Body Of Missing Girl Found Near Highway Teen Apparently Drove Car Off I-90 At Lookout Pass

A Spokane teenager who disappeared after speeding off to visit her out-of-state boyfriend appears to have died in a car accident six weeks ago.

Road workers Friday morning spotted a battered blue 1980 Chrysler New Yorker in the weeds below Interstate 90 on the Montana side of Lookout Pass.

A girl’s badly decomposed body lay a few feet from the car.

Authorities confirmed the car is the one Amber Lynn Valero, 15, stole from her parents six weeks ago.

The teenager withdrew $100 with her parents bankcard and took off for Sheridan, Wyo., at 2:30 a.m. Aug. 16 to see her boyfriend, Isaiah Proctor.

Mineral County Sheriff Mickey O’Brien believes she may have been speeding or may simply have fallen asleep while descending the steep mountain pass that same night.

“I’m sure she just ran off the road and went down the 200-foot embankment,” O’Brien said. “It looks like she rolled three or four times and landed in high-brush. That’s why it was so hard to see from the highway.”

While authorities haven’t officially identified the body, Isaiah and his father Don Proctor don’t doubt it is Valero.

“They (police) had to come here to get the description of her ring to tell,” Don Proctor said. “It’s her.”

Amber and Isaiah met almost a year ago in eighth-grade, just after the Proctors had moved to Wyoming from Denver. They connected immediately and started dating.

In July, Amber’s family moved to Spokane. The pair talked nightly by telephone and wrote letters back and forth. They last spoke the night before Amber disappeared.

The night she left, her mother called her father, Tony Valero, who was still in Sheridan.

He drove to the Interstate’s Sheridan exit and waited for her for hours. She never arrived.

Proctor, worried for his distraught son, then drove nearly 1,000 miles through four states in search of the blonde-haired, green-eyed girl. He posted 600 fliers and chatted with gas station attendants, waitresses and motel clerks along her expected route.

Valero’s disappearance had stymied authorities and shaken up both sets of parents. The case was unusual because the girl had a planned destination, no source of money and the car had not been found.

In the past month, Proctor traced dozens of leads that went nowhere. He recently hired two investigators to check out new ones.

He said there is a tiny measure of relief in having the search be over.

“At least we know now where she is,” he said.

But having answers didn’t make the loss any easier on his son.

“It’s worse,” said a crying 14-year-old Isaiah. “I loved her and I’m sorry about what happened.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo