For weeks, a curious stench had wafted through an area of trails in the Burbank foothills confounding walkers — until Monday, when someone decided to investigate.
What the hiker found was a gruesome end to a months-long search that had befuddled authorities looking for missing FBI agent Stephen Ivens.
“I had been out the night before and smelled that, too, but you know, I didn’t think anything of it. You smell things out in the woods,” said Gretchen Bingea, who often walks her dog in the hillside area where the body was found. The narrow service road skirting a Catholic school complex is popular with casual hikers and dog walkers in the residential area.
On Monday evening, around sunset, Bingea was walking on the service road when she passed a neighbor. They continued on their separate ways, but a short time later, Bingea and a friend heard a whistle.
“He was calling us to come back down,” Bingea said.
When they did, the neighbor told them he had gone off the trail to investigate the stench, thinking it may be a dead animal.
He had found something else.
“I found a skeleton,” Bingea recalled him saying. “I said, ‘You are kidding.’ ”
He wasn’t. He led Bingea and her friend to the spot, where she said she saw a body leaning against a small tree.
“I could see the skull, just kind of leaning against the tree — the clothes on a body and a leg bone,” she said.
The group immediately backtracked and called police.
Los Angeles County coroner’s officials would later confirm what was widely expected: The body was that of Ivens, his department-issued gun recovered near his body.
Ivens, 35, had been missing more than two months, since walking away from his home, about a mile and a half from where his body was found. His wife, Thea, said he had been depressed and anxious.
The cause of death had yet to be determined pending the results of an autopsy.
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