter was found dead near the southern Adirondack boundary.
Hunter didnât make it
On Friday, Dec. 4, at 9 p.m., DECâs Ray Brook dispatch received a call from a member of a hunting camp in the Sander Road area of the Fulton County town of Bleecker, advising that a 45-year-old hunter from Scotia was overdue from an afternoon hunt.
Forest Rangers Ian Kerr and Gary Miller responded to investigate and search the area. The rangers searched throughout the night and located tracks and personal items left by the hunter, but could not locate the subject.
She is found all by herself, frozen to death, far from the road, in an international area on the French-Swiss border, where neither country has police jurisdiction. Suspicious, wouldn t you think? That s what strikes David Rousseau, a best-selling writer of murder novels, who needs a plot for his new book. Finding himself in the snowbound hamlet of Mouthe, he settles in and begins to poke around.
Her name is Martine Langevin. She had become known as Candice Lecoeur. She was barely 20. A photographer spotted her pumping gas at the local station, shot her for a pinup calendar and launched her into a life of (limited) local fame. With her hair dyed blond and her lips bright red, she looks from some angles like Marilyn Monroe, and the photographers find those angles. Soon her portrait graces packages of the local cheese, and she s doing the weather on regional television.