MISSING: She Vanished with Her Dog… 2 Years Later, Her Twin Is Still Searching

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At the time of the early coverage, West Fargo police and Jonett Wanner’s family were asking for help finding her after she had been missing for 2 weeks. Family members said they had checked parking lots and spent a great deal of time traveling in an effort to locate her vehicle.

When the search began, the team started at Jonett’s home. In cases like this, they said, the first step was to identify a person’s patterns. According to Jonett’s sister and the people who had gone through the house, they found razor blades and signs suggesting Jonett had been cutting herself. There were multiple towels in the bathtub with water in it. Her sister said Jonett would only leave her phone behind if she was going to the park. If she was going to the store, she would always take either her purse or her phone. That detail, in their minds, ruled out a number of accident locations, but they still wanted to begin at ground zero near her home.

They drove into the subdivision where she lived and began checking nearby water. One location measured more than 6 ft deep. They examined a corner that seemed worth another look, but the thinking was that if the depth dropped by even 12 in, a vehicle would not be hidden there. They decided to move on to Lindenwood Park and come back if necessary.

At another target, one of them saw a square object on sonar and insisted on checking it again. The reading showed 12.9 ft of depth and a square shape on the bottom, but it was only about 3 ft wide, too narrow to be a vehicle. Even so, he refused to leave without one more pass. After another scan, he concluded it was a tree and said he was convinced of that.

They then checked a river access point to the northwest. The water there was only about 4 ft deep. One of them dismissed the location outright, saying Jonett was not coming there to dump herself in such shallow water. That brought them back to River’s Bend Park, where they checked another pond for depth. A reading there came in at 7 ft 2 in, but the bottom appeared clean all the way to the grass line, with nothing of interest.

Next they went to the high school pond, the closest pond to Jonett’s house. Her home, they noted, was right nearby. The idea was simple: if she had a medical emergency close to home, this was the kind of place she might end up. But the pond read only 3 ft to 3.5 ft at one end and around 4 ft throughout. It was too shallow.

By then it was after 6. They debated whether to finish 3 remaining locations or stop for the evening. They still had the broken fence area to check, along with several northern boat ramps. In the end, they chose dinner and warmth over pushing farther into fading light. Before stopping, they summarized the day’s work. The high school pond had effectively been confirmed. They had checked the Lindenwood locations. That left the boat ramps to the north, more access points farther up, and the drainage near the broken fence. The plan was to return at 8:30 the next morning, clear the remaining locations, and use both the boat and the RC sonar boat if the equipment held up.

The next morning began at sunrise.

They returned to the subdivision and launched near the pond closest to Jonett’s house. Her home, they said, was only 5 or 6 doors away. As they moved across the water, they described their search pattern: about 54 ft from the bank, casting 75 ft to the left and 75 ft to the right. They were hoping for a situation like a previous case in Florida, where Jan Shoop had been found in 6.5 ft of pond water in a subdivision. They noted that Florida news was full of similar neighborhoods where vehicles had gone into retention ponds unnoticed.

On one pass, an object appeared just inches below the surface. Both the sonar and the live view hit it, and one of them said nothing should be sticking up that high in 5 ft of water. For a moment, it looked promising. Then they changed angles and saw what it was: a tree or pipe structure with rocks around it. They dropped a magnet to be certain. It was concrete, hollow, and not a vehicle. What struck them was how hidden it had been. It was only about 12 in below the surface, and yet it could not be seen from above.

They worked the corner nearest Jonett’s house, the closest point of water to the home in that entire area. Depth there ranged from 3.7 ft to around 4.3 ft. Sonar showed what looked like 2 large rocks. Nothing appeared on side or down imaging that suggested a vehicle. They cleared it and moved on, changing the sonar battery and adjusting the electric motor as they went.

The next pond looked even shallower at first. One reading came in at 1.4 ft, then another at 8.8 ft, followed by 4.5 ft, and farther out they finally got the depth they needed. They identified the drainage pipe and agreed that if anything else in that pond rose up off the bottom, it should not be another pipe. Even so, the site seemed unlikely. The corners and access points were awkward, bordered by houses that had always been there. They said it would have been very difficult to drive a car into any of the nooks and corners. The only plausible approach was from the roadside along one edge. After checking it, they cleared that pond too.

