If they were never found, what would an investigation conclude?

[Manti]

Imagine the searchers never find the tent or any of the bodies.


I think it was nearly the case... the bodies were all covered by snow, the exception is Igor's arm and the two Yuris being under only powder snow. If it snowed a bit more, or the wind was subsequently less strong, the tent would have been completely covered too...

This means no diaries, no Evening Otorten, no cut tent, no photos of lights in the sky (specks of dust on a negative?), well, no photos from the trip at all.Parts of their tracks might be found, along with their former campsites. The labaz is unlikely to be found..

If you were the investigator, what would you conclude in that case?


_{(Or, to go one step further, if you were a conspirator staging the incident, which outcome would you prefer? What actually happened or the scene never being found?)}

[sarapuk]

Imagine the searchers never find the tent or any of the bodies.


I think it was nearly the case... the bodies were all covered by snow, the exception is Igor's arm and the two Yuris being under only powder snow. If it snowed a bit more, or the wind was subsequently less strong, the tent would have been completely covered too...

This means no diaries, no Evening Otorten, no cut tent, no photos of lights in the sky (specks of dust on a negative?), well, no photos from the trip at all.Parts of their tracks might be found, along with their former campsites. The labaz is unlikely to be found..

If you were the investigator, what would you conclude in that case?


_{(Or, to go one step further, if you were a conspirator staging the incident, which outcome would you prefer? What actually happened or the scene never being found?)}

It would not be possible to conclude anything. People go missing in remote areas of the World in this day and age. Obviuosly 9 people going missing at the same time would be very unusual but how could any conclusion be drawn if there was absolutely no Evidence whatsoever ! ?

[trekker]

Imagine the searchers never find the tent or any of the bodies.

This would be totally suitable for murder case or some kind of conspiracy. Now we have wealth of details, places and timings. It would be much better for murder or conspiracy case to lose Dyatlov Group without any evidence. It would have been totally plausible to lose the group totally without trace in the 300 km route.

[Manti]

It would have been totally plausible to lose the group totally without trace in the 300 km route.

Yes this is what I'm thinking as well as I read about the "staged scene". I don't understand why someone would go to all that trouble instead of just burying them along with the tent somewhere. They are never found, but this would be expected. Their planned route wasn't submitted to the university. The time of any supposed incident is unknown hence how far along the route they would have been is unknown too. Enormous potential area to search. Nobody would question why they weren't found.

Isn't that much safer (for the stagers) than dropping off bodies with suspicious injuries on a mountainside?

[Investigator]

This can happen with mountain climbing and is usually due to falling or getting blown off the mountain or falling into a crevace, so that would not be unusual, though if there were no trace whatsoever, that would be unusual  (ropes should be found somewhere, for example).  In the case of one or two people never found in the woods but not climbing a mountain, it seems that it's often falling into a an area difficult to access or getting caught in mud, dying of hypothermia, then getting "swallowed up" by the mud, if it's not some sort of suicide or crime.  I don't know if there are crevace-type features or deep mud areas where the group was hiking through during the time they did, but first thing I'd do is try and determine those features of the landscape.