Confession, Or Deception?
The search party spent months combing the surrounding area of The Grand Canyon looking for bodies or any other kind of evidence that may point to Glen and Bessie Hyde’s whereabouts, but they didn’t find anything.
Several years after the disappearance of Glen and Bessie Hyde, a group of men were taking their boats down the Colorado River. They spotted an older woman who was going down the river alone. They invited the woman to join the group, and she introduced herself as Georgie Clark. The rafting tour guide began to tell the legend of Glen and Bessie Hyde around the campfire. The old woman abruptly said that she was Bessie Hyde.
Georgie Clark claimed that she was actually Bessie Hyde and that she stabbed her husband after they got into a fight. Bessie wanted to leave because she felt that the trip had become too dangerous. Glen began to beat her, so she grabbed a knife and stabbed him. This woman said everything so matter-of-factly, everyone around the campfire believed her. One of the men in the group found Georgie Clark’s phone number, and called her afterward to see if she would do an interview to talk about the story. The old woman denied everything, saying that she never claimed to be Bessie Hyde, and hung up the phone.
Of course, if she really was Bessie Hyde, she would have to say this. She confessed to murdering her husband, after all. However, this does not explain why she decided to leave all of their belongings behind in the boat. If Bessie truly did kill Glen, she would have been alone in the middle of The Grand Canyon, miles away from civilization in the middle of winter.
After Georgie Clark passed away, her best friends requested to search her home to look for clues. Clark had also told her best friends that she was Bessie Hyde, and yet she never showed them any proof. Stranger yet, she never let her friends come over to visit her house. When they went through their belongings, they found a mixture of evidence that makes the mystery even more confusing.
Georgie Clark had a birth certificate that said her real name was Bessie DeRoss. They also found a marriage certificate of Bessie and Glen Hyde. In Clark’s underwear drawer, she had a pistol. These three pieces of evidence may be enough for some people to believe that she had been telling the truth. However, all of the photographs of Georgie when she was younger look drastically different from Bessie Hyde. They are not the same person.
So, was Georgie Clark so deep in her lies that she had a fake birth and marriage certificate made? Or, did she steal these documents from Bessie’s boat? Is she actually the murderer? Maybe Georgie Clark was disappointed that she accomplished just as much in the Colorado River as Bessie Hyde, and yet she never seemed to get any recognition for her skills until after she pretended to be someone famous.
A man named Richard Westwood wrote an entire biography on Georgie Clark, and he concluded that while her accomplishments as a solo woman adventurer were incredible in their own right, she was not Bessie Hyde. None of it makes much sense.