Stefanie Damron’s diappearance has divided a small town
It has been a year since a teenager in northern Maine got into an argument with her sister and stormed off into the woods, never to return home.
Everyone thought
Stefanie Damron would come back in a few hours, after she cooled off.
But hours turned into days, weeks and months, and Stefanie is still missing.
Since she disappeared, the family’s unconventional and reclusive lifestyle has led to suspicion, and the case has divided a town.
The Damron family says that on Sept. 23, 2024, when the parents weren’t home, 13-year-old Stefanie got into an argument with her older sister and stormed off into the woods.
“She just looked at her grandfather and told her grandfather, ‘I’ll be back,’ and she never came back,” Stefanie’s father, Dale Damron, told a local podcast.
He has avoided being on camera, even when he was interviewed by the podcast in March of 2025.
“She was our handful. Always into things, always into mischief,” Damron said. “But she was a happy kid. Always happy.”
After a year of searches, with state police, the FBI and local volunteers picking through dense vegetation and vast forests, there are still no answers about what happened to Stefanie.
The Damrons moved to the remote area of New Sweden, Maine, in 2021. They chose a spot far from the prying eyes of neighbors to live off the grid, with no running water and only a generator for power.
Their driveway, now a shrine to Stefanie, goes back several hundred yards to where they built a small, wooden structure.
It’s similar to a yurt, but has sleeping pods extending off the sides, as shown in drone footage.
“We live in a 200-square-foot home that has four separate bedrooms, if you can believe that,” Damron said on the podcast. “They’re talking about this being a yurt. It is a yurt, it’s a hexa-yurt built out of OSB and everything else, just like a normal house.”
Damron, known as “Dale” in the community, said the solitary, back-to-nature style of raising kids was a way to be free from the financial weight of a big mortgage and expensive utility bills.
But even in the remote setting, his oldest girls found a way to connect.
“They were waiting until Papa took his sleeping pills or wasn’t paying attention,” Damron said. “They would sneak off with his phone, get on some kind of weird website.”
His story has sparked suspicion because the phone was a flip phone, generally thought to be safer for kids and the internet.
Police have not revealed any details about the device.
But a neighbor, Shelly Carson, said the last time she saw Stefanie, just weeks before the disappearance, the girl was asking for a ride to see her friend.
“I was worried about where she wanted to go, and I can kick myself for not asking her that day,” Carson said. “Because she was really upset, she was crying, she couldn’t find a ride, her parents wouldn’t take her, her uncle couldn’t take her.”
Damron believes the day Stefanie walked off, she made a plan to meet up with someone on the road.
“I honestly think that she got picked up by somebody,” he said. “She thought she was going to come home that night, and they didn’t bring her home.”
Investigators won’t say whether they were able to get any information from the phone. In a recent update, investigators only said, “We are hoping for the best outcome, to find Stefanie alive.”
The Damrons’ choice to live off the grid with young children, in such an unforgiving environment, has drawn criticism from neighbors.
Some admit they repeatedly called child protective services.
“I was concerned that they had proper food, water, heat and clothing for the conditions that they were living under,” said neighbor Doug Tinsley.
“They would come here and get water and it would be, I would have to say, like three to four times a week,” Carson said. “My heart actually broke for them.”
Her husband, Christopher Carson, also had concerns.
“They were, like, five-gallon pails that they would haul up here, I think in a wheelbarrow,” he said. “They would fill them up and they would haul them back down that long driveway.”
But Damron said that because the kids were homeschooled, CPS workers visited the home regularly and were satisfied.
“We’ve been here for four years and twice a year for four years, CPS has always come out there,” Damron said on the podcast.
He is angry, wanting the focus to be put back on the search for Stefanie.
“Instead of putting all this negativity towards judging us, judging that, put that energy into finding my daughter,” he told the podcast.
Everyone admits it’s been a long year.
“This has taken a tremendous toll on this community. It’s a different place than it was a year ago,” Tinsley said.
“Chris and I moved out here because we wanted peace and quiet,” Shelly Carson said. “But then Stefanie came up missing, and ever since then, everybody’s on edge.”
Stefanie’s parents have a message for her, hoping she finds her way home.
“Please just come home. We love you,” Damron said on the podcast. “The family’s not the same. None of us are the same. We’re all missing a piece of our heart; we just need our baby home.”
Dale Damron declined to be interviewed by NewsNation for this story.
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