As they moved equipment, they found the transport wheels had gone flat. While wrestling with the gear, they kept returning to the question of what Jonett had intended to do that day. One of them said she would have had to gun it down a hill and into somebody’s backyard to end up in one of those ponds. The other said he did not think that fit. Jonett had her wallet with her. Her sister had said that was something Jonett would do only if she was going to do something quickly. She had taken Scooby, but only her wallet. That, to them, suggested an errand or destination that was brief and familiar.

They checked another pond and found it only about 5 ft deep. That one was clear as well.

From there they parked near a hair salon and assessed another body of water. At first the depth reading malfunctioned and claimed 40 ft, which they knew was impossible. After the equipment settled, it came down to 5 ft, then 6 ft and 7 ft. That was deep enough to warrant a launch. They asked whether Jonett could have driven into it. The answer was yes. Once they got the boat in, they saw consistent 5 ft and 6 ft readings, then 6.3 ft, before shallowing to 2.9 ft again. They had looked at 2023 imagery and confirmed the surrounding obstacles had already been there then. The place where they had parked appeared to be the only other possible drive-in point, though it too was lined with trees. It was the deepest of the ponds they had checked, but it also came up empty.

By 10:30 they had cleared 4 or 5 locations in about 2 hours. That left the broken fence section and the larger question of whether they were even still dealing with an accident scenario. One of them said they needed to keep working outward and clear everything within a 1-mile radius. Two locations just to the north came back into focus because of their proximity to the church Jonett had reportedly been upset with. The church, they said, might matter. Jonett had a Bible open in the bathroom. The razor blades were there. The towels were in the tub. To them, those details gave the church-adjacent areas significance.

They drove north and pointed out Jonett’s grocery store along the way. They looked at 2 nearby bodies of water. Both seemed far off the road, but one of them wanted to clear them anyway. At the first, they used a sonar ball to check depth. The reading held at about 5.7 ft. Then they moved to the ramp. Jonett walked all over that area, they said, and would have known the ramp was there. The first reading looked like almost nothing, around 2 ft or less, then a second reading gave a more logical result of about 5 ft to 5.5 ft. They reasoned that if a vehicle were there, it would be visible and large on the screen. It was not. They checked the other nearby location as well.

Standing there, they asked again where Jonett’s special spot might have been. Had she gone farther north and found a new park with different boat ramps? They knew she had started going outside her usual 5-mile radius to other parks. They ruled out downtown. They ruled out dog parks, because those were not places she had been using. That left the possibility that she had been exploring a new park to the north, somewhere she enjoyed with Scooby.

Then the discussion shifted back to the bathroom. There had been strange things going on there, they said, and they could not dismiss that. If it had been a medical emergency, many of the places they were checking were already too far from home to fit that scenario. The chain-link fence theory had also fallen away, because everything there was bent in the wrong direction. As a result, the accident theory was losing ground. In their view, the case pointed back toward self-harm. The Bible in the bathroom, the towels in the tub, the items on the sink, and the fact that Jonett had taken only her wallet while leaving her purse and phone behind all fit a pattern they said they had seen before, where someone carries only a few essential items and leaves the rest at home.

At that point, they said they were no longer looking at accident locations. The remaining possibilities, in their minds, were the northern boat ramps and the parks beyond them. They headed for Island Park.

At Island Park, they studied the map and focused on 2 lower areas that looked deeper than the rest. One of them remarked that a spot could drop to 17 ft within 10 ft, just as they had seen near the church, so they were careful not to dismiss anything too quickly.

They launched and began scanning. The water read 5 ft, then 7 ft, then as much as 14 ft. Out there they saw an object that, at first glance, looked like a dock or some other structure under the water. It was about the length of a car, but not where they would have expected a vehicle to sit if it had gone in from the ramp. It was a river location, not a pond, and that gave them pause. On another pass the image changed. One of them said it almost looked like a car upside down.

The live view came up. This time the shape was unmistakable. There were tires. There was an axle. The vehicle was upside down. They said it was 100% a vehicle.

From the sonar image, they thought it looked taller than a sedan, perhaps an SUV or crossover. They estimated it at roughly 6 ft high and about 14 ft to 15 ft long. One of them pulled up the dimensions of a Nissan Rogue to compare. A Nissan Rogue, he found, was 184 in long, or about 15.3 ft. The window pattern seemed to match as well. The rear side windows looked larger than the front, and there appeared to be the smaller third window toward the back. The front wheel placement, the hood length, and the shape of the rear hatch all seemed consistent. Looking at the sonar image and the reference photo side by side, they began to think they had found Jonett’s vehicle.

