Body found near Highway 395

A body matching the description of Amy Wheelock, who has been missing for a week, was found Saturday by a hunter, Spokane County sheriff’s deputies said.

“There was a very extensive effort to find her, and we were too late,” said her father, Robert Wheelock, Saturday night.

A hunter found the body about 4 p.m. Saturday under a tree near U.S. Highway 395 and Wild Rose Road.

No foul play is suspected, said sheriff’s Sgt. Chris Kehl. An autopsy likely will be performed on Monday.

Amy Wheelock, 26, left her apartment in the 300 block of East Wedgewood Avenue a week ago telling her roommate, “I’m going for a walk,” said Katie Smith, who lived with Wheelock for four months.

Wheelock left behind her car, purse and cell phone and missed church, a doctor’s appointment and work.

Police had received reports of someone fitting her description walking north on Division Street near the Northpointe Plaza shopping center, near the Dragoon Creek Campground and on Deer Park-Milan Road.

Wheelock, who was diagnosed as bipolar in 2002, had been withdrawn from her normal activities in the week before she disappeared, friends and family said. But she had never disappeared like this, they said.

Wheelock, who volunteered in a lab at Sacred Heart Medical Center, once served in the U.S. Air Force and has lived in Spokane since 2002, when she moved here to be closer to her father, a retired Dayton, Wash., police sergeant.

Early in the search, her father urged people who lived along Highway 395 to walk their property.

Although Wheelock was last seen Sept. 22, Spokane police and the Sheriff’s Office didn’t join in the search until Thursday. Although police had been in contact with her father since Sept. 23, they said they didn’t have enough information to start searching until four days later.