Lachelle Knott was a 53-year-old woman who was last seen in Salome, Arizona, on June 24, 2018, when what was supposed to be a short camping trip with her adult son became the beginning of a deeply troubling disappearance. Lachelle and her 28-year-old son, Jordan Dustin Leigh Knott, reportedly left Salome at approximately 4:30 that afternoon and were headed for Alamo Lake State Park, where they intended to camp for two or three days.
They were traveling in a Ford Ranger that was towing a black trailer carrying a black Honda four-wheeler, and two dogs were traveling with them. Lachelle was described in missing-person records as approximately 5 feet 4 inches tall and 150 pounds, with brown hair and hazel eyes. Her ears were pierced, and records noted that she sometimes spelled her first name as “La Chelle.” Nothing about the beginning of the trip suggested that Lachelle and Jordan intended to disappear permanently; they appeared to have set out together for a recreational trip into the rugged desert and lake country of western Arizona.
When Lachelle and Jordan failed to return and could no longer be reached, concern grew because the physical evidence suggested they had successfully reached the Alamo Lake area. Their Ford Ranger, the trailer, and the Honda four-wheeler were subsequently located at Alamo Lake State Park, but Lachelle and Jordan were nowhere to be found. The discovery left investigators and their family with an especially difficult mystery: the transportation and recreational equipment they had taken with them remained behind, yet both people had vanished. The two dogs that had accompanied them were also part of the unanswered story in early accounts. Publicly available missing-person information did not provide evidence that Lachelle or Jordan had deliberately abandoned their belongings or planned to sever contact with their family. Instead, their case was classified as an endangered missing-person situation, and very little information concerning the investigative steps, searches of the park, surrounding desert, lake, or nearby terrain was publicly released. The scarcity of contemporary news coverage also meant that many details normally available in a missing-person investigation—such as the precise location of the vehicle, the condition in which the campsite or belongings were found, whether telephones or identification remained behind, and what searches were conducted immediately afterward—never became widely known.
As time passed, the case took an even more heartbreaking turn. Later records show that both Lachelle and Jordan were deceased, although publicly accessible sources provide remarkably little explanation of how their deaths occurred or how investigators ultimately reached that conclusion. Parker Funeral Home records list Jordan Knott, born November 6, 1989, as having died on September 5, 2018. A separate funeral-home record for Lachelle lists her birth date as December 29, 1964 and her death as February 27, 2019. Those dates fall months apart despite mother and son having disappeared together on the same camping trip, and available public records do not clearly explain whether the listed dates represent the actual dates of death, dates on which remains were recovered or identified, or dates assigned during the administrative handling of their cases. Jordan's missing-person record later disappeared from NamUs, and by 2021 neither his nor Lachelle's case could be found there by people following the investigation, consistent with the cases having been resolved rather than remaining active missing-person investigations. A later public discussion of the case was accordingly categorized as involving both Lachelle and Jordan having been found deceased.
What remains striking is how little information about the final outcome has been made publicly available. There is no reliable online source establishing that Lachelle and Jordan were victims of violence, nor is there a publicly documented official explanation showing that they drowned, suffered an accident, became lost in the desert, or encountered some other emergency. Speculation arose over the years because two adults, two dogs, and a seemingly ordinary camping trip ended with the Ranger, trailer, and ATV left behind at Alamo Lake, but speculation should not be substituted for facts that investigators have not publicly confirmed. The surviving information instead tells a quieter and more tragic story: Lachelle Knott, 53, left Salome with her son Jordan on June 24, 2018, expecting to spend only a few days camping at Alamo Lake State Park. Their vehicle and recreational equipment were later found there, while mother and son remained missing, leaving their family without answers. Subsequent records eventually established that both had died, bringing the missing-person aspect of their cases to a sorrowful close, but the publicly available record still does not clearly explain precisely what happened to them after they arrived at Alamo Lake. In overview, what began as a routine mother-and-son camping trip became a prolonged double disappearance, followed by confirmation of two deaths whose exact circumstances have remained largely outside the public record.Last Seen: Jun 24, 2018