They put a buoy on it. One of them said everything lined up: height, length, and windows. Then he began to suit up to dive.

On sonar, they tracked him as he went down over the roof and around the body of the vehicle. From above, they could see him circling it while he worked through the silt. The vehicle appeared old. It was stuck hard in the mud, and the heavy silt made it difficult to identify.

When he surfaced, he apologized immediately. It was not Jonett’s car. It was an older 4×4 Chevy Blazer, not a Nissan.

They continued to scan the area to make sure there was nothing else nearby. They kept coming back to how close the match had seemed. It was the first vehicle they had found in the region, in a quiet boat-ramp location, and it was almost exactly the same size and basic shape. They saw other large square objects on sonar in the vicinity, but none had the height that vehicle had shown.

They also discussed how the Blazer might have gotten there. One theory was that it had come down the hill and floated downstream. Another was that, years earlier, when a nearby road still gave easier access, someone could have simply rolled it downhill in neutral and let the river take it. It would not have required much.

Not far away, they passed memorial crosses and referred to another violent case along the same riverbank. Family and friends had been gathering there to remember 14-year-old Jaylen Walker, who had lost her life on August 19 and had been found stabbed to death along the Red River just over a month earlier. The memorial carried the message “justice for Jaylen,” and the sentiment expressed there was blunt: someone had killed her and left her there.

After the dive, the diver explained exactly why he had ruled the vehicle out. There were no license plates visible. He could not determine the make from the wheel. He could not find any identifying emblems. The back hatch area was one color above, but the entire lower section of the vehicle was red. At first he had wondered whether the color change might have come from repairs only at the rear, but the red continued along the whole lower body. The upper body looked black to him, not gray, though he noted that Jonett’s vehicle might have been dark gray rather than a lighter gray. That color difference alone had not entirely excluded it. What finally ruled it out was the rear window. The window they had seen in sonar had looked promising, but when he physically felt it, there was no center divider and no small internal separation at the back. That made him certain it was not Jonett’s vehicle.

He said he had gone around the Blazer 3 times trying to understand exactly what it was. By the time 5 minutes had passed, the optimism from above had faded. If it had been Jonett’s Nissan, they thought they would have found the silver Nissan badge quickly, or at least been able to strip away enough debris to reach the plate. He had tried to reach into the rear and clear what he could. There was nothing in the rear. He could not access the passenger side. Only the driver’s side was reachable. The driver’s door appeared to have been ajar or partly open. He could not tell whether the seat belt was engaged. The front end was silted in and somewhat mangled, and he was unable to clear it fully.

From there, they shifted to the north boat ramp at Island Park and noted that 1 location there, plus 3 more farther north marked in green on the map, would have to be wrapped up that day.

Then Sergeant Travis Bird of the Fargo Police Department called. He had been told they were the ones coordinating the location of the submerged vehicle. The diver gave him a pin drop for the vehicle at the south ramp of Island Park and explained that he was now on the north side, downstream, where he had just spotted another object that he was about to mark. If a dive team was not coming, he said, he could suit back up and dive the second one as well.

Bird asked whether he had already dived on the first vehicle. He had. He told the sergeant he knew the first one was a Blazer, but he had not been able to determine whether anyone was inside it. All the windows were broken out. The rear appeared flushed out. The front seemed silted in and a little mangled. The door looked partly open, and he had not been able to clear it for police. He described it as black with red along the bottom, probably a late 1980s vehicle. If he had to guess how long it had been there, he would have said between 5 and 10 years. Bird confirmed the location as south of the dam and downstream from the falls, before the bridge, roughly 100 yards south of the bridge and about 400 to 500 yards down from the boat ramp. He said he would call the dive team and determine what it would take to get them moving.

By then, 2 patrol units had rolled up, though they were heading toward the other ramp rather than the location where the searchers were standing. The searchers left them to sort that out and moved on to the second target.

That second object did not look right. It appeared to stand about 5 ft tall, which suggested something taller than a normal car, but the shape was off. One of them said the difference would be obvious once they got the next recording. On further inspection, it was not a car at all. It was just trees.

