On the morning of August 4, 2013, firefighters arrived at a remote cabin in Boulevard, California, to find it reduced to rubble and ash. The fire had been set deliberately. Timed incendiary devices planted before the occupant left had done their work. In the garage, partially concealed beneath a tarpaulin, lay the body of a 42-year-old woman. Inside the burned structure, investigators found a second body. It belonged to a child. The family dog, Cece, had been shot and buried in a sleeping bag.
The cabin belonged to James DiMaggio. He was nowhere to be found. Neither was 16-year-old Hannah Anderson.
The Andersons
Tina Anderson was 42 years old and worked as a holistic health practitioner in Lakeside, California. She was raising two children largely on her own while her husband Brett worked a three-month assignment in Tennessee. Her daughter Hannah was 16 and devoted to cheerleading, the kind of teenager who packed her summers with camp and spent her free afternoons texting her best friend Marissa Chavez. Her son Ethan was 8. People who knew him said he was funny and fearless.
On the morning of August 3, 2013, Hannah texted Marissa to lock in plans. They would meet at Hannah’s house after cheerleading camp that afternoon. The plans were specific. Marissa confirmed.
Marissa never heard from her again.
The Man They Trusted
James DiMaggio had been part of the Anderson family’s life since before Hannah was born. He had met Brett Anderson through their shared work in 1997, when Tina was six months pregnant. By the time Hannah arrived, DiMaggio was already woven into the fabric of the family. He showed up at birthdays. He took the kids camping and fishing and shooting. He drove Hannah to gymnastics. To Brett, to Tina, to everyone who knew them, he was Uncle Jim.
He was a telecommunications technician who owned a cabin in Boulevard, in the rural scrub of eastern San Diego County. He let Hannah use it whenever she wanted, hosting friends there, allowing the teenagers to drink and smoke even though her parents had not approved. He had only two rules: no boys, and no one was permitted upstairs. He never explained either one.
For sixteen years, no one had reason to question any of it.
What Brett and Tina did not know was that Hannah had been pulling away from DiMaggio for months. He had told her during a car ride that he would happily date her if they were the same age. On a separate trip to Los Angeles, he snapped at her for not paying him enough attention. Hannah told her closest friends that he creeped her out and that she hated being alone with him. She stopped visiting the cabin. She stopped returning his messages.
DiMaggio sent her an apology on social media. Her parents never learned the reason for it. In the weeks before the murders, DiMaggio had been exchanging handwritten letters with Hannah and had spoken with her by phone more than a dozen times. An affidavit prevented the specific contents of those letters and calls from being released to the public.
On August 3, DiMaggio invited Tina and the children to his cabin, telling her he was moving to Texas and wanted to say goodbye. This was later established to be a lie. His house was in foreclosure. He had no plans to go anywhere.
Hannah did not want to go.
August 3, 2013
DiMaggio collected Hannah from cheerleading camp that afternoon and drove her to Boulevard, telling her that Tina and Ethan were already at the cabin waiting. When they pulled in, Tina’s car was not in the driveway. Inside, Hannah saw her mother’s belongings scattered across a table. She asked DiMaggio where her family was. He told her Tina was in the garage with the dog.
From somewhere above her, through the ceiling, Hannah heard muffled sounds.
She recognized them. It was Ethan.
DiMaggio produced a pair of handcuffs and told Hannah to put them on. He pulled out a small black gun and told her he was struggling. He demonstrated Russian roulette. He told her his plan was to take her into the Idaho wilderness. Hannah screamed. DiMaggio told her to stop or he would kill her. He went upstairs to deal with Ethan. A silence followed. When he came back down, he told Hannah she looked unwell and gave her painkillers. She lost consciousness.
She woke handcuffed in his moving vehicle, hours north of Boulevard.
In late September 2013, the San Diego County Medical Examiner released the autopsy findings. Christina’s ankles had been bound with plastic cable ties. Duct tape had been wrapped around her neck and her mouth. She had suffered at least 12 blows to the head, multiple fractures, and a deep cut across her neck. Ethan had died in the fire. Skeletal fractures indicated he had endured significant trauma before it.
Investigators recovered timed incendiary devices, a gas can, rolls of duct tape, ammunition, arson wire, used condoms, a map of Yosemite, and a pair of handcuffs stored in trash bags in the attic. Every item had been brought to the cabin before August 3.
None of it was accidental.
The Manhunt
California issued a statewide Amber Alert on August 4, the first in the state’s history transmitted directly to cell phones. Because the identity of the child’s body found at the cabin had not yet been confirmed, the alert listed both Hannah and Ethan as missing. Within hours, their missing persons poster had been shared thousands of times across social media. Law enforcement launched a search spanning the full Pacific Coast from Canada to Mexico. The FBI and U.S. Marshals joined local authorities. Brett Anderson flew home from Tennessee immediately.
Marissa Chavez spent August 4 waiting for a text that never came. Another friend called and told her to turn on the news. She did.
On August 7, a group of horseback riders near Cascade, Idaho, came across two people in the backcountry. A teenage girl in pajama-like trousers was holding a tabby cat. She kept her eyes down and did not speak. The man with her was carrying almost nothing for someone in remote wilderness. That evening, the riders saw a news report about the abduction. They contacted authorities immediately.
That same day, investigators located DiMaggio’s abandoned blue Nissan Versa near the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, approximately 1,000 miles from San Diego. The license plates had been removed. The car had been pushed beneath brush. On August 9, aerial FBI surveillance footage captured what appeared to be a man, a young girl, and a cat near Morehead Lake.
Law enforcement closed in.
The Rescue
On August 10, 2013, an FBI tactical team located DiMaggio’s campsite near Morehead Lake. From a surveillance aircraft overhead, agents had been watching a young girl wave a piece of bright orange fabric at the sky. It was the cover of her sleeping bag. Hannah did not know the plane above her was federal law enforcement. She was doing what DiMaggio had told her to do: signal for forest rangers so he could threaten them and take their horses.
At 5:21 p.m., an FBI agent fatally shot James DiMaggio after DiMaggio fired at least one round at officers. He was hit six times, in the head, arms, and upper torso. The manhunt was over.
Hannah Anderson was found at the campsite with no visible injuries. She was taken to a hospital for crisis counseling. The San Diego County Sheriff confirmed she had not gone willingly, and that DiMaggio had threatened to kill her and anyone who tried to save her if she did not comply. She was, the sheriff said, a victim in every sense of the word.
Asked whether she was relieved that DiMaggio was dead, Hannah did not pause.
Absolutely yes.
What He Never Said
No motive was ever formally established. Those close to the case concluded DiMaggio had developed a fixation on Hannah over many years. Two years before the murders, he had added the children’s grandmother Bernice, as a beneficiary on his $112,000 life insurance policy. He stipulated that the funds go directly to Hannah and Ethan. He did not want Brett or Tina to receive a cent, reportedly because he did not trust them to handle money on the children’s behalf.
He had known Hannah since the day she was born. He had watched her grow up across sixteen years of birthdays and camping trips and drives to gymnastics. What he intended for the two of them in the Idaho wilderness, no investigator was ever able to determine. He had planned the murders down to the incendiary timers, the route north, and the handcuffs waiting in the attic.
He had planned for everything except being found.
The San Diego County Medical Examiner formally identified the child’s body recovered from DiMaggio’s burned cabin as Ethan Anderson’s. He was 8 years old. The people who knew him said he was funny and fearless.