Still, another suspicious shape remained nearby. They noticed something red on the left side of the screen and wondered whether it was a memorial marker connected to a vehicle beneath the surface. They switched from the buoy to a red magnet so they could test it without marking it as definitively as before. On sonar, the shape looked square and straight. The tire area almost suggested a vehicle, but there were no visible windows and no visible wheels. It was clearly not a Nissan Rogue. They kept questioning it, but nothing about it quite fit.

They then checked beneath the bridges to see whether there was any access point from another park, but the water became too shallow. It dropped down to about 1 ft or 2 ft before opening again into a deeper channel. The park was there, but not a place where someone could simply drive into the river.

At the ramp, they were met by an officer named Tim. The diver told him that the second object farther down was not a car. It was too square. The magnet would not stick to it. There were no wheels and no automotive features at all. It seemed to be some kind of concrete structure. The officer said people were on the way and the recovery process would begin. He asked for a little more information for the report, mainly demographic details. The searchers said that if the vehicle were pulled out that same day, they would like to stop by and watch. If it had to wait until the following day, they would already be gone, because they still had 3 more locations to check. They mentioned the area just north of there with 2 access points across the way, and another park 3 or 4 miles away. Then they left for M.B. Johnson Park.

At M.B. Johnson Park, they looked at the steep riverbanks and expected disappointment before they even launched. On earlier readings, the deepest water they had seen there had been only about 5.5 ft. As they scanned, the numbers bore that out. The deepest part was still around 5.5 ft until they found a small deeper hole at a bend. In that area, they picked up a shape beneath the water that did not immediately look like a tree. One of them said it might be a vehicle and asked for another pass from the opposite angle. The screen image from the first angle was enough to raise real hope again. They even said “Nissan Rogue” aloud.

But the second pass did not support it. From the opposite direction, it no longer looked like a vehicle. It seemed more likely that the bank itself was creating the image, or that the contour of the bottom was misleading them. They refused to rule it out immediately and checked it again from several more angles. By the end of that sequence, they were no longer seeing anything there.

They moved on to what they knew would be the last location of the trip. By then they had been at it for 2 days, and the question remained the same: what was Jonett’s new spot? For a time, Lindenwood Park had seemed to be that place. Now Trefoil Park had come into focus. They wondered whether this was the place Jonett had been referring to but had not told her sister about. She liked the river. She liked the trees. Bill had sent along a video showing the falls on the left on the Minnesota side and the steep boat ramp at the newer park on the west side, the North Dakota side. Somewhere in that stretch, he had snagged on something and had hoped it might be a car.

But by then the unrelated vehicle found in the Red River had already entered the news cycle. Reports stated that the vehicle recovered that weekend did not appear to be connected to the West Fargo missing-person case. It had been discovered on Wednesday by Adventures with Purpose using sonar. At Trefoil, the searchers looked for the kind of deeper hole that might have hidden another vehicle near the ramp, but they did not find one. One area they expected to be deeper was only 2.5 ft. The boat ramp to the right, the area they were most interested in, was only about 3 ft deep. It was too shallow.

Later reporting from police said the recovered vehicle appeared to have been in the river for quite some time and that there was no evidence anyone had been inside it. West Fargo police continued to investigate Jonett’s disappearance separately.

The search ended in frustration. They had believed when they came into the case that they might find Jonett and Scooby on the 1st day. Even on the 2nd day, after moving out of the subdivision and onto the river, they remained hopeful that they were finally working the right locations. Instead, the only vehicle they found was the older 4×4 Blazer.

Even without a resolution, they believed the search still mattered. In their view, unsolved cases sometimes advanced only because awareness spread. A fisherman might already have the right sonar on his boat. Someone else might have a sonar ball. On the right day, with the right light, a drone operator might catch something from above. They referred to the Sartopo map they had been using and the notes they had made on it, because that map showed exactly where they had searched. At the same time, they warned that the case had to be approached logically. There was no point fixating on some tiny pond a vehicle could not even reach.

They also mentioned Leaf Lake and other lakes near Jonett’s former address. Other search teams had already checked some of those places without finding anything. Still, they repeated a saying from their line of work: a place had not truly been searched until they had searched it themselves. Every search, they said, had to be treated the same way. They had recently revisited a case from a couple of years earlier and seen it solved after they had missed the answer by only a few feet. If you miss by an inch, they said, you miss by a mile. They carried that lesson into Jonett’s case. Everything they had done there, and everything they had learned from it, was meant to bring them closer to Jonett, to Joenell, to Jonett’s daughter Amber, and to the rest of the family still waiting for her to come home